The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness by Lomax Eric

Author:Lomax, Eric [Lomax, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Prisoners of war, Burma-Siam Railroad, 1939-1945, Lomax, World War, Eric
Publisher: New York : W.W. Norton
Published: 1995-10-10T05:00:00+00:00

How many miles to Babylon?

Three score and ten

Can I get there by candlelight

Yes, and back again.

I am Alpha and Omega

the beginning and the end

the first and the last

and did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green.

O for that warning voice which he who saw,

The Apocalypse heard cry in Heaven aloud.

Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

At the worst moments time became completely separated firom my inner world of pain and sleeplessness. Once I came out into the yard, after what I thought was an all-night interrogation and saw the dawn light oiling the river at the end of the yard, filling our cages with luminous shadow. Then suddenly it went dark and I realized that I had been watching the sun set.

They brought back the first NCO. He would bang on the table with a big wooden ruler, waving it threateningly to get my attention. *Lomax, you will tell us.' He was becoming more and more aggressive.

One morning I was taken into that room and there on the table, spread out carefully, was my map. It looked so fine, so neatly done. The NCO and the interpreter stood at the window with their backs to me. The room was silent. They left me standing there for a long time.

Then they turned and from both of them came a storm of fake anger. They had obviously known about it all along, but were now trying to shock me. This is a very good map . . . why did you make it? From where did you steal the paper, where did you get your information? There must be other maps from which you got your information . . . Where are they? Were you planning to escape on your own? With others? Who are they? And then they kept returning to one thing: who we were planning to meet up with, whether there were villagers who had promised to help us, whether we received instructions by wireless, whether any villagers had radios. Were you in contact with the Chinese? And so on.

The young interpreter was now getting deeper into his role as interrogator, as though he were enjoying it. They were really worked up. I could feel their frustration at being sent around in circles by my stubborn refusals. There was a violent electricity in the air.

They wanted to know why I had drawn the railway on my map. I tried to convince them that I was a railway enthusiast, that I had made the map so that I would have a souvenir of Siam and the railway, and know where the stations were. They could not imagine that this was partly true: I had not lost my instinct to record and list and trace. I spoke to them about trains, loaded them up with information about British standard gauge and how interesting it was to see a metre-gauge railway in operation, and the problems of exporting locomotives designed for one system to countries with different systems.

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