Fear Drive My Feet

by Peter Ryan

  I studied him carefully as he sat there smoking. His dark-brown face was thin and parrot-like, almost as if his head had been squashed flat between two boards. His body was as skinny as a skeleton. No matter how much he ate, he looked half-starved. His upper arms were adorned by keloid scars in the shape of grotesque formalized faces with gaping mouths. They were the result of wounds inflicted as part of a ritual that was a common practice in the Sepik River country, where his home village was. The fact that he had become a constable of police tickled Achenmeri’s vanity enormously. He was particularly proud of his uniform – khaki shorts, shining brass-buckled belt, and khaki peaked cap with a gleaming badge. The cap, which perched precariously on top of his woolly hair, he was in the habit of removing, to turn self-consciously round and round in his hands, lost in silent admiration of a piece of property so magnificent and carrying with it such prestige. As his fingers were never too clean, the new cap was little more than a greasy rag before we had been on the track many days. The rifle, too, added to his already vast conceit. All day long he fondled and patted it, and he spent every spare second rubbing off imaginary specks of rust. I discovered that he had never fired a shot out of it, and was really rather scared by the weapon. He knew which end the bullet might be expected to emerge from – wasn’t there a hole there for the purpose? – but little else. His anxiety to display his devotion to duty was pathetic. My slightest order was the signal for shuffling and stamping, for saluting and slapping of the rifle-butt, and his dark eyes would roll wildly as he hissed, ‘Yessir! Yessir!Yessir!’ He might have been a good musical-comedy figure, but was hardly a source of comfort and inspiration to a young greenhorn on his first patrol into territory that was wild and largely unexplored as well as being controlled in all its approaches by the Japanese.

  A faint breeze just stirred the green foliage that grew like a wall on either side of the river. From the sun I guessed that it was about three o’clock. The meagre information I had been given suggested that we should reach Bob’s camp shortly before dark on this the third day. It was time we moved on.

  ‘Achenmeri!’ I called.

  Instantly there was a scuttering of pebbles and a fumbling as he sprang to attention and saluted.

  ‘Yessir!’

  ‘Talkim four-fella you-me walkabout now.’

  The other four grinned to each other at my halting order in pidgin English. Natives, and white men who had mastered the language, spoke so rapidly that the words seemed to pour forth in an almost incomprehensible torrent. I was trying desperately to acquire fluency, and listened keenly to every word the boys said, though understanding but a small part of it. One of the few useful tips I had been given by the district officer was that pidgin was a real language with rules and grammar of its own, and must be learnt as such. He was one of the best pidgin speakers in the Territory himself, and emphasized that it was not merely a matter of bastardizing English by throwing in a few ‘fellas’ and ‘belongs’. He pointed out that many Europeans who had lived for years in New Guinea had never realized this fact, and their ability to converse with natives easily and accurately was limited accordingly.

  The carriers were standing up now, stretching their back muscles before lifting their loads. The proprietor of the long cigarette put the six-inch remnant behind his ear, and in a few moments we set off single file along the narrow muddy track, my iron patrol-box swinging from side to side, lashed to a pole which two boys carried on their shoulders between them.

  For most of its length the track followed a stream called the Wampit, which was a tributary of the Markham River. Bob’s, I had been told, was almost on the banks of the Wampit, and not far from the junction of that stream with the Markham. It was hidden in thick jungle, but one of the carriers said he had been there before and could guide us to it.

  As we walked, the country became lower and flatter, and the track increasingly muddy. The heat, too, grew more and more oppressive. It was the sort of heat one sometimes finds in big laundries or in other places where there are large quantities of boiling water. Though we were now almost down to sea-level, and the heat and humidity could not have got much worse, I nevertheless had the strange feeling of going ever downward into an inferno.

  At last, a little after five o’clock, with the Wampit on our right hand, the carriers stopped at a dried-up, rocky little watercourse that crossed the path; they pointed up it to the left.

  ‘Master, lookim,’ they said. ‘Road belong place belong all master.’

  I could see no ‘road’. The boulder-strewn gully showed no footprints. The only track seemed to lie straight ahead. But they assured me that the path led to the Markham River, and they struck off confidently up the watercourse. After a few minutes’ scrambling over the stones, I saw Bob’s there in front of us.

  I shall describe this jungle camp carefully, since for me its atmosphere, its people, and its life sum up one important phase of the infinitely varied, infinitely monotonous activity called war.

  The place was named after its founder, Bob Griffiths, who had built it at the time of the Japanese invasion. He was a member of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, a tiny local militia of a few hundred, the only force to meet the assault of many thousands of Japanese. In fact, so few men had we that all the Australian posts at that time were called only by some familiar name – Bob’s, Mac’s, Kirkland’s, and so on. Nobody asked who Bob or Mac might be – they were known to all.

