The up country parties left on foot towards the end of January. All the fit went with them, and theoretically Chungkai was left as a sick Base Camp.

CHAPTER 7

THE second period at Chungkai, when the Engineer officers were away, was one of comparative peace that was not disturbed for two or three months, by which time so many sick had arrived back in Chungkai that fresh parties were needed up above. Our battalion was now in charge of a very reasonable Major, and his assistants, too, were all reasonable and efficient.

One cannot say that life was very interesting. The markets were moved inside the camp and were under strict Nip supervision. The first month was really passed killing time and trying to improve camp diet. We still didn’t realise that our group would be fated to build the railway a couple of hundred kilometres up country, and nobody bothered. Sometimes we had plague or cholera inoculations, but that was only routine. We heard vague reports from the two new camps above – conditions seemed about the same, and the embankment there was said to be lower. After another two months they’d be moving on again – it was all very vague and didn’t seem to concern us.

The one menace in Chungkai at the time was stealing. It wasn’t just the question of the sick men, who were never paid at all by the Nips, being driven by hunger to pinch from their comrades or officers; there were several gangs about who stole on an organised basis, and they had Thai agents who would buy anything they had managed to collect. To these men nothing was sacred. Rings and watches were stolen off dying men in hospital; drugs began to disappear, including the irreplaceable quinine. It wasn’t safe to leave washing hung up outside a hut for more than ten minutes without watching it.

Sometimes the camp would be startled into wakefulness at night by that awful cry of ‘Thief! Thief! Stop him!’ followed by a mad hue and cry in Stygean darkness. There is something really frighteningly primitive about the hue and cry; people would sit up in their mosquito nets, the short hair on their necks literally bristling, listening to the results of the clumsy chase. The thief practically always escaped. Sometimes a complete pack or kit-bag would disappear, to be found empty next morning by one of the latrines; or perhaps it would just be a pair of boots, a blanket or a purse. It got so bad that new methods of policing had to be tried out.