Amongst the Dead

by Robert Gott

  The lorries were brutal, but the train from Larrimah to Katherine put paid to any notion that soldiering generally, and entertaining specifically, were glamorous. We were herded into cattle trucks still redolent of their former occupants, and the symbolism wasn’t lost on me, I can assure you. I was too discreet to mention slaughter and abattoirs to the men around me, although I did make the observation, sotto voce, to Brian, who nodded and disconcertingly pointed out that the irony extended to us as much as to anyone else. He was right, of course, and it is a testament to the understanding between us that I wasn’t in the least irritated by this, and confined my response to pointing out that ‘irony’ wasn’t really the word he was looking for.

  When we arrived in Katherine it was just before lunchtime, and we were in the process of locating the members of the concert party when Sergeant Rothfield, the show’s producer, whom I had barely seen since our arrival in Maryborough, found us.

  ‘Slight change of plan,’ he said, and he made no attempt to disguise his annoyance.

  ‘You three have been redeployed. No idea why. It’s not my business, but it leaves us short for tonight’s performance, which is my problem, but a pain in the arse.’

  I tried to look both sympathetic and surprised, an unexpectedly difficult combination. He indicated a vehicle parked beneath a spindly tree, making it clear that this was to take us somewhere. It was what the Americans might call a ‘jalopy,’ and was in such a parlous state of disrepair and so rusted that it didn’t look so much as though it had been parked near salt water for an age, but that it had been parked in salt water. If this was representative of the North Australia Observers’ Unit’s clout when it came to requisitioning necessary materials, we really were on our own. The driver was a man who was on the wrong side of fifty — one of those men who’d lied about his age in order to serve (lowering it, rather than raising it) — and he was dressed in a strange amalgam of the familiar and the antiquated. It transpired that this was the unit’s non-combative dress, and it consisted of Australian Light Horse surplus from the First World War.

  We drove in silence some small distance out of what I supposed was the town, and stopped in a sparsely wooded place which was busy with men and vehicles. There were a few substantial buildings, but most of the accommodation was in tents, and many of these had their canvasses propped up with rough bush-timbers. This was the beating heart of the NAOU. Aesthetics were not as important, it transpired, as the fact that the camp was difficult to see from the air because it nestled amongst the comparatively riparian fertility of this section of the Katherine River. When it was pointed out to me that Katherine had been bombed several times, the drab tents suddenly assumed a more pleasing aspect.

  The three of us were shown into a large tent, one whole side of which was open: it held a motorbike, several drums of what was possibly fuel, crates, small boxes and, at one end, a desk, unattended at the time. We were soon joined by a soldier who took up his position behind the desk without uttering a word, as if he were too distracted to notice that three people were standing before him. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. His only clothing was a pair of shorts, boots, socks, and a well-worn hat which he placed on the edge of the desk. Clearly the more formal attire of our driver was reserved for excursions outside Unit HQ. He must have been forty, although he looked somewhat haggard, despite a torso that was fit and hard. His hair was cut very short, and looked like it had been hacked haphazardly by himself without the aid of a mirror.

  ‘Captain Manton,’ he said, and didn’t offer us the opportunity to introduce ourselves. ‘I’ll be perfectly frank with you blokes. I have no fucking idea what you’re doing here or why I’m expected to hold your hands.’

  Glen unexpectedly raised his hands and said firmly, ‘See these hands? No one’s asking you to hold them. Sir.’

  Captain Manton shook his head.

  ‘You don’t look like Nackeroos, but you’ve got their fucking attitude to discipline.’

  His tone softened slightly, but he still didn’t encourage introductions. Doubtless he already knew who we were, but I didn’t see why courtesy had to be added to this war’s crowded casualty list.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We all know better than to ask too many questions in this unit. My instructions are to provide you with some specialist kit, which doesn’t amount to much more than a long-sleeved shirt and a hat with insect netting. You’re leaving in an hour, in a truck driven by one of our blokes. He’s experienced, and you should get to Darwin in one piece late tonight, unless he does an axle.’

  My heart sank at the prospect of more hours spent rumbling over corrugations. My face must have given me away because Captain Manton added, ‘The road between here and Darwin’s been upgraded and it’s not too bad. If rain holds off you shouldn’t be delayed. Get yourselves some lunch and be back here in an hour.’

  He stood, and seemed to be expecting a salute. When nothing eventuated he sighed, and muttered an inaudible imprecation before leaving us.

  The mess hut was inside a large, corrugated-iron shed, and the food provided, despite the constant attention of flies, was quite satisfactory, although its adequacy might have been the result of its comparison to tinned peaches.

  The truck that was to take us to Darwin was driven by a teenager who said he was twenty. I would’ve been unsurprised to learn that he was twelve. His name was Pete, and he displayed all the pointless enthusiasm of youth. The truck, requisitioned in Darwin — its windshield bore half-a-dozen bullet holes, the consequence of its having been strafed during a bombing raid — was the first vehicle he’d ever driven, and he felt for it as one might for a living, breathing creature. Since being assigned as its driver he’d crawled over and under it and he spoke of it with the intimate familiarity of a gynaecologist.

