One Fourteenth of an Elephant
By Ian Denys Peek
Published by Pan Macmillan Australia, 2003
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

Still coming back to Kanburi

A thoughtful, moving and inescapably harrowing recent memoir about building the Death Railway that keeps the abomination relevant 60 years on.

The Nation
Published in autumn 2005
Perhaps to commemorate the 60th anniversary of end of World War II last month, Asia Books is re-circulating this 2003 memoir by one of the fellows who helped build the Thailand-Burma “death railway”, and all pecuniary interest aside, the bookshop chain deserves thanks, because the whole thrust of such accounts is that it’s absolutely crucial that people never forget what happened on our western frontier over the course of four dreadfully brutal years.
The need to keep on dredging up the now-distant past is a matter of considerable debate – there are many who would prefer, in the interest of international peace, individual peace of mind, or more cynically, better trade deals, to put it all behind us now – but in Peek’s astonishing memory and eloquent prose lies a compelling reason.
He wrote in 2003 (and saw no reason to say otherwise in the 2004 reprint) that Japan has still not properly apologised for its behaviour in the war. Tokyo’s most recent effort to say sorry, last month, was in fact a watered-down version of a decade-old official confession, suggesting that the Japanese government, always in need of the votes controlled by its feisty right-wingers, is becoming progressively less sorry.
“You have to move on,” one Death Railway survivor told CNN at the August 15 memorial in Kanchanaburi (often referred to as “Kanburi”, then and now), “but what gets my goat is that they don’t recognise what they did. They just butchered people without any apparent reason.”
“I can accept the fact,” said another, “that the young generation of Japanese is not to blame – it was was their fathers and grandfathers – but until they own up, they’ll always be a pariah nation,”
Grumpy old men holding out for a few dollars in recompense? Not in most cases. You have to read a book like Peek’s to find out why.
Everyone should have a memory as sound as this particular octogenarian, though many of us would crumble under the sheer weight of the horrors it stores. Fortunately for Peek and his readers, there is much to recollect that is positive as well, inspirational no less, and a rather surprising amount of levity – of the sort that the PoWs relied upon to keep them sane in desperate circumstances.
Peek, a Briton who grew up in the East and now lives in Australia, presents in 520 pages a diary-like report of his ordeal, from his capture as a member of the Singapore Volunteers in early 1942 to his shipping “home” to Liverpool after the Japanese surrender.
He was at various camps, though never at Hellfire Pass or at the one made famous in the book and film “Bridge on the River Kwai”. He may not have endured Allied bombing directly, as many did, but went though all the usual agonies we’ve heard about elsewhere, the “speedo” forced labour and the disease – dodging cholera but having a go at malaria and surviving the usually fatal beri-beri on willpower alone.
His story is engaging throughout, and even the occasional repetitiveness collaborates with the many enthralling anecdotes to give us a sense of immense time passing (four birthdays behind barbed wire in a rotting loincloth!), and all the while, “We have been reduced to men who mean nothing, who have no control over their own lives and who cannot give help of any real substance to anyone else.”
He is often bothered, of course, by the unavoidable fact that they are helping the Japanese build a supply railroad for the subjugation of British Burma and India, and at book’s end isn’t sure whether the world will forgive them for it. He wonders if the “just following orders” cop-out will work, since uncaring Allied officers routinely ordered them to cooperate, or whether he can deflect any blame tossed his way onto Churchill and other leaders who didn’t do enough in the first place to protect his beloved Singapore.
Soul-searching like this sets Peek’s memoir apart from the many other books written about this particular abomination in history, and in fact makes it a fascinating study of the drawn-out mental processes involved in such gruelling captivity. He takes it to the furthest level, questioning divinity’s very existence.
“In all this turmoil of bodily and mental stress I have still not come across a single man giving thanks to God for anything at all, nor on the other hand have I heard anyone railing at God for seeming to be completely indifferent to us … You would expect that some bulwark of spiritual/religious strength would be welcome ,,, We all started with it when we entered this valley of shadows … but it has withered away and we no longer look for it.”
Intriguingly, though, the psyche is not without succour from beyond. In one instance his brother, imprisoned elsewhere, appears to him with an urgent plea to come to him, and suddenly Peek is presented with a chance to move to the camp where his sibling is facing death.
On another occasion, he and his comrades are halted in mid-march by an uncanny mutual feeling that later proves to stem from their presence in an unmarked PoW burial ground. Upon discovering that his old friend was among those shovelled into the earth at that spot, Peek lets loose with a tirade against his captors. “the whole foul, savage, barbaric and uncivilised Japanese nation … May the Japanese be cursed forever.”
“One Fourteenth of an Elephant” – the title refers to the number of men it takes to match the labour of a pachyderm briefly assigned to help them – is blessed with Peek’s sensitivity. A college-educated volunteer, he’s neither officer class nor average grunt, so he can bring to his account an intelligent perspective that would be lost to the ordinary conscript.
The sheer emotionalism that emerges can be truly hair-raising thanks to his descriptive talent, as when suds from a rare bar of soap fall from him and convulse a passing toad. He almost has a nervous breakdown there and then, and similarly is left close to collapse after coming within a breath of murdering a particularly brutal guard with a slash of his spade.
Local readers will be delighted that no Siamese is injured in the telling, and in fact earn nothing but praise, as do the landscape and the elephant of the title.
But in the end the story is about the sacrifice and those who died trying.
“The dead are still so close to us. Nearly all of them are young ghosts of less than a year. The few we knew personally and the thousands whom we never met, they are indissolubly our kith and kin. They crowd the atmosphere around us, waiting patiently to be taken to their final rest. We are keenly aware of their presence; they brush softly against our hearts. We must never forget them, however long we live.”
About 60,000 Westerners were forced to work on the Death Railway and many, many more South and Southeast Asians, and one in five died in the process. They figures are charted as best as can be managed when you visit the cemeteries and memorials in Kanchanaburi, but the real import of what happened (and is still happening to those who were involved) won’t become clear there, or as you’re watching the annual sound-and-light on the riverbank in December. You’ll have to read a book like Ian Peek’s.