The Long Green Shore (16 page)

The nearest Minnie got to respect as an officer was when the men said he ‘wasn't a bad poor bastard'. The other skulls laughed at him behind his back—but managed to get him to do a good deal of their paperwork for them back in standing camp.

So this was our new officer. First Slapsy and then Minnie—we could certainly draw the crow.

They told us this might be the last show we would do before going home. We were to take over from the Second Battalion for a while—then they would come through us and finish the stretch.

We were hearing rumours of another war, too. The second front had opened in Europe. We heard the news in whispers down the line—in occasional wireless news—in reports of men coming back from hospital.

While we marched along the long green shore men died in the steel ring of Cherbourg—the earth was stained more red at Arnhem—the Russian guns thundered as they rolled in the East. Something was happening north of us in the Pacific—there was a place called Iwo Jima.

So we went on—what was left of us. We struck good weather. The road was broad and hard. We were second platoon. The only Nips we saw were the dead ones that the sections in front left for us.

One day we halted near the body of a young Nip lying by the side of the track. It was smoko. Janos walked over and flopped down next to the body: ‘Come on,' he invited Pez. ‘It's all right, he doesn't stink. He's fresh.'

The Nip was only a lad—it's hard to tell with them, but he looked about eighteen. He had fallen forward on his face, his head was turned to the right and his legs sprawled. He had died swiftly, without struggle, and looked as though he had fallen in exhausted sleep. There were three bullet holes in his back, smudged black with blood around the edges—quite neat and seeming to bear no relationship to death. A trickle of blood had dried in the corner of his mouth. One hand was outflung and he still clutched a fresh bundle of plucked grasses—another bundle was tucked into his back pocket.

‘Wonder why he was picking grass?' said Janos. ‘He doesn't look as though he was hungry.'

The grasses were thick and juicy looking.

‘I think it's that koyu the natives use,' said Pez. ‘They say it's a good vegetable.'

‘A man should have green vegetables,' said Janos. He took the grasses out of the hand of the dead man. He had to use force to bend the fingers back.

‘You're not going to eat it, are you?' asked the Laird.

‘Why not? If it won't kill him, it won't kill me.'

Janos made the stew that night and stirred the grass into it. None of the others except Pez would eat it with him. Pez didn't quite understand: ‘What is this? A sacrificial supper?'

Janos just grinned.

They had pitched their doover facing the beach and Janos had gone down to the fires to make the stew while Pez dug the weapon pit.

The sun was slanting down when Janos got back. They sat on the edge of the weapon pit and ate the stew. It was good and hot, with flour stirred into it to thicken it. The dead Nip's grass tasted something like spinach, but faintly bitter. Neither said anything more about it.

It was stand to before they finished. First Janos crouched down in the pit and smoked, then Pez. They sat together, talking in low voices.

It was a safe billet and time to get a good rest. We were camped in a little belt of trees on the edge of the white sands. In front of us was the sea—behind us a broad dirt road. Other platoons were camped across the road, ahead and behind us.

Pez and Janos sat together on the edge of the weapon pit. The moon had risen before stand to ended and it was shining bright and silver on the sand and mottled on the road and left us in black shadows in the trees.

‘It's been a long time, Pez,' said Janos. ‘This is a hell of a business…'

‘Yeah,' said Pez. ‘It's been a long time—a lot of men…'

‘I don't know what I go back to when it ends—if I'm left when it ends,' said Janos. ‘Sometimes it bothers me.'

‘Don't worry, boy,' said Pez. ‘We're near enough to the end now—you're home and hosed—we'll drink a gallon of beer in Ma Maloney's yet.'

‘When we first went away, home was close,' reflected Janos. ‘You could remember it, and what you would do when you got back was clear.

‘But it's been a long time now and things have changed. When you go back on leave the children you left behind—the kids next door—are men and women and you walk like a stranger in the street. People say hullo to you in the street and drink with you in the pubs and ask you how it was—but you don't really belong there—you're a wanderer, a blow-in, a ghost. They treat you with politeness, but not too lavishly. They spread themselves the first time you went away—they seem to resent it a bit now every time you come home again—they sent you away like a hero—they seem to expect that you should have done the decent thing and died like one—then they could feel satisfied they'd done right by you.

