Eyewitness (22 page)

Hours later, during one of these pauses, I heard the dull swish of swiftly flowing water. The Markham! I had got there sooner than I expected. It would take every scrap of my energy to swim it, and I removed my clothes, such as they were, and buckled on again the belt which carried revolver, compass and sheath-knife. Then I stumbled forward, heading for the sound of the water. When I reached it I found it was nothing but a small creek flowing down to the river. I nearly cried with rage and disappointment, and decided to go no farther that night, but lay down naked where I was. The mosquitoes were terrible, settling all over my body in swarms, and their bites nearly closed both my eyes. Finally, to escape them, I dragged myself into a shallow puddle of mud at the edge of the stream, and slept there.

*

Shortly before daylight I moved on, weak and stumbling, my heart jumping in the frightening way I had noticed in the mountains. The last few miles were easier, for the pit-pit gave place to kunai, through which one could at least walk upright. At any moment I expected a volley of shots, for the country was flat, and if, after sunrise, the Japs had taken the trouble to post a few men in trees, they could not have failed to see me. I crossed one new track through the grass, which showed many enemy footprints, and reached the Markham about mid-morning. As I looked across its swift brown streams I knew that I was too tired to swim it before I had had a rest, so I crawled into a patch of bush and dozed until about midday. Then I swam as silently as possible from one island to the next, resting for a short while on each one. Every time I touched a log or floating piece of rubbish I was terrified it was a crocodile, and struck out with renewed vigour. I really believe it was this fear, coupled with the expectation of a burst of machine-gun fire from the north bank, that enabled me to make the distance.

On the south bank at last, I lay breathless in a patch of grass. Voices came from not far away. I eased my pistol out of its holster and peered through the grass. Two Chivasing natives, with their women, were walking straight towards me, chattering happily, quite unaware of any alien presence. As soon as they drew level I jumped from cover, shoving the pistol into the ribs of the nearest one. The men trembled, but made no sound, and the women moaned faintly. They were too terrified to shout – apparently they thought I was going to shoot them out of hand.

‘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 mosquitoproof 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 Kirkland’s or Wampit.

‘Where’s your pay-book 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 realise it’s a crime in the Army to lose your pay-book? You can’t be issued with any equipment here without a pay-book.’

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.

Osmar White

When human history was beginning, New Guinea and the islands and seas surrounding it were already a barrier between two worlds. To the north and west were the animals and plants of Asia, and to the south and east were the animals of Australia. There was little interpenetration.

The barrier stood through history, and today still stands. On New Guinea’s narrow beaches the teeming east ends. Its mountains and jungles and rivers are the green armour guarding the empty south.

Osmar White, born in New Zealand in 1909, had knocked around Asia as a journalist before the war and was a natural choice to become an official Australian correspondent in 1942. He was not one to sit around in Port Moresby. White with Damien Parer made the arduous trek to Wau taking a team of porters with supplies to Kanga Force – mainly the 2/5
^th
Independent Company who were among the earliest Australians fighting the Japanese in New Guinea in early 1942. A few months later, with Chester Wilmot and Parer, White was in the dark heart of the front-line on the Kokoda Track at Isurava. He was later badly wounded in the Solomon Islands when the American ship he was aboard was bombed by the Japanese.

Green Armour
was written in Australia in 1943 while he recuperated. It was published first as
Green Armor
in 1944 in New York, and in Australia in 1945, and became an instant classic.

White’s descriptive writing in this and his later books about New Guinea is that of a writer fully engaged with the landscape, the history and the people – which in the case of
Green Armour
are the soldiers he met on the front-line

*

Wilmot took the radio sound truck as far as the road-head, which had then been pushed out through the fringes of the rubber country almost to the village of Uberi.

There were already signs of the great adventures in military engineering that were, within a few months of this date, to alter fundamentally the haphazard nature of New Guinea campaigning. Road-making in such country was a Homeric undertaking. Bulldozers, scoops, power shovels, graders and rollers were ripping a canyon through the jungle and a wide, deep gutter in the glutinous soil. Thousands of tons of metal, crushed coral, pumice, logs and gravel were poured into the seemingly limitless belly of the road’s foundations. Even so, it was still a river of mud in which every wheeled vehicle but the unconquerable jeep sooner or later stuck fast or skidded into the ditch.

But afternoon rains had been exceptionally light for three or four days, and the sound truck made it. We were spared a 15-mile slog through morass. We had stopped at the native labour compound on the way to pick up three native reject carriers to carry half-loads of Parer’s camera gear. It looked then – and proved later – to have been hardly worth the trouble. They were Pari boys, ruined by tourist and poor missionary influence. The second day out, we kicked their behinds down the trail and carried the gear ourselves. It was a bad thing in principle, but it saved hours of precious time.

