In spite of the improved route the second stage was a long, extremely hard day. After leaving Uberi the route lay along the river flats for awhile. Then it slanted up a razorback into which more than a thousand steps had been cut. In three or four miles it rose 2000 feet. From the crest was a magnificent prospect of ranges sweeping down into the valley of the Brown River.
The formation of the trail had psychological drawbacks. The more or less regular steps seemed to make the going more difficult than an unimproved native trail, where stepping from root to root broke the monotony even if it slowed progress. At the foot of Uberi ridge a severe rainstorm caught us in the early afternoon. Parer started worrying about his film again, but I found the rain refreshing, the violent claps of thunder stimulating.
Eoribaiwa village stood on the top of a 2500-foot ridge. The engineers had let in 4000 steps on the approach. That night I saw what the country could do to raw troops. A detachment of engineers came in behind us in full marching order. Most of them were big men and fit by normal standards. They made the last few 100 feet of climb out of the valley in five- or ten-yard bursts. Half of them dropped where they stood when they reached the plateau. Their faces were bluish grey with strain, their eyes starting out. They were long beyond mere breathlessness. The air pumped in and out of them in great, sticky sobs; and they had 100 miles of such travelling ahead.
Parer again distinguished himself for guts. Clipped by a sharp dose of fever – his first acute attack – pale, streaming profusely with sweat, and at the same time shivering violently, he refused stubbornly to stop. In the morning, almost forcibly, I made him split his pack between us. He would stop every hour or so, reeling on his feet, and protest that he was capable of carrying his own gear.
The ‘beef’ was vanishing from chubby Wilmot before our eyes. His technique of travel was amusing. Downhill he took terrific, two-yard strides that would have broken my ankles. He went like a whirlwind, outstripping the rest by miles. But when we struck the next hill, we drew even. Halfway up we would pass him hoisting one leg after the other with agonised slowness. Three hundred yards away his grunts, groans, whistlings and profane cries were audible. He clawed his way to the crest and fell flat on his face. If he had not been strong as an ox he would have scrambled his guts. He was the wrong build for this sort of work – but the right temperament. He was still grunting, cursing and whistling at the end of the day – and still travelling.
There was rain every afternoon. The nights were getting chillier as we climbed, and the staging camps were yet inadequate. I could hardly believe that 2000 troops, raw to such conditions, had passed that way and left so few stragglers. They were men of great heart.
The Koiari villages, used as a basis for the reconstruction of the staging camps, had originally been only half a dozen poky, palmplaited huts, with bamboo flooring. Now most of the men had been recruited for carriers or had ‘gone bush’ in the hills.
The Koiari were a fine people, very dark-skinned with a peculiar hair-do – a bun worn squarely on top of the head. Physically they were robust and more free from skin diseases than any other Papuan natives I had seen. Despite close proximity to Moresby, they had resisted the ‘civilising’ influence and until a few years ago the coast villagers lived in terror of their raids. The tribe showed surprisingly little resentment of the sudden and bewildering invasion of their domain by a white army. The men, accepting the patrol officers’ explanation that the Japanese were bad people who would loot their gardens and steal their women, were serving willingly on the carrier lines. The women were employed weaving palm thatch for troop shelters.
When the main forces moved through, however, only about a quarter of the troops could be got under shelter at night. They had been forced by the severity of the going to discard more of their already cut-to- the-bone equipment. Hundreds of men slept in the mud. They had been issued one blanket and one ground sheet to six or seven men. They had already been drenched to the skin by the afternoon rain. Sometimes the downpour did not ease off but continued half the night and was followed by a piercingly cold, early-morning wind. Open fires were forbidden and, in any case, could scarcely have been tended. The march to Myola had taken from seven to ten days. It was not hard to imagine the condition the men were now in – long before beginning the serious business of fighting the Japs.
