The most intriguing Gallic visitor to Singapore after Andre Malraux was Pierre Boulle who, following his wartime experiences in Southeast Asia including more than two years in a prisoner-of-war camp, would write The Bridge on the River Kwai and later Planet of the Apes. He trained as an electrical engineer, but his time in Indochina beginning in the late 1930s was mostly spent as a spy. After two years of tedious work in French industry, the young engineer, a graduate of the École Supérieure d’Electricit, sought a post overseas, an experience he narrates in an autobiographical novel of 1951, Le sacrilège malais (S.O.P.H.I.A.), the English translation known only as S.O.P.H.I.A. Somerset Maugham’s Sortilège malaise, a 1928 French translation of a collection of short stories published in English as The Casuarina Tree in 1926, inspired the title of this, his second novel. The many themes outlined in S.O.P.H.I.A. dealing with the Orient reappear in Boulle’s more than twenty novels and six collections of short stories. And like his admired Maugham, much of Boulle’s works deal with individual corruption and personal disillusionment.

What a reading of Boulle’s life in Southeast Asia and writings reveals is how experience becomes reformulated as fiction, how a place, particularly Singapore and Malaya, provided him with a redefined sense of French loyalty and how he transformed that loyalty into action. Boulle’s writing also shows how an author experiencing traumatic events is able to access, if not process, them through reimaging the drama, harshness and pain, sometimes in extremis. Boulle shows how the art of narrative and fiction provides an individual with a form of adjustment by writing through the trauma. His engagement with espionage, war and hardship led to a literature of survival through which identity emerges.

Boulle did not become a writer until he resettled in France in 1947. Immediately after the war, suffering from dysentery and malaria, he returned to France but did not stay. He took up his post on a rubber plantation in Malay again but realized that a return to his pre-war established and ordered plantation life was entirely unsatisfactory. He realized one night that his psychological need was to write: he had to re-encounter his 155traumatic experiences as a spy and then a prisoner-of-war but through fiction. Two writers who captured this sense of identity reshaped by the region and indirectly trauma became his models: Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. His first work of fiction was William Conrad (1950), an homage to Conrad; his second acknowledged Maugham: Le sacrilège malais (1951).

Boulle went on to write a series of novels, philosophical tales, collections of short stories and two autobiographies. Science fiction, as well as the metaphysical detective story, were genres of great appeal to him following his account of his war experiences in The Bridge on the River Kwai, a study of character, loyalty and discipline. Its protagonist, Colonel Nicholson, embodies a rigid doctrine expressed by Ricardo in Victory: “There’s a proper way of doing things. You’ll have to learn to be correct (Victory 129). In Conrad, the reference is to managing violent behavior but it directly bears on the excess actions of the British colonel in the The Bridge on the River Kwai.

After several years working in industrial Clemont-Frerrand, Boulle learned that a French business was looking for an engineer for its plantations in Malay. At the age of twenty-four in 1936, he left France and the opening pages of S.O.P.H.I.A. details his arrival in Kuala Lumpur through the character of Maille on a stifling morning in December 1936. A paragraph outlines his initial reaction to Malaya and the overpowering jungle:

The Malayan world saw them, in their early days, toil along the steep paths, clamber up the hills, come to a stop at the limit of the plantation, and halt in awe, for no apparent reason, before the ramparts of the jungle. On occasion, the Malaya world saw them peer furtively into the damp undergrowth at the foot of the giant trees, as though it was a forbidden garden . . . . (S.O.P.H.I.A. 227)

Fantasy and danger confront the new colonials who were fearful of exploring either the jungle or the people (S.O.P.H.I.A. 227).

The history of the French in Indochina–by the 1880s it included Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia–is complex involving religion, colonial aspirations, social reform, political dominance and commercial exploitation. Tea, rice, coffee, coal, zinc, tin and rice–as well as rubber–became some of the exploited natural resources oddly justified under the rubric mission civilisatrice (a civilizing mission). Jesuits missionaries arrived in the 17th century. By the 18th, trade became the principal activity, while missionary work continued. By the 19th century, French colonial expansion meant intervention in the society and culture, while early efforts at national unification failed.

