The Long Green Shore

by John Hepworth

  It was about this time we found what had apparently been a big Nip base camp—crumbling buildings and piles of incense and rotting junk. We salvaged some postcards out of the mess—miracles of exquisite fragility in design.

  Pez and Janos found the door to the big cave-like room dug out at the back of the store room. Pez kicked the rotting door away and Janos twisted a bunch of dried cane into a torch and lit it. By the flaring, smoky light they could see that the room was crammed with shelves all filled with small metal containers, each bearing numbers and symbols. Pez took one down and opened it. Inside was a handful of ashes.

  ‘Ashes,’ said Janos. ‘Ashes of the dead. They’re names and numbers on those boxes. Christ, there are thousands of them. This was an army.’

  In the smoky red flare of the cane torch, thousands of metal containers crouched on the shelves of that cave-like room, each bearing a name and a number, each containing its handful of ashes.

  This was an army.

  The fantastic news came through the day before we attacked the final hill.

  We got it from the sig wires, up from the beach—it sounded like: ‘They dropped one bomb and a city was destroyed.’ The sig wires kept repeating something about an atomic bomb—atomic bomb. As we were waiting to go down the valley to that hill, everyone was talking about it.

  ‘It sounds fantastic,’ said Harry Drew, ‘but these are days when fantastic things happen—they’ve been splitting the atom for years, of course…’

  ‘Drop another one,’ said Pez. ‘Drop a dozen and finish this bloody business quick.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harry Drew. ‘I don’t know if it’s the sort of thing that should be used—a whole city—women and children.’

  ‘Is one big bomb any different to ten thousand small ones?’ demanded Pez. ‘They kill women and children just the same.’

  ‘It sounds horrible,’ said Janos. ‘It sounds frightening.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Pez, after a pause. ‘It’s frightening—but it might save a lot more lives in the long run.’

  *

  ‘B’ Company were ahead of us and we had to pass through them. Their headquarters were set on a little flat knoll at the junction of three tracks. The Sally tent was set up on the highway and the coffee urns were out and smoking. We stopped for coffee and biscuits and the talk was all of an atom bomb—‘One bomb, one city!’ They were incredulous, and yet it seemed right.

  There was a small graveyard to the right of the track, opposite the Sally tent. There were three crosses and one open pit. As we finished our coffee, and filed away from the tent we could see the Don Company boys bringing the body up from down the valley.

  It was a bad track to the left—knee-deep in black, slimy mud. They had the corpse, wrapped in a grey blanket, lashed to a litter and they had tied themselves to it with ropes.

  The leader would give a shout and they would all fling themselves against the ropes, grunting and plunging against the thick, clinging mud and dragging the corpse and the four men who were carrying and steadying the litter, half a dozen wild staggering yards at a time—until they stopped exhausted and bogged down. All of them—the men on the ropes and the carriers and the corpse on the blanket—were plastered from head to foot in stinking black mud.

  It was young Jimmy Travers—that little fair-haired bloke who came out from doing three months in Groverley only a week before we sailed.

  We are pinned down.

  Right at the foot of the track that clambers crazily up the hillside to the ridge we must win, we are pinned down under fire from the Nip weapon pits that are dotted left to right up the slope—deadly pockmarks on each side of the track.

  We are bound in terror to the earth under their fire. We will never rise.

  But Janos is calling for grenades—and suddenly, incredibly, he is standing—black hail is falling and he is standing! And, incredibly, we are standing, too—and he is screaming: ‘Come on, you bastards! Do you want to live forever?’

  We are running—we are charging—we are shouting! We are gods and madmen! Janos standing and his screaming of that terrible, fatal cry of battle that has been flung down the centuries—it drags us from the earth and storms us—laughing, yelling, screaming, stabbing, snarling, firing—it hurls us up the hill.

  We win the ridge. The enemy is dead behind us, but ahead he still lives. Again we are driven to the earth, and this time we cannot rise. We are bound naked to the earth. Darkness falls, but still we cannot move. We must lie till dawn, clasping the earth in the agony of fear. Until dawn, when our comrades can attack on that other hill.

