The Long Green Shore (2 page)

From the last Christmas of the Second World War, until that war ended, two brigades of the Sixth Australian Infantry Division fought an obscure but at times bitter and bloody campaign along the savage north coast of New Guinea.

When the war ended, and the snakeskin drums sounded the word through the mountains, they were within sight of the deathly valley of the Sepik.

This campaign from Aitape to Wewak was an unnecessary one. The Japanese army in the area was isolated from the rest of the Pacific. They occupied no strategically important ground: they showed no aggressive intent.

This campaign was war in its classic wastefulness. It was fought for no apparent reason, other than that Australia might claim another Division in action; and, perhaps, strengthen her voice with their bodies at the Peace table.

To that end, a few hundred men died.

I know it is not such a great number in the millions of the dead—but it is bitter that they might have died in a better cause.

The Long Green Shore
is not, strictly, the story of this campaign. But I have chosen it as the framework because here the battle itself has no importance other than individual life and death, and this allows a sharper drawing of men's awareness of life and death. The victory of the Desert, the defeat in Greece, the drowning, gaunt agony of the Kokoda Trail would not have allowed quite the same delineation.

This is essentially a true book, though many of the incidents did not happen in this piece of war, but to other men in other campaigns. The men are true men, but none is one man entire—each is a synthesis of half a dozen or more.

This is the Australian soldier as he is…with something about him essentially national; but, at the same time, basically the same man at war as the legionnaires who crossed the world with Alexander, or the commando who marched with Xenophon through Asia Minor.

It is a long time ago, as our time goes. We who were young begin to grow old.

They have carried the dead out of the green and drifting sea of the rainforest and planted them row by row in domestic earth.

The world is not at peace. But it will be. Surely it will be. One day.

J. H.

We sailed that last night through the tail end of a hurricane sea. We came up and ran naked on the open canvas square of the battened hatches, standing taut and breathless against the ecstasy of cleanliness in the driving rain.

We scooped water from the pools that gathered in the folds of canvas and lathered the fresh foam of soap on our salt-dry bodies. We lined up for the plunge under the showers where the rain guttered off the gun platforms and deck housing in fat shuddering streams.

It was the first freshwater bath we had had for a week. There was a spirit of carnival, a revelry of cleanliness and nakedness in the rain, with the combed wind sweeping the open deck and voices shouting and laughing in the storm while the darkened ship plunged through the rolling seas.

*

Pez and Janos came in naked from the rain bath on the deck, blundering through the double blackout curtains in the roll of the ship, and climbed gingerly down the thin steel stairway into the moist stench of the hold.

There is always a stench, a slave smell, in the hold of a troopship. The stink clings to your clothes and skin long after you climb up into the fresh air.

They picked their way through the crowded well of the hold, dodging the bawdy salutes of their mates to their nakedness, and entered into the maze of bunks massed in double tiers five high.

As they dried themselves on greasy towels in the cramped alleyway between the bunks, Janos wrinkled his nose: ‘I can't stand this stink—you could cut it with a spoon.'

Janos was a tall, lean lad from the rich and rugged floodlands of the New South Wales north coast. He had a strong, bony face, a wry mouth and clear grey eyes. His nose was broken and crooked in a way that sundry women had found intriguing.

‘Broke her that many times playing football,' he'd tell you, ‘decided last time to let her stay broke and I've never had any trouble with her since.'

He came from Grafton where jacaranda blooms and strange tales are told of what happens when the blue flower bursts.

‘It's the fever,' he said, ‘the jacaranda fever. You can see it in the wenches when they walk the street—the way they swing their hips and carry their breasts proud and look sideways at you with that summer look in their eyes. You've got to step careful at night in the long grass down by the river. It's a great thing to be young and have your strength and be in Grafton when the jacaranda blooms.

‘And there is a legend that any wench whose head you tilt to kiss beneath a jacaranda tree, who does not have the same colour shining in her eyes, then she, poor girl, will die a virgin.' He grins: ‘The legend has been proved in part—concerning those whose eyes
do
shine.'

