10 Photos: Town On The River Kwai (Kanchanaburi, Thailand)

“Sleep tight, dad. We won’t forget.”

In Thailand’s Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, where 6,982 Allied prisoners of war are buried, one need look upon only a handful of graves – and the epitaphs left by loved ones – to recoil at the cost of war. I’m standing now over the grave of Sergeant S.T. Jephcote, who served with the Sherwood Foresters. I’m interested in the date of his death – November 21, 1943 – but it is in reading his epitaph, left by his children, that something takes hold inside me.

I continue walking through the carefully maintained grass, still looking at the plaques at the head of each grave. “Only those who have lost their loved one can feel the bitterness of ‘Gone,’” says the inscription under the name W. Alff, who was 32 years old when he died on October 15, 1943. And then another inscription, this one over the grave of a Lance Corporal Newman: “Au revoir, my darling, until we meet again, I hope in a better, happier world. Mum.”

There is a cumulative effect to reading such things, to knowing that each of the men buried here left behind broken hearts and unspeakable grief, to knowing that each of these men died in the agony of a world war, and to knowing that, ultimately, they needn’t have died this way.

Reaching the end of one row, I ease myself into the grass. It is time to sit a while, to let the weight of this cemetery continue to sink in. It is time to be silent and remember.

* * *

Kanchanaburi sits 80 miles west of Thailand’s smog-filled capital Bangkok, in a landscape of limestone hills along the banks of what most in the West know as the River Kwai. Some travelers venture to the town to explore nearby waterfalls and caves. Others come for the guided rafting and kayaking trips, or for overnight treks into hills near the Burmese border.

But almost all are drawn by something else as well: history.

The Pacific theater of World War II roared into action in December 1941, when Japan’s military bombed Pearl Harbor and simultaneously fanned out across Southeast Asia. A year would pass before the conflict’s deadliness reached Kanchanaburi, and it would arrive not in the form of battle but as a railway project dependent on forced labor – a project destined to consume in excess of 100,000 lives.

The goal of the Thailand-Burma Railway was simple: to provide the Japanese a land route to their forces stationed in Burma, since the sea route around the Malay Peninsula was exposed to Allied attack. The construction began in September 1942 and would take 16 months to complete. Of the more than 300,000 laborers employed on the site, 60,000 were Allied prisoners of war (POWs).

During my five-day stay in Kanchanaburi, I would try to begin or end each day in Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, where half of the more than 12,000 POWs who died on the railway are buried. But it was the bridge on the town’s outskirts that drew most visitors’ attention.

Thanks in large part to the 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwai, each day hundreds of visitors, both Thai and foreign, descend on the bridge. The film won seven Academy Awards and gave popular culture a legendary war story, but it heavily fictionalized what actually happened here.

For this reason, the Thailand Burma Railway Centre, opened in 2003 and located two miles from the bridge, may be the place to begin a visit. Its professionally designed displays explain why and how the Thailand-Burma Railway was built. By the end of the exhibit – it concludes on a second-floor cafe, where visitors are treated to a cup of coffee or tea while overlooking the cemetery – the visitor understands not only that the Hollywood film was a work of fiction but also that the bridge, while famous, was but a small part of a much larger endeavor.

Yet many never make it to other portions of the railway, or even to the museum. Instead, at all hours of the day, they roam the bridge. They photograph the bridge, buy t-shirts at the bridge, and eat grilled corn at the bridge. And if they’re lucky – or have checked the train schedule posted nearby – they look on as a train (several pass each day) lumbers over the bridge.

* * *

While most of the Thailand-Burma Railway was dismantled after the war, the section from Kanchanaburi to Nam Tok, a small community 50 miles to the northwest, is still active.

And so on my first full day in Kanchanaburi, after eating a breakfast of fresh fruit and yogurt at the Jolly Frog (a wonderfully named guesthouse), I walked the short distance to the highway and flagged down a bus bound for Nam Tok. Two hours later I arrived. After visiting Sai Yok Noi, a waterfall popular with Thai tourists, I walked to the nearby train station and bought a three-dollar ticket back to Kanchanaburi.

