1. INTRODUCTION
I am indebted to Philip Yancey’s book “Rumours of another World for first bringing this awesome story to my attention and for his insights and revelations to us today.
I guess most of us here today would have heard of or even seen the film “Bridge over the River Kwai”. The film portrayed the brutal treatment of Prisoners of Wars forced by the Japanese to construct a railway line through the Thai jungle.
Ernest Gordon’s autobiography called “Miracle on the River Kwai” tells an extraordinary tale of survival in the prison camps. Even the title of his book suggests a story that has not been told.
2. BACKGROUND
Ernest Gordon was a British Army officer captured at sea by the Japanese at the age of twenty-four. Gordon was sent to work on the Burma-Siam railway line that the Japanese were constructing though the dense Thai jungle for possible use in an invasion of India. For labour, they conscripted prisoners of war they had captured from occupied countries in Asia and from the British Army itself. Against international law, the Japanese forced even officers to work at manual labour, and each day Gordon would join a work detail of thousands of prisoners who hacked their way through the jungle and built up a track bed through low-lying swamp land.
Naked except for loincloths, the men worked in 120-degree heat, their bodies stung by insects, their bare feet cut and bruised by sharp stones. Death was commonplace. If a prisoner appeared to be lagging, a Japanese guard would beat him to death, bayonet him, or decapitate him in full view of the other prisoners. Many more men simply dropped dead from exhaustion, malnutrition, and disease. Under these severe conditions, with such inadequate care for prisoners, 80.000 men ultimately died building the railway, 393 fatalities for every mile of track.
3. THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE
For most of the war, the law of the jungle had ruled in the prison camp. As starvation, exhaustion and disease took an ever-increasing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived became poisoned by selfishness, hate and fear. We were slipping rapidly down the slope of degradation. Before the patterns of army life had sustained us. We had still shown some consideration for each other. Now that was all swept away. Existence had become so miserable, the odds so heavy against survival, that, to most of the prisoners, nothing mattered except to survive. We lived by the law of the jungle ~ the law of the survival of the fittest. It was a case of “I look out for myself and to hell with everyone else”.
For most of us, little acts of meanness, suspicion and favouritism permeated our daily lives. In the food line, prisoners fought over the few scraps of vegetables or grains of rice floating in the greasy broth. Officers refused to share any of their special rations. Theft was common in the barracks. Men lived like animals and hate was the main motivation to stay alive.
We had no church, no chaplain, no services. We were forsaken men ~ forsaken by our friends, our families, by our Government. Now even God seemed to have left us.
4. THE SACRIFICIAL LIFE
But something was astir in the prison camp, something that Gordon would call “Miracle on the River Kwai”. Stories began to circulate around the camp, stories of self-sacrifice, heroism, faith and love. It was the custom among the Argyll’s for every man to have a “mucker” ~ that is, a pal or friend with whom he shared or “mucked in” everything he had. An Argyll called Angus had a mucker who became very ill. It seemed pretty certain to everyone that he was going to die. Certain, that is, to everyone but Angus. When someone stole his mucker’s blanket Angus gave him his own. Every mealtime Angus would draw his ration only to give them to his friend. Perhaps you can guess the end of the story. The mucker got better. But Angus collapsed, and died caused by starvation and exhaustion. All for his friend. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. The story of Angus’s sacrifice spread through the camp firing the imagination of everyone. He had given a shining example of the way we ought to live.
Another event shook the prisoners. Japanese guards carefully counted tools at the end of day’s work, and one day the guard shouted that a shovel was missing. He walked up and down the ranks demanding to know who had stolen it. When no one confessed, he screamed, “All die! All die!” and raised his rifle to fire at the first man in the line. At that instant a man stepped forward, stood at attention, and said, “I did it.”
The guard fell on him in a fury, kicking and beating the prisoner, who despite the blows still managed to stand at attention. Enraged, the guard lifted his weapon high in the air and brought the rifle butt down on the soldier’s skull. The man sank in a heap to the ground, but the guard continued kicking his motionless body. When the assault finally stopped the other prisoners picked up their comrade’s corpse and marched back to the camp. That evening, when the tools were counted again, the work crew discovered a mistake had been make; no shovel was missing.
One of the prisoners remembered the verse “Greater love have no man than this, than a man lay down his life for his friends.”
These acts of self-sacrifice shone like beacons causing a transformation in the camp. Prisoners started treating the dying with respect, organizing proper funerals and burial, marking each man’s grave with a cross. With no prompting, prisoners began looking out for each other rather than themselves. Although to be caught meant death, prisoners undertook expeditions outside the camp to find food for their sick fellow. Thefts grew increasingly rare. Men started thinking less of themselves finding ways to help others.
The new spirit continued to spread through the camp. Death was still with us – no doubt about that. But we were slowly being freed from its destructive grip. We were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrast between the forces that made for life and those that made for death. Selfishness, hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, self-indulgence, laziness and pride were all anti-life. Love, heroism, self-sacrifice, sympathy, mercy, integrity and creative faith, on the other hand, were the essence of life, turning mere existence into living in its truest sense. These were the gifts of God to men … True, there was hatred. But there was also love. There was death. But there was also life. God had not left us. He was with us.
