Weller's War

by George Weller

  “I wonder if anyone ever measured the light those things give out,” murmured Frank.

  “I bet it's a half of one candlepower, at least.”

  “Half, hell. I could read by that bigger one. It was as good as any bed lamp. Better light, too. Natural light.”

  Bill, who had a case of malaria that was being held down by atabrine like a fire by a wet rag, had been trying to get himself transferred back south where he could get rest and treatment. His several messages requesting a change had been ignored. Suddenly he took Frank and me by our sweat-slippery arms. “Hey, listen,” he said, “I think those mushrooms are the answer for me. They can get me back to Australia.”

  “I doubt if they're poisonous,” I said.

  “I'm not going to eat them,” said Bill. “I'll just take them to my lean-to, get out my machine and write a story.”

  “What about?” said Frank dourly. The censorship had not been easy on us.

  “It doesn't matter what it's about,” said Bill. “It's the lead that will get them. The minute New York reads my lead, they'll understand it's no use keeping me this side the Hump any longer. They'll realize I'm off the beam, but good. The first words they see will be better than a certificate of cerebral malaria. They can't miss that I'm troppo and have to be taken out.”

  “What'll you say, then?”

  It seemed now almost as if Bill's face must give out a glow, so intense and confident was his voice. “Listen, now,” he said, “here's my lead: Somewhere in New Guinea.” He took a breath and held our arms tighter. “I am writing this story at the front by the light of a mushroom.”

  We thought it over a little. Frank and I had been at Buna just long enough so that neither of us was very sure of his judgment. “Might work,” said Frank at length. “Worth trying,” I agreed. It seemed a rather plausible device to us, perhaps because we were on our second and third recurrences ourselves.

  As soon as we got back to the intelligence tent, we were told that a courier had landed at Dobodura just before sunset with a bag of mail. There was a letter waiting that said a replacement would arrive next morning to relieve Bill.

  The next night during the radio hour, an M.P. noticed the two mushrooms violating the blackout and picked them. He took them to the cooking enclosure, where there was an argument as to whether they were edible, and if they were, whether they would give out a light through your stomach. I went away before the argument was settled, and the next morning no one in camp knew what had become of the illuminated mushrooms.

  Eventually Frank and I decided to go to Milne Bay. We caught a jeep to Buna Mission, where there was a colonel who was an old friend of ours. At one time this colonel had been known as “the mayor of Dobodura,” because he gave directions to all who tumbled into that nexus of Kenney's early airborne operations. He was a middle-aged colonel of supply from a college town, and he spoke with a careful enunciation that seemed out of place in the jungle. He was helpful and courteous, and we knew he would get us aboard some kind of coastal lugger to reach Milne Bay.

  It was already night when we reached the place on the beach where the colonel and his outfit were camped. Once there had been a time when he was in charge of all the supplies that came over the range, and the campaign had depended on him. But Buna was over, the dead were buried, and the supplies which had once been flown in by transport, skimpily and irregularly, were now arriving less dramatically but much more frequently by sea. So the colonel now had a grimier and less attractive job than supply: salvage. His men were camped in the thick squatty trees by the black sand beach, and they were sorting out the lost rubbish of war, the misshapen shoes, the discarded jungle jackets foul with odors, the guns that had been buried in the muck by mortar bursts (their former owners now lying under crosses in the little cemetery with the drivers of the Australian Bren gun carriers)—all the lost parts of two armies that had fought and passed into time. It was a sour job, like washing up the dishes after a party. Tied down to such tasks, with the real job already finished, soldiers and officers feel themselves forgotten.

  In answer to his questions we told the colonel that the commanding general, his G-2, and his G-3 had flown back together to Australia, presumably to talk with General MacArthur. “Anybody say anything back there about orders to take us out?” he asked. We shook our heads apologetically. Supply and salvage, the housekeepers of the army, go on forever. “I didn't expect so,” he said. “Well, I'll put you aboard a Tazzy boat leaving about two in the morning.”

