Eyewitness (25 page)

Like all other colonial races, the Papuans have learned to treat the white man with a certain amount of awe. They call him ‘taubada’, which means something like ‘lord’ or ‘master’, and they do what he tells them. They are a little bewildered to hear the white man call: ‘How are you, sport?’ as they pass him, but I do not think that it is having any ill-effects on their morale, and I think it is helping to develop in them a vague sense of loyalty to a cause which they can only dimly begin to understand. The only recompense they get is a few handfuls of cigarettes, and it is the only recompense they fully understand. The troops are generous with their smokes, and a cigarette means more to a Papuan than a pound note.

Life changes as you push up the track. Standards of living deteriorate, sometimes below normally accepted standards even of primitive existence. Thoughts become sombre, humour takes on a grim, macabre quality. When men reach the nadir of mental and physical agony there are times when sickness or injury, or even death, seems like something to be welcomed. Near Efogi, on a slimy section of the track that reeks with the stench of death, the remains of an enemy soldier lies on a crude stretcher, abandoned by the Japanese in retreat. The flesh has gone from his bones, and a white, bony claw sticks out of a ragged uniform sleeve, stretching across the track. Almost every Australian who passes, plodding up the muddy rise that leads to the pass, grasps the skeleton’s grisly hand, shakes it fervently and says: ‘Good on you, sport!’ before moving wearily on.

There are many Japanese graves, some crude, some elaborate, all marked with the piece of sapling bearing Japanese ideographs. There are many crudely pencilled signs stuck in the bushes or nailed to the trees: ‘Bodies two Australians ––
^th
Battalion, 25 yards into bush’; ‘Twelve Jap bodies 50 yards north-west’; ‘Unknown Australian body, 150 yards down slope’. In the green half-light, amid the stink of rotten mud and rotting corpses, with the long lines of green-clad Australians climbing wearily along the tunnel of the track, you have a noisome, unforgettable picture of the awful horror of this jungle war.

There are the bodies, too, of native carriers, tossed aside by the Japs to die, discarded callously and left unburied in the jungle. These natives were recruited in Rabaul, sent to Buna roped together in the stinking holds of Japanese freighters, and then thrown into the enemy’s carrier lines. They received little food, no medical attention, and payment with worthless, newly-printed Japanese 1s. notes of their invasion currency. They died in their hundreds of overwork, malnutrition and sickness.

Since then the Japs have made their stand in the toughest area of the pass through the Owen Stanleys – a terrible terrain of thick mountain timber, great rocks drenched in rain, awesome precipices and chasms. Often the troops have to make painfully slow progress by clawing with hands and feet at slippery rock faces overlooking sheer drops into the jungle. The almost constant rain or mist adds to the perils of sharp limestone ridges, narrow ledges flanked by chasms, slimy rocks and masses of slow-moving mud.

In this territory the Japanese are fighting, with a stubborn tenacity that is almost unbelievable, from an elaborate system of prepared positions along every ridge and spur. Churned up by the troops of both armies, the track itself is now knee-deep in thick, black mud. For the last ten days no man’s clothing has been dry and the troops have slept – when sleep was possible – in pouring rain under sodden blankets. Each man carries all his personal equipment, firearms, ammunition supply and five days’ rations. Every hour is a nightmare.

General Allen, who fought in the last war and who has been leading these Australians in the attack on the Kokoda Trail, says without any hesitation: ‘This is the toughest campaign of the A.I.F. in this or any other war.’

Yet the fighting spirit of the Australians is inspirational. Today I spoke to some of the badly wounded. One man had a terrible wound caused by a bullet from a Japanese sniper which had entered his face and come out from his chest. He grinned at me and said: ‘We can’t be worried, sport. You can’t afford to lose your sense of humour in this bloody country!’

