How soldiers coped with malaria

"I got soaked in the monsoon rains and when I arrived at the hospital where we delivered the patient, I developed malaria and a short time afterwards lobar pneumonia so they had to stop the quinine in order to give me the treatment for the pneumonia which was MMV693, and the result was that I got a number of occurrences of malaria and I was evacuated to a Welsh Mission hospital.”

Alexander spent the rest of his time in Burma at the Welsh Mission Hospital before being sent to hospital in Calcutta. Vulnerable, he caught a number of other diseases; amoebic dysentery, then bacillary dysentery, after which Alexander had infectious hepatitis accompanied by jaundice.

“I lost a lot of weight, I felt very weak, it was quite serious, yes. Particularly the amoebic dysentery, I was lucky. The treatment was quite painful, painful injections. Luckily that was brought under control. …When I came back to England I got malaria reactions when, if I got a fever or a cold”. Eventually blood tests showed that Alexander was clear of malaria but he had endured a long period of illness.

"And certainly, the NCOs were honour bound to ensure that each of the men took his Mepacrine each morning. … the word spread among the Gurkhas that this made them impotent … and we had to try to ensure that that rumour was scotched.

"There was no truth whatsoever in it of course. The yellow eyes worried people, your eyes went yellow with this stuff but except that after six weeks you were so dog tired, putting one foot in front of the other that you didn’t really notice if a man was yellow or not.”

"The M.O., whom I shall call McMenemy, accused me of not taking my mepacrine tablets (which was a military offence), but when I pointed out that, like everyone else, I was a rich yellow in colour from swallowing the bloody things, he admitted grudgingly that they were not an infallible prophylactic.

Half the section was feverish to some degree, and scoured by dysentery in its various forms (“Ah ’m crappin’ ivvery colour bar blue” was Grandarse’s diagnosis). We blamed the monsoon, which certainly had one alarming effect: it puckered the skin in a revoltingly puffy fashion, and brought forth a great plague of jungle sores on wrists and ankles. McMenemy painted them purple and gave us constipating draughts…”