  In the middle of the evening we were taking a walk up the beach with the colonel when the bomber from Rabaul came grinding in over the sea. It was hot and still, and the little waves made a delicate fussing sound as they patted the beach. The Japanese turned at sea and started east toward Oro Bay, where he usually began his nuisance patrol. We had settled down in a slit trench and were waiting for the raider to come back, pass overhead, and go on toward Morobe, when the colonel stood up with a start, and staring into the darkness demanded: “What are those eyes looking at us there?”

  It was a cluster of small lights, green and cool, shining out of the jungle. “It's not animals, Colonel,” said Frank. “It's mushrooms.”

  “Mushrooms?”

  “Yes. We have luminous mushrooms in New Guinea.”

  “I never heard of such a thing,” said the colonel. “It's some sort of animal.”

  “Wait, I'll get them for you,” said Frank, getting out of the trench.

  “Don't show a light,” said the colonel. “That Jap is smart.”

  “You don't need any light,” said Frank. “These mushrooms give out a light of their own.” He was already twenty feet away, climbing over rotten logs.

  The colonel leaned nearer until his shoulder touched mine. “I don't mind Frank having his little joke,” he whispered. “But personally it sounds to me as though he's been on this side of the range too long. Malaria can affect a man to the point where he's not responsible for himself. Sometimes I have to keep a tight grip on myself. I hope you'll put Frank on the first plane you can get out of Milne Bay. He needs a good rest to clear his mind.”

  Then Frank came back. He had a long dead branch, which he was carrying carefully. There was a row of five luminous mushrooms on it, as even and similar as green buttons on the wall of an elevator. “There, Colonel!” he said, handing it down.

  The colonel took the branch as if he thought it electrified. “Well, I never—certainly never in my life—never saw anything to match this.” He held the mushrooms out as a child does buttercups, under my chin. “You look supernatural,” he said. “Well, I never. I certainly never.”

  “Take them to your tent,” suggested Frank. “Plant them back of the guy rope, where the sentry can't step on them. Kind of mark of rank, see?”

  “But aren't they visible to aircraft?” asked the colonel.

  “If they are, then that Jap must be seeing nothing but green buttons all over New Guinea,” said Frank.

  “That's true, that's true,” agreed the colonel. He held the branch delicately in long, thin fingers. “Well, I never, I certainly never.” He carried it back to his quarters.

  Uncertain what kind of accommodations there would be on the Tazzy boat, we turned in for a nap on the floor of the warehouse. When the sentry wakened us at one, we went over to say goodbye to the colonel. His tent was dark, and I parted the flaps hesitantly. “Come in, come in,” said the colonel loudly and warmly. We pushed in.

  The colonel was sitting at an improvised desk. In the position before him where a pen set would be was the branch with the little green creatures on it. They shed a faint, gentle light on his intent face.

  “You won't guess what I'm doing,” he said. “I'm writing.”

  “What are you writing, Colonel?” said Frank.

  “I'm writing a letter for you to take back to the base censor,” said the colonel. “A letter to my wife.”

  “Not much you can say, is there?” I said politely.

  “There's ne
ver much,” said the colonel. “That's why I don't write very often. But this time is different. This time I've got an opening sentence here that is going to make her sit right up. You're reporters; you ought to be good judges of how to hold a woman's interest. What do you think of this?—here's how I begin: ‘Darling, I am writing you tonight by the light of five mushrooms.’ How about that for a salutation?”

  Before I found words, Frank was able to reply. “It certainly ought to interest anyone, Colonel,” he said. “Why, a lead like that would make anyone wonder whether you oughtn't to be relieved.”

  RICH FOOD? THAT'S RICH—CAN OPENER

  TIRES YANKS

  With Advanced American Troops in New Guinea—April 6, 1943 (Delayed)

  One American airman was killed and another wounded last week by stray Japanese soldiers living a vagabond existence in dugouts near the portable hospital with forward American troops where this writer is confined under treatment. But the most disturbing phenomenon during convalescence under a torrid tent in northern Papua is not the possibility that Japs may emerge from the surrounding jungle seeking food, and knock off this correspondent on his canvas cot. It is, rather, the plain American “G.I. Dogfaces,” obsessed with their own food problems, who surround the writer's cot, can openers in hand, and peer through the mosquito net, demanding: “Are you that jerk correspondent who wrote all the so-and-so about the rich French food we are supposed to be getting here? We're looking for that liar.”

