Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘It seems the code books have been destroyed earlier when the Brigade HQ had been wiped out so the bloke sending back his confirmation to Anderson can’t use code and if he sends it in plain English the Japs will know what’s gunna happen. So he sends this message in Australian, “Look up at sparrow fart!” and of course we know there’ll be a plane over at dawn. The Japs’ code breakers are probably scratching their heads wondering what the fuck farting sparrows have got to do with anything.

  ‘At dawn we look up and there they are, two Albacores escorted by three Buffalo fighters from the RAAF station at Sembawang. Them Buffaloes are well named. They’re old and they’re slow but the Japs are caught by surprise, they own the air and they’re not expecting nothing like this so they don’t have time to scramble their fighter planes.

  ‘The Albacores drop their much-needed supplies, three food canisters and the morphine, then decide to go on a bit of a bomb run at the same time. They drop two bombs on the village, two more on the Japs in the rear and the last two into the rubber where we’ve got our Battalion HQ and they kill and wound seventeen men. We only hope they did more damage than that to the Japs.

  ‘Well, the fighting continues fiercer than ever and we’re getting nowhere, the only blokes not fighting are the ones so seriously wounded they can’t lift a rifle or carry a mortar shell. We’re trying to push out the perimeter at the bridge but the Nips ain’t giving an inch. They send in their tanks again, which close in and this time there’s not enough of us to stop ’em getting in amongst us.

  ‘We’re now the same as the 2/29th were when they reached us two days earlier, we’re down to around three hundred men. But they’ve copped the same hiding we have and have now got, at a rough count, around a hundred and fifty men left. The 2/15th Field Regiment are down to about a hundred and the Indian brigade have got less than five hundred survivors and are in terrible shape and in no condition to fight much longer. It’s as plain as the nose on your face we can’t go on. There’s no given way we’re gunna take the bridge or the village on the other side. I’m gunna die the day after my birthday, which ain’t so bad, I suppose. At least I get to live a year longer.’

  That’s Tommy again with what Nancy calls Irish humour. Which is humour that shows how dumb the Irish really are. If it’s true then she’s of Irish descent and so is Tommy and me, don’t know why she thinks being Australian for five generations is going to make us any smarter than we were before we came here.

  Tommy goes on. ‘Anderson is buggered if he’s gunna surrender but decides instead to withdraw to the east. There’s been no contact with the enemy in that direction for hours so he reckons it’s the best way to go. The idea is to circle around the Jap positions and make for Yong Peng, which is fifteen miles as the crow flies but a whole lot longer the way we have to go to avoid the enemy. It’s all on foot through swamps and jungle so we sabotage what trucks, carriers and guns we’ve got left and prepare to move out in small groups. It’s like every man for himself, with Yong Peng the destination.

  ‘We also have to make the hardest decision you can make in war and that is to leave your wounded behind. There’s one hundred and fifty can’t make it. We make them as comfortable as possible in trucks and fill them with morphine and leave what’s left for them to use as well as enough rations.’

  Tommy pauses, looking down into the water between his feet, the fire in the distance is now down to a glow, perfect for the rabbit. I hope the clothes are dry enough to put on before we turn in for the night.

  ‘Mate, I’m saying goodbye to blokes I’ve trained with, some of them we picked up at that first recruitment drive and who are part of the Snowy Mountains contingent. We’ve been real good mates and shared many a beer and a laugh together.

  ‘One bloke, Lofty Mason, gives me his fighting knife, “Take it out, Tommo,” he says, meaning for me to take the knife out of its combat sheath. I pull it out, “Look on the blade.” I do as he says, he’s got the name “Garth” embossed on it. “It’s me small lad at home in Cooma. If you come out of this alive, mate, can you get this to him, tell him it’s took more than one Jap in his name. Then tell him I love him, the same to his mum.”

  ‘“Don’t you worry, mate, I’ll hand it back to you personally,” I say, trying to sound a bit cheerful.’ Tommy looks up. ‘What else could I say? It turns out the Japs herd them all together and bayonet them and then make this big funeral pyre and douse it with petrol and set it alight.

