There is one image that jabs and thrusts its way out of the pages of The Forgotten Highlander over and over again, and considering what its author Alistair Urquhart had to endure in the labour camps of the Far East during the Second World War, it’s the image you might expect: a Japanese guard, eyes bulging, bayonet stabbing, mouth screaming fury. Urquhart is 90 years old now, but at night he still fights sleep to stop that image coming at him.
That angry, raging face – which sometimes belongs to a jailor known as The Black Prince, sometimes Doctor Death, sometimes The Mad Mongrel – tells a lot of Urquhart’s story, but so do the lists that lengthen as the book progresses, some of which reveal the gruesome details of Urquhart’s ordeal, some making you wonder how on Earth he got through it.
One of the most memorable for Urquhart is the list of Japanese words that were screamed and beaten and kicked into him – kumi, tenko, gunso, roku, bango – but it is the painfully long list of conditions he suffered while working on the Death Railway in Thailand that is the most vivid for readers. By the end, it resembles the index of a medical textbook but it’s actually just one man’s medical history: cholera, claustrophobia, dehydration, dengue fever, diptheria, dysentery, malaria, pellagra, starvation.
Urquhart’s descriptions of the twisting agonies of the diseases, the despair of them, are uncomplicated but vivid, as vivid as what he saw and smelt and touched in the camps: putrefying flesh, heads on stakes, and the two most relentless colours – the brown of the latrines and the red of the blood.
But there is another list that weaves its way through all the terror and nastiness, a list of song titles: Abide With Me, Singin’ In The Rain, The Old Rugged Cross, Rule Britannia, Sentimental Journey. Urquhart has always loved music and dancing, and those tunes may not soften the reality but they did help him through his time in the camps. Sometimes he sang them with others, but often he just sang them to himself, in his head, alone.
Perhaps surprisingly, Urquhart did a lot of his coping alone. In prose that is straight and unflouncy (maybe the words of a soldier should always be that way), he describes the men who would steal food from the sick and the dying, the men who got angry or paranoid, the men who went mad. This was not a bonding experience, and Urquhart coped by turning back into himself. “There was no memorable sense of community,” he says.
“I lived a day at a time in my own little world, a private cocoon, and adopted the position of self-sufficient loner.”
This need to be alone, which was a friend in the camps, seemed to become an enemy for Urquhart when he came back home to Aberdeen.
He spent hours walking the streets of the city, even at night, because he had lived a solitary life for so long that love and company and other people only suffocated him.
Urquhart also describes how he feels now, how his experiences changed him, how the camps have hardwired anger into him. He is angry because he believes the British government turned a blind eye to Japan’s war crimes to forge alliances against China and Russia; he is angry too at the Japanese because he believes their government has not accepted its guilt.
What Urquhart does not explore – and it would have been interesting had he done so – is whether he has ever thought about taking direct action against his anger. Has he ever considered, as other prisoners of war have, meeting some of his captors, or going back to the site of the camps? In that sense, the story feels a little unfinished even though there are more important points for his book to make. Urquhart worked on the bridge over the River Kwai but the movie, he says, can only ever be a sanitised version. This book is utterly unsanitised and that is its greatest strength.
It is also honest about how in extreme circumstances, human beings don’t always band together, and survival is often down to you and your willpower. And this means that, in the end, The Forgotten Highlander, isn’t a story about the weakness of the human body, it’s a story about the strength of the human mind.
The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart is published by Little Brown, priced £18.99.
