My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  But as time went on the situation took on queer little tones of surprise, especially after Wally Solomons went away. He was posted to the AIF and went overseas in that first convoy that should have taken Jack – long afterwards I heard at the Barracks, that he became a full colonel in Palestine or somewhere, and they spoke highly of his brilliant organization of desert transport – and after he had gone Helen and Sandra Solomons – and the red MG – were almost inseparable.

  During this period I was usually working very late at the office, and was often away on trips for days at a time. It was odd to come home to Beverley Grove after midnight to find some hilarious party in full swing, with Sandra and Helen and young officers from LHQ or the Navy or the Air Force, and young women I had never seen before: there would always be an embarrassing, halting moment when my appearance would be taken in critically, almost as if I were an interloper – and a sober one at that, and in civilian clothes! – and then Helen would run to greet me, and take my hands most affectionately, and make the introductions.

  Still more surprising was the curious and often repeated experience of my chancing accidentally upon Helen and Sandra in the lounge of one of the smarter city hotels, Menzies or The Australia or the Old Treasury.

  These were two distinctly beautiful women, and each time I saw them they seemed to have grown a little lovelier, a shade smarter, more ‘groomed’, more sophisticated – both had acquired that bright almost indefinable air of women bent on gaiety and pleasure – and the usual admiring young officers would be with them. If I was beckoned over to join the group – and sometimes I was not – I would have the feeling of being almost a stranger – a stranger, I mean, to Helen – and the young men in their uniforms would be guardedly patronizing because, I suppose, they could not be quite sure how important I was, or how influential with their superior officers at the Barracks, but also because of some uncertainty they must have had about the personal situation that existed between Helen and me.

  To this day I do not know whether these gay encounters of Helen’s were innocent or guilty, because it never bothered me to try to find out: an occasional little thought concerning Jerry Farley would sometimes trespass, to be soon dismissed. One thing I know – Helen always did seem very proud to introduce me to her friends, so I suppose that was something …

  I was, in fact, more concerned about Jack than I was about Helen.

  He was not discharged from hospital until several months after his division had sailed for overseas in the Queen Mary, and although he was then declared fit for active service and drafted to a base reinforcement camp, two more infantry divisions went abroad without him, one to fight in Syria, the other to be overwhelmed by the Japanese in Malaya. He was constantly applying for a definite overseas posting, but somehow he was always passed over. Then two months later he was back in hospital with some complication concerned with the pelvis injury.

  When I visited him there he seemed cheerful enough, and confident, and his talk now was all about tanks: he had heard that Australian armoured divisions were being formed: he would wink at me and hint at the ‘strings’ he was pulling. But his second discharge from hospital I think must have carried with it evidence of some dubious medical risk, because this time the Army seized upon his previous civilian employment as a factory storeman to transfer him to Base Ordnance Stores. He had been promoted to the rank of corporal, and he still wore his grey-bordered overseas colour-patches, and although he was angry at delays and ‘Army red tape’ he was still perfectly confident of getting away. He had become almost fanatical about his fitness. He had rigged up a punching-ball in a corner of one of the ordnance depots, he did special exercises which some physiotherapist in the hospital had told him about, he dosed himself with tablets of calcium and phosphorus because he believed it would help to strengthen his bones. The armoured division was formed and left him in the ordnance stores.

  I am sure he was having more trouble with that game leg of his than he would ever admit, because he suffered some injury later when moving heavy ammunition cases, and was taken back to hospital again.

  At the time this happened I was away on a very special assignment – a 15,000-mile tour of the entire Australian defence effort organized at the personal request of the Chief of the General Staff (the first of Mr Brewster’s ‘big things in the wind’), the object of which, in a long series of articles and a published book, was to stimulate recruiting. It was an assignment I greatly enjoyed and for which I have ever since been grateful. It is a good thing to have the privilege of discovering one’s own country before seeing other parts of the world, the size of it, the loneliness beyond the cities, the beauty and the savagery, that frightening and desolate heart that is the well-spring of the myth. When I flew back from Darwin the newspapers were full of the first Australian victories in the Libyan Desert. And Jack was back in hospital.

  He gave me a crooked little smile when I went to see him, and said, ‘So they took bloody Tobruk without me, eh? Those Grey Caps and Bludgers! You wouldn’t read about it, would you?’

  He did not seem quite as cheerful as before, and there was a sort of self-consciousness about him, as if he was embarrassed at my finding him in a hospital bed again, or because I thought him guilty of a physical weakness.

  ‘It’s all this bloody Army red tape!’ he said with some heat. ‘There was nothing wrong with me all that time they kept me down in that reinforcement depot. There’s nothing wrong with me now, if they’d only wake up to themselves! Jesus, you should’ve seen some of the bastards they sent away! I wouldn’t have given ’em a gun to shoot wooden ducks in one of those Luna Park places! They shoved them off to North Africa, though.’

  I tried to cheer him up, and I told him something about my trip, especially North Australia and the Centre and the great military road they’d made running up from Alice Springs.

