The Narrow Road to the Deep North Read online

  Rabbit Hendricks—a compact man with an ill-fitting set of dentures—was finishing a sketch on the back of a postcard of Damascus that was to serve as a replacement for a disintegrating photograph of Lizard Brancussi’s wife, Maisie. A spiderweb of fine cracks had spread across her face, and what was left of the emulsion had curled into so many tiny autumnal leaves that she was now a woman to be guessed at. Rabbit Hendricks’ pencil drawing captured the same pose and neck, but it was a little more Mae Westish around the eyes and a lot more Mae Westish around the chest, suggesting a cleavage Maisie had never boasted, and a look that was somehow more direct and alluring, and that spoke of things about which Maisie rarely did.

  Explain to me, Jimmy Bigelow was saying, why we machine-gun waves of black Africans fighting for the French who are equally intent on killing us, Australians fighting for the English in the Middle East?

  The drawing—which seemed possibly false, and therefore a strange betrayal—troubled Lizard Brancussi. But because everyone else thought his wife looked wonderful he offered Rabbit Hendricks his watch in exchange, declaring that was his girl. Rabbit refused the offer, took out a sketchbook and began drawing a group portrait of them having their morning coffee.

  It’s not even fucking east of fucking Australia, said Jack Rainbow. He had the face of an anchorite and the tongue of the wharfie that he, a hop farmer, was not. It’s north, he said. No wonder we can’t work out where the next village is. We don’t even know where we are. It’s the far fucking north.

  You always was a commie, Jack, Darky Gardiner said. I’ll give you twelve to one I’ll be dead by breakfast. Can’t ask for fairer than that.

  Jack Rainbow said he’d rather shoot him there and then.

  Dorrigo Evans put down ten shillings at twenty to three that the sergeant would make it through the war.

  Rightio, said Jimmy Bigelow. I’m with him. You’re a survivor, Darky.

  You throw two coins up in the air, said Darky Gardiner, producing a bottle of cognac from a bag at his feet and topping up everyone’s coffee, you bet on the outcome, but the fact is, if it’s landed two heads three times in a row, it’s still statistically just as likely to be two heads again. So you bet two heads again. Every throw is always the first throw. Isn’t that a lovely idea?

  A moment later the war finally found them. Dorrigo Evans was standing next to the armchair, pouring a coffee, and Yabby Burrows had just arrived from the field kitchen with a hot box containing their breakfast, when they heard a seventy-five shell coming in. Darky Gardiner leapt out of his chair, grabbing Dorrigo Evans by the arm and pulling him to the ground. The explosion passed through them like a cosmic wave.

  When Dorrigo opened his eyes and looked around, the blue armchair with its little silver fish had vanished. Amidst the dust fog an Arab boy stood up. They yelled at him to get down, and when he took no notice Yabby Burrows rose on his haunches to wave him down, and when that had no effect he ran to the boy. At that moment another shell hit. The force of the blast blew the Arab boy onto them, his throat slashed by shrapnel. He was dead before anyone got to him.

  Dorrigo Evans turned to Darky Gardiner, who was still holding him. Next to them, Rabbit Hendricks was shoving a dusty pair of teeth back in his mouth. Of Yabby Burrows nothing remained.

  I like to keep my bets close, the Black Prince said.

  Dorrigo was about to reply when an enemy plane came in on another strafing run down their far flank. As it rose above them, the plane abruptly transformed into a puff of black smoke. A speck falling from it blossomed into a parachute, and it became clear the pilot had escaped. As the winds swept the airman towards them, Rooster MacNeice grabbed one of the Cypriots’ .303s and took aim. Dorrigo Evans shoved the barrel away, telling him to not to be so fucking stupid.

  And Yabby? Rooster MacNeice yelled, his lips gravel-covered, his eyes wild white balls. Was that fucking stupid? And that kid? Was it?

  He had a face that seemed handsome but which, as Jack Rainbow pointed out, looked up close as if it had been built out of spare parts. His accompanying reputation as an inept soldier was such that when he lifted the .303 back to his shoulder, took aim again and fired, everyone was amazed that he found his target. The parachutist twitched as if blown by some sudden, violent wind, then abruptly slumped.