But it was not always peaceful. In 1858, Napoleon III ordered an attack on Tourane (Da Nag) by Admiral de Genouilly to end the persecution of Catholic missionaries but also to gain greater political control. The Admiral also received permission to attack Saigon initiating an almost three-year battle. When the Vietnamese finally conceded, they guaranteed the practice of Catholicism, and, most importantly, ceded three provinces to France which became the French colony of Cochinchina. Further fighting resulted in additional provinces for France and soon all of southern Vietnam and the Mekong Delta were under French control, although a unified French policy was non-existent. Each colonial governor had substantial autonomy. Earlier in 1863, the King of Cambodia requested a French protectorate over his country.

By October 1887, the French had seized vast tracks of land and re-organized them into large plantations where rice and rubber were the main commodities.¹ In less than one hundred years, Indochina supplied 5% of all global production of rubber. Michelin tire had several plantations. The French also imposed an extensive taxation system that included an income tax on wages. Additionally, the state (that is France) established monopolies on rice wine and salt, another lucrative income source, as was opium, Vietnam producing more than 80 tonnes a year by the 1930s. By 1935, the collective sales of rice wine, salt and opium were supposedly earning more than 600 million francs per year (Llewellyn).

What Boulle emphasizes in S.O.P.H.I.A., his early glimpse of the region, is the colonial ethos marked by the formality of behavior, especially in the dress and attitude of the planters marking a rigid hierarchy of acceptable and unacceptable actions. There could be no fraternizing with an Asiatic whether male or female and certainly no wine with dinner, only water. Yet the allure of the jungle remained, its “immensity and mysterious majesty overpowering all despite an oppressive physical life, isolated and withdrawn from society also emphasized by Maugham (S.O.P.H.I.A. 88). The novel sustains a fascination with the borderline between French civility and colonial goals threatened by the unregulated life of the jungle. Maugham developed this in stories like “The Letter” or “The Force of Circumstance” often exposing a second, irregular life of the colonial in a world where nature duplicates the duplicity of the colonial, where a river “under the breathless sun of midday. . . had the white pallor of death” (Maugham 46).

It is important to recall the competition between the British and the French for domination of the Orient originating in the 17th century, compounded by the interests of the Dutch. The geographical space of the Orient was a contested site of western cultures turning the Orient from an alien to colonial space as Edward Said outlined in Orientalism . The natives might have been attracted to France and French thought, but the British seemed to be in the ascendance with their practical solutions to civic and political problems.

In S.O.P.H.I.A., Maille is promoted to the technical section but finds that he no longer has the sensation of living in the Far East. Harassed by company affairs during the day, “at night they [company officers] sought relief in alcohol. In the heart of Malaya, they had recreated the European way of life” (S.O.P.H.I.A. 156). He becomes depressed at one point because his ten-page report on new mixtures of rubber had been returned. It must be typed in capitals if it is to be read he’s told. His individuality disappears as his restlessness increases. But then war intervenes: Maille resigns and the rest of his adventure is summarized in the novel.

Boulle, however, recounts many of his actual activities following his departure from his Malay plantation in a short memoir, My Own River Kwai (Eng. 1967) written mostly at the end of the war but not published until 1966 in French, 1967 in English. Referring to a set of Frenchmen in Southeast Asia as in a “permanent state of restlessness by the equatorial sun, they, nevertheless, kept up with the news in Europe every evening via wireless on isolated plantations tucked into the jungle wilderness” (My Own River Kwai 7). He admits that he and others were romantics, eager to play a role in the epic unfolding in Europe; when Southeast Asia became ensnared in the battle through Japanese hostilities, they did.

