Fear Drive My Feet

by Peter Ryan

  ‘All right – it’s a good idea,’ I said. ‘Now, for God’s sake let me get some sleep, and go to sleep yourselves!’

  Next morning before starting we gathered every scrap of wrapping paper from the army biscuits and burnt it, and carefully buried the bully-beef tins. If any of the natives told the Japs we had been here, we were determined that there would be no scrap of evidence. I even packed my boots into the bed-roll and walked barefoot, for the print of an Australian army boot, with its distinctive horseshoe heel-plate, would have been certain proof that we had passed along the track.

  The ground was rough, and my feet were soon covered in cuts. As I watched Watute’s leathery feet padding along in front of me I wondered how long it would take for my soles to become as tough as his.

  We walked rapidly, continually downhill, roughly following the course of the Busu River towards Lae. It became very hot after the sun rose, for we had left the high country behind and were approaching the coast. About midday we passed a huge bomb-crater in the jungle on a nearby hillside. Probably the bomb had been jettisoned by a lost or damaged aircraft.

  A few moments later we reached the large village of Musom, about fourteen miles from Lae. Natives who had been lounging about sprang to their feet in angry astonishment as we strode into the centre of the village. An uproar broke out as men rushed from the houses waving pig-spears and bows and arrows, and shouting. I slipped the safety catch off my rifle, and saw Watute do the same, and we backed up against a large house so that nobody could sneak in behind us, while we waited for the row to subside. Dinkila’s friend from Lambaip stood close by, translating freely as the kanakas yelled and gesticulated. We gathered that some of the people were for killing us off at once, while others were trying to restrain them. The noise died down to a threatening rumble, and an elderly man stepped sullenly forward.

  ‘Me luluai,’ he announced in a defiant tone, making no attempt to salute.

  ‘Where’s your cap, luluai? And the village book?’ I demanded sharply.

  ‘Hat now book ’e something belong gov’ment belong Australia,’ he said bluntly, and went on to explain that cap and book had both been destroyed, and any Australian who wanted to go on living had better keep clear of his village. His speech received an ugly growl of approval from the crowd. They had the numbers to shoot us down quite easily, even if it cost them a few casualties. Probably, however, we would be picked off by bowmen hidden in the bush that fringed the village.

  Bluff seemed our only hope.

  ‘You’ve seen that hole the bomb made on the hillside up there, haven’t you, luluai?’ I asked.

  He grunted a surly assent.

  ‘That was caused by just a single bomb,’ I went on evenly, trying to infuse a note of menace into my voice, to cover up very genuine fear. ‘Just one bomb cut down all those trees and made that enormous hole.’

  The crowd was quiet now, listening intently.

  Jumping suddenly forward I stuck my face up close to the luluai’s face, shouting at the top of my voice, ‘You’d better look out, luluai! My friends with all those aeroplanes know where we are now! If anything happens to us they’ll come over and drop hundreds of bombs, all over the place!’

  As the luluai fell back a step, I took a step forward, still shouting at him. ‘Bombs everywhere! No gardens, no houses, no women, no children, no luluai either!’ I went on, piling horror on horror.

  The luluai melted back into the crowd, but I called him out by himself again, and painted in the full ghastly details of the imaginary air raid. As the crowd began looking upwards apprehensively, as though fearing vengeance from the skies at any moment, I thought of the parson who used sometimes to add a marginal note to the draft of his sermon: Shout like hell here – argument very weak. That parson apparently understood an audience.

  Before long most of the kanakas had put their weapons down and moved to the other end of the village, where they stood murmuring uneasily. The luluai was reduced to a state of unwilling civility.

  We asked him about the movements of the Japs.

  ‘I suppose an ignorant old man like you thinks the Japanese are the government now?’ I said.

  ‘Master, me no lookim Japan. Me-fella no savvy long Japan.’

  ‘ ’Em ’e gammon, master,’ Watute said quickly at my elbow. ‘Look at these things I found in the houses.’

  He held out several Japanese newspapers, and a bottle with a Japanese label, half full of kerosene.

  ‘Where did you get those, luluai, if you haven’t been dealing with the Japanese?’

  The old rascal squirmed and wriggled, but stuck to his story that he and his people had had nothing to do with the Japs. It was obviously untrue, but he was unshakable, so I fell back on more idle threats, to prevent him rushing straight to Lae to tell the Japs what had happened.

  ‘We’ll be round here for a day or two, luluai, so don’t tell the Japanese. Remember – no matter whose fault it is, if any harm comes to us in your country the aeroplanes will come and bomb you.’

  He gave me an ugly glare – he was quite shrewd enough to guess that the whole business might be a bluff, but was too terrified of the bombs to gamble on his luck.

  Watute drove the point home: ‘You see, luluai? If you want to save your own skin, you’d better look after us, and do everything you can to make sure we leave here safe and sound.’

  We munched a few bits of biscuit and had a drink of water. Then, with a final warning to the luluai not to try any funny business, we hurried along the track towards Gawan, a large village one stage nearer the Chinese camp.