  Later that day when they finally ate the now cold porridge that was in the hot box Yabby Burrows had been carrying, no one sat with Rooster MacNeice.

  14

  AND ON THEY went—the jokes, the stories, the poor buggers who never made it back, the Tripoli palace requisitioned for an AIF recreational centre, two-up and crown and anchor, beer and mates, working girls in the room off the corridor coming down to the ring to play two-up and see if they felt lucky, the footy in mountain villages against the Syrian kids. And then in Java, after their surrender, the women in wet sarongs picking tea they sometimes saw when they went out on firewood foraging parties, how beautiful they were changing into dry sarongs and picking nits out of each other’s hair—Christ, Gallipoli von Kessler said as they walked past, walking past that, that’s what I call punishment.

  But their punishment was only just beginning. After six months they were trucked down to the coast on their way to a new project in Siam; a thousand of them, three days sardined in the greasy hull of a rustbucket boat to Singapore then marched out to Changi Gaol. It was a pleasant place—white, two-storey barracks, lovely and airy, neat lawns, well-dressed Aussie soldiers, fit and hearty, officers with swagger canes and red tabs on their socks, a good view over the Johor Strait, and vegetable gardens. Emaciated, clad in a motley of Australian and Dutch uniforms, and many without shoes, Dorrigo’s men stood out. Java Scum, Brigadier Crowbar Callaghan, commander of Changi’s Australian POWs, had christened them, yet, despite Dorrigo Evans’ entreaties, Callaghan refused to provide them with clothes, boots and provisions. Instead he tried and failed to remove Dorrigo Evans as their commander because of his insubordinate attitude in demanding Callaghan open up his stores.

  Little Wat Cooney came up to Chum Fahey with a plan of escape. It was to get on to a working party down on the Singapore wharves and there get themselves nailed into crates or something and be loaded into a ship and in this way get back to Sydney.

  It’s a good plan, Wat, said Chum Fahey. Only it isn’t.

  They played a game of footy against the Changi camp’s top side and lost by eight goals, but not before hearing Sheephead Morton’s three-quarter-time address that began with words that would become for them immortal—

  I’ve only got one thing to tell you blokes, and the first of them is . . .

  Two weeks later the Java Scum left in the same rags in which they had arrived, the uncrated Wat Cooney among their number. Now officially designated as Evans’ J Force, they were taken to the railway station and crammed into the small, closed steel-box wagons used for carrying rice; twenty-seven men in each, not enough space to even sit. They travelled in tropical heat through tunnels of rubber trees and jungle, glimpsed through a profusion of sweating diggers and a partly open sliding door, that tangled green endless over them, and falling away from them the Malays in sarongs, Indians, the Chinese coolie women, all in their gay cloth headgear out there working the rice paddies, and them in the close dark of those cruel ovens. They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet.

  Beneath them, the railway line beat on and on, as in the sweat-wet slither they swayed in each other’s arms and legs. Near the end of the third day they began to see paddy fields and clumps of sugar palm flashing by, and the Thai women, dark and buxom, raven-black hair and lovely smiles. They had to take turns sitting and they slept each with his legs draped over the next man, enveloped in a fuming stench of stale vomit, of rancid bodies, shit and puke, and on they went, soot-slicked and heartsick, a thousand miles, five days and no food, six stops and three dead men.

  On the fifth afternoon they were taken off the train at Ban Pong, fort
y miles from Bangkok. They were put in high-framed trucks, thirty men jammed in each like cattle and hanging on to each other like monkeys, travelling through jungle on a road six inches deep in fine dust. A vivid blue butterfly fluttered above them. A Western Australian POW crushed it when it landed on his shoulder.

  Nightfall came, and still the road went on, and late that evening they reached Tarsau, covered in filth and encrusted in road dust. They slept in the dirt and were back in the trucks at dawn for an hour heading up little more than a bullock track into the mountains. At the track’s end, they got off the trucks and marched until late afternoon, when they finally stopped at a small clearing by a river.