5. LET ME HELP YOU
Ernest Gordon could feel himself gradually wasting away from a combination of beriberi, worms, malaria, dysentery, and typhoid. Then a virulent case of diphtheria ravaged his throat so severely that when he tried to drink or eat, the rice or water would come gushing out through his nose. As a side effect of the disease, his legs lost all sensation. Paralysed and unable to eat, Gordon was in the Death House, where prisoners on the verge of death were laid out in rows until they stopped breathing. The stench was unbearable. He had no energy to fight off the bedbugs, lice and swarming flies. He propped himself up on one elbow long enough to write a final letter to his parents and then lay back to await the inevitable.
“There is no escape,” whispered a voice in his mind. Gordon however said to himself “Life has to be cherished, not thrown away. I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going to surrender”. “All right, but what do I do about it?” he asked himself. Another voice replied, “You could live. You could be. You could do. There’s a purpose you have to fulfil. You’d become more conscious
Of it every day you keep on living. There’s a task for you; a responsibility that is yours and only yours.” Good enough” Gordon said to himself “I’ll get on with it”.
Gordon experienced the change of attitudes in the camp in a very personal way. His friends built a new bamboo addition onto their hut on high ground, away from the swamp. They carried his shrivelled body on a stretcher from the contaminated earth floor of the Death House to a new bed of split bamboo, installing him in clean quarters for the first time in months.
Lying alone there in the silence Gordon was approached by a man called Dusty Miller “Good evening, sir,” “I’ve heard you needed a hand and I wondered if you’d care to let me help you.” I studied him for a moment. “Are you quite sure you want to help me?” I asked the question not knowing what to expect. His offer had surprised me, for it was so different from the attitude we had come accept as normal. “Of course I want to help you, he replied with such warmth that there was no doubting his sincerity.”
Dusty was one of two fellow Scots who volunteered to come each day and care for him. Dusty faithfully dressed the ulcers on his legs and massaged his useless, atrophied muscles. They brought him food and cleaned his shack. After weeks of such tender care, Gordon put on a little weight and, to his amazement, regained partial use of his legs. The strong and simple faith of Dusty Miller was an inspiration; it suggested that he had found the answer so many of them sought. Ernest Gordon questioned Dusty as he was putting fresh bandages on his tropical ulcers about the horrifying waste of life in the camp and if there was any point in living. Dusty firmly replied that God knows us. He knows about the sparrow and each hair of our heads. He has a purpose for us. Dusty conceded that we can’t see everything He is doing now. Maybe our vision isn’t very good at this point, “for here we see as in a glass darkly,” I suppose eventually we shall see and when we see we shall understand.
Gordon let his mind dwell on his conversations with Dusty and knew that there was truth in them. Because Dusty exemplified it. So Gordon begun to be aware of the miracle that God was working in the Death Camp by the River Kwai. Dusty’s example, and the self-sacrificing heroism of Angus, had humbled him. He became determined, with God’s help, to overcome the frailties of his spirit, as men were doing around him daily. He responded to the power of renewal in the camp. This was indeed a miracle.
5. THE GOSPEL
As Gordon continued to recover, an Australian sergeant, approached him and asked if he would lead a discussion group wondering if there might not be something in Christianity after all that they had failed to understand, having been so shaken by their experiences. His lads wouldn’t stand for any “Sunday School Stuff” ~ they wanted “the real dingo” about Christianity. They had seen the absolute worst there is, but believed there’s got to be something better. And Gordon a fighting soldier and one who had been to university was there choice to lead the group. The conversations kept circling around the issue of how to prepare for death, the most urgent question of the camp. Seeking answers, Gordon returned to fragments of faith recalled from his childhood. He had thought little about God for years, but as he would later put it, “Faith thrives when there is no hope but God.”
Gordon knew they had to find out as much as they could about Jesus and through their readings and discussions they gradually came to know Him. He was one of them. He could understand their problems; because they were the kind of problems he had faced Himself. Like them, he often had no place to lay His head, no food for his belly, no friends in high places. He, too, had known bone~weariness from too much toil; the suffering, the rejection, the disappointments that make up the fabric of like. As they read and talked, they understood that the love expressed so supremely in Jesus was God’s love.
Maybe it’s been a long time since you have thought about God. If like Gordon you have little or no hope reach out to Him today with all your heart. God will meet you where you are. Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” His was the ultimate costly sacrifice of a good and perfect life laid down for you ~ for me.
