The March of the One Hundred POWs Selected for Three Pagoda Pass is a moral ordeal in which Dorrigo Evans is made to select prisoners for a journey that is likely to kill them. Faced with Major Nakamura’s order to send one hundred men one hundred miles farther into the jungle, Dorrigo must choose between refusing to assist the Japanese and using his limited power to give the selected men a better chance of survival.

The Order and Its Stakes

Dorrigo had briefly nodded off while the parade was assembling, exhausted by his work and the camp’s demands. Near midnight, he turned to the seven hundred prisoners gathered before him and explained that one hundred would leave after the morning parade for another camp near Three Pagoda Pass. The numbers repeatedly failed to tally: men arrived from the railway, sergeants disputed who was present, and guards and prisoners had to count again. The disorder made the order more than an administrative task. Every name depended on deciding who would be taken from a camp in which the men were already sick and starving.

The Choice Between Two Forms of Selection

Major Nakamura framed the transfer in terms of saving rice for the Japanese army. For Dorrigo, that rationale exposed what the order made him responsible for: Nakamura could choose without regard to the prisoners’ chances, and the sickest might be selected precisely because they were least useful to the camp. If Dorrigo chose instead, he could favour those with the best prospect of surviving the journey. That did not make the choice merciful. It only gave him a chance to influence who faced the danger, while he knew most would probably die regardless.

The parade ground filled further as men on light duties, cooks, and hospital patients were brought in. They stood sick and starving; some collapsed from exhaustion and were left lying in the mud. On the supply road beyond them, a long column of Japanese soldiers pressed towards the Burmese front, dragging artillery through mud deep enough to reach the axles. Filthy and exhausted, many of them very young, they continued into the night with little more than grunts and groans. Their passage placed the prisoners’ forced march within a wider machinery of wartime movement: exhausted men pushed onward in opposite directions, though only one group was being selected by its own imprisoned commander.

A Japanese sergeant who had savagely beaten Dorrigo paused to smoke as the soldiers went by, then passed his cigarette to another non-commissioned officer and shared a joke. The casual exchange persisted beside the column’s misery. Watching the young soldiers disappear into the darkness, Dorrigo felt the whole war passing before him; the moment joined the order he had received to the surrounding system of force, in which routine gestures and military necessity proceeded alongside exhaustion and death.

When the column had vanished, rain fell in a deluge. Beyond the kerosene lanterns and the guards’ torches, the night was dark; rain swept down from the teak trees and across the clearing. To Dorrigo, the rain and jungle seemed to make the camp an endless, unknowable prison, slowly killing those enclosed within it. The natural setting did not release the men from the immediate human decision: Dorrigo still had to walk among them and name the hundred he believed most likely to endure the march.

Choosing the Hundred

Dorrigo began the selection by looking for the practical signs that might determine whether a man could survive the journey: above all, boots. With his lantern held low, he moved along the first row and saw bare feet, infected sores, legs swollen with beri-beri, and ulcers eating almost to the bone. He stopped at Chum Fahey, whose untreated ulcer had consumed nearly the whole calf and exposed rotting bone. Fahey, pale and wasted, could not be sent. The inspection turned the order into a series of intimate judgments: Dorrigo had to look closely at bodies he had tried to keep alive, then decide which might endure another hundred miles.

He continued up and down the lines, touching and naming the men he judged to have the best chance. Each choice condemned a prisoner to a march from which most might die anyway; the men who seemed least likely to survive were not spared by any general mercy, but by Dorrigo’s effort to keep the choice from being made indiscriminately. When the selection ended, he stepped back with his head lowered. He thought of Jack Rainbow, whose suffering he had caused, and Darky Gardiner, whose prolonged death he had been forced to watch. The hundred men now before him added another burden to those failures of rescue.

The selected prisoners gathered around him in a circle. Dorrigo expected them to curse or reject him, since everyone understood that this was a death march. Instead, Jimmy Bigelow stepped forward, wished him well, and thanked him; one by one, the others shook Dorrigo’s hand and did the same. Their gratitude did not undo the coercion of the choice or lessen its danger. Once the farewells were over, Dorrigo walked into the jungle beside the parade ground and wept.

The March Within the Railway’s Larger History

The selection takes place within a forced-labour system whose human cost dwarfs the camp’s immediate count. Of the twenty-two thousand Australian POWs captured by the Japanese Empire, nine thousand were sent to work on the Death Railway; when the first train traversed the completed line on 25 October 1943, its route passed beds of human bones that included the remains of one in three of those Australians. The hundred men Dorrigo had to choose thus faced not an isolated hardship but another demand made by a railway built through the captivity and deaths of prisoners and Asian labourers.

The scale of that labour force remains uncertain. Allied POWs were only about sixty thousand of the workers; alongside them were a quarter of a million Tamils, Chinese, Javanese, Malayans, Thais, and Burmese, or more. Estimates of deaths among these Asian labourers range from fifty thousand to two hundred thousand, and no agreed total exists. The uncertainty gives the march a further weight: Dorrigo’s painful acts of naming and choosing are individual, while the people consumed by the railway exceed any reliable count.

The postwar memorial to the railway sharpens that contrast. Steam locomotive C 5631 is displayed at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the Book of Souls lists more than two million people who died in service to the Emperor of Japan. Enshrinement there carries absolution, and among the listed dead are 1,068 men convicted of war crimes and executed after the war, including men found guilty of mistreating POWs on the railway. Yet the locomotive’s plaque says nothing about the railway’s horror or the people who died building it. Their names are absent from the memorial; for the hundreds of thousands of Asian labourers, there is no book of lost souls. Against this historical erasure, the march scene preserves a smaller, terrible record: a commander forced to name the prisoners he had tried to save, and the selected men who answered his shame with thanks before he went alone into the jungle to weep.