Train no. 486, the last one of the day, departed at 3:15 p.m. Immediately I was struck by the color green outside the window, so bold and suggestive of life.

Yet it was amid such color that so many POWs – one out of five who worked on the railway – died of disease, malnutrition, and abuse. In addition, up to 90,000 civilian laborers, mostly Burmese and Malay, lost their lives, their bodies tossed aside like worn out tools along the route, where they remain today scattered and unmarked.

For two and half hours the train swayed and rattled southward, stopping at several small stations along the way. At one stop a family leaned out the window and tossed fried chicken scraps down to appreciative dogs. Three windows behind them, as an ice-cream salesman on the platform pulled strawberry-flavored cones out of a cooler attached to his motorbike, hands clutching 20-baht notes poked out in reply.

After passing through a rain shower, the train came back into the sun. Late afternoon light streamed through the windows and turned our yellow benches gold. The sun’s warmth also sent half the passengers firmly to sleep.

At 5:40 p.m. the train slowed. Then, to a clanking sound that suddenly seemed solemn, we rolled over the famous bridge. Outside, scores of cameras flashed as if the train carried a cargo of Hollywood celebrities. But we passengers knew the photographs were not directed toward us. What was being photographed was the past. The flashes were the present’s way of acknowledging that something significant had happened here.

Five minutes later the train pulled into Kanchanaburi station, and I stepped back into town.

* * *

While in Kanchanaburi, I sometimes ventured well beyond the town of 62,000 people, out into a landscape thick with beauty.

I rented a motorbike to explore back roads and scenic stretches of river. I took Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory to read along an abandoned portion of railway. And wherever I went, I sought solitude so that I might better touch upon the history of the place.

But a walk through town could be just as rewarding as a hike in the hills. As if taking its queue from the river’s gentleness, Kanchanaburi encouraged visitors to decelerate the speed with which they might normally think and move, to loosen up and look around, to be at ease.

And so in the guesthouse restaurant, I’d dine on pork schnitzel or fish curry while films such as Lost in Translation and Titanic played on the communal television, and I would meet fellow travelers from around the world. I would chat with locals at an optometrist shop. Or I would play pool with Apple, a hotel receptionist who moonlights as a masseuse.

But always, at some point each day, I would stop to visit the graves at Kanchanaburi War Cemetery. Located in the middle of town, they served as a jolting reminder that others have gone before us, that what we see and how we live isn’t detached from the past. The graves also prodded one to give thanks, not least for the local men and women who caringly tended to the grounds. The cemetery was a place where past and present acknowledged each other.

* * *

The Japanese continue to maintain a presence in Kanchanaburi, but its form has changed. Honda Waves, a motorbike popular throughout Southeast Asia, and Toyota pickups, particularly popular in Thailand, dominate the roads.

It was on a Honda Wave, available for rent for the equivalent of five dollars a day, that one morning I rode out to Chung Kai War Cemetery, two miles downriver. With its 1750 graves, Chung Kai is smaller, quieter, and less visited than the larger cemetery in town.

A light rain began to fall shortly after I arrived. Brushing through damp grass in my sandals, I came upon the grave of 22-year-old T.P. Johnston, of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. I felt the cool wet on my toes, and I read, “Oh for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.”

I continued looking at the plaques as I walked down one row and then another, all the while reading names like A. Frampton and T.H. Smart, reading ages like 23 and 36, reading things like “Beautiful memories are all we have left, Mum and Dad,” and “No treasure on earth can ever replace you. I loved you. God Bless. Mother.”

Each of these graves was a reminder of human frailty, but also a reminder of greatness. Each was a reminder of the heart-breaking reality of death, but also a reminder of the incredible depths of love.

The rain continued to fall and I began to shiver, but I didn’t mind. I looked around at the silent graves and a flowing river, at tropical flowers and the color green. Kanchanaburi, through its history, nature, and culture, was conspiring once again to make me pause and look inward. And as I did, I saw that I was beginning to look outward as well, with eyes renewed and a heart more centered.