  We reached Gawan by mid-afternoon, and though the people were anything but pleased to see us they concealed their feelings and showed at least formal politeness. The local luluai and tultul wore their hats and made some gestures of cordiality, giving us a house and a supply of food.

  ‘Have you been dealing with the Japanese?’ I asked the tultul.

  ‘Certainly not – we wouldn’t dream of such a thing.’

  ‘What about the people of Musom?’

  ‘Yes, they have been down to Lae. But not the Gawan people.’

  Watute and I grinned at each other. They didn’t mind telling tales on other villages, while protesting their own innocence.

  ‘Tultul, do you know the camp down the river where the Chinese are living?’ I asked.

  He was silent, licking his lips and swallowing, and curling his toes in the dust.

  ‘Do you hear the master asking you a question? Speak up!’ snapped Watute.

  ‘Yes, me savvy,’ he whispered.

  ‘We want to go there tomorrow, and we would like you to guide us.’

  He looked piteously from Watute to me, and back again, hoping that we might be joking. Oh no! his expression seemed to say. No – anything but that!

  ‘Come on – you heard,’ Watute prodded him.

  ‘No – it’s not safe!’ he blurted out. ‘What if the Japanese shoot you? Then I’ll be in trouble with the Australians.’

  ‘You’ll be in trouble with the Japanese if they find out we got even this far, and you’ll be in trouble with me if you don’t do what you’re tol
d. You’re in plenty of trouble, tultul.’

  ‘Please don’t go!’ he implored, groaning and almost weeping. ‘It’s not that I won’t take you, but it’s too dangerous.’

  After pleading unsuccessfully for half an hour, he finally gave in, and with a terrified expression muttered ‘Yessir’ to Watute’s order to be ready at three o’clock in the morning. Then he went off, shaking his head and trembling, to his own house across the village.

  The sun set brassily behind the timbered line of black hills as Dinkila prepared my tea. It was dark when I finished eating, and I lit the little lamp while Watute and Dinkila squatted on the floor to eat their meal of boiled sweet potatoes. We sat there, talking and smoking for some time, and then, leaving the lamp burning low where it stood, we took our rifles and dropped quietly out the back of the house and into the edge of the bush. If the tultul should fetch a Japanese patrol to surround the house, we could now easily escape to the river and make our way upstream to safety in the Wain country.

  All night we sat huddled together in the bushes. Time stretched out unmercifully, and I remember trying not to look at my watch, and being disappointed, whenever I did steal a glance, to find how slowly the night was passing.

  The village was fairly quiet. Sometimes a glowing cigar-end betrayed a figure moving, and in a nearby house an old man coughed and spat. Shortly before midnight, as the moon rose, we were surprised to see the women and children, with large bundles on their backs, slip out of the houses and glide like shadows along the track that led north to the hills.

  ‘What does it mean?’ I whispered to Watute. ‘Do you think they’re expecting a Japanese raid?’

  The moonlight showed his old face creased with thought. ‘It could mean that,’ he said at last. ‘But probably they’re just playing safe. If they were sure a raid was coming, the men would have gone too.’

  We sat on in silence, letting the mosquitoes bite us as they would. The minutes ticked painfully by, gradually adding themselves together to make slow, reluctant hours.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I complained. ‘And all the food’s up in the house.’

  Watute chuckled softly, and fumbled in his haversack, bringing out a strange black object with little bits of dust and tobacco adhering to it.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Pig. Master kai-kai,’ he replied, offering it to me.

  It was a knuckle of camp-cured ham from the boys’ Christmas pig. I hacked off a piece with my sheath-knife and nibbled it gingerly, more with the idea of not offending Watute than of enjoying it. It tasted surprisingly good, and I soon asked for another bit.

  Three o’clock came at last, and while I covered him with my rifle Watute went across the village to wake the tultul. He emerged yawning and stretching from his house, accompanied by a friend, and as soon as he saw me he began to make excuses and fresh protestations against going with us.

  ‘It’s no good, tultul,’ I said. ‘We’re going, so that’s the end of it.’

  He looked as if he might burst into tears, so we gave him and his friend a packet of biscuits and tried to cheer them up. The tultul wasn’t a bad sort really, but circumstances had put him into the damnable position of having to placate the implacable and somehow help each side in turn without being caught by the other.

  Watute took off his uniform and borrowed an old black loincloth from Dinkila. Then he ruffled up his hair and rubbed his face and body with ashes from the fire, till he looked like any grubby kanaka from the bush. I told him to leave his rifle behind, and gave him two hand-grenades, which he put in a little string dilly-bag with his tobacco and matches.

  We followed the tultul and his friend down the winding track. For the first couple of hours the bright moonlight enabled us to walk swiftly, but by five o’clock we were so deep into the valley, and in such thick jungle, that we had to sit down and wait for dawn. The soles of my feet were stinging, for though I had patched the cuts up with sticking-plaster it had been washed off by the wet grass and the many small streams we had crossed. Leeches worried us too, swarming up our legs and fastening onto the skin till they dropped off, gorged to bursting.