The other day I was given the copy of a letter written home by one of these young Australians – a NSW private named Barney Findlay. It’s worthwhile reprinting some of it:

Some of the old unit are so thin now that you would be shocked to see them. This trip is a physical nightmare. We have been overloaded all the way, and all of us are carrying on our backs more than native porters do. Remember those tinpot marches of two hours in the morning we used to grumble about? They weren’t very much training for this. Yesterday we were 12 hours on the track and most of us were ‘out on our feet’, but we had to keep going. It’s hard to explain how gruelling these marches are, but I’ll try.

You spend four hours rising 2000 feet painfully step by step with your heart pounding in your throat, resting every 100 feet of rise. And then when you gain the top, it is only 15 feet wide, and you immediately start to descend 2000 feet. This is dangerous as well as painful, because you get ‘laughing knees’, and only your prop stick in front of you keeps you from falling headlong. The farther down you go the weaker your knees become, but you don’t lie down and die as you feel like doing, you keep resting and going on and on.

At the end of the day, after, say, eight bitter hours of travelling, you have moved two miles onward, but you have surface walked eight or ten miles, and overhead you can see the planes roaring by, covering in 15 minutes the distance it takes us five days to do. One of our chaps was a wreck at the finish.

The first night out we tried to rest in a shelter of bushes many thousands of feet up, but none of us could manage sleep. Next day we were caught in a fierce storm, and staggered and slipped through it for two long hours. When we rested we lay out in puddles in the pouring rain, panting and steaming and wet through in the fullest sense of the words.

But you had to keep going. Everything was wet and heavier now, and although not yet halfway we had to finish that dreadful 2000-feet climb. At nightfall we staggered into a ramshackle native grass hut. It had no sides, and the rain was driving in on us all night. One of the men sat up all night. At an altitude of 4000 feet I lay on the bare ground all night in wet clothes. It was bitterly cold. As soon as we settled down the native rats started. One of them ran across my face and scratched my nostril with his sharp claws. They kept running over my body, and when I dozed off they started nibbling at my hair. The chap next to me had a patch nibbled completely out of his hair by morning.

He was very tired, and I kept waking up and disturbing him. The bugs got to work then and started biting my hips and my ankles, which were itching like fire that night and all next day. By mid-morning the chap I was with was in a pretty bad way, but we had a 12-hour stage to do, and we had to keep going. It is usually half a day to climb a ridge and half a day to go down, and we had been doing a ridge a day. Now we had to go down a ridge, up a ridge, and down a ridge again. It was the cruellest day I’ve ever spent in my life. Each time I stopped my calves got cramped, and by the time I had walked the cramp away I was too tired to go on, and had to rest. Then I’d get cramp again.

You might ask why I or anyone else kept going. You keep going because you have to, and because if you stop you stop nowhere, but if you keep going you might get somewhere. Everybody vows that never, never will he do it again. But there are days of this ahead of us, and the Japanese somewhere beyond. Gee, this is tough country. The farther you go the tougher it gets, but so long as a chap doesn’t get sick he can hang on somehow. And Kokoda is somewhere over those ridges.

All the water has to be carried by hand, and it is very precious. No wood will burn unless it has been roasted over a fire for many hours. So far we haven’t been able to live off the country, as it would be like slow suicide. But one of these days we’ll get to Kokoda …

Alan Moorehead

Alan Moorehead claimed he couldn’t spell, typed with three fingers, suffered from vertigo and wanted to be a literary writer, not a mere journalist. He was both. He was of a generation which fled provincial Australia of the 1930s for the wider world – but never really escaped. His wartime writing, especially the three books about the desert campaigns published as
African Trilogy
, and the account of the end of the war,
Eclipse
, is amazingly vivid and well written.

Moorehead was born in 1910 in suburban Melbourne, studied at Melbourne University where he sold paragraphs to
Table Talk
and the
Herald
– his great juvenile scoop was selling exam results for publication in the
Herald
, paid for line by line. He vowed to leave the country when he had saved £500, which he achieved in 1936.