‘If the war ended tomorrow, we'd be lost and lonely—we're lost and lonely now, so where's the beginning and the ending…?'

Pez made no answer—there was none to make. But it's a bad thing when a man starts talking about the future at times like this. In the rambling philosophy of a camp, that sort of thing is all right. But it's not a good thing to start thinking on those lines when you're on the track.

The whisper to stand down came floating through the trees.

‘Come on, boy, let's sleep,' said Pez.

They were comfortable bunks in the clean sand that night—you could still feel the warmth of the sun on the earth through the blanket. Pez and Janos lay silent side by side under their tent flaps for a while. Then Janos said goodnight and rolled over. He was asleep in a few moments.

Pez lay awake and listened. There was a calm brooding silence on the beach. The hard, comforting feeling of his rifle lay beside him—the muzzle resting on the pack that made his pillow—a strange beloved to lie abed with. ‘But I have known women who could be less cold, yet not so comforting,' he thought.

‘Oh no, it couldn't be, Janos my brother—while we live we are not lost. All your courage and skill and wisdom cannot go for nothing. While we live we are not lost.'

Pez found himself thinking, for no reason, of the Deacon. He remembered one morning they had come up the track and on top of a sharp rise there was the body of a Nip ludicrously dead. His body made an arch, resting on head and feet, his naked backside poking up in the air. We ran right into him as we topped the rise. The body was swollen and the skin had that tight, waxy look that they get. He was crawling.

The Deacon had paused in mock surprise—stepped back, sweeping his hat off, and bowed low to that backside: ‘And good morning to you, sir,' said Deacon. ‘The face is familiar but I'm afraid I can't quite place where I've met you.'

Why the hell should he remember Deacon…?

While we live we are not lost…

The Laird woke Pez for guard at two o'clock. He rolled out into the pit and sat there smoking a covered cigarette to wake himself properly.

Just before he was due to wake Janos, there were shots up the beach and a man came running down the sand. In the bright moonlight you could see he was a Nip. Pez fired, but it seemed he missed. Then an Owen opened up from further down. You could see the spurts of sand running across the beach towards him and then his body shuddered as the bullets struck him.

He started shrieking—a terrible, animal noise, and, turning, he rushed into the sea and was lost—though for long minutes afterwards you imagined you could hear the screams coming, pounded through the thunder of the surf.

Janos was behind Pez in the pit by now.

‘Silly time for a bloke to go for a swim,' he said.

When we went forward that morning we ran into a Nip mountain gun. That was the finish of Minnie. It was the first time he had been under fire and he just ran around in circles. ‘Like a chook with no head,' the Laird described it. He had no idea what to do. Whispering John and Harry Drew took charge. Minnie just crawled into a hole and stopped there.

A couple of days after that they sent Minnie back down the coast to the base camp. He was sent back as a neurosis case—an officer is entitled to get neurosis a damn sight quicker than a private.

It was that morning, too, that the Indians were shot. They'd escaped from the Nips and tried to get into our lines. They came down the track, waving bits of rag.

Young ‘Squizzy' Taylor from Charley Company shot them down as they came. He was a bit nervous and Connell's orders were to take no prisoners. He didn't realise until he'd done it that they were our own men.

Two of them were dead when they got to them. The third they carried in and Doc Maguire worked over him all day—but he died.

The next day we took our objective—this was to be the end of the trail for us, they assured us.

We passed through a stretch of country that had been lived in once and was now overgrown. The roads were sunken but still definable. Everywhere was the ghostly smell and sign of the enemy—piles of rusting ammunition dumped along the side of the track—foxholes, weapon pits and dugouts burrowed in between the writhing octopus roots of the trees. For here, again, gnarled thick-limbed nightmare trees grew twisted into violent still life. Dozens of burned and rusting trucks were entangled in the jungle growth at the side of the roads—most of them had the skeleton of the driver underneath and the steel cabins were punched full of holes where the planes had strafed them.

