The Cadet Corporal

by Christopher Cummings

  “Take out your notebooks and copy this down,” he ordered.

  “I haven’t got a notebook,” replied Andrews.

  “Nor have I,” added Dianne.

  “Why not? You were told to bring one to camp,” Graham replied. Then he realized he was wasting time. He tore several pages out of his own notebook and passed his spare pencil to Dianne. Roger gave Andrews a pencil. The message was letters in Trigrams and Graham now read them out. To his annoyance he found that neither Andrews nor Halyday understood what he meant. As quickly as he could he explained, then said, “Now, Roger, you do the ‘Alternate letters’ method. Pat, you do the ‘every second letter’ method. Kirsty, you use the Trigram sheet. Lucy, you use the codewheel. Dianne, you try the ‘writing normally but grouping’ method. Halyday, you try ‘writing backwards’.”

  “But I can’t write backwards,” Halyday cried.

  “Can’t write at all!” teased Andrews.

  “Stop the teasing Cadet Andrews!” Graham snapped. He shook his head in exasperation and turned to Halyday. “You don’t write backwards. You take the last letter and put it first, then the second last and put it second, and so on till you see if it makes a word.”

  “What about me?” Andrews asked.

  “Help Halyday,” Graham cried. He then set to work writing out two alphabets along the edges of two pages. These he was then able to slide them up and down beside each other, in the same manner as the code wheel worked. Very quickly he realised that one of the alphabets needed to be double. While he was doing this he was dismayed to see that Gwen’s section had cracked the message and was on the move.

  The direction they went in at least gave a clue to the sorts of words to look for. Graham set to work moving the letters one to the right so that A became B and so on. As he wrote his alarm was increased when Bannister’s section set off, followed almost immediately by Peter’s. “Keep working!” Graham called, seeing that Andrews had stopped to watch.

  Then Harriet’s section moved away, followed by Stephen’s. That irked Graham and he broke into a sweat. ‘It must be easy to work out,’ he thought. He hadn’t seen any of the people in the other sections using their codewheel or code sheet so he stopped and thought. ‘I will try backwards,’ he decided. As quickly as he could he began to copy the message placing the last letter first and then reversing each letter’s place. Almost at once a word began to appear. A wave of exhilaration swept through Graham. “Backwards! That is the method.”

  “So why am I being made to do it if you are too?” Andrews asked sarcastically.

  Graham did not answer. Instead he rapidly decoded the message, then sprang up and showed it to Sgt Yeldham. Sgt Yeldham shook his head. “You have to write it out neatly so I can read it.”

  Graham opened his mouth to protest, then gritted his teeth and quickly re-wrote the message. This time Yeldham nodded and Graham said, “Come on Four Section! Get up and move! Let’s go!”

  Andrews and Halyday muttered and grumbled and were last up. Roger helped urge them all along. They set off at a fast walk across the top of Sandy Ridge. Almost at once Cpl Gallagher called on his section to get up and move. As quickly as he could walk Graham hurried his section down into the hollow where Lt McEwen had conducted the static observation and on up to the flat tongue of rocks. There were already five sections there and, to Graham’s dismay, he saw Gwen’s section get up and head off on the second leg even before he had arrived.

  After copying the message, Graham got the whole section to copy it.

  “Don’t see why I should bother,” Andrews grumbled. “If you are going to do it too.”

  “Oh please co-operate,” Graham said. He didn’t want a bickering match to bring the teamwork unstuck.

  By then Peter’s section was also on the move, followed within a minute by Bannister’s. ‘Oh come on!’ Graham thought anxiously. This time he concentrated on checking whether the alphabet had been moved on to the right or left and allowed the others to work at the tasks he had given them. Most of his energy was then used up in keeping Andrews, Lucy and Kirsty at their tasks. Kirsty looked very tired and was in a bad mood. He did not dare annoy her by trying to urge her to work faster.

  Crane’s section arrived. Harriet’s and then Stephen’s left. Then Gallagher’s also moved, passing Graham’s. “Oh come on!” he urged. “Just try the first four or five letters. If it isn’t working try something else!”

  Then Kirsty spoke up. “It’s this Trigram sheet.”

