Soldier Boy

by Anthony Hill

  Afterwards, Jim walked around the garden with his parents, each of them wondering if it might not be for the last time.

  ‘Do you know when you’re sailing, son?’

  ‘It can’t be long, Dad. We keep hearing different days.’

  ‘You’ll let us know, Jim. We want to see you off.’

  ‘Course I will.’

  ‘Jim, it’s not too late! You could still change your mind … tell them your right age. They won’t be too hard on you.’

  ‘Mum! We’ve been through that! I told you, I can’t back out now! Anyway, I’ve assigned most of my pay to you. They’ll send it every fortnight.’

  ‘It’s not money I want, Jim! It’s you I care about!’

  ‘Don’t, Mum! You’re just upsetting yourself and me, and I don’t know when I’ll be home again …’

  So Amelia and Charlie bit their lips and fought back the tears. And when Jim left to get his train back to camp, they kissed and hugged him at the front door. Saying goodbye. And the whole family gave him a brown leather belt to wear under his jacket. It had a little money pouch – and inside, they tucked a five-pound note. Mary, Annie and Millie walked with Jim to the railway station. The same way they always walked to school.

  ‘I caught the 6.35 train from town on Saturday night’, Jim wrote in his Monday letter, ‘arrived here about 9.30 and they did not know I had been away so I am wright as rain …’

  Spelling was never his strong point.

  They heard that day their departure had been postponed yet again. Jim tried to send a telegram to let his parents know. But the post office wouldn’t send cables about troop movements. Security.

  On Thursday, though, came the news they’d all been waiting for. Hats were thrown into the air and men crowded into the canteen to celebrate with a glass of whatever they fancied.

  ‘Dear Mum and Dad,’ Jim wrote from the Salvation Army recreation tent. ‘We are told we are going Monday now for certain. We could not go before until we had completed our shooting. We were down the range on Tuesday and Wednesday shooting, and I passed my Musketry …’

  It was still raining, Jim told them, but his parcel of underclothes had arrived at last. He enclosed some more photographs, and asked that one be sent to Aunt Mary at Maldon.

  It was a photo of himself, standing to attention in his uniform. His slouch hat, looped up on the left side, the Rising Sun badge of the AIF on his lapel. A soldier boy of only fourteen, looking serious beyond his years. Vulnerable too, of course. But then, so does every soldier about to leave for war.

  They spent the next few days packing their equipment. Oiling rifles. Sharpening bayonets. Cleaning boots and webbing till they shone. The sense of excitement was everywhere. Men laughed at the adventure on which they were about to embark. If they also felt apprehensive, well, they tried to keep it to themselves.

  Such emotions couldn’t be hidden by their families, however. On Saturday, they got twenty-four hours final leave. Jim went home to Melbourne in the crowded train for the last time.

  It was a solemn, sombre family who sat down to dinner that night. Esther’s husband, Charlie Anderson, tried to keep everybody’s spirits up by saying what a grand thing Jim was doing and how he wished it was himself.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Esther.

  ‘You have got everything? Enough warm socks?’ Amelia, too, was trying to be bright. Trying not to say what was really on her mind. The time for argument was past.

  ‘Everything, Mum. It’s summer over there. We’ll be warm enough, I reckon.’

  ‘You will be all right …?’

  ‘He’ll be fine. It’s turning into stalemate on Gallipoli. Neither side can break through.’

  Percy Chaplin, the military policeman, knew about these things. He was almost family. Percy and Alice were getting married: in fact, though it was kept very hushed, Alice was already pregnant.

  ‘You mustn’t worry about me, Mum,’ said Jim.

  ‘I can’t help it. I look at the casualty lists in the paper and the pictures of the wounded men in hospital …’

  Charlie said, ‘Then we must try to be as brave as Jim.’

  But in the silence of the night, Jim could hear weeping from his parents’ room. He pulled the blankets over his head, however, and tried to shut the sound from his ears. He could bear nothing to disturb his own excitement at leaving.

  He went back to Seymour next morning. The following day – another wet Monday, 28 June – they broke camp and marched to the station where the train was waiting.