At intervals were stacks of boxes with Japanese lettering burned on the sides. The boxes had rotted in the rain and burst with the weight of their contents—ammunition and equipment, but never food or clothing.

Our objective was a clearing a little inland. There was nothing to it. We went carefully along the track and reached the clearing without any trouble. There was a native hut in the centre. We riddled it from the edge of the clearing and then ran up to it.

Old Whispering John it was that kicked open the door. Janos and Pez and the Laird went on to clear the other side. Young Sunny covered old John. The rest of the platoon took ground.

Old John told the story later. He leaned his chin affectionately on Janos' shoulder and sniggered confidentially: ‘There's this Nip there,' he whispered. ‘He's lying on the bed and when I kick the door in he staggers to his feet. So I let him have a burst in the guts.' He sniggered. ‘He walks round the room for a while holding his guts—and then he goes and lies on the bed.'

‘Maybe he was tired!' snarled Janos—twisting his head to avoid old John's foul breath.

The war in Europe ended.

Young Sunny came running along the track: ‘They've tossed it in—the Huns have tossed it in!' he yelled.

‘Take it easy,' growled the Laird.

No one danced on the long green shore because the war in Europe had ended. A big shoal of fish had come in near the beach that morning—in close enough for our grenades. We had fresh fish for breakfast and that was more important just for the moment.

It was something to talk about, sure. But what the hell! Europe was a long way from us—our war was still going—it would take time to swing armies and air force men from Europe to the Pacific—our job was still to do, and time was the deadly factor.

It is a simple equation—the old blokes are the most worried—matter-of-factly worried. A soldier may have a thousand lives—no more. You can stand up just so many times and after that, no more. The longer you go, the higher the odds pile up. These old blokes have bowed to death so often—they know their time is running out.

It was that day, too, that Pez went back to hospital. He had been up all night with vomiting and diarrhoea. He was a pale shivering shell in the morning.

‘You've got the wog all right, boy,' said Janos.

‘Feels like it,' chattered Pez. His eyes were swimming, his skin burning, he was deadly cold inside.

Janos carried his pack for him down to the RAP.

‘Don't worry about it, boy,' he said. ‘This looks like the end of it. They reckon we're finished now. The Second's taken over and our next trip will be home. If we get home, the way things are shaping, we'll never go away again—she'll be all over before that.'

Doc Maguire took a look at Pez.

‘Looks like a touch of the wog,' he said cheerfully. ‘But even if it's not we'll send you back for a bit of rest—fatten you up a bit. Have you been eating all right?'

‘Oh, not badly, on and off, Doc,' shivered Pez.

‘Thought so,' said the Doc. ‘A bit of starvation is what's wrong with you.'

‘I'll make sure they send your letters back,' said Janos. ‘Look after yourself, boy.'

Pez lay down on a stretcher with a couple of blankets over him while he waited for the ambulance. He could keep nothing in his stomach. They gave him a cup of tea—he brought it up. They gave him a dose of quinine—it came up immediately and the bitter sting of it remained at the back of his nose.

All the world is dazed and pitched off-key. The body loses substance.

There is only one other patient in the three-tonner ambulance truck with him—a young lad from the Second Battalion with a leg wound. He grunts a little as the truck bumps and sways down the road. His eyes are a little hysterical—too much white showing in them—and his voice rambles…

‘I cut their throats,' he is saying. ‘We never took any prisoners in our mob—I cut their throats—even the dead ones. After it's finished I go around and cut their throats—even the dead ones.'

He falls silent and groans between his teeth as the truck grinds and bumps down in a rough pinch.

‘My brother was in Malaya,' he says. ‘They killed my brother in Malaya—some blokes who were with him told me—they cut his throat like a pig…'

They waited half an hour at the ambulance station at the 'drome for the plane to come in. There are other cases there—stretcher cases mostly that have been carried down from the hills.