Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  Tommy doesn’t say anything for about two minutes, just takes sips from his mug, puffs on his cigarette and looks into the fire. I decide to climb back into my sleeping bag, sit up nice and cosy, hugging my knees, and wait for him to talk.

  ‘Well, we’re in a right pickle, mate,’ Tommy begins at last. ‘The Japs have chased us across the causeway onto Singapore Island. Not only do they now control all of Malaya, they’ve got the food they need growing on the land and what we’ve left behind during the retreat. There’s so much stuff we haven’t taken, food, ammo, equipment, that the Japs call them “Churchill Supplies”. Now they got airfields to bomb us from, what’s more, they control the water supply that is piped over from Johore Bahru to Singapore. Although they have far fewer men than us, they’re well trained and battle-hardened.

  ‘That bloke Winston Churchill never could get it into his head that the Japanese just might be good soldiers. Far as he was concerned, they were a bunch of midgets with buckteeth wearing glasses thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle. He reckoned they’d be a pushover. He kept all his trained Pommie soldiers to fight the Germans and, same as we done, sent the raw recruits to the Far East as reinforcements. Some bloody pushover! I hate the Japs, can’t never forgive them for what they done, but they were bloody good soldiers. A man would be stupid to say otherwise.

  ‘Anyway, we blow up the causeway between the mainland and Singapore, which any galah can see is basically a waste of time. They also blow up the water supply, which comes from Malaya. Percival reckons there’s plenty of big reservoirs on the island but he doesn’t reckon on two things; the Japs overrunning them or bombing the pipes at that end. That’s exactly what happens and one of the reasons for the final surrender was the lack of water for the one million civilians in the city.

  ‘Anyway, Bennett wants to destroy the entire causeway but there’s old Percival at it again who overrules him. In the end they blow up the first seventy feet or so. As the water at low tide was only about four foot deep, the Japs simply waded across until they repaired it. They’d have come across easy enough even if the causeway wasn’t there. F’instance, some of our blokes who got left behind in the final withdrawal from Johore waited until low tide and then swam across. At best, blowing it up was a minor inconven ience. The Japs rebuilt it, good as new, in a couple of days.’

  ‘But I read there were around 120,000 soldiers on our side, more than three divisions,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, on paper! On paper it all looks dinky-di, we should’ve been able to make a go of it.’ ‘Just bad leadership, you reckon?’

  ‘Can’t say that, mate. I’m only a corporal, a shit-kicker, trying best I can to stay alive. The real point is we’ve got no air cover and a huge number, about half, of the men available to us were Indians. I don’t want to heap shit on the Indians, some of them fought like tigers in Malaya, but many were fresh recruits who’d had hardly any training. Like our own reinforcements, they were raw as butcher’s mince. The Pommie 18th Division arrived in Singapore in time to see us crossing the causeway. They’d just spent eleven weeks at sea and hadn’t acclimatised to the heat and humidity. They’d expected to be sent to the Middle East and what training they had was for the desert, not the jungle. The experienced blokes like us who fought in Malaya were exhausted, especially those of us who’d fought at Parit Sulong.

  ‘We left Johore Bahru on the tip of the Malay peninsula and marched across the causeway to Singapore with the Japs hot on our tail. The Australians and what was left of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were the last to come across. The Jocks are a crack outfit, the only one of the Pommie battalions to train in jungle warfare. The English garrison troops thought they were crackers. Us and the Jocks are supposed to be the seasoned fighters, just in case the Japs surprise us from the rear, they said.’ Tommy chuckles at the thought, ‘We were that knackered I doubt we could have fought a boy-scout troop. But the highland pipers weren’t beaten yet, they played “Hielan’ Laddie” and “A Hundred Pipers” as we marched across. It was grand after the horror of fighting. There’s this story I heard told of the Argyll’s drummer, a bloke called Hardy.

  ‘It seems Hardy ain’t never been known to run and he’s at the very end of the rear guard and he’s taken his usual measured step as we’re retreating across the causeway. His C.O.’s getting just a tad anxious so he yells to Hardy to get his arse into gear, the Japs are on the way and the engineers want to blow up the causeway.

