The Long Green Shore (7 page)

‘How would Selby go?' asked Pez. Selby was the fat cook. ‘Old long-pig Selby—the man I'd sooner be shipwrecked with.'

‘That bookie from the Fourth had a wife and kid, didn't he?' rumbled the Laird from the corner.

‘Yeah,' said Pez. ‘Two kids.'

The mail finally caught up with us and most had two or three letters. Some of the literary boys had as many as a dozen, but most of us didn't have the stamina to write to that extent.

Janos had two letters—one from his mother and one from Mary. The one from Mary was quite short. He had opened it first. He read it and then put it aside while he opened his mother's letter and read that slowly.

Things were not good at home. His younger brother had been staying out at night. The landlord had been trying to get them out of the house. There was not much money, but his allotment was helping greatly. Where was he? Was there anything he needed? When would he be home? When would the dreadful war finish?

His mother—she was a woman whom he felt he only vaguely knew. Older than she should have been. Sick and broken and defeated. Always on the verge of tears and infuriating in her ineffectual passion to be possessive of her children. They had never known her. They had been alien to her all their lives, although they kissed her goodbye and fled her tears when they went to the wars, and bothered to half-lie to her when they had been out all night.

Janos turned back to Mary's letter and read it through twice more.

Pez looked up from Helen's letter on the other bed: ‘Get one from the Queensland?'

‘Yeah, I got one,' admitted Janos.

‘I'll get the sporting page off you later,' said Pez.

‘Ain't gonna be no sporting page,' said Janos. He tossed the letter across to Pez. ‘A Yankee marine—she wants to live in Idaho—she sends her love and hopes I'll understand.'

‘You understand?' asked Pez.

‘Sure! Elementary, dear Watson! A Yankee marine—she wants to live in Idaho—she sends her love—sure, I understand!'

‘Snap out of it,' says Pez. ‘Helen sends her love.'

‘Tell her thanks,' said Janos. ‘But the phrase is distasteful to me just this once.'

Helen knew Janos though she had never seen him. Our wives and sweethearts knew our comrades whom they never saw—sometimes they knew them better than we did.

‘You weren't banking on her, were you?' Pez asked after a while.

‘No,' said Janos. ‘I don't bank on anything.'

‘There'll be time to look around when we get back—you can do better. To hell with her.'

‘It's a long way to go just to look around,' said Janos. ‘Even when you know nothing will come of it, it's good, while you're away, to know that there's a door that you can knock on first when you get home. So long as you've got a contact you can feel you're not all soldier—you can be half a man still.'

Janos was still carrying this black mood around with him when he ran foul of Connell in a dirty temper.

Connell hauled Janos out in front of the section and abused him: ‘You're not even a soldier's bootlace,' he told him.

Janos was standing very stiff and straight and he answered Connell back though his voice was so low we could hardly hear him: ‘We'll see about that after we've been up the track a bit,' he told Connell.

We thought Janos was a moral to go along for answering back but Connell just sneered at him: ‘We'll see,' he said.

Janos was still taut with anger when he fell in again beside Pez: ‘I'll show him—I'll show the rotten bastard.'

‘Take it easy, boy,' muttered Pez.

Later, they lay on the beach, baking in the sun.

‘You won't show anyone anything unless you relax and watch where you're going,' said Pez. He was worried. It's bad for a man to be caught up in anger with one idea. He doesn't watch where he's going or what he's doing—he walks into things on the track.

‘Sure, I know,' grinned Janos. ‘I'm having a tough trot. I'm feeling sorry for myself. In the words of the classics: “Dear Bill—What a bastard!” '

He lay for a moment and then he said quietly and earnestly: ‘I will show him though—and to hell with her.'

The natives were coming back from the hills now, where they had fled when the Nips struck this coast. The poorest refugees in the world—refugees in the jungle.

Pez and Janos watched them come down the wide dusty road that curved round the bay.

