The Long Green Shore (6 page)

Back in the tent Deacon drags out his airmail pad, sharpens a stump of pencil by slitting the wood away from the lead with a long thumbnail, lays tobacco, papers and matches handy, and disposes himself to write his letters.

‘Come on down the Yank camp,' the Laird urges.

‘I've got to write a letter,' objects Deacon.

‘Hell, you can write any time,' the Laird argues. ‘But if we don't scrounge through the Yanks early, all the best munga'll be gone.'

‘I've got to write a letter,' insists Deacon. ‘I've been trying to write it for a week.'

‘Another day won't matter then,' reasons the Laird.

‘But it's to my Queensland heeler—my Sheila—my best sort.'

‘Then she's probably out with a Yank,' the Laird argues conclusively. ‘Another two days won't matter.'

Deacon tosses the pad on his bed as he rises to go out.

‘Beloved Margaret,' it opens with a little flourish.

The rest is blank.

It is a time of waiting and speculation, rumours and legends, old tales told of old campaigns, endless poker games with greasy, dog-eared packs of cards.

Discipline—the petty, stupid discipline of a base camp—largely disappears. The officers are not so insistent on being saluted at every turn—not that they got saluted at every turn when they did insist on it.

But still the daily bumble of routine orders harasses us.

For three days blankets must be folded in two to the centre and packs placed directly behind them on our beds. Then, for four days, webbing equipment must be laid out on the blankets with the bayonet pointing down. For six days after that the order is changed and bayonets must be laid diagonally across the webbing. Then the order is changed again: webbing equipment is moved down in front of the blanket and the pack must be placed in the centre of the blanket.

These ridiculous orders are an eternal mystery to the troops.

Dick the Barber supposes that the skulls must earn a living and justify their existence in some manner.

Every morning and afternoon there are route marches in the blazing sun with full packs.

They are brokenfoot marches. For a start our feet are tender from shipboard. And the air seems light in the tropics—it leaves empty aching spaces in your lungs after you have been marching a while. The pack straps cut deep into your shoulders as you march and after a few hundred yards you are panting like a fat poodle. The sweat squirts from your skin, saturating the jungle green shirt and slacks.

The only pleasure in it is to stumble in from the march and line up with your dixie at the cookhouse for a quart of tepid, sweet tea—you suck at it, blowing like a horse, and feel it soak down inside of you.

‘I think you're being too hard on them right off,' Doc Maguire told Connell.

‘Too hard, hell!' said Connell. ‘I'm going to march them till they start to drop. Anyone that can't stand this pace won't stand the going further up. I don't want any weak sisters—I want them hard and tough and hungry when I take them in.'

‘You can march them in the morning for one hour, Cliff,' said Maguire. ‘There'll be no route march in the afternoon.'

They were standing beside the table in the RAP tent. There was no one else in the tent; but young Cliffie, the orderly, who was painting the dermatitis on Brogan's backside in the adjoining tent, heard what was said.

Connell stopped for a moment as though he wasn't sure what he'd heard.

‘What the hell do you mean?' he said.

‘An hour in the morning, Cliff, no marching in the afternoon,' said Maguire calmly. ‘You'll break those men if you keep on running them like you are—you won't harden them, you'll break them.'

‘I'll march them how I want.'

‘Not while I'm the Doc, Cliff.'

‘Keep to your lousy pills—that's your job—mine is to make these men ready for the track.'

‘That's my job too, Cliff.'

‘I'm the Colonel!'

‘I'm the Doc, Colonel.'

‘Not when I'm through with you, you won't be,' snarled Connell.

The thin red veins had sprung into a scarlet web on his white face. He picked up a thin glass beaker and smashed it on the table: ‘Like that you'll be—from tomorrow!'

Connell was on his way out of the tent. He couldn't have heard, but the Doc murmured to himself, almost with a quiet certainty and satisfaction: ‘An hour in the morning—none in the afternoon.'

After a while the Doc came into the tent where young Cliffie was practising his impressionist art on Brogan's haunches.

‘How are you, lad?' he asked. ‘How are you feeling?'

