Tank Boys

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Taz replied. ‘By the way, was last night’s assault a success?’

  Scott nodded. ‘Villers-Bretonneux was almost cut off as planned. A lot of Germans there surrendered. A few apparently escaped along a railway cutting to the east. Our troops are going through the town as we speak, mopping up. The operation was a success – Villers-Bretonneux is back in our hands. Now, on your way.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Taz and Frankie said in unison, trying to hide their relief at overcoming the first hurdle in their attempt to pass Richard off as an Australian. Richard, for his part, smiled warmly at the lieutenant.

  ‘Give these brave lads a hand,’ Scott said to his men.

  As they proceeded to push and pull Richard and Frankie out the western side of the crater, Taz dropped to one knee beside Rait’s body. Glancing around to be sure he wasn’t being observed closely, he then reached to the dead corporal’s throat, grasped the AIF identity disc hanging there and yanked hard. The thin leather cord around Rait’s neck snapped, and Taz came away with the disc and broken cord. He quickly stuffed them into a trouser pocket as he rose to his feet.

  ‘A mate, was he?’ asked Lieutenant Scott.

  ‘Our section leader, sir,’ Taz replied. ‘He died bravely. I just wanted to say a last goodbye.’

  ‘I understand,’ Scott replied. ‘Well done, son.’

  As Taz departed the crater, he noticed that parts of Mephisto’s front roof were jutting into the air, apparently as a result of Lieutenant Biltz’s demolition charge. Otherwise, the tank still looked very much intact. Helped from the crater by the men of the patrol, Taz joined Frankie and Richard, who were squatting at the rim waiting for him.

  The trio traipsed across the scarred landscape, towards the new Allied front line at the Villers-Bretonneux–Domart road, several hundred metres away. Side by side now, with Richard in the middle, they kept low, their pace dictated by Taz’s limp.

  Once they were out of sight of Scott and his men, Taz passed Rait’s identity disc to Richard. ‘Yours, Archibald Rait,’ said Taz. ‘Don’t lose it.’

  Nodding, Richard retained a firm grip on the disc.

  The heads and rifle barrels of Australians in a trench ahead were now visible, and a sergeant soon waved them in.

  ‘You realise what today’s date is, Frankie?’ Taz asked, as they approached the trench.

  ‘Wouldn’t have a clue, mate,’ Frankie replied. ‘I don’t even know what day of the week it is!’

  ‘It’s Thursday, April twenty-fifth.’

  ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’

  ‘It’s Anzac Day.’

  ‘What day?’

  ‘Anzac Day. You know, the day when people back home stop to think about our men who’ve been killed fighting over here.’

  Frankie shrugged. ‘That’s a new one on me.’

  ‘It started a year after the Anzac landing on Gallipoli. I think they called it Commonwealth Day that first year. Last year they changed the name to Anzac Day.’

  Frankie shrugged again. ‘Anzac Day? If you ask me, mate, it’ll never catch on.’

  The regimental aid post they found their way to had no roof, walls or beds and was located in a quarry. A medical officer and three orderlies were tending to scores of Australian wounded, who sat and lay out in the open on the gravel. The trio arrived to see the overworked medical officer on his knees, trying to save the life of a seriously injured man. The doctor took one look at the three bloodied youngsters and, seeing they could stand, gave instructions for them to be sent to a field hospital behind the lines.

  With a dozen other walking wounded, Taz, Frankie and their new German friend shuffled past Bois l’Abbé. After forty-five minutes of walking, they found themselves at a tented field hospital with beds, busy staff and scores of patients. Taz, Frankie and Richard kept close together and were lined up at a bed where a tall, dark-haired Medical Corps corporal was attending to new arrivals.

  The corporal had been working through the night without sleep, and huge dark circles hung beneath his eyes. As the other two stood and watched, Taz went first, easing himself onto the edge of an iron bed. The corporal pulled off Taz’s trousers then used a wet cloth to clean away dried blood, revealing the leg wound that had caused it all.

  ‘Bullet went in one side of the thigh and clean out the other without hitting the bone,’ the corporal observed. ‘You were lucky.’ Without another word, he splashed the entry and exit wounds with iodine then bound Taz’s thigh with a length of white bandage.

