A noise aroused me, and I looked up to see Sheila closing the door. She turned and came toward me, holding a candle. She wore a nightgown.
“Hello, Yank,” she said with a soft gaiety. “How d’ya like it in the paddock?”
I propped myself up on an elbow and nodded my answer. She sank to her knees beside the bed and looked into my face with laughing eyes. “I’m fond of you, Yank. I hope you’ll be coming up to see me often.” I looked at her and she leaned closer and said, “Anything you want me to do for you?” I looked at her and she blew out the candle.
I saw Sheila every chance I had for about a month, sometimes dining at our headquarters, sometimes going to a dance, sometimes taking long walks about the lovely town she lived in, where the wattle grew bright on the hill—sometimes drinking endless cups of tea in her parlor to moisten a throat gone dry with the telling of tales of America to her lame and widowed mother. Not till the end of this time, till she told me that she was going to Tasmania, did Sheila tell me that she was married.
After Molly and Sheila, no more affection.
Only the chase.
How does it go? How should I know. I am not a Casanova, nor is this a textbook for the amorous.
It is cold, yes; it is calculating, of course; but a man should not risk involvement when satisfying lust. He must never be romantic. He must leave romantic love to the unrequited poets who invented it.
At times the chase would end in strange coverts. There was the drink waitress with the strongly developed moral sense.
“You Yanks,” she panted, “have no morals.”
“How so?”
“Ah,” she said, scathingly, “just look at your Hollywood. Why, you read about those stars every day—going on with each other the way they do. Married four and five times. They’d be run right out of Australia. We’ve still got some morals left!” She drew the cover up to her chin. “Not you Yanks—all you want from a girl is to sleep with her!”
Only a fool, or one no longer interested in the chase, would have pointed to the difficulty of her position.
The same evening my homeward steps crossed those of another marine, younger than I, who grumbled as he sought to remove lipstick smears from the collar of his tunic.
“Trouble with these Australian girls,” he complained, “is that they ain’t got no morals. They’re too easy. Catch an American girl giving herself away like they do. No siree, buddy—they’ve still got morals.”
The descendants of the Pharisee are legion. ‘O God. I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men … adulterers, as also is this Australian, as also is this American, as also is …”
It was the drink waitress who was the enigmatic one. As often as I was in her company, I could not comprehend her. She affected to despise Americans, yet, if she did not see me, she saw another marine. She liked to keep my money, yet, everytime I offended her, she pulled it from her purse with an imprecation and gave it back to me. Hot-tempered, she was cold. Drink waitress, she did not like to drink. Scoffer at American music, she would travel miles to a jazz dance.
When we went boating on the Yarra, she trailed her hand languidly in the water and seemed so bored that I secretly rejoiced, for we marines had been getting soft and the task of rowing upstream had become an ordeal. At last, when she began to yawn, I put the craft about and made for the boathouse.
The moment we set foot upon the shore, she wheeled in white anger and blazed at me: “Fancy! Fancy a man like you—to take a girl out on the water and bring her back without as much as a sweet look!”
Next day, my chest and arms throbbed with pain—and I was not rueful that I would not row or see her again.
Sheila came back. On a Saturday night when I had to remain in the Cricket Grounds and had gone to bed early, someone awoke me and said, “There’s a girl outside the gate asking for you, Lucky.”
She had been in Tasmania only a few months, yet she seemed older. We walked in the park and talked. Sheila wanted to go to town, but I told her I could not—even though she was going back to Tasmania in the morning, I could not.
“But we can’t just sit here in the park,” she wailed.
“Wait,” I said. “I have an idea. The others are on forty-eight-hour passes. I’ll get their sleeping pads and blankets and bring them out here. You go get a couple bottles of beer.” I gave her the money. “We’ll have a picnic. Okay?”
She laughed and said, “Yank, yer a bonzer boy.”
