Fear Drive My Feet

by Peter Ryan

  ‘You-fella got canoe? ’Em ’e stop where?’

  They nodded, and pointed to a spot on the bank nearby. I made them lead me to it and ordered them to take me to Kirkland’s. They were so terrified that I was afraid they would faint, but I jabbed them in the ribs with the pistol and forced them to get aboard.

  Although I felt certain in my mind that Les was dead, I did not have positive evidence. I did not want to ask the Chivasing people directly, so I phrased the question in a way which did not reveal my ignorance.

  ‘What are you going to do with the other white man?’

  Their reply snuffed out the lingering spark of hope that Les might be alive.

  ‘We will bury him in the cemetery at Chivasing,’ one said in pidgin.

  ‘We will see that he gets a proper funeral,’ added the other man ingratiatingly, as if that would atone in some way for his people’s treacherous share in Les’s death.

  The rapid muddy stream was sweeping us down towards Kirkland’s, and I made the natives hug the south bank closely, to keep out of the range of Japanese who might be on the north side. When Kirkland’s came in sight I stood up, waving my arms above my head and cooeeing, and I was shortly answered by a hail from the low kunai hill behind the camp. As the canoe nosed in under the foliage to touch at the landing-place, several Australian soldiers stepped out of the bushes and helped me ashore. Half carried, half supported, I made my way with them to the wretched little huts, and sat down in the mosquito-proof room while they brought me tea and some army biscuits.

  Nobody said anything much, and I sat there dully, staring at the swamp. I had no sensation of joy or relief, though I knew in a remote and abstract way that I was now safe. I had no thoughts, no feelings whatsoever. I felt neither grief on account of Les nor anger at the Japanese or Chivasings. Nor did I feel any sense of warmth or companionship towards the soldiers who were now preparing water for me to wash, and giving me articles from their own scanty clothing to cover my nakedness. I was too spent, emotionally, to feel or think or care, and I know now that such a state is the nearest one can come to death – an emptiness of spirit much more deadly than a grievous wound.

  After I had been sitting there for a little while, Kari, Watute, Dinkila, Pato, and all the other boys limped up to see me. They managed a salute, but I could see they felt as dispirited and weary as I did. They were cut about and tattered, and caked with grey Markham mud that cracked and dropped off in little flakes as the skin stretched beneath it. I shook hands with each one, and they shuffled back to the little hut, where they were crowded together. Kari and Watute remained for a few moments to talk. They had stayed across the river looking for me, they said, and when they found my tracks leading to the river, concluded I would be all right, and floated themselves down to Kirkland’s on logs. Arong, the boy who had entered the village with Les and me, had been captured by the Japs and taken to Lae, Watute added.

  Next day a horse was sent down for me, and I rode to Wampit. Here I had a proper hot shower, and willing helpers gathered round with needles and dug dozens of thorns out of my limbs and body. There was no skin at all on my legs, and my feet were so enormously swollen that I thought boots would never fit on them again. Months later, I was still digging out odd thorns that had been overlooked at Wampit.

  The following morning I set out on horseback for Bulolo township, which had replaced Wau as the military headquarters of the area. The police and other natives followed on foot, and during the several days which for me were occupied in writing the long report of the patrol they straggled in by twos and threes, still very weary.

  After a few days I went to the store to get new clothes. I was wearing a woollen shirt, a pair of ragged green shorts, and some old sandshoes, but no hat or socks. All of these had been given me either at Kirklands or Wampit.

  ‘Where’s your paybook and your other papers?’ demanded the quartermaster.

  I explained the fate of my clothes and papers and other possessions.

  ‘Good God, man, that’s no excuse!’ he snapped. ‘Don’t you realize it’s a crime in the Army to lose your paybook? You can’t be issued with any equipment here without a paybook.’

  I didn’t argue, but let the district officer arrange a new issue of clothing for me. But I started to wonder all over again if wars were really worth the trouble.

  IX

  EXCEPT FOR sitting up to write the patrol report, I spent most of the time for the next week lying on my bed-sail smoking, reading, and dozing. The police and other boys were doing much the same, and I hardly saw them.

  At the end of that time, however, my feet had shrunk to their normal size and I could get them into boots again. I wandered about, gossiping to anyone who had time to talk, and performing various duties in the district office.

  Jock McLeod came in one day. He was in charge of the lines of native carriers supplying our troops as they advanced on Salamaua, through the Buang mountains, and was as usual engaged in a bitter feud with the Army.

  ‘The rotten bludgers!’ he exploded with characteristic vigour. ‘I can’t even be bothered talking to them any longer! I’ve got these coons slaving their guts out; they aren’t properly housed, and they’re on about half rations, and I’ve been telling the Army so for weeks. Now the boys are all going down sick and the Army is demanding explanations. When I tried to tell them the boys are only human, some bloody jumped-up snotty-nosed staff officer told me I had the wrong slant on the job. “You must regard the natives merely as so many units of energy, Mr McLeod,” he said, “like motorcars” ’

  Jock’s fulminations and Vertigan’s more temperate representations had some effect, and arrangements were made for better rations for the carrier lines.

