Eyewitness (10 page)

I’m pullin’ off my colours, I’ll throw away my web,
I’m goin’ down to Cairo to get a beer an’ bed.
I’m tired o’ bein’ a soldier, so ’elp me Gawd I am;
Of dust an’ salty water; of bully, marg. an’ jam;
Of fightin’ Huns an’ Dagoes out here all on our own,
While sittin’ back in Aussie, are my friends who stayed at home.

Now when I told my mother I’d volunteered to fight,
She said, ‘God bless you, Digger, an’ bring you back all right.’
But they called me ‘chocolate soldier’ an’ ‘five bob tourist’ too,
They said, ‘You’ll never see the front – or even get a view.’
They said, ‘You’ll have a picnic no matter where you roam.’
But they weren’t game to face it, my friends who stayed at home.

They’re not such bad shots either – along the rabbit track;
For rabbits aren’t so dangerous; an’ rabbits don’t hit back.
They shine before the barmaid; they brag, they’re full of skitin’,
But at the corner of the street is where they do their fightin’.
A billiard cue their rifle, a bar their battle zone,
For there are no bullets for my friends who stayed at home.

I’ll bet they’re walkin’ down the street, their chests puffed out with pride,
An’ skitin’ to their cobbers how they saved their worthless hide.
While out here in the desert if a bloke should show his head
He’ll just as likely get it filled with some damn German’s lead.
But give me the old Lee-Enfield; I’ll buckle me webbin’ about.
Though I’m only a flamin’ private, I’ll see this business out,
And if I stop a bullet, I’ll die without a moan,
Though they put the kibosh on me – my friends who stayed at home.

No-one said anything when Mick finished reading. He took out the makings. ‘And the bloke who wrote that stopped one,’ he said. ‘Wonder what’s stopping those blokes back home?’ (Although hundreds of Diggers in Tobruk firmly believed that this poem had been written by one of the garrison, I understand that it is a last war veteran. It is quoted here because so many Australians in Tobruk adopted it as the expression of their own viewpoint.)

All we could see ahead was a trail of dust, as we followed a truck laden with mail, rations and ammunition. It was nearly dark and for once the enemy was not shelling as we drove across the flat in front of the Blue Line minefield and made for a twisted wadi that led to the headquarters of the battalion holding the northern sector of the Salient.

The track was a trough of brown powder, which swirled up under the floorboards of our open ‘pick-up’ – a sturdy little Morris truck specially built for war in the desert. It had no hood or windshield, and the dust made me cough. ‘Can’t take it, eh?’ said the Digger at the wheel. ‘I’ll try it out here where it’s not churned up, but you’ll probably get your guts bounced out as we go over the camel-thorn.’

He lugged the wheel over, but it was better on the track in spite of the dust. The camel-thorn bushes gather drifting sand in their tangle of branches until they form solid hummocks about a foot high, and too irregularly spaced for a truck to straddle or dodge them. At last we reached the mouth of the wadi. There was no track, but the driver found his way round huge boulders, across deep gutters and along the rough rock-face, with the truck often tilted at an angle of 30 degrees or more.

At the head of the wadi we found Battalion H.Q. housed in a number of small, wide-mouthed caverns which nature had hollowed out of the rock. The troops had sandbagged the entrances to the caverns and made ‘dugouts’. The C.O.’s quarters were heavy with the smell of Scotch. Half an hour before an enemy shell had gone through the sandbag wall of the next dugout. It hadn’t gone off, but it had broken the battalion’s last bottle of whisky.

The dugout was just big enough to hold the colonel’s stretcher, a table made from packing cases, three petrol cases nailed together to form a ‘chest-of-drawers’, and two rickety chairs scrounged from a house in the town. The colonel spread out his maps and explained how they held the Salient by giving more than they got. Before he’d finished, I found that even a colonel’s dugout in Tobruk had its colony of fleas.

It was dark when we resumed our journey forward, but with uncanny eyesight the driver picked out the track – a line of churned dust. Riding on the step was a Digger who knew the way through the minefields. A couple of nights before a truck had blown up there and had drawn the full fury of the enemy’s fire on itself and its passengers.

