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PARTISAN REV I EW
me from his rough bamboo desk, and had gone into a long tirade in
barely comprehensible English about my unspeakable wickedness in fail–
ing to tamp down the sods of turf that were placed in rows along the
sides of the embankment to hold it together. Finally he had gripped his
enormous unsheathed sword, waved it at me, and shouted, in panting
fury: "Eef nexta you do not steep the grasses down hardly, I wee
I
keel
you." As I'd saluted hastily and retreated, I'd noticed that the book on
his desk was McDougall's
Introduction to Social Psychology.
The Japanese, I knew, had had quite enough technological expert–
ness to get their own way on their own terms; we, on the other hand,
had not been able to avoid going rather far in collaborating with them.
Not that we had ever been given the choice between building a bridge
for the Japanese or not building one; and the nearest any of us got
to designing a bridge for them was to correct some obvious error in
the measurements-if we didn't, some Japanese engineer would be sure
to come round and, having beaten a few men senseless, force the rest
to stay out all night doing the job properly. But the fact remained that,
for whatever compelling reasons, we had actively helped the enemy
by playing an important supervisory role in the building of a strategic
military railway.
Even so, collaboration hadn't gone nearly as far as in Boulle,
if
only because to do any more than was absolutely necessary to keep re–
lations with the Japanese tolerable, was to incur the deadly opprobrium
of being called "Jap-happy." Colonel Nicholson, I reflected, would have
earned the title as soon as he showed that he really wanted to build
the bridge, even if it hadn't leaked out before that he had increased
his men's daily work load entirely on his own initiative.
It was certainly pure fantasy for Boulle to write of sick men leav–
ing the hospital hut and "going to work with a smile on their lips" just
out of devotion for their colonel. Sometimes they had gone, in doomed
resignation, at the point of Japanese bayonets; but never to please
anyone, let alone a colonel, if only because respect for superior rank
had weakened considerably under prison conditions. I remembered the
time when a well-meaning but too conspicuously healthy colonel had
stopped to say a few words of insensitive cheer to one of the worst cases
in the dysentery ward; at first the man had totally ignored him, and
then, without sitting up, he had suddenly opened one eye and whispered
with hoarse intensity: "When I die I'll HAUNT buggers like you."
What, I wondered, would actually have happened to anyone who
had tried to act in the way Colonel Nicholson did in Boulle's novel?
The odds were that he would soon have been replaced. Survival came
