Doubleday £18.99 pp522
Ian Denys Peek was 21 when the Japanese army captured Singapore in September 1942. A month later, he and his brother Ron were in a crowded goods wagon, heading north into Thailand on their way to work on the infamous Siam-Burma railway, built to shuttle Japanese troops up the Kwai valley into Burma and on to the borders of India. Best remembered for the film The Bridge on the River Kwai and Ronald Searle’s drawings of his skeletal fellow-prisoners, the railway was to become one of the horror stories of the second world war, a byword for brutality that claimed the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers, mostly British and Australian. Peek worked on the railway until the Japanese surrendered in 1945, but only now has he given his version. Written in the present tense, like a loose-limbed diary, his account of what he saw and suffered (the book’s title refers to the amount of work each prisoner felt himself impelled to do) is touching, vivid, angry and utterly compelling. It is also exceptionally well written.
To say that the railway was built by slave labour is technically incorrect, since the prisoners were paid a pittance: every now and then a floating shop would appear on the river, and they bought themselves a banana or a duck’s egg to augment the standard diet of dried fish and rice infested with maggots and flavoured with rats’ droppings. The terrain could hardly have been more hostile: vertiginous, heavily forested mountains reared up on either side of the river, and the prisoners (barefoot, clad only in loin-cloths and equipped with the most elementary tools) were expected to hack, dig and blast a track on which the lines could be laid. Nor was the climate any better: the mountains between the Gulf of Siam and the Indian Ocean have the highest rainfall in the world, and the heat and the humidity were intolerable.
The prisoners were surrounded by “the foul odours of human degradation and decay”: the camps were a sea of mud, their beds were bamboo slats and the lavatories were a stinking pit. Not surprisingly, diseases were rampant: inflamed testicles indicated the onset of beri-beri, a scratch on the leg could easily turn ulcerous and lead to its amputation, and Japanese guards who sought free treatment by consulting medical officers could find themselves being deliberately infected with dysentery via a jab in the throat with a sharpened piece of bamboo dipped in faeces. It was a brutal, unforgiving world, unredeemed, for Peek at least, by Christian notions of forgiveness, let alone political correctness: for the “thick-brained Nips” he felt “only contempt, hatred, loathing, unlimited”, and to deal with the horrors of everyday life (including burying a mass of decomposing corpses) it was necessary to “develop an attitude that verges on disembodiment”.
Advertisement
Camp life, for all its inevitable tedium — the same book being read over and over again, the same old stories endlessly repeated — was full of surprises and curious anomalies. Despite an abysmal shortage of equipment, the medical officers proved amazingly ingenious, managing skin grafts, blood transfusions and even the removal of shards of skull from the brain of a prisoner brought low by a drunken guard wielding a spade. Rather less welcome was the occasional appearance of senior British officers, impeccably turned out and seemingly oblivious to all around them. Peek felt contempt for most of the officer class: not only did they fail to look after the interests of their men, but they lived apart, were looked after by batmen, and — if Peek is to be believed — spent their days playing cards, reading and grumbling about the shortage of tobacco.
“The haunting has already begun, and will hold me in its grip until I die,” Peek declares after witnessing his first death in camp. Religion provided no consolation at the time, but with luck his book will exorcise some ghosts. Given the sameness of life in the various camps Peek experienced up and down the River Kwai, and the shortage of incident (Allied bombers droning overhead and news of the Normandy landings provide rare relief), One Fourteenth of an Elephant is, perhaps inevitably, repetitive and overlong. Sceptics may wonder how, without the benefit of a diary, he can remember in such detail the events of 60 years ago. The rest of us can only wonder at the resilience of the human spirit, “tough as a manilla hawser, capable of absorbing enormous stresses and then regaining its original form and elasticity”.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £15.19 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585