Browning Battles On

by Peter Corris

  'I should have taken their dog tags,' I said.

  Harry's eyes were fluttering as he drifted towards sleep. 'You what?'

  'The dog tags. So their relatives could be notified.'

  Harry's face split into a grin. Just for an instant he was the Honolulu pimp again, the smart Jap in the white sharkskin suit. 'You're an optimist, Dick. That's what I like about you. Want to take first watch?'

  He was asleep before I could answer.

  Who were we kidding? We both slept for three or four hours. My watch had survived the whole ordeal, but it was set to Burbank time. It showed nine a.m. but the sun was too high for that. I made a guess at eleven and reset the watch. Then I nudged Harry. He came awake, muttering in Japanese.

  'No savvy, Harry. Collect your thoughts. We're going to have to decide which way to go. I vote east.'

  Harry knuckled his eyes. 'What if we're a couple of miles from the west coast of New Guinea?'

  I shrugged. 'All civilisation is in the east.'

  'My people are from Kyushu.'

  'Meaning?'

  'The west of Japan.'

  'Let's toss for it.' I found a dime in my pocket and spun it.

  Harry called. 'Heads.'

  The dime fell on the leaves. Tails.

  'Fuck it,' Harry said. 'Well, at least give me the dime.'

  I handed the coin over. He held it between his thumb and cut forefinger, turned it to catch the light. I think it was at that moment I decided I could trust Harry, all things being equal. A dime meant a hell of a lot to him—he was an American at heart. I took out the compass and we got our bearings. As I was shouldering my pack I looked back in the direction we'd come. Tiredness and stress play tricks on you. For a second I imagined I was back in Australia, out west of the Blue Mountains somewhere, and that I could look at the horizon in any direction I wanted to. Instead I saw a blank grey-green wall of jungle only a few feet away on all sides. A shiver ran through me. I didn't want to die anywhere, but I especially didn't want to die here.

  After a few minutes slogging eastwards, with Harry cutting and slashing as before, the terrain changed. We faced a long climb up a muddy hillside, less heavily overgrown than the country we'd come through, but steep and treacherous-looking. Harry put his bayonet away and gave me a grin. 'Still want to go east?'

  I got one of the bottles of Johnnie Walker from my pack, ripped off the foil, drew the cork and took a long swig. I put the bottle back, moved past Harry and began to climb. I've always had strong legs—the result of a lot of running away from raided orchards, shops where temptation had got the better of me and my belt-wielding father when I was young. And from horse riding later.

  The slope was severe but the trees growing on it had had their roots exposed by heavy rainfall and there were good hand and footholds. It was hard, sweaty climbing, but I fell into a rhythm and went up pretty quickly. I could hear Harry behind me making heavy going of it. As luck would have it, the roots were widely spaced, very suitable to a six-footer, not so convenient for a runt like Harry. I beat him to the top by a couple of minutes and had time to have another swig of scotch and get a Camel going before he joined me.

  'I thought Japan and Hawaii were full of mountains,' I said. 'You seem to be better on the flat.'

  Harry lay on his back gasping for air. 'Those goddamn roots were like a ladder for you. I needed a few more rungs.'

  It was only a slight exaggeration to say that we'd climbed out of the jungle. There was still dense forest ahead of us, but the country had definitely changed. The trees were not woven together and interlaced with creeper. The way was still upward but it looked more gentle. When Harry had caught his breath and eaten a chocolate bar, he unshipped the binoculars, took off his specs and gazed back down and to the west. He held the glasses steady and looked for a long time. Then he swore and spat a brown stream of saliva.

  'What's wrong?'

  He handed me the glasses. I panned them across the scene. I saw the smudge of brown smoke rising from the trees a long, long way back. 'I don't see anything to worry about.'

  'How about six Japanese soldiers, maybe seven.'

  'Where?'

  'What does it matter? Not far back. Let's move out.'

  'How much ammo have they got?'

  'Not a lot, but some.'

  I was tired after my showy climb. I wanted to lie there on the grass, maybe smoke another cigarette, even brew up some coffee. 'They'll never make the climb,' I said. 'Not in the boots they've got and in their condition.'