  Next, it was Frankie’s turn to sit on the bed. Working robotically, the corporal cleaned the gouge in his forehead, bathed it in iodine then swathed Frankie’s head with a bandage by winding it around and around his skull and pinning it in place. The bandage was effective but far from flattering, leaving Frankie’s hair jutting up untidily.

  ‘No major damage then, mate?’ Frankie asked the corporal.

  The corporal looked at Frankie with a hint of a smile. ‘Did you want there to be?’

  ‘No, no,’ Frankie quickly returned. ‘I just thought, you know, a head wound . . .’

  ‘Looks like your head was at a right angle to the shooter when the bullet hit you,’ the corporal said matter-of-factly, helping Frankie to stand.

  Feeling a little woozy, Frankie nodded. He remembered looking around as they were running forward to the attack, and at that moment had felt the sting of the bullet creasing his forehead. ‘If I hadn’t looked around just then,’ he said, half to himself, ‘the bullet would have gone right into my brain.’

  ‘Then you would have had a head wound to worry about.’ The corporal turned to Richard, took him by the arm and sat him on the edge of the bed in Frankie’s place. After removing the blood-caked bandage from around Richard’s neck, he looked up. ‘What did this?’ he asked. ‘A bullet? Shrapnel?’

  Richard glanced worriedly at Taz and Frankie, then, pretending his voice had been affected, made a rasping sound by way of reply.

  ‘Save your voice, chum,’ said the corporal sympathetically. Casting the soiled rag onto a pile of used bandages in the corner, he studied Richard’s neck wound. ‘Nothing serious,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look deep. But you can’t speak?’

  Richard shrugged and made a rasping sound again, pointing to his throat.

  ‘That’s odd,’ said the corporal. Then he noticed Richard’s grey trousers and lack of boots. ‘What are they all about?’

  ‘We had a real tough time last night, Corp,’ said Frankie. ‘Lost all our platoon. Us three – we’re all that’s left. Holding a flaming Jerry tank against counterattack after counterattack – I can’t tell you what a flaming nightmare it was. I lost my tunic in a shell hole. Archibald here lost his pants and his boots.’

  ‘We were lucky to have got out of it alive,’ Taz added.

  ‘I imagine you were,’ the corporal agreed. ‘But –’

  ‘It’s all right for you blokes back here behind the lines,’ said Frankie, who’d come to the conclusion that offense was the best form of defence. ‘You haven’t got a clue what us blokes go through out there.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ the corporal returned irritably. ‘I’m sending the three of you back to the stationary hospital. You two for rest and recuperation, and this bloke to be looked at more closely by a surgeon for his throat problem.’ He looked intently at Richard. ‘But if it turns out you’re a malingerer, chum,’ he said, poking Richard in the chest, ‘watch out!’

  Richard smiled weakly.

  Taking up a pencil and a medical report form, the corporal asked, ‘What’s your name then?’

  In answer, Richard held out his hand, in which he still clutched the identity disc.

  ‘Rait, A. B.,’ said the corporal, reading the disc, then writing the details on the form.

  And so it was that Richard Rix officially became Archibald Browning Rait.

  Frankie, Taz and Richard were taken to Amiens in the back of a crowded motor ambulance, and from there they
journeyed by hospital train that night to Rouen and the Australian Army’s 8th Stationary Hospital. They came with cardboard baggage tags pinned to them, on which the corporal at the field hospital had written brief notes on their wounds.

  The hospital at Rouen was so crowded that there were full beds in every corridor. All the patients were Australian. The crushing Allied success of the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux had come at the cost of 5000 Australians killed and wounded.

  Before he left the field hospital, Richard had been provided with the trousers and boots of an Australian soldier who’d died there. He now looked just like Taz and Frankie, with no one in the crowded hospital giving him so much as a second glance.

  Taz and Frankie were seen by a doctor who gave instructions for them to be sent to a base depot for rest and recuperation before being sent back to their unit. Richard’s future was not so certain; he was separated from his saviours for attention by a surgeon. As soon as Taz and Frankie had been seen by the doctor, they went looking for their new friend. Frankie, unsteady on his feet, turned out to be suffering from concussion as a result of his head wound and was given an old wicker wheelchair with wheels that squeaked. Taz pushed him around the hospital, and that afternoon they found Richard in a full fifty-bed ward.