  ‘She’s got expensive taste in oil,’ Pete said. ‘Four gallons every hundred miles.’

  There was pride in his voice as he described the truck’s inefficient, oil-guzzling capacity, as if it were a personal extravagance that was an expression of class.

  I volunteered to sit in the back with the oil drums as companions, generously leaving the front seat to Brian and Glen, who would earn their relative comfort by conversing with Pete.

  The allegedly upgraded road remained an allegation as far as I could tell, and it was busy with traffic, all of it military. It wasn’t possible to sleep, though I had to close my eyes against the glare and dust. I thought of my parents, who’d spent what my mother called her ‘year of heat’ in Darwin and Broome more than thirty years previously. My acquaintance with ‘north of somewhere’ had so far been brief, and I supposed that its attraction had yet to reveal itself, but I couldn’t imagine Mother moving through this humidity, heat, and dirt, to say nothing of the insect life, with anything approaching equanimity.

  In mid-afternoon rain fell, or rather it flowed from the sky as if a vast reservoir somewhere above had been breached. This was my first experience of the Wet — and it was a Wet that would prove to be the most unpleasant on record. If my mother’s year had been one of heat, mine would turn out to be one of mould.

  Miraculously, despite the road becoming a river of churned mud, Pete’s truck remained mobile. Where the way was impassable, small detours had been cut into the scrub, and a corduroy track laid. There was no danger of losing our way, having joined a sort of unofficial convoy. The going was slow, although the traffic thinned as trucks pulled out at Mataranka, Adelaide River, and Batchelor. We passed roadblocks into Darwin just after 1.00 a.m. In the darkness I had no sense that there was a town there at all — I could only make out the shadowy forms of low trees and what looked like the shattered silhouettes of one or two bombed houses. The air was tainted with the unmistakeable odour of something rotting.

  Pete, who said he was following orders, dropped us at the Sergeants’ Mess at Larrakeyah Barracks. The tropical night was faintly luminous, and I was
surprised when I looked about me to see the dark outlines of substantial, undamaged buildings. Not even the thinnest thread of light escaped from any of them. We farewelled Pete, who disappeared into the night and, not knowing what else to do, knocked. There was no reply, so we entered and groped our way to a further door. A faint nimbus around it indicated life within. We went in, without knocking this time, and came upon two men, both smoking and wearing what I was to learn was the uniform of the north, mosquitoes permitting — a pair of shorts and boots, and nothing else, apart from a tin hat when danger threatened.

  ‘What are you blokes doing here?’ one of them asked, and managed to sound pompous despite wearing no shirt. ‘This is the Sergeants’ Mess.’

  ‘It’s all right, Bill. They’re expected.’

  The voice came from behind us. He must have followed us in. He was more formally dressed than his fellow sergeants, if the addition of a sweat-stained shirt can be called formal. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five-years old, but there was something about him that was grave and impressive, and it didn’t come from his rank. It occurred to me, as I saw the other men defer subtly and without rancour to him, that if he survived the war he’d amount to something.

  ‘Luther Martin,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘My parents thought it was amusing.’

  ‘I imagine the joke’s worn a bit thin over the years,’ I said.

  He smiled, and revealed a startling gold cap over one of his front teeth.

  ‘By the age of twelve I was choosing my friends on the basis of whether or not they resisted the temptation to say anything.’

  He didn’t sound like a soldier, but I suppose in a time of war the army is full of people who aren’t by inclination military men.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ he said. It was then that I noticed that the room was furnished with an eclectic mix of domestic chairs and sofas.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Glen said. ‘I feel like I’m in somebody’s lounge room.’

  ‘In a way you are,’ Luther said. ‘It’s all looted from houses around here.’

  He shot the other two sergeants a glance.

  ‘Hey,’ the one he’d called Bill said, ‘I wasn’t even here when all that was going on.’

  ‘Neither was I,’ said his mate. ‘We all sit in them, though, don’t we?’

  Luther acknowledged the justice of the remark with a cock of the head, and explained.

  ‘Back in February, after the first raids, blokes went a bit crazy. The civilians had been mostly evacuated, so their houses were unprotected, and lots of blokes — army blokes, mind you — had a field day. You hear stories of bloody grand pianos being loaded onto trucks. What the hell would you do with a grand piano?’

  ‘Maybe it’s in the officers’ mess,’ Brian said.

  They laughed.

  ‘Well, anyway, it was a bloody disgrace,’ Luther said.

  ‘Better to be sitting on it than just letting it get blown to pieces,’ said Bill.

  ‘So it’ll be returned, will it, if the house survives and the owners come back?’ asked Luther.

  ‘The spoils of war, mate.’

  ‘As a general rule,’ Luther said calmly, ‘that’s meant to refer to stuff you win from the enemy, not old Mrs Whatever-her-name-is who lives in Cavenagh Street.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ was the response, and it was clear that no one was interested in pursuing the ethical ambiguities of looting. Luther told us then that we could expect an air raid, but that the barracks probably wouldn’t be heavily attacked.