The third day out, fever started to creep up on me again. I declined to emulate Parer and stopped at Menari village to give the quinine a chance to work. We were all glad of the break. All day I lay on the veranda slats feeling half dead. I had a bad cold and a painful cough.
The natives here were restive because some of the troops had been raiding their banana and pawpaw patches. The patrol officers were worried because the headmen demanded not compensation but the punishment of the culprits. They refused to accept beef and rice in payment for the damage done. They wanted justice.
This was the type of minor slip-up in discipline that could have had very serious consequences. Few people realise how completely we were dependent on native goodwill.
After leaving Menari we met two wounded men coming out from Kokoda and Deniki – men of the 39th Battalion. One had been shot through the foot, the other through the left eye. The bullet had passed obliquely and shallowly through his skull from just above the cheekbone, and emerged behind the ear. He complained of severe headache, but said the wound itself was not painful. The man with the bullet through his foot was leading him. The pair had walked 113 miles in 16 days. They expected to reach the road-head in another five.
A little later we passed three more wounded men. The first was shot through the shoulder, the second through the thigh, and the third had a badly shattered hand. They were jubilant because they had wounds that would earn them home-leave. They had been nine days on the trail.
None wanted to talk about the Kokoda fighting. They merely said that the Japs were hard to see in the bush, but that the 39th had got amongst them in the rubber plantation and inflicted high casualties. What impressed me most deeply about these wounded was their apparent desensitisation. They were completely inured to suffering. They accepted it as an integral part of living. Pain was as much a part of their day as eating and sleeping. True, t would have been easy. But they did not want to live too much. They were not afraid.
Swinburne’s prayer ‘From too much love of living, from hope and fear set free …’ had a new meaning to me now. I knew why a medical officer in Moresby said forebodingly: ‘God knows how we are going to get the wounded out. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
*
To make up for the day lost at Menari, we decided to travel a double stage at Lake Myola. It was a 15-hour walk. I sweated heavily. My very skin ached. It hurt to breathe deeply – yet it was strangulation to try and moderate that painful breathing.
Blue valley after blue valley. Ridge and valley, and valley and ridge. Mile upon endless mile of hills seen from open patches of grassland. There was a detour about Kagi – a russet, round thatched village clinging to its jungle crag. There were pole fences about overgrown yam and sweet-potato fields. It was blue country, all covered with a mantle of majestic cloud and mist. We went up a dizzy ridge that rose and kept rising, topless. The sky was growing black with night. The storms of the afternoon merged into one continuous downpour. The last four hours’ going was along the gutterlike detour.
On Myola ridge the forest was very dense and the trail laced over by huge roots and fantastically wide tree buttresses. The passage of troops and carriers had churned the footway into a knee-deep glutinous quagmire. A sentry challenged. He stood out and flashed a torch over us. His steel helmet was already red with rust. He had wrapped a ground sheet around him for warmth. He was saturated and plastered with mud from head to foot. He had not been dry since he left Moresby. Behind him, three others had managed to get a small, smoky fire going. They were crouched over it, too dispirited even to look up. The rain trickled in streams from their backs and helmets.
Headquarte
rs was a mile farther on. Ten miles would have been all the same to me. It is difficult to describe the abysmal depression that had me in its grip. The rain did not vary in intensity for as much as a minute – an endless, drumming, chilling deluge. It roared and rustled and sighed on the broad leaves of the jungletop. It soaked through the green pandanus thatches of shelters and spilled clammy cascades upon the bowed backs of exhausted men. It swamped cooking fires. Creeks ran in every hollow. One’s very bones seemed softened by the wetness.
We reported at the command post. We were given lukewarm stew and rice in a muddy mess tin, and I drank three mugs of tea that tasted rankly of rotten leaf mold. We were assigned shelter. The camp had been erected too hastily to allow such luxuries as slat floors. Bed was a ground sheet and blanket in four inches of mud. The mud would have been liquid if it had not been bound together with rotten fern fronds and sticks. In the morning the rain stopped for the first time in a week. I spent a few hours soaking up sun and drying out gear, but my cold was steadily getting worse.
