BRIDGES OVER THE KWAI
87
before seniority in the jungle camps, and incompetent or unbalanced
commanding officers had often been quietly sidetracked by their junior
colleagues; in one case, when the incumbent refused to go, he'd been
told that unless he voluntarily went sick the doctors were prepared to
stretch a point and certify him as insane.
That would have been one way out with Colonel Nicholson. In
any case, he would never have lasted in a real prison camp; and yet,
once again, I had to admit that there was something in Boulle's point,
since Nicholson's tranced commitment to the bridge was essentially a
desperate response to the most incessant of our frustrations. However
much we hated the Japanese and their railway, it had been very dif–
ficult to go on day after day and month after month without putting
something of ourselves into the work we were being forced to do; the
need which led Nicholson to forget everything but the bridge so that
he and his men could share the solidarity that comes from "concentrat–
ing on something which would last" was real enough. Still, we'd never
actually been able to forget that we were prisoners, and so we'd usually
found ourselves forced into a life of rather meaningless compromises
between our notion of duty and our instinct of workmanship: one
minute we would be doing a bit of casual sabotage with a faulty bolt
or a well-placed ants' nest, and the next we'd be trying to make a neat
job of a mortise and tenon joint, or straining to get some heavy timber
into perfect alignment.
Boulle's picture bore little direct resemblance to what I had seen
on the Kwai; but the severe internal consistency of his fiction suggested
that there was nothing accidental about the way he had manipulated
historical reality. His ultimate purpose, I began to realize, as I read
through his other books, was to dramatize the ridiculous disparity be–
tween the West's rational technology and its self-destroying applications;
Colonel Nicholson, in fact, symbolized his civilization's great sophisti–
cation about means, and its absolute, though quite unconscious, muddle–
ment about ends.
This new perspective of the West's mastery-and misuse---of tech–
nology helped to explain Boulle's most glaring departure from the facts
-making the Japanese abjectly dependent on the bridge-building skill
of their captives. The other main plot element-the saboteurs of Force
316-was obviously intended to dramatize the same point. The elaborate
preparations of Shears, Warden and Joyce to blow up the Kwai bridge
were exactly parallel to those which Nicholson and his staff had used
to build it, and taken together they demonstrated the West's absurd
waste of its technological finesse, a demonstration which Boulle brought