There was something new in the Doc's voice—he really sounded as though he cared how a buck private was feeling with the island itch around his backside.

‘Not bad, Doc,' said Brogan.

Brogan had never before called Maguire anything but ‘Sir'—with politeness as insolent as was safe.

Next day we marched for an hour in the morning—there was no march in the afternoon.

A good deal of the day we surf and sunbake naked on the sand. Soon we are nearly as brown as the native boys.

Equipment is checked and issued. We line up at the grindstone in the pioneer tent and sharpen our bayonets—they're handy for opening tins.

Rations are pretty light on at our cookhouse but we live well by scavenging on the Yankee rubbish dumps down at the old camp and by raids on the ration dump through the barbed wire.

The Yanks always seem to have too much of everything—compared to us—and they always seem to leave half their gear behind them when they go.

Down past the point there are hundreds of jeeps and trucks and amphibious craft rusting in the Yank car park. One company dumped twenty good jeeps in forty fathoms of water out past the reef because they had no one to hand them over to and they didn't want to take them with them.

There is good scrounging down at the old Yank camp. Rubbish is piled up in the deserted mess huts and kitchens—shattered crates and boxes seem to have been hurled together in a pile in the middle of the floor. Some of the tins have busted and are rotten, but most of them are quite good. Anyway we always listen when we puncture the tin to make sure the air sucks in and the vacuum seal still holds.

Scratching around the camp one afternoon, Pez and Janos found themselves caught between sundown and darkness in the mess hut. It was a strange feeling—suddenly the light was grey and the beach was desolate. Everything seemed very silent, as though there were watchers in the fringe of the scrub and in the shadows of the sand dunes.

The flywire door, torn off its hinges, flapped mournfully against the wall. It was some distance down the beach to their own camp—the tents were out of sight. No one was visible on the beach—it might have been the end of the world.

‘What the hell are you running for?' grinned Janos as they went back down the beach quicker than was really necessary.

‘That place didn't feel as though it liked having me there,' said Pez.

The Yank rations are so good that even their rubbish dumps have better food than we've got in our kitchens. Every tent is crowded now with tins of pineapple and peanut butter and assorted stews and hashes. In some of the field rations there are cigarettes and glucose lollies. At night we drink American coffee and munch American-issue chocolate (made in Australia, but not for us) and puff American cigarettes.

There is a deal of discussion about the Yanks. They are all right—they fight well, when they can throw a couple of hundred tonnes of high explosive into a position. They live too well—compared with us, that is. They get too much money—compared with us. They talk as though no one else was fighting the war. They take our girls. ‘Over-dressed, over-paid, over-sexed and over here.'

All that's left of them here now is the sustaining rubbish dump of their food, and after a few days the Laird passes the general judgment on that: ‘It's all right,' he says, lifting his nose from a dixie of American corned beef hash and baked beans. ‘It's all right for a change, but it's too sweet and too soft. For the track—for the hard road—give me our old bully and biscuits. You'd go further on a tin of bully and a packet of dog biscuits than you'd go on a hundredweight of this stuff.'

Things are pretty quiet here.

Only one night Regan gets frightened by the shadows on the beach during his guard. Dick the Barber comes on as his relief. Dick comes up softly through the sand without him hearing and when Regan looks up and sees this figure standing beside him he drops his rifle and runs screaming along the beach.

We found him a couple of hundred yards along where he had fallen in the sand and couldn't rise again for terror.

We got him back to the tent and Pez feeds him the quick cup of coffee Brogan put on. The Laird and Harry Drew are quietly recalling how frightened they've been from time to time by shadows: ‘I would have screamed then,' the Laird recalls, ‘but I couldn't.'

Doc Maguire walked into the tent. There was a moment's silence and no one seemed to know what to say.

‘I heard someone,' said the Doc. ‘Young Cliffie told me it was down here—I thought somebody might be hurt.'

‘No,' said Pez. ‘Just one of our blokes got a bit of a scare and gave a bit of a yell—he's not hurt.'

The Doc was looking at Regan where he sat huddled on the bed: ‘Fear can hurt, too. Are you feeling all right, lad?'