The bunks were darkly silent. I denuded Chuckler’s and Hoosier’s sacks, as well as my own, rolled all up into a huge cylindrical wad, and stumbled out into the park with it. Sheila came along with the beer, as I was spreading out our couch beneath a big tree. We sat on the pads and reached for the beer.
I groaned in dismay. She had forgotten to get a bottle opener.
“Don’t fret, Yank,” she said. “Here’s a go,” and she placed the neck of a quart bottle of Melbourne bitter to her mouth and bit off the cap.
Ah, those Australian girls, I reflected, as the wonderful amber fluid came foaming free.
“Y’know, this is a serious offense,” she said, making herself comfortable beside me. “It’s offending in the King’s Domain.”
“What’s that?”
“All public property belongs to the Crown. Something like this is called offending in the King’s Domain—and they can put you in prison for it.”
“Bloody good show, eh?” I teased. “Poaching, what? … here’s a go, Sheila—to His Majesty the King …”
We spent the night in the park, and she left me in the morning, left me when gray dawn drew back the curtain of the night—left me forever.
I gathered the bedding together and stumbled back to the stadium. To my horror, the companies were already forming for reveille outside the wall. With my roll of bedding I was as inconspicuous as an elephant, a most patent offender in the King’s Domain.
But I resolved to brazen it out. Sinking my face deeply into the bedding, I broke into a half trot.
I shall never forget the look of incredulity that creased the brow of Old Gunny when I passed between him and H Company. I had gone but ten steps or so when a titter broke out. Then catcalls. Then roars of ridicule. I increased my speed. But it had spread to the other three companies and soon I was running a gauntlet of derision. Running I was, now, and with all of my speed—for the shouting and the laughter and the hooting had risen to a gale of sound that blew me through the gate and up the steps to the bunks.
If I had offended the King that night, my comrades had exacted ample justice in his behalf.
2
But two things might restrain a man in the Great Debauch: malaria and guard duty.
Malaria meant hospital, sometimes it meant shipment home. So determined were we to enjoy ourselves, though, that a man experiencing the dull, wearing discomfort of an approaching seizure would still go to town; nor was it uncommon to see such a hardy sensualist huddling against a lamppost, face whitened, teeth chattering, tunic clasped tightly about his shivering body looking for a taxicab to take him back to camp and a cot in sick bay.
That was how I saw Scar-Chin last. His malarial attacks had become fiercer as they became more frequent. This last time he lay in agony on a cot in sick bay, which was a made-over office beneath the stadium. He had the “bone-cracking” malaria, the malignant kind that bakes your body in an oven and stretches your bones on a rack.
I had come to say good-by, for I had heard he was to be shipped home. I could not be sure if he had recognized me; nor could I torture him by asking, for such suffering cannot endure the intrusion of another human person. So I took my leave of Scar-Chin, whom I loved, Scar-Chin of the sardonic wit and the steady nerve. I held his burning hand and said good-by. There came, I think, a glint of recognition, a quivering round the mouth as though he were marshaling those muscles for a smile. But I could not bear to watch him struggle. I dropped his hand and left.
For those impervious to malaria, only guard duty
could keep us out of the fleshpots. When our battalion had the guard, no matter what company might stand it, we all had to stand by and remain within the Cricket Grounds.
It was like the old days at New River, almost as though life moved again around the old triad of huts, beer and oil. We would troop in from the drill field and clean up. We would divest ourselves of the long underwear and plunge into the cold showers.
Someone would grab the buckets—for beer this time, not oil—while the squad gathered at the foot of the mezzanine overlooking the field. Everyone would be there: Chuckler, Runner, Hoosier, Oak-stump, Amish, the Gentleman, plus newcomers like Broadgrin—a wide-shouldered, pleasant-faced lad from the Louisiana bayous who had come in as a replacement on Guadalcanal—and Big Ski, another replacement, tall, rangy, sallow, given to talking out of the side of his mouth about his Army hitch in Hawaii and his wife back home. Big Ski was the only married man among us.
