The Long Green Shore (12 page)

*

Our Company was spread along half a mile of beach that ran from a small river to the edge of a large clearing. On one side was the pebble-white, sharply shelving beach; on the other, a grey stretch of swamp. The wood sprouted between and the main body of our troops were sprawled through the thicket. Most of them lay in the hot shade, with head and shoulders propped up on sweat-stained packs, rifles lying close at hand and legs sprawled ungainly.

About ten-thirty the Nips opened up with a barrage from their mountain guns in the hills. The Log prodded the sleeping Cairo Fleming as the splintering explosions of the shells strode on long legs down the fringe of the wooded strip, probing into the blindness of the trees. These ordinary contact shells couldn't do much harm, but occasionally the Nips sent over a timed fuse that burst in the air and the shrap smacked down through the trees. They were nasty.

Cairo yawned and slid down into the hole beside the Log. They crouched, listening for a moment as the shell bursts strode past them down the beach.

Cairo's head drooped and he was about to drift into sleep again when a shrill, moaning scream swelled up from down the beach—swelled and rang on and on—and the cry was flung from mouth to mouth along the beach: ‘Stretcher bearers! Stretcher bearers!'

The scream of the wounded is the loudest sound of battle—even through distance you can feel the minute texture of its agony sliding like ice in the veins and the pity of it like a strong hand twisting your bowels.

Doc Maguire passed them, going towards the screaming, ploughing through the sand on the fringe of the trees.

‘Who was it, Doc?' called Cairo.

‘Don't know. Don Company, I think,' he replied without looking or pausing.

The line of shells was creeping back down the beach now. You could see the burst of them in the sand and the violent, lopped convulsion of branches where they struck among the trees. Maguire walked straight into them without slackening.

‘A good man,' said Cairo.

‘Yeah,' said the Log.

A few minutes later the grapevine whisper ran down through the line: Rocky Bennet—burst right on top of him—dead.

‘He was a good little bloke,' said Cairo. ‘Remember that time in Cairns he took on the three provosts? He did three months in Groverley for that lot. Remember, he always used to say: “Three months'll do me, I'll do it on my head. A month for each of the bastards is fair enough.” '

‘Was he married?' asked the Log.

‘Yeah, I think he had a wife,' said Cairo. ‘I think he got married on that last leave.'

They sat for a long time in silence. The Log crouched there—his head sunk on his breast, but his eyes wide and steady with memory.

‘What are you thinking about, mate?' asked Cairo.

‘Nothing. Just thinking,' said the Log.

‘Anything worrying you?'

‘No,' said the Log. ‘I was just thinking that if my son had lived he'd be about ten months old now.'

Cairo looked quickly away and there was silence in the pit.

All day long we huddle in the trees. We are waiting for our guns to come up within range.

Way back behind us, the Gunners and the Fourth Battalion, which is in reserve, are bringing up the guns. They tie ropes and chains to the twenty-five pounders and drag them along by animal force…straining and groaning inch by inch through the treacherous soft places—cheering and laughing breathlessly as she rumbles slowly but steadily behind them on the good going. Chanting the Volga Boat Song breathlessly. The Volga, not so Vulgar.

The old catch-cry is raised, of course. The old vulgar suggestion is made: ‘If you're going to work like a horse, you might as well look like one!' A couple of clowns carry the idea further. They expose their genitals and prance against the ropes, neighing and pawing like stallions.

It doesn't make the drag any easier, but it gives a laugh. It helps keep the men on their feet long after they should have fallen.

Janos heard the plane first. The whisper sped and the fringe of trees between the swamp and the sand came swiftly to furtive life—crouched, concentrating on the sky.

The Nips had been shelling us desultorily all day. Rocky Bennet had been killed and Doc Maguire had three or four wounded bedded down under a bank at the bottom edge of the beach.

The Wirraway came cruising casually down the beach, about four hundred feet up, and dipped its wings in salute to us in the trees as it swung inland. We could see the saluting gloved hand of the observer and his hooded, goggled face peering down as he waved.

