I do not propose to bore you with what the duties of an RTO are. They are many and varied, and the job is extremely interesting. I was to learn the ropes from and assist another young subaltern called Mayhew, and actually I was only supposed to be temporary until the arrival of a Captain fellow who was supposed to be on his way to take over at Mandalay with Mayhew as his assistant. With the railway south of Thazi in enemy hands, Mandalay station was the busiest and most important station on the whole of the Burma Railways system, and Mayhew and I were accordingly kept mighty busy. We had a staff of one sergeant, a night clerk and a couple of couriers. The railways were then being used almost entirely for military purposes and were functioning more or less normally, although they were very short staffed, a great number of the staff having already run away.
I soon settled down to my new job and began to thoroughly enjoy it, although the work was extremely hard and the hours long. One of our greatest difficulties was to stop looting on and around the station and another was to dispose of corpses. Mandalay was badly afflicted with a cholera epidemic and its victims invariably seemed to choose the station to die on. We were seldom without two or three bodies lying around and, needless to say, I was not long before getting a cholera inoculation.