The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan Read Free Book Online

who strove to be mistaken as English, a man who had turned to the army in 1927 for the opportunities that had eluded him elsewhere in life. Though he and Dorrigo Evans were the same rank, by dint of experience and by virtue of being a military man as opposed to a medical man, Rexroth was Dorrigo’s senior.
    Colonel Rexroth turned to Dorrigo Evans and said that he believed that all their national British strengths would be enough, that their British esprit de corps would hold and their British spirit would not break and their British blood would bring them through it together.
    Some quinine wouldn’t be bad either, Dorrigo Evans said.
    A few Englishmen had come over from their camp and were presenting a short play about a German POW in the Great War. The night air was so thick with swarming insects that the performers looked slightly blurred.
    Colonel Rexroth said he didn’t like his attitude. Only seeing the negative. This demands positive thoughts. Celebration of the national character. And so on.
    I’ve never treated the national character, Dorrigo Evans said.
    The Australians had started cheering for the German prisoner.
    But I am seeing, he went on, an awful lot of diseases of malnutrition.
    We have what we have, Colonel Rexroth said.
    To say nothing, Dorrigo Evans said, of malaria, dysentery and tropical ulcers.
    The play ended with jeers and catcalls. Dorrigo finally recalled what Colonel Rexroth always reminded him of: the beurre bosc pears Ella’s father used to eat. And he realised how hungry he was, how he had never liked those pears with their rusty skin, and how now he would have given almost anything to eat one.
    Diseases of starvation, repeated Dorrigo Evans. Drugs would be good. But food and rest even better.
    If their work building the railway line for the Japanese hadn’t yet become a madness that would kill them, it was already beginning to take a profound physical toll. Les Whittle, who had lost his fingers to pellagra, was now playing a rotting accordion—held together with stitching and buffalo hide patches—with bamboo sticks tied to his wrist. His singer, Jack Rainbow, had lost his vision. Watching him, Dorrigo Evans wondered if it was avitaminosis or the combined damage of several maladies that had done this—whatever the cause, he was painfully aware that food would cure this and almost all of the afflictions he saw. Jack Rainbow’s anchorite’s face was now puffy as a pumpkin, and his wasted body below also oddly bloated with beri-beri, lending an ulcer—which had eaten through a swollen shin to the bone—the appearance of a blinded pink iris that gazed out from the wound at the crowd of POWS, many as grotesquely affected, as if hoping finally to see the audience of its dreams.
    The performers were now playing out a scene from the movie
Waterloo Bridge
, with Les Whittle as Robert Taylor and Jack Rainbow taking the role of Vivien Leigh. They were walking towards each other on a bamboo bridge.
    I thought I’d never see you again, said Robert Taylor, disguised as the fingerless Les Whittle, in a highly affected English accent. It’s been a lifetime.
    Nor me you, said Vivien Leigh, disguised as the blind, bloated, ulcerated Jack Rainbow.
    Darling, said Les Whittle. You haven’t changed at all.
    There was much laughter, after which they played the movie’s signature song, ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
    You see, Colonel Rexroth continued, it’s what we carry within.
    What?
    British stoicism.
    It was an American movie.
    Pluck, Colonel Rexroth said.
    Our officers are paid by the Japanese army. Twenty-five cents a day. They spend it on themselves. The Japanese do not expect them to work. They should.
    Should what, Evans?
    Should work here in the camp. Digging latrines. Nursing in the hospital. Orderlies. Building equipment for the sick. Crutches. New shelters. Operating theatres.
    He took a deep breath.
    And they should pool their wages so we draw on it to buy food and drugs for the sick.
    That