Through the Valley
I recently found Ernest Gordon’s book,
“Through the Valley of the Kwai” in which he chronicled his
experiences on the “Death Railway.” Gordon wrote with candor
about the two years he was a POW in World War II.
One story in particular has touched me
deeply. I needed a godly reminder that people can change. Ugly
hearts can be transformed. Light always beats out darkness. This
is the story he told…
Ernest Gordon, a Scotsman, was a company
commander with the 2nd
Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He fought in the
Malayan Campaign and the Battle of Singapore. In fact, he was
one of the last Allied soldiers to cross the causeway from
Johore before it was blown up by the Japanese.
After the capture of Singapore he escaped to
Java and attempted to sail several thousand miles to Sri Lanka
in a native fishing boat with a group of other British officers.
They were captured by Japanese warships and he was returned to
Singapore as a prisoner of war.
At the age of 24 Gordon was sent to work in
the prison camp that would be constructing the Burma-Siam
railroad.
The Japanese were especially cruel to their
prisoners. For every mile of track, 393 men are said to have
died. Wearing nothing but loincloths, they worked for hours in
the scorching temperatures. Prisoners were treated like animals
and became themselves like beasts trying to survive the
unsurvivable. Theft was as rampant as illness.
Eventually Gordon was transferred to the
“Death Ward,” designated for those who were not expected to
survive. Most succumbed to malnutrition, malaria, beriberi, and
what is now known as flesh-eating bacteria.
He describes his purposeless existence in
that cruel and indifferent setting: “I was a prisoner of war,
lying among the dead, waiting for the bodies to be carried away
so that I might have more room.” In their fight to survive, the
men lost all sense of right and wrong, light and dark, good and
evil. Their world shrank to each individual struggle to stay
alive one more day.
At night the Japanese guards would count the
tools before anyone was permitted to return to camp. One evening
when a shovel was missing, a guard shouted relentlessly for the
guilty man to present himself. When no one responded, he
callously screamed, “All die! All die!”
Finally, a young man stepped forward and
confessed to the theft. He was immediately killed before them.
Later one of the guards discovered a mistake
in their counting. There had never been a missing shovel. The
young man who stepped forward was innocent; he had sacrificed
his own life to preserve the lives of his fellow inmates.
Attitudes immediately and dramatically
shifted. Instead of men focused on a detached game of survival
of the fittest, prisoners began to look out for each another.
One of the men remembered the words of Jesus: “Greater love has
no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
(John 15:13)
Gordon, who once lay for dead, was slowly
nursed back to health by two special soldiers in their late
twenties, a simple gardener named Dusty Miller and a devout
Roman Catholic named “Dinty” Moore. They gave him 24-hour care,
boiling rags to clean and massage Gordon’s diseased legs day
after day.
To everyone’s surprise, Ernest Gordon
survived. He became a makeshift chaplain for the camp. After
they were liberated, he entered seminary. In 1954 he was named
Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University.
“Faith thrives where there is no hope but
God,” he later testified.
Light always conquers darkness.