  Harry was restrapping his pack. 'You want to bet your head on that?'

  We moved out, united. There's nothing so powerful to a soldier as fear of the army he's deserted. I speak from experience. In 1917 I deserted from the 1st AIF in France and joined up with a British and a German deserter.4 I've never known a tighter comradeship, and that's how Harry and I were behaving now. He didn't need his bayonet and my long legs weren't any advantage. We moved as one, slogging through what they now call a rainforest.

  After a while the truth of that description became dramatically clear. The tree canopy was heavy and I didn't notice the sky darkening overhead as the afternoon wore on. Suddenly thunder was rolling all around us and the rain fell as if a giant fire hydrant had been opened just above our heads. We were instantly soaked and there was no point in looking for shelter. We kept moving. Rain makes me miserable. It reminds me of time I had to spend inside as a kid, under my mother's watchful eye and tormented by my older brother, Tom, who liked to pepper me with questions like, 'Who is the Prime Minister of England?' I could never see why it mattered. Tom was great mates with our cousin, Rory, a favourite of our father. Rory liked to play a game in which he was a boxer and I was a punching bag.

  But Harry was whistling and humming. Tuneful he wasn't, but eventually I recognised it—'On the sunny side of the street'.

  'What're you so cheerful about?'

  'I'm thinking about those assholes behind us. I'm pretty damn sure they couldn't have got to the climb before the rain came.'

  I could see what he meant. The rain would've turned that slope into a mudslide, impossible to climb. And if the Japanese had got around and up somehow, they'd have no way of knowing what direction we'd taken.

  Tramping along, wet to the skin, I felt relieved enough to sing a few bars:

  Grab your coat, an' get your hat,

  Leave your worries on the doorstep.

  Just direct your feet,

  To the sunny side of the . . .

  'Jesus, Dick,' Harry said. 'You're no Crosby.'

  4

  The rain lasted about an hour, and after walking through the steamy heat for the rest of the day we were both dead tired. Harry was for pressing on to the next ridge but I voted against it by dropping my pack under a tree and getting out the Johnnie red. I realised then that Harry was just as unwilling to be alone in this wilderness as I was. We worked on our bottles for a few minutes. The insects were troublesome and I fancied the air had cooled down a good deal.

  'We need a fire,' I said. 'To keep off the bugs and stay warm. Might even try to heat some food.'

  Harry grunted.

  'Feel like scouting about for some wood?'

  'No.'

  We sat for a while as the light drained out of the sky. Pretty soon it'd be too late to find fuel. My muscles were stiffening and I was beginning to feel every one of those years Harry suspected I had on the clock—damn near fifty. Suddenly we were both on our feet, shouting and waving. Anyone watching us would have thought that we'd gone mad, but we'd seen and heard it together—a plane, passing quite low over us, heading east. It was hopeless, of course, like trying to catch the director's eye in a crowd scene. I'd done that often enough to know the odds against.

  We watched the dot recede in the sky.

  'Was it one of yours?' I said.

  'I was going to ask you the same thing.'

  'Maybe it was neither.'

  Harry stared at me. 'A civilian plane? Out here?'
r />   I shrugged. 'We don't know where the hell we are. We might be five miles from Port Moresby.' I couldn't resist adding, 'If only we'd had a fire going.'

  'Yeah, or if we'd taken a flare gun from the B52 or had a radio or could fly our fuckin' selves.'

  I went off to gather wood. When I got back I found that Harry had spread out a groundsheet and was mixing something up in his mess tin. I dropped the wood and searched through my pack for some paper. All I could find were the letters I'd taken from Major Smith's briefcase. I ripped them open, dumped the contents inside the bag and used the envelopes to start the fire. I fed the wood in and we had a good blaze going in a few minutes. Harry heated his mixture and spooned it into himself. I wasn't hungry. I ate a compacted fruit bar and drank some whisky. Coffee was another matter. The K-rations contained packets labelled 'coffee powder', something which neither of us was familiar with.