Moorehead got his start by wangling a job as a temporary correspondent in Gibraltar, before moving to Paris, and finding his way to Egypt during the phony war period in 1940. He found his métier in the desert, writing for the London
Daily Express.

The real reason why the war correspondents did rather better in the desert than anywhere else was that the issues were so simple. There were no distractions, no cities, no railroads, shops, cinemas, markets, farms, children or women. There was no fifth column, and there were no politics. We never saw money or crowds or animals or hills and valleys. We saw the arching sky and the flat desert stretching away on every side. Consequently we saw the small incident (as distinct from the set-piece battle) achieve a significance it would never have in Europe or the tropics, and we saw it clearly, we saw all round it, we knew its beginning and its effect.

Moorehead reported from Bardia after it was taken by the Australian 6
^th
Division in January 1941:

Australians, cigarettes in the corner of their mouths and steel helmets down over their lined eyes, squatted here and there among the prisoners, or occasionally got to their feet with a bayoneted rifle and shouted, ‘Get back there, you,’ when some Italian started to stroll away. These men from the dockside of Sydney and the sheep stations of the Riverina presented such a picture of downright toughness with their gaunt dirty faces, huge boots, revolvers stuffed in their pockets, gripping their rifles with huge shapeless hands, shouting and grinning – always grinning – that the mere sight of them must have disheartened the enemy troops. For some days the Rome radio had been broadcasting that the ‘Australian barbarians’ had been turned loose by the British in the desert. It was a convenient way in which to explain away failures to the people at home.
But the broadcast had a very bad effect on the Italians waiting in Bardia for the arrival of the Australians. I saw prisoners go up to their guards to touch the leather jerkins our men were wearing against the cold. A rumour had gone round that the jerkins were bulletproof.

Moorehead followed the course of the war from the landings in Sicily in 1943, through the Normandy landings to the liberation of Paris, and to the final surrender. Moorehead and some mates also managed to accept the local surrenders in Denmark and Norway before the arrival of the genuine officials. All of these events were recorded in
Eclipse
(1945).

Moorehead was a committed Anglophile, but rediscovered his Australian heritage after the war through writing
Gallipoli
(1956) and
Cooper’s Creek
(1963), as well as his love of Africa in
The White Nile
(1960) and
The Blue Nile
(1962). He was the true pioneer of the literary travel history book that has become so popular in recent years.

His last years were tragic. He suffered a stroke in 1966 which meant he could not communicate, while his mind was as active as ever. His wife, Lucy, wrote his memoir
A Late Education
(1970) from his earlier notes, but she died in a car crash in Italy in 1979. Moorehead was also in the car. He died of another stroke in 1983.

*

The Volkswagen ran very well. The dial on the dashboard showed that it had covered only 500 kilometres when its owner, a German captain, had been shot dead. The motor, placed in the rear where you normally expect to find the luggage carrier, was often capable of outstripping an American jeep on the road. And now I was determined to drive it into Paris on the day the city fell. On the 24th of August we set out from the Lion d’Or in Bayeux, which had been our bridgehead home for two and a half months.

An unbelievable change had come over the battlefield. The road blocks had vanished. The guns were silent. Everything was in movement, and that claustrophobic feeling we had had in the narrow bridgehead was now suddenly and completely dissipated. We ran on through the powdered wreckage of Caen, and out into the exhausted plain of Falaise, into Falaise itself, where the cathedral altar was still burning quietly; then across the mouth of the extinct pocket, where all the side-roads were piled with the debris of dead carcasses and carts and tanks. Then into the American sector at Argentan and Alençon. We were now part of an enormous hue and cry along the roads. In tens of thousands of vehicles the American colossus was rushing forward on to Paris and the Seine. The railway line had been opened up from Cherbourg to Le Mans, a fabulous achievement. When trains stuck along the line they were simply pushed over the embankment to let the rest of the traffic flow through. On the road the truck drivers had orders to blow up their vehicles if they had a breakdown, so that the route should be kept clear for the oncoming convoys.