The ‘lake’ was 300 or 400 acres of kunai grass and reeds on a mud pan. But for the danger of Japanese aircraft, it would have been infinitely preferable as a campsite to the dank jungle skirting it. Nevertheless the 14th Battalion had crept cautiously out of the bush and made a collection of tiny grass shelters hard to spot from the air. They were full of scorpions and beetles, but better than depressing green huts under cover of the forest.
When the rain clouds started to collect again I stirred myself and gathered a large bundle of reeds which, laid latticewise on the mud of the floor, kept the ground sheet and blanket clear of the muck.
The second morning at Myola I was lying in the sun sound asleep when transport planes started to drop supplies. A wild Australian flying an old DH 86 nearly brained me with a case of canned beef. The Lodestars and the DC2s could come in low enough to drop accurately. They had the power to climb out steeply. But the unhappy Australian had to unload his cargo at 500 feet, and most of it fell well out in the bush. It was fascinating to watch cases of canned beef explode as they hit ground. The gold-coloured cans scattered like shrapnel.
Most unenvied job at the lake was that of ‘marker’. The marker had to stand perilously close to the dropping area and take compass bearings on bundles that undershot or overshot clear ground. The bush was so dense that only a small percentage were ever recovered, even though scores of natives were employed searching. The total loss, including food or material damaged beyond use by the fall, was about 25 per cent of the cargoes. Even so, the transports put down as much as 25 tons in a day. Supply parachutes, then scarce, were used only to deliver mortar bombs and fuses and machine-gun ammunition.
The force now had five complete three-inch mortars and about 300 bombs. These had gone down front. Everybody was reassured by the presence of ‘artillery!’ News came through that the 39th had been forced back from Deniki and that the 16th was relieving it on a line that ran through the village of Isurava. This meant that the Japs were at last getting into the Owen-Stanleys themselves and that something was wrong.
Supply difficulties were self-evident. Planes were reported to be making experimental droppings at the villages on the trail between Myola and Moresby. Several men had been killed or injured by packages crashing through the grass roofs of the huts.
The third day at Myola we heard that the situation at Isurava was deteriorating. The Japs had anticipated the push on Kokoda and had hit first. We decided to move forward immediately.
From Myola to Templeton’s Crossing was the worst stage on the Owen-Stanley trail. For long stretches it was precipitous – no more than a muddy cleft in a clay cliff, down which one swung on lawyer vines and supple branches made ragged and greasy by thousands of pairs of clutching hands.
More and more wounded or sick were coming back along this fearful route. Most of them were walking skeletons. Their eyes were bright with fever. They travelled a few yards in a burst, then paused. You could see the loose skin on the sides of their necks palpitating like a lizard’s throat. Their greeting was unvaried. They said ‘Good day, dig. Pretty tough, eh?’ – and grinned. The grin didn’t mean anything – or did it?
Templeton’s Crossing was a dry camp with kunda bunks by the riverbank. We stayed the night and pushed on.
I will never forget the scene as Eora came into sight halfway down the last ridge. Hundreds of men were standing about in mud that came up to their shins. The whole village, built of pandanus and grass, looked as if it were about to founder in the sea of mud. The huts leaned drunkenly. There were piles of broken-out ration boxes and firewood half submerged. The men were slimed from head to foot, for weeks unshaven, their skins bloodless under their filth.
Lines of exhausted carriers were squatting on the fringes of this congregation eating muddy rice off muddy banana leaves. Their woolly hair was plastered with rain and muck. Their eyes were rolling and bloodshot with the strain of long carrying. Some of them were still panting.
It was Mubo Gorge over again – only this time there was a whole army in the jungle instead of a few bands of elusive scouts. Machinegun fire was almost continuous. A Jap .50 caliber was going dub-dubdub away in the east. They said the Japs were gradually cracking us. The 2nd/16th was moving into position. The 53rd militia had broken on the right flank and was on the run.