A tribe moving camp, or on the march, moves in order—the women, bowed against their loads, laughing and chattering—that shrill island laughter—the men striding out and the children running and laughing beside them. Going to work in the mornings or coming home in the evenings, there is laughter and chatter and they will sing—they are together, there is community among them as they move.

But these people moved silently and slowly. Pez and Janos stood on the side of the road and watched them come.

There were about forty of them strung out down the road—incredible skeletons, their black skins tinged grey with sickness and starvation. They were naked except for strings round their middles holding a piece of rough bark or rough-woven grasses to hide their genitals. They carried nothing but sticks to help their walking and a few clutched leaf-wrapped fragments of food.

They were not moving together. Each one walked as he could and the few children, their bellies swollen with hunger, kept close beside their parents and their heads hung down. There was no talk and no laughter.

‘The poor bastards,' said Pez. Janos was silent.

At the end of the line was a man. As bone-thin as the rest, he yet walked with a stubborn, savage strength about him and his sunken eyes burned in the hawk-like skull of his face. He carried a thick hollow bamboo stick. He looked up, straight at them, as he came abreast.

‘What have you got there, mate?' said Janos.

The native stopped and tapped the bamboo enquiringly, as he looked at them. Janos nodded.

The man squatted in the dust, keeping at a distance from them. He up-ended the bamboo and shook it, watching them all the while. A tight bundle of gold and white feathers shook out. He caught it in one hand and held it up to them, expressionless.

‘Bird of paradise,' said Pez. They came closer to see it. ‘And Christ, she stinks.'

The skin had not been properly cleaned and was rotten—putrid flesh and long, slender, gold and white feathers.

‘How much do you want for it?' asked Pez.

‘One and six,' said the native carefully. He pronounced it
one and sick'ss.

Pez dug into his pocket, pulled out some coins, and offered him a shilling, a threepence and three pennies. The native shook his head: ‘One and sick'ss.'

‘He wants the right coin, I suppose,' said Janos. He pulled out a zac and tossed it to Pez.

Pez showed the man the coins—the shilling and sixpence. He nodded and proffered the bird.

‘Wait a bit,' said Pez. He went and plucked a large green leaf and took the bird on it. The native picked up his bamboo and set off after the others with long, stubbornly strong strides. He clutched the coins tightly in one hand.

Janos cursed and abandoned his attempt to knock a green coconut from the palm by hurling stones at it.

‘Hey!' he said to the big bronzed native boy who had watched his efforts for some time with a quizzically philosophical look. ‘Hey, what about shooting up the tree and getting a coconut for me, mate?'

The boy looked at him and grinned without answering. He was a big fellow with a graceful, proud body, a spotless scarlet lap-lap twisted around his waist and a scarlet hibiscus tucked in his crinkly black hair.

‘Hmm,' thought Janos. ‘Doesn't speak English, eh.' He tried to recall what little pidgin he'd picked up from conversations.

‘You fellow,' he began, uncertainly but beguilingly. ‘Catchem coconut belongem me.'

He paused expectantly. But the boy just grinned at him.

Janos gestured dramatically to the boy, the tree and himself and tried again: ‘You fellow catchem coconut belongem me—me fellow givem cigarette. One cigarette—two cigarette—three cigarette,' he coaxed, carefully raising three fingers in turn. ‘Go up along tree, catchem coconut bringem me.'

But the boy just grinned.

Then, just as Janos, desperately, was about to try again, the boy spoke. Perfect colloquial English, with a slight American accent: ‘I really wouldn't eat them yet—they're too goddam green,' he said. And walked away.

‘Christ,' said Janos, retailing the story with great delight. ‘I could have belted him in the teeth! There's me battling with the pidgin—trying to get him up the tree after the coconuts and after all that, he turns to me and says, “I really wouldn't eat them yet—they're too goddam green.” '

Nearly six weeks we had been here now…six weeks of nerve-tightening expectancy and subtle shaping of the mind for battle and hardening of the body for the track.