As Janos dragged his jungle green shirt off the bed, the leather wallet fell out and dropped open on the floor. Pez picked it up and handed it back to him, glancing as he did so at the photo framed in the celluloid panel.

‘Janice on top tonight,' he observed. ‘Is little Mary out of favour?'

‘No,' said Janos, ‘Janice is on view tonight in memory of things lost but not forgotten. She was a sweet little thing and accommodating too, and it is my great regret that she had a husband.'

Janice had been a part of the jacaranda fever. A buxom lass, she was—a rich northern dish of milk and honey. That night he was in her room at the pub and her husband came home unexpectedly—well, maybe a husband wouldn't appreciate a perfectly reasonable explanation concerning the aphrodisiac effect of the blooming of a blue flower, so Janos went out the window—taking most of his clothes with him, but forgetting his hat. For weeks afterwards a brawny citizen haunted the pubs, tenderly enquiring if any of the AIF boys had lost a hat.

‘Hell, that reminds me,' said Pez. ‘I should write to Helen tonight—haven't written since we left Cairns.'

‘Write tomorrow when we get ashore—she'll get it just as soon.'

‘Yeah, tomorrow we're ashore,' said Pez, ‘and maybe soon it won't matter whether I wrote or not.'

‘Cheerful bastard, aren't you?' grinned Janos. ‘I can't stand this stink—I'm going to sleep up on deck, rain or no rain.'

‘I'll take a wander round and see what the troops are doing first,' said Pez. ‘I'll be with you later.'

All the card players were gathered at the tables or on blankets spread in the open space in the well of the hold. Those who had money still played poker. Those who were broke, watched, or played bridge and five hundred. A few were already half-asleep on their bunks, the sweat streaming from them. Others, where the lights on their beds were good enough, read or wrote. Not many were writing letters—there was nothing much to say—but there was plenty of literature available.

We had received a comforts parcel the day before—you remember those parcels that a benevolent nation distributed for your cultural relaxation and entertainment on shipboard. There were a great number of inspired novelettes in gaudy paper covers with such titles as
The Corpse on Fifth Avenue
and
The Corpse with the Missing Face
and
Gunfire at Rustlers Gulch.
And they tried to tell us there was a paper shortage back home.

But these well-wishers thought of the physical as well as the spiritual man. There was also in each parcel a tin of very sticky lollies, a handkerchief, a pair of socks, a tube of toothpaste which was admirable for cleaning rifle barrels and polishing metal souvenirs, and, of course, a cake of soap.

A grateful country looks after its men when they are going into battle. ‘Nothing,' as Dick the Barber remarked sourly when we opened the parcels, ‘is too good for the Australian soldier.'

Pez made his way down the alleys between the bunks.

There was Regan lying on his bunk—the top one of the tier, with the luxury of direct lighting and an overhead air vent that roared gently in amplification of the sound that you heard when you were a kid and pressed a shell against your ear to hear the roar of the sea.

Regan lay in his bunk in fractional comfort, his body sticky and sweating and his face and throat bathed in the thick, cool jet of air. He was a thin lad in his twenties with a ragged thatch of black hair, a thin, swarthy, Irish face and close-set blue eyes.

He was holding a paper-backed novel, but he wasn't reading. He was lying there, staring at the blurred page and feeling fear in his heart. It had always been the same for him—this fear of being hurt and the greater fear of people knowing that he was afraid.

Pez passed on and paused to watch the poker game for a moment. He saw Cairo Fleming grin and bluff his last pound on a pair of deuces. And when old Whispering John called him on an ace-high blue, he laughed. He got up from the table broke, and he grinned: ‘Hell, Mrs Kelly wouldn't let her little boy Ned play with you blokes.'

You can tell a lot from the way a man plays poker—especially the way he loses.

Old Whispering John always played his cards with elaborate cunning, close to the vest. Next hand he was first to bet.

‘I'll make it a modest sixteen shillings,' he whispered.

Brogan's hand went into the pack and young Griffo made it twenty-four. Sunny and Ocker both threw in and it was up to John again.