*

It did not take me long to realise that carrying a 50-pound load up and down razorbacks demanded quadruple the energy expended in straight, unburdened climbing. We made Uberi after a three-hour scramble over a stiff ridge. The forest was comparatively open and the trail in fair condition. No rain had fallen for nearly a week. The main body of troops had gone through four or five days before. Since then there had been just enough traffic on the drying ground to settle the clay.

The engineers had done considerable work on the old native path already. Before that, travelling had been almost impossible. On one clay slope elements of the 39
^th
Battalion were reported to have taken 17 hours to travel 600 yards. They had to cut their way up the chute as mountaineers would cut a traverse on a snowfield.

In spite of the improved route the second stage was a long, extremely hard day. After leaving Uberi the route lay along the river flats for awhile. Then it slanted up a razorback into which more than a thousand steps had been cut. In three or four miles it rose 2000 feet. From the crest was a magnificent prospect of ranges sweeping down into the valley of the Brown River.

The formation of the trail had psychological drawbacks. The more or less regular steps seemed to make the going more difficult than an unimproved native trail, where stepping from root to root broke the monotony even if it slowed progress. At the foot of Uberi ridge a severe rainstorm caught us in the early afternoon. Parer started worrying about his film again, but I found the rain refreshing, the violent claps of thunder stimulating.

Eoribaiwa village stood on the top of a 2500-foot ridge. The engineers had let in 4000 steps on the approach. That night I saw what the country could do to raw troops. A detachment of engineers came in behind us in full marching order. Most of them were big men and fit by normal standards. They made the last few 100 feet of climb out of the valley in five- or ten-yard bursts. Half of them dropped where they stood when they reached the plateau. Their faces were bluish grey with strain, their eyes starting out. They were long beyond mere breathlessness. The air pumped in and out of them in great, sticky sobs; and they had 100 miles of such travelling ahead.

Parer again distinguished himself for guts. Clipped by a sharp dose of fever – his first acute attack – pale, streaming profusely with sweat, and at the same time shivering violently, he refused stubbornly to stop. In the morning, almost forcibly, I made him split his pack between us. He would stop every hour or so, reeling on his feet, and protest that he was capable of carrying his own gear.

The ‘beef’ was vanishing from chubby Wilmot before our eyes. His technique of travel was amusing. Downhill he took terrific, two-yard strides that would have broken my ankles. He went like a whirlwind, outstripping the rest by miles. But when we struck the next hill, we drew even. Halfway up we would pass him hoisting one leg after the other with agonised slowness. Three hundred yards away his grunts, groans, whistlings and profane cries were audible. He clawed his way to the crest and fell flat on his face. If he had not been strong as an ox he would have scrambled his guts. He was the wrong build for this sort of work – but the right temperament. He was still grunting, cursing and whistling at the end of the day – and still travelling.

There was rain every afternoon. The nights were getting chillier as we climbed, and the staging camps were yet inadequate. I could hardly believe that 2000 troops, raw to such conditions, had passed that way and left so few stragglers. They were men of great heart.

The Koiari villages, used as a basis for the reconstruction of the staging camps, had originally been only half a dozen poky, palmplaited huts, with bamboo flooring. Now most of the men had been recruited for carriers or had ‘gone bush’ in the hills.

The Koiari were a fine people, very dark-skinned with a peculiar hair-do – a bun worn squarely on top of the head. Physically they were robust and more free from skin diseases than any other Papuan natives I had seen. Despite close proximity to Moresby, they had resisted the ‘civilising’ influence and until a few years ago the coast villagers lived in terror of their raids. The tribe showed surprisingly little resentment of the sudden and bewildering invasion of their domain by a white army. The men, accepting the patrol officers’ explanation that the Japanese were bad people who would loot their gardens and steal their women, were serving willingly on the carrier lines. The women were employed weaving palm thatch for troop shelters.

When the main forces moved through, however, only about a quarter of the troops could be got under shelter at night. They had been forced by the severity of the going to discard more of their already cut-to- the-bone equipment. Hundreds of men slept in the mud. They had been issued one blanket and one ground sheet to six or seven men. They had already been drenched to the skin by the afternoon rain. Sometimes the downpour did not ease off but continued half the night and was followed by a piercingly cold, early-morning wind. Open fires were forbidden and, in any case, could scarcely have been tended. The march to Myola had taken from seven to ten days. It was not hard to imagine the condition the men were now in – long before beginning the serious business of fighting the Japs.

The third day out, fever started to creep up on me again. I declined to emulate Parer and stopped at Menari village to give the quinine a chance to work. We were all glad of the break. All day I lay on the veranda slats feeling half dead. I had a bad cold and a painful cough.

The natives here were restive because some of the troops had been raiding their banana and pawpaw patches. The patrol officers were worried because the headmen demanded not compensation but the punishment of the culprits. They refused to accept beef and rice in payment for the damage done. They wanted justice.

