DORRIGO EVANS WAS driving through an intersection in Parramatta at three in the morning—a place and a time subsequently never publicly explained, along with the small matter of an alcohol reading—when he first found himself flying, being suddenly thrown into the air, never to return to earth. A carload of drunken kids fleeing the police in a stolen Subaru Impreza had crashed a red light and run straight into Dorrigo Evans’ ageing Bentley, totalling both vehicles, killing two of them and critically injuring one of Australia’s greatest war heroes, who had hurtled through his car’s windscreen.
He was three days in dying, and in that time possessed of the most extraordinary dreams of his life. Light was flooding a church hall in which he sat with Amy. Blinding, beautiful light, and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent oblivion and into the arms of women. He was flying and he was smelling Amy’s naked back and he was soaring ever higher. Whilst around him the nation prepared itself to mourn while simultaneously debating the decline of youth, contrasting the noble heroics of one generation with the vile and murderous criminality of another, he was stunned to realise that his life was only just beginning, and in a faraway teak jungle that had long since been cleared, in a country called Siam that no longer existed, a man who no longer lived had finally fallen asleep.
16
DORRIGO EVANS AWOKE from a terrible dream of death. He realised he was so exhausted that he had momentarily nodded off while the parade was assembling. It was almost midnight. He turned back to the seven hundred men assembled in front of him, and explained that it was his task to pick one hundred men to march to another camp one hundred miles deeper into the jungle of Siam. They would be leaving immediately after the morning parade. The men were counted and then counted again, and somehow the numbers didn’t tally. More men staggered in from the Line, confusing matters further. Sergeants sought to explain who was there and who wasn’t and why they weren’t. There was some heated discussion between Fukuhara—immaculately uniformed, even at this late hour—and the guards, one of the Australian sergeants was slapped around, and after some confusion the counting began again.
Major Nakamura had come to him an hour earlier with Fukuhara and given him the order that one hundred men were to be selected to march to a camp near Three Pagoda Pass.
None of these men should be asked to do any more, argued Dorrigo Evans. There is not one prisoner in this camp capable of such a march.
Major Nakamura insisted that a hundred were to be found.
Unless you change your treatment of prisoners they will all die, said Dorrigo Evans.
Major Nakamura indicated that he would choose if the Australian colonel would not.
They’ll all die, said Dorrigo Evans.
Again Lieutenant Fukuhara translated; Major Nakamura listened and then spoke. The lieutenant turned to Dorrigo Evans.
Major Nakamura say that very good thing, Lieutenant Fukuhara said. It save Japanese army much rice.
Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest—and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura—and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant.
As the parade went on, as additional men on light duties or cooking or in the hospital were rounded up and brought in, as they stood there sick and starving, as the occasional man collapsed from exhaustion and was just left lying in the mud, the prisoners watched a long column of Japanese soldiers appear, marching along the rough track that ran along the far side of the parade ground, which, when not impassable from the monsoon, served as the supply road for the railway.