There was silence in the tent and all eyes turned to Regan—some things a man has to say for himself.

‘Yeah, I'll be OK, Doc,' managed Regan.

‘I thought maybe he should come up to RAP for the night. We could send him to sleep, make sure he got a good rest.'

‘I think he's better here, Doc,' said Pez. ‘I think he's better with us.'

The Doc looked round the tent: ‘Yes—maybe you're right.'

There was a long pause. The Doc didn't offer to go. A decision was made and approved by all without a word being spoken.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee, Doc?' said Pez. ‘We just made a quick brew.'

‘Sure,' said the Doc. ‘Thanks.'

‘Here's a mug,' said Bishie, emptying the dregs of his coffee.

Pez sloshed some water from the bucket and washed the grounds out. The Laird had the billy ready and filled the chipped enamel mug generously.

‘Milk?' said Pez, reaching for the condensed milk tin.

‘No thanks, Pez,' said the Doc. He sat on the edge of the bed beside Regan and ladled sugar from the biscuit tin container that Pez presented to him with the air of a host.

Medals and strips of ribbon are hard-won things and you can wear them proudly if you have that sort of pride. But there are other things—more common, more generously given, but harder to win—particularly for officers, harder to win. We are brothers, we are men. Our words will never say the things we mean—but living we will drink to you. Dead—our hearts will weep for you.

The Doc sat on the edge of the bed and sipped from Bishie's chipped enamel mug.

‘Bloody good coffee,' he said.

The Nip was down the road too far to do any damage to us but you could get the scent of him—that rotten-sweet incense smell he left behind him in the jungle.

His burned, shrapnel-pocked trucks stood along the side of the road—under some of them a crumbling skeleton. Rusting iron push-carts, jungle carts, were scattered round in the undergrowth with pieces of rotting webbing equipment. There were scores of Nip rifles—mostly broken and half-burned—and clips of ammunition half-buried in the sand.

There seemed to be a strange foreign significance to all this junk. You never actually thought it, but you felt: ‘This was the enemy; he lived here; he used these things. This rising sun laid out in wood, with the heart burned black and dead—this was his cook-fire.'

The enemy is always strange and there is a faint awfulness about the place where he has been. For you can never imagine the enemy as just a man—if you could, perhaps you would never kill him.

The poker game was going one afternoon; Laird was darning a pair of socks and Deacon was contemplating his letter to Margaret, when Dick the Barber stuck his head in the flap and announced:

‘They ate the bookie from the Fourth Batallion.'

He was a nice bloke, the Fourth Battalion bookie. He laid fair odds and you could always be sure of the dough come settling day. Not like Scottie of the Second who welshed on a good book and went through sooner than pay—even though he had plenty socked away at home, money that he'd made from the game. A loud-mouthed alec, Scottie had always been. But the bookie from the Fourth—he was a quiet sort of a guy; he'd done a bit of pencilling before the war and set up in business for himself when he enlisted.

A patrol had gone out across the river and run into an ambush. They had two killed and hadn't been able to get the bodies out with them when they withdrew. Next day they attacked and recovered the bodies; but when they got them they found the brains, kidneys and liver had been cut out and slices of flesh cut from the buttocks.

Harry Drew sucked strenuously at the gurgling bowl of his pipe: ‘Yes. We struck that last time in the Owen Stanleys—about Templeton's Crossing—up above the Crossing I think it was. We found the bodies with the flesh cut off the backsides and we found fresh meat in the dixies round their cook-fires later on. But whether they were eating it themselves or feeding it to their dogs—they had a lot of dogs with them—we never really found out.'

‘I don't think I'd fancy being eaten,' says Janos. ‘Not that it matters when a man's dead—but somehow I don't think I'd fancy it.'

‘No,' grinned Pez. ‘It's sort of undignified.'

Deacon, lounging back on his bed, head propped up on his webbing pack, flicked a cigarette butt through the flap of the tent with careful concentration before he spoke: ‘That's a question—how hungry would you have to be before you'd eat human flesh? A question. Myself, I reckon I came pretty close to it that last time. They say it tastes like pork.'