Fear Drive My Feet (6 page)

‘Did John Clarke fix you up with trade goods?' Bill asked when we had finished the
map.

‘Yes. And he's lending me Kari, to go as far as Gain. I feel a lot happier about
my chances now.'

‘Is there anything I can scrounge for you? What weapons have you got?'

Bill was incredulous when he learnt I had nothing but a pistol.

‘Good God, you should have a tommy-gun at least!' he exclaimed. ‘I can't get you
one, worse luck, because we're as short as hell ourselves. But I'll see if there's
anything else I can do.'

The result of his scrounging was that I got half a dozen hand-grenades, a pair of
powerful but old-fashioned field-glasses, and several boxes of ammunition for my
.45 revolver.

At about half past five we walked down to the Wampit for a swim, and as soon as I
had eaten my tea – the same old food – I turned in to sleep.

Next morning, as the trees were shedding their last drops of water from the night
rains, and the steam was rising from the wet ground, Corporal Kari, Constable Achenmeri,
and I set out from Bob's. John Clarke had helped again by securing six young men
from nearby Mari village to carry my gear, for my other carriers had to return to
Wau. As the line of eight natives swung into the jungle, heading north for the Markham,
I waved goodbye to John, Bill, and my other new friends, and strode after the carriers.
In a few seconds the camp was out of sight and the only hint of its presence was
the put-put-put of the little motor that charged the radio batteries. Within a minute
even this could not be heard. All round there was nothing but green, steaming stillness.

It was about eight o'clock when I set out, and my immediate destination was Kirkland's
Dump, our farthest outpost on the bank of the Markham, nearly two hours' walk away.
I had by now adopted the habit of reckoning distances in hours rather than miles,
for distance as the crow flies is a meaningless term in New Guinea. In bad country
a whole day's hard struggle might find one only three or four miles advanced, while
twenty miles might be covered on the flat without great difficulty. For this reason
one always thought in terms of how long it took to reach a place, and not how far
away it was.

Most of my two hours' walk lay through swampy country, and the track wound its way
hidden in the jungle which fringed the foot of a grassy ridge. In places the
track
was so boggy that poles had been laid along it to prevent its being turned entirely
into a bottomless pool of mud. Covered with ooze and slime, and none too well anchored,
the poles were a difficult obstacle unless one's boots were plentifully studded with
sharp sprigs. The natives, with their bare feet, negotiated the poles with much less
difficulty.

At about nine-thirty we reached a place where the track climbed up a kunai-covered
hill. From the summit the view was not obscured by the jungle, and one could survey
almost the entire Markham Valley. While the carriers had a spell I sat down on my
patrol-box and studied the country.

The ‘valley' was an immense plain, almost perfectly flat, and covered partly by large
stretches of kunai and other grasses and partly by patches of scrub and jungle. Ten
or fifteen miles away, across this level expanse, were the mountains in which Jock
was living. They rose up sheer and blue from the valley floor, though the tops still
could not be seen for the line of clouds that seemed to sit eternally upon them.
In this line of mountains, like gates in a wall, were the dark gashes of the valleys
of the three main tributary streams on the north side of the Markham – the Leron,
the Irumu, and the Erap. Muddy and swollen from the rains in the enormous mountains
they drained, these rivers hurled themselves out of the hills and rushed across the
plain to join the Markham.

Almost beneath me, near the southern edge of the valley, was the Markham itself –
a vast yellow-brown river consisting of three or four main streams which constantly
joined and redivided and were interconnected by dozens of smaller channels. Between
the main streams were grass-covered islands of considerable size, whose shape and
position changed with every flood. Fifty miles to westward this incredible stream
could still be discerned snaking its
tortuous way through the malarious crocodile-infested
valley. It was difficult to cross even at the best of times, but in the wet season,
when it was full of floating trees and smaller rubbish, it was an impassable barrier.