  Lying in his bed and staring at the ceiling, Richard turned to see the pair coming towards him. Breaking into a smile, he sat up. ‘I wondered if I would ever see you again,’ he said as the pair reached his bedside.

  ‘You shouldn’t be talking, Archibald,’ Taz said. ‘Your throat wound – remember?’

  ‘It is all right,’ Richard whispered. ‘I knew that I must speak at some time. I told them that I was a Dutch immigrant to Australia.’

  ‘Dutch?’ Taz smiled. ‘Good. Like I suggested before,’ he said, keeping his voice down so that the men in the adjacent beds couldn’t hear him. ‘Rait might be considered a Dutch name.’

  ‘And they believe you?’ Frankie marvelled.

  Richard nodded.

  ‘Nicely done,’ said Taz.

  ‘So what are they going to do with you?’ Frankie asked. ‘Have they said?’

  ‘I am to see a surgeon who will inspect my throat.’

  ‘Then good luck with everything, mate,’ said Taz, shaking Richard’s hand.

  ‘Yeah, good luck,’ Frankie concurred, reaching from his wheelchair to do the same. ‘You’ll need it.’

  Richard shrugged. ‘Whatever happens, my war is over.’

  The pair came to see Richard again the following day, with Frankie again in the wheelchair. They were to depart that afternoon by train for Number 1 Base Depot at Boulogne on the English Channel coast, to spend several weeks recuperating.

  ‘Any news yet?’ Taz asked Richard.

  Bored and sitting on the edge of his bed in hospital pyjamas, Richard shook his head. ‘I am still waiting to be seen by a surgeon. They are very busy.’

  Again the three of them shook hands, this time in parting.

  ‘Thank you both for all that you have done for me,’ said Richard sincerely.

  ‘You might have done the same for us,’ Taz returned.

  ‘Just remember one thing,’ said Frankie.

  ‘What is that?’ Richard responded.

  Frankie leaned closer to Richard and lowered his voice. ‘If you get caught, you’ve never met either of us before in your life.’

  Richard threw his head back and laughed. Then, with a twinkle in his eye, he said, ‘Who are you two fellows again?’

  This made Frankie and Taz laugh too.

  As Taz wheeled Frankie from the ward, he looked back at Richard, who waved him goodbye. ‘I wonder if we’ll ever see him again, Frankie.’

  ‘Nah,’ replied Frankie. ‘That’s the last we’ll ever see of him, mate. But at least we’ve done something good in this flaming war. He was our one good deed.’

  Two weeks later, Taz and Frankie stood in front of a desk at the base camp in Boulogne. A sergeant of the Medical Corps, a man with grey hair and a large handlebar moustache, sat on the other side of the desk, filling in their medical records.

  ‘Right, you two,’ said the sergeant. ‘How’s the leg, Dutton?’

  ‘Still a bit tender, Sergeant,’ Taz replied.

  ‘But you can walk on it without difficulty?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

  ‘That’s handy, because you and Pickles have both been certified fit for return to duty by the docs.’

  ‘That’s it, toss us out just in time for the next big battle,’ Frankie said with a cheeky grin. Now that his head bandage was gone, he had a thick red scar etched across his brow.

  The sergeant scowled at him. ‘Experienced men like you two are in demand back at the front for the last big push against Fritz.’

  ‘Experienced?’ Frankie returned with a snort of derision. ‘I don’t know how much good our experience will be. We did a lot of cringing in shell holes to survive this long. Is there a Cringing Battalion we could join?’

  ‘I’m sending you both back to the 52nd,’ the sergeant went on, disregarding Frankie’s remark, ‘but I don’t know how long you’ll be with them.’

  ‘Why’s that, Sergeant?’ Taz asked with a puzzled frown.

  ‘Seems we suffered so many casualties in winning the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, the three AIF brigades involved were reduced to the size of three battalions.’

  ‘Crikey!’ Frankie exclaimed.

  ‘The word is that the 52nd is going to be abolished and its surviving men absorbed into other units,’ the sergeant advised.

