Along this sloping road we discovered the graves of many men – that is to say piles of earth had been heaped over their bodies where they lay in the malarial drains alongside the road. Those bodies we buried decently. From a Tamil we learnt that these men had all fallen victims to Japanese tanks coming unexpectedly through the village. A Padre had done his best to bury them before in a great hurry, and in some nearby shell holes the Nips had thrown the bodies of Indian soldiers, roped together in nines and tens, presumably prisoners.

As none of us could speak Tamil or Malay it was not easy to ask about Peter. But ultimately we pieced together this information. There was a fragile cross on the grassy verge of the road opposite the place the Sergeant identified as the spot where they had seen the white thing in the middle of the road. That white must have been a sighting mark of sorts for the Nip tanks which were less than fifty yards away. As Peter had picked it up so they had opened fire. The day after the capitulation a Padre had found him there, and now he lay beneath the grass at the edge of the road where he fell. All that was left for us to do was to put up a proper cross.

Thus our tour of the battle area on Singapore Island ended; that week’s battle of bloodiness and confusion, when the Japanese made full use of their temporary great superiority in planes, tanks and men. Even they could not guess how rapidly and vastly Nemesis was going to overtake them.

CHAPTER 4

LIFE in Bukit Timah under the new Nip engineers was a mixed blessing. On the one hand the work for the troops was becoming harder and more monotonous; the sun and sweat was reducing their clothing to rags, and they were so tired by 6.30 that they had little energy left for washing clothes, or indeed for anything else – the evening meal, a wash down, a place in the canteen queue, was enough for them in their precious and scanty free time. On the other hand the new management did step up both the meat and vegetable ration, and a few people got cheques cashed through a branch of the Bata Shoe Company in Singapore, which was under the management of a pro-Ally Indian.

Curiously enough, although our rations were now better, we must have just about reached the limit of our pre-captivity reserves, and nearly everybody was smitten with an embarrassing type of dermatitis, brought on by deficiency in the ‘B’ vitamins; also, a lot of men were going down with dysentery, so that we were compelled to evacuate them back to Changi Hospital. As new men failed to take their places, the work became proportionately harder and longer.