*
It took great effort to write coherent notes on the happenings of the next few days. It was impossible to say: ‘This happened, and then this happened.’ Everything was confusion.
Parer, excited by so much cinematic material at Eora, decided to stay there and get it on celluloid while he could. Wilmot and I joined a small party of stragglers from the 16th going down to battalion positions. All distinguishing insignia had to be taken off because the Japs were reputed to have an uncanny ability to spot officers. Losses among commissioned men had been disproportionately high. We went down, stumbling and teetering over bad log crossings. Machine-gun fire sounded, without intermission, from the hills on either side.
The Japanese were ‘infiltrating’. Their patrols had penetrated far into the hills on the flanks of the trail positions. Indeed, they ignored the positions we were anxious to defend, and were striking out boldly into the trailless forest of the high hills. Our men were not prepared for such tactics. The bulk of them were troops trained for desert warfare. They were more than half afraid of the country. You could see that in their movements, in their whole attitude. They were far more afraid of the country than the Japanese.
They were continually worried by the idea of being ‘cut off’. To their minds, being cut off meant that one must wander in the jungle, wander in the hills, wander in the valleys … up and down and up and down those heartbreaking razorbacks, until one died of hunger or exhaustion.
You could see them thinking that way. The commandos on Huon Gulf thought that way until they learned better – until they learned that it was almost as easy to move off the trails as on them. A bushman thought of these hills as friends to conceal and protect him; a formally trained soldier thought of them as deadly enemies eternally ready to baffle and trap him.
I travelled for awhile with a young officer belatedly going down to join his unit. He had gone off into the bush at Myola to look for an overshot load of air-dropped mortar bombs. He had not gone half a mile before he lost himself. He wandered for four days before he managed to get direction again from listening to the sound of the planes dropping loads on the lake. No-one could blame the man for his lack of bushcraft. But the troops were being led by such men as he – men never trained to be bushmen; men who never could be bushmen, because they lacked the instinct.
Machine-gun fire became more intense as we went on. Most of it was on the fl anks, but some was dead ahead and we heard one or two bursts directly behind us. The Japs had moved on without opposition to Kagi Ridge, and it seemed as if Myola itself might already have fallen to a flanking attack. Occasionally there would be the dull, echoing crash of an exploding mor
tar bomb. Absolutely nothing could be seen.
It was uncanny. The bullets made a strange noise among the leaves – a low, deadly whispering. The whispering could be heard before the rattle of the discharge. The enemy was holding positions on the other side of the river and kept up an intermittent fire on every clearing. There were numerous clearings, and to pass them we divided up into twos and threes and dashed across them bent double.
After a time my nerve broke under the constant gauntlet running and I refused to play. Every time we approached an open space I would detour into the bush and scramble along the clay scarps under cover – or worm a way through the dense undergrowth. This proved just as rapid a means of getting to the other side of the clearing as the more direct method. More and more wounded and stragglers were coming back. The engagement was becoming really heavy.
Three hours out from Eora, we learned that the Japanese had been mortaring the brigade headquarters position. Elsewhere they were using .50-caliber guns to clear fields of fire. Large sections of the forest were rotten with fungus and it was possible to cut down sizeable trees with a few well-placed bursts.
The whole battle had become a blind groping in a tangle of growth. One party came in with a story of having travelled for miles just under the crest of a steep ridge, parallel with a party of Japanese. No-one on either side was willing to show his head against the skyline for a shot, so they fought it out by tossing grenades at one another over the crest. The Mills grenade won. It had real, lethal quality. The Japanese were using a light grenade. One man of the patrol had his teeth knocked out by a Japanese grenade striking him in the mouth. It fell to his feet and exploded. All he suffered in addition to his loss of teeth was a peppering of shrapnel in one thigh.
Eyewitness Page 23