  Into the blessed river they jumped to swim. Five days in steel boxes, two days in trucks—how beautiful is water? Beatitudes of the flesh, blessings of the world beyond the veil—clean skin, weightlessness, the rushing universe of fluid calm. They slept like logs in their swags, until the whoop of monkeys awoke them at dawn.

  The guards marched them through the jungle three and a half miles. A Japanese officer climbed a tree stump to address them.

  Thank you, he said, for long way here to help Emperor with railway. Being prisoner great shame. Great! Redeem honour building railway for Emperor. Great honour. Great!

  He pointed to the line of surveyors’ pegs that marked the course the railway was to take. The pegs quickly vanished in jungle.

  They worked on clearing the teak forest for their first section of the line, and only after that task was complete three days later were they told that they now had to make their own camp at a location some miles distant. Huge clumps of bamboo, eighty feet high, large trees, kapok with its horizontal branches, hibiscus and lower shrub—all this they cut and grubbed and burnt and levelled, groups of near-naked men appearing and disappearing into smoke and flame, twenty men hauling as one on a rope like a bullock team to drag out clumps of the vicious spiked bamboo.

  Next they went foraging for timber and passed an English camp a mile away; it stank and was full of the sick, and officers doing little for their men and much for themselves. Their warrant officers patrolled the river to stop their men from fishing; some of the English officers still had their angling rods and didn’t want common soldiers poaching what they knew to be their fish.

  When the Australians got back to their camp clearing, an old Japanese guard introduced himself as Kenji Mogami. He thumped his chest.

  It meana mountain lion, he told them, and smiled.

  He showed them what was required: using a long parang to cut and notch the roof framing; tearing the inner layer of hibiscus bark into long strips to lash the joints together; covering the roof with palm leaf thatch and the floor with split and flattened bamboo, with not a nail in any of it. After a few hours’ work building the first of the camp’s shelters the old Japanese guard said, Alright men, yasumi.

  They sat down.

  He’s not such a bad bloke, said Darky Gardiner.

  He’s the pick of them, said Jack Rainbow. And you know what? If I had half a chance I’d split him from eye to arsehole with a blunt razor blade.

  Kenji Mogami thumped his chest again and declared, Mountain lion a Binga Crosby. And the mountain lion began to croon—

  You go-AAA-assenuate-a-positive

  Eliminanay a negative

  Lash on a affirmawive

  Don’t mess with a Misser In-Beween

  Nahhhh donna mess with Missa Inbeweeeen!

  15

  AT THAT EARLY time on the Line when they were still capable of doing such things, the men staged an evening concert on a small bamboo stage, lit by a fire either side. Watching the performance with Dorrigo Evans stood their commanding officer, Colonel Rexroth, a study in irreconcilable contrasts: a highwayman’s head on a butcher’s body, a pukka accent and all that went with it in the son of a failed Ballarat draper, an Australian who strove to be mistaken as English, a man who had turned to the army in 1927 for the opportunities that had eluded him elsewhere in life. Though he and Dorrigo Evans were the same rank, by dint of experience and by virtue of being a military man as opposed to a medical man, Rexroth was Dorrigo’s senior.

  Colonel Rexroth turned to Dorrigo Evans and said that he believed that all their national British strengths would be enough, that their British esprit de corps would hold and their British spirit would not break and their British blood would bring them through it together.

  Some quinine wouldn’t be bad either, Dorrigo Evans said.

  A few Englishmen had come over from their camp and were presenting a short play about a German POW in the Great War. The night air was so thick with swarming insects that the performers looked slightly blurred.

  Colonel Rexroth said he didn’t like his attitude. Only seeing the negative. This demands positive thoughts. Celebration of the national character. And so on.

  I’ve never treated the national character, Dorrigo Evans said.

  The Australians had started cheering for the German prisoner.

  But I am seeing, he went on, an awful lot of diseases of malnutrition.

  We have what we have, Colonel Rexroth said.

  To say nothing, Dorrigo Evans said, of malaria, dysentery and tropical ulcers.

