But the solicitude with which the porters who remained treated the wounded would forever remain imprinted on the memories of those they saved. At night, when it was time to rest, the porters would take great care to ensure that the Digger was on level ground with a fire nearby to keep warm, and at least one of them would sit through the night to make sure that the wounded Australian soldier would not want for water, or food, or simple company in his oft-tormented and delirious stages. Gently, oh so gently, for the severely wounded who could not eat, a thin paste of milk powder and water would be fed to them, spoonful by spoonful. Never, no matter how hopeless a Digger’s medical condition might have been, was one of them abandoned. Never.
On a single day in the withdrawal from Isurava, Bert Kienzle had forty-two Diggers on stretchers moving back under the steam of 336 porters, who were already exhausted from having carried so much ammunition and supplies towards the frontline.
Of the correspondents, it was never put better than by Chester Wilmot, when he later reported to his listeners: ‘When this war is over we should raise a memorial in every Australian capital to the New Guinea natives so that we may never forget how much of the white man’s burden was carried by the natives in this roadless jungle warfare… so that we may remember how many Australians owe their lives to the natives who bore the wounded in their stretchers across the tortuous trail to safety… ’
210
Right among the wounded and stragglers who did not have the luxury of someone to carry them though, Osmar White made his way back from the frontlines, feeling completely wretched. Chester Wilmot had decided to wait on the track until Brigadier Potts came through, so he could interview him, meaning that Ossie was now on his own and suffering with every step. It wasn’t merely his physical exhaustion, nor even the tingling he sometimes felt on his body when he wondered what it would feel like to be taken by a Japanese bullet; for both exhaustion and fear he had more or less learnt to live with. What he had not really got used to was his ongoing feeling of uselessness and fraud when he was among fighting men, when he had not fought himself, and was entirely powerless to affect the course of events.
He trudged on. What made it even worse, somehow, was that he remained able-bodied and uninjured while all around him were men who had taken bullets and had earned their right to withdraw. Like, for example, the bloke up ahead who had lost his leg, but was still propelling himself forward. A mortar bomb had sliced the leg off below the knee, and dropped it like a lump of meat off a butcher’s bench, but it hadn’t stopped this bloke. Under his own steam he had tied up the end of the stump to stop the blood flow, put a couple of dressings right on the end, and then wrapped the whole thing in the end of an old copra sack. And now he was variously hopping and crawling his way back. Of course Osmar had offered his help, but was waved away. How could a bloke not feel a fraud when face to face with such courage?
Sure Osmar had chosen this course and was confident that his reports from frontline positions made a contribution to the war effort in their own way, but in this specific time and place… it was hard to accept that.
211
Time and again his mind turned back to a conversation he’d had with the proprietor of his newspaper, Sir Keith Murdoch, shortly after the war had broken out and Osmar had tried to join the AIF. Sir Keith had blocked it, using the manpower regulations which ensured that essential services were maintained.
‘We don’t want you rushing around with a pack on your back,’ he firmly told Osmar. ‘You’ll fight the war with your pen.’
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You’ll fight the war with your pen…
You’ll fight the war with your pen…
And now here he was…
Even as daylight turned to darkness there was nothing for it but to keep pushing on in the company of many other groups of straggling men whom he kept passing. Certainly the odd little bundles by the track showed that some soldiers were taking a kip for the night, but the majority had kept going with the view that with the Japs pressing close behind, with no shelter or medical help whatsoever bar the village of Eora which lay up ahead, it was better to stumble and stagger south through the darkness. For the most part White kept himself to himself, nodding to the wretched men he passed— many of them holding blindly on to the belt of the man in front, who was doing the same to the man in front of him, and so on— but not really wanting to talk.
Every now and then the last and weakest man in these catastrophic conga lines would sink to his knees and fall face flat down on to the track, until the leader of the next group would either encourage him to join his own line, or at least move him off the track.
Never, ever, had Ossie felt so alone, so weak. He had only two choices. He could fall to the track himself, or he could keep moving. He kept moving. And sometimes it was surreal. At one point, in the wee hours, he was moving through a notably dark part of the jungle, which had a great deal of a kind of phosphorescent fungus growing all around, meaning that the track showed up as a kind of black highway through the dull luminescence. And here and there, equally all blackness in the glow, was the shape of a man, a fallen Digger who could go no further and had sunk to the side of the track. Some of them were already dead, and indeed, maybe this was what it was like to pass from life into death, all along the blackness and into the netherworld…
And then, frequently, one of the black ghosts would speak, in a low, ethereal, appropriately deathly hush, begging to be released from the darkness.
‘Dig, I say, Dig… are you going to Eora? Then tell them to send a light down the track will you? Tell them to send a light, Digger. Tell them to send a light!’
Men were sinking, and dying, for want of a light in the darkness. Osmar had one, stored against the moment of a life-threatening emergency, and now he could stand it no longer. He took it out. Turned it on. There was a stirring behind him. From the darkness, from places unseen, the mumbling gathered. A light. A light. There was a light in the darkness. First a man who had been shot twice in the chest came up and put his arm on Ossie’s shoulder. Behind him a man who had taken a grenade and was now carrying shrapnel in his forearm and thigh. And they kept coming, the black figures rising towards the glowing, and others moving to him from the shadows as they kept on down the track.
In no time at all no fewer than a hundred Diggers had formed up in a line behind him and they were now all gingerly picking their way forward… a hundred sons of Australia, a hundred fathers, husbands, brothers and friends, a hundred souls in search of home.
Now and again, Osmar would turn the light back on the men, by way of encouragement—picking out the dull, hollow, half-dead faces as he did so—but mostly he used it for what was absolutely necessary to pick out creek crossings and difficult sections of terrain.
