The Long Green Shore (19 page)

Well, the trader, who is a man of imagination, goes back to his schooner and drinks a square bottle of gin with his raffish mate and has a long think. As a result of this he goes for a little trip around the islands, waiting for his beard to grow nice and long. Then he comes back and waits until he gets word that the missionaries are away on tour again.

He dresses himself and his mate in robes of blasphemous white and, with a bunch of black heathens dancing and waving palm leaves before him, he strides into the mission yard, raises his hand and declares in a voice of the mountains, ‘I am Big Pfella Jesus and I have come for my copra!'

And the faithful mission boys worked like slaves to get the copra onto the boat for him. When it was all loaded, the trader called them all together and prayed over them fervently and blasphemously in pidgin: “You pfella boys, good boys—supposim you catchim longa me Heaven—plenty kai kai, number one—plenty pom pom, number one…” and he went around as they knelt in the dust and laid a godless paw devoutly on each woolly head and sprinkled his own special brand of holy water from a gin bottle with the label carefully washed off. Then he presents the head boy with the bottle and the little bit of holy water left in it for his own use and tells him he's a number one good boy. Back he goes to his ship, with his own heathen crew dancing and waving palm leaves before him, and away he sails.

We asked Tamal, the big police boy, what he thought of the missionaries.

Tamal grinned sourly: ‘Too much Jesus, not enough kai kai,' he declared.

So we gave him a tin of bully.

Janos kills two more Nips as forward scout, but when Connell passes on the track Janos doesn't move to add up the score for him.

It was the morning after we took the last village on the western ridge that the Indian came in.

A youngish man, he was, but he looked ancient and bone-thin with the dirty-grey pallor of starvation shining through the Punjab copper of his skin. He had crouched all night in the rain outside the sentry lines and came in half an hour after dawn, waving a piece of cloth and crying:

‘Master! Master! Don't shoot—Indian! Indian!'

He kept up his shrill, quavering cry until he was well inside the perimeter. Then, when he saw he was safe, he suddenly stopped and was shaken with a fierce, cold fit of shivering.

‘Tired—tired—hungry,' he told Pez and Janos who were taking him back to Company headquarters.

He tried to tell them of the years of starvation and death that had passed since his capture and of the great fear that possessed him when he walked towards the sentry crying shrilly: ‘Don't shoot! Don't shoot!' The Nips had told them that the Australians would shoot on sight and there had been rumours about the other Indians who tried to give themselves up down the shore and had been shot waving the white flag.

He had escaped the previous day and crept in terror through the bush to the Australian lines. In the afternoon, at a hidden waterhole, he had carefully washed the piece of cloth he had used as a white flag. As he waited, an Australian patrol had drifted swiftly and silently along the ridge above him. He had wanted to call out to them, but he had been afraid.

Then, as it grew dark, he had crawled as close as he dared to the Australian perimeter and crouched there all night. In the morning he had walked in—expecting every minute to feel the numbing sting of bullets punching into his flesh—with the great agony of freedom so near, swelling in his breast—and then the terrible flood of weakness and fierce shuddering that took him when he realised he was free, he was safe…

He tried to tell them all about it, but all he could do was to look at Pez and Janos with a pathetic grin, gesturing round the camp and then to himself and chanting softly: ‘Good—good—good.'

Pez reported him in to headquarters.

‘Bloke here by the name of Ranjit,' he said. ‘Been ack-willie for three years—reporting back for duty.'

Captain Baird talked to Ranjit, then told him to wait while he contacted Battalion, back down the track.

‘What about giving him a feed, Cap?' said Janos. ‘Looks as though tucker's been a bit light on for him.'

‘Sure,' said Baird, ‘take him over to your kitchen.'

So Pez and Janos took him over to the kitchen and the mob gathered round to try and talk to Ranjit. They gathered he had been taken in Singapore and had been a slave of the Nips ever since. Of the company of ninety of his countrymen that they had brought to New Guinea with him, only fifteen were now left alive.

You could almost see the strength and life flowing back into his body and his eyes as he tried to tell them where the Nips were and how strong they were and what had happened to him.