  ‘So, we’re out of there and the Japs see us going but maybe they’ve also had enough because they don’t come after us. Later they send planes over to strafe us but we’re in the jungle and they can’t see us and we’re not too concerned. The going is really rough, there’s times we’re wading up to our waists in swamp and then thick jungle and up and down mountains. Some blokes arrive at Yong Peng several days later but we make it by late that night.

  ‘There’s the six of us, all that’s left of our platoon, Blades Rigby, the other four and me. We’ve become a small independent unit and we vow we’ll stick together, come what may.’

  ‘That’s only six out of thirty men, one-fifth, and you had knife training?’ I say, though maybe I shouldn’t, I don’t mean to suggest how come the casualties are so high with them being so highly trained and having knives an’all. I just want to know what happened, but Tommy thinks I mean the knives.

  ‘Yeah, the fighting knives. Blades Rigby was exaggerating a bit when he said every Jap can disarm you if you’re coming at him with a bayonet on the end of your rifle. It’s still the standard way to fight ’em close up, that and the hand grenade. If it sounds like we’re in control and each of us is a sort of superman, that’s bullshit. Mate, no way! I know it sounds a bit gung-ho, the knives and all. I mean it ain’t in the official war history or anything. But I have to say, I don’t reckon I’d personally have come through the war without what Blades Rigby taught us. I owe him a great debt.

  ‘But, for the most part, we fought just like the other platoons, only on three occasions I come suddenly upon a Jap and I used me knife.’ Tommy squints up at me, ‘Okay, that’s three times I could have been dead. Far as I’m concerned, you only die once and I’ve been given three extra lives because of Blades Rigby’s constant knife drills. Fair enough?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to criticise,’ I protest. ‘I just wanted to know what happened to your platoon.’

  ‘About the same as every other platoon, I guess. When we get to Yong Peng there’s 499 Australians left, and our platoon is doing slightly better than average. Like Lofty Mason said, he’d also taken three Japs with his blade before he copped a Jap bullet. Maybe the knives helped a bit, eh?’

  ‘So what happened next?’ I ask, knowing Tommy’s kind of put me quietly in my place.

  ‘From Yong Peng they wait for the stragglers to get in and they truck us back to Johore Bahru. We’re too bloody exhausted to be happy we’ve survived. Besides, with most of your mates dead, you don’t want to celebrate nothing. Blades Rigby is the only bloke that’s happy, he’s off his head most of the time, don’t know what it is he’s on as there’s not a drop of grog out here in the jungle, but he calls it “jungle juice” and he must have personally killed twenty or more Japanese. Later he called what we were doing “bravely running away” and I reckon he was right, though I don’t know so much about the brave bit. I was shitting my pants most of the time. More than once I said goodbye to all the Maloneys whose names I could remember, because this particular Maloney was on the way out, convinced he wouldn’t make it through the day’s fighting.

  ‘Well, we eventually get to Johore and they give Anderson the VC after that. Some say that because of the gallant resistance of the 8th Division at Bakri/Muar River and the bridge at Parit Sulong and Anderson’s refusal to surrender, General Yamashita, “The Tiger of Malaya”, had to abandon his plan to invade Australia. If it hadn’t been for the way we fought the Japs and held them up, in al
l likelihood Australia would have faced invasion from the north-west.’

  Tommy scratches his head and takes a sip from his mug, though his tea must be dead cold by now, he’s been talking a good hour. ‘To tell you the truth, I dunno about them being held up that long, or if it’s correct what they said about us saving Australia. All I know is the Japanese crossed Malaya from north to south in fifty-six days, a feat declared impossible by the British High Command in Singapore.

  ‘Their soldiers were lightly equipped and whole divisions were mounted on bicycles. The Brits also said they didn’t have good maps and would get lost in the virgin jungle. That’s a laugh, there were fifth columnists everywhere. They even had the smaller jungle paths flagged. You can ride a bike as good as you can walk along a jungle path.