We darted in and out of the rubber-tracked Shermans travelling 40 miles an hour. As we went past each tank a foetid blast of hot air nearly blew the Volkswagen off the road. The rain poured down and it made no difference. The whole army had gathered itself into an irrepressible momentum, and it stretched back along the roads for 200 miles, gargantuan, frightening, thunderous, forever renewing itself and rearing forward. Upon the villagers it had the effect of a tempest, something uncontrollable, beyond any human jurisdiction. The soldiers themselves riding in the tanks were seized with an excitement that urged them on and on, so that they forgot or disregarded the normal routine of life, the need for rest and sleep, and everything in their consciousness was directed into this one desire to go forward, faster and faster, farther and farther.

For nine hours we never for a moment left this continuous roaring of the traffic. If there chanced to be an empty ditch in the road you came immediately upon another line of vehicles that stretched ahead without end, a convulsive column of discoloured steel that lay over the green countryside with the appearance of some monstrous dragon.

In the afternoon we ran on to Chartres, still pretty well untouched, life going on fairly normally in the streets, the two spires still soaring upward with the same majestic placidity and indifference. Some exuberant patriot had climbed to the pinnacles with clusters of flags, the tricolour, the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack.

We found friends inside that good restaurant at the foot of the cathedral, where the German officers had lately been taking the best of the wine and the black-market food.

Had Paris fallen?

No, not yet. There was fighting round Versailles. Fighting inside Paris between the German garrison and the Resistance. Leclerc’s French division had been pushed to the front to try and break into the city from the south. Everybody was gathered at Rambouillet for the latest news. We plunged into the traffic again and came out at Rambouillet. About two hundred journalists were frisking round the hotel. Rumours by the hundred, but no definite news. Tomorrow perhaps, or the day after. Everyone was venting their irritation and impatience on the BBC, which had been broadcasting that Paris had already fallen.

In the morning we were told to go on to Longjumeau, about 15 kilometres to the south of Paris. A fever now began to seize the villages. As soon as a vehicle stopped the people rushed to decorate it with flags. The women, especially the larger and less personable women, flung their arms round the soldiers, plastering them with lipstick. Once we got out ahead of the column, in a forest, and we turned back. There were many maquis roaming in the woods, and they were shooting on all German cars. Even with its load of flags the Volkswagen looked aggressively German. But then we were swept into the stream again, and it carried us on through Longjumeau, and straight on towards the Porte d’Orléans and Paris.

And then before it was yet midday the Eiffel Tower suddenly soared up over the plain, and one knew with certainty that Paris was falling, that here at last was the end of a four years’ voyage round the world.

A young French lieutenant stood in the centre of the roadway, blocking all traffic except that of Leclerc’s division. He spoke English well in a clipped and resolute way.

‘No-one can pass this point.’

‘But we are British and Americans.’

‘I have my orders.’

Over on the left a long line of civilian lorries and cars was drawn up beside the road, refugees who had fled Paris during the fighting, and who now wanted to get back. A little group stood round the lieutenant arguing fiercely.

‘But there is no fighting. The road is clear.’

‘I’m sorry, but you cannot go on.’

‘We have passes from Eisenhower’s headquarters.’

‘That may be. But I take my orders from General Leclerc.’

The situation was clear enough. The pride of the Fighting French was at its peak that morning. They and they alone were going to occupy their own capital without anyone else, American or British, interfering. There was going to be one liberator of Paris, and that was General de Gaulle. When the rest of the Allies arrived they were going to find the strategic parts of the city occupied by Leclerc’s men.

An American colonel drove up in a jeep and was stopped. ‘But I am the Corps Commander’s liaison officer with General Leclerc,’ he protested.

‘Sorry sir, but you must have a special pass.’

