Fear Drive My Feet (23 page)

The first hint of Les's approach was the passing of a line of about forty laden carriers,
in charge of four young police-boys wearing their brand-new navy serge uniforms
with
red sashes. At the end of the line marched a medium-built man of about thirty. When
I approached he pushed his battered felt hat off his perspiring brow and ordered
the police to halt the carriers for a spell.

‘Are you Les Howlett?' I asked.

He regarded me with dark humorous eyes. ‘Yes. I suppose you're Peter Ryan?'

‘That's right.'

We shook hands, and I said, ‘Wampit Camp is just about half an hour away. What about
pushing on?'

‘Let's,' he replied briefly. ‘I'm a bit keen on a wash-wash and a feed. All right,
walkabout!' he called to the boys, who lifted the cargo and moved off again down
the track.

It was dark by the time Les had had a wash and we had eaten our tea. Heavy rain poured
onto the low-pitched grass roof of the hut, and for the first of many nights to come
we faced each other across the lantern and planned.

‘What are those police of yours like, Les?' I asked.

‘Not bad. They're smart lads, but they haven't had very much experience yet.'

‘I'll turn them over to Kari and old Watute, two of mine. They'll make policemen of
them.'

‘Good idea. Now about those stores…'

And so on, planning, scheming, making a hundred suggestions and discarding most of
them, and laughing often. Les chain-smoked cigarettes; my pipe was never cold. By
midnight we felt we had straightened out a lot of problems, and had got to know each
other. I had discovered Les's quick, quiet sense of humour, and had come already
to look for the gleam in his smiling dark eyes across the hurricane-lamp. It was
something that buoyed me up often in the months ahead.

Next morning, in front of the hut, Corporal Kari paraded our little squad of police
– eight in all. There was a striking contrast between my boys and those Les had
brought
fresh from the depot at Port Moresby. Mine, wearing patched and faded khaki loincloths
and battered peaked caps, lacked the parade-ground smartness of the recruits. But
they were tough, steady, and reliable, old soldiers tempered in the fire of many
campaigns. The difference in the faces was interesting, too. My boys looked like
a bunch of thugs compared with the fresh-faced youthful recruits. However, the newcomers
seemed keen and eager, and I felt that with experience, and after a spell under the
stern hand of Kari, they would be as good as any. I watched them drill for a quarter
of an hour or so, till Kari dismissed them.

Les had brought six other boys over with him – they all came from various parts of
the Huon Peninsula. With them to help us there was a good chance that wherever we
might go we would be able to make ourselves understood. And they would be most useful
for propaganda purposes, for they had seen the tremendous progress made since the
early days of the war, and the huge aerodromes and enormous troop concentrations
at Port Moresby, and would be much better able than we were to convince the people
of their own villages that the Allies were now possessed of real military strength.
It was easy to understand the scepticism of the natives in the villages when I, a
single white man, talked about our enormous resources. They used to retort that they
had only my word for it that we had large numbers of troops, while they could actually
see, not far away, thousands upon thousands of Japanese. Now, they would listen with
much more attention to our story, for it would come from the lips of one of their
own people.

Although we firmly rejected all equipment that was not absolutely essential, our
combined stores amounted to nearly seventy carrier-loads. Most of it was either food
or trade goods. We were gambling on being able to sneak this
very substantial quantity
of material into the Wain, for we wanted to be independent of cargo-dropping from
aircraft – as well as being unreliable, it was likely to betray our position to the
enemy.

The large supply of trade goods comprised knives, axes, beads, mirrors, calico, matches,
tobacco, newspaper, salt, and a thousand razor-blades. This last item was a rare
prize, for razor-blades were highly valued by the natives, and were very easy for
us to carry round in our pockets. A couple of packets represented payment for food
for our whole party for days. At that time they were very hard to get, even for the
troops, and the Army was reluctant to part with such a large number ‘just to issue
to natives'. It had taken a good deal of persuasion on Major Vertigan's part to get
them.