Here and there we came to a sentry. The colonel had warned us to remember the password because, he said, ‘these men don’t wait to ask questions.’ He didn’t know his own sentries. The challenge and the passing were typically Australian.

‘That you, Pete?’

‘Yeah, mate, ’oo’s that?’

‘Mick ’ere. On yer go.’

It was the same when we continued on foot. Not once this night – nor on any other night – did I hear a password. It would have taken a smart German, however, to trick them. One time two Diggers, lying in a listening-post in no-man’s-land, saw two shadowy figures coming towards them. ‘Who are you?’ challenged one Digger. ‘We are Aussie soldiers,’ came the answer. The Diggers replied with a Tommy gun.

After half an hour’s bumping along we reached a slight hollow, beyond which vehicles could not go. A chink of light from a hole in the desert beckoned us. We lifted a groundsheet and dropped down a small hole into an old water cistern – roughly pear-shaped and about 30 feet by 20. Through the fug of dust and cigarette smoke glowed the light of several hurricane lamps, burning evil-smelling Italian oil. It was a Company H.Q. Men were sitting round eating, smoking and talking. Their evening meal had just arrived and they were tackling it before it got cold. Dust, stirred by restless feet, went in with every mouthful. It was warm and stuffy in the cistern but at least you could have a light and a smoke.

From the roof hung sticky fly-catchers blanketed with victims. On a natural, flat rock table in the middle lay an odd assortment of dirty mess dixies, dusty-lipped tins of jam and margarine, the ends of two loaves of bread, a couple of Bren magazines and a Tommy gun. You had to be careful not to trip over a half-sleeping Digger, an empty dixie or a can of water on the floor.

In one corner the company sergeant-major was trying to hear above the surge of speech a message from Battalion H.Q. In another the O.C. of the company was holding a platoon commanders’ conference. By the light of a senile torch they pored over a map.

Conference over, we went on by foot for half a mile to the forward posts. As usual there were no landmarks so the guide took a signal wire in his hand and we found the first post easily.

It was S10 – one of the Italian-built concrete posts. ‘Follow me and stick to the track,’ said the guide, as he led us in through the minefield and the barbed wire – much battered by shelling but draped with booby-traps like a Christmas tree.

There was not a sound of war, but in the weapon pits on top of the post Diggers were squatting beside each machine-gun. Inside we tripped over men sleeping fully clothed on the concrete floor of the narrow corridor-trench, which was cluttered up with empty dixies, boxes of ammunition, rifles and accumulated junk. We stumbled over cursing figures till we came to a small concrete room opening off a side trench. It was about six feet square. Its furniture was a couple of ammunition boxes and a table made from petrol cases. The Italians had meant it to be a ‘shell-proof’ command post, but the roof was cracked and crumbling and only the steel reinforcement kept it from falling in.

Following my upward glance at the roof, a Digger said: ‘They’ve got their finger on this blasted place. They can land a bloody shell on ’ere any time they like. When there’s a blitz on, we cop all the muck in the world. It’s the only entertainment we get.’

‘Shut up, will you,’ said another Digger, with his ear to the phone in the corner. ‘The news is comin’ on.’ The battalion sigs were picking up the BBC news and ‘piping’ it out along the signal lines to the forward posts. The Digger at the phone began taking notes.

There was silence, more or less, until he put the phone down. He read out the headlines: ‘Roosevelt and Churchill meet at sea – Nazis reckon they’ve surrounded Odessa – ’ and finally, ‘At Tobruk patrol activity only.’

‘Patrol activity only,’ echoed a Digger with heavy sarcasm. ‘The bloke who wrote that oughta been ’ere last night. I suppose the Aussie papers’ve still got bands playin’ in Tobruk’s main square.’

It was hardly the moment to introduce a correspondent who broadcast for the BBC. Someone produced a dixie of tea, brewed over an Italian primus, and the platoon commander – a young sergeant – began telling me about the post.

‘You won’t see much here,’ he said. ‘This is in the second line, and we do little except send out patrols. In some ways it’s better in a frontline post, like S9. There you can hit back. We’re at the receiving end most of the time here, but it’s better than being in the dug-posts in the Salient itself. Like to go over to one?’