  ‘Hardy takes no notice, he ain’t never run from the enemy to date and he ain’t gunna start now. The engineers are looking at their watches, waiting to push the plungers, and Drummer Hardy is still beating his drum to the same measure, increasing his pace not one inch, and while we cross the border the last two pipers alive in the Argylls play “Blue Bonnets over the Border”.’ Tommy laughs and so do I. ‘Finally he crosses the Straits of Johore and the C.O. gives Hardy a proper bollocking for being so bloody slow. But Hardy answers, “Sir, Japs are only Japs and it is undignified for an Argyll to take any notice of them.”

  ‘I remember looking about me at the blokes who fought at Parit Sulong and on the way, and you can see in everyone’s faces they’ve had enough. We weren’t cowards, nothing like that, we were just bloody exhausted. Up ahead there’s new recruits, young kids just out of school, some of them singing “Waltzing Matilda”, thinking how good it will be to fight the Japs, the job they’ve come over to do.’

  ‘Another cuppa?’ I ask Tommy. He nods and I get out of my sleeping bag and put a little more wood on the fire, empty the tea-leaves out of the billy and go down to the stream to fill it, then set it back on the fire.

  Tommy lights another Turf. ‘Moon’s clear enough, should be a nice day termorra.’

  I think about how we’ve only had a few hours’ sleep and we’ll be spending the better part of tomorrow morning trying to get up the mountain. ‘Keep talking,’ I say to Tommy, ‘I can hear you okay while I make the tea.’

  ‘Nah, wait till it’s done, I need to clear me mind a bit. Should have known yiz would’ve wanted to know all the details, it’s how yer mind works, don’t it?’ ‘It’s just that I want to hear it the way you did it, Dad.’ Tommy doesn’t reply and goes on smoking, staring into the night. I make the tea. We’re running out of sugar so I leave off putting some in my cup. I don’t really mind it without anyway. ‘There yer go,’I say and hand him his mug.

  ‘I’ve never told any of this before,’ Tommy begins, holding his mug in both hands to warm them, the cigarette hanging out the corner of the broken side of his jaw. That side doesn’t work that well so he can talk almost perfect with a cigarette in his mouth. ‘When you listen to the blokes on Anzac Day after they’ve had a pot or two and the bullshit begins waxing lyrical, you’d think the lot of us were heroes.’

  ‘You were, Dad.’

  Tommy shakes his head. ‘No, mate, it was just that there was no place to hide.’ He takes the fag that’s down to no more than half an inch out of the corner of his mouth and repositions it to the front, then draws it down to his fingertips and flicks the last quarter of an inch into the fire. The tops of his finger and thumb are stained dark from nicotine.

  He takes a sip of the hot tea and then gets going again on the story. ‘As you say, there’s about 120,000 Allied troops and it looks dinky-di, but we don’t amount to what you’d call a fighting force in any army’s manual. The Indians have just about had it, the Pommie reinforcements have just arrived and our reinforcements are wet behind the ears. On the credit side there’s six 8th Division battalions, a good part of whom have had jungle experience, and the Jocks who can acquit themselves same as us, we’re the old hands who now know how to fight the Japs.

  ‘Anyway, we cross onto the island and, with the 2/20th and 2/18th and blokes from the machine-gun battalion, we make up the 22nd Brigade and are told to take up positions on the north-west coastline. That’s where Bennett reckons the Japs will invade, though Pe
rcival disagrees and thinks the attack will come from the north-east and that’s where he puts his main thrust.

  ‘We’re told to dig in. Our platoon draws the short straw and we get the position well forward as the greeting committee for the Japanese coming across the Straits of Johore. “To dig” is also a bit of a joke, we’re situated in the middle of a mangrove swamp. We tell ourselves that at least the going is gunna be as tough for them as it is for us and the Japs have to come and fetch us while we only have to wait.

  It’s small comfort, we’ve seen how the Japanese come in, stepping over the bodies of their mates.

  ‘Maybe the Japs decide to give their men a bit of a rest. We have to wait a week before they make their big move. Meanwhile they’re shelling the daylights out of us. A week sitting in the middle of a mangrove swamp isn’t exactly homey. It’s the eighth of February, right in the middle of the monsoon season, it’s been raining all afternoon to make us just a little more uncomfortable than we already are. Don’t know why, but we sense this is the time they’re gunna come.

