The Ghost Of The Tropical Sun

The jungle breathes a humid, heavy breath, Where Sandakan holds secrets kept in death. The airstrip cuts the earth, a jagged scar, A monument to hunger, deep and far. We carved the soil for planes that never came, While typhus burned the marrow in our frame. The rations thin, the spirit wearing grey, As malice strips the flesh of us away. In cages built of bamboo and of wire, We trade our souls for splinters and for fire. They watch us from the tower, hollow-eyed,

While all our brothers wither deep inside.

Oh, the road to Ranau winds through silent green, A witness to the horrors, felt but rarely seen. The skeletal line, the shuffling of the feet, Where mercy died beneath the jungle heat. We walk the shadow, we walk the ghost, Forgotten men on a burning coast.

The command arrives like static on the wind: Gather the living, leave the rest behind. But who is living when the ribs are bared? When hope is buried, and the soul is snared? Five hundred men, the first of many rows, Stripped of our boots, our names, our heavy clothes. They drove us out to mountains we would never scale, The sick, the broken, the thin, and the pale. The jungle wall an emerald prison gate.We march into the crushing hands of fate.

Fall to the mud! The bayonet descends! The snapping of the branch where friendship ends! A stumble is a sentence, a pause is a shroud, We are drifting like smoke from a funeral cloud. Don’t look back! Don’t ask for grace! The jungle demands its harvest in this place. The leech, the rot, the fever, and the fly, Beneath the indifferent, suffocating sky! They fall into the ferns, they sink into the silt, Carrying nothing but the weight of our guilt!

The higher we climbed, the thinner the air, A suffocating mask of deep despair. The mountain peaks like tombstones in the light, Mocking our struggle in the black of night. I see my brother staring at the sun, His race is ended, his battle is done. I cannot lift him, I cannot remain, I am only a vessel of sorrow and pain. The earth turns to iron, the sky turns to lead, We are marching to join the ranks of the dead.

When the empire shattered and surrendered its might, We were extinguished like lamps in the night. Of twenty-four hundred, the count was refined, To six who survived, and the rest left behind. Did they die for a kingdom? Did they die for a name? Or just for the madness, the pride, and the shame? The jungle grows over the paths that we bled, But the soil is forever the home of the dead. The brass and the bullet, the rust and the rain, Cannot wash away the echoes of the pain.

The trees remember what the history fades, the quiet dignity of all the shades. Sandakan whispers when the day is done, Under the setting of a tropic sun. No grave. No name. No peace.