I looked at the pile of trade goods with satisfaction. For the first time I could
go into the Wain without being a beggar and depending for charity on the good nature
of the natives. Now, I thought, I would be able to give things away with a lavish
hand, mindful of the anthropologists' warnings that natives despise nothing so much
as meanness.

Our wireless set, an Air Force job, was a masterpiece. It was light and compact and
could be unpacked and set up quickly. Moreover, it operated on dry batteries, which
was an advantage; an accumulator set would have needed a charging unit for the batteries
and petrol to run the unit on, both of which would have added to our problems. The
noise of a recharger's engine would have echoed for miles round those hills, too. When
packed into the special padded box Les had made for it, and complete with spare valves,
batteries, headphones, tools, aerial, and other spare parts, our wireless set could
easily be carried by two men, and though it was often severely battered during carries
through rough country it never once let us down. Les and I thought of it with the
affection one bestows on a faithful friend.

Because of rumours circulating among the natives that the Japanese were making regular
patrols from Lae to the Erap River, we decided not to go by my usual route up the
Erap Valley, but to cross the Markham higher up, opposite Chivasing, on the north
bank. Chivasing was one of the bigger villages, and we hoped to get enough carriers
there to take us across the uninhabited stretch of the Markham plain to the villages
of the more densely populated Middle and Upper Erap, through which we would pass
to the Wain. This route would take several extra days, but it was safer, and would
enable us to visit many villages that had seen no European since the last peacetime
patrol, in 1941.

We sent a message to Mari village telling all the able-bodied men to present themselves
for carrying next day, but only twenty-five of them turned up, and it was clear that
we would have to make two trips to get all our stores to the Markham.

We decided to make two short carries the first day, moving all the gear as far as
Kirkland's. By three o'clock the carriers, under the leadership of a native called
Sela, had returned from the first trip. Picking up the remaining cargo, they set
off at once on the second trip. I walked at the tail of the line, intending to spend
the night at Kirkland's. Les was to follow in the morning.

Half-way between Wampit and Kirkland's I called in at Bob's. Although I knew the
camp had been more or less abandoned, it was a shock to see it manned by only four
men. The long huts were empty, the door of the store lay open and broken, and the
sergeants' mess where I had eaten so many happy, if frugal, meals was falling down.
Without any laughing, chattering natives, the silence was more unearthly than ever;
and the smoke from the single cooking-fire still hung motionless among the trees.
I asked the four men, all of whom I knew from those earlier days,
whether they felt
the same sense of awful desolation as I did at this moment.

‘Feel it!' they exclaimed. ‘You notice it just by walking in here. You can imagine
how it's affecting us after all these weeks.'

I felt sorry for them as I looked at their strained and pallid faces.

‘Remember how we used to play the old gramophone at night, and gather round the
signal hut to listen to the news?' they asked, and we talked a while of the old days,
when Bob's was, in a sense, ‘home' to us all, and its fires and bustling activity
made it a place of comfort and refuge in the hostile jungles that surrounded us.

Kirkland's was unchanged, except that Tom Lega had obtained leave to go to Australia,
and the place was in charge of another corporal, Curly Lee. I had met Curly the previous
year, on a brief visit to the Salamaua front. He had been camped at Skindiwai, a
wet, cold little group of bark shanties almost buried in the dark, mountainous rainforest.

‘Fair dinkum, it's enough to give you the horrors!' exclaimed Curly. ‘We used to
huddle round the fires at Skindiwai and say we'd give anything to get warm. Down
here in the flamin' Markham we'd give anything to get bloody well cold again!'

‘And the mossies!'

‘I don't mind mosquitoes biting at night,' chipped in one of the other men. ‘I've
been on this ruddy island now for so long that the mossies are just part of life
– we'd miss them if there weren't any. But when the bastards go all day and all night,
like they do down here, it's a bit over the odds.'

