Enemy No 19

During the Second World War, Stanley Septimus Pavillard served as a medical officer in Malaya and Singapore before being captured by the Japanese in February 1942. He was subsequently sent to the camps of the Burma–Thailand Railway, where disease, starvation, forced labour and systematic brutality killed thousands. More than fifty years later, he returned to that world in Enemy No. 19, a novel grounded in experiences for which research facilities had been supplied rather too comprehensively.

The story is set in the Far East under Japanese occupation and draws upon the precarious lives of prisoners who found themselves reduced from soldiers and civilians to numbers under an administration that regarded survival as an unnecessary luxury. The title itself suggests the official conversion of a human being into an item on an enemy list: identity simplified, dignity removed and paperwork presumably completed in triplicate.

Pavillard had already written directly about his captivity in Bamboo Doctor, first published in 1960. Enemy No. 19 is a later fictional treatment rather than simply a reissue of that memoir, allowing him to shape the realities of captivity into a wartime novel. Its inventions are supported by the unmistakable knowledge of someone who had seen the camps from inside and knew precisely how much could be improvised when conventional civilisation, medical equipment and elementary mercy had all become unavailable.

As a prisoner-of-war doctor, Pavillard treated men suffering from cholera, dysentery, tropical ulcers, malnutrition and deficiency diseases with almost no proper supplies. He improvised apparatus from bamboo, performed surgery with crude instruments and organised treatments under conditions in which an ordinary hospital inspection might reasonably have concluded that the building, equipment, food and freedom were all missing.

He also risked his life sending information about camp conditions to the British authorities. His report was among the earliest warnings to reach the Allies concerning the treatment of prisoners working on the railway. The situation was so appalling that officials initially questioned whether the account could be genuine, bureaucracy retaining its admirable instinct to greet catastrophe by requesting further verification.

That history gives Enemy No. 19 a weight beyond conventional wartime adventure. It reflects the moral distortions of captivity: the struggle to preserve loyalty, humour and human decency inside a system designed to destroy all three. Courage appears not only in dramatic acts of resistance but in the daily business of treating another patient, sharing inadequate food or refusing to regard a numbered prisoner as disposable.

The novel also belongs to the literature of the Far Eastern prisoner-of-war experience, sometimes overshadowed in popular memory by the war in Europe. Pavillard’s perspective insists upon the scale of suffering inflicted across Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia and upon the resourcefulness of those compelled to survive it. The enemy here is not merely an opposing army but hunger, infection, exhaustion and the steady pressure to stop behaving like a human being.

Published by the Pentland Press in 1997, the year of Pavillard’s death, Enemy No. 19 was his final book. It is an uncommon title by an author whose remarkable wartime service earned him an MBE and the lasting gratitude of men who believed that, if he was present, they might somehow be all right.

This copy is in Good condition. It shows the normal signs of previous reading but remains sound, complete and considerably more comfortably housed than anyone depicted within it. An interesting copy for readers of Second World War fiction, Japanese prisoner-of-war history and books written from hard-earned personal knowledge.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where customers retain their names, numbers are confined to orders, and bamboo medical instruments are not part of the dispatch procedure.

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