by JH Fletcher
The impact of his bleak vision was colder even than the sneak wind that plagued him. Hunched in his mud-soaked greatcoat, Colin shivered, knowing that he faced a future without purpose and without hope.
The hours passed. Night returned. Moonlight once again silvered the land. Along the whole sector, stealthy sounds revealed that the front was coming back to life. The creak of wheels, the barely audible cursing of drivers whose wagons, again and again, had to be extricated from the clutching fingers of the mud, sounded across a landscape which had suffered too much and now lay, sullen and inert, beneath the hammer blows of the rain that had once again begun to fall.
Turning to look behind him, trying to get the crick out of neck and shoulders locked too long in one position, Colin saw a battery of horse-drawn artillery moving into position. Moonlight shone softly on the coats of horses, the metal of helmets and guns. Somewhere a horse whinnied and was still.
A column of burdened men arrived in the trenches, pausing only briefly before moving out into the wastes of no-man’s land. They were a wire-setting party, staggering beneath the weight of the dannert coils slung from metal pickets across their shoulders. Colin watched as they moved out under cover of an imperfect darkness. The ghostly moonlight lit the landscape with cruel clarity, every human being, every hump and hollow, linked to its own black shadow.
Not only moonlight; somewhere out there the unseen enemy was putting up flares. Balls of fire, silver, red and green, rose in an eerie silence to hang momentarily in the black sky before exploding in a mass of falling stars. No sooner were they extinguished than more followed, the silent sequence of lights warning them that matters, on both sides of the line, were coming inexorably to a head, that cataclysm was rushing upon them.
And still nothing happened.
Further along the front, some other blokes weren’t so lucky. Down there, a bombardment was in progress. It was too far away to pose any danger to them; from the safety of the breastwork they watched as the muzzle flashes of the guns illuminated the sky, the roar of the detonations rolled over them in continuous waves. Cataclysm, made manifest.
Colin stood down.
‘Don’t go too far,’ the sergeant warned him. ‘I got a feeling we’ll be in for it later.’
Too far? Where was there to go, around here? Colin said nothing but picked his way through the darkness to his billet in the wrecked farmhouse kitchen. There were men everywhere; he tried to avoid them but it was impossible.
‘Watch where you’re putting your bloody great boots …’
The protest pursued him half-heartedly; everyone knew that being trampled on from time to time was one of the minor but inevitable consequences of the war.
On the other hand there were some things too important to ignore. About to lie down, Colin stopped, staring at what had once been a window, and at the shirt and underpants fluttering in the breeze that carried with it the hot, confiding, charnel smell of old battlefields and death.
‘What’s this lot doing?’ he demanded indignantly.
Big Lance Doolan sat up, scowling. ‘My shirt and pants. What’s it look like?’
‘Like an invite to the Boche to chuck shells at us. Once they know we’re usin’ this place —’
‘I’ll take ’em down before light. Whadya think? Reckon I’m stupid?’
Colin thought the big man was a pain in the arse. He grinned at him, which was answer enough, but said only: ‘Long as you do …’
He lay down, wrapped in his greatcoat. It was soaked with mud and the rain which had fallen earlier that evening; he wondered briefly if he would be warmer if he took it off, but he couldn’t be bothered. He thought about unlacing his puttees, even taking off his boots — the officer was always on at them about the dangers of trench feet, telling them to change their socks, which seemed pretty stupid when most of the time they were up to their knees in mud — but he remembered what the sergeant had said about trouble coming and decided to skip it.
Within seconds he was asleep. Seconds later, or so it seemed, he was wrenched cruelly back into consciousness by the roar of a bombardment that was no longer far away but was erupting all round him, the walls of the farmhouse shuddering in a continuous concussion of exploding shells.
5
Men were scrambling to their feet, snatching rifles, packs, bayonets. Whistles shrilled in the darkness, voices …
‘Attack! Attack!’
They were running, no clue what was going on, impelled by the group panic that had seized them. They reached the breastworks, not even knowing how they’d got there. All along the line, men were scrambling onto the firing step, rifles pointing, fingers curling around triggers, every mouth dry, every eye watching for the first glimpse of the attack …
If there was going to be an attack.
To the rear, their own guns opened up. They listened to the shells as they flew over their heads. More sinister than the thunder of the guns was the hiss of the invisible ordnance: the squeal of small calibre shells punctuated by the hoarse bellow of the heavy armament. The sound soared up the scale in a scream that peaked and faded until, somewhere out there in the darkness, it terminated in an explosion that lit up the sky before ceasing as abruptly as it had begun. From the enemy lines came the harsh chatter of machine-gun fire. No attack had gone in, so almost certainly the Maxims were firing at shadows, but were nonetheless dangerous for that.
For the remainder of the night they waited, muscles taut, hearts pounding, but the attack never materialised. First light and they were able to relax at last; no one would be coming now, when the machine guns would wipe them all out long before they could force their way through the newly laid wire.
