The Long Green Shore (5 page)

Chicken farms in Surrey are a dream of the open sea, but when the fowls scratch under your window you dream of the sea again. Chicken farms and a war a-blowing?

He remembered getting out the good black suit and brushing it down—the smell of solid serge and mothballs. The trip to London—the polite disinterest of the Admiralty and the suggestion that this might be a younger man's war. The days and weeks spent sitting on hard wooden benches outside snugly closed office doors. A quiet, solid, stubbornly persistent figure in brushed black, twisting the hard-brimmed hat in his stubborn, ship-wise fingers.

Finally they got tired of his persistence and, in despair, had given him the
City of Benong—
which itself was too old for a young ship's war.

They had been somewhere off the bloody beach of Dunkirk; the stukas had missed them when they ran for Alexandria after Greece fell; and the Son of Heaven had lost them in the darkness out of Malaya.

Captain Dyall Jones eyed the broken sky ahead.

‘Keep her steady on that pattern, Mr Johnson. She'll do.'

‘Aye, sir,' said Mr Johnson; and thought privately, with immense pride, what monstrous maritime things a man would take to sea in times of war.

Captain Dyall Jones left the bridge and the
City of Benong
sailed out under a sky of streaming cloud and moon.

Pez lay trying to think of home.

He thought: ‘I should be calling up pictures of how the fire would be burning in the front room at home on a night like this. And how it would be—coming in out of the rain to the warmth of the fire.'

But the images were all manufactured in words first and then forced into the brain. There was no real picture—no emotional memory.

Even in the thought of Helen there was no warmth—though God knows there had been enough fire between them when they lay together; and a deep, friendly warmth of peace and home on those calm evenings when they sat opposite each other, quietly reading or talking.

And then, of course, there was their problem—three people loving where only two could love. No good thinking about that—there could be no solution yet.

‘When the war is over,' she had said. ‘When you both come home.' There was loyalty in her—even if loyalty is not always sense. ‘I can't write to Bob and tell him it's ended,' she said. ‘And when he comes home and I know he's got to go again—I can't tell him then.' She had stared into the fire, her hands clasped against her temples, ruffling the shining brown of her hair. ‘And I don't know whether it
has
finished. I know how I feel about you, but I know he needs me. War and loneliness can twist things—you can't just grab what you think you want without thinking if other people have rights.'

The whole business seemed far away now. All you could do was say: ‘Sometime—sometime I will again consider hotly the problems of life and love.'

But a man might never measure out that time, or know if it was coming to him.

Maybe that was the solution. If Bob was killed…

You couldn't wish him dead, but it would solve it. There would be no barriers then—no divided loyalties—no question except that answered by the hasty heart.

But there was no reality in that either. That was in the future, and a soldier has no future.

Suddenly he felt the great loneliness of himself upon the earth: the monstrous, lonely howling of the wind was in the rigging; he had lost his past—the future was uncertain; he was alone on a stormy-mooned ocean.

Pez settled back into the rough warmth of his blanket cocoon. He breathed the cold, clean air.

So there was no future—what the hell.

He slept.

Pez awoke in the first grey dawn, stretched his cramped body on the nest of ropes, crawled out of his blankets and went to the rail.

The
City of Benong
was anchored in the lee of a small island that lay in the mouth of a broad, shallow bay. There was a great mass of shipping gathered in the calm waters of the bay—a war armada of rusty, sea-grey vessels. Invasion barges surged through the tangle. On the distant smooth black sands, a long line of barges were humped half on the beach, half in the water—their jaws flopping open on the sand like clumsy mechanical saurians.

At first glance the green bank of palms and jungle growth seemed solid. But as Pez gazed he saw the long palm-leaf buildings take shape under the camouflage of trees, the distant toy movements of men and trucks, the thin, hazel pennants of smoke from the cook-fires in the camps.

You could pick out ant swarms of activity where they were loading cases on trucks at the food dumps and the flow of movement in the marshalling yards on the beach where they were loading men and equipment into the barges.

