The labour forces were streaming now from the bamboo camps to the working sectors. The daily treks before work could begin became longer and more tiring. Underfoot conditions in this monsoon morass were abominable. Many parts of the route to the farthest working points were deep in mud and water, and one dragged one foot after the other from a squelching bog. In some places the mud was knee deep, and strength was sapped by the time we reached the digging areas. This made no difference to the Jap engineers and guards. They just called for more speed at work to make up for lost time. Inevitably the railway was behind schedule. The Jap grew in anger, cursing and kicking us to renewed effort. Great wooden bridges were thrown across chasms in atrociously dangerous conditions, and more and more embankment sections were completed to bring the railway nearer those pushing on from the opposite end - Moulmein. I took part in bridge building under the supervision of expert Jap engineers, helping for weeks to put up a huge wooden construction. Trees felled in the forest were trimmed and carted to the area. The interlocking of these sections remained a mystery to me - as it does to this day, for I am no engineer - but the construction continued at a rare pace, and the bridge reached out between the banks, perhaps 60 or 70 feet high, of a great chasm.

Fixing the big, heavy wood block sections at the apex for the eventual laying of the track was a real precision job. Blocks were hauled into position by rope, a precarious business, as we slowly moved out on the narrow supporting ledges. I remember that one or two working colleagues lost their foothold, fell over the side, and broke arms or legs. The Japs did not like such accidents, not because they resulted in injury to the men, but because they reduced the daily working output. When a man was lost in such a way the rest of this team had to pull a little harder on the ropes to get the blocks into position. There were no reinforcements. When the final blocks were placed where they ought to be a number of us were detailed to "go over the side". Standing, with legs apart on sapling supports, we had to bore holes into the blocks for clamping purposes. This was a task I thoroughly disliked. I have no head for heights and I could not bear to look down to the yawning gap below, but there was no avoiding the dreaded order and each day I strove desperately to keep up my courage by whistling or singing as I did the job. The supervising engineers thought, quite wrongly, that I was enjoying myself and that I was a good and contented prisoner. After ten days on that assignment I was as pleased as the engineers to see the end of it - for very different reasons. I breathed freely again as we left the sector to the plate-laying gangs.

We moved again - to a small camp. By this time many more of us had been further weakened by the constant strain of hard labour, and the lack of proper sustaining food. We were in a hazy state. I felt crushed almost to the point of exhaustion. My arms and legs just went through the motions - digging and filling, filling and digging, carrying and dropping.

When, now, thoughts of home and loved ones came into the bruised mind, they jostled like a crowd in a confined space; there was no clarity, just a wildly dissolving film of faces. At night I sank exhausted into sleep, often disturbed by nightmares. When morning came, we dragged our weary limbs to the railway again, like the sick maltreated animals we were.

Half a dozen of us, and two Jap guards, were left behind to tidy up the camp in readiness for the arrival of maintenance workers. Two days before the main party left the Japs brought in a water buffalo to provide a meat variation on the monotonous dried vegetable soup.

The buffalo was tethered to a tree and one of the Jap guards was detailed to slaughter it. He took careful aim with his rifle but instead of killing the buffalo his first bullet penetrated its head just below the horn. The infuriated animal snorted and roared, pawed the earth, and strained violently on its ropes. Everyone darted away. Another guard came to take a shot at the buffalo. He, too, put his bullet into the animal, without hitting any vulnerable spot. Again the buffalo roared its disapproval, straining so heavily on the rope that the tree to which it was tethered seemed about to split and fall. A water buffalo in pain and anger is not a pleasant sight. At last a few more bullets were fired and the heavy animal sank to its knees, rolled over and died.

British cookhouse butchers skinned it and removed the intestines, which were buried in a trench several feet below ground. The day after the main party left the camp, we were cleaning up when half-a-dozen vultures appeared in the skies immediately above. The ugly, sad-eyed birds slowly descended, landing not far from where the buffalo remains were buried. For a while they watched as we worked in the camp.

