They'd heard that the Japs had been raping army nurses and they thought they'd be doing us a favor. They're very considerate like that, the British. But since bullets were scarce, they decided to evacuate us.
Whilst Bridie was a nurse at an army field hospital, she had heard that the British considered shooting all the nurses as they realized that the Japanese were getting closer. They had promised to bury them with full military honors, but this plan had been aborted when they realized how many nurses there were and how many bullets it would require to shoot all of them. Bridie's observations about the British being considerate are entirely sarcastic and weighted down with irony. They also explain her feelings about the British, which are actually based in far more reality than Sheila's; Sheila had never served in any capacity and so had no first-hand knowledge at all about the ways of the British army or the way in which they considered their service men and women to be commodities rather than people.
Bridie is also explaining here how she came to be on the ship back to Australia; she was being evacuated from Singapore because of the impending Japanese invasion. Ironically this is what landed her in the hands of the Japanese; the British had left the evacuations far too late and so the evacuees' ship was torpedoed by the Japanese who were already in submarines waiting for the invasion orders to come.
She pulled pages out of her Bible for cigarette papers. When it was over I heard her telling a minister that she'd survived the war because of the Good Book.
Another prisoner, Ivy, was addicted to cigarettes and told Bridie and Sheila that she would rather starve than go without her cigarettes every day. When there were no cigarettes to be had, she would light up old banana plant leaves and smoke them instead. She also tore pages out of her Bible to use to role up the banana leaves in, or for any tobacco that she managed to get out of the other prisoners or the guards.
After the war, wanting to seem like a God-fearing woman, she told the minister that she had only made it through the war because of her Bible, knowing that he would interpret this as a statement of her reliance on her spirituality, and would be more likely to look upon her favorably and help her start her life over again.
To go with a Jap. To give him pleasure. How could you ever live with yourself?
Sheila and Bridie argue over who was more culpable in helping the Japanese get women - the Aussies or the Brits? Sheila is less judgmental of the women who slept with Japanese guards. Although she admits that far more of the British women went with Japanese guards than Australian women, she defends them and tells Bridie that they had their reasons, and they did it to feed their kids, or themselves.
Bridie is not having any of it. To her, there is a line between right and wrong and there is no gray area or middle ground. The Japanese are the enemy and they are doing unimaginably awful things to both the allied soldiers and to the prisoners they have at the camps. To give them any form of pleasure at all after what they have done is baffling to her and it is not something she would ever consider doing.
This is also the moment at which Sheila realizes that although she offered sexual favors to a guard to get medication for Bridie, Bridie would not have done the same thing for her, because Bridie would have rather died than give pleasure to the Japanese enemy.