  ‘Darkness comes suddenly in the tropics, one moment you can read a map, the next you need a torch to see your own feet. We’re sitting there quietly shitting ourselves, each man thinking about what’s about to happen, feeling a bit sorry for himself. We’ve just fought ourselves to a standstill in Malaya and deserve better.

  ‘They’ve told us all to write letters home, which is not a real good sign. Letters home are generally followed by a telegram from the War Office to your next of kin.

  ‘Anyway, we’re sitting biting our knuckles when the shelling really steps up. There’s a total barrage coming at us, sixty to eighty shells a minute, in the area where we’re dug in. There’s huge sprays of mud and shit every time a shell lands. You can’t see them in the flash made by the explosions. Lumps of mud thump down on the ground beside you and hit you so we’re all covered in shit. Something hits me in the neck and fair takes me head off. “Jesus! I’m done for!” I grab my neck but there’s no blood. Then something starts flapping at my feet.’ Tommy laughs and looks at me. ‘It’s a bloody great fish, not a mark on it, we would’ve cooked it for tea under different circumstances!

  ‘Next to me is an old bloke, first-war veteran, name of Tony Freeman, and in between the explosions and the shells whistling above his head, he says to me, “May as well take a smoko, Tommy, no point ducking. If your name’s on one of them mortars or heavy artillery shells, you won’t know nothing about it anyway. They’ll keep this up a while, it’s when it stops you’ve got to watch out, that’s when the buggers will come at us.”

  ‘He’s right. Eventually the barrage stops and we get ready for the fray to come. But there’s nothing, not a sound. After a while I reckon the silence is worse than the shelling. At least in the jungle you’re fighting on equal terms, they don’t know where you are and you can’t see them. Here we are sitting ducks, we’re not goin’ nowhere and they know where we are.’

  Tommy glances at me. ‘You see, I’ve changed me mind about them having to come to us across the mangrove, which don’t seem the better option any more. We’re sitting ducks, all I can see is the black strip of water in front of me. After a while, I pick up the faint splash of oars and then shapes of boats and barges. Black shapes are moving towards us in the water, now there’s bloody hundreds o’ them. I hear Tony Freeman say “Here comes the fucking Spanish armada!”

  ‘We wait until they hit the shore on our side and our machine guns open up. I guess they’re dropping like flies, but who knows, there’s no encouragement to be taken, it’s dark. I think to meself, I’ve seen this before in the jungle, they’re dying for the Emperor God and no machine-gun crossfire ain’t gunna stop the fuckers. Soon they’re close enough so we can hurl grenades at them or pick off their dark shapes with a rifle.

  ‘It don’t make no difference, they run over their comrades’ bodies, wave after wave. There’s not enough of us to cover the whole perimeter and there’s gaps between our various units which they find out soon enough and our crossfire don’t keep them out.

  ‘We’re expecting our own artillery to start hitting them any moment, but no such thing happens. Later we find out that the communication lines have been cut by the Japanese bombardment and, with no orders, our artillery blokes are helpless. Eventually a runner gets to them and gives them the orders. The artillery are told to bring down fire everywhere, so they give it all they’ve got. A total of 4800 rounds fall and now there’s bodies landing with a thump in front of us.

  ‘Soon enough the machine guns are out of ammunition, their barrels red-hot from continuous firing, and the Nips are still coming, shouting out in the dark, splashing through the mud and the water, happy to die in the name of Nippon. The machine-gunners fix bayonets same as we do and we’re in among them hand-to-hand. We are outnumbered eight to one and haven’t a hope in hell of stopping them.

  ‘Did you kill any?’ I ask, excited.

  Tommy stops. ‘It’s not a question you ask a soldier,

  Mole.’

  I bow my head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, don’t be. If you didn’t kill the enemy, he was gunna kill you. The answer is you don’t count, it’s your bayonet or his, your knife or his, you do the best you can to stay alive. Killing don’t really come into it, just staying alive is what it is all about.’ He grins, ‘Mate, when you’ve got yourself an enemy who don’t seem to care if they die, you’ve got your work cut out just staying alive. We fought hard as we could and we retreated hard as we could without ever turning our backs.