  That annoyed Graham a bit because, when he looked at it, it was both obvious and easy. As quickly as possible he copied the message neatly, aware that Crane had overheard Kirsty and was also now decoding the message. Worse still, two more sections were hurrying across the dip towards them: Rankin’s and Cpl Parnell’s.

  4 Section set off with Crane’s hot on their heels. The route led them north on a compass bearing to a creek junction in the gullies leading down from Sandy Ridge. On the way they hurried past the odd formation looking like a railway embankment washed out by floods. Graham could not decide whether it was a natural ‘dyke’ or an old dam constructed by miners in the 19th Century.

  By the time they reached the next clue Gwen’s section had already left and Capt Conkey was visible hurrying after them. Peter’s section set off as Graham arrived. That all made him feel very anxious and flustered. Once again he quickly copied the message, then got the section to make copies. “Stop talking and concentrate on your own task!” he cried as Dianne and Lucy began talking.

  As they did Graham’s impatience increased as first Bannister’s, then Stephen’s and Harriet’s sections all got up and hurried on ahead. As they did Graham felt his hopes of doing well sinking. Then Roger handed him a neatly printed message.

  “Alternate letters,” Roger explained. “That is the complete message.”

  “Good on you Roger!” Graham cried. He sprang up and showed it to Sgt Yeldham who was busy talking to Sgt White and did not seem inclined to hurry.

  The section set off down the dry creek and angled across the hillslope on a compass bearing to end up at the junction of the road to Canning Junction. Lt Maclaren was there with a safety vehicle and water jerries so Graham told his cadets to refill their waterbottles as they were all perspiring in the heat. While they did that he copied the message, noting with satisfaction that all the sections ahead of them were still there.

  “Must be a hard one,” He muttered, then focused on getting them all to work at their allotted task. Then Gwen’s section got up and moved, causing the sinking failure feeling to seep in again. Soon afterwards Peter’s section set off. Minutes ticked by and Graham determined that the message was not in any of the easy methods. “It isn’t backwards, or grouping, or every second letter, or alternate letters, and it isn’t the Trigrams so it must be the code wheel,” he said. He had already tried moving A to B and A to Z so now he concentrated on working around the Alphabet on the code wheel. He did C while Lucy and Dianne did D on the codewheel. Then he tried five letters of E and Lucy started on F.

  “It’s ‘F’,” Lucy said delightedly. Graham at once set his two Alphabets to F and began working on the second half of the message while Roger wrote it down. “Kirsty, start making a neat copy while we decode,” Graham ordered.

  By teamwork the message was cracked but not before both Stephen’s and Gallagher’s sections had moved off. Graham showed Sgt Yeldham and then got the section moving. It was a compass bearing and distance but he did not need it as the other two sections were walking ahead of them. They hurried after them, with Andrews and Lucy starting to trail behind and mumble about blisters and heat.

  The leg took them only 500m, back across the same dry creek to a big Burdekin Plum tree. The next message was coloured naval flags drawn on a sheet of paper and Graham was able to decode it in seconds. Unfortunately so had all the sections ahead of them and they had all gone by the time he showed it to Sgt Yeldham. By then Harriet’s and Bannister’s sections were arriving.


  “Come on, we have moved up from sixth to fifth,” Graham urged. He now badly wanted to stay in the front half of the company but could see two more sections hurrying across from Lt Maclaren’s vehicle. The next leg was only 150 metres- across the flat, down over the dry creek and up to the shed where Graham had handed Carnes over to Capt Conkey during the navex. The shed was visible from the tree so they just puffed up the slope without navigating.

  By then the first four sections had already moved off. ‘Must be easy,’ Graham reasoned, and it was. The message was in ‘pig pen’ code and only took 2 minutes to decode. By then both Harriet’s and Bannister’s had arrived and Brown’s and Crane’s could be seen coming up the slope.

  The message took them north along the road for 500 metres to the Canning River. It was a hot walk and the section strung out in the heat and it took all of Graham’s urging to encourage them. He had to resist the impulse to shout angrily at them. The road curved around the base of the large, low hill nicknamed ‘Black Knoll’ and Graham glimpsed the actual ‘knoll’ of black rocks on top amid the scattered ironbarks.