Outside it wasn’t as quiet as it had been. Every few seconds a German machine-gun would spit out a burst of red tracer bullets. Fifty yards to our right streaks of light shot by like live morse code. ‘That’s a fixed line from Spandau Joe – down an old Italian pipeline,’ said the Sergeant. ‘The post we’re going to is on the far side of that. If we make it snappy we’ll get across before the next burst. The pipeline’s an easy route to follow and he puts one down there every now and then.’

We went on. There was no signal wire to guide us but the track was marked by a thin hessian tape strung between camel-thorn bushes. The post was very crude – three sandbagged circular machine-gun pits about four feet deep and five feet across. They were connected by shallow crawl trenches, off which opened two low dugouts, roofed over with boards, corrugated iron and sandbags. The desert here was soft grey sand instead of the usual rock and brown earth. The corporal in charge of the post said they had a job preventing the walls of the pits and trenches from falling in. ‘Even sandbags don’t help much,’ he said, ‘because heavy Jerry mortars landing round the post blow the sides in anyway.’

It was after eleven. The troops had finished their meal and, in front of the post, some of them were putting up more barbed wire, muttering curses as they struggled with an obstreperous coil.

Suddenly from somewhere in the darkness two German machineguns came to life. Bullets sang past the post, followed by sharp cracks like the backlash of a stockwhip. We bent our heads below the parapet; the men working on the wire hopped back to their trenches and in a few seconds their guns were firing. There were only the corporal and six men in the post, but they had four automatic weapons and an antitank rifl e between them. To their own Tommy gun and Bren they had added a captured Fiat medium machine-gun and a light Breda. They gave the Germans a stirring reply.

After five minutes it seemed that every enemy machine-gun for a mile around was firing on us. The Australian posts on either side joined in and the whole front was ablaze. From the German lines, four or five hundred yards away, went up flare after flare. They certainly knew where this post was. One machine-gun, firing on fixed lines, sent a stream of tracers a few feet above our heads every minute or so.

‘That’s a big bastard – probably a Schwartzloe,’ said the Corporal. ‘Fires from somewhere near the water tower. Too far away for us. If we had a Vickers or a decent mortar we might get him. But our mortars haven’t got the range. If we bring ’em up here, they draw the crabs. If we put ’em back behind somewhere, they can’t reach the water tower.’

After a quarter of an hour the enemy’s flares went up less often; one by one his guns stopped; but the big Schwartzloe still stuttered out occasional bursts and a few heavy mortars landed behind us. One more flare hung in the sky and spluttered out, leaving the now silent German lines shrouded in darkness.

The Australian posts on either side of us fell silent too, but the Corporal said, ‘Keep ’er goin’, boys. Jerry started it.’ Turning to me he added, ‘If we didn’t give ’em more than they give us, we couldn’t even stick our heads out. We usually stir ’em up, but we’re keepin’ things quiet tonight. We’ve got some blokes comin’ up with mines. They should’ve been here before this started, but those mortars must’ve landed bloody near ’em.’

Our guns kept going a little longer but the Germans didn’t want to renew the fight. ‘OK,’ said the Corporal. ‘We’d better get on with the wiring.’ Grumbling a little, the troops scrambled out of the machinegun pits. As he went, a Digger mumbled, ‘Gawd struth, Corp., one thing you’ve always got plenty of round ’ere – and that’s blasted barbed wire.’

A few minutes later half a dozen figures loomed up out of the darkness. It was the mine-carrying party. ‘Did you cop much o’ that, Joe?’ asked the Corporal.

‘My oath, we did,’ replied Joe. ‘The M.G.s was all right, but them mortars damn near blew me tin ’at off. You can ’ave that game. Lyin’ out there with a box o’ mines beside you, an’ Jerry mortars givin’ you the works. Got a water bottle?’

He took a swig, and then went on – ‘Brought some mail for yer. It come up too late for the ration party. I got a letter from ’ome meself today. A bloke’s a flamin’ mug – diggin’ ’ere in the desert, an’ back in Aussie rabbit skins is eight-an’-six a pound.’

