The Narrow Road to the Deep North

After six months working in Java, the officers truck the prisoners to Siam for a new project. Then the Japanese take the men to a railway station and ship them in small railway cars without even enough room for the POWs to sit down. In the five days of the trip, three men die. They arrive at the Line and begin clearing the teak forest. Three days later, they are told to make their own camp at a location many miles away. An old Japanese guard named Kenji Mogami shows them how to make huts. 

One night, the men staged a concert on a small bamboo stage. One of the players has lost his fingers, and another has gone blind. Colonel Rexroth takes the stage when they finish, saying that they will get each other through their ordeal, and that they should consider themselves as one group; he wants the Australians to think of themselves as Englishmen. He asks Dorrigo to help him work on a plan to build a cemetery for their dead: “I’d love you to be part of this” (44).

Dorrigo writes that the “Speedo” (44) began, meaning there were no more rest days. Sick men grow sicker, and those who are already sick begin to die at the longer shifts. Colonel Rexroth dies, and soon the other officers require the living to work double shifts to replace the dead men. Dorrigo assumes command and the men begin calling him Big Fella: “There were moments when the Big Fella felt far too small for all that they now wanted him to bear” (44). He feels that he and the Big Fella are two separate people: one is noble, and Dorrigo is not. Their hospital hut fills with dying men, as starvation begins to claim their lives in addition to disease.

A kitchen hand brings him a steak for his dinner one night. He says that the Dark Prince—their name for Darky—managed to sneak away, kill a cow, and get some meat. The men want Dorrigo to have the steak. He tells the hand to take it to the men in the hospital and share it amongst them: “Much as he knew no one would have begrudged him the meat, he also understood the steak to be a test that demanded witnesses, a test he had to pass, a test that would become a necessary story for them all” (47). In the moment he believes it is the persona of the Big Fella who acts, not Dorrigo Evans, who is starving. He sees himself as “a weak man whom the thousand were forming into the shape of their expectations of him as a strong man” (48). The hand leaves with the steak, excited that he will also get to taste it. 

Dorrigo looks at Lynette and believes that she has become another duty for him, in a life that seems to be nothing but duty: “Dorrigo Evans hated virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves. And the more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it” (49). He listens to Lynette talk about politics and realizes that she bores him. Instead of listening, he thinks about the Speedo, and of how on the previous day he had tried to write an account of Darky’s beating. It was the same day that “[they] cremated poor old Guy Hendricks” (51).

Lynette says that she can tell when he is “thinking of her” (51). Then she asks him why Darky’s beating—carried out by three Japanese soldiers—stands out to him in the middle of so many other horrors he experienced. Dorrigo tells her that she doesn’t want to know. Lynette says, “She’s dead, isn’t she? I’m only jealous of the living” (52).