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PARTISAN REVIEW
anywhere else; but when I thought about it I saw that Boulle's main
narrative elements had some basis in fact.
The Japanese had certainly forced a great many officers in Siam
to do manual work on the railway, although under conditions signifi–
cantly different from those described by Boulle. At the time when the
pressure had started, in November 1942, I personally had been in Chung
Kai, a camp four miles north of Tamarkan. At first our commander
had refused repeated demands that all officer prisoners of war be sent
out to work on the railway; but when one morning we were all ordered
on parade, and the Japanese guards took up their positions and loaded
their rifles and machine guns, the British colonel in charge had felt
obliged to yield. There was a good deal of argument afterwards as to
whether the Japanese would actually have fired; witnesses, certainly,
would not have deterred them, as Boulle suggested in his novel; and
even if there had been no mass-shooting, the Japanese would undoubt–
edly have used other drastic methods to gain their ends. In any event,
officers soon started doing manual labor on the railway in every camp
where there were more of them than were absolutely needed to admin–
ister the troops.
I knew things had been different in Tamarkan, chiefly because, as
in Boulle's novel actually, there hadn't really been a large enough sur–
plus of officers to make it worth while for the Japanese to press the
issue. The chief trouble there had been about the authority of the
allied officers in charge of working parties; and after many delays and
unpleasant incidents the Jaapnese commander had finally come to
realize that the tasks assigned were done much better if the officers in
charge were held responsible only to the Japanese engineers, and not
to the Japanese prison guards, who were incapable of organizing the
work properly. Some such division of responsibilities had eventually be–
come fairly standard all along the line, but it had been carried out with
particular success at Tamarkan, mainly because, as the bridge was so
large, Tamarkan was a more permanent camp than any of the others
and one where the work needed much more elaborate organization;
there had therefore been much more opportunity-and necessity-for
both sides to settle down together; and the British officer in charge
had in fact exploited this situation so well that his prowess in "handling
the Nips" soon became a legend.
Colonel
T---
was tall, vigorous, and rather handsome, if you
fancy those English faces that look like soulful bulldogs. He was not,
like Boulle's Nicholson, a regular officer, but a prominent businessman;
and his consider!lble success with the Japanese was based on an intelli-