So we spent the night, sitting in the gathering dark, facing outward to the black puddle of the infield, singing or telling stories, hearing in the lulls the muted voices of other squads, similarly spent, all around that huge horseshoe enclosing the playing field. The songs we sang were not our own; America had still not given us a song to sing. We borrowed “Waltzing Matilda” and “Bless ‘em All” from the Aussies, and “I’ve Got Sixpence” from the British, whom we had never seen.
Soon, even this mild sport came to an end, and the day that they marched us out to the camp at Dandenong we knew that the soft times were over.
Full marching packs again. Helmets clanking against gun barrels. Sergeants bellowing again, unable to conceal a certain pleasure. Pack straps pulling, cutting into the shoulders—the soft new flesh shrinking, and the veteran shrugging and shifting his load, remembering, desponding. All this again; like a detested acquaintance dropping in for a drink, stirring up old animosities and confiding that he expects he’s back in town for good. So make the most of it—and wait for the others to move out.
“Commmm-panee!”
There it was.
“… Harch!”
Silence, just a jot of it, just that tiny bit of nothingness, devoid of sound or movement, dividing one infinitesimal measure from another, infinity itself, perhaps—and then that unmistakable sound, the soft shrugging sigh of troops moving in unison, followed by the flat, ragged rap of multitudinous feet upon the pavement—and we were off.
“My mother told me there’d be days like this—but never so many of them.”
“Hey! Get that machine gun outta my face. Whatcha trying to do, make me a casualty?”
“Keep off my behind then, you jerk—and you won’t win no Purple Heart.”
“Yeah, Purple Heart! Purple ass, you mean, that’s what he’ll win.”
Dogs by the dozen were marching with us. They raced up and down the line of march, barking playfully. They were so silly and lovable and faithful, we had to laugh at them; a sort of sentimental laugh that moistens the corners of the eyes.
“Look at them crazy mutts,” said Chuckler. “We walk a hundred yards, and they run a mile. They’ll be pooped out before we get halfway there.”
He was right, although he could have shortened the distance. We had not gone four miles, before I saw the first of them lying exhausted along the roadway. His head was sunk between his paws and his tongue lolled sideways in the dirt, the lower half covered with dust. He watched us sorrowfully as we passed. Poor fellow, he was bushed. For the next mile, the way was littered with canine casualties. But they would not desert us.
I stopped feeling sorry for the dogs when I felt the blisters building up on the soles of my feet. They had issued some of us New Zealand Army shoes before the hike, and I was among these unfavored sons of the quartermaster. They were of heavy and astonishingly stiff black leather, with unbending soles and clickety heels.
They were not for us, accustomed as we were to our Marine “boondockers” of buckskin and crepe rubber, a wonderful soft and comfortable shoe designed to make no noise. But this New Zealand instrument of torture! This shoe of steel! This boot of pain! It was working on the soles of my feet with the exquisite delicacy of a vise!
Pain became my companion for the next ten miles, until all of me appeared to be concentrated in this incredible tenderness being pressed at every step against the cruel steel of my shoes. But I made it to our new camp, and when I presented myself to the battalion doctor, and he had examined the great blisters that now hung like udders from the balls of both feet, he said to me, “You should have walked the last ten miles on your hands.” I agreed, and sighed with sensual pleasure as he cut them and let the water run out, bandaged them, and sent me hobbling back to my buddies.
I was not the only one who wore those brutal boots. There had been others, similarly afflicted. The shoes were not issued again, for they had come close to ruining the feet of a quarter of the battalion.
Our new encampment accommodated the entire First Regiment. It was set on the slope of one of the hills, which a land pitifully poor in altitudinous earth has called the Yuyang Mountains. But they were no more than hills; gentle, rolling rises, with here and there a narrow brook. Poor Australia. Here, too, nature has withheld her favors. There are no rivers as we know them: only brooks, and one of them flowed at the foot of the hill on which our tent camp was located.