‘I am going on,’ said the colonel.

‘I have orders to shoot.’

‘Then shoot,’ said the colonel, and he drove on.

Everyone was feeling a little excited at that moment. No-one dared to shoot the colonel, and some of the rest of us decided that we too were going to get by. We found a side-road, slipped along it, and presently we were back on the highway travelling fast into the southern suburbs. A warm and brilliant sunshine had succeeded the rain. At the Porte d’Orléans the crowd was out in the streets. Nothing was changed, nothing really altered. The cobblestones. The flapping signs in red and gold over the pavement cafés.
Patisserie
.
Charcuterie
. Three golden horses’ heads over the horse butcher. The newspaper kiosk at the corner. Café des Sports. The Métro maps with the broad blue lines. The
flics
with their flat blue
képis
.
Appartements à louer
under the mansard roofs. A battered green bus beside the road. Two priests who stood, gesticulating. A girl with piled-up hair intensely and unnaturally blonde. The racing changing colours of the city, the uplift of a Paris street. A woman in a black shawl, incredibly old, her face wizened and monkeyish, pausing uncertainly at the intersection.

‘
Bonjour, maman
.’

Had we ever been away? Had it not been just one night, a long sleep? And now good morning; another day. It was not at all the feeling, ‘I have been here before,’ but, ‘I have never been away.’ Only this long night had intervened. Driving the Volkswagen down the road we used to take so often, the Avenue d’Orléans, I found it impossible to feel any of the expected things; either the sense of accomplishment or triumph, of release or joy, of reverence or excitement; not even any deep feeling of delight. It was even beyond anti-climax. One had been prepared and braced to plunge down to God-knew-what excesses of emotion and hysteria. But here was nothing, absolutely nothing. An utter ordinariness, an acceptance. Jean Sablon used to have a song:
‘Paris, tu n’as pas changé, tant mieux.’
Idiotically it went racing round my head while I casually noted that such and such a house was still there, and the Métro on the corner unmoved. It had not even been such a long sleep but simply a sleep troubled by bad dreams. The retreat to Belgium. The bombing. The years in the desert. All that time in Tunisia and Sicily and Italy. The smashing and destruction along three thousand miles. All this was completely unrelated in time to life as it had been in Paris before the war. There was no strain upon the memory. Everything was here waiting to be taken up again as though those four years had never existed, and now there was nothing to get excited about, no need to shout.

At the junction of the Raspail and the Boulevard St. Michel the big green lion still pranced triumphant. All round the crowd surged and scurried and ran among the vehicles. They had now given way entirely to delirium. There was a pressing wall of faces round the car. Again and again the phrase,
‘Nous vous avons attendu si longtemps.’

Sometimes when you got a moment to sit back and take a breath you saw nothing but fifty or a hundred hands stretched out to take your own. After so much kissing, the soldiers in self-defence were seeking out the prettier girls. The column was halted, and for the next twenty minutes events went by in a blurred and confused whirl of light and sound and movement. It was like watching a distorted motion picture, and that phrase,
‘Nous vous avons attendu si longtemps,’
went on and on until it sounded like a damaged gramophone record on which the needle keeps jumping back on to the same three bars of music.

There was something heartbreaking in this welcome. It had an undertone of exhausted relief. We were made to feel that we were not only welcome but a necessity to life itself. The people of Paris had had their bad dreams too; but of that we knew nothing as yet as we stood on the edge of the city at the Place Denfert Rochereau.

Already General Leclerc had advanced as far as the Gare Montparnasse, and he was conducting armistice negotiations there with General Scholtz, the commander of the German garrison of Paris. Scholtz, a regular soldier, had been holding out at his headquarters in the Hotel Meurice, in the Rue de Rivoli. But now, seeing it was hopeless, he had emerged under a white flag to make his surrender. Germans and Vichy sharpshooters were still resisting at a dozen strongpoints through the city.