  It had been dark and filled with death a long, long time. The Nips had been tossing grenades—blast grenades—must have been all they had. There was no shrap, but the concussion beat like a mighty hammer blow on the earth, which shuddered and trembled in your embrace—it smacked like a fist at the nape of your neck.

  Pez could hear Janos’ voice—a long way away, it seemed—small and frightened, whispering: ‘Pez…Pez… Where are you…? Pez… Pez…’

  Pez dragged himself inches into the darkness towards a vague shape that whispered.

  ‘Here, boy, what’s wrong?’

  Janos wriggled swiftly to him: ‘I’m frightened, Pez—it’s getting me—I’m frightened.’

  A blast grenade landed in front of them and crushed them between the earth and sky.

  Janos almost started up. Pez slammed an arm across his shoulders and pinned him back to the earth. ‘Keep still, boy,’ he pleaded. ‘For Christ sake, keep still. We can’t move. We’ve got to wait till morning. We’re in a fold here—we’re safe if we keep still.’

  Janos’ breath was shuddering and his body trembled violently under Pez’s arm. ‘It’s got me, Pez,’ he whispered. ‘I’m frightened.’

  And so, through the long nightmare of darkness, Pez held him to the earth—whispering, pleading with him, and holding his trembling body to the earth.

  We are saved.

  ‘B’ Company attacks with the first light and springs us from the trap. We are haggard and grimed and grey—our eyes burn red in gaunt faces—our hands tremble.

  Pez has to lift Janos to his feet.

  ‘I’m through, boy,’ he whispers. ‘Never again—I can never go again.’

  *

  But we didn’t have to go again.

  Word came through that we were to stay put—patrol our front, but keep out of trouble.

  We built our doover tents on the ridge and on the lip of the gully. We corded the muddy track with scrub timber. The Sally tent moved up to us on the ridge and there was the Sally bloke dishing out hot coffee and biscuits.

  Strange how you grow accustomed to a piece of earth and it is home. This hostile ridge we stormed foam-flanked became familiar in a day—our land—won with blood. Behind that hummock there, the old soldier, Whispering John, had died; the fixed little grin had snarled back when we found him, showing his stained yellow teeth. Near that pit there, young Regan fell with a bullet in his spine—they say he may never walk again.

  We wait.

  There is a swift wing unbeating in the sky; there is a high wind that never stirs a leaf, blowing without a ripple over the Pacific and the whole world—a waiting wind. There is a strange and soundless bugle call frozen like a curlew’s call midway between the earth and stars.

  And at night we lie in our doovers and young Snowy Miller from Don Company up the hill sings the songs—the old songs. He has a choir-boy voice, untrained but sweet and true, and the old songs float down the hill, drifting through the trees…‘I Dream of Jeanie’ and ‘Waken for Me’…

  ‘She’s over,’ the sig wires said. ‘I tell you she’s all wrapped up—she’s buggerup finish—she’s ridge!’

  But nobody really believed it.

  Then Bairdie came up the track and called us together and read it out to us. A personal letter from the General, almost; assuring us that we had won—innings declared.

  And the drums began beating in t
he hills—they throbbed and boomed through the hills all day and into the night—telling the Kanaka boys with the Nips in the mountains, that it was over—no more hide and seek—time to come home for dinner.

  And when the police boys and the carrying parties passed, the boys grinned hugely and stamped their splayed feet in the joyful mud: ‘War bin pfinis—bagerup pfinis—Japan man pfinis—hihihihihihi—plenty kai kai, plenty pom pom—war bagerup—pfinis!’

  Surely one should dance and sing and pound a comrade on the back—we won! But we feel lost and lonely and there’s a breathless wind in the high air. We sit about in our doovers and speak quietly and casually—and it’s only when you look at a man’s eyes that you realise he is seeing something beyond the mountains and the trees—a vast, slow, broken wheel is turning in the sky—and in some strange way he is unbelieving and afraid of what he sees.