  ‘So now we’re about as far south as you can get in Malaya and we’re set to hop over the causeway to Singapore. They’ve made up our battalion numbers with over seven hundred new blokes, all recruits, a lot of whom haven’t been in the army much more than a month and don’t know their shit from a tin o’brown Kiwi.

  ‘Because I’m a corporal I’m made a section leader to train a third of the platoon.’ ‘Congratulations,’ I say, grinning in the dark.

  Tommy holds up his hand, restraining me. ‘It’s no honour, I can tell yer. I’ve got blokes in my platoon who still call a rifle a gun and it’s my job to pull them into shape before the next attack. Give you an example, I take them onto the makeshift shooting range one day and each has ten rounds rapid fire at a hundred yards. Not one of the silly buggers even hits the flamin’ target, which is roughly eighteen inches across. When I bring out a knife and demonstrate how it goes into the gut and how to bring it out in one movement, a bloke from Sydney faints. I reckon the Nips must be quaking in their boots when their intelligence tells them the fighting shape we’re in.

  ‘We’ve now been fighting the Japs for less than two months and they’ve come right across Malaya with us retreating all the way. I’m not so sure about the impregnable-fortress theory. Still and all, I hope to Christ the British High Command are right, I can do with a bloody good rest.

  ‘I’m one of the lucky ones, I haven’t been wounded, only a bit scratched and cut about, everything festers in the jungle anyway, so we’re all wounded in different ways. We’ve got a touch of the squits and various other complaints, tropical ulcers starting, infections. Most of all, we’re completely knackered. A bit of a rest in Singapore city would be just what the doctor ordered. So when in late January we withdraw to Singapore from the shithouse they call Malaya, Tommy Maloney is one happy little soldier.

  ‘Mate, if I’d only known, Malaya was to be the dress rehearsal and the shit is about to hit the fan in a big way. We’re in Singapore and from here there’s no place to go except into the sea.’He sits back and reaches for a Turf, the packet with a box of matches is resting on a rock beside the hot pool. The way he’s smoking I hope he’s brought an extra packet. Usually it’s only three or four a day when we go bush, back home he’s puffing all day. He lights the fag and then I see his hands are shaking and he has two goes with a match. He’s been telling things pretty calm-like, but now I see the memories flooding back are taking their toll.

  I can’t help myself, though I know it’s like showing off and I’m not usually like that, but I want Tommy to know how interested I am. I want him to know before he gets into his sleeping bag that I’ve waited a long time for this night, this moment. That he’s taking a battering telling the story and it’s not for nothing. I really care and his time ain’t wasted. So I decide right off to recite it, the poem he taught us when I was six years old.

  ‘Singapore

  A mighty island fortress

  The guardian of the East

  Impregnable as Gibraltar

  A thousand planes at least

  Simply can’t be taken

  Will stand a siege for years

  We’ll hold the place forever

  And show our foes no fears

  Our men are there in thousands

  With defences quite unique

  The Japanese didn’t believe us

  And took it in a week.’

  Tommy laughs, ‘Jeez, Mole, I must have told you that one when you were knee high to a grasshopper. Good on ya, mate.’

  So we’ve had our meal and another brew and then we’ve crawled into our sleeping bags and I reminded him again to make sure he wakes me. Now, when I think back, I wonder why the urgency? After all, when we eventually come back out the tunnel again it’s going to be a full day and probably half the night to get home, plenty of time to tell me the whole story on the journey back.

  I tell myself at the time that he may change his mind. Tommy’s a funny blighter, better get him now, here at the big old tree that’s become a sort of spiritual home for four generations of male Maloney. He’s brought me here as a sort of initiation, something only he can give me. It’s a precious gift, a secret place, a kingdom of our own. It’s only fitting that he tells me his story here. I tell myself he’ll say things here beside the mighty Alpine Ash, the Maloney tree, that he won’t elsewhere. Now I’ve been initiated, there’s another knowledge I have to acquire and my greatest fear is that once we’re back in the outside world, Tommy might clam up again. Tommy’s spent too much time alone in the bush and in a prison cell so when there’s people around they seem to diminish him and he goes quiet and almost completely disappears.