  A few hours later, corporals and sergeants shouting orders, they reached Station Pier, Port Melbourne. The troopship Berrima, just arrived from Sydney with the 20th Battalion, was already berthed. The band played ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Australia Will Be There’, though men scarcely heard it for the beating of their own hearts. They formed into columns and slung their packs. With heads high they marched through the crowd of families and friends, and up the ship’s gangway.

  Jim found himself a place by the deck rail. He looked for his parents and sisters among the faces below. He couldn’t see them at first. And then … there they were! Waving and shouting farewell, and blowing him kisses.

  Goodbye! Good luck! God be with you, son!

  The liner blew its siren and bells rang. Tugboats gathered steam. Gangways were pulled away and the ship’s ropes cast clear. Those watching on the wharf threw hundreds of streamers, like a paper rainbow, to the men crowded on board. Cheering. Waving. Sobbing. Jim caught a streamer, red-and-white, and, holding it, leaned over the rail as the ship began to move. He peered through the billowing colours for his family somewhere in the crowd: catching glimpses, in these last few moments, of his own mortality.

  ‘Goodbye Mum!’ Jim cried. ‘Goodbye Dad! Write to me …’

  A gap opened between the pier and the ship’s side. Wider and wider, as they moved into open water. Smoke poured from the funnel. The propellers sprang into life. The streamers pulled and strained. One by one they snapped and fell away as the Berrima moved under her own power.

  ‘Auld Lang Syne’ played the band, and ‘God Save The King’. Until the notes were borne away on the wind. The faces of those on the wharf grew blurred and distant, and at last disappeared altogether as the troopship steamed down the bay.

  They were going! The bit of red-and-white streamer could no longer hold Jim Martin to the land of his birth.

  He put it away for safekeeping. And went below.

  7: THE BERRIMA

  Thus Amelia Martin remembered her son as she last saw him: Jim crowded at the ship’s rail, cheering and laughing and flushed with adventure; Jim draped in streamers, as the Berrima pulled away from the pier.

  What happened after that, Amelia knew only from letters and the souvenirs he sent home from Egypt. But she couldn’t tell – as mothers can – what her soldier boy really felt. She wasn’t there when Jim got sick at Gallipoli. She wasn’t beside him through that last awful hour on the hospital ship …

  rocking …

  sweating …

  calling for water …

  Jim felt a cool, wet cloth on his brow … an arm around his shoulders, lifting him and holding a glass of water to his lips. He heard a woman’s voice, not unlike Mum’s, through a misty, white veil as he opened his eyes …

  ‘Thank you.’

  Jim lay back on the pillow. His body felt as nothing. Empty. Floating. But at least there wasn’t the pain any more of last week … wracked with vomit and cramps until he couldn’t stand up … couldn’t hold his rifle steady in the trench at Wire Gully … couldn’t even keep down any water, and his throat on fire …

  ‘Please … am I going to get well?’

  ‘Of course, my boy.’ The voice, like his mother’s.

  His heart feebly pumped morphine through his veins. After the fears and agonies of the past week, Jim sensed relief. He’d be all right. Right as rain. When he’d told them at home he was doing splendid …

  He lay there, slipping i
n and out of wakefulness, aware of the ship’s motion. It reminded him of those nights on the Berrima, men swinging in their hammocks as the ship steamed across the Indian Ocean. Even better, when they got to the tropics they were allowed to take their bedding on deck. The night air was so cool after the heat below, as they lay watching the stars come out, brighter than Jim had ever seen them. He could hear his mates around him talking, playing cards and having a smoke until Last Post at 2200 and lights out …

  Fragments of memory fluttered through Jim’s mind. Smoke? Course he smoked. They all did. Tried it, anyway, until Jim thought he’d cough his heart up. The other blokes wetting themselves, as he did the drawback and his eyes turned to water.

  ‘Enjoy that, Jim! Make a man of you …’ his mate, Cec Hogan was laughing. Cec would carry his tobacco pouch, water-stained and tattered, with him right through the war.

  There was no smoking between decks, though. Risk of fire, and strictly forbidden. There was a corporal … what was his name?… who’d been reduced to the ranks when caught. And Harry Johnson was given two days’ fatigues. Two days scrubbing decks and paintwork!