  ‘You’re a lucky bastard, seeing all that,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have a go up there myself one of these days. You know, you’re getting to be quite a big shot, aren’t you?’ he went on. ‘I mean, all these trips you make, and those whacking great articles you write. The blokes here in the ward talk about your stuff, you know. And they did down at the ordnance place … not only the boys, the officers too. You’re getting quite a reputation, aren’t you?’ He thought for a while, and then he said, ‘Davy, doesn’t it worry you a bit, though? I mean, I know this stuff you’re writing is important and all that – well, people talk about it and it is for the war – but like this trip of yours, going around the camps and garrisons and things, doesn’t it sometimes make you feel you should be in it yourself?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘I mean, I’m not saying you’re an urger or anything like that, but this recruiting stuff, well, it is sort of urging in a way, don’t you think?’

  ‘It has to be done,’ I said. ‘They want it. And somebody’s got to do it.’

  ‘Oh, I know. And I realize it’s bloody important and all that. It’s just … well, the way you feel about it yourself is what I was thinking of.’

  ‘It doesn’t worry me, if that’s what you mean. This last job, for instance, was practically under military orders. It was the Chief of the General Staff himself who asked for me to do it.’

  ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’ He nodded, although I had the feeling that he didn’t think his question had been answered, and then he grew thoughtful, and seemed to hesitate, and then, ‘Davy, there was something I was going to ask you,’ he said. ‘You knowing all the brass-hats and the skulls down at the Barracks, and that. I mean, I don’t suppose you could pull some strings for me … to get me overseas, I mean? You’d have influence down there, wouldn’t you? That’s all it would need, you know, I’m bloody sure of that.’ He glanced at me quickly, and there was a tiny glint of desperation in his eyes. ‘You see, they’ll be shoving me out of here next Monday,’ he said, ‘and I’m dead scared it might be that ordnance thing again unless … well, you know …’

  ‘Well, I�
�ll see what I can do,’ I said.

  I did nothing about it, though. I suppose I could have tried to pull some strings, but somehow I thought it would be futile, and I was not entirely confident of my influence within the military structure, and anyway I had more important things to do. Jack went back to the ordnance depot.

  I saw very little of him in the months that followed. A great many things were happening – defeat in Greece, defeat in Crete, the besieging of Tobruk, Syria, and there were a good many Australians there in the Battle of Britain – Justin Byrne among them – and the newspapers were filling up with casualty lists, and it was a war now, a real war, there was no doubt about it, and the hospital ships were coming back, and one began to remember again the things in our old hallway and in the drawer of the big wardrobe and the group snapshots on the front lawn and the mask of Gabby Dixon’s face faint in the room-shadows and this was when the guilt began to creep in, not too disturbingly at first, but with a cruel stab to it in the office one night when there on the long spiked proof of one of the casualty lists from Greece and Crete, there was the name – somebody had ticked it with red ink – TURLEY, Lieut. Gavin J., with his VX number after it, among fifty or so other names listed under the cross-heading ‘Missing in Action’.

  I telephoned Peggy at once. She was crying. She was killed three weeks later when the Turleys’ shabby little Baby Austin rammed a parked lorry in Brighton Road. The cadet-reporter who was covering the City Morgue on the day of the inquest told me that the pathologist’s evidence made it unmistakably clear that Peggy had been very much the worse for drink, and there must have been some doubt in the coroner’s mind because he brought in a finding of death by misadventure. The real tragedy of it all was that Gavin’s escape from Crete was reported in the papers later that very same week.

  There were the things that hurt, but the months dragged on and I still procrastinated with myself. There was a smell of defeat and disaster in the air – so soon, it seemed, after the Libyan victories, and deep down inside myself I was a prey to all the dark fears of my childhood, and I thought of death and of maimings and of ruined faces, and more and more I came to dread the prospect of being involved in it, and if conscience would stir or guilt prick me – without any sense of duty or of patriotism, though – I would find myself resenting the way I thought people were looking at me in the street, or the innuendo I suspected in a conversation. It was, for me, a restless, troubling, morbid time, and I was still unable to bring myself to any point of decision that might force me to exchange for uncertain jeopardies the security and the importance of the role I had. Even when the Japs came in and the war moved closer, I could still not make up my mind.

  In the end the problem, as usual, was taken out of my hands. And again by Mr Brewster.

  The Morning Post had decided to appoint its own war correspondent, and I had been chosen for the job. ‘We all know, David, how desperately you’ve wanted to get into the thick of things,’ said Mr Brewster with a pompous sincerity – he even had his hand resting on my shoulder as he spoke – ‘and your chance finally has come. We’re sending you to New Guinea. You must be ready to leave within forty-eight hours. We’ve teed up everything for you … shots and vaccination, kit and uniform … you have to report to the Barracks, Room 27, Block J, for credentials, cap and shoulder badges …’ I only half-heard what he said: I was stupefied by a kind of raging, confused panic, in which relief, uncertainty, fear, and despair were all present, and fragments of his conversation were woven without connection through a whirl of thoughts gradually coalescing into a realization of a fateful finality … ‘need your measurements … tropical-weight officer’s uniform … in the event of your falling into enemy hands you have, under The Hague Convention, the same status as a major … you will be unarmed, of course …’ Only his final remarks do I remember clearly:

  ‘I’m confident this will be the beginning of a really brilliant period for you. The war won’t only be New Guinea, you know. We’ve other irons in the fire, too. You’ll travel. You’ll see things. You’ll meet people. And it will be after the war when you will really come into your own. So always remember, David, that the only good war correspondent is a live one. You’ll be there to report the war, not to fight it. Don’t be impetuous or foolhardy. We want you back, you know. We’ve plans for you.’