  At first grey light we hurried on, and sunrise found us halted on a cliff above the river outside a village called Gwabandik. Watute went ahead to reconnoitre alone in his guise of kanaka, while the rest of us waited in the jungle just off the track. He was back in five minutes with the news that there were no Japanese about, and that the Gwabandik people, while surprised at our visit, were quite friendly.

  The tultul and his friend and Watute and I perched on the edge of a house and ate a couple of tins of bully beef, while the Gwabandik people gathered round curiously to hear what was going on in other parts of the island. They were so near to Lae that they had a good idea of the devastation our bombing had caused.

  I asked them about the Chinese camp. Yes, they knew it well. It was quite close – in fact some of them were going there that morning with a supply of vegetables. Yes, they would take me down with them, provided I was careful and first let them make sure there were no Japanese about. I told them I was in a hurry, and they obligingly rushed about, getting their loads ready.

  In the middle of these preparations Watute suddenly leapt to the ground and raced to the end of the village, where he intercepted an aged native he had caught slipping into the bush. In true police-boy style Watute grabbed his arm and propelled him up to me.

  ‘Master, this-fella man, ’em ’e tultul belong Tali!’ he said excitedly.

  Tali was a village near Lae known to be under Jap control.

  ‘Is that true? Are you the tultul of Tali?’ I asked.

  He was a tall, thin grey-haired man, and he drew himself erect and said in a dignified voice that Watute had made a mistake.

  Watute was scornful. ‘I don’t make mistakes like that,’ he said. ‘This man gave the kiap trouble in peacetime, and I’ve seen him both in Tali and in Lae.’

  The old man denied it, saying that he belonged to another village nearby. Though he remained calm, I could see that Watute’s certainty worried him.

  I asked the Gwabandik natives about him, but they were evasive. ‘Just an old man,’ was the gist of their replies.

  I felt that Watute was probably right. Even if he had made a mistake, there was something suspicious about the old man – the evasions of the Gwabandik boys seemed to point to that. At all events, it would be dangerous to let the old native go, so I told him he would be kept under guard until we left the area, and motioned him to get in the line in front of me. He began to protest, but thought better of it, shrugged, and moved into line. We started off downstream, led by about a dozen Gwabandik natives carrying bundles of vegetables and fruit.

  Most of the time Watute walked at the head of the line. He appeared indistinguishable from the kanakas, and no one would have guessed that he was usually a trim, clean, uniformed police-boy. Neither would anyone have suspected that his innocent-looking little dilly-bag held two deadly ‘hand-bombs’, as he called the grenades, with which his aim was unerring.

  Once he dropped back beside me to mutter about a theory he had worked out regarding the tultul of Tali, if such were really the identity of our prisoner. For some weeks we had been hearing stories which suggested
that white missionaries were still living near the coast and carrying on under Japanese auspices. The reports, which came from natives in widely separated villages, agreed in substance, and seemed authentic. Watute had a theory that one of these missionaries had sent the tultul, a strong mission supporter, to see whether it was safe to resume missionary activity in this area.

  I put this to the old native, but he only mumbled unintelligibly in reply. However, I noticed that he no longer denied that he was the tultul of Tali, nor that some Europeans were working near Lae with Japanese approval.

  On its far side the river was joined by a large tributary and became a huge torrent, its tawny surface broken and foam-flecked.

  ‘Which side of the river is the Chinese camp on?’ I asked the tultul of Gawan.

  ‘Place belong Kong-Kong ’e stop long other fella half.’

  ‘Well, how do we get there? Look at that river!’

  ‘Bridge ’e buggerup finish, me-fella savvy brokim water.’

  ‘Yes, you can get across, I dare say. But what about me?’

  ‘Master, more better you stop. Now me-fella bringim number one belong Kong-Kong, name belong ’en Peter, now you-fella talk-talk along this-fella half.’

  In other words, I should stop on this side of the stream, and they would fetch the unofficial leader and spokesman for the Chinese – a man named Peter Ah Tun, whose name I had heard from Jock.

  Watute and I weighed this suggestion and decided in favour of it. It had the advantage of keeping the river between us and the Japanese and also of cutting out the dangerous crossing.

  We were soon led on to a flat, open stony beach, and the Gwabandik natives announced that they would make the crossing here. They would ask Peter Ah Tun to come back with them at once. Three of them were needed to get over safely, they said. If I watched them I would see what method was used to pass these flooded streams. They grabbed a dry log of driftwood from the beach – a sizeable tree about fifteen feet long – and tucked it under their left arms, with one man at each end and one in the middle. Then they plunged straight in. The current caught them, and they would have been swept rapidly downstream, but, as they bobbed about, they struck out strongly with their right arms, and each time their feet touched bottom they kicked powerfully forward. In this way the three natives reached the other side in a few minutes. They pulled their log up clear of the water, took off their loincloths and wrung them dry, and set off at a run down the far bank.