  They found Jim, once, scratching his name in the paint on the companionway stairs. It was a pretty silly place to break a rule. He was put on mess duties for a week. Peeling spuds. It wasn’t so bad, not when the others were all out on deck in the heat doing drill. Or listening to lectures on map reading. Or learning semaphore signals with two coloured flags …

  Talking to the crew, as he sat peeling his potatoes, Jim learned a lot about the Berrima. They were proud of her. She’d already played a gallant part in the war.

  ‘I was with her taking the troops up to Rabaul after the war broke out, and they seized New Guinea from the Germans,’ said a mess steward. ‘Saw a bit of shooting, too. And last January we towed the submarine AE2 behind us all the way to Suez.’

  Australia’s second submarine had covered herself in glory. A few days after the Anzac landing, the AE2 found a way through the minefields guarding the Dardanelles and into the Sea of Marmara. But the sub was unlucky. It was damaged by Turkish gunfire, and the crew had to sink the vessel and surrender.

  A few months earlier a British submarine, commanded by Lieutenant Norman Holbrook, had braved the same minefields to sink a Turkish battleship. Unlike the AE2, Lieutenant Holbrook’s sub returned safely and he was awarded the Victoria Cross. His name became famous. Even as the Berrima steamed towards Colombo, the town of Germanton, in southern New South Wales, where Jim Martin’s Aunt Mary had once run the Riverina Hotel, was patriotically changing its name to Holbrook.

  They held three parades every day on board the Berrima. Reveille at 0600, the bugle echoing through the ship. Wash in cold water, roll up your hammock, and half an hour of physical jerks before breakfast. Parade again at 0930 for two hours of drill.

  SQUAD – SHOULDER – HARMS!

  Sergeant Anderson shouting above the sea sounds.

  SQUAD – STAN-DAT – HEEZE!

  Boat drill, too, so they’d know what to do if the ship got torpedoed and sank. Useful that, in time to come. How to put on a life jacket. Which lifeboat was yours and how to board it …

  Dinner, and two hours’ parade again, though nothing too strenuous in the heat of the tropics. Sometimes they had rifle shooting from the ship’s side, to keep up their skills. Or lessons in first aid: how to dress a wound, and mend a broken limb.

  ‘Hey!’ shouted Charlie Nunn, when Jim was trying to strap a splint. ‘If me bloody leg’s not broke now it will be when you’ve finished!’

  Poor Charlie would die of wounds in France next year.

  They lined up for more inoculations by the medics against enteric fever and just about every other disease they could think of.

  ‘There’s not a germ left that could live in my arm,’ said Bob Lowry.

  Pity, though, for young Jim Martin lying so ill aboard the hospital ship with typhoid, that the vaccine didn’t always work …

  But then, they couldn’t help the flies … the stinking, filthy flies of Gallipoli, feeding on corpses and living in open cesspits … crawling into your mouth as soon as you opened it to eat. Swallowing them, like a plague. No wonder men got sick …

  Jim’s brief connections of thought flickering.

  The food on the Berrima was always good. Porridge for breakfast. Roast for lunch and heaps of vegetables. Especially potatoes! Milk for your tea and coffee, and plenty of butter. Lots to eat. Except when it got rough. The plates slipped up and down the galley tables, and blokes rushed to the ship’s side to heave it all up again. Fred Goodman spent half the voyage leaning over the rail.

  Mostly, though, when parade was over, it felt like a holiday for these ‘six-bob-a-day tourists’. There were concerts at night, deck quoits and sports days when they all went in for sack races. There was a bit of boxing. And Jim and Cec Hogan sat on a spar bashing away at each other in a pillow fight. Until they fell off together and became best mates.

  Sometimes, during those long, lazy afternoons, the two young soldiers would stand on the shady side of the deck, watching a school of dolphins leaping through the ship’s wake. Yarning. Talking of home and families. Sharing confidences.

  ‘You heard of Ned Kelly?’ Cec asked.

  ‘The bushranger? Hanged in Melbourne? The Kelly Gang …?’

  ‘Yeah. My family knew them.’

  ‘Gorn …’ Jim disbelieving.