We crowded round the sand table with the country sculpted out in miniature and the ‘I' Officer gave us the disposition of our own and the enemy forces—reports brought in by native patrols from deep in Nip territory. There were patches of prophetic red on some of the features along the toy shore. We were to know them in time—Bayonet Ridge and that dark gulch where Slapsy Paint would lie dying in front of us through the long agony of a dying day.

We attended lectures on malaria control, hygiene in the jungle, scrub typhus.

Over the road, ‘A' Company showed they had learned their lessons well and were prepared.

They had a new sergeant major—a pukka, spit-and-polish type—who had decided to come and get himself a bit of combat glory before the war ended after spending the first four years of it at Duntroon frightening would-be officers.

He tried to pull his Duntroon stuff on ‘A' Company. They warned him several times, but he took no notice. Then one night they caught him in the dark and beat him up. They knocked him down and then kicked him about a bit.

Not very pretty—but it showed that the boys were ready for the trail. This wasn't a pretty business.

Connell called a battalion parade.

When all the companies were drawn up on the sandy square he took over without ceremony and stood them easy.

‘Now keep quiet and listen,' he said.

They slouched, leaning on their rifles, and tipped their hats forward to shield their eyes from the glare of the sun. Connell walked slowly up and down in front of the slouched jungle green ranks—turning a little from side to side to include them all as he spoke.

‘I want to talk to you, men,' he said. ‘This is the last time I will talk to you all together before we go into action. It will be the last time I'll talk to some of you—before we finish this show, a lot of you will be dead.'

‘Cheerful bastard,' grunted the Laird.

‘There have been a lot of rumours around that the Nip was starving, that he was disorganised, that he had no arms or ammunition.

‘I have instructed my officers to tell you, and I give you my own word now, that such is not the case. Some scattered members of his force may be starving and unarmed; but the great mass of his army is intact, well fed and well armed. They have nowhere to retreat to except the jungle and you will find them a desperate and skilful and completely savage foe.

‘We are going to search out this enemy and destroy him! And, in order to do that, we must be more cunning, more skilful, more enduring and more savage than he is himself.

‘I don't know what you have been taught in the past, but as far as I am concerned, you can forget what they call the “rules of war”. The little yellow bastard knows no laws of decency, or humanity. We'll have no time to take prisoners—destroy them where you find them in any way you can.

‘This is going to be no picnic. You are fighting through some of the worst terrain in the world and fighting the most savage foe in the world. A lot of you are going to die, but this battalion, if I have anything to do with it, is going to be the best battalion in the divvy.

‘I think it's the best battalion in the divvy at the moment—and it's going to stay that way if I have to kill three-quarters of you to do it.

‘This is a hard game and you've got to be bloody hard to play it. I won't ask any man to go anywhere I won't go and I expect every man to follow me to the end.

‘Any man who hasn't the guts to go the full distance can take his pack and go now—I don't want him with me.

‘The only thing I can promise you is blood and guts—and I want to see more of the Nips' than your own. I can promise, too, that you will eat more regularly this time than you did in the Owen Stanley campaign—there'll be no ten men to a tin of bully beef a day this time.

‘That's all I've got to say—except to wish you Good Hunting.'

Janos' voice fell clear and casual through the parade: ‘When do we go, sir?'

Connell looked straight at Janos a moment. ‘I don't know—but it won't be long.'

A challenge had been noted and remembered.

As we marched back to our tents, Deacon was murmuring with mild inanity: ‘Before our wedding day, which is not long…'

‘What the hell's that?' says Fluffy.

‘
Prothalamion.
I think.'

‘What?'

‘Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song…'

Remember, we played poker a lot—hour after hour the greasy broads fluttered over the blanket. You could lose yourself. There was no need to think and the money didn't matter much, whether you won or lost—this was no time to think about money.

The brain could not be shaken with vague fears—you could lose yourself in the calculation of two pairs with the chance of filling or the chance of buying a gutzer straight.

‘Never try and buy the middle pin to a straight,' Dick the Barber used to say. ‘There's men walking around today with the arse out of their strides through trying to buy a gutzer.'