After spending time as a rubber planter in Indochina fifty miles from Kuala Lumpur, the French conscripted Boulle in 1939 as part of a program to mobilize the French in Southeast Asia. The French consul in Singapore organized the call-up as shadows of the European war took shape in Asia with the beginning of Japanese aggression.² But as he admits in My Own River Kwai, the author was an idealist. The disasters of France became in his mind an element of fabulous wonder, more so because he was thousands of miles away in a jungle (My Own River Kwai 7-8).

Boulle was initially assigned to Saigon, an assembly point for the French residing in an area that included Malaya, the Philippines, Indonesia, China and even Australia. He then went to a Military training center in Mỹ Tho, Vietnam where he taught Annamite soldiers how to march while shouldering a gun, actually a piece of bamboo. He went on to Hu but after eighteen months of training men of the countryside (whom he knew would make poor soldiers), and after the fall of France in June 1940 and the new Vichy leanings of Indochina’s administration, he returned to Singapore in July 1941.

He now formally joined the Free French Movement, a decision based on pride as much as patriotism. This was essentially an operation of the Free French Resistance to attempt to reconquer Indochina. He was soon invited to join Force 136, the British SOE (Special Operation Executive) in Southeast Asia to learn how to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance. Boulle became a spy training at a secret jungle location operated by the British known as The Convent. He was soon taught how to blow-up bridges, derail trains and silently dispatch enemy sentries (My Own River Kwai 46). But instead of instantly being sent on a mission, he held a Singapore office job correlating intelligence reports.

A rumor that he would be airdropped into Indochina to organize a fifth column remained only a rumor. Instead, he had an undercover assignment to go to Indochina and teach new recruits about explosives which he was to transport by boat. This was mysteriously explained to him at the Adelphi Hotel by a Professor May who walked three times around the building to ensure no spies were present and then entered. But after a few days at sea, the operation had to turn back: the Japanese knew of their mission and their landing point.

Throughout this time (1939-41), Singapore acted as if the war was a play on stage elsewhere, November 1941 no exception as Boulle outlines in his autobiography (My Own River Kwai 49-50). Large social dinners went on as did the Alhambra cinema on Orchard Road. Many locals, whether British, Chinese, Indian or Tamil, refused to believe that there would be a Japanese attack upon such a well-fortified British outpost. Members of a Singapore golf club heard that a Hong Kong golf club refused to dig defensive trenches on their golf course because it would disfigure the greens. The Singaporeans agreeded. Such denial continued until the night of 7 December 1941 when Japanese fighters first bombed Raffles Place, Chinatown and the RAF base at Seletar, in north-east Singapore. Boulle gives a vivid account of the ensuing confusion and destruction in his autobiography.

But anxiety was increasing, especially when on 10 December 1941 the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse were sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers in the South China Sea off the east coast of Malaya as they were returning to Singapore. Boulle claimed that he could hear the shelling from Singapore which had now lost any naval superiority or offensive advantage. The Japanese bombers came from airbases in French Indochina.

The sinkings weakened the British Eastern Fleet in Singapore, and combined with the attack on Pearl Harbor, it meant that the Allies had virtually no attack power in the Pacific other than three American aircraft carriers. But Singaporeans carried on as if they were immune, although there was an atmosphere of “unimaginable over-excitement” captured in J.G. Farrell’s novel, Singapore Grip (My Own River Kwai 52). But on 1 January 1942, Boulle and others were still enjoying a restaurant evening in the Cathay, a Singapore skyscraper, while searchlights sought out enemy aircraft above (My Own River Kwai 51, 54).

The Free French Movement, however, was attempting to establish a fifth column in Indochina starting with a parachute drop of Boulle and Jean de Langlade, a former director of his plantation company in Malaya who left to join the Free French in Singapore and now an operative. But suddenly, new plans emerged: a move of the Free French office to Kunming, China. The small group of agents were to travel there via Rangoon in civilian clothes with false names and British passports, moving along the mythologized Burma Road, the road to Mandalay.