5. THE KINGDOM OF GOD
Gordon became the unofficial camp chaplain. The prisoners built a tiny church, and each evening they gathered to say prayers for those with the greatest needs. The informal discussion group proved so popular that a “jungle university” began to form. Whoever had expertise in a certain field would teach a course to other students. The university soon offered courses in history, philosophy, economics, mathematics, natural sciences, and at least nine languages, including Latin, Greek, Russian, and Sanskrit. Professors wrote their own textbooks as they went along, on whatever scraps of paper they could find. Prisoners with artistic talent salvaged bits of charcoal form cooking fires, pounded rocks to make their own paints, and managed to produce enough artwork to mount an exhibition. Two botanists oversaw a garden, specialising in much needed medicinal plants for the prisoners. A few smuggled string instruments combined with carved woodwinds out of bamboo resulted in an orchestra being formed. One man blessed with a photographic memory could write out the complete scores of symphonies and soon the camp was staging concerts, ballets, and musical theatre performance.
Ernest was able to inspire a prisoner called Dodger Green, a man who had lost all hope. Gordon listened and talked with him, encouraging read the New Testament. Although Dodger knew he did not have long to live he became determined to live out the days that remained moment by precious moment. Volunteering to collect and clean the used ulcer rags he served others by carrying out the filthiest job in the camp. Dodger turned out to have hidden assets. He had a quick eye and a sharp mind, perhaps unsuspected by himself until he learned to use them in the service of others. The last time Gordon saw him, Dodgers slight figure was moving energetically along, intent on some errand for a comrade. He conveyed the impression of a man happy and fulfilled by having found a purpose.
Gordon experienced the change in his comrades when coming across wounded Japanese soldiers. They were moved by compassion for these men, whose uniforms were encrusted with mud, blood and excrement with wounds, sorely inflamed and full of pus, crawling with maggots. Japanese guards tried to prevent them helping these sick men, no longer fit for action, whenever one of them died en route; he was thrown off into the jungle. They could understand now whey the Japanese who so cruelly treated their own were so cruel to their prisoners. Gordon says we ignored the guards and knelt by the side of the enemy to give them food and water, to clean and bind up their wounds, to simeil and say a kind word. Grateful cries of thank you were uttered. On being rebuked by another allied officer Gordon responded by telling him the story of the Good Samaritan. Although the officer gave him a scornful glance and, turning his back, the words of Jesus came to him, “Love your enemies”. Gordon goes onto say that their experience of life in death had taught them that the way to life leads through death. To see Jesus was to see in Him that love which is the very highest form of life, that love which has sacrifice as the logical end of its action. To hang on to life, to guard it jealously, to preserve it, its to end up by burying it. Each of us must die to the physical life of selfishness, the life controlled by our hates, fears, lusts and prejudices in order to live in the flesh the life that is of the spirit. “We were beginning to understand that as there were no easy ways for God, so there were no easy ways for us. God, we saw, was honouring us by allowing us to share in His labours, in His agony for the world He loves”.
Gordon’s book tells of the transformation of individual men in the camp, that when liberation finally came the prisoners treated their sadistic guards with kindness and not revenge. The liberators were so infuriated by what they saw that they wanted to shoot the Japanese on the spot. Only the intervention of the victims prevented them. Captors were spared by their captives. “Let mercy take the place of bloodshed,” said these exhausted but forgiving men. “Not an eye for an eye, a limb for a limb”.
As Philip Yancey states in his book "Two worlds lived side by side in the jungles of Thailand in the early 1940s. The miracle on the River Kwai was no less than the creation of an alternate community, a tiny settlement of the kingdom of God taking root in the least likely soil, a spiritual fellowship that somehow proved more substantial and more real than the world of death and despair all around. To a man the prisoners clung to the desperate hope that their lives would not end in a jungle prison in Thailand but would resume, after liberation, back in the hills of Scotland or on the steets of London or wherever they called home. Yet even if it did not, they would endeavour to build a community of faith, beauty, and compassion, nourishing souls even in a place that destroyed bodies. Perhaps something like this was what Jesus had in mind as he turned again and again to his fabourite topic: the kingdom of God. In the soil of this violent, disordered world, an alterative community may take root. It lives in hope of a day of liberation. In the meantime, it aligns itself with another world, not just spreading rumours but planting settlements~in~advance of that coming reign".
Ernest Gordon’s own life took an unexpected turn. After liberation, in contrast to all his previous plans he became a minister, eventually becoming Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University, where he died in early 2002, just before the film about his life called “To end all wars” was completed.
6. BEING LIKE JESUS WHEREVER WE ARE
Because of the witness of others in the Camp attitudes changed dramatically. We may not be in such extreme circumstances but we can still influence others by being like Jesus wherever we are. In the death camp just a couple of duck eggs bought through the canteen could save a life. It’s an example for us too that our little acts of kindness can also impact and save lives.
Maybe like Dusty you can offer your help to someone in need and make a difference, today. It may not be easy. You may not be thanked. Dusty was crucified by a Japanese Warrant Officer. He hated this good man of deep faith and warm heart, incapable of a mean act, even against a brutal tormentor. Dusty’s goodness was hated by someone who could not break him. As for Jesus, so for Dusty and for us too, sometimes goodness is repaid in sheer hate. As Ernest Gordon confessed “It is hard to be a disciple, Lord”. But love conquers all.
God wants to show His love and power in the darkest places on earth. He can use even us to paint His light on this world’s dark canvas. Lets think differently. Lets live differently.