  ‘What! After all the 52nd’s been through and achieved?’ Taz responded, aghast. ‘Just wiped off the books with a stroke of the pen?’

  ‘That’s criminal!’ Frankie joined in.

  ‘That’s war,’ the sergeant replied matter-of-factly, dipping his pen in ink.

  On a chilly day in May the pair rejoined the 52nd at a tented camp on the western outskirts of Villers-Bretonneux. As the Medical Corps sergeant at Boulogne had pointed out, the 52nd Battalion had been drastically reduced by the battle over 24–25 April. The entire battalion was now the size of a company. And the flow of reinforcements from home had dried up. Australia had already contributed 350,000 volunteers to the war, and the young country’s manpower reserves had been drained dry.

  At the camp, Taz and Frankie had a ten-man tent to themselves. There, on the morning after rejoining their unit, Taz awoke to see a familiar face in the tent’s entrance.

  ‘Richard!’ Taz exclaimed, hardly believing his eyes.

  Sure enough, there was Richard. Decked out in a new, well-fitting AIF uniform, he smiled down at them. ‘Hello, Taz, my friend.’

  Frankie now opened his eyes and looked up in amazement. ‘Flaming heck! Where’d you spring from?’ he said, sitting up.

  Richard, carrying a backpack, came into the tent and with a weary sigh sank down on the nearest vacant camp bed. ‘I ran away from the hospital,’ he announced, keeping his voice low.

  ‘You what?’ Taz exclaimed.

  ‘I ran away. The doctors became suspicious when they could find nothing wrong with me. So after a week I decided I had better get away from there.’

  ‘But they’d put you down as a deserter,’ said Taz, incredulous. Then he had a thought. ‘Well, they’d put A. B. Rait down as a deserter.’

  ‘I knew that,’ Richard explained. ‘The only thing I could think of doing was finding you two fellows. So back to the Somme I came, walking all the way, and here I asked to find the 52nd Battalion. When I arrived at the camp, they simply checked my name off the roll and accepted that Archibald Rait had returned from hospital. I said that my records were being sent after me.’

  ‘Clever blooming devil!’ said Frankie, a mischievous glint in his eye.

  ‘When I asked about you two fellows,’ Richard went on, ‘I was told that you were still in hospital and that I was the only member of your old platoon here. So no one was going to give me away. No one knew me. I have simply fo
llowed orders ever since.’

  Both Taz and Frankie roared with laughter and jumped up and shook Richard by the hand.

  In the middle of their reunion, another voice interrupted the merriment. ‘Have any of you blokes seen Archie Rait?’

  The heads of all three spun around. A sergeant was standing in the tent entrance with his hands on his hips.

  ‘Will Eager!’ Frankie exclaimed, recognising the real Archibald Rait’s best friend. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘Nah, the Jerries couldn’t kill me,’ Eager replied. ‘Tough as old boots, I am. Even came out of the last scrap with an extra stripe.’ He patted the sergeant’s stripes on his left arm. ‘You two knew Archie Rait – you were in his platoon. Someone told me yesterday that Archie was back with the battalion.’

  ‘No, mate,’ said Frankie, glancing anxiously at Taz. ‘That’s not right. Someone’s got that wrong.’

  ‘Archie Rait’s dead,’ said Taz, looking at Eager. ‘Frankie and I watched him die in an orchard south of Villers-Bretonneux.’

  ‘On Anzac Day,’ Frankie swiftly added.

  Eager’s smile faded. ‘Really?’

  ‘Cross our hearts and hope to die, mate,’ Frankie assured him.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Taz. ‘Whoever said Rait was still alive is wrong. Without a word of a lie, Rait is dead.’

  ‘Oh,’ Eager groaned. A look of disappointment came over his face, followed by a wave of sadness. His eyes fell absently on Richard, little knowing that this was the Archie Rait who had returned to the battalion. ‘Bugger!’ Without another word, he turned and left.

  Frankie and Taz looked at each other, the blood drained from both their faces. ‘Crikey!’ Frankie said in a low voice. ‘That was close.’

  ‘Wasn’t it just?’ Taz agreed. Both turned their gaze to Richard. ‘We’ll have to do something – and fast!’ said Taz. ‘The three of us. Or all our gooses are cooked.’