"Air raid live tonight! Admission free for prisoners" 

On January 2nd 1943, five Australian men who had been working in the tin mines at Yala in Southern Thailand, were brought under Japanese guard into the internment camp that had been hastily constructed on the playing fields behind Thammasat University in Bangkok.
The Australians were exhausted. Three of them were still lame from wounds. They’d had a very bad time of it down south, and a number had been killed. They now joined over three hundred Commonwealth internees made up of traders, university teachers, insurance men, lawyers, and their wives and children.
They new experience of confinement soon brought out the best and the worst in people. Those civilian internees who had cruised through their office days in Bangkok in a crapulous haze of dry martinis, were now sober for the first time in years. They lost weight, began to read, and organised drama societies and lecture evenings. A few, who weren’t used to picking up anything heavier than money, refused to join in any activity in the camp, and remained aloof, separated by their own arrogance, no doubt feeling that they were too special to have to do anything either for themselves or for others. They were ignored, and withdrew into a spiteful silence. Nothing changes!
Although everyone in the camp believed in the need for freedom, many understood the greater importance for order. In the tight and crowded circumstances one without the other was dangerous. As it was, there were marital affairs, personality clashes, and furious arguments over the hierarchy of command - and children saw adults under stress at close quarters; always a valuable education. With so many people to organise, committees were established to handle the sleeping arrangements, first-aid classes, sporting activities, sewer duties, the cooking, and the complaints. It had all the makings of some insane tropical soap opera.
To those outside Thailand at the time, Bangkok was a mere backwater in the furious theatre of a global war. Yet these internees had a ringside seat when the first major Allied bombing raids began over the city on January 8th 1942. They were to continue for the next three and a half years.
From the diary of an English trader after a raid in April 1943; “As the alarm sounded some idiots in one of the camp buildings started to smoke, and after a warning, were shot at by the guards . . . next day we discovered that the raid had hit Assumption College, a clinic at the end of Silom Road, and a row of shops on Jawarat Road. There were many Chinese casualties.”
Later on in the war, waves of American Super Flying Fortresses would come howling and thundering “a mere 600 feet above the river following its curve and midnight glisten to the bridges and railyards at Lopburi. Many a hole was made in our mosquito nets when the ack ack guns finally spoke . . .”
By which
time, it appears,
the boombers
were already over another province, if not another country.
A former Archbishop of Canterbury once said that, “Cricket is merely organised loafing.” He may be on to something there. At the camp, teams were patched together that consisted of men and women from countries as far apart as Uganda and New Zealand. A young Canadian who was politely asked to play at ‘silly mid-off’, picked up a stump and threatened the umpire - a matronly, middle-aged English woman from Devon. Bad idea. She coolly told him to, “Play where you’re told, or yu’ll be moved to ‘square-leg’ - and may I remind you, I have a bottle of Scotch that’s older than you.” At which point he “jumped into the river and swam off in the direction of Thonburi in a frightful rage, waving the cricket stump above his head, cheered on by two grinning solicitors from Ceylon holding plates of sandwiches.” The Thai guards gulped once and blinked twice, but didn’t shoot. I wonder what the Archbishop would have thought of that.
At the war’s end, the last entry in the trader’s diary is not his own, but from a survivor recently liberated by the Allies from the Thai-Burma railway in September 1945:
“Two hundred of us dressed in a queer assortment of garments dropped from relieving aircraft, filed noisily into a large hangar at Don Muang airport. Then an astonishing thing happened. All fell silent as we caught sight of a table in a corner with tea-urns and mugs on it. Standing there, smiling, was a pretty English girl with long fair hair sweeping in a wave over her neck, dressed in a crisp summery outfit. Two hundred toughs, clad like scarecrows, were hushed by the sight, and many were visibly affected. She signalled to us to file past to receive tea and sandwiches, and we did so quietly and even shyly. An elderly, unshaven private immediately in front of me, when asked if he would like sugar, murmured with genuine feeling, the old hackneyed reply, ‘Oh Miss, if you just put your finger in it, it will be sweet enough.’ He stared at her in a dog-like way, and stumbled past, blinded by her presence.”
By the way, the English do not watch cricket, they study it. To find out how people perform while loafing about.