  Everybody in New Guinea, especially on the northern, uglier side of the Hump, understands that canned, dehydrated, denatured foods are unavoidable circumstances of war—like bullets, ants, dogtags, and blood tests. When tommy guns have denuded the last trees of coconuts, and native gardens remain deserted by their dusky keepers—who have either been pressed into labor corps or fled to the hills—it is more than we could expect to be living in a paradise of tropical fruits and fresh fish as imagined by steak-and-orange-juice-fed cartoonists 12,000 miles away.

  Broken crackers or water flavored with orange extract are accepted as part of the war scene. What gripes the slouch-shouldered dogfaces fighting off malaria, bush typhus, anemia and hookworm is being told by letter from relatives in the United States, or thinkers in Washington, or trenchermen covering the Papuan war from “somewhere in Australia” (American correspondents in New Guinea now total two) how luxuriously he is living in the jungle and what sacrifices are being made by the public to keep him fat and jolly. Meat may be scarce and expensive in America, but not because the Army in Papua is living off it. Fruits and vegetables may have risen in price in Australia, but not because the soldier here is eating them.

  What really gets the hairy infantrymen down is reading eulogies about how much shipping space has been saved by dehydrating eggs, drying milk into dust, and canning everything. Did anyone of these dietary lyricists ever try fighting on inert foods after being accustomed to fresh meat, salads, vegetables, cow's milk, fruit? It is recognized that these shipping savings are unavoidable. Nobody in the swamp expects an official announcement of the obvious fact that compressed foods taste like hell. That is war. But it is peculiarly maddening to be told that war is a feast.

  The catalogue of fresh food that has reached this correspondent during the last fortnight may be interesting to those who think the American soldier is eating them out of house and home. In thirteen days this correspondent has gluttonized on the following uncanned provender: one piece of meat, one egg, one pear, one beet, one dish of cabbage, two split plums, twelve individual grapes. Two apples, one of which was obtained dishonestly. Everything else was canned.

  Today a man in the next thatched hut received a letter from his girl, saying: “Tenderloins have disappeared in America, but we are glad to make this small sacrifice for you to have them.” When he read this passage to fever patients they were impelled to do something violent. But only their temperatures were able to rise.

  CHICAGO MEN IN NEW GUINEA TALK OF HOME

  With Advanced Forces in Australia-mandated New Guinea—May 14, 1943

  You slip over Huon Gulf with gasoline fumes in your nose. You slept on an uncushioned deck last night and will tonight. But leave it to Sergeant Eugene Sullivan, Chicago's junglewise policeman, to say something relaxing.

  The lean, dark former pavement-pounder points to a long, green island—one of scores stretching along this coast to Salamaua—shifts his revolver and says: “Me and Madeleine Carroll on that island.” Sullivan is twenty-eight and unmarried, but the only time he has ever been near this island was when searching for Jap survivors from the Bismarck Sea battle.

  Your putt-putt approaches the beach. You and Sullivan undress, pile your clothes on deck and jump overboard in the neck-deep water. A lieutenant hands your clothes down and you stack them on your head. No sharks' fins can be seen, so you leave the boat's cool shadow for shore. Halfway in, clouds of sandflies attack. As you step on the deserted beach, flanked with tumble-down brown native huts, you struggle into your clothes without pausing to dry.

  Sullivan says: “You'll think you're not bitten for about two days. But just wait and see.”

  As usual he's right. Within forty hours you develop hard-cored red pimples—an average of fifty to seventy bites per square foot of flesh—and scratch all day and night for the next five days.

  The only sign of war in the stilt-supported village is a Jap belly tank that some native suspended under his hut as a water tank before he decided to flee. Everything has gone. Pots and pans have been carried into the jungle pending decision as to whether the Japs will be expelled from Salamaua. A sandy circle on the bamboo floor, like the hearth in an American home, is empty. A ceremonial mask for dances lies broken nearby, grimacing its white-striped palm-husk cheeks.