  The Canning was a pleasant surprise. The river was about 200 metres wide and the steep banks were lined with a dense growth of trees and rubber vines. Most of the river bed was dry, white sand which was almost blinding in the sunlight but the ten metres closest to their bank was water. The water was crystal clear and only about knee deep. The road crossed the river bed on a long, low causeway which had a trickle of water flowing over it.

  The message was in Morse Code but even so Gwen, Peter and Stephen had already gone on the next leg and Gallagher left while Graham was still copying the message. This turned out to be a very frustrating and disheartening stop because the message just would not seem to come out, at least not to Sgt Yeldham’s satisfaction, and Bannister moved ahead of Graham again. Worse still Harriet, Brown and Crane were all there before Graham finally realized he had made a mistake in his copying of the dots and dashes. Blushing at the mistake and feeling angry and ashamed he quickly corrected the message and set off.

  The route led up a winding narrow gully which was in fact the lower end of the dry creeks flowing down from Sandy Ridge. This section of the gully was deep and the banks had a thick tangle of rubber vines on them as far up as the junction which had been the half-way point on the observation course the previous day. It was stiflingly hot in the gully and Graham found he was very thirsty. Both Kirsty and Lucy looked very red in the face and he insisted they drink.

  The next message was taped to a rock in the creek bed. It was in Trigram code and this time Kirsty recognized it in seconds and they hurried on, the sections still in the same order. The leg was only a hundred metres, up onto the bare top of the North Gravel Scrape. To Graham’s surprise Gwen and Peter were only just leaving and the other sections were all still there. Lt Hamilton had a safety vehicle there with more water so Graham told the section to refill their waterbottles and to have a big drink while he copied the message.

  By the time that was done Stephen’s and Gallagher’s sections were on the move but this time Dianne worked out the method was grouping and they managed to move off ahead of Bannister’s section. ‘We are now fifth again,’ Graham thought. ‘Maybe we are in with a chance?’

  CHAPTER 18

  HOT GOING

  The ninth leg led up a long, gentle and very open ridge to a gate in the fence that ran East-West across the area. Along the way the heat was reflected up from the sand and bare earth so fiercely that Graham found himself parched. He wiped sweat from his face and drained his second last waterbottle. Grumbling became endemic in the section but Roger helped to urge them to keep on trying. Concern about heat exhaustion kept Graham glancing at the others. Lucy worried him the most as she seemed to be very pale. She was still perspiring so he hoped she wasn’t getting sick.

  At the next clue Graham found only Stephen’s and Gallagher’s sections. Gwen’s and Peter’s had already moved on. ‘We won’t catch them,’ he thought ruefully. The message was a long one in Trigrams and that discouraged Graham as well. He copied it and sat the section in the shade of a tree, then started them working.

  Three more sections arrived: Harriet’s, Bannister’s and Rankin’s. Rankin’s was a real surprise as Graham had not seen them since the start. They seemed to be all fired up and were determined to overtake those ahead of them. That got Graham even more anxious. “Come on people. We are in the running for third if we try,” he urged. “Only check four letters. If it isn’t turning into a word by then change the method.”

  To speed things up he set to work on the ‘random’ letters method. By crossing out every second letter he quickly established that that was the method used. “Kirsty, you do this part of it, Roger, you do the next line Halyday, you do the last line. Dianne, you copy it out neatly as we do it,” he ordered.

  The teamwork did it and they had the answer in two minutes. Graham checked his watch and noted with dismay it was coming up to 11:00. He knew that the exercise had to be all over by 12:00. ‘There are probably only two or three legs left,’ he thought.

  By then Stephen had his section moving. Gallagher’s also stood up and started off at the same time as Graham’s. There was a scramble down into the dry creek and up onto the wide grassy ridge between the two creeks. CUO Grey ended this by yelling at them to stay in section groups. That slowed both Graham and Gallagher because Andrews and Lucy were straggling behind and Gallagher had two cadets trailing as well.