  The play ended with jeers and catcalls. Dorrigo finally recalled what Colonel Rexroth always reminded him of: the beurre bosc pears Ella’s father used to eat. And he realised how hungry he was, how he had never liked those pears with their rusty skin, and how now he would have given almost anything to eat one.

  Diseases of starvation, repeated Dorrigo Evans. Drugs would be good. But food and rest even better.

  If their work building the railway line for the Japanese hadn’t yet become a madness that would kill them, it was already beginning to take a profound physical toll. Les Whittle, who had lost his fingers to pellagra, was now playing a rotting accordion—held together with stitching and buffalo hide patches—with bamboo sticks tied to his wrist. His singer, Jack Rainbow, had lost his vision. Watching him, Dorrigo Evans wondered if it was avitaminosis or the combined damage of several maladies that had done this—whatever the cause, he was painfully aware that food would cure this and almost all of the afflictions he saw. Jack Rainbow’s anchorite’s face was now puffy as a pumpkin, and his wasted body below also oddly bloated with beri-beri, lending an ulcer—which had eaten through a swollen shin to the bone—the appearance of a blinded pink iris that gazed out from the wound at the crowd of POWS, many as grotesquely affected, as if hoping finally to see the audience of its dreams.

  The performers were now playing out a scene from the movie Waterloo Bridge, with Les Whittle as Robert Taylor and Jack Rainbow taking the role of Vivien Leigh. They were walking towards each other on a bamboo bridge.

  I thought I’d never see you again, said Robert Taylor, disguised as the fingerless Les Whittle, in a highly affected English accent. It’s been a lifetime.

  Nor me you, said Vivien Leigh, disguised as the blind, bloated, ulcerated Jack Rainbow.

  Darling, said Les Whittle. You haven’t changed at all.

  There was much laughter, after which they played the movie’s signature song, ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

  You see, Colonel Rexroth continued, it’s what we carry within.

  What?

  British stoicism.

  It was an American movie.

  Pluck, Colonel Rexroth said.

  Our officers are paid by the Japanese army. Twenty-five cents a day. They spend it on themselves. The Japanese do not expect them to work. They should.

  Should what, Evans?

  Should work here in the camp. Digging latrines. Nursing in the hospital. Orderlies. Building equipment for the sick. Crutches. New shelters. Operating theatres.

  He took a deep breath.

  And they should pool their wages so we draw on it to buy food and drugs for the sick.

  That again, Evans, Colonel Rexroth said. It is example that will get us through. Not Bolshevism.

  I agree. When it is the right exam
ple.

  But Colonel Rexroth was already ascending the stage. He thanked the entertainers, then spoke of how the division of the British Empire into arbitrary nationalities was a fiction. From Oxford to Oodnadatta they were one people.

  His accent was thin and reedy. He had no gift for rousing oratory but a misplaced sense that his rank gifted him with this talent. He sounded, as Gallipoli von Kessler said, as though he were playing a flute out of his arse.

  And for that reason, Colonel Rexroth went on, as members of the British Empire, as Englishmen, we must observe the order and discipline that is the very lifeblood of the Empire. We will suffer as Englishmen, we will triumph as Englishmen. Thank you.

  After, he asked Dorrigo Evans if he would like to be involved in planning for the building of a proper cemetery overlooking the river, where they would be able to inter their dead.

  I’d rather get the Black Prince to steal some more tins of fish from the Japanese stores to keep the living from dying, Dorrigo Evans said.

  The Black Prince is a thief, Colonel Rexroth replied. This, however, will be a beautiful final resting place and worthy of the efforts of all concerned for the welfare of the men and far better than the present practice of just marching off into the forest and burying them wherever.

  The Black Prince helps me save lives.

  Colonel Rexroth produced a large sketch map outlining the location of the cemetery and the layout of the graves, with different sections for different ranks. Proudly, he told Dorrigo that he had reserved a particularly idyllic spot overlooking the Kwai for officers. He pointed out that the men were beginning to die, and dealing with the corpses was now a matter of the highest priority.