I went back with the mine-carrying party. The front was lively again. Every few seconds a flare went up or a machine-gun burst whipped past. I was walking with Joe, and I found myself ducking involuntarily when anything happened. A couple of times we all flattened out on the sand and camel-thorn when something seemed to come rather close. But for the most part Joe walked nonchalantly on.

As we approached the Company H.Q. in the fuggy cistern, I said to him, ‘Do you usually cop much on the way up at night, Joe?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you do an’ you don’t; but they gotta be good to get you.’

G.H. Fearnside

G.H. (Geoffrey Harry) Fearnside was born in 1917, and began his writing career in a trench in Tobruk and is one of the finest soldier writers of Australia’s involvement in the Middle East. Fearnside served with the 2/13
^th
Battalion through Tobruk and El Alamein. His older brother Fred, also in the 2/13
^th
, was killed in November 1941 at El Duda near Tobruk when the battalion was fighting its way out of the besieged town.

Fearnside completed
Sojourn in Tobruk
while in the Middle East, writing some of the stories in Tobruk, and others, including ‘Advanced Dressing Station’, beneath a fig tree in Egypt. One was written during a lull in the battle of El Alamein, on captured German writing paper.

It is not journalism but the kind of ‘factional’ writing that many found it necessary to use to convey the truth of their experience. There are many other examples from World War II, but Fearnside because of his unadorned style and finer insights is better than most.

Fearnside wrote a factual story of his wartime experiences in
Half To Remember
(1975) and edited the excellent unofficial history of the 2/13
^th
,
Bayonets Abroad
(1953). After the war he worked for the
Bulletin
, and in public relations and edited two trade magazines. Geoff Fearnside died in 1978.

*

Just before dawn one morning they bring me to the Advanced Dressing Station. It is situated below a stony ridge. A huge Geneva standard flaps noisily on a nearby flagpole, proclaiming to any strafing airmen that this is a medical centre. It is evident that some labour has been expended in trying to camouflage the Station. A liberal sprinkling of native mud has turned the former whiteness of the tent’s canvas to the dun colour of the earth. Camouflage nets are artfully arranged over the entrances to the dugouts in which the medical people live. The whole effect, I think, is rather absurd. It shows both an appalling lack of imagination, and a thinly veiled admission of distrust of the humanity of German airmen. A huge pennant announces that this is a medical centre and every effort is subsequently made to deny the naturally sceptical enemy the means of satisfying himself that it is so.

I am told to wait until the doctor is ready to see me. The sun has not yet risen. All is grey and still and it is pleasantly cool. I sit upon a sandbagged ramp leading down into a dugout but presently I am sick again and am running swiftly to the nearby latrines. A fellow who is wearing no badge of rank but who nonetheless seems to have authority, seeing what I am about, shouts for me to use the latrine further on. This is annoying, but only in relation to the urgency of my sickness. Of course this fellow does not wish to contract this highly contagious disease.

When I come back he beckons me to him and invites me to have cup of tea with him. He is a corporal and his name is Brierly. He knows what is the matter with me. There has been an epidemic of dysentery. Possibly he has had it himself. No-one is really immune from it in a place like Tobruk. He has a small petrol fire burning just beneath the flagpole and it is a restless red flame in the greyness of the dawn.

‘You are here early,’ he says.

‘My unit is in the line,’ I reply; ‘if we wish to parade sick we must leave before it gets light and return during the hours of darkness.’

‘Why is that?’ he asks, and the question is quite serious.

I tell him it is because it is unsafe to move about in daylight up there where the unit is.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘I get up early so that I can see the sunrise each morning. I watch the sunsets, too. Those two things, you know – the sunrise and the sunset. They are the only really decent things I see here. The men that come through this station are sick, wounded or dying. You see the terrible aftermath here, collected and mustered for inspection. You fellows up in the line see it differently. You must be rather inured to violence. Probably you see only your share of it. This is a clearing house of every hateful thing of which war is capable. There is an endless procession of tortured men, dying men, dead men. Endless. We hear the gun-fire continually pounding at the fronts, and the enemy planes jettisoning their bombs. Those noises, you know. Then that appalling silence and then the ambulances driving up and delivering their ghastly burdens to us. All day long there is aching heat, heat hazes dancing along that ridge, dust blowing drearily across the flat, flies …’

He pauses and stirs the fire. The flames leap suddenly, as if resentful of his touch.