By 10 February, nearly 30,000 Japanese troops had arrived at Johor. Singapore began its evacuation of women and children, while Boulle moved up to Kuala Lumpur stopping at his old plantation with gunfire in the distance. Boulle was then on the move, taking a flying boat to Rangoon with a shabby suit and a revolver. Because of Japanese fighter planes, the trip took four days via Sumatra and the Dutch East Indies. Rangoon had been bombed and public services withdrawn. It was in stark contrast to the “elegant, formal environment of Singapore” he writes (My Own River Kwai 58).

He quickly headed north on 30 January 1942 with a new British passport, but without any valid papers or cash, just a new Buick intended for the British Consul in Kunming and a miniature revolver in his pocket. Operating under the name of Peter John Rule, the secret agent romanticized his journey to Mandalay across lower Burma: “I bathed in a waterfall streaming down towards the plain, then continued my ascent towards China” (My Own River Kwai 60). A comic tale of entering China–he slept in the Buick to wait out the unhelpful military guard post–and then a riotous account of heading to Kunming essentially to help the resistance movement in China, Burma and French Indochina follows. He arrived after five days, exchanging his watch for the final three gallons of petrol allowing him to drive the last thirty miles.

Next are details of overcrowded Kunming, capital of Yunnan province and his contact with Chinese generals in support of the Free French movement. But his plans to infiltrate Indochina had to wait for supplies, from radio transmitters to interpreters at the same time the Japanese were approaching Mandalay, having already seized Rangoon. But in April 1942, the mission of Boulle and de Langlade began, disguised as Englishmen even carrying a crate of tinned food marked “Made in England.” Their goal was to make contact with members of the French Resistance in Indochina.

They headed south spending time in Mongtseu and then on to a military post called Pin-Ku-Yin in the mountains where on the wireless they heard daily reports of the Japanese advance including news from the renamed Singapore, Shonan, where the Japanese made passionate appeals to unite “under the banner of the rising sun” (My Own River Kwai 95, 96). After moving on to another village before attempting a border crossing into French Indochina, they found guarded and impassable roads, intensified because it seemed everyone was a counter-espionage agent.

The answer was to travel by raft on the Nam-Na river down to the Mekong and then moving on to Hanoi in the Vichy controlled region of the country. This was in August 1942. “At Singapore,” he writes, “long before the Japanese invasions, I had already envisioned a similar scheme, starting from Siam, descending one of the tributaries of the Mekong, then the Mekong itself, and ending up in Cambodia” (My Own River Kwai 125). He then fashioned an almost unmaneuverable raft to the amusement of the Chinese (with diagrams in his autobiography). With the Houni as guides, he trekked with his raft through the jungle, crossed into Indochina and prepared to launch in order to drift down the river to Hanoi.

A chaotic journey ensues with accidents, confusing waterways and an unsteady raft jammed into rocks resulting in near abandonment. But Boulle perseveres, although on the third night of the voyage, he was tossed overboard after crashing into a submerged rock (My Own River Kwai 139). The entire experience has a Conradian drama to it not unlike Lord Jim’s sensations when he faces the disaster of the sinking Patna caught in a squall and leaps into a sea-ruined lifeboat at the end of Chapter 9 of Conrad’s novel which in the next chapter he calls “an everlasting deep hole . . . a deluge of pitchy blackness” (Lord Jim 94). Boulle will use part of his Conradian narrative of the raft adventure in the jungle venture of Joyce in Bridge on the River Kwai.

Boulle soon faced more challenges and at one point had to tramp to shore where a group of Thais surprised him. He created a false story but was taken to Laichau with a new name, Routin. Greeted as a guest in the town, he even attends a wedding breakfast but a French Captain begins to grill him. He is then introduced to Major F. who visits him at his hotel room. Boulle unwittingly tells him the truth about his involvement with the Free France Movement and his real purpose: to infiltrate and co-op sympathetic Vichy officials. To his surprise, Major F. admits his support of the Vichy government and after a drink at the bar and the courteous offer of half a dozen cigarette packs, arrests him.