This was the type of minor slip-up in discipline that could have had very serious consequences. Few people realise how completely we were dependent on native goodwill.

After leaving Menari we met two wounded men coming out from Kokoda and Deniki – men of the 39
^th
Battalion. One had been shot through the foot, the other through the left eye. The bullet had passed obliquely and shallowly through his skull from just above the cheekbone, and emerged behind the ear. He complained of severe headache, but said the wound itself was not painful. The man with the bullet through his foot was leading him. The pair had walked 113 miles in 16 days. They expected to reach the road-head in another five.

A little later we passed three more wounded men. The first was shot through the shoulder, the second through the thigh, and the third had a badly shattered hand. They were jubilant because they had wounds that would earn them home-leave. They had been nine days on the trail.

None wanted to talk about the Kokoda fighting. They merely said that the Japs were hard to see in the bush, but that the 39
^th
had got amongst them in the rubber plantation and inflicted high casualties. What impressed me most deeply about these wounded was their apparent desensitisation. They were completely inured to suffering. They accepted it as an integral part of living. Pain was as much a part of their day as eating and sleeping. True, t would have been easy. But they did not want to live
too much
. They were not afraid.

Swinburne’s prayer ‘From too much love of living, from hope and fear set free …’ had a new meaning to me now. I knew why a medical officer in Moresby said forebodingly: ‘God knows how we are going to get the wounded out. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

*

To make up for the day lost at Menari, we decided to travel a double stage at Lake Myola. It was a 15-hour walk. I sweated heavily. My very skin ached. It hurt to breathe deeply – yet it was strangulation to try and moderate that painful breathing.

Blue valley after blue valley. Ridge and valley, and valley and ridge. Mile upon endless mile of hills seen from open patches of grassland. There was a detour about Kagi – a russet, round thatched village clinging to its jungle crag. There were pole fences about overgrown yam and sweet-potato fields. It was blue country, all covered with a mantle of majestic cloud and mist. We went up a dizzy ridge that rose and kept rising, topless. The sky was growing black with night. The storms of the afternoon merged into one continuous downpour. The last four hours’ going was along the gutterlike detour.

On Myola ridge the forest was very dense and the trail laced over by huge roots and fantastically wide tree buttresses. The passage of troops and carriers had churned the footway into a knee-deep glutinous quagmire. A sentry challenged. He stood out and flashed a torch over us. His steel helmet was already red with rust. He had wrapped a ground sheet around him for warmth. He was saturated and plastered with mud from head to foot. He had not been dry since he left Moresby. Behind him, three others had managed to get a small, smoky fire going. They were crouched over it, too dispirited even to look up. The rain trickled in streams from their backs and helmets.

Headquarters was a mile farther on. Ten miles would have been all the same to me. It is difficult to describe the abysmal depression that had me in its grip. The rain did not vary in intensity for as much as a minute – an endless, drumming, chilling deluge. It roared and rustled and sighed on the broad leaves of the jungletop. It soaked through the green pandanus thatches of shelters and spilled clammy cascades upon the bowed backs of exhausted men. It swamped cooking fires. Creeks ran in every hollow. One’s very bones seemed softened by the wetness.

We reported at the command post. We were given lukewarm stew and rice in a muddy mess tin, and I drank three mugs of tea that tasted rankly of rotten leaf mold. We were assigned shelter. The camp had been erected too hastily to allow such luxuries as slat floors. Bed was a ground sheet and blanket in four inches of mud. The mud would have been liquid if it had not been bound together with rotten fern fronds and sticks. In the morning the rain stopped for the first time in a week. I spent a few hours soaking up sun and drying out gear, but my cold was steadily getting worse.

The ‘lake’ was 300 or 400 acres of kunai grass and reeds on a mud pan. But for the danger of Japanese aircraft, it would have been infinitely preferable as a campsite to the dank jungle skirting it. Nevertheless the 14
^th
Battalion had crept cautiously out of the bush and made a collection of tiny grass shelters hard to spot from the air. They were full of scorpions and beetles, but better than depressing green huts under cover of the forest.

When the rain clouds started to collect again I stirred myself and gathered a large bundle of reeds which, laid latticewise on the mud of the floor, kept the ground sheet and blanket clear of the muck.

The second morning at Myola I was lying in the sun sound asleep when transport planes started to drop supplies. A wild Australian flying an old DH 86 nearly brained me with a case of canned beef. The Lodestars and the DC2s could come in low enough to drop accurately. They had the power to climb out steeply. But the unhappy Australian had to unload his cargo at 500 feet, and most of it fell well out in the bush. It was fascinating to watch cases of canned beef explode as they hit ground. The gold-coloured cans scattered like shrapnel.