Colin was so tired he could have fallen asleep standing up. He crouched on his haunches at the bottom of the trench, only to have someone fall over him at once. A minute later and someone did it again. He knew he’d get no rest if he stayed where he was so, cursing, he crawled out of the trench. Too weary to care even about the danger of snipers, he half staggered, half fell in the general direction of the farmhouse that seemed suddenly to have acquired all the attractions of the home he had never known.
He never made it. Halfway through the morass, he found he could go no further: his legs were simply not up to it. The clouds had cleared away; beneath the warmth of an unfamiliar sun he found a hollow, stretched out and was at once deeply asleep.
In his dreams, the Cloud Forest came to him.
The tree ferns, the reed-spiked pools, the clean and tranquil air of that far mountaintop, filled him with such longing and delight that, in his dream, he wept. When he awoke, he found that he had indeed been crying. For a moment he was ashamed of such weakness, then told himself that there was no need for shame; that, on the contrary, the dream had healed him or at least brought him to a place where hope was again strong within him. He fell asleep at once, was at peace. And saw …
… the paintings in the secret gallery; the sun-burnished stone; the consciousness of himself, separate and secure within the edifice of rock and past times, staring out at the boy he had been, at the man he was, at the certainty that, despite his apocalyptic vision conjured by the mist-enshrouded patrol, he was safe. They can blow me to bits, he thought, but they can’t touch me. The affirmation, serene and certain, filled him. The Cloud Forest would be his guardian. He did not understand what it meant, knew only that it was true.
A series of shattering explosions woke him, returning him from the dream of stone cliffs, of cool and tranquil delight, to a world riven by noise, the violent convulsions of air and quaking earth.
Colin scrambled to his feet, staring up at the springing geysers of mud and smoke, listening to the shattering sounds that rose, again and again, from behind the ridge of tormented earth beneath which he was lying. Without sight, movement or conscious thought of any kind, he knew at once that what he was seeing was the bombardment and final disintegration of the shattered farmhouse which, but for his weariness, would have been his shelter and his
grave.
He remembered the exchange he’d had with Big Lance about the shirt and pants. Like an invite to the Boche … Lance had promised to take them down before daylight, had been indignant at the idea that he might forget. Then had come the alarm and they had all grabbed their rifles and rushed back to the breastwork …
Would Lance really have remembered in those circumstances?
Colin listened to the recurrent boom of the explosions, watched the pillars of smoke and dust, and imagined the clothes fluttering in the breeze, sending a message to the watching Germans that the farmhouse that they had thought abandoned was in fact occupied …
And now this.
He cursed the stupidity that had brought such a catastrophe upon them. There were normally about a hundred blokes in there at any one time. He wondered how many had been killed because of Lance’s underpants.
6
In the event, it was seventy-two, including Big Lance himself. Mick Owens, who had nearly bought it at Gallipoli, hadn’t been so lucky this time, with his hip joint smashed into a thousand pieces.
As soon as they were pulled back from the line, Colin went to the base hospital to see him. A hip wound was always nasty, a guarantee of unbearable agony and the likelihood of infection from dirt impacted by the blast into the wound. On top of that, there was the certainty that the injured man would never walk again: a grim prospect when you were only nineteen. Even so, Colin was shocked to see him.
Mick was delighted that he had come. He trembled with agitated joy, saying over and over again what a pleasure it was, how he had always known that Colin was a true mate …
While Colin stared at his face. Mick had been a boundary rider before the war; the physical training instructors had picked him out as an example to the others, because he had always been so bronzed and fit. Even Colin himself, far and away the most agile of any of them, had admired Mick’s fitness and general air of good health. Now his face was yellow and sunken, marks like bruises showing through the skin. Dark lips were flecked with dried specks of foam, bitten through in places when the pain had savaged him. His teeth looked like tombstones, his eyes flat and without life; even his frenzied excitement at Colin’s visit gave them no spark of brilliance; their sad opacity reflected the light, that was all. The bruises flowering so darkly around his eyes and in the hollows of his temples showed how death was at work, consuming the essence of the man Colin had known as Mick Owens. This man had ridden on horseback halfway across North Queensland, had told them stories by the dozen of his adventures; this body had contained enough force to see off three Turks, each bigger than himself. And now?
Done for.
Colin couldn’t wait to get away but knew he mustn’t be too obvious about it. So he sat helplessly, trying to put into halting words plans for a future that would never exist.
‘We’ll have to get together, once this lot’s outa the way …’
To his horror, he found that he was beginning to resent Mick for the state he was in, for showing him what the real future was for him and all their mates. It was unbearable.
Die! Why can’t you die?
He was sure his expression had shown nothing yet he saw Mick Owens’s face change as though he had looked back from the lonely road on which he was now travelling, to see the unspoken words painted in letters of blood upon the air between them.
Guilt filled him. He tried to deny his own thoughts by continuing to prattle, ever more feverishly, about the things they would do together when Mick was out of hospital.
