‘We’re
not
moving,’ the soldier replied with equal force, while still somehow communicating his complete indifference to what this AIF officer felt about it. They were many, he was one.
Well, if it was like that, there was only way these blokes would understand. Stan drew his gun, cocked it, and pointed it at this recalcitrant soldier who was clearly their spokesman. ‘Move.’
They moved.
Nearing 10 p.m., finally, Stan met the stretcher party about a hundred yards and two hours from where and when he had first heard the news about Butch. They had managed to get Butch into a small clearing about fifteen yards off the track where Don could have some space and peace to do what he could.
When they shone the torch on Butch, though, Stan immediately knew it was every bit as bad as he had feared: close to hopeless. The burst of machine-gun fire had sprayed Butch right across his belly, and through the globs of blood Stan could see his brother’s intestines. Just the fact that they had got him back down that murderous slope from where he had been hit was extraordinary enough, and in fact 10 platoon had lost one more man killed and one wounded in the process, but it was a measure of how much Butch was loved by his men that they would take such risks to get him out.
Don did his best, but it was little enough. Though he dressed Butch’s wounds, and gave him morphine to ease the pain, the look he gave Stan confirmed the obvious—it wouldn’t be long.
They talked of the days on the farm. That time with Uncle Abe. Of Mum and Dad. Their sister and two other brothers. Sang songs of their childhood. At that moment, they knew, Mum would be just likely turning in after making Dad a cup of tea. What about the time during the floods when they were on their raft and Stan had nearly drowned, only to be saved by Butch getting to him in the nick of time? They talked of rugby, of days with the Powerhouse Club, of things that happened in the Middle East.
As Stan and Butch quietly talked, most of the men of the 2/14th and 39th Battalions were quietly filing past on the track, just fifteen yards away, taking up their new defensive positions in the darkness.
Among them was Joe Dawson, with his best mates, Ray Phillips and Wally Gratz. Joe was carrying his own rifle, as well as Ray’s highly prized new Bren gun, while Ray and Wally came behind with a heavy ammunition box suspended from a sapling. It was a black hell on earth trying to manoeuvre in the darkness on such a track, tentatively putting one foot forward after another to see if you could put it down on something solid, and at one notably narrow spot Joe stepped off the track for a bit of a breather and to let other blokes pass, while he let Ray and Wally catch up. No sooner had he taken a step back though than…
there was nothing there
… and he was suddenly falling. Fortunately, a small ledge several yards down the cliff-face stopped him and with great difficulty, and Ray and Wally’s help, he was able get back up on the track.
Once he was back, top-side, Ray wasted no time making sure that no real damage had been done.
‘How’s me bloody
Bren?
’ Ray said to Joe, clearly appalled.
‘Stuff your bloody Bren, I have hurt myself!’ Joe roared back. In fact though, he felt little real pain at all, despite having taken a lot of skin off both knees. In that kind of environment, just finding yourself still alive was usually more than enough to act as a painkiller. The three Digger mates struggled on down the track.
By two o’clock in the morning it was done. Under the very noses of the Japanese, all of the Australians had successfully slipped away and were now dug into their new positions just below the line of the Isurava Rest House.
Back in the tiny clearing, though, it was apparent to Stan Bisset that the life was ebbing out of his brother’s eyes. Just when it seemed he was gone though, a sudden spark of something would return, and Stan would sing to him some more. In one brief hopeful moment Butch was even lucid enough to congratulate Stan on his thirtieth birthday, which had occurred just two days earlier. Stan thanked him for the thought and then held Butch’s hand all the tighter as a sudden shudder of agony—like something was breaking deep inside the older brother—swept over him. Don Duffy visited periodically and kept the morphine up to Butch, but really there was little to do but talk spasmodically, sing a little, and wait. Sometimes, Stan thought of his mum and dad, back in Victoria, and wondered how they would take the news. It would likely be the near death of his mother especially.
Finally though, at 4.00 a.m., while Stan was holding Butch’s hand, there was a sudden slight shudder and then he went limp. Stan squeezed Butch’s hand, hoping for some return pressure, a spark of life left, but there was nothing, stone-cold nothing. His brother’s hand was already cold and clammy.
Butch was gone. Stan wept.
At dawn, almost on the spot where he died, they buried him. Stan said a prayer over his grave, where he had also lashed together a couple of small stripped saplings into the form of a cross. And then he was back into it…
It was later recorded in the official
History of the Second Fourteenth Battalion
by author W. B. Russell: ‘Perhaps no other single death could have more deeply shocked the Battalion. “Butch” was one of the most strongly individual men in the Unit, and every man’s friend. He had all the manly virtues together with a rollicking sense of humour. Above all, he loved his men unto death and they returned his devotion.’
Sadly, Butch was just one of many who had been either killed or wounded during this terrible period of the battle, among both the Australians and the Japanese. The campaign was so bloody at this point that the natives of Isurava—who had abandoned the village weeks before when the battle had descended upon them and were now gathered at what they thought was a safe point about a mile downstream of the creek on the northern side of the village— were horrified to see that the water now ran red. They refused to drink from it, a sanction that would last for generations.
Osmar White and Chester Wilmot continued to make their way forward. It was hard, grim work to be heading
towards
the cannon’s roar and constant
dub-dub-dub
of the heavy Japanese Juki machine guns—the Diggers had nicknamed them ‘woodpeckers’ for good reason—but if there was action about it was their job to be there and they pressed on. Sure, correspondents were meant to be unarmed and it totally contravened the dictates of the Geneva Convention that they had a few hand grenades with them and a rifle, but it still made them feel a little better that they possessed something with which to defend themselves should it come to it.