Of course it was raining, and of course there was mud. The food was a slop of mutton and soggy vegetables. For fuel, there was a ration of split logs for the wood-burning stove in the center of each tent. For recreation there was an occasional weekend liberty, and a slop chute a mile down the road where they served the greenest, foulest beer I have ever drunk—brewed, I am sure (if the word is not concocted), in the PX officer’s own lister bag, and served to us in our canteen cups in a room fit to hold twenty people, but filled every night with at least two hundred.
The weeks went by in night marches and night problems and daily drill in the fields, no different from the days as a New River recruit; more boring, perhaps even galling, because it was expected of us—the celebrated victors of Guadalcanal.
Sometimes we would be issued a handful of rice, or the equivalent of what a Japanese soldier lives on, and be ordered to maneuver at night and make forced night marches of thirty miles or so, and sleep by day. I remember sleeping in a field, and being awakened by a huge gentle-eyed cow which nuzzled me in meek reproof for having chosen the tenderest pasture for my couch. From night problems we learned one lasting lesson: when a map and a compass come into contact with a second lieutenant, prepare yourself for confusion.
Throughout, there had been an insensible drawing in of discipline, like a rider slowly pulling back on the reins. But there came a sudden rearing halt when they reshuffled the companies.
Sergeant McCaustic had taken charge of H Company as First Sergeant. He was a slender man hardly above the minimum height requirement, possessed of filthy tongue, twisted by an openly sadistic temperament but saved from being a monster by an excellent sense of humor and a quick brain.
In Sergeant McCaustic I had found my personal hair shirt. We had come to an understanding within a day or two; that is, we had agreed that we were incompatible. When the time for reshuffling came, Sergeant McCaustic disposed of me with gleeful dispatch.
I expected it as I walked to the company tent with the others at the fateful call. It was raining, but Sergeant McCaustic ignored the raindrops plastering his thin locks against his narrow skull. He spoke with unconcealed glee as he stood there, surrounded by grinning, smirking platoon sergeants and buck sergeants, while the men half encompassed them in a crescent.
“All right, here it is. This company has been goofing off long enough—and it’s all because of a few eight balls and yardbirds. So today we’re getting rid of them.”
A few of the sergeants held their hands up to their mouths. They were enjoying it. It was obvious that the “eight-ball list” had not been drawn up by McCaustic alone.
“I pity the companies that g
et them, that’s all I can say,” McCaustic continued in his rapid way of talking. “But here we go. The following named men are to be shanghaied,”—there were snickers—“that is, transferred, to E Company. As soon as their name is called they will return to their squad area, gather up their gear and fall out in front of the company tent.”
Each time he called a name, McCaustic grinned. A sergeant or two would laugh. The mirth would pass from them out to the crescent. But the laughter in the crescent was never so hearty or unfeigned as was that in the sergeants’ circle. For each name meant the disgrace of some man, the departure of a buddy, the rending of the fabric of a friendship smelted in Parris Island and New River and tempered in the crucible of Guadalcanal. Each time a name was called, something was lost, something immeasurable, perhaps not even felt by most of the men in the crescent; but lost, nevertheless, like a clod of earth slipping silently off the river bank and into the current and on to the sea.
He called my name. There rose the laughter, and I walked to my tent in grief.
Good-by Chuckler, so long Hoosier and Runner, farewell to H Company. My spirit sank within me. I wept as I walked, and now the rain was merciful, for I could bow my head and pull my helmet low as though to keep it out of my face. I got to my tent and packed my things. But now grief was mingled with humiliation and indignation and I began to hate Sergeant McCaustic with an unforgiving, unforgetting, unrepentant hatred. My hands hungered for his neck. I yearned to be alone with him in his tent, I burned with the intensity of my hate, and if God Himself had bidden me then to love this man I cannot answer for my reply.
Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific Page 15