  He was interested to hear of the situation north of the Markham, and had the last laugh when he remarked with a quiet grin, ‘I said you’d find the Nips all round Boana by the time you got back there.’

  After a couple of weeks, as soon as their raw feet and aching limbs were better, the boys wanted to return to the bush. Kari and Watute approached me as a delegation:

  ‘Master, me-fella man belong work bush. Me-fella no like sit down long arse long station.’

  I confessed to them that I was finding station life pretty tedious too – a dull routine of sending signals inspecting labourers, and writing letters and lists. I promised I would do my best to get us back to more congenial work in the bush.

  In July luck changed for me: I was posted back to the bush. But I learnt with bitter astonishment that I was to have a new squad of police. They were smart recruits from the depot, faultless on parade, but utterly inexperienced in bush work. Mighty Kari, shrewd Watute, crackshot Nabura, and all the other policemen were posted elsewhere. We gathered in my hut for the last time, while Dinkila packed my gear. I gave Kari an old pipe, Watute a sheath-knife, and the others any odds and ends I could scrounge.

  It was a sad parting when we shook hands. I never saw any of them again, though I heard that Kari was made a sergeant-major, the highest rank to which he could rise. But they are never far from my memory, and I hope that, back in their grass-thatched villages, they sometimes think of me.

  I still had Dinkila and Pato, and all the other non-police natives who had been with me on the Huon Peninsula patrol, and we se
t out in July for the Lower Watut River – to Tsilitsili. Our errand was as follows:

  The Allies were now firmly on the offensive, and the Americans wished to establish a forward fighter aerodrome in the Lower Watut area. This would enable our fighters to range as far as Wewak, which was not possible from the existing dromes in Port Moresby. It would also serve as a partial jumping-off place for our impending assault on Lae. A few Americans and Australians had already moved to Tsilitsili and begun work on a landing-strip.

  Although our patrols, some of them native troops of the Papuan Infantry Battalion, were watching the Markham from the mouth of the Watut down to Kirkland’s, there was a twenty-mile stretch of the Markham upstream from the Watut mouth which was quite unguarded. In this sector the enemy could easily cross the river and attack the aerodrome construction at Tsilitsili. Kaiapit lay just across the river from this stretch, and it was known that the Japanese were there in force, but since Harry Lumb’s death information from the area had been irregular and uncertain.

  Our job was to watch this twenty-mile stretch of river, find out all we could of enemy activity on the other side, and warn Tsilitsili if the Japs made any attempt to cross and attack the drome.

  The four-day journey down the Watut was uneventful. One night we slept in a big comfortable house of native material overlooking the lovely valley. Fully equipped, the house looked as if it were awaiting the return of its owner, which would never happen, for the house was Harry Lumb’s. It was from here that he had worked his gold mine in peacetime.

  One of my new police-boys told me the story of how Harry was supposed to have died. He was in a village called Ofofragen, near Kaiapit, and the natives had assured him that there were no Japanese about. Then they betrayed him to the very same band of Japs who had so nearly caught Watute and Pato near Boana a few days earlier. He was shaving, and in the mirror caught a glimpse of the enemy advancing on the house. According to this boy they shot Harry down as he made a grab for his Owen gun. He had always said that the Japanese would never take him alive.

  At Tsilitsili (pronounced, by the way, ‘silly-silly’) I found a mushroom metropolis. Where a week ago had been a sleepy native village, a tent town straggled through the fringes of the jungle, inhabited by American troops and airmen, both white and negro, Australian soldiers and airmen, Papuan infantrymen, native policemen, carriers, and labourers. On the rough earth airstrip, hastily cleared, DC-3 transports roared in and out, unloading troops, stores, and construction equipment. A major operational base had sprung from the earth just at the back door of Lae, the enemy’s main stronghold.

  By lamplight in their tent that night I met the local Australian and American commanders and discussed the details of my assignment. They were acutely conscious of the danger from that exposed twenty-mile stretch of the Markham, but were sceptical about its chances of being effectively patrolled by one white man and a few natives.

  I told them it was my intention, if at all possible, to use the inhabitants of the villages as additional scouts, and by that means develop a fairly efficient watching system, to warn them of any attack. It was agreed that I should set out next day, and I was immediately supplied with an abundance of stores and enough carriers to transport them.

  An American officer of engineers spoke for the first time just as I was about to leave the tent.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he began diffidently, in a soft, drawling voice, ‘if you’d have me along on this trip? Must be kinda lonesome on your own.’