‘We’ll take a trip around the Top End … You can set it up: you’ll be back in Oz before any of us.’
The breath hissed in Mick’s throat. ‘I’ll never ride a horse again, that’s for sure.’
All his life had been the sun-drenched plains, the vast and empty sky, the horse under him.
‘You can’t be sure of that,’ Colin told him. ‘They can do wonderful things nowadays.’
The lies hung in the still air, mocking them both.
Finally he could bear it no more. ‘Best be makin’ a move …’
To his horror, Mick grabbed his hand. ‘Before you go …’
‘What?’ Feeling an up-swell of panic that he was about to be asked for something beyond his power to give. He wanted to snatch his hand away, to run …
‘That place you told me about once … when you was in the circus? Up a mountain somewhere. You give it a special name …’
‘The Cloud Forest?’
‘That’s it.’ Mick’s hand lay, trusting and inert, within his own. ‘Tell me about it again.’
Like a child, pleading for a story before the dark.
How was he going to manage it, with his dying mate, in this place? How was he going to find the words to explain how he’d felt when he had entered the world of rock and fern and water and discovered its underlying sense of mystery and grace?
All he knew was he must do the best he could for this mate who’d be lucky to last out the week.
‘There was this place, high up in the mist …’
Even now, he said nothing of the paintings. They were private to himself and to the people who had spoken to him through them. To talk of them, even in such a situation, would be betrayal. He did the best he could with the rest of it, but what Mick made of it he didn’t know. Later, when he knew by his increasingly broken responses that Mick no longer knew what was going on, he left him in his twilight world of antiseptics and pain and went back outside into the rain.
He breathed in deeply as he left the hospital. A khaki line of mud-splattered trucks was drawn up by the entrance, red crosses painted on their sides. The air was keen and filled by the silent crying of the dead, while, away to the east, he could hear the ceaseless rumble of the guns.
7
He went back down the mud-churned lane between dripping hedgerows, dank and dark, until he came to the paddock and the bell tents of the rest area. He found his tent and went inside. A bloke called Wally Bart, whom he had got to know quite well in the last day or two, was the only man inside the tent, lying in a shroud of blankets, a cloud of cigarette smoke wreathing about his head.
‘How’s he doin’?’
Colin shook his head: he didn’t want to talk about it.
‘Poor bastard,’ said Wally Bart.
It was all he said, and his patient silence made it easier, eventually, for Colin to start talking about Mick and how he reckoned he wouldn’t last the week.
Wally was a new arrival and hadn’t really known Mick Owens at all. That, too, made it easier to talk about his friend, not as a man who at that moment was dying in the hospital, but as someone he had known in distant and happier times and who was now at peace.
Only thing, once he got going he didn’t seem able to stop. About the good times he and Mick had had, how they’d knocked the shit out of Corporal Rabbit, how the pair of them had seen off a mob of Turks at Mule Valley, what Mick had told him of his life as a boundary rider before the war. Before the war: with that gate kicked in, the next thing was the circus and how, in a time before memory, he had been found wandering in some forest; and so, finally, to the memory of the place that in truth he had never left: the Cloud Forest and the sustaining miracle of what he had seen and felt during that distant time on the upper slopes of the mountain.
‘You sayin’ Mick wanted you to talk to him about it?’ Wally said. ‘Why should ’e do that?’
Colin thought it had to do with the fact that Mick was dying, but he wasn’t getting caught up in any talk of that sort. ‘How should I know?’
Wally puffed a fresh cigarette; about his head, the smoke billowed like thoughts. ‘Cloud Forest?’ he repeated. ‘Makes you think, don’ it?’
Colin saw that he was not looking for an answer, was simply exploring the boundaries of the wonder that the idea had woken in him. The unexpected image warmed his mind and heart while, beyond the pool of brown light inside the tent, a chilly wind chucked handfuls of rain like gravel against the sloping c
anvas walls.
Through the blue tobacco cloud, Wally’s eyes assessed Colin shrewdly. ‘Sounds like it must be a pretty special place, this Cloud Forest o’ yours.’
Colin was cautious about making such an admission. He was afraid that pinning it down in such a way might damage it, and the memories that were so precious to him. He felt an obscure need to guard what he had seen and felt from the inquisitive eyes of this friend, even from himself. ‘Dunno ’bout special …’
‘Did somen to you, though, din’ it?’
Colin shook his head, a tad too emphatically. ‘Nothing like that.’
Although of course it had, which made it even more important to deny it, for fear of being thought less than a man.
‘Yeah.’ Wally breathed smoke, contemplatively. ‘Somen special. That’s why that poor bastard Mick wanted you to tell him ’bout it, I reckon.’
This Wally was turning out to be a deep one yet Colin, who might have been uneasy at being confronted by notions so inexplicable and unexpected, was not. He thought Wally might be right, although he was not quite ready to admit it.
‘Just a place I came across when I was a kid.’ While knowing it was far more than that.