  The war correspondent badges were green-and-gold and looked like pickle labels. I took them with the tropical-weight officer’s uniform to Helen in her sewing-room.

  ‘I like your needlework too,’ I said.

  There was a coral reef outside the harbour, and a wrecked ship on it, and there were coconut palms growing here and there, but Port Moresby was drab, squalid, hot, and dusty, no more than a depressing suburb of the true tropical jungle. It had already been bombed pretty heavily by the time I got there, and the town itself had been abandoned and the liquor stores looted, and there were pieces of twisted corrugated iron and splintered plaster and smashed timber all over the main street, and the garrison was scattered and dispersed through nineteen miles of dreary scrubland.

  The smell of defeat and disaster was much more pungent here, and I suppose this was understandable enough, for the place was undermanned and poorly equipped and a brooding sense of hopelessness prevailed everywhere in the heavy humid air.

  I needed no infection from it, for my own mood was depressed, fearful, and demoralized enough. I felt myself to be an unwilling observer of an inimical situation in a hateful place. And I was deeply conscious of how inexperienced I was. I suppose it cannot but be disturbing to be the unarmed man among armed men, the untrained among trained men, the amateur among the professionals, to be a thing apart from the esoteric community, the outsider, the separate being.

  They gave me quarters in a native hut with the Signals Officer, in a small clearing in the dusty scrub near the Military Intelligence Section, not far from a ravaged airfield littered with the burnt-out carcasses of planes. The garrison had virtually no air support whatever and only a few batteries of anti-aircraft guns, and the Japanese bombers would come over by day or by night almost without impediment, and we would scatter, cower in slit-trenches, hide in the undergrowth, cringe against the earth, and hate it.

  At the beginning one was very conscious of being a nuisance, too. I am sure they tried very hard not to show it, but in the provision of quarters, a chair in the mess, the issue of some tropical equipment, there was a faintly grudging quality, as if they resented having to do it for a non-combatant, a civilian masquerading in khaki, an incubus forced upon them by superior orders. Yet there was also an almost pathetic desire on their part for the right sort of publicity, a wish to be seen by the people ‘back home’ not in the true sad hopelessness of their situation, but as men almost of heroic stature, up against it, certainly, but steadfast and staunch, doughty defenders of their native land.

  It was not until much later that I realized how ideally fitted I was for the role that had been forced upon me, for the temper of the times, the machinery of military security, the very atmosphere of New Guinea in those early, desperate, embattled days, called for a deft duplicity. I was the perfect person for the job that had to be done – a writer with what Gavin Turley had defined as ‘flairs’ and with tendencies towards the unscrupulous. From the very beginning one was committed to journalistic chicanery whether one wanted to be or not.

  Yet as one looks back on it now and very clearly sees the difference between the picture as it actually was and the somewhat glorified picture that was conveyed back to the people in mainland Australia, one also sees how desperately necessary the dishonesty was.

  To Australians in those first two months of 1942 this was no longer the mythic far adventure. The seemingly invincible Japanese were swarming through the Pacific, bombs were actually falling on Australian soil, and war was at the very threshold. The mood at home, under the threat of that Yellow Peril that had haunted the minds of three generations of Australians, was very different from what it had been in the
earlier, brave, audacious days of the challenge from far away, and darkened by the realization that the country’s best fighting men – the handpicked, the well-trained, the battle-seasoned – were all still overseas, ten thousand miles away …

  It would never have done to have admitted the truth of things, for the times were desperate and demoralizing enough, and New Guinea was the only bastion against invasion, and so one painted a picture in vivid colours and larger than life of this little tropical fortress of heroes, brave and unflinching and undismayed under the blows of the arrogant, advancing enemy. One did see heroic actions, of course – and in later months one was to see immeasurably more – and one did see bold efforts to cope with a situation which seemed hopeless and impossible and almost defeatist, yet the dispatches that went back under my name and the sweeping dateline of ‘Somewhere in New Guinea’ gave only a false and highly tinted version of the truth. For morale at home and for security in the field there was, admittedly, nothing else that one could have done, but the falsity I built, or allowed to be built, around myself is perhaps less excusable. I wrote copiously and I wrote brilliantly and I wrote with all the practised ‘flairs’ for which Gavin Turley had commended me, and I skulked and I dodged and I was desperately afraid, and I wrote myself into my own lie, the lie I had had to create, so that it was taken for granted that I was there, right there, in the thin red line of heroes, and gradually I picked up all the tricks of evasion and avoidance and wove them into an almost fool-proof pattern. I suffered nothing more than a spurious self-inflicted heroism. One has sometimes wondered since about the real truth of other Omdurmans and Agincourts …