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train at Ban Pong, forty 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