  ‘Fair dinkum. We lived next door to the Kelly’s in Greta West. Mum knew his sisters and his cousin, Tom Lloyd, who made Ned’s armour, and she nursed old Mrs Kelly when she was sick …’

  ‘That true?’

  ‘Honest injun!’

  ‘You still live there?’

  ‘Nah. Dad’s a builder. We moved to Benalla. I was still going to school when the war …’

  ‘School?’ Jim exclaimed. ‘What d’you mean … school?’

  ‘Nothing … A mistake … I …’

  Cec Hogan drew a deep breath. How far could he trust this mate?

  ‘You keep a secret?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. What?’

  ‘I said I was eighteen on the enlistment form. But I’m not really. Put my age up. Said I was a butcher. But I’m not really. My mate, Bob Briggs, is the butcher. I was still at high school when I told them, “Bob’s joining up and I’m going too”.’

  ‘What did your people say?’

  ‘They carried on. Dad swearing. Mum crying. The headmaster saying, “You’re top of the school and you mustn’t leave.” But I said, “I’m going anyway, and if you try to stop me I’ll run off and join under another name”.’

  ‘Me, too.’

  ‘Thought so.’

  They slyly looked at each other in the late afternoon light. And laughed. Jim’s secret was out.

  ‘How old are you really?’ he asked Cec Hogan.

  ‘Sixteen. Seventeen on October 26th. And you, Jim?’

  ‘Same. Sixteen. Same as you.’

  Jim looked away, as if the sun burned his eyes. Half his secret was out, at least. He dare not trust himself … or trust anybody with the whole truth. Not even a mate. The merest slip, and he could be sent back to Australia and have to start all over again. He knew of quite a few fellers of sixteen or seventeen who’d got away with putting their ages up – but none as young as himself.

  ‘Tell us about you, Jim.’

  So he told Cec about Amelia and Mary Street, the farms at Maldon and Charlie’s rejection.

  Never mind, Dad. I’ll go instead.

  But he let the lie of his real age sit between them. It was safer that way.

  Two weeks out from Melbourne they ‘crossed the line’ at the equator. One of the crew came over the ship’s side dressed as King Neptune. Everyone was shaved with foam and had their heads ducked in a tub of water – officers and all! Talk about fun, when they wrote home.

  Best, though, was Colombo, on the island of Ceylon, where the Berrima stopped to take on coal. It was the first foreign city most of the men
had seen. The ship stood out to harbour, tugs and coal barges coming and going, and natives dressed only in loin cloths swarming on board and jabbering away.

  ‘I dive! I dive!’

  They were diving after silver sixpences the soldiers tossed from the top deck, coming up grinning and waving, and clambering back aboard.

  ‘I dive again!’

  They were pretty good, and lucky not to break their necks. The water wasn’t all that deep!

  In the afternoon the troops went for a long march around the city: past the shops and red-roofed mansions of the European quarter, the gardens dripping with bright, perfumed flowers; past the hovels where the natives lived, all trying to sell over-priced fabrics and jewellery and cigars to the passing parade.

  ‘You buy banana? Sweet banana?’ Little kids ran after them in the dust.

  ‘How much you want?’

  ‘Sixpence each, sahib.’

  ‘Thief! I’ll give you sixpence for the whole bunch.’

  ‘One shilling and sixpence, sahib.’

  ‘One shilling.’

  ‘Very well, sahib. You are a hard man, sahib.’

  The blokes dearly wanted to ride in a rickshaw – the little open carts pulled by the native men. But they weren’t allowed. So after tea, Jim and Cec Hogan went ashore anyway without permission. ‘French leave’ they called it. They weren’t the only ones. And they went for their rickshaw ride, up into the hills and the tea plantations, giving the runner a whack on the shoulders with a bamboo cane if he didn’t go fast enough. It was the custom.

  Of course, when they got back to the ship, an officer was waiting to take down names. More punishment fatigues! Jim and Cec Hogan slipped unnoticed through an open porthole.

  The Berrima left next morning, heading back into the Indian Ocean. Shipboard discipline resumed. But there was still time to watch the flying fish like small aeroplanes skimming the water, to feel the rain on their skin when a storm broke, and to stand by the ship’s rail looking at the blue haze of the Arabian coast as it hove into view.