Inland, the hazy, fanged, green mountains piled up into the mist of distance. Thick white cloud lay in the valleys and trailing scarves of it clung on the climbing jungle trees of the mountainside.

Pez turned to find where the sunglow was growing—got his bearings and turned to gaze down the long green shore.

This was the way they were going—down there where the trees and the foam and the beach faded into the perspective of sea and sky.

Down past there was Nip country…

Janos joined Pez at the rail.

He yawned: ‘Christians awake and greet the happy morn!'

The order is to disembark at ten o'clock sharp. So at eight everyone has been herded up out of the hold and crushed into company lots on the deck with all their gear.

At twelve, we are still there in the open sun on the burning steel deck. At half past, word comes round: there will be no meal—we'll get that ashore—but there is a cup of tea down the galley for those who want it. There is a general scramble for chipped enamel mugs.

The troops are used to this old army habit: run like hell to the start point and then sit on your backside for two hours—move two paces and sit some more.

They are sprawled over the deck, some squatting on their packs playing cards, some reading paper-backed novels, a couple scrawling letters home.

Old Whispering John is still in the poker school. He is still winning and grins delightedly as he shuffles the greasy pack.

Some are slouched over the rails, checking up on landmarks and trying to establish the position of our troops and the Nips: ‘Down there, just past that far headland—that's where the Fourth Battalion's holding them.'

Rumour and information—positive if not factual—comes scrambling aboard a troopship along the anchor chain as it drops into the shallows of a new harbour.

The young reinforcements are cocky and elated. They confidently pass on to each other the news that the Nip is starving and disorganised and half-armed. They make profound military assessments. They see this is going to be a snack, with all the glory and no danger. Some of them are condescending and almost sorry for the enemy. They begin to doubt, in their self-mesmerism, whether it is really worthwhile taking the trouble to defeat such a sorry foe. If they go on like this, they will be feeling offended that the brass hats have offered them such a menial glory.

But the old hands are not so complacent. Mud is mud and here they make mountains of it. And a starving animal or a starving man is fierce.

We hear that up the river the Fourth Battalion has struck some opposition from our ‘unarmed' foe: three killed yesterday, a couple wounded.

It is the Yankee armada in the bay. They are leaving, sailing north, tomorrow.

We hear for the first time the legend of the nurses—the legend that goes with us down the long green shore. But it is always on a different track—over the other hill.

The Fourth Battalion brought out some Yankee nurses that the Nips had captured in the Philippines, we hear. The Nip officers brought them over with them and have been using them. One of these nurses is in a bad way—rotten with the pox. She begs them not to bring her back. She wants to shoot herself. She smashes a bottle and tries to cut the veins in her wrists. They're down at the hospital now, we are told. You can see it—that long native hut and those tents back behind that wooden tower—you can see the red cross through the trees.

God knows where this legend comes from, but every week or so it revives. Sometimes there are four nurses, sometimes seven. Sometimes the Fourth rescues them, sometimes the Fifth or First. But otherwise the story has the same theme each time—and lots of our blokes believe it and repeat it seriously each time they hear it.

These rumours and legends of the track and camp are the soldiers' literature and radio and vaudeville show. Rumours of peace, rumours of leave—legends of death and miracles of chance.

Most popular are the legends of the immorality and stupidity of officers—and a number of these are not rumours.

*

Finally, at three o'clock, disembarkation starts. A choppy swell has risen and we must go over the tall side of the ship and clamber down the wildly swaying scrambling nets, into the tossing barge below.

It is a heavy climb with the full weight of equipment on your back. Your arms creak in their sockets and the net bucks like a steer. And your mates still on deck, and those already safely down, jeer and cheer as you ride the wild ropes and stumble into the barge.

Dick the Barber is the last man down for our barge. We have to drag him off the net by force. He is white and shivering. Shells don't worry Dick so much, but heights terrify him. All the way over Kokoda he crossed those little vine and log bridges across the ravines on hands and knees, clinging like a koala.