The sun was now blazing from the metallic, cloudless sky. The oppressive blanket
of stillness seemed more unearthly, intensified because we could see the vastness
of the area it covered. The silence is bearable when you are walled in by the jungle,
because you are conscious of only a small slice of it – the quietness of your immediate
surroundings. But this vast landscape in which nothing moved or spoke was eerie
and rather frightening. It was not the peaceful quiet of a friendly countryside,
but brooding, malevolent, full of watchful eyes.

Kari pointed to a tiny smudge of smoke from the trees that fringed the river. It
came from the camp at Kirkland's, he said.

We followed the track down the grass-covered spur towards the Markham, and an easy
twenty minutes brought us to the edge of the timber, where a big fair-haired young
man was squatting in the shade. He stepped forward to meet me with a friendly grin,
and we shook hands and introduced ourselves. As he pushed back his shabby and shapeless
slouch hat I noticed that it was decorated with a magnificent flame-coloured plume
from a bird of paradise, the unofficial emblem adopted by many members of the New
Guinea Volunteer Rifles. His name was Tom Lega, he told me, and in peacetime he had
worked on the Bulolo goldfields. At present he was the corporal in charge of the
little detachment that manned Kirkland's.

‘I was expecting you,' said Tom. ‘They told us on the phone from Bob's that you'd
left, so we put the billy on, and the brew is just ready.'

He led the way through the trees, and in a few moments we were in the centre of the
camp – four wretched shelters of ragged sago-frond thatching.

‘Come into the cage,' he said. ‘We spend most of the day in here.'

He held aside for me the blanket which covered the entrance to a tiny room made entirely
of fly-wire screening sent down from Wau. It was only the refuge of this room, I
believe, which made it possible for anyone to live at Kirkland's, so bad were the
mosquitoes. Even in the daytime they made life torture. As at Bob's, the men had
developed a special technique for springing rapidly under the mosquito-net at night,
otherwise a whole cloud of the pests would have swarmed under it too. Even so, it
was impossible to get into bed unaccompanied by an odd mosquito or two. These were
found in the light of a torch and dispatched by a momentary touch with a burning
match. They disappeared with a fizz in a tiny puff of smoke.

It would be hard to imagine a more unhealthy site for a camp. Standing outside the
cage, one could have tossed a stone to right or left and it would have fallen with
a plop into stinking swamp. The sort of water they got from the well is better left
undescribed. Yet these men had been here for months, and some of them would be here
for months more, guarding the crossing of the river.

Four other men were leaning their elbows on the table that ran the length of the
room. They wore only boots and shorts, and their greetings were terse, casually Australian.

‘Hi-ya!'

‘How y' goin'?'

‘How y' makin' out?'

But on their pallid faces were grins which made the welcome warm enough. They passed
the tea, for which
there was the luxury of a little sugar to each cup, but no milk.
Tom explained that the sixth member of the patrol was doing his turn of sentry duty
on the landing-place a few hundred yards downstream.

While we drank the tea they explained to me the role of Kirkland's in the scheme
of things, both at the present moment and as it had been in the past. It was now
our most forward post in the ‘Markham End', and was maintained from Bob's as a sort
of watching-post. They were to warn Bob's by telephone if the enemy tried to cross
the river, and to deal with them with their Vickers machine-gun if it was a small
party. Against a force of any size, of course, they would have no hope. The telephone
line was the constant burden of their lives, for the phone was faint at the best
of times, and every few days a tree would fall and smash the wire.

Another of their jobs was to maintain the ‘ferry service'. Earlier in the year, before
the Japanese had begun effective patrolling of the Markham Valley, our most forward
elements had been kept on the north side of the stream, principally in the vicinity
of Nadzab. On the maps of the period appear names such as Mac's camp, Shep's camp,
Zoffman's, and others. All these posts were cunningly hidden off the main tracks,
and from them our scouts used to patrol to the very outskirts of Lae, and, on one
or two occasions, right among the Japanese to the Lae aerodrome. The ferry service,
consisting of a few canoes, with crews drawn from the native village of Chivasing,
had been the link which maintained contact across the river and kept up supplies.
An old New Guinea hand, Tommy Zoffman, had been in charge of this section of the
operations, with the unofficial title of Admiral of the Markham Fleet.