We sat and yarned in the mosquito-proof room for the rest of the afternoon, but the
conversation continually came round to guesses at how much longer the war would last,
and how much longer it would be necessary to go on living in this dreadful spot.

‘When I stop to think about it,' said Curly, ‘it beats me why this rotten, lousy hole
hasn't sent us all off our heads!'

About five o'clock, when the last of the Mari boys had gone and I had checked over
all the cargo, Curly and I walked up to the kunai-covered hill at the back of the
camp to watch the cook-boy and his mate catch flying-foxes, or black bokis as they
were called in pidgin. These passed over in a cloud every night, and the method of
snaring the creatures showed once again how intelligent these ‘savages' were. They
took the long, light, spear-like midribs of coconut-fronds and covered one end of
them with an entanglement of thorny vines. These missiles would be hurled among the
flying-foxes as they made their way overhead, the thorns would catch in their wings,
and the weight of the midribs would bring the creatures tumbling to earth. Their
smell was repulsive, and they were infested with vermin, but when skinned and cooked
they were tasty enough.

Kari put my bed-sail up alongside Curly's, and we talked till quite late that night.
Curly told me there were no canoes or boats' crews at Kirkland's now, because no
patrols went over to the north bank of the Markham. The Chivasing natives had dismantled
all their canoes because they were frightened to be on the river in case they were
shot at by aircraft.

Early next morning the Mari carriers returned to bring our gear up to Naraguma, an
hour or so farther up the Markham. Naraguma was really a dependent hamlet of Mari
itself, but had been abandoned by order of the district officer. He did not want
natives moving about near the Markham, for they might be spying for the Japanese.
For this reason, it was felt that the whole south bank of the Markham between the
Watut and the Wampit rivers should be kept uninhabited.

The Mari boys would leave us at Naraguma, and carriers would be brought down from
Chivasing for the remainder of the trip. Curly walked up to Naraguma to keep me company,
and we made our way together through the thick jungle that fringed the river. When
we reached the little village the carriers dumped their loads and at once set off
back to Kirkland's for their second lot. Curly helped me stow the loads beneath the
houses. We noticed that though the buildings were in good repair the jungle was already
starting to creep in upon the settlement. A few months more, I thought, and it will
be a hard job to find Naraguma.

Curly waited while I sat on my patrol-box to scrawl a brief note home – the last
I would have an opportunity to send for several months. He wrapped it in the oilskin
folder we all carried to prevent our papers becoming soaked with sweat, and buttoned
it into his shirt pocket.

We shook hands.

‘So long – see you in Sydney or Melbourne,' was all he said. With a quick glance
at his tommy-gun to make sure it could be brought instantly into action, he disappeared
into the surrounding jungle.

By three in the afternoon the boys were coming in by ones and twos with their second
loads. As each man stacked his cargo beneath the houses I paid him off – a shilling
and a stick of tobacco for his day's work.

Les arrived at four, behind the last load of cargo. He had made sure that nothing
was left behind. As soon as he came into sight I called out to Dinkila:

‘Cookim hot water long wash-wash belong master!'

‘All right, master, me lookim,' he replied as he ran down to the river to fill a
bucket.

As soon as Les had bathed and changed his clothes we set Dinkila and Les's cook to
prepare a meal while we
sat down to learn our list of code words.

‘This is the list,' Les said, pulling a paper from his pocket. ‘These are the keys
to the code we will use, and we must memorize them in that order. We don't want to
carry any papers of that sort on us, in case we are captured.'

The words – there were about a dozen – were ordinary enough. ‘Attractive' and ‘evidently'
were two I can recall, but it took us a little time to learn them in the right order.
Then we dropped the paper in the cooking-fire and watched it blacken, curl up, and
slowly burn. Somehow it seemed symbolic. I felt a link had been severed, and Les
must have thought the same.

‘It's almost like burning our bridges, isn't it?' he asked with a smile.

As we lay beneath our mosquito-nets that night we speculated on how we should fare
when we had really crossed our Rubicon, and how the natives of the north side would
receive us.