‘Those blokes are mad, you know,' said Dick the Barber, ‘plain mad. Fancy going up in the air when there's good solid ground to crawl on.'

The Wirraway circled the hill where the Nip battery was set up. The plane buzzed up and down, casually skimming the trees, and occasionally darting down viciously and peck-peck-pecking at some target. Then she climbed up and circled, waiting, above and back of the hill.

There was a swift, high rushing and whining in the air, and halfway down the Nip hillside the trees exploded and a big mushroom of dirty white smoke puffed out.

The plane came skimming over the hill and banked through the smoke.

A few minutes later, another smoke shell landed higher up the hill. Then another burst, right on the ridge—then another and another, tracing the contour along. We cheered.

‘They never miss, those boys,' said the Laird. ‘They snipe at five miles.'

The Wirraway dived in again, strafing along the ridge—peck-peck-pecking viciously along the hill—like a willie wagtail attacking an elephant. Then she turned and came sweeping over our trees again, her wings dipping in salute, and sped back down the beach.

‘He'll be sleeping warm and eating well tonight,' said Pez. ‘We should have joined the Air Force.'

Janos grinned: ‘We should have stayed home,' he said. ‘Here, have some bully.'

‘I'll have just a trifle more of the
pâté de foie
, me good man,' says the Deacon to Bishie.

Deacon is lounging in his pit, his feet propped up on the edge, his hat carefully tucked at the back of his neck to stop the sand trickling down where his head and shoulders rest against the other wall.

‘Certainly, old cock,' says Bishie, who is reclining on one elbow beside the pit.

He digs a knob of pink and white bully out of the tin with a spoon and proffers it to Deacon: ‘More
foie gras
, me Lord—and would your Lordship care for an iced vovo to go with it?'

‘Thank you,' says the Deacon, taking the knob of bully delicately in his fingers. ‘But if you refer to the dog biscuits, me good man—stick 'em! I believe I lost my second-last filling on one this morning and my dentist's three thousand miles away.'

‘Anything else, old cock?' enquires Bishie servilely.

‘Just a sip of the Veuve Clicquot.'

Bishie passes the water bottle.

‘And tell Lady Jane to bath well before she goes to bed,' continues the Deacon. ‘Last time, me good man, you were a little careless behind the ears—scrub her thoroughly all over this time.'

‘Oh, sure, old cock—all over!' leers Bishie.

‘And tell the second chambermaid I'll see her in the dunny later,' says the Deacon.

The sun is dying. We are packed and ready.

The barrage opens with a single whine and explosion on the enemy hill.

Then the shells fall—one-two…one-two-three…

And now the air is full to the black sky with the rushing whine, the shuttling, zipping, heart-swelling pattern of shells plucking the heartstrings of the earth and sky. In the gathering darkness we can see the constant flashes running along the enemy ridge and the crown of the hill is smothered in smoke and flame and thunder. The hill top seems to heave and we can almost see dark things tossing and falling…

We move out of our little wood and, in single file, cross swiftly under cover of the first darkness and our sheltering guns. That quarter-mile of waste sand and kunai into the broad shelter of the trees seems as wide as the earth. For the music of the guns—whether they are our own or the enemy's—makes your heart enormous. We are lost for ever with shadows before us and shadows behind us and the sweet foul music of hell above and around us and the naked, sterile and unfriendly earth beneath our undestined feet.

We make the shelter of the trees.

By whisper and touch and instinct we break up into our little groups and bed down in the darkness—huddled closer together for comfort in this strange place.

After a while our barrage eases. But at irregular intervals during the night, one or two shells will burst over on the hill.

‘That's just to keep 'em awake and make 'em nervous,' Harry Drew whispers to Regan.

The Fifth Battalion, who are travelling further inland, are coming up to the hill. They are to put on an attack in the morning and the barrage from our twenty-fives opens up again with the first smudge of grey.

Then, quite suddenly, the shells stop. Everybody is listening in that silence. Then it comes—the swift, thin clatter of the Brens and Owens, the heavier beat of the Nip woodpeckers, the spaced reports of rifles and, smacking through them all, the slamming explosion of mortars and grenades.