Two days later, Boulle is transferred to Hanoi and deposited at a military prison, followed by a court marshal by the Vichy regime. He was twenty-eight and sentenced to hard labour for life. He only spent, however, two years and four months in the forced labor camps of Indochina where conditions were harsh. He began his imprisonment with a month of solitary confinement. But working with French agents, he managed to escape in 1944, part of an elaborate transfer plan from Saigon to Laos which involved four days at a seaside villa and the total cooperation of his French guards who facilitated his escape in a car with others to Hanoi (My Own River Kwai 166-79, 207-10). Within days and several flights later, he was in Calcutta, the new headquarters of the Free French in Southeast Asia.

Immediately after the war and ill with malaria and dysentery, Boulle returned to France but without a goal. He soon headed back to Malay to resume his work on the plantation but one night he had an epiphany: after his war adventures, he could no longer face such uninspiring, monotonous work. He could no longer do an ordinary job and after writing a letter of resignation drove to Kuala Lumpur and flew back to Singapore. From there, where he more or less began his career in the East, it was a flight to Paris and the beginning of his writing career, settling in a Left Bank hotel room in 1947.³

In Paris, he began to write with William Conrad (1950, republished as Not the Glory) his first effort, a novel with roots in Joseph Conrad. The capacity for self-delusion becomes its theme, the plot detailing how a Nazi spy (William Conrad) becomes a British patriot, dying in battle as a heroic British colonel. His second novel, translated as The Malay Spell (1951), was written to celebrate Somerset Maugham. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1952) was his third book. His experiences, especially his period in a prisoner-of-war labor camp, became the material for this internationally successful work, translated into twenty-two languages; it sold six million copies in the U.S. alone and was released as an Oscar-winning film by David Lean in 1957. In 1963, he published his science fiction novel Planet of the Apes, which also won several Oscars.

Importantly, the epigram to The Bridge on the River Kwai is a passage from Conrad’s Victory (1915), set in Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia, formerly part of Java, suggesting that despite one’s best actions, “folly” controls everything. More specifically, the passage is part of a lengthy speech by Heyst to the femme fatale Lena whom Heyst has rescued and is now with him on Samburan island. His topic is the fate of man and the attempt to define and rationalize who is a good man and how is that measured? “He – [Captain Morrison, a mentor] was very ruthless and yet he was not without pity . . . even to fools he was not utterly merciless” Heyst explains (Victory 185). This is context for understanding how Boulle conceived the character of Colonel Nicholson.

But for Heyst, “man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation” (Victory 185). But he reminds us that “it is by folly alone that the world moves,” and that Captain Morrison was “quite unfitted for this world, he was a failure, a good man cornered”– the paradox likely referring to Conrad’s earlier novel Lord Jim (Victory 187). The passage in its entirety works toward our fuller understanding of Nicholson and his place in the world of Colonel Saito’s camp where man, to borrow a phrase from Conrad, “is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation” (Victory 185).

One of the striking features of Victory is its use of duplicate or double characters, something Boulle employs as well. In Victory, it is Heyst and the renegade Jones, or Heyst and Schomberg, characters who undergo demoralizing experiences, one a hero, the other not. A disillusioned Heyst explains a condition applicable to him and later Nicholson: that he is alone, “on a Shadow inhabited by shades . . . . I have lost all belief in realities,” something also experienced by other characters in the novel (Victory 327). Delusion or illusion are two sides of the same coin Conrad shows, the combination exactly what supplies Nicholson with his irrational devotion to helping the enemy create their bridge. Expressing incredulity at the end as he realizes that a British officer (Joyce) has just killed Colonel Saito and told Nicholson he is to blow up the bridge, all Nicholson can utter is “‘Blow up the bridge!’” both a statement and question confirming his delusion – the bridge is a masterpiece that must be saved – and illusion that in building the bridge he is not assisting the Japanese (The Bridge on the River Kwai 214-15).