Suddenly they hurled themselves at the earth above the buffalo remains, scooping out the soil at a terrific rate until, incredibly, they came upon the meal they had waited for. They fought viciously among themselves as they pulled out the offal. Each bird tore at its share, and then flew away to a quiet spot to gorge. There were more fights as first one and then another, having consumed its spoils, tried to plunder from the rest. When all was gone the gaunt, evil birds sat around, their heads and beaks drawn in between their wings. By next morning they had flown off. With our fatigue completed, we also moved off to join the rest of our party.

After Dutch prisoners from Java and Sumatra had joined the push, the Jap commandants flung Tamils and Indians from Malaya into rail-building work. These poor natives, already emaciated when they arrived in Thailand, had been inveigled into making the journey on the pretext that they were coming to a land flowing with milk and honey. Instead, they found themselves thrown into the monsoon mud, with meagre rations to add to their troubles. An appalling number of deaths quickly reduced their labour battalions as dysentery and starvation took their roll. We often passed these native workers as we moved out to the railway in the morning. Some of them, curled up near the railway embankment, were obviously dying unattended. Often we found their bodies on our return in the evening. Then we had the duty of digging shallow graves for them. As the monsoon began to peter out, some of us were ordered to work with Thailand natives, helping to fell great teak trees for use in bridge building. It was hard going as we used the double-handed sawing implements, but I thought it had its compensations; it was preferable to the digging and carting of earth.

We felled scores of trees. Each time one toppled British voices yelled "Timber!". the trunks, shackled with steel hawsers, were hitched to the harness of a working elephant and hauled away to a central spot where the branches were trimmed and the bark was chipped off. Later, these tree trunks became bridge supports.

I had bouts of recurring malaria and dysentery, but recovered fairly quickly and returned to another spell of labourious work. Then came the greatest blow. A number of us were struck down with beri-beri. This disease had two forms; wet beri-beri which resulted in the body swelling, as in dropsy complaints, and dry beri-beri, which sent continuous excruciating pains through the limbs.

I went down with the wet symptoms, and my thin frame began to expand at an alarming rate. There was no release for the liquids formed in my body, which swelled so hugely that when I went into the camp's tiny hospital I was barely able to walk. There was little medical treatment. I had to push spoonfuls of rice polishings down my throat. This was a vile-tasting grit ty powder, which reminded me of sawdust. I had to lie quite still on my bamboo bed. This illness almost cost me my life.

I learnt on my return home that about this time my wife had a dream premonition that I was sick. She dreamt that she was unable to move from the bed and that near her was someone lying on a bed, with another person in white - it seemed in the dream a doctor or white-coated hospital orderly - standing alongside. The following morning she woke up with the scared feeling that the person she had seen lying ill in the dream was myself. At that time she did not even know that I was a prisoner. She did not know whether I was dead or alive. But for days after the dream she underwent mental agony. There was no solace for her, and no news. On my bamboo bed the only bedding was my sacking and a dirty sheet. They offered little comfort and if I stretched out I seemed to feel every little niche in the wood.

The disease, which by now seemed to have every appearance of elephantiasis, gave me a figure like the well known fat man in a tyre advertisement. It was nearing the region of the heart, and had it continued that way I should have died.

The doctor warned me of the possible consequences. I was not unduly alarmed. My prayers increased, and, I believe, they were answered. Several officers in the camp, some of whom I knew from my Divisional H.Q. days in England, were in the fortunate position of being able to buy eggs when a Thai river trader unexpectedly came to the camp slopes. With a fine spirit of companionship, they gave me two eggs a day for a week to augment the sparse diet. Fortunately, too, a bullock had been killed by the Japs and the offal handed to the hospital cookhouse. I was given a share of the liver. The vitamins and proteins from the eggs and meat gradually released my dropsy-like condition. The outlook brightened as each day the swelling retracted, and when I had sufficient strength to exercise and walk a little the beri-beri began to recede altogether. I was thankful to return to something like normality. To those generous British officers and the medical men concerned I s hall ever be extremely grateful; nor must I omit to mention the rare humanity shown by the Japanese on this occasion.

When I rejoined my toiling companions, the work of the railway between Thailand and Burma was almost completed. It ended soon afterwards. Although the completion was several months behind schedule the Japs were jubilant. They celebrated by getting drunk on Saki. I do not think that as they rolled in merriment they gave a thought to the terrible cost in human lives or the broken bodies left in camp hospitals all along that grim line.