What highlighted the seriousness of the Australian situation, however, was the thickening traffic of sick and wounded Australian soldiers coming the other way. To see many of these Diggers it was a wonder that they could still stand, let alone stagger along. For, truth be told, a lot of them were mere skeletons with the skin still attached and still mighty hearts that continued to beat despite everything. More often than not suffering from fever, entirely emaciated, these figures could only proceed a few tottering steps at a time, before gasping for air—‘The loose skin on the sides of their necks palpitating like a lizard’s throat,’ as White described it— resting and then going again.
199
Still, though, there was remaining spirit in them, with each man that was still capable grinning at the oncomers and saying an all but unvaried greeting as the journalists stopped and leaned away each time to try to give the wounded right of way on the too narrow track: ‘Good day, Dig. Pretty tough, eh?’
It certainly was that. After salutations and whatever cigarettes and encouragement they could spare, the two non-combatants moved forward. What simply staggered both of them was the stoicism of the wounded, their lack of complaint and their total commitment to sticking together to see each other through.
‘Here’s a steep pinch and a wounded Digger’s trying to climb it,’ Chester Wilmot described it for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. ‘You need both hands and both feet, but he’s been hit in the arm and thigh. Two of his cobbers are helping him along. One goes ahead, hauling himself up by root and branch. The wounded Digger clings to the belt of the man in front with his sound hand, while his other cobber gets underneath and pushes him up. I say to this fellow he ought to be a stretcher case, but he replies… “I can get along. There’s blokes here lots worse than me and if we don’t walk they’ll never get out… ”’
200
And sure enough there
were
plenty of blokes in a lot worse condition, many of them being carried out on stretchers made from a couple of saplings with a blanket strung between them, bound by lawyer vine—with the worst of them lying in a rough pool of their own blood formed at the bottom of the stretcher and sometimes dripping through. Mostly these stretchers were being borne by teams of eight porters, working as two teams of four to bring their precious cargos back. Though the terminology originally used by the Diggers to describe an assembly of porters was a ‘boong line’, these natives had now been effectively re-christened as ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’, for the dedication to their task was extraordinary. Many of the porters had been working as beasts of burden beneath unimaginably heavy loads since 7 July, when the 39th’s B Company had started moving out over the Owen Stanley Range.
The two war chroniclers regarded the capacity of the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels with amazement and great admiration. Neither was surprised when on one occasion two or three of them were chatting in their own native language when one native suddenly broke into the one English phrase he had heard constantly over the last few days, from just about every digger his stretcher group had passed: ‘Bloody awful job that… ’
201
It was that, but somehow they managed it. While the correspondents had been on their own long trek forward it was all they could do to keep their feet, and yet the porters—with four times the load—never slipped, their toes seeming to grip the soil and roots like enormous claws, seeking out every nook and cranny to gain purchase. Certainly it was taking them all day to move just one digger back four miles or so, but clearly the efforts of the Diggers’ comrades on the frontline was providing the precious time needed to do just that.
202
And for the record, the New Guinea porters were also doing much the same for the Japanese on the other side of the battlefront. A Japanese soldier, Yoshihara, would later write that the Papua New Guineans, ‘Helped by offering food and carrying wounded, and there were countless thousands of Japanese troops who owed their lives to the Papua New Guineans… ’
203
The Japanese soldiers were usually evacuated from the battle site by what were called Casualty Clearing Units, platoons of fifty to sixty Korean or Formosan conscripts who had been brought to New Guinea for this specific purpose. They would get them back to relative safety where they could be handed to the porters.
204
The further the duo moved up the track, the thicker the stretcher traffic became, and the more chaotic a process it was for the two opposing streams to pass each other on the exceedingly narrow passage. The reporters’ rate of progress was cut down to half a mile an hour in the worst spots. This chaotic nature of men passing each other was in strange contrast to the way the jungle’s natural life had organised itself. Right beside the track was the signal wire strung from tree to tree. Going uphill, an endless procession of ants was making its way forward on the topside of the wire, while on the bottomside was an equally thick stream of ants going downhill.
205
Presently, up ahead, they came across porters who had for a minute gently placed one of the stretchers on a rare piece of flat ground to give both themselves and the wounded Digger a break. This Digger had a bedraggled ‘rollie’ cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and, spying their approach, asked if one of them had a light.
Ossie White, always the best organised, had some waxed matches secreted in an oiled silk tobacco pouch, and gave him one, and rolled another cigarette for later.
‘Thanks, mate,’ the Digger said with some feeling, as he struck the match on a tin helmet, ‘a smoke helps a lot… I’ll be okay now.’ The porters gently lifted him, and he was borne off in one direction while they continued in the other.
Not long afterwards, Chester Wilmot spied a familiar figure limping towards them, a bloke by the name of Bill who he used to go to school with. Back then Bill was a very useful left-arm bowler, though it was clear by what remained of his left arm that those days were now gone forever.
After a warm hail-fellow-well-met, Bill recounted what had happened. His platoon had been defending a patch of ground up at Isurava when three of their blokes were wounded and then another of their blokes by the name of Butch was killed. It had been hell there for a while, and nearly all of them had been wounded in one way or another, but the main thing is that they had got all the wounded safely back. It was an absolute bastard about Butch, though. Now Bill, too, had to press on, with a week’s walk still between him and a hospital.
A little further again Chester and Ossie caught up to some men labouring their way towards the front, laden down with mortar ammunition. Just as they passed, a wounded Digger coming the other way said: ‘Get those up quick, sport… They were lobbin’ four inch mortars on us this morning from that ridge on the right… They couldn’t shift us but we’d like to give them something back… ’
Through such encounters and the little chats along the way the two were able to glean some idea of what was happening ahead of them, at least as good an idea as many of the wounded soldiers who had naught but their own shocking experience and that of their immediate mates to go on.