  Pez chopped the side out of a biscuit tin and found some black paint somewhere. THE ROAD BACK, he daubed in bold letters and planted it beside their doover, with an arrow pointing back down the track to the sea.

  He spent a deal of time outlining to Janos an ambitiously alcoholic project for the first civilised pub they encountered.

  It was almost dark on the night of the day the war ended when Janos rose to take the first trick at guard.

  ‘How are you feeling, mate?’ asked Pez. ‘I’ll take it if you like.’

  ‘No, I’m all right.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Janos with a grin. ‘I’m a big boy again now—I’m not afraid of the dark any more.’

  He went down to Harry Drew’s doover to get the Owen for guard.

  Those of us further down the hill heard the single, flat explosion of the shot from the crest of the ridge, and the long cry—stretcher bearers! stretcher bearers!—came pelting down the hill.

  We heard their shod feet thudding on the corded track as they ran up the hill and, after a while, we heard them returning—the careful, dragging trample of their feet, as though they carried something heavy.

  ‘What happened?’ someone called from the darkness beside the track.

  ‘Owen went off accidentally.’

  ‘Anyone hurt?’

  ‘Yes, Janos.’

  ‘Is he bad?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  And the earth stood open to receive its dead.

  This man born of woman, who had but a little time of life, lay shrouded in a grey blanket. To lie in cold corruption in the black earth—in the alien earth where the leaves weep for ever for the rainforest.

  Pez and Harry Drew and Sunny dug his grave—narrow and not too deep—and the cross is painted that says, NX13686 Private W. E. Janner.

  The rest of the platoon, loaded ready for the track, stand bareheaded in the rain. Connell, who came up that morning and had waited for the burial, stands behind Pez.

  And when it is done, except for the earth heavy on him, Pez steps forward, and scraping a handful of sticky clay, casts it on him. And Connell steps forward and throws a handful of earth into the pit himself—then walks hurriedly away back down the track.

  The platoon moves off and Pez and Harry Drew and Sunny shovel the thick earth furiously and silently into the pit, smooth the mound and plant the cross at the head.

  They climb into their packs and Pez picks up the ROAD BACK sign that had stood outside their doover.

  He walks to the grave and, bending over awkwardly under the weight of his pack, plants it firmly at the foot, with the arrow pointing away down the track towards the sea.

  Harry Drew leads off the track, with Sunny after him.

  Pez follows.

  The drums are beating in the hills.

  Pez sat in his tent at the new camp on the beach, writing a letter.

  Dear Mrs Janner,

  I am writing this on behalf of the platoon.

  Your son died saving some of our lives.

  We were cut off and surrounded and there was a break made through our lines. Bill stopped that breakthrough and saved us. But he was killed doing it.

  We will never be able to tell you how we felt about him. All we can say is that he died most bravely and he was our friend…

  What the hell! He could have died like that a thousand times—instead of the monstrously stupid chance of a gun going off accidentally.

  Private W. E. Janner…used to know a man once of that name…Janos we called him—the God that looks forward and back.

  Why shouldn’t he write a lie like that to her—it could have been the truth. What the hell would she care, anyway? She never really knew him. All she’d want to do would be to cry over him a little.

  Not that we weep…our hearts are dry—but our brother Janos is dead.

  Pez walked out of the tent and, in the rich moonlight, ploughed across the unfamiliar sand of the new camp to the beach.

  There was a wind blowing high that did not blow. A broken wheel was turning in the sky. There was a bugle call transfixed by the spear of stars, pinned like a curlew call between the earth and sky.

  The bay was empty and the seas stretched barren far away. But soon the seas would bring ships and there would be a coming home and a heart singing. We must go on down a long, long track. But at least when he got home there was a door to knock on—even if an uncertain door.

  God, there must be a meaning. Fiercely he was certain that there must be a meaning.

  Surely, while we live we are not lost.

  Oh Janos, Janos my brother!

  Surely we are not lost—while we live.

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