Ian Watt
BRIDGES OVER THE KWA I
When Pierre Boulle's
The Bridge over the River Kwai
came
out in 1952 its title at once set me wondering. As a lieutenant in the
British army I'd been one of the sixty thousand allied prisoners of war
who'd slaved for the Japanese on the Burma-Siam railway along the
west fork of the Meklong river; and its Siamese name was the
Kwai
Noi,
meaning "small stream," as opposed to the east fork, the
Kwai
Yai,
or "big stream." But although we had actually built hundreds of
bridges over wayside streams, none of them had crossed the
Kwai Noi
itself; the only real bridge Boulle could be referring to was the big one
at Tamarkan across the broad waters of the
Kwai Yai,
just a mile up–
stream from where it joined the
Kwai Noi;
and yet when I started
reading I found that the bridge was supposed to be hundreds of miles
to the north, just by the Burmese border.
Obviously, then, Boulle's novel made no pretense to literal authen–
ticity; and it was as far from reflecting my own unforgotten images of
what had happened ten years before along the banks of the Kwai as
had been the dozen or so other novels and memoirs I'd read about the
famous railroad of death; but as I read on I came to see that
The
Bridge over the River K wai
had its own kind of interest and truth.
Boulle's hero was a devoted but confused British officer, Colonel
Nicholson. When, in clear violation of the Hague Convention, the Japa–
nese camp commandant, Colonel Saito, ordered all Nicholson's officers
to do manual work on the bridge, he resisted Saito's brutality so bravely
that he eventually succeeded in carrying his point : but then his narrow
conception of his duty led him to re-establish the morale of his troops,
and to vindicate his own patriotic pride, by building an incomparably
better bridge than the one the Japanese had begun, and on a much more
suitable site, even though it would obviously help the enemy's army on
the Burma front .
Nothing much like this had actually happened at Tamarkan or
