The Long Green Shore

by John Hepworth

  Scratching around the camp one afternoon, Pez and Janos found themselves caught between sundown and darkness in the mess hut. It was a strange feeling—suddenly the light was grey and the beach was desolate. Everything seemed very silent, as though there were watchers in the fringe of the scrub and in the shadows of the sand dunes.

  The flywire door, torn off its hinges, flapped mournfully against the wall. It was some distance down the beach to their own camp—the tents were out of sight. No one was visible on the beach—it might have been the end of the world.

  ‘What the hell are you running for?’ grinned Janos as they went back down the beach quicker than was really necessary.

  ‘That place didn’t feel as though it liked having me there,’ said Pez.

  The Yank rations are so good that even their rubbish dumps have better food than we’ve got in our kitchens. Every tent is crowded now with tins of pineapple and peanut butter and assorted stews and hashes. In some of the field rations there are cigarettes and glucose lollies. At night we drink American coffee and munch American-issue chocolate (made in Australia, but not for us) and puff American cigarettes.

  There is a deal of discussion about the Yanks. They are all right—they fight well, when they can throw a couple of hundred tonnes of high explosive into a position. They live too well—compared with us, that is. They get too much money—compared with us. They talk as though no one else was fighting the war. They take our girls. ‘Over-dressed, over-paid, over-sexed and over here.’

  All that’s left of them here now is the sustaining rubbish dump of their food, and after a few days the Laird passes the general judgment on that: ‘It’s all right,’ he says, lifting his nose from a dixie of American corned beef hash and baked beans. ‘It’s all right for a change, but it’s too sweet and too soft. For the track—for the hard road—give me our old bully and biscuits. You’d go further on a tin of bully and a packet of dog biscuits than you’d go on a hundredweight of this stuff.’

  Things are pretty quiet here.

  Only one night Regan gets frightened by the shadows on the beach during his guard. Dick the Barber comes on as his relief. Dick comes up softly through the sand without him hearing and when Regan looks up and sees this figure standing beside him he drops his rifle and runs screaming along the beach.

  We found him a couple of hundred yards along where he had fallen in the sand and couldn’t rise again for terror.

  We got him back to the tent and Pez feeds him the quick cup of coffee Brogan put on. The Laird and Harry Drew are quietly recalling how frightened they’ve been from time to time by shadows: ‘I would have screamed then,’ the Laird recalls, ‘but I couldn’t.’

  Doc Maguire walked into the tent. There was a moment’s silence and no one seemed to know what to say.

  ‘I heard someone,’ said the Doc. ‘Young Cliffie told me it was down here—I thought somebody might be hurt.’

  ‘No,’ said Pez. ‘Just one of our blokes got a bit of a scare and gave a bit of a yell—he’s not hurt.’

  The Doc was looking at Regan where he sat huddled on the bed: ‘Fear can hurt, too. Are you feeling all right, lad?’

  There was silence in the tent and all eyes turned to Regan—some things a man has to say for himself.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll be OK, Doc,’ managed Regan.

  ‘I thought maybe he should come up to RAP for the night. We could send him to sleep, make sure he got a good rest.’

  ‘I think he’s better here, Doc,’ said Pez. ‘I think he’s better with us.’

  The Doc looked round the tent: ‘Yes—maybe you’re right.’

  There was a long pause. The Doc didn’t offer to go. A decision was made and approved by all without a word being spoken.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee, Doc?’ said Pez. ‘We just made a quick brew.’

  ‘Sure,’ said the Doc. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Here’s a mug,’ said Bishie, emptying the dregs of his coffee.

  Pez sloshed some water from the bucket and washed the grounds out. The Laird had the billy ready and filled the chipped enamel mug generously.

  ‘Milk?’ said Pez, reaching for the condensed milk tin.

  ‘No thanks, Pez,’ said the Doc. He sat on the edge of the bed beside Regan and ladled sugar from the biscuit tin container that Pez presented to him with the air of a host.

  Medals and strips of ribbon are hard-won things and you can wear them proudly if you have that sort of pride. But there are other things—more common, more generously given, but harder to win—particularly for officers, harder to win. We are brothers, we are men. Our words will never say the things we mean—but living we will drink to you. Dead—our hearts will weep for you.

  The Doc sat on the edge of the bed and sipped from Bishie’s chipped enamel mug.

  ‘Bloody good coffee,’ he said.

  The Nip was down the road too far to do any damage to us but you could get the scent of him—that rotten-sweet incense smell he left behind him in the jungle.

  His burned, shrapnel-pocked trucks stood along the side of the road—under some of them a crumbling skeleton. Rusting iron push-carts, jungle carts, were scattered round in the undergrowth with pieces of rotting webbing equipment. There were scores of Nip rifles—mostly broken and half-burned—and clips of ammunition half-buried in the sand.

  There seemed to be a strange foreign significance to all this junk. You never actually thought it, but you felt: ‘This was the enemy; he lived here; he used these things. This rising sun laid out in wood, with the heart burned black and dead—this was his cook-fire.’

  The enemy is always strange and there is a faint awfulness about the place where he has been. For you can never imagine the enemy as just a man—if you could, perhaps you would never kill him.

  The poker game was going one afternoon; Laird was darning a pair of socks and Deacon was contemplating his letter to Margaret, when Dick the Barber stuck his head in the flap and announced:

  ‘They ate the bookie from the Fourth Batallion.’

  He was a nice bloke, the Fourth Battalion bookie. He laid fair odds and you could always be sure of the dough come settling day. Not like Scottie of the Second who welshed on a good book and went through sooner than pay—even though he had plenty socked away at home, money that he’d made from the game. A loud-mouthed alec, Scottie had always been. But the bookie from the Fourth—he was a quiet sort of a guy; he’d done a bit of pencilling before the war and set up in business for himself when he enlisted.

  A patrol had gone out across the river and run into an ambush. They had two killed and hadn’t been able to get the bodies out with them when they withdrew. Next day they attacked and recovered the bodies; but when they got them they found the brains, kidneys and liver had been cut out and slices of flesh cut from the buttocks.

  Harry Drew sucked strenuously at the gurgling bowl of his pipe: ‘Yes. We struck that last time in the Owen Stanleys—about Templeton’s Crossing—up above the Crossing I think it was. We found the bodies with the flesh cut off the backsides and we found fresh meat in the dixies round their cook-fires later on. But whether they were eating it themselves or feeding it to their dogs—they had a lot of dogs with them—we never really found out.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d fancy being eaten,’ says Janos. ‘Not that it matters when a man’s dead—but somehow I don’t think I’d fancy it.’

  ‘No,’ grinned Pez. ‘It’s sort of undignified.’

  Deacon, lounging back on his bed, head propped up on his webbing pack, flicked a cigarette butt through the flap of the tent with careful concentration before he spoke: ‘That’s a question—how hungry would you have to be before you’d eat human flesh? A question. Myself, I reckon I came pretty close to it that last time. They say it tastes like pork.’

  ‘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 cigar
ette—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.