But then the light died. In the blackest hour of the darkest night, it just faded away like a heart that no longer beat and it was impossible to continue on as anything other than a totally blind man feeling his way forward. It really couldn’t be done, and Osmar stopped, bringing to a halt all who were with him.
The man who had been shot in the chest, immediately behind said: ‘I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll wait till daylight.’ Osmar gave him a nip from his brandy flask just before he sank to the arsenic weed he had chosen for his bed.
‘He was asleep, before I had straightened up from bending over him,’ White later wrote. ‘I started to cry. The tears rolled down my face, burning. Now there was no light. The line fell away, disintegrated. I was alone.’
213
And now it was the 39th’s turn to dig in and defend, as the 2/14th and 2/16th fought their own rearguard actions against the pressing Japanese ahead and prepared to fall back through. They set up their guns and one working mortar just ahead of Eora Creek, surrounded by the mountains. Exhausted, ravaged by sickness, starvation and, in many cases, wounded as well, they were still a proud fighting force, 150 strong and fully intent on doing their part. It was most particularly a pleasure to help the men of the AIF just as they had been helped at Isurava.
It wasn’t easy though. One whose concentration kept wavering, try as he might to bring it to heel and make it stay on the one straight line, was Smoky Howson, manning a Bren gun beside a deep hole on a cleared ridge above the village. Time and again he would peer ahead over the sights of his Bren for any sign of movement, time and again his sight would waver back to the deep pit beside him. Was he looking, right then and there, into his own grave, the place he would rest for all eternity? There was no doubt that if he was hit by a Jap bullet that was where he would land, and equally no doubt that if he were dead that was where his mates would bury him. The bottom of that grave looked so bloody
black
, it was unnerving. There had been times, admittedly, in this campaign, when things were so grim—when he had been so wet, sorry, starving and scared—that Smoky had thought a bullet might be the easy way out, but this was not one of them. He bloody well wanted to
live
. He pulled his eyes back one more time to the sights of the Bren gun, looking for movement. He knew the Japs were coming for them, he just didn’t know when.
Just behind him at Eora at this time, and through the long night, the army surgeons were performing major and minor medical miracles in the most atrocious conditions. Life and death operations were being conducted with a lantern for light, mud for a floor, and prayers for hope. A classic form of triage was underway whereby incoming wounded were sorted into essentially three groups: those who could be saved with instant medical help; those who could still likely survive and keep moving south without it; and those who would likely die anyway, whatever treatment they received. It was a distinction designed to ensure that the limited medical resources were not wasted. The upshot was that while some soldiers seeking treatment were just as quickly ushered out again, and others were put in the queue for surgery—often by torchlight—others were taken to the far side of the medical hut, behind a rough curtain, and simply made as comfortable as possible until such time as the last spark of their being had gone. Their lives had begun in a hospital in Victoria, with joy and good cheer all around—
‘a son, we have a son!’
—and ended here, in the mud, with a bullet in the guts, despair all around, and their light slowly fading
The combination of extreme conditions and extreme injuries inevitably gave rise to attempts at extreme remedies. Of these, perhaps the most bizarre was to sometimes leave maggots on badly infected wounds, on the grounds that as the maggots were eating rotted flesh they actually gave the soldiers a better chance of not succumbing to gangrene in the time it would take to get back to a genuine hospital in Moresby. The other notable method was entirely up the other end of the spectrum of medical logic. That was to encase all serious wounds in plaster of Paris as a way of keeping all the mud, slush and infection away from them. It was a very messy procedure to put P.O.P., as it was known, on a gaping shoulder wound—and positively wretched for the unfortunate person, hopefully back in Moresby, who would take it off again in perhaps ten days time—but it was a treatment that had apparently worked well in the Spanish Civil War and it was the most prevalent method used now.
214
This method even applied to head wounds, with doctors applying plaster of Paris skull caps to men who had taken bullets to the head, though usually only if the patient was still conscious. For the firm rule applied, as subsequently stated: ‘A patient completely unconscious from a penetrating head wound is not worth operating on if other casualties are waiting. No patient with a penetrating head wound who was deeply unconscious on arrival at the main dressing station lived long enough to be evacuated.’
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One thing that often staggered the doctors and medical orderlies was how little the men complained. Despite the most grievous injuries, most of the troops seemed to feel that complaining was beside the point—and that point was either to get well enough to return to the frontline, or to get the hell out as quickly as possible.
Among the men, ‘a homer’ became the vernacular for a wound that was bad enough to have them sent home, and while it was true that in the course of the campaign some of the men coveted such a wound so badly that they inflicted their own injuries, for the vast majority the aim was
not
to get home, but back to the frontline. The most likely homer was a bad wound in the legs which prevented mobility, for it was truly extraordinary how men with the most terrible injuries in the upper body were able to keep going, so long as their legs were strong enough to get them there.
For most who could not walk properly, or were too weak to do so, the only way out remained to be stretchered by the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, but some refused on the grounds that this would unnecessarily strain resources.
One such was Corporal John A. Metson from Sale in Victoria, who was shot in the ankle at the battle of Isurava. Though offered a stretcher, Corporal Metson said ‘be buggered’, maintaining that he could still crawl, and that was exactly what he was going to do. Wrapping torn blankets around both his hands and his knees, he set off for Port Moresby, some eighty miles away, across some of the most inhospitable country on the planet.
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When at last Osmar White arrived at Eora the morning after the worst night of his life, his attention was attracted by one of the injured soldiers, lying wanly on a stretcher with a bad wound to his stomach, still waiting to be seen in the tent. He was a young redhead, probably about twenty years old, and he was seriously pissed off, muttering that he’d been fighting for weeks and still hadn’t even seen a fucking Jap, let alone been able to fire his gun at them. Aware now that White was watching him, the redhead beckoned him over.