‘You can't make it twenty-four,' said Whispering John querulously. ‘It was only a four-bob game.'

‘I made it eight for cards,' said Griffo. ‘You made it sixteen yourself, first bet.'

Whispering John looked hard at young Griffo and felt hatred for this youth who sat looking at him with elaborate unconcern and a womanish mouth.

‘I wish to Christ I knew what you had in your hand,' John whined.

‘There's one sure way to find out,' said Sunny.

‘All right, all right!' snapped Whispering John. Anyone'd think I didn't have the guts to look.' He held his cards up between a bony thumb and forefinger. He was breathing unevenly.

Young Griffo laid down three queens.

‘Six tits,' he said.

Whispering John slammed his cards down with petty viciousness on the table: ‘I had three tens,' he complained. ‘I get three tens and he has three queens. He's been got at, the bastard. He's been touched. Christ, I never seen such paper as I'm getting tonight.' He pushed the stool back and stood up, ‘That finishes me—when your luck runs that way it's time to get out.'

Pez threaded his way back into the alleys between the bunks.

There was a group around the Laird, who swung gently in the hammock he had scrounged from the crew's quarters and slung between two iron stanchions so that it was in the cool spot right under the big ventilator shaft.

‘Well, I don't know,' boomed the Laird, ‘but I'll make a bet that fifty per cent of these skulls we've got get themselves killed or go troppo within a week.' He snarled with fine scorn: ‘Duntroon boys! My God, what hoons! What drongos! After seeing their form it's my considered opinion that they couldn't lead their old grandmothers to the company latrine.

‘You know that little bloke?' he said. ‘You know, that smooth-faced snotty little bloke with the curly hair—what do they call him?—Billy the Kid, that's right…' His voice dropped to a horrified rumble: ‘Do you know what he tried to make me do at Redlynch, just before we got on the boat? He tried to make me do rifle exercises by numbers! I've been in the army four years and that hairy-arsed schoolboy comes along and wants me to do rifle exercises by numbers. I told him what he could do with the rifle—by number, too, and bayonet end first.'

Said Dick the Barber: ‘Well, I don't know, you can't always tell by the way a bloke looks—remember Bosker?'

‘Who's he?' asked Bishie. ‘Not that big major up at Brigade?'

‘No,' said Dick the Barber. ‘He was a lairy little bloke, Bosker, with a kind of Haw Haw voice and an absolute nut about having your buttons done up. He got killed at Sanananda—but he did a bloody good job.'

‘Yeah,' said the Laird. ‘He should have got a VC for that job—he earned it.'

Pez remembered that day. Three times Bosker had gone through that desolate waste of swamp and palms, where the shells were falling, to carry orders to ‘A' Company, pinned down on the flank. The fourth time he died in the swamp.

‘But I wouldn't worry too much about these apes of officers we've got,' Dick the Barber was saying. ‘When you get down to it, who does the work? The poor old drack private and the corporal. The corporal—he's the leader—he's the one that actually takes the men in and does the job after all the brass hats have finished deciding what the job is. And we've got better corporals than any other army in the world.'

Said Bishie: ‘If it comes to that, we can always shoot the skulls first and carry on from there.'

But Dick the Barber was talking: ‘And you know there's men on this boat that aren't even getting their efficiency pay. Brass hats—brass bastards! They're going to send those men in and ask them to go forward scout and they won't even give them efficiency pay.

‘Christ, it's an insult! They say to a man: “Now, if you're a good boy for six months, and you don't go ack-willie, and you know how to fire a Bren gun, and you can do your bloody gas drill that you'll never bloody need—then we'll open our great big brass hearts and give you an extra zac a day.”

‘Sixpence a day! A lousy zac! Christ, you'd think they were giving you gilt-edged security for life! Some of these blokes over-stayed their leave a couple of days—or else they shot into town and got drunk—so they took the lousy zac a day off them.'

His voice jumbled with bitterness and anger: ‘So they reckon they're not efficient soldiers, but they're still going to send them into action. They ought to be cut up and their swags burnt!'