And the mob grinned with delight as they watched him put away the biggest issue of bully beef stew that any one man ever put away. ‘Good on you, mate,' they said, and grinned at him. He grinned back as he ate and smoked the cigarettes they rolled for him.

As he passed through the Company on his way back down the track to Battalion, Ranjit wore a huge grin and greeted every single person he passed with a salute and a bow. The privates grinned at him with delight and returned his salute and said, ‘Good on you, mate!' but some of the officers were uncomfortable and seemed uncertain whether to return his salute or smile benignly.

‘Good morning, sah—good morning, sah,' said Ranjit, on his triumphal way. He got well to the top of the first hill then collapsed quite suddenly.

Old Doc Barnes, the medical orderly from Don Company, cursed the bloody fools who had let him stuff so much bully beef into himself and called for the stretcher bearers.

So Ranjit was carried back in triumph—suffering from malnutrition and over-eating.

It was about this time we found what had apparently been a big Nip base camp—crumbling buildings and piles of incense and rotting junk. We salvaged some postcards out of the mess—miracles of exquisite fragility in design.

Pez and Janos found the door to the big cave-like room dug out at the back of the store room. Pez kicked the rotting door away and Janos twisted a bunch of dried cane into a torch and lit it. By the flaring, smoky light they could see that the room was crammed with shelves all filled with small metal containers, each bearing numbers and symbols. Pez took one down and opened it. Inside was a handful of ashes.

‘Ashes,' said Janos. ‘Ashes of the dead. They're names and numbers on those boxes. Christ, there are thousands of them. This was an army.'

In the smoky red flare of the cane torch, thousands of metal containers crouched on the shelves of that cave-like room, each bearing a name and a number, each containing its handful of ashes.

This was an army.

The fantastic news came through the day before we attacked the final hill.

We got it from the sig wires, up from the beach—it sounded like: ‘They dropped one bomb and a city was destroyed.' The sig wires kept repeating something about an atomic bomb—atomic bomb. As we were waiting to go down the valley to that hill, everyone was talking about it.

‘It sounds fantastic,' said Harry Drew, ‘but these are days when fantastic things happen—they've been splitting the atom for years, of course…'

‘Drop another one,' said Pez. ‘Drop a dozen and finish this bloody business quick.'

‘I don't know,' said Harry Drew. ‘I don't know if it's the sort of thing that should be used—a whole city—women and children.'

‘Is one big bomb any different to ten thousand small ones?' demanded Pez. ‘They kill women and children just the same.'

‘It sounds horrible,' said Janos. ‘It sounds frightening.'

‘Yes,' agreed Pez, after a pause. ‘It's frightening—but it might save a lot more lives in the long run.'

*

‘B' Company were ahead of us and we had to pass through them. Their headquarters were set on a little flat knoll at the junction of three tracks. The Sally tent was set up on the highway and the coffee urns were out and smoking. We stopped for coffee and biscuits and the talk was all of an atom bomb—‘One bomb, one city!' They were incredulous, and yet it seemed right.

There was a small graveyard to the right of the track, opposite the Sally tent. There were three crosses and one open pit. As we finished our coffee, and filed away from the tent we could see the Don Company boys bringing the body up from down the valley.

It was a bad track to the left—knee-deep in black, slimy mud. They had the corpse, wrapped in a grey blanket, lashed to a litter and they had tied themselves to it with ropes.

The leader would give a shout and they would all fling themselves against the ropes, grunting and plunging against the thick, clinging mud and dragging the corpse and the four men who were carrying and steadying the litter, half a dozen wild staggering yards at a time—until they stopped exhausted and bogged down. All of them—the men on the ropes and the carriers and the corpse on the blanket—were plastered from head to foot in stinking black mud.

It was young Jimmy Travers—that little fair-haired bloke who came out from doing three months in Groverley only a week before we sailed.

We are pinned down.

Right at the foot of the track that clambers crazily up the hillside to the ridge we must win, we are pinned down under fire from the Nip weapon pits that are dotted left to right up the slope—deadly pockmarks on each side of the track.

We are bound in terror to the earth under their fire. We will never rise.

