The Narrow Road to the Deep North

He had arrived in Siam in 1943 as a prisoner of war. They were not yet starving, “nor had their work for the Japanese become the madness that would kill them like so many flies. It was hard, but at the beginning it was not insane” (21). Their first job was to clear a kilometer of teak trees to make way for a future railway. 

Dorrigo is writing the forward for a book of illustrations of the POW camps, done by Guy Hendricks: “Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is” (22). Although it was already clear that Japan would most likely lose the war, they believed they would win, and they had hundreds of thousands of slaves, including 22,000 Australian POWs, 9,000 of which worked on the railway: “On 25 October 1943, steam locomotive travels the length of the completed Death Railway, it will be past endless beds of human bones that will include the remains of one in three of those Australians” (23). He is unhappy with the draft of what he has written, and there is “one name he could not write” (24).