  ‘Eventually, at dawn we get the message to withdraw and by morning it is all over for the advance defence, which, of course, is us. The Japanese make one last assault before they finally halt the main attack. They’ve won the foothold they needed to take on the rest of the island and now need time to gather their forces.

  ‘We withdraw to the other side of the Tengah airfield, that is, what is left of us. Our dead are now in Jap-held territory, we’ve had to leave them where they’d died.’ Tommy sighs, ‘A more sorry-looking bunch of blokes you wouldn’t want to see at a school reunion. We’re covered in blood and mud, some of the machine-gunners have no skin left on their palms, it’s burnt off from the red-hot barrels. ‘The 20th, 18th and ourselves have ceased to exist as battalions, the majority killed or wounded, or they’ve been cut off, routed, wandering about in the dawn light not knowing what’s hit them. I doubt we could have made up one battalion out of the lot of us. But one thing’s good, there’s still the six of us together under Blades Rigby. We’re beginning to think we must be leading charmed lives, Malaya, now this. I’m the only one that’s copped something, which is only a bloody awful headache where the fish hit the back of me neck, the other blokes are untouched.’

  Tommy reaches out and picks up one of the sticks I’d cut earlier to dry our clothes and he pokes at the fire, turning the logs, bringing it to life. I get out of my sleeping bag and put a dead branch over the top of the fire so it will catch in the renewed flames.

  ‘Remember before we went to sleep, I told you about the padre with the funny name, Wardale-Greenwood, how he helped lay on a mortar attack?’

  I nod, ‘I don’t reckon you’d get Father Crosby doin’ that, eh?’

  Tommy grins, ‘Don’t suppose, though you never know, he did rescue the Virgin in the fire. Well, the padre’s still with us and if it weren’t for him, I reckon a lot more blokes would have died. He takes no notice of the enemy fire, mortars landing, shells exploding, don’t seem to matter to him, he’s hopping from one wounded bloke to another, applying field dressings and comforting the dying, saying final prayers when it’s needed. Then he wades up to the waist through a swamp to help get forty wounded men to safety. Reckon he should’ve got the VC, no risk.’ I smile to myself, Tommy’s handing out VCs again. ‘From the airfield we move back to Brigade HQ at Bulim Village. Much later the same day, a Captain Richardson arrives
with some blokes from the 2/20th and a few machine-gunners. Poor bugger was in charge of a forward post and didn’t get the signal to move out when we did. Just about dawn, when we’re in the process of getting the hell out, they get the full brunt of the final Japanese attacks and somehow they hold them out until about tenthirty, most of it hand-to-hand combat.

  ‘Eventually the Japs withdraw and the blokes that are left, because most of them are dead, pull back to where their HQ should have been. All they see is dead bodies. The captain decides to try to make it to Tengah airfield, a fair distance across country, hoping to find out where the commander, Brigadier Taylor, has his HQ.

  ‘That’s easier said than done. There’s Jap snipers infiltrated everywhere and the enemy seems to control the intervening country. His blokes are on their last legs. Soon enough they’re ambushed and Richardson breaks them up into two small groups and tells them to try and make their own way back.

  ‘What’s ahead is jungle, river and swamp, where a rifle isn’t all that useful, so most of them chuck their rifles and any other kit that’s heavy and just keep their bayonets. Eventually some of them, including the captain, make it to Bulim Village hours after everyone else. There’s nothing said about their lost rifles and kit, they’re not the only ones done that.

  ‘Then at Bulim Village we move by truck to the base depot, where we’re hurriedly formed into a scratch battalion that’s got no real name. They simply call us X Battalion. There’s some few of us know how to fight but the remainder are untrained reinforcements who couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag. There’s only about two hundred of us all up and those who haven’t got rifles and kit get reissued.

  We’re told to take a couple of hours sleep then to move back into the line.

  ‘I can’t believe my flamin’ luck, a man couldn’t take a prize in a one-man raffle, we’ve jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Like I said, we’ve got a bunch of no-hopers, drongos who couldn’t fix a bayonet and charge if their lives depended upon it, which sooner or later it will. If I’m gunna have to fight, it would be nice to know the bloke next to me knows which end of a .303 is up!