‘Those sunrises and sunsets are the only worthwhile things I ever see. I have watched them for five months.’

It is very odd to hear a man talk like that, but of course one can see what he means.

He has a fine face, and watching the sincerity in his eyes and hearing the earnestness of his voice, it is not hard to imagine what has inspired him to join a medical unit. But he would change his tune if he were to go into the line for a time. He would not change of his own accord: the front-line would change him as it has changed us all. I try to tell him that, but although he generously seeks to respect my experience, he is not convinced.

I draw a clumsy comparison for him: ‘If you were an executioner and committed hundreds of people to death every week, do you suppose that would not affect you in some way?’

‘I have a mind,’ he replies simply.

‘You have emotion,’ I counter. ‘That would beat you.’

‘There is a cavalcade of hideous human pain and misery here,’ he says, indicating the Advanced Dressing Station, ‘and yet I still look at the sunrise and see the beauty of it.’

‘It is an outlet for your emotions,’ I reply. ‘You have managed a compromise. We are not so fortunate up in the line. The conditions there often ravage the stoutest hearts; there is not much sleep; your nerves are sooner or later affected by the eternal shriek of shells; there are patrols and those other nerve-wracking experiences. They combine to master you in time. That is what you don’t realise. They change you. Your case is different. You, personally, are not affected – your body is not emaciated and sick nor are your nerves deranged. If you are secure in a beautiful home, you can accept the wretchedness and misery you see outside because you can lift your eyes to the hills. But if your home is a battered ruin and there is no prospect but evil and hate and death, to look up into the hills is the gesture of a fool committing himself to unnecessary pain.’

We drink our tea. It has milk and sugar in it. I have expressed my feelings and am annoyed that I have done so. There is no-one in the world who can understand the psychology of the front-line except the men who have served there long enough to acquire a sense of values regarding it.

Corporal Brierly gives me cigarettes because he knows we cannot always get them up there. He is a gentleman. Foolishly I offer him one of the cigarettes he has given me and he takes one as if it is the most natural thing in all the world.

Presently I am obliged to excuse myself and race to the latrines again. When I return an orderly comes from the Station and announces that the doctor will see me. Corporal Brierly touches my arm and points to the east. A low bank of cloud is hung in the heavens like a golden fleece and slanting rays of light radiate from the rising sun.

‘Look at the dawn,’ he says, and there is a serenity in his voice that has a place in the tranquillity of the morning. Something vague and disquieting stirs deep within me. There are evidences of something lingering; something once defined but fading from definition; a lamp not yet extinguished, guttering lowly. It is a glimpse of beauty.

I leave Corporal Brierly and go in to see the doctor. Inside there are two rude tables on which are laid all manner of medical paraphernalia; two forms; some unoccupied bunks and a centrally placed dais that probably serves as an operating table. For all its crudeness, the place is scrupulously clean and the inevitable odour of anaesthestics permeates the atmosphere.

The medical officer is a slight, bird-like individual whose face is inexpressibly worn and haggard. His movements are quick and agitated perhaps born of nervousness engendered by overwork. It is more than probable.

He regards the note I have from our regimental medical officer with obvious disapproval. The latter has diagnosed my complaint as clinical dysentery. Perhaps this fellow is annoyed at being disturbed at such an early hour. Brierly said they had been busy working into the night. I am determined that if he accuses me of malingering I will punch him in the face and suffer the consequences gladly.

Absurdly I hurriedly leave him and race again to the latrines. It makes me laugh to think I am keeping a Major waiting while I obey a natural cause. Bardsley will see the humour of it. War and nature alike have no respect for the vanity of human things. I think he is inclined to regard my action as a bold endeavour to establish my bona fides for he seems more testy when I again confront him.

When he has satisfied himself that I am not malingering he gives me a dose of what I am sure he considers the most unpleasant medicine he has and commits me to a wretched diet. And then, as if relenting, he directs that I am to remain in this rear area until he chooses to send me back to the unit.