  'Do you heat it with the water, or pour the hot water on it?' Harry asked.

  'Search me.'

  We adopted the first method and ended up with a thick dark liquid that looked and smelled like coffee but didn't taste like it.

  Harry watched me survive a sip, then tried it himself. 'What d'you think of it?'

  'Needs whisky,' I said.

  I was tired, but I couldn't sleep. The ground was no harder than ground I'd slept on before, the insects no more busy and the company no worse. I'd been in situations just as desperate, like when I'd been shanghaied into the Mexican Revolution by Dwight Springfield and tricked into joining the Canadian Mounties by Henry Connybear.5 The difference was that those times I'd known what country I was in, what state and town even. There was something very disturbing about not knowing where I was, not within a couple of thousand miles in any direction. I made a pillow out of my pack, turned up the collar of the brigadier's jacket and tried to sleep. I waited for Harry to start snoring. I was sure he'd be a snorer.

  I ran through memories of some of the women I'd slept with. Bittersweet memories for the most part, with moments of ecstasy and despair about equally mixed. This was a getting-to-sleep technique that usually worked. Sleep was so much better than those fights and betrayals, those deceptions and desertions. It didn't work. I was on the point of sitting up to smoke a cigarette when Harry's quiet voice cut through the humming, crackling noises of the night.

  'Lie real still, Dick. Don't move a muscle.'

  I immediately wanted to jump ten feet in the air. I said, 'Harry. What—'

  The pistol shot was like an electric shock. I felt it run through me rather than heard it, and I went rigid, cramping all down the right side.

  'It's OK,' Harry said. 'Just a snake.'

  I never liked snakes. Tom, my brother, used to bring brown snakes into the house and put them in my bed. I never liked Tom either. I couldn't move. Harry put the gun down and fossicked around until he found a stick. He reached over and I heard the stick make contact with something smooth. Harry lifted the snake up and held it over the fire. His shot had turned its broad, dark head into a bloody pulp. The body, about four feet long, was still twitching. Slowly, my muscles relaxed and the cramp gave way.

  'Where . . . where was it?'

  'Coming down the tree behind you. Looked like it was taking a fancy to the back of your neck.'

  'Great shot,' I said. 'Thanks.'

  'You're welcome.' He retracted the stick and examined the snake closely. 'Makes me wish I'd paid more attention in school. Might've been able to identify this sucker and know where we are.'

  'I never found school learning much use when it came to survival,' I said.

  Harry flicked the snake away into the bushes. 'Ain't it the truth. Tell me how you come to be in US uniform in a US plane and you an Aussie with an Aussie uniform in your kit.'

  'It's a long story.'

  'I can't sleep. We got all night.'

  I started to tell him, all about the Hollywood propaganda movies and John Farrow and the FBI. I threw in May Lin and Bette Davis and Spencer Tracy. He was snoring before I got on to Errol Flynn.

  We got moving at first light, wearing our jackets for the first few hours or so against the early morning cold, and then rolling them up and tying them to our packs. The packs were a little lighter for the food and liquor we'd consumed. There was no argument now about which direction to take. We marched towards the rising sun and by mid-morning I was aware that I had a crick in my neck from looking up into the sky for a plane. We went over the first ridge and I caught my breath as we neared the top, hoping for a sight of human habitation. But beyond the ridge was more forest and further ridges. Harry used the binoculars anyway, quartering the field of vision, adjusting the focus. I smoked and rubbed my still-sore ribs. My cuts and abrasions were healing, thanks to the ointments we'd taken from the medical chest. I wondered how the Japs were doing, back in the jungle. Then I forgot about them.

  We pushed on and at the first rest stop Harry busied himself by cutting off his sergeant's insignia and turning his jacket inside out. The drab green cloth was a light beige on the inside. He tore the peak from his cap, rubbed mud into it and pulled it out of shape so that it looked like a brown beret.

  'What's the idea?'

  'I'm thinking about that plane. I'll swear it wasn't military. That means I don't want to look like a Japanese sergeant in these parts.'

  'I'll vouch for you,' I said.