The epigram from Victory used by Boulle sets the tone for the philosophical dimension of The Bridge on the River Kwai provisionally overshadowed by its emphasis on action. When Warden reports to Colonel Green in Calcutta after the attempt to blow up the bridge fails, although small explosives cause the train to derail and both Saito and Nicholson are killed, the colonel reminds him that “‘Nothing matters apart from action’” (The Bridge on the River Kwai 220). A skeptical Warden quizzically agrees but wonders for a moment about the value of the entire colonial experience:

Here we are, for instance, blundering into this part of the world in order to teach Orientals how to handle plastic so as to destroy trains and blow up bridges. (The Bridge on the River Kwai 220)

He knows it’s wrong but Colonel Green wants to hear none of it. His focus is only on the action, not the reason for the action, superficially echoing Conrad. In the “Author’s Note” to Victory, Conrad ironically writes that “thinking is the great enemy of perfection” (“Authors Note,” Victory lv).

Conrad had an important stylistic as well as thematic influence on Boulle, evident in this passage from S.O.P.H.I.A. The sensual, visual and physical blend as they do in Conrad:

The warm gentle sea of Malaya impregnated by the rivers and streams with the damp scent of the jungle and the diabolical smell of the durians – perfumes that mingled on the beach at night with the barely perceptible ripples reflecting the faint glow of the moon. (S.O.P.H.I.A. 233).

With perhaps a slight touch of the sinister is this passage from Ch. V of Victory describing the sea:

The flaming abyss of emptiness, the liquid, undulating glare, the tragic brutality of the light, made her [Lena] long for the friendly night, with its stars stilled by an austere spell; for the velvety dark sky and the mysterious great shadow of the sea, conveying peace to the day-weary heart. (Victory 204).

The impact of Conrad, not only in Victory but Lord Jim and likely Under Western Eyes, with its focus on spying, was lasting.

The Bridge on the River Kwai opens with a critical passage on similarities between the East and the West:

The insuperable gap between East and West that exists in some eyes is perhaps nothing more than optical illusion . . . During the last war, ‘saving face’ was perhaps as vitally important to the British as it was to the Japanese . . . . Perhaps the conduct of each of the two enemies, superficially so dissimilar, was in fact simply a different though equally meaningless manifestation of the same spiritual realty. (The Bridge on the River Kwai 9)

The novel is about the situation of Allied POWS forced to build a 415 km (258 mile) railway in the jungle linking the Bay of Bengal to Bangkok and Singapore. which was to pass over the River Kwai. In actuality, the bridge built by British prisoners-of-war over the River Kwai was at Tha Makham, eighty miles west of Bangkok. Boulle’s fictional bridge is near the Burma frontier, some two hundred miles from the only actual bridge across the river.

Thousands died during the construction of the railway as Boulle suggests, but the novel focuses on a single POW camp and the fictitious British Colonel Nicholson. Re-creating the stress and hardship of the camp is Boulle’s way of writing through the trauma, allowing him a victory over the adverse conditions he personally underwent. But at the end of the novel, the bridge still stands, an ironic monument to the doggedness of Colonel Nicholson for whom “ponderous dignity was a “mark of British Superiority” (The Bridge on the River Kwai 10). Hollywood, however, needed something more dramatic and uplifting for the ending. In the film, the bridge blows up.

In the novel, Singapore reappears several times, the setting for examples of Colonel Nicholson’s misuse of discipline. When word comes in early 1942, to cease fire and surrender to the Japanese, a group of his younger officers plan to escape down the coast and sail for the Dutch East Indies. Nicholson blocks their scheme, pointing out that their actions contradict the direct order to cease fire and surrender. Any move to escape on their part would be an act of disobedience. Nicholson’s command was to wait until a senior Japanese officer arrived to accept the surrender of himself and his unit. His piercing look reinforced his resolve, his eyes “the color of the Indian Ocean on a calm day,” his mustache that of “an unruffled hero.” (The Bridge on the River Kwai 12). Clipton, his medical officer and narrator, approved the escape but Nicholson’s tenacity in preventing the act was irreproachable.

