201
but I was told the Japanese Army could not agree. I think the trouble was that Argyle St. camp was so close to the Central British School, (Sawamoto's own hospital) that he wanted any source of infectious disease removed as far as possible from his vicinity, but whether it endangered the lives of 5000 British soldiers mattered not at all. For all these cases we had only one I.M.S. officer and no mursing orderlies; we tried in vain to be allowed to get more I.M.S. men and mursing orderlies over to help us for we knew there were some available.
The conditions in the Indian hospitals was now beyond description; on the cold concrete floors of the windowless doorless rooms of an old recreation building lay about 100 Indians wherever they had happened to fall when they were helped in; those who were too weak to move passed their frequent motions where they lay; whose who could move crawled outside but without supervision they relieved themselves anywhere on the ground. Pools of blood, mucus and pus lay everywhere and what was not sucked up by the swarms of eager flies, soaked into the ground. Fortunately the weather was cold, but what would happen in the hot weather one dared not think. Not even Lt. Sawamoto's news that he and Major Hoh were being transferred to Canton and that Colonel Takata would treat us better than Major Joh, made the future any brighter. I slept little that night.
20.
7th January. Our sick list was now as follows:-
British Hospital
#
Indian
Isolation
21 cases
36 cases 130 cases.
A Japanese Staff officer visited the camp this day but General Maltby got nothing out of him excepting the information that the Imperial Japanese Army was very busy and we would have to be patient.
For the past week I had been preparing my plans for escaping and I now told General Maltby that I was convinced that this treatment by the Japanese was deliberate and I could not ascribe to the general opinion that it would improve with time. My opinion was that when the warmer weather came it would be impossible to stop the spread of the dysentery with the primitive facilities at our disposal; that the meagre diet of rice would so weaken the men that they would fall an easy prey to any epidemic, and that with the summer, cholera which was endemic in Kowloon, would certainly slay those whom dysentery had failed to kill. I was convinced that the only thing that could possibly save the lives of those 5000 men was for someone to escape and either (a) force the Japanese to alter their policy by pressure from without, or (b) to smuggle vaccines and medicines back into the camp from China,
(See page
for (c) which occurred to me as a possibility during my escape). I do not think either the General or the Brigadier had much faith in my plans and after some discussion I promised that I would not try to escape until I felt that all I could possibly do in the camp as S.M.0. had been done.
21.
On the 8th of January Col. Takata, the new Japanese A.D.M.S., visited the cap and he was justifiably appalled at the hospital conditions;
this gave me heart until he followed that observation by the statement that the dysentery was our fault and he ordered me to stop it at once. Neither the time nor the place was opportune to venture a remark about Canute, so I meekly replied that we would do all in our power if we could but be given the facilities so often requested, to which he curtly replied that the I.J.A. was very strict about these things and that we must do as we were told. He ordered us to put barbed wire around the Indian Isolation "Hospital" and I agreed to do so provided we were supplied with the where-with-all, meekly suggesting that barbed wire would not stop the flies from spreading the disease which was the real danger,
A/