  From where our little party halted, at the foot of an enormous ficus-tree, I could see that the camp consisted of a dozen or so rough huts thatched with sago-palm fronds, and left without walls for the sake of coolness. They were not in a clearing, but sprawled about in the thickest forest. So intent had their builders been on concealment from the air that the huts themselves had taken on the impress of the builders’ desires, and had a furtive look about them, almost as if they knew they were supposed to be hiding.

  The tall trees, with their tangled superstructure of creepers, quite blotted out the sun, and I knew that even at midday the place would have the appearance of being in a green-tinted twilight. Now, towards dusk, it seemed infinitely sombre and forbidding. The ground was damp and spongy, and a vague smell of decay pervaded everything. The jungle tolerated this man-made excrescence, it seemed, confident that in a little while it would be swallowed up without a trace.

  Everything in this little settlement was damp. Clothes and blankets soon acquired a clammy feeling that was impossible to remove, for one dared not sun them in a patch of grassland not far away, lest they be spotted by the Japanese reconnaissance planes that often flew low overhead. Blowflies buzzed lazily everywhere, and every couple of days the blankets were fly-blown.

  No breeze stirred the air. The smoke from the cooking fires hung motionless in a blue haze among the trees, and over the whole area hung a fearful silence, too vast to be broken noticeably by the voices of the forty or fifty men who comprised the garrison. Even the rattle of gunfire was subdued by this uneasy quiet.

  Gaunt, pallid men in ragged green uniforms were moving about the camp doing various chores – cleaning weapons, sewing up torn clothes – while one directed the work of a party of natives who were repairing the roof of a hut. Quite close to me, a smart squad of native police were lined up on parade beneath the trees. A tall serious-faced man with a close-clipped moustache was quietly
calling the roll, sucking hard on a chipped and blackened pipe between names. This, I knew, must be John Clarke, an old New Guinea hand who was in charge of the police and the native carriers at Bob’s. When he had finished his roll-call I walked across to him and told him who I was.

  He gave me a friendly smile and shook my hand warmly. ‘I heard you were coming. I’m very pleased to see you. Now, I’ll get you fixed up with a place to sleep, and you can have a clean-up, and we’ll have a yarn after that.’

  ‘Thanks, John. It’ll be good to get these clothes off and into some clean ones. I think I’ll have a swim in the Wampit to cool off. Is it safe to go in here?’

  ‘Pretty safe. But don’t go too far out into the current. There don’t seem to be many crocodiles around.’

  As we talked, John had been leading the way to a long hut containing only one or two beds.

  ‘You’ll be pretty private here,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a couple of boys to put your bed-sail up at this end, where the roof doesn’t leak.’

  After his mosquito-net, the bed-sail is probably the New Guinea traveller’s most useful item of furniture. It consists of a double sleeve of canvas about seven feet long and three feet wide. Two stout poles are inserted along either side to make a rough stretcher, and the poles are supported at the ends by a couple of stout sticks lashed together at the top like shear-legs. The result is a tightly stretched canvas bed, cool and springy, raised two or three feet off the ground. It can be erected in a few minutes, and the canvas is practically no weight to carry. Moreover, in the daytime, on the track, it forms a useful waterproof wrapper for blankets.

  The boys summoned by John unwrapped the roll of bedding and ran to fetch suitable poles, while Achenmeri thrust himself importantly forward to supervise this weighty operation. John raised his eyebrows at the antics of this bumptious and comical constable, but he said nothing, while I groped in my haversack for some mail I had brought.

  He glanced at the handwriting on the envelopes and smiled, before tucking the three or four letters into the breast pocket of his shirt, to be read and enjoyed later, alone. It was the first mail he had received for weeks. There was a paper for him, too, and he slit its wrapper at once.

  ‘It’s the Bulletin!’ he exclaimed with a grin of pleasure as he unrolled it. ‘I like to read that – it’s my Bible, the Bulletin.’

  ‘Isn’t that a pretty old copy?’

  ‘No, not very,’ he said in a surprised voice, looking at the dateline. ‘Only a couple of months. I’ve had it a lot older than that.’

  I began to understand life at Bob’s when I saw how excited John became over a two-month-old copy of a newspaper. Cut off by rivers and mountainous jungles, these men were isolated not only in a physical sense, but had their own time-scale as well.

  I had found towel and soap in my patrol-box. ‘How do I get to the Wampit, John?’

  ‘Follow that gully straight on past the main track, where you came in, and keep going. It’s about a hundred yards.’

  ‘O.K… I’ll be back soon.’ By the time I had gone ten yards Bob’s had vanished so completely from sight and hearing that I stopped and had to resist deliberately the desire to run back and reassure myself that the place was really there and that I had not been dreaming.