But Janos is calling for grenades—and suddenly, incredibly, he is standing—black hail is falling and he is standing! And, incredibly, we are standing, too—and he is screaming: ‘Come on, you bastards! Do you want to live forever?'

We are running—we are charging—we are shouting! We are gods and madmen! Janos standing and his screaming of that terrible, fatal cry of battle that has been flung down the centuries—it drags us from the earth and storms us—laughing, yelling, screaming, stabbing, snarling, firing—it hurls us up the hill.

We win the ridge. The enemy is dead behind us, but ahead he still lives. Again we are driven to the earth, and this time we cannot rise. We are bound naked to the earth. Darkness falls, but still we cannot move. We must lie till dawn, clasping the earth in the agony of fear. Until dawn, when our comrades can attack on that other hill.

It had been dark and filled with death a long, long time. The Nips had been tossing grenades—blast grenades—must have been all they had. There was no shrap, but the concussion beat like a mighty hammer blow on the earth, which shuddered and trembled in your embrace—it smacked like a fist at the nape of your neck.

Pez could hear Janos' voice—a long way away, it seemed—small and frightened, whispering: ‘Pez…Pez… Where are you…? Pez… Pez…'

Pez dragged himself inches into the darkness towards a vague shape that whispered.

‘Here, boy, what's wrong?'

Janos wriggled swiftly to him: ‘I'm frightened, Pez—it's getting me—I'm frightened.'

A blast grenade landed in front of them and crushed them between the earth and sky.

Janos almost started up. Pez slammed an arm across his shoulders and pinned him back to the earth. ‘Keep still, boy,' he pleaded. ‘For Christ sake, keep still. We can't move. We've got to wait till morning. We're in a fold here—we're safe if we keep still.'

Janos' breath was shuddering and his body trembled violently under Pez's arm. ‘It's got me, Pez,' he whispered. ‘I'm frightened.'

And so, through the long nightmare of darkness, Pez held him to the earth—whispering, pleading with him, and holding his trembling body to the earth.

We are saved.

‘B' Company attacks with the first light and springs us from the trap. We are haggard and grimed and grey—our eyes burn red in gaunt faces—our hands tremble.

Pez has to lift Janos to his feet.

‘I'm through, boy,' he whispers. ‘Never again—I can never go again.'

*

But we didn't have to go again.

Word came through that we were to stay put—patrol our front, but keep out of trouble.

We built our doover tents on the ridge and on the lip of the gully. We corded the muddy track with scrub timber. The Sally tent moved up to us on the ridge and there was the Sally bloke dishing out hot coffee and biscuits.

Strange how you grow accustomed to a piece of earth and it is home. This hostile ridge we stormed foam-flanked became familiar in a day—our land—won with blood. Behind that hummock there, the old soldier, Whispering John, had died; the fixed little grin had snarled back when we found him, showing his stained yellow teeth. Near that pit there, young Regan fell with a bullet in his spine—they say he may never walk again.

We wait.

There is a swift wing unbeating in the sky; there is a high wind that never stirs a leaf, blowing without a ripple over the Pacific and the whole world—a waiting wind. There is a strange and soundless bugle call frozen like a curlew's call midway between the earth and stars.

And at night we lie in our doovers and young Snowy Miller from Don Company up the hill sings the songs—the old songs. He has a choir-boy voice, untrained but sweet and true, and the old songs float down the hill, drifting through the trees…‘I Dream of Jeanie' and ‘Waken for Me'…

‘She's over,' the sig wires said. ‘I tell you she's all wrapped up—she's buggerup finish—she's ridge!'

But nobody really believed it.

Then Bairdie came up the track and called us together and read it out to us. A personal letter from the General, almost; assuring us that we had won—innings declared.

And the drums began beating in the hills—they throbbed and boomed through the hills all day and into the night—telling the Kanaka boys with the Nips in the mountains, that it was over—no more hide and seek—time to come home for dinner.

And when the police boys and the carrying parties passed, the boys grinned hugely and stamped their splayed feet in the joyful mud: ‘War bin pfinis—bagerup pfinis—Japan man pfinis—hihihihihihi—plenty kai kai, plenty pom pom—war bagerup—pfinis!'