Jimmy Bigelow’s bugle

Jimmy Bigelow’s bugle begins as a working instrument in the POW camp and becomes the material thread linking daily death to a lifetime of remembrance. While bamboo, clothing, leather, food, and human flesh succumb to decay, the brass horn seems to resist it. Its continued sound is no guarantee of consolation: Bigelow plays because the dead must be honoured, even when the music raises questions rather than offering rest.

An Instrument Against Decay

At the camp, Bigelow’s bugle marks the day from its beginning. Its Reveille sounds into the dank dawn, where the grey light reveals the mud, filth, and wall-less tents. The contrast between the instrument’s clear, familiar function and the surrounding conditions is stark: it can announce morning, but it cannot restore a world in which morning brings any promise of safety or renewal.

The bugle’s durability matters because nearly everything around it is breaking down. Its leather strap has rotted, so Bigelow replaces it with a knotted rag and slings the instrument over his shoulder. He loves it partly because, unlike the jungle’s bamboo, clothes, leather, food, and flesh, it appears impervious to rot. The horn is not literally outside the camp’s hardship: its strap fails, and its player’s body deteriorates. But the instrument persists through successive deaths, giving Bigelow a physical object to hold on to amid a setting where both possessions and people are consumed by decay.

Funeral Duty and Physical Ordeal

When cholera makes funerals a daily responsibility, Bigelow is assigned camp duties so he can continue serving as bugler. He follows the stretcher party through the dripping jungle, carrying the horn on its improvised strap. Among the dead is Rabbit Hendricks, whose body and few possessions must be burned to prevent contagion. Bigelow is surprised by how little he feels at the sight; the repeated funerals have not made grief simple, but have left him performing necessary tasks in the presence of a numbing succession of deaths.

The instrument’s sound becomes especially difficult to produce as malnutrition damages Bigelow’s mouth. His palate sheds skin, his lips swell, and his tongue becomes so swollen and sore that rice tastes like hot grapeshot. He is told the condition is pellagra caused by a lack of vitamins. The illness turns the bugle call into a physical struggle: his tongue obstructs the airflow, and he has to force his body to manage the short stops as The Last Post quickens and then falls away.

Rather than stop, Bigelow improvises. He works breaths around his swollen tongue and concentrates on striking the notes, trying to keep the melody together for the men who will remain in the jungle and never return home. The tears that come are from the pain of playing, not an emotion he recognises in himself. He turns away quickly, unwilling for others to mistake the tears for softness. The scene makes the bugle’s duty inseparable from the cost of fulfilling it: the tune survives, but only through an act of bodily endurance.

What the Music Can and Cannot Say

For Bigelow, The Last Post does not mean that a soldier can now rest or that his work is finished. Faced with deaths he hates and cannot undo, he keeps playing while privately resisting the reassuring meaning others attach to the call. The bugle does not resolve the questions raised by the funerals; it gives them a recurring form. Bigelow continues to play the music he hates because stopping would abandon a duty to those who have died.

That duty carries beyond the camp. He plays at Anzac Days, gatherings of POWs, official functions, and sometimes at home late in the evening when memory overwhelms him. He hopes the music will be understood as he intends it, but recognizes that listeners make other meanings of it. The bugle therefore serves both as public remembrance and as a private, unresolved witness: its familiar melody can be heard by a crowd, while the questions Bigelow hears within it remain his own.

Postwar Return and Final Playing

After the war, its memories initially surface only occasionally, like a bad bump in the mattress during the night. As ordinary life fills with work, family, children, illness, and death, Bigelow finds it difficult to remember whether Hobart came before or after the camps and the Line. For years, he does not play The Last Post at all. The interval does not erase the bugle’s association with the war; it holds that association in reserve while the rest of life appears to take its place.

In old age, the balance changes. Bigelow has good years and grandchildren, but as he declines, the war returns more insistently and the other ninety years of his life seem to dissolve. At ninety-two, lying in hospital after his third stroke, he raises the bugle with his good arm and plays once more. The smoke and smell of burning flesh return to him, and he understands the war as the event that has come to contain his life. The instrument that once marked funerals in the jungle thus closes his story without providing release: after silence lasting years, its sound brings the past back with overwhelming force. Its persistence is both a form of remembrance and evidence of how completely remembrance can possess the survivor.