  'That's big of you, Dick, I appreciate it. But Bren guns don't always listen to phony brigadier generals.'

  He had a point. He was betting on us falling into the hands of my side rather than his. Fine. But if it came to the crunch, how was my side going to treat me?

  We spotted a few more planes during the day. They were heading south-east and, by unspoken agreement, we altered our course. The planes were military this time, but flying very high and impossible to identify. The country didn't change much and neither did the weather. It rained in buckets in the afternoon, just as before. Dying of thirst wasn't going to be one of our problems.

  Like Harry, I hadn't ever been an attentive student. I'd scraped along for a few years at Dudleigh Grammar by a combination of cheating and learning things off by heart, parrot fashion. That kind of knowledge doesn't stick. The result was that although I recognised some of the trees, eucalypts, acacias and such, for all I knew they grew everywhere from Malaya to Tasmania. I'd certainly seen gum trees in California and South Africa. Same with the birds. There were all kinds, big and small, but I've never known anything about birds and all I could say about these was that some were black, some were white and some were reddish-brown.

  We spent the following days in the same way—tramping, getting wet, drying off and sleeping. The ground got harder at night after the whisky ran out. The food was monotonous and getting short. We thought about hunting but didn't see any animals worth killing and we didn't want to waste our ammunition anyway. There were berries growing on thorny trees and some of the pulpy plants looked edible, but we didn't want to take the risk. By the twelfth or thirteenth day we were hungry and losing condition. There were fewer planes, but those we saw were still heading south-east.

  We struggled up to the top of a ridge and Harry got out the glasses. He stared for what seemed like hours until I got impatient.

  'What can you see? A bar, whorehouse, golf course, what?'

  'A river,' Harry said. 'I think.'

  'Terrific. We can catch fish with our bare hands.'

  'You dope. Rivers flow to the sea, don't you know that? The sea means ships, towns maybe.'

  If I'd ever known, I'd forgotten. I grabbed the glasses and made adjustments. My vision was better than Harry's but he was more painstaking. It took me a minute to get the focus right. Then I saw it, glinting in the distance. 'It loops,' I said.

  'So what?'

  'It makes these wide loops. If we follow it we'll have to walk ten miles to make one.'

  'You got a better idea?'

  I'd once spent a lot of time on a river, far too long in fact, with a band of Cana
dian Indians. The trip had been a nightmare, apart from a little female comfort, but I'd been impressed by how far and fast you could travel on a river.6

  'Maybe we could make a raft.'

  Harry was wiping his glasses. He replaced them and stared at me. 'Yeah, I woulda suggested that myself, it's just I didn't notice you had an axe in your pack.'

  'There might be some fallen trees,' I muttered. 'Anyway, a river is something different. I'm sick to death of this bloody bush.'

  We pushed on towards the river.

  'A raft,' Harry mumbled. 'Huckleberry fuckin' Finn. Why not a canoe? Hia-fuckin'-watha.'

  'I thought you didn't remember anything from school.'

  As we tramped along Harry recited:

  By the shore of Gitche Gumee,

  By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

  Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

  Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

  Dark behind it rose the forest,

  Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,

  Rose the firs with cones upon them;

  Bright before it beat the water,

  Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

  'You hope,' I said.

  'That's funny. I didn't think I'd taken any of that crap in. You want to hear some more, Dick?'

  'No. Listen to this,

  I had written him a letter

  Which I had, for want of better

  Knowledge, sent to where I met him

  Down the Lachlan, years ago . . .'7

  'English poets are all fags,' Harry said.

  5

  It was almost dark by the time we got to the river. We made camp, not talking much, and ate what was just about the last of our rations. The powdered coffee had all gone—we'd acquired a taste for it—and the whisky was a memory. I'd have given a lot for a cup of tea, which was a drink I hadn't taken for thirty years. There was something about the air, the sound of the river, the look of the stars, that reminded me of picnics I'd been on in the Hunter Valley as a boy. The adults all drank hot, strong, sweet tea—all except my father, that is. 'Wild Bill' drank beer and rum. Some of that would have gone down well, too, but just then I'd have settled for tea.