  Checkpoint 11 was on the power pole which had been a checkpoint on both the day and night navexes. It was in numbers and at that Graham almost jumped with relief. It could only be from the one page double-digit code sheet or from the numerical place of the letters of the Alphabet. He told Roger to try the code sheet with Dianne while he asked Kirsty to help him. As he had already numbered the letters on one of his notebook pages he was able to read the letters almost as fast as he wrote them down. It was the method and within four minutes he had his section moving, leaving a glum faced Gallagher behind. Graham found himself moving neck and neck with Stephen.

  As they moved off, Rankin’s and Bannister’s sections came hurrying up and Graham glimpsed at least two more sections back at the gate on the other ridge. Graham wasn’t sure how many sections were ahead of them but he was feeling a lot better. ‘We are well up in the front half of the company at least,’ he thought.

  It was only when they reached a jerry can with a message taped on it at the point where the ridge reached the Scrubby Creek track near 4 Platoon’s bivouac site that he realised there were only two sections ahead of them: Gwen’s and Peter’s. He was unsure which was leading as both were visible clustered up near the officer’s camp on the crest of Sandy Ridge.

  It now became a feverish race against Stephen’s section, the two friends exchanging glances and urging their cadets on. It was the Trigram codesheet and Kirsty had it within a minute. By the time she had it written out Rankin’s section had come puffing and sweating up the ridge at the run with Bannister’s hot on their heels. To Graham’s chagrin Stephen’s section suddenly set off. As quickly as they could he got the message finished and shown to Sgt Yeldham. Sgt Yeldham scowled but nodded.

  “Come on, run!” Graham cried. He looked back and saw Andrews and Lucy were only walking. Before he could yell again he was surprised to hear Halyday yell at them.

  “Oh run please! Look, it is only just up to the officers. Come on, help us. We might come third or second if you do.”

  Roger and Kirsty both moved to trot beside Andrews and Lucy to encourage them and the section hurried across the grassy flat. Stephen’s section saw them coming and broke into a run to try to maintain their lead. Both sections arrived at the last clue gasping and sweating but together. Graham saw that Capt Conkey was standing watching with Lt Standish and that spurred him on to a last effort.

  It was numbers again and Halyday snatched the codesheet off Dianne and quickly began to read out words and letters. He was right. As they wr
ote down the message Graham was in a fever of impatience as he could hear Stephen’s section doing the same thing. Rankin’s section came running in then, followed by Bannister’s and Gallagher’s.

  In the end it was a frantic dash with the final message to Capt Conkey. Graham beat Stephen by a couple of running paces. Capt Conkey looked at the message and nodded. “Good, third place. Well done Cpl Kirk.”

  At that Graham glowed with achievement. He grinned at his cadets and said loudly, “Well done Four Section. Great team effort.”

  They smiled back and he led them over to the big tree where Gwen’s and Peter’s sections sat. “Who won?” he asked Peter as they arrived.

  “Who do you think? Headquarters of course,” Peter replied.

  Gwen poked her tongue and laughed. “Not by much!”

  Stephen’s section joined them and the friends sat and yarned. To Graham’s relief Stephen did not seem to resent being beaten and they talked happily. After a while Peter stood up and excused himself. “I just want to check that the radio piquet has worked OK,” he explained. He went over to the CP, which Graham saw was still manned by Carnes and Rundle. A few minutes later Peter came back. “The Hutchie Men have located St Michael’s. They are on their way back now.”

  “Where are St Michael’s?” Graham asked.

  “At an airfield over beyond the army camp,” Peter replied. Graham had seen the airfield on the map but had never been to it. He knew that 4 Platoon and some members of HQ were setting out after lunch to sneak up and do a recon, ready for a night raid and he was aware that he was very jealous. It was exactly the sort of thing he burned to do.

  The other sections straggled in over the next half hour and were seated in the shade. Graham allowed the girls to go to the toilet and emptied the last of his four waterbottles and still felt thirsty. It was now very hot, the temperature in the mid thirties, the tropical sun blazing down from a clear sky.

  To almost universal surprise Dimbo’s section was neither lost, not last. They came in second last but made it. The unfortunate last was Cpl Griffin’s section from 4 Platoon. Graham overheard Sgt Grenfell, who had been with them as DS, describe them to CUO Masters as, ‘a real pack of noddies!’ That made Graham feel even better.