‘They're into it,' says the Laird.

All day long the firing continues on the hill, dying away for a while into silence spaced by single sniping shots, then flaring up again in the swift rattle of automatics and the slam of grenades.

We hear it, fading a little behind us, as we advance that day, and it is still with us when we camp that night.

We lost a man that night.

Early in the afternoon we passed along the beach where the trees were twisted with the mighty winds sweeping in from the depths of the Pacific. They were things of violence—with great roots widespread, clutching the earth, and limbs twisted paralytically to withstand the storm.

Charley Company was along the beach, Don Company was across the track, and we swung inland, into the fringe of the dripping rainforest, to make the other side of the perimeter.

We had a bit of time before dark and we made ourselves comfortable. We put up our tents carefully and made our beds strong. They sent us up a meal in dixies from the kitchen back down the track—bully stew and dehydrated spuds boiled up. It was fairly hot, it tasted good, and there was even some fairly fresh bread that had been dropped by the bully beef bombers back in the clearing.

It looked like being a quiet night, but the rain and the wind started about a quarter of an hour after dark. The rain came dredging down through the thick curtain of trees. The wind could not touch us, but we could hear it beating gigantically against the treetops.

It was an old, dead tree, shaken and felled by the fist of this wind that, in the middle of the night, crashed onto the doover tent where the Deacon and Bishie dossed with the Log and Cairo Fleming.

Another four feet to the right and they would all have copped it. As it happened, Bishie was sitting up near the head of his bunk to keep himself awake for his guard. The tree missed him, smashed the end of his bed and, falling at an angle, killed the Deacon as he slept.

Most us didn't know what had happened. Some of us, near enough, heard the crash. We heard the sound of chopping—axes beating on solid, dead wood—but in this blind world of wind and darkness and drumming, ceaseless rain you can't tell where things are. You can only sit tight and watch and listen. What happens in your own tight circle of rain and darkness is all that concerns you—the rest can wait.

It took an hour to cut the tree away from the Deacon. It had crushed him across the chest and stomach. He couldn't have felt a thing, he must have died straightaway. They had to lift carefully to get him onto the blanket.

The Log and Cairo and Bishie dug his grave. Bishie wept while he dug. They buried him just after dawn.

A soldier leaves so little when he dies—a watch they gave him when he left the office to enlist—a small pack of faded photographs—some old letters in a mildewed wallet—stained with the sweat of his skin when he was living and the blood of him when he died.

As we passed out on our way down the track that morning, the grave was by the side of the path, the fresh-mounded earth with a sealed, inverted bottle stuck neck down in the soft soil. Bishie had lashed together two small broken branches from the tree that killed him, to make a cross.

Oh, Deacon, who sought love and never found it! If I had paused beside you as you dreamed, as Fluffy did that night on the boat…I wonder did the ancient mark burn on your brow then, even as you dreamed? Oh, Deacon—to life you should have been so great a lover—but the embrace of the earth is cold and wet where you lie under the rain trees on that little hill.

The telegram that went back home said: ‘Killed in action.'

Deacon had carried a battered writing pad in his webbing pouch. Bishie found it as he went through his things and tossed it away. As we passed on, it lay under the bushes in the rain, not far from where he lay.

His number, rank, name and unit were scrawled across the top of the page. Then ‘Beloved Margaret,' with a little flourish. The rest was blank.

You get used to the colour and the smell of death—the blood from the mouth, the destroyed flesh, the small black scuttling things that infest the corpse in the jungle.

You get used to the colour of death in the living—the grey jungle-pallor on the faces—the bright, blind weariness of eyes—the bones showing up white and hard under the skin.

After the first time, you get used to a man going crazy beside you—you watch for it. Usually you can pick them—they get very quiet for a day or so—their eyes get an absent sort of look, as though they were thinking back. Then a madness boils up in them like a curse of Job and they will scream and sing with it. They will fight you with the strength of it—clawing with teeth, and boots, and nails—cursing and praying.