94
PARTISAN REVIEW
the Japanese was sometimes rather like a football game; that jungle
commandos at least got to have picnics and mixed bathing; that the
Saitos of this world were really very sympathetic when you got to know
them; that good-time Charlies like Shears turned out to be trumps
in
the end; and that even paranoiacs like Nicholson at least snap out of
it before it's too late. No one, in fact, has to pay the full price for
cruelty or selfishness or folly-or even for being what they are; ideas
and actions and environments don't have their predictable consequences;
and since you never see them again you're bound to assume that the
sick men you saw in the hospital hut don't actually die.
Having thought about the book and the movie has at least helped
me to see why I should never have expected to find in either of them
the real story of the bridges on the River Kwai. Even the climax of
the story would have been far too unpalatable. It is true that in the
last few months of the war the Tamarkan bridge and a lot of others
on the line were continuously bombed from the air, and that some train–
loads of retreating J apanese troops were delayed for short periods; but
hundreds of prisoners were also killed and wounded when the flying
fortresses missed their targets and hit our camps; it was accidental, of
course, like Colonel Nicholson's death, but there was nothing affirmative
about the irony.
In any case the life of a prisoner of war is the last subject in the
world for fiction. The whole point of his life is that he is not free; that
he is not so much a person as an extreme case of a more general modern
condition-the powerlessness of the individual caught in the grip of
vast collective purposes; in the end what he does makes very little
difference, and he knows it. Given the decision to build that railway
and at that speed and with only those resources, it was inevitable that
over twenty thousand allied prisoners should die; no one individual,
good or bad, weak or strong, English or Japanese, could have reduced
that toll appreciably.
The lesson for those who survived is not very different from what
everybody really knows but doesn't like to admit: that survival, always
a selfish business, gets more so when it is difficult; and that the greatest
difficulties of the task are the result, not of any exceptional cruelty or
folly but only of the cumulative effects of man's ordinary blindness and
egotism and inertia. Who would want to read a book or see a movie
merely to be shown that what was suffered by the real River Kwai was
for the most part the product of a very common sum?