  I think about the tree again. It’s stood tall two hundred years before the white man came and chopped down all the great monarchs of the forest and sawed them into planks from which they’ve built their shitty little homes and bred their snotty-nosed, barefoot kids, just like what we’ve done. Except that it’s a Maloney that’s saved one old tree, to remind us all that when we cut down the great trees, we cut down the anchors of the earth and allow the broken land to crumble and wash away forever.

  Now Tommy’s telling me that I’m its guardian. That, while the Maloneys may have amounted to nothing much in the past, stayed the lowest there is, they have nevertheless been entrusted with this one great task and they haven’t failed in three generations. He’s saying the secret has become mine and he’s going to have to trust me to keep it safe, the fourth-generation Maloney, the next guardian of the mighty Alpine Ash.

  Tonight he’s been yacking away, a Tommy I’ve seldom heard before, except sometimes when we’re alone and he talks about nature. Now he’s talking about himself, that’s different, Tommy is unlocking his heart. He’s digging up memories that haven’t been aired since he come back looking like a drover’s dog, a bag of bones that lay on the soft pillow that meanwhile Nancy had become. It’s stuff I need to know urgently. Maloney stuff. If you know the past, you may just figure out what it is that makes you who you are. I only wish I’d brought the alarm clock from home.

  Then, in a sudden panic, I tell myself, ‘What if Tommy doesn’t wake up till morning?’ I think about trying to stay awake, building the fire up, sitting in the hot pool, thinking about Anna Dombrowski.

  Tommy’s snoring away. At least there won’t be any tears tonight. Poor little bugger’s dead to the world. Now that I’ve been over his story in my head so I’ve got it down pat, my eyelids are like lead.

  I look up one last time, along the mighty pillar that rises from the forest floor, the massive trunk of the old man Ash. My eyes follow up the great stem and, through its missing canopy, I see there’s stars pinned to a sky that has become its rightful roof.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I don’t know how but I wake up. Sometimes your mind has its own alarm clock. The moon overhead is pouring silver light through the canopy. Tommy is snoring away. We’ve never known Tommy when he didn’t snore. Nancy says it’s because of his broken nose and his sinuses and his battered jaw. I glance over at the fire, which is down to a few glowing embers. Somewhere in the trees to my left I hear a mopo
ke, then another answering, the real name is boobook owl, but what they sound like is ‘mopoke’ so that’s how come they get that name. The frog chorus has stopped.

  Judging from the position of the moon it’s around midnight. I crawl out of my sleeping bag, my body stiff and aching from the cuts and bruises I’ve copped in the tunnel and from sliding down the waterfall. I collected wood to build up the fire before going to sleep and, soon enough, bring the billy to the boil.

  Tommy isn’t all that happy being woken up. I guess he’s hurting even more than I am. He grunts when I shake his good shoulder and groans when I shake him a second time. He opens his eyes, sits up, and I hand him a mug of tea. I’ve put a bit of extra sugar in to perk him up a bit. ‘I’m sorry waking you, Dad.’ I really am because Tommy needs the sleep, though I can’t take a chance he’ll clam up on me once we get off the mountain.

  ‘Nah, ’s all right.’ He remains sitting up in his sleeping bag and takes out a Turf cigarette. Most working-class blokes smoke roll-yer-own. Far back as I can remember he’s always smoked Turf. John Crowe used to say it wasn’t a bad name for them because they were made from pure horseshit. Tommy takes a couple of puffs to help him wake up, then a sip from his mug and sighs.

  I wait for him to say something but he doesn’t so I say, ‘I suppose I could have waited and you could tell me on the trip home.’ I’m apologising to him, because in the light from the fire I see he looks like absolute shit, as if he’s whacked beyond belief.

  ‘Nah, it’s okay, I couldn’t do it nowhere else, it’s partly why we come here.’

  ‘Doubt we’ll get home by temorra night. Climb out’s gunna take us five hours, I reckon,’I say, for want of a reply.

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that, Tuesdee late.’ He gives a weary grin. ‘Yer mother’s gunna be ropeable.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s been worth it, you telling me the war stuff and the tree and all.’