Awaiting the arrival of the Japanese, Nicholson worked out his own ceremonial surrender, the handing over of his revolver to his Japanese superior. He even practiced the move and put on his best uniform in preparation for the meeting. But only an NCO drove up in a jeep. No senior officer was in sight. Directed by the Japanese to put their rifles in a truck, Nicholson ordered his men to stand fast, even as Japanese submarine guns threatened them. A major finally appeared and, to the Japanese officer’s surprise, Nicholson disarmed himself and grandly presented his pistol. The astonished major broke out in “a long burst of savage laughter” deflating Nicholson’s act (The Bridge on the River Kwai 14).

In a prison camp near Singapore, Nicholson continued his allegiance to “a strict Anglo-Saxon code of behaviour” despite the enemy’s disorderly conduct. His men behaved well “but fared badly.” Nonetheless, faultless conduct was the only acceptable behavior; any looting or buying extra rations was unthinkable (The Bridge on the River Kwai 15). He held regular inspections to ensure that his rules were followed. In this way he thought his men would command the respect of their Japanese overlords, including saluting even to the Japanese guards. Nicholson’s frequent citation of violations of the Hague Convention to the Japanese on the treatment of international prisoners often met with his own beating. But his effort, as he told Clipton, was to make his men feel they were commanded by them, not the Japanese.

The opening chapter on the Singapore jungle camp that begins the novel establishes the irreproachable behavior and authority of Nicholson before he and his unit head to Siam after a train ride across Malaya followed by an exhausting march. They recalled their time in the Singapore” camp, actually the Changi POW camp (there were seven internee camps on the Changi peninsula which had been the principal base of the British in Singapore), as “balmy days by comparison to what would be the brutal camps on the Burma-Siam railway” (The Bridge on the River Kwai 18).

Singapore, in fact, becomes a point of reference throughout the remainder of the suffering Nicholson and his men undergo at their camp on the River Kwai commanded by the brutal Colonel Saito who is an alcoholic, enjoying the whisky and brandy “left behind at Rangoon and Singapore” (The Bridge on the River Kwai 27). Yet hostility was to be met with dignity according to Nicholson as they lay two short stretches of rail line and turned to their major and backbreaking job of building a bridge across the River Kwai to show that British engineering was superior to Japanese control. Only the whimsical behavior of nature – the river unexpectedly dropping two feet and exposing the wires and charges set by a special team to blow it up – overturns the plans to destroy it.

Colonel Nicholson’s final inspection tour, just before the first train is to cross, leads to his discovery of some suspicious brown objects in the water below. He scrambles down and discovers the wire leading to the charges with Colonel Saito following. Shears, the special ops expert, cannot believe one of his own, a British Colonel no less, was exposing the explosives. And at that moment, the train approaches. But Joyce, another operative, suddenly breaks cover and knifes Saito before confronting Nicholson who in shock tries to prevent the explosion. He partially succeeds. As Boulle makes clear, the real enemy was Nicholson not Saito (The Bridge on the River Kwai 218-19).

Colonel Nicholson’s sense of duty and pride in his work would not allow the bridge to be harmed and in combat with Joyce prevents him from detonating the bridge. Only a small charge on the bridge causes the engine to plunge into the river with two or three coaches but the bridge still stands. Only the third party member, Warden, hiding in an observation post acted, shelling Nicholson, a number of Japanese troops and the two injured British operatives until all were killed, following the agency’s mantra: “Nothing matters . . . apart from action” (The Bridge on the River Kwai 220).

