It was then about three a.m., a dark, moist night, and our Company was given about a quarter of an acre of long wet grass to rest in till dawn, when we hoped to return to our old trenches if the fire hadn’t made them impossible. That two hours was eerie in the extreme. First came a messenger to call away the Company Commander, the Sergeant-Major and other men, to leave Singapore and go away on an official ‘escape party’ – so we reckoned the higher command already knew we were finished! Then later, bent double, creeping through the dark, came a reconnaissance patrol from another company. We thought, as they gave no sign, that they were Nips and only just refrained from firing at them; instead we cursed them fluently in the dark and said if they came round unexpectedly with no signal again, they could expect to be shot. Yet within half an hour back they came again, and our fingers were quivering with chill and nerves on our revolvers, when we recognised that it was the same people once more.

Of course no one could sleep and the grass was absolutely sodden. We had four sentries posted, and one of them was an awkward, shortsighted fellow. As one of the men stumbled into the bushes to relieve himself, he was challenged by this sentry. Not realising he was the challenged man, he walked on, and when challenged again, muttered some curses. The sentry then fired, and hit him high up in the chest. He groaned and writhed in agony for about 20 minutes, but we could do nothing to help him. I crawled over to him, but he was dead before the stretcher bearers arrived. His grey body was hastily buried in the dawn light. The previous day that same man had had a Nip bullet go through his steel helmet and out the other side of it while it was on his head, and he’d never got a scratch. A typical wasted life in the muddle and misery that make up all wars and battles . . .

But now, arrived back in bright sunlight in this area, the ghost of our previous fears was made ridiculous. How bright and clearly the foliage glittered! How difficult in broad daylight to recapture those old feelings! We saw, indeed, a mass of slimy, slit trenches in thick undergrowth, but the old haunted feeling was gone. In my platoon headquarter trench I tried again to find my last pair of spectacles that I had lost 24 hours before the end of the battle, but could find no sign of them; the trench was a scummy pool of thick water breeding millions of mosquitoes.