Dysentery

Depicts four desperately emaciated servicemen; their protruding ribs and stick thin limbs are mirrored in the bamboo of the hut they rest in. The figure in the foreground has dark circles around his eyes and hallowed cheeks. The are visibly week from starvation, dehydration and dysentery.
Jack Chalker, serving in the Royal Artillery, was captured at the fall of Singapore. In October 1942 he was in a party sent to Thailand to construct the Burma-Thailand Railway. Chalker secretly made drawings of the various camps and conditions endured by the prisoners. He drew and painted on whatever materials he could find or steal from the Japanese, hiding his work in sections of bamboo buried in the ground, the attap roofs of huts, or the artificial legs worn by amputees in the hospital camps. His work provides a candid and moving record of the prisoners' suffering.