The barge swings away from the ship's side and turns for the land amid ribald jeers from up top and obscene warnings of improbable fates in store for us ashore.

The section moves into the row of tents nearest the beach. The area had been a Yankee cemetery. The coffins were dug up only a few days before the battalion moved in and the area smoothed over with bulldozers.

Slapsy Paint, our Loot, appears and gives his usual vague directions about bedding arrangements and meal parade and wanders off again.

The heavy, leaden-grey casks of the Yankee dead are stacked over in one corner of the area. There are several hundred of them. A gang of American negroes, half-naked and glistening in the sweating sun, are loading them onto lorries.

Pez and Janos go down together to collect their bed boards from the dump near the temporary kitchen.

Jonesy, the thin cook, is idly inspecting the contents of blackened dixies ranged on the long trench fire. From time to time he pumps with his foot the roaring petrol burner that sprays a long, pent blue tongue of flame down the trench.

Pez sniffs hungrily: ‘What's for dinner?'

‘Stew,' says Jonesy. ‘A good bully beef stew.'

‘Well,' says Pez. ‘If it's good you know what to do with it—a good thing never hurts you.'

They trudge home through the black sand with their bed boards and wooden support frames. Home…a word that means many things to a soldier. It can be a two-man tent in the scrub or a hole in the ground.

Those rows of tents in the naked square still have an unlived-in quality. The dirt on the floors is not even trodden down yet. There are none of the appurtenances of living that make a home—the food box in the corner, the water buckets outside the door, the blackened home-made billy for the inevitable brew of tea.

Everyone starts the business of settling down to a new home—according to taste, once the first scramble for a bed is over. Dick the Barber has the story of the coffins—Harry Drew has been to the ‘I' section up the road and has the good guts about the Fourth Battalion—Laird has located food among the wreckage of the deserted American camp down the beach and has marked out a wire and sentry protected ration dump over the other side of the road for future reference.

The coffins belong to the Yanks who were killed taking this beach. They are taking them back down the coast and planting them until the war is over and then taking them back to the States.

‘Why the hell don't they plant 'em and let 'em grow,' growls the Laird. ‘Another piece of dirt's no different the way they are.'

‘It's respect for the dead,' says Deacon. ‘Don't you know the dead have to get more respect than the living?'

‘Respect this bloke, then,' says Pez. ‘He's through living.' Pez had been scraping the sand smooth underneath his bed and uncovered a thin-boned skull and a few frail ribs.

He tosses the skull into the middle of the tent and Fluffy grabs it and checks the teeth: ‘No gold. The Yanks have cleaned him out before.' It was the first time Fluffy had ever handled a human skull. ‘I'll take it home for me kid sister,' he says. He handles it gently as he passes it on.

Janos examines the rib bones: ‘They're so thin.'

The Laird grunts: ‘There's not much to a man when you get down to the bone.' Deacon made to pass him the skull. ‘Don't give me that,' the Laird rumbles. ‘I've seen too many.'

Deacon balances the skull delicately on his extended palm and addresses it with wry heroics: ‘Alas, poor Yorick…'

‘A swim! A swim!' the cry goes up. Clothes are flung off hurriedly and there is a dash for the tent flap.

Pez gathers the skull from Deacon's hand as he goes and tucks it under his arm. Fluffy tackles him as they race across the sand and Pez, as he falls, tosses the skull to Janos with a smooth rugby pass.

The bunch of lean, naked figures race, shouting, over the black sand to the surf. The bleached skull passes among them, tossed like a football.

Janos, on the fringe of the scrum as they near the water, misses a pass and the skull curves out in a slow arc—hits and rolls slowly until it fetches up against the shell-shredded stump of a coconut palm.

They leave it there and race on—poise for a moment on the firm, sea-washed sand of the beach—then rush down the shallow, shelving water of the ebbing wave and hurl themselves, yelling, over the white foaming wall of the incoming breaker into the deep, cool silk of ocean banked behind it.