  By the time I reached the Wampit bank the sun was already below the treetops, and the palms and wild breadfruit-trees were outlined black against the brassy shine of the sky. The foliage rustled lightly in the breeze that blew upstream. I sat down on a log at the water’s edge and slowly unlaced my boots, then pulled off my green shirt and shorts and let them fall in a sweat-soaked heap on the little beach of black sand.

  The river here, in its lower reaches, was swift and muddy, but the water was cool. I waded gratefully in to thigh-depth and washed myself. New life seemed to return with cleanliness. At this somewhat open point the breeze was too strong for the mosquitoes to be a pest, so, having dried myself, I squatted naked on the log and looked downstream.

  Not far away the Wampit almost lost itself in a vast flat area of swamp and sago-palms before emptying into the mighty Markham. Over the trees and across the Markham (which of course I could not see), I glimpsed again the Saruwageds. Filtered through an almost invisible haze of dust, the evening light cast a delicate softness upon them. They were blue, every conceivable shade from ice-blue to deepest purple. I knew that even the foothills were at least twenty miles away, but the mountains showed with startling clarity, mounting up and up, fold upon fold, until the tops disappeared into a level bank of cloud. I studied them intently, knowing that the next few weeks would find me somewhere in their remote blue fastnesses.

  ‘Somewhere over there is Jock,’ I thought. ‘And somehow I have to find him.’

  It was nearly dark. I pulled the towel about my waist and hobbled barefoot up the stony creek-bed, back to the camp. When I got there the others were putting on long trousers and gaiters, rolling down their sleeves, and rubbing their hands and faces with mosquito-repellent lotion; in short, making all the preparations for evening which characterize the mosquito-infested camp.

  John Clarke appeared out of the gloom as I was getting dressed. He looked slightly embarrassed, I thought.

  ‘You aren’t an – er – officer, are you?’ he asked.

  My shirt carried no badges of rank, and his bore none either, though I knew he was a lieutenant. In fact, hardly anyone wore his rank in those days, partly because the store never had any badges and also because the Japanese made a feature of trying to pick officers and N.C.O.s off first, if they could identify them.

  ‘No – I’m only a warrant-officer. Why?’

  ‘Well, you see, we have an officers’ mess here. I’d like you to eat with me, but of course – ’

  I cut him short. ‘For God’s sake don’t worry about that! Just show me where the other mess is, and I’ll be O.K.’

  ‘It’s not quite so simple. There’s a headquarters mess, where the sigs and orderly-room staff and so on eat, and a sergeants’ mess, and of course there’s the men’s mess. I suppose you’d better eat at the sergeants’ mess.’

  I stared at him. Here were forty or fifty men at the edge of the world, and pretty well on the edge of eternity too; bound together, one would have thought, by every important tie both of interest and sentiment. And yet, to take their meals, they split up into four groups. I could see that John’s sense of personal hospitality was somewhat offended at having to send me to eat elsewhere, but that the system itself was crazy didn’t seem to occur to him. And, to be quite honest, within a day or two I had so slipped into the way of things myself that I found nothing ludicrous in the spectacle of the same atrocious food from one central cookhouse being carried through the bush among the flies to four different mess-huts. Very few of the absurdities and injustices of army life worry you much at the time. You can’t buck the system, so you put up with it, and pretty soon you don’t notice. I don’t think this means that most people are militaristic at heart. Real militarists are those who seek to justify the system, and find it good. The vast majority tolerate it because they have no choice.

  As I finished buttoning up my sleeves John pointed out the sergeants’ mess on the far side of the camp. The loud clatter of a beaten kerosene-tin announced that tea was ready.
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  ‘You’ll be right, then, will you? I’ll see you later,’ John said, and made off into the darkness.

  I strolled across to the sergeants’ mess – a rough hut like all the others. A man was setting fire to little piles of green leaves all round it, making a smoke-screen to keep the mosquitoes away. A smoky hurricane-lamp spread a shadowy red glow over the interior. Four stout poles driven into the dirt floor supported the rough table-top provided by light sticks laid side by side. The five men round the table were perched in various attitudes of discomfort on old bully-beef cases. They were meditating quietly, saying nothing at all to each other.

  As I introduced myself and asked whether I could share their meal, they hastily found another case for me, assuring me I was welcome. They wanted to hear the latest news from Wau, and would have welcomed the devil himself to supper, I believe, provided he had brought some diverting gossip with him.

  I looked round the table at my companions as they told me their names. They were all young men – not one of them out of his twenties – but without exception they were heavily bearded. For all one could see of their faces they might have been middle-aged.

  Among them was Bill Chaffey, a farmer and Member of Parliament from New South Wales, with an enormous red bushy beard that made him look like the prophet Isaiah. And there was Bob Sherman, an Englishman, whose glossy black whiskers reminded me of a melodrama villain. If he had suddenly exclaimed, ‘Ha, my proud beauty! Out into the snow!’ it would have seemed quite in keeping with his appearance.