By Roger Beaumont
  Available at Bookazine

The Headsman of Colmar

By David Cocksedge

A grisly assignment on a winter's night

PIERRE TORTURE was an unusual name for the executioner of the French town of Colmar in the late 18th century. His surname was obviously bestowed on one of his ancestors because of his profession. The post of public executioner had passed down from father to son in his family for many generations.
He lived alone in a small house situated outside the town. Because of his sinister calling, he was not exactly a popular man, and he accepted that fact without rancour.
On the misty night of 8 November 1780, he was enjoying a rest by his fireplace following his evening meal, when there was a violent knocking at his door. He opened it, and three men, wrapped in heavy cloaks with hats pulled down over their faces stood before him.
"You are the headsman?" one of them asked without ceremony.
"Yes"
"You are alone?"
"Yes"
As soon as he answered for the second time, the three men threw themselves on him, and in spite of his exceptional strength they soon overpowered him. He was gagged and bound without a further word being said.
The men then bundled him into a roomy closed carriage waiting for them close by, and they got in beside him as a fourth man whipped up the horses and they drove off at a quick pace into the misty darkness.
When they were well out of town, the man who had spoken first to Pierre Torture addressed him again. "You need not be alarmed", he said. "No one will harm you. We are taking you to carry out a sentence that has to be carried out by a licensed executioner. When you have accomplished this task, you will be taken back to your home safe and sound, and you shall receive two hundred louis as a reward. But do not attempt to find out where you are going or who we are. If you cry out for help or try to escape we shall be forced to kill you."
He was then ungagged and untied, and given a drink of wine mixed with water. At daybreak next morning they tied a black band around his eyes, and the windows of the carriage were carefully darkened with blinds. The journey continued all that day and throughout the following night and then one more day. Horses were changed several times and fresh starts made at a quickened pace. The three men and their prisoner ate and slept in the carriage. Torture's every movement was closely watched and he could not tell in which direction they were travelling. It seemed to him, however, that they had crossed the Rhine.
On the evening of the second day, he was able to tell by the sounds made by the four wheels that they were crossing a drawbridge, apparently, for he could hear heavy chains rattling as they bounced over wood. In a few seconds the horses were brought to a standstill. A gate opened and Torture, guided by the men, got out of the carriage and walked forward. Presently they went up some stairs, and then through a succession of long halls, their footsteps resounding beneath the lofty vaults. It was icy cold.
At last they stopped and the dark drape was removed from his eyes. He found himself in a vast crypt, hung with funereal black draperies and dimly illuminated by torches. In front of him, against the wall, stood a row of stone stalls in which a dozen men, garbed like judges, sat motionless. They were not masked, but Torture could not make out their features due to the nature of the lighting and the distance.
In the middle of the crypt, in the glare of the torches held up by attendants in hooded gowns, stood a young woman dressed in a long dark robe, her face covered by a thick veil. At her feet was a block of wood, and leaning against it was a sword, which Torture immediately recognised as similar to those used by executioners in Switzerland.
Then one of the members of the tribunal began to speak in German. He said to Torture: "You are here to fulfill your function. This woman has been condemned to death, and you will behead her."
The Frenchman overcame his bewilderment and recovered his senses somewhat. He protested that he could not act as headsman in this matter without the prescribed orders from the authorities over him. He was an official executioner and not an assassin.
The president of the tribunal merely repeated his command. When Torture persisted in refusing, the president said, "You have a quarter of an hour in which to obey. If you have not accomplished your task within that period, it is you who will be the first to die. And then we shall find a more complaint executioner." As he spoke, a great clock above them struck eleven o'clock.
No one moved for several more minutes, as the clock ticked off the seconds.
"You have only two more minutes"; the judge said presently, as an attendant handed Torture the sharpened sword.
Without any kind of protest the woman knelt down, turning her black veil as she did so. She rested her neck in the hollow on the block of wood. Torture now saw that she was exceptionally beautiful. There was an eerie mixture of dignity and sorrow in her movements.
Torture reluctantly moved into position and lifted the great sword. Then he swung it downwards in one expert and convulsive movement.
An instant later the woman's head rolled on the stone floor.
The Frenchman's nerve deserted him, and he fainted. He was lifted to his feet, and with his eyes again bandaged, he was taken back to the horse-drawn carriage. Two days later he was left at the door of his own home, his purse fattened by the two hundred louis he had been promised. Haunted by his memory of the beautiful woman he had murdered, he secretly donated all the money to a local orphanage. But he never forgot her, and she came back to him often in his nightmares.

(Research: 'Pierre Torture' by Frederic Boutet, Xanadu Publications Ltd)

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