Nowadays, however, in the face of much more intensive Jap patrolling, only quick
reconnaissance visits were
made to Nadzab. A few stores were left hidden in Mac's.
As far as we knew, the Japs had never discovered the exact location of these camps,
though they must have been aware of their existence. Our patrols seldom remained
more than a night or two, and the ferry service was kept for these periodic visits,
and was of course used by Jock McLeod.

As we sat round the table drinking tea and nibbling hard army biscuits, we talked
about the possibility of my living over the other side of the river. The others did
not seem to fancy my chances, and one of them summed up the general opinion:

‘You're nuts! The Nips are a moral to get on to you sooner or later. Jock McLeod
went over weeks ago, and we haven't heard from him since.'

‘That doesn't say he isn't perfectly safe in the bush somewhere,' I argued.

‘Ah, well, you're going to give it a try, so that's that!' Tom said as he swilled
down the dregs of tea in his cup. ‘The canoes and boats' crews should be ready now,
so I'll walk down to the landing with you.'

I said goodbye to the others, and we left the wire room, hastily replacing the blanket
over the door. Calling to Kari, Achenmeri, and the six carriers from Mari to follow,
Tom and I strode along in silence through the bush and the kunai-grass at the edge
of the Markham.

Five minutes brought us to the landing-place, a small shingly beach with overhanging
trees that concealed the canoes perfectly, since only the very tips of their masts
showed through. They were of a type well known in New Guinea, consisting of a single
hollowed log for the main hull and an outrigger to give stability. A sail, made of
old sugar-bags, was sometimes hoisted on the mast for sailing up the Markham before
the strong breeze which blew upstream in the latter part of each afternoon.

For the present crossing we would require only two canoes, and the crews, powerful
black-skinned natives from Chivasing, were bailing them out at the water's edge with
half coconut-shells.

The northern bank was just discernible, low, muddy, and grass-covered. The six Mari
carriers scanned it uneasily, and muttered among themselves. Achenmeri, too, looked
nervous. He said nothing, but rolled his eyes round and round. It was plain that
they did not relish the prospect of this trip up the Erap; but Kari, moving among
them, and talking in quiet, confident tones, seemed to reassure them.

On a slightly rising piece of ground behind the landing was the sentry. He had been
there since dawn, half hidden among the bushes, searching through his binoculars
the opposite bank of the Markham and the mouth of the Erap.

Tom called to him. ‘Anything doing over there?'

‘Not a thing moved all morning,' he replied with a wave.

This, of course, was good news, but its significance was not very great, for the
real danger lay higher up, where the main track which ran the whole length of the
Markham Valley crossed the Erap. If the Japanese had decided on more extensive patrolling
they would almost certainly begin by using this track, which I should have to cross
in a few hours' time.

My patrol-box, blankets, and food had been loaded onto the two canoes, and with three
carriers on each, Achenmeri and I squatted down on the deck of one, with Kari in
charge of the other. We exchanged a quick handshake and goodbye with Tom, and then
our near-naked crews pushed off into the swift, muddy water.

The current was so strong that it was impossible to cross directly from one bank
to the other, so, sweeping
rapidly downstream, we made diagonally for the first island.
There was very little freeboard on the canoe, and from time to time water splashed
into it. The crew did not seem very concerned at this, and it was one-third full
before they began bailing with their coconut-shells. Meanwhile, with all three paddles
on the right-hand side, with much panting and sweating, they were slowly urging our
little craft nearer to the island. As soon as we reached the shallows they jumped
overboard and began pushing, until we finally grounded at the lower end of the island. Then,
by means of a rope made from vines, they hauled the canoe through slack water to
the upstream end of the island, and we were off into the second main stream and over
to the second island. Another repetition of the manoeuvre, and we had crossed the
Markham and were on more or less dry land at the mouth of the Erap. The crossing
had taken about half an hour.