One of the early readers of the novel and who spent time working on the Burma-Siam railway was the literary critic Ian Watt who was a lieutenant in the British army at the time and one of the 60,000 allied prisoners who slaved for the Japanese. In a 1959 article, he assesses Boulle’s presentation, noting that it is not historical. There was no bridge crossing where it was supposedly set: the parallel was a bridge at Tamarkan. However, the enforcement of officers to do manual labor along with enlisted men was correct.

From his personal experience, Watt recalls a British Colonel who was not a regular officer but a business man who, when confronting the Japanese, did so in a manner so that they would never lose face. His method was, first, military swagger, then second, pointing out there could be no difficulties between honorable people eager to do the right thing and third, that he would act in a way to ensure efficient labor management if given a free hand. Colonel T’s success was achieved with methods quite different from Nicholson’s in the novel. Watt also criticizes Boulle’s belief that the West had a monopoly on organizational and engineering skills. Proof of this misbelief, Watt argues, was the relatively easy capture of Singapore with fewer Japanese soldiers than the British.

Watt also notes that collaboration was the means of survival. His own group did not design a bridge for the Japanese but corrected some of their measurements with construction projects. They did play an important supervisory role, but the collaboration did not go as far as Boulle describes. If any one did act like Nicholson, he would likely have been replaced Watt claims, adding that “survival came before seniority” in the jungle camps and unbalanced commanding officers would be removed (Watt 87).⁴

Watt confirms that commitment to a single project was real, workmanship occasionally taking precedence over duty. But there was also conflict: one moment “casual sabotage occurred but the next it was the attempt to make a neat job of a tenon joint or place a timber in perfect alignment” (Watt 87). What Watt does admire in The Bridge on the River Kwai is Boulle’s dramatization of the disparity between the rational technology of the West and its “self-destroying applications.” It is the West’s sophisticated ideas about means but its muddled sense of ends” (Watt 87).What most upsets Watt is Boulle’s making the Japanese entirely dependent on the bridge-building skills of their captives.

The second plot, the saboteurs of Force 316, makes the same point: detailed preparations but in the reverse – not to construct but to destroy the bridge. The intensity of Shears, Warden and Joyce to blow up the bridge parallel exactly the focus of Nicholson and his staff to build it. We are back to Conrad and his use of duplicate characters and situations in Victory. In Boulle’s novel, this comes to an ironic ending when the self-deluded Nicholson attempts to sabotage the saboteurs causing both sides to be blown up by the mortar shells fired by Warden. Nicholson blows up instead of the bridge to underscore the “sardonic paradoxes in the novel” (Watt 88).

The Bridge on the River Kwai is a tragic-comic portrait of British character seen from a French point of view. Opposites work throughout the text as anarchy underlies the rigid obedience demanded by military organizations, a condition echoing, perhaps, Kurtz and Marlowe in The Heart of Darkness. There is a “blind destructiveness” in the manner of the West regarding their means but not in the ends of its technology Watt concludes (Watt 88).

Like Conrad, Boulle structures his novel out of opposites not only of character but theme. The pursuit of paradoxes, essentially French Watt suggests with its focus on logical clarity, negates the British ability to make the best of the anomalies to survive on a foundation of utter devotion to duty by Nicholson. And in the novel, of course, the bridge survives.

Feted in France and even Hollywood, Pierre Boulle continued to write including a popular French TV show A Gentleman’s Profession (Un Metier de seigneur), in English known as A Noble Profession (1960) and then, drawn to science fiction, Planet of the Apes (1963) receiving further international acclaim when it, too, was released as a film in 1968; sequels would soon follow. Identity and deception were Boulle’s overall concerns, enacting La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that “At times we are as different from ourselves as we are from others” which applies an almost 17th century moral injunction to his work, including A Noble Profession which deals with a spy who is also a traitor (La Rouchefoucauld). Despite his own disguises when a spy in the Southeast Asia, Boulle could ironically declare that “we abhor any individual who . . . tries to pass himself off as something he is not” (Noble 9).