memorials

On the River Kwai

 Standing in one of the war graves cemetery in Kanchanaburi on a hot and humid Thai day. The water sprinkler was spraying. There was no one there. We had come by the Kwai river with the Bridge behind us.

Friend Carl.

With just the sound of the woosht, woosht of the sprinkler I wandered the rows and rows of the small metal plaques. The Suffolk and Cambridge regiments. The Royal engineers. The Highland regiment. A Dutch regiment.  Most of them 22 or 23. A few as old as 35. Some with just their names. Some with a bible passage or a line of poetry from Wilfred Owen. Some just what you would put on a postcard home.


" Best son ever." " Couldn't be more proud." " Thinking of you every day."

just one of thousands.

" love Mum  and Dad."














Such a weight on one's chest.

All those young men. And all their mums and dads and brothers and sisters.


Have read " The Narrow Road to the Far North."
Saw many years ago " To End All Wars."
Watched the night before heading west to Kanchanaburi, " The Bridge Over the River Kwai."

The Bridge over the River Kwai

But it is this acre of grass. One of many.








With little squares of metal and the engraved notes from home. And the books where you can read what street in Inverness or Hertfordshire, Melbourne or Darwin, Christchurch or Dunedin;  these young men left from, in a khaki uniform. And who sent them off. Probably waving.

etched into stone.

Later that day at the Hellfire Pass Memorial Museum,  which was started by an Australian POW who came back in 1984  determined to find the Konyu Cutting which they had all called  'Hellfire Pass.'





Almost consumed by Jungle, he found it and convinced  the Australian government to dedicate it as an historic memorial to all those who died while constructing the Burma Thailand railway.

Of the 60,000 allied POW's that worked on the railway, 12, 900 died there. Around 90,000 civilian laborers also died. from inadequate food, inadequate medical facilities and the brutal treatment of the guards.














There are no words for the enormity of standing on a piece of railway high up in the jungle that cost so much. No words.

Hellfire Pass today. with a tree now grown, where the tracks would have been.

a bowl made by an Australian now a potter, once a POW here at Hellfire.

So I leave it to Dr Kevin Fagan  whose words are engraved on a piece of stone at a clearing the far end of Hellfire Pass. Beside a small stream which comes down from the mountains.  With tall trees and a canopy of leaves with an occasional monkey leaping from  a branch.
All quiet now.