  ‘Unlike the RAAF base,’ he said, ‘we’ve never been carpet-bombed. The odd high explosive job, daisy cutters, strafing, but they’ve chosen not to reduce us to rubble. Some bloke reckons he heard from someone in Intelligence that the Japs want to use the barracks after they invade. Makes sense, I suppose. It’s not like we’re hard to see.’

  ‘Those bastards bombed the crap out of the hospital,’ said the man who wasn’t Bill, ‘and it’s only a hundred yards away.’

  A few minutes later, the wail of an air-raid siren sounded, and we were bundled outside into the uncertain safety of a slit trench.

  I don’t know how many bombs fell, or even how long the raid took. The crump and thump of bombs and ack ack fire, the squall of shrapnel and mosquitoes, and a terrifying sense that I was about to die, all conspired to make time stand still. As the noise faded and I realised that all I could hear was the mosquitoes droning, someone gave me a small shove to indicate that it was safe to stand up. Spears of bright search-light flew upwards, and the air was thick with the awful smell of explosives. An incendiary had hit a building a small distance away, and men were already scrabbling to put out the flames. I was glad of the darkness because I was afraid the people around me might see my trembling as unmanly.

  ‘Not a bad show,’ someone said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I thought. ‘Let’s bring on the fucking dancing girls.’

  We returned to the Sergeants’ Mess with Luther. The others went off to help put out fires and assess the damage.

  ‘I don’t think people down south know that Darwin is still being bombed like this,’ Brian said. Luther crossed to a desk and withdrew from a drawer a sheet of paper with the words ‘Army News’ in a banner across the top.

  ‘This came out two days after the first raid. The twenty-first of February. Printed here. Not a bad effort, considering.’

  I ran my eye over it, expecting to read something significant about the bombing. It turned out that it wasn’t considered sufficiently important to warrant more than a few bland paragraphs. Or, rather, it was considered so important that it had to be censored into nothingness. There was an assurance from the Honourable A.S. Drakeford, Minister for Air, that service casualties numbered only eight. Bizarrely, no mention was made of the fact that the harbour had been attacked or that bombs had fallen in the centre of town.

  ‘Not quite the truth?’ I asked.

  ‘The truth is that that first raid was devastating. God knows how many hundreds of people were killed in the town and in the harbour — especially the harbour. The RAAF base was more or less destroyed. I’ve heard stories that there were so many casualties that bodies had to buried wherever a convenient place could be found for them, and that crocodiles kept digging them up and taking chunks out of them.’

  ‘That certainly didn’t make it into The Age or The Argus,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll see tomorrow that Darwin doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s just a whole lot of soldiers wandering around in rubble.’

  ‘Civilians?’

  ‘A handful. The blacks and the whites were evacuated. There are some nurses. A few others. Something else you won’t read about in the papers? After the RAAF base was carpet-bombed, the airmen there were spooked, and just up and left. Headed south to Adelaide River, that’s what I’m told. The Adelaide River Stakes, they called it. They couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Officers, too. Some blokes I’ve spoken to reckon they were told to go bush. I don’t know if they were scared, or just confused and poorly led. Most of them came back eventually. Thank God for the Yanks. I’ll tell you something: you won’t hear a bad word said about the Yanks up here. They’re bloody marvellous.’

  Glen, who’d said very little, suddenly spoke up. ‘The bloody Japs are going to do it, aren’t they? They’re really going to land here. They’re actually going to invade.’

  There wasn’t the slightest trace of fear in his voice. I imagine his experiences in Milne Bay had steeled him against panic — but neither was there any excitement. He was simply expressing a reasonable assumption. Luther nodded.

  ‘That seems to be the general view. If Port Moresby falls to the Japs, we’re next. Like I said, thank God for the Yanks.’

  Brian, whose nerves were doubtless as shaken as mine by the air raid, cut across the conversation and aske
d rather sharply, ‘So what are we doing here? I mean here, in the Sergeants’ Mess? Why the privilege?’

  I couldn’t see that sitting in an ugly room full of stolen furnishings was a privilege, but I took his point. We ought to have been banished to barracks that housed soldiers without rank; unless, of course, James Fowler had been wrong, and Army Intelligence had alerted a few people up here to who we were and what our mission was. When I thought about this mission I realised that I hadn’t allowed myself to ponder its magnitude, except in the beginning when it had seemed as safe and uncomplicated as a parlour game, where simple deduction would solve the puzzle. Who is killing the Nackeroos? No worries. William Power will find out for you. I think it was the shrapnel that made me wonder if I hadn’t over-reached myself on this occasion.

  ‘The army,’ said Luther, ‘despite all appearances to the contrary, is an efficient bureaucracy. I asked the Amenities people to do me a favour and lend me some entertainers from one of the concert parties, just for one day for a specialised job. You were volunteered.’

  ‘By whom?’ Glen asked.

  ‘I just do the paperwork. I put in the request, and it came back in the affirmative.’

  ‘All this sounds a bit irregular,’ Brian said, although he couldn’t possibly know what was or wasn’t regular in the army.