  But the village isn't wholly deserted. Two sad sacks in green come down the beach, shoeless and with pulled-down fatigue caps and rifles. Soon there appears a sarong-clad member of the Australian native constabulary.

  Under the beating sun, which makes you giddy reflecting from the sand, you wander through the empty village to the graveyard. Behind some stilted houses are doghouses, also on stilts. That is where the family's tame parrot lived, but he has gone too. A tiny chapel's benches have been overturned by the Japs; during their occupations, Christian religious literature is used as scrap paper. Even the Bible is not respected, and pages of St. Mark are scattered about.

  Here is a broken-down hut where, as the native cop tells the Chicago cop, “Bebbies go mission school, sleep here, kiki here.” Kiki is food.

  The graveyard's sleeping forms are outlined ovally in pebbles, the tall wooden crosses with peculiarly short arms marking Christians. Shifting his musket, this No. 1 police boy shows how they are buried, not by families but by status, in three rows: “Here man fella, here Mary and her pickaninny bebby.” He also shows, with shadowed face, the grave of his predecessor killed by Jap strafing. “One fella, balus [pigeon] belong Japan shoot him. This fella police boy; he die.”

  As all along the coast, there are Jap entrenchments meant to hold off landing parties. You wander through an endless line of huts, some merely mangers for common soldiers and coolies. The officers' quarters are more elaborate. Finally, you come upon the full-size hut of the commander with adroitly concealed chair for sitting alone watching the sea. His chair of meditation faces the dimly seen shore of New Britain—and Tokyo.

  These shore defenses, evacuated without a fight by Japs withdrawing toward Salamaua and Lae, are quiet, unlike the marshy glades around Sanananda. There, a few days earlier, the writer wandered among hundreds of Jap skulls and forgotten equipment deep in forest. Here everything is policed as carefully as a picnic ground. In an hour's search, you sweatingly find one broken water filter, one pair of shorts patched with a piece from a blanket, and a large sea turtle's shell used for washing. You discover a single corpse on the beach with pelvis bones and white ribs sticking out from the sand. At first you think it must be from Huon Gulf, but the police boy hands Sulliva
n a Jap sun helmet found in the coarse witchgrass, points to the bones and says: “Plenty too much sick—he die.”

  After a march of some distance on the blinding sand, you reach one of those innumerable green rivers that emerge from this mountainous shore. Manned by native boys, there are two outrigger canoes, each with a tiny deck five feet by eighteen inches. You and Sullivan sit down on these precarious platforms, the boys dip rounded paddles, and you move upstream, losing the ocean immediately.

  Presently, by means improper to reveal, you reach the farthest forward Allied outpost, quite unlike those crashing battleposts with shells always overhead and mortars pumping. It commands a good view in a certain direction. It is quiet. And in this outpost occurs the Stanley-Livingstone meeting you have been planning.

  You approach a dark-haired, slightly bearded young man and say, “John Justin Smith, former assistant music critic of the Chicago Daily News, I presume.”

  Taken aback in quite un-Livingstone fashion, Smith responds, “Yes, but who in the heck are you, and what are you doing here?”

  At first Smitty is dumbfounded. We try to pass off this meeting at the end of MacArthur's uttermost tentacle as nothing. After all, aren't Chicago newsmen always running into each other in these jungles? One must remember that the world is getting smaller. The war correspondent starts to thumb through Smitty's copies of the Daily News, not having seen any in six months.

  “Read them but don't take any,” says Smitty “The natives buy them for cigarette paper.” The favorite dish here is C-ration with onions, purchased with old Chicago Daily Newses. “They taste fantastic,” Smith says.

  The natives show impatience, and Smitty says, “You stop all right along canoe, pretty soon me come.”

  The paddlers obediently leave. As we plunge through the thirty-foot jungle of brown, fernlike sago palms, he tells how he went swimming in the river until the natives warned of poopook, or crocodiles. When eventually we reach the two outrigger canoes, the music critic himself takes the paddle while the displaced boy sits in the bottom of one hollow log. As he dips in the limpid green water, Sullivan remarks, “Bet you wish you could paddle this job right down the Chicago River.”