I am glad of that. All the previous day I had been confined to a slittrench in which I had retched incessantly and in which I had been forced to excrete.

‘Do you mean to tell me,’ snaps the Major, more outraged than disbelieving, ‘that you have no better sanitary arrangements than that?’

‘Not as yet sir,’ I reply. ‘The night before last we jumped our front and dug in only a few hundred yards from the enemy. It was not easy digging – he could hear us picking at that distance and constantly harassed us with machine-gun fire. We had to get down as best we could before daylight.’

‘But sanitation!’ protests the Major, to whom, apparently, cleanliness is next to godliness.

‘We have to crawl if we wish to move about,’ I tell him. ‘Often we cannot sit up. It is really awkward …’

These men are different from us. This Major must be a fool. Probably he will lodge a protest to the senior medical officer and expect an instant improvement in the sanitation of the forward defended localities. Does he think we are animals?

Throughout the day I wander about this peaceful place, exulting in the unrestricted freedom of movement. I sit on the latrine and kick my legs, crowing lustily and proud as a growing infant. I shout with glee when a box barrage leaps magically over the distant township and the dive bombers come slanting down. It is all very silly. I am behaving like a child.

The flies are not so troublesome here. There is ample scope for sanitation. No doubt the bird-like Major has made that his personal responsibility. Also they have access to certain disinfectants and stores which we never see further forward. Who can imagine great latrine boxes placed behind our positions in the Salient, and soldiers getting up out of the ground and strolling over to them? The Germans would resent this exemplary endeavour to defeat the enteric diseases.

In the afternoon Corporal Brierly kindly offers me his dugout and bids me get some sleep before the evening meal. His dugout is very clean and tidy. He has an orderly mind. Fastened onto the earthen wall is a photograph of a beautiful girl standing beside a bicycle. She seems strangely out of place in such a setting and I wonder if she is his wife or his sweetheart. It seems to be years since last we saw a white woman. Cob Ainsley once laughingly said that he never in his life felt comfortable among women and after Tobruk would dread his return to their society.

I am awakened sometime later by the rumble of gun-fire up at the front. There is something doing up there; one can tell that by the way the guns are firing. Corporal Brierly looks in and when he sees I’m awake he comes and sits upon the step leading in to the dugout.

‘The enemy is shelling our lines,’ he says. ‘We hear that the El Adem sector is standing to. There is a rumour there may be an attack coming.’

We listen to the faraway roar of the guns. The explosions sound clearer underground, as a noise is carried under water. Sometimes the bed on which I lie trembles.

‘Later there will be a silence,’ says Brierly. ‘There always is. It is very impressive – that silence – just as if men are pausing aghast at some terrible thing they have done. You see. You should notice the difference back here.’

But I know what Corporal Brierly doesn’t know. Those men up there, under the bombardment, are lying hard against the earth, tense, mute, expectant. Feeling will go out of them. They will lie there waiting. Just waiting. Without intent some of them will thrust their fingers into the earth. Others will stare at the ground seeing nothing but the substance to which sooner or later they will return. It will be soon for some of them. Far too soon. When the barrage lifts, feeling will come back into them; the numbness will go; and then the reaction will set in.

‘After that,’ Brierly is saying, ‘after that tragic silence the ambulances will come. The procession will go on.’

That is how he sees it, and it is as he says. There is no silence like that which comes after a bombardment, and the whole front is quiet. It is just the same up there in the line. It is indeed an unholy stillness.

When the ambulances arrive, as he foretold they would (fortunately there are only three of them), he asks me to come with him into the Dressing Station, but qualifies his offer by adding, ‘that is, if you wish.’ He is some kind of receiving clerk who enters the histories of the wounded men from their field-cards into a record book. That is his duty, he says – to record pain. I suppose he is hoping to incline me to his way of thinking. He has said that a man can conquer anything by the strength of his mind. Up to a point he is right, but when the mind is itself hurt and damaged, is it capable of conquest? He thought my idea of looking up into the hills was a good metaphor, and said so, but our association of ideas is different. He doesn’t seem to realise that.