  He was about thirty, with red hair, and a face brick-red from sunburn. Blue eyes smiled a little nervously from behind gold rimless glasses.

  ‘My name’s Tex Frazier, and I come from Texas,’ he went on. ‘I’m kinda interested in maybe putting some airstrips up that Markham River. I guess I’ll see I don’t get in your hair too much.’

  I usually preferred to patrol alone, but I had been sick a great deal from fever, and weak from the hook-worms which had invaded my system during the barefoot patrolling of earlier months. It would be an advantage to have someone along, and he had such a frank, engaging presence that I agreed at once, and we arranged to leave before first light next morning.

  X

  I HAD PICKED the village of Amamai for our headquarters. It took us four days to get there, of which two were spent on the banks of the Wafa River waiting for its floodwaters to subside so that we could cross.

  Pato distinguished himself during those two days. He made a fishhook out of the brass clip that held the Rising Sun badge in my hat, a fishing-line from odd bits of twine, split a log open for grubs for bait, and in less than half an hour had landed a monster cod from the muddy waters of the Wafa.

  A large part of the walk to Amamai was through dense sago-swamp. We squelched through it as cautiously as we could, scouts out ahead, for no one knew whether the Japanese were there or not. In the early stages I had great trouble with Tex. When silently reconnoitring a stretch of track he would suddenly think himself back in the Lone Star State and burst loudly into a spirited version of a Moody and Sankey hymn. He found it so hard to stop this that I detailed a policeman to walk nearby and silence any outburst before it gave us away.

  By the end of the second day Tex had mastered the need for silence. That night, over our meal, he said sheepishly, ‘By golly, it sure must have given you the shivers when I lifted up my voice a mite too high! But I’m all well controlled now.’

  The people at Amamai were friendly. Most of the able-bodied men had been taken away by Harry Lumb to work as carriers on our supply lines. But the older men, and the women and children, built me a house on a knoll from which, with binoculars, I could sweep a vast extent of the Markham Valley, on both sides of the river.

  Tex and I quickly patrolled every village for several days’ walk around, distributing trade goods to establish ourselves in favour. The people were all fairly friendly, but wary. They knew the Japanese were just across the river; sometimes they saw parties of them on the opposite bank; sometimes the enemy sent natives across, seeking information.

  I sent a police-boy back to Tsilitsili with a report on the situation, and Tex and I continued our patrolling.

  During one of our walks Tex was unusually silent for a long period. When we sat down in a little village to drink coconut milk he told me what he had been pondering.

  ‘This is the way I figure it, Peter,’ he began. ‘If we have to keep sending messages back by police-boy, it’ll take him two or three days to get there, and another two or three days to get back – maybe six days he’s missing. Now, if we have to send a lot of messages, we’re mighty quick going to run clean out of police-boys. Yes, sir! What we need is an airplane.’

  ‘Sure, we need one. But where will we get it?’

  ‘People find it mighty hard to refuse a Texan when he’s real set on something,’ Tex drawled with deadly seriousness.

  Next morning, with the aid of every man, woman, and child in Amamai, he set to work on an airstrip.

  ‘Just a little one for a start,’ he said. ‘Enough to put a Piper Cub down on. If we want heavy aircraft later, we’ll extend our strip.’

  I could hardly believe he was serious, but he assured me that he was.

  The following day, patrolling by the Markham, we pounced on a native who was doing
his best to slip away from us into the river. He did not belong to any local village, and the police frog-marched him up to the house for interrogation. It was here that I missed Watute. In half the time, and with twice the accuracy, he would have uncovered the information for which I now had to work all day and night.

  I got out of the man that he was a native of Orori village, across the Markham, and had been sent to spy by the Japs. He told me that a strong force of the enemy was starting to move forward from Madang, through Marawasa, to Kaiapit, and perhaps on to Lae. Some of the enemy patrols Les Howlett and I had encountered were partly engaged in surveying a route for this movement.

  This was information of first-rate importance, for, as it turned out, the Japanese formation the native referred to was a strong group commanded by General Nakai, with which the Australians were to fight heavy battles in the months to come.

  I wrote down what the man told me, and sent a report back to Tsilitsili with a police-boy. Tex went with him.

  ‘This is the last time either you or I walk through that terrible messy swamp,’ he said. ‘When I come back, I’ll be flying. You keep that airstrip clear!’

  I was still doubtful, but I had grown so fond of Tex that I begged him to return, by whatever means he could.

  Two days after he had gone we saw an American fighter aircraft limping back from an attack on Madang or Wewak. It was on fire, and crashed some miles away across the Markham. We saw the pilot jump and float down on his parachute, but we could not find him. Then, when we had almost given him up, two natives helped him into the camp, dirty, cut about, ragged, and exhausted.

  We fed him and cleaned him up, and he told us about his struggles through the rivers and swamps.