Chapter 12 Incredible Howe Hoax; Wake of Tradition; Queer cattle......

THE INCREDIBLE HOWE HOAX

You can never tell. I am sure of that-now.

The invitation posted on the wall newspaper of the R.A.A.F. Repair and Servicing Unit in Darwin was a mixture of apparent authenticity and obvious impossibility. But Sergeant Jack Gough who looked after the newspaper was a little dubious of the result.

"You know," he said, "I wouldn't be surprised if somebody fell for this."

I ridiculed the very idea. It was frankly burlesque. It was unmistakable. Anybody reading it would detect its spurious nature.

"The modem army," I said loftily, "no longer consists of a gullible peasantry."

Jack pressed in the thumbtacks, and we stood back to survey the work. I glowed with pride of authorship; he still shook his head in doubt. "If only one man believes in it, and carries out the instructions, we're in for some bother."

How right he was! How wrong I was!

But he did not foresee even then what it would lead to. This quarto piece of typescript was eventually the cause of frantic telegrams between Naval Intelligence and the R.A.A.F. It made the Silent Service noisy, and there were, subsequently, nasty things said about "violation of security", and "stern disciplinary measures" and so on.

Here is the cause of all the trouble. What would you have thought if you had seen it on your wall newspaper?

"Proposed visit of H.M.S. Howe"

"During the proposed visit of the British battleship Howe to Darwin Harbour it has been decided to make available trips round the harbour for the benefit of interested personnel on a Sunday to be decided. Those persons desirous of participating are to submit their names to the Senior Naval Officer, Darwin, as soon as possible.

"Fun and Games: Personnel are warned that interference with the main armament is forbidden (considerable damage has been reported from areas where the projectiles from these guns have landed), though permission has been granted for the 6-inch secondary armament to be available for the purpose of sinking bottles and other flotsam. Prizes will be awarded to those people proving most efficient at bottle-sinking. The R.A.A.F. is co-operating by towing a continuous string of drogues past the small calibre A.A. weapons, and each competitor will be allowed 1,000 rounds for this sport. Two drogues shot down, and a probable, will result in the award of a box of high-grade chocolates.

"Fishing: Fishing will be permitted during the lunch hour, when the battleship will anchor in the Middle Arm.

"Servicewomen: You are reminded that although our sisters in uniform will be aboard, they are not part of the planned entertainment.

"Moonlight Cruise: The latter part of the trip will be a moonlight cruise up the West Arm. (Moonlight is being provided by courtesy of the R.A.A.F. Meteorological Section.)

"Community Singing: The day's entertainment will conclude with supper in the wardroom and gunroom messes, followed by community singing.

"Roll up and enjoy yourselves. Make this function a success."

Beneath this invitation was a silhouette drawing in Indian ink of a battleship.

The first indication that something was stirring occurred late on Tuesday afternoon, 13 March 1945, a few days after the notice had been displayed.

A naval staff car swept in like a destroyer, made fast alongside the fence outside the orderly room. There was a flash of gold braid, as the Senior Service dived into the orderly room. A coldly precise voice requested the commanding officer. He saw him immediately and the C.O.'s office door closed on some very interesting conversation.

I wasn't in the office, but I know almost

to the word what was said. The naval officer had some letters for the C.O. to read. There were four or five of them, and the wording in each was almost identical. I quote one of them:

"To Senior Naval Officer, Darwin.

"Dear Sir, I will be pleased to enjoy the moonlight trip to be arranged on the Howe. Allow me to thank the Admiralty and yourself for allowing such a trip. It will help to bind the bonds of friendship between the services. Following are the names of several of my friends who would like to come along also. Etc., etc."

The C.O. was astounded. He knew nothing about the notice on the wall newspaper, so he sent for the letter writers. They too, were bewildered. Their source of information, they said, had been a notice on the wall newspaper, so Sergeant Gough was called in, and the noose-though I did not know it then-began to close on me.

I was not required until the following afternoon, but by that time I had naturally heard all about it-it was all over the camp. People pointed me out as the instigator of the "Howe Hoax"!

"When is the Howe coming in?" I was asked. "What about a knockdown to Brucey Fraser?" greeted me everywhere. And apparently solicitous friends came up to me quietly and said, "I believe detention at Box Creek is pretty tough nowadays-I hope you don't get a long stretch!"

I was wrong again. I thought that no one would believe the notice-and I thought that I would suffer a fearful penalty. But the Official Mind has a sense of humour. They frowned; they stopped frowning; they grinned; they roared with laughter. When I saw the C.O. I received a "Slight Admonishment".

The offending notice had been forwarded to the Senior Naval Staff Officer and the idea of a moonlight trip on a British battleship with prize shoots, and supper in the wardroom had been too much for him. He had laughed; his deputy had laughed, and so on in order of seniority, until even I was permitted to laugh.

However, I must warn those who would trifle with security regulations. Some of the laughs were a trifle hollow!

G. B. H. SAUNDERS (R.A.A.F.)

IN THE WAKE OF TRADITION

Criticism of Parliamentarians and their official advisers, a contempt for the past, and an indiscriminate condemnation of administrative decisions, are popular pastimes today - as they always have been.

All too often there are grounds for such an attitude. But time is the test of the greatness of men's works; and time has proved the soundness of the basic decisions of the 19 11 London Imperial Conference, which made the Royal Australian Navy virtually an integral part of Britain's Royal Navy.

Those main decisions were:
- Our naval forces, while in Australian waters, would be controlled by the Australian Government;
- Training and discipline generally would be uniform with that of the Royal Navy, officers and men being interchangeable;
- Australian ships placed at the Admiralty's disposal in war would remain an integral part of the Royal Navy for the duration of the war.

Even if there had been no family bonds of common sentiment and common interest, sound judgment alone would have dictated such a course.

For nigh on a hundred years Britain had maintained, undisputed, that supremacy at sea which long years of battle had brought to her. For all nations her Navy was the standard of efficiency.

Less than a year after the first Australian Squadron reached Australia, World War I began. In the heat of battle and in the chill of grey patrols, the new Navy was moulded into the ways of the old. Men and ships were blended into a fighting team which made all the oceans its arena, and won the goal of victory.

With a second world war now behind us, all that may have assumed the mustiness of history. But it should be re-told; for there were - and still are - those who, in the darkest days of the recent war, professed to see a weakening of Australia's strength in sending Australia's sailors and ships to join Britain in her battle of the world's distant seaways.

The fact that the vast majority of these critics were not in any of the services is beside the point. The deeds of Australian men and ships overseas will bear scrutiny in any light -including that of our future security.

In September 1939, as in August 1914, the Australian Government placed our naval forces at the disposal of Britain. And World War II was to see Australian ships and Australian naval personnel in action in even theatre of the global conflict. From Australian coastal waters to the United Kingdom; in the highways and byways of the Middle East; on the Murmansk convoy run; in the Battle of the Atlantic, the landings in North Africa, Sicily and Italy; in the invasions of Normandy and the South of France; at Singapore and Madagascar; in the Java Sea and the Bay of Bengal; in New Guinea, Papua, the Solomons and the Philippines; in Borneo and the China Sea and in Japan's home waters.

Not without good reason was the Middle East the first zone in which H.M.A. ships were closely linked with the Royal Navy's war at sea.

Even during the first nine months of the conflict, while Italy maintained a fretful neutrality, the Mediterranean was a lifeline vital to the safety of North Africa, India and Australia alike.

Before the end of 1939, as a first instalment of her contribution to the protection of that lifeline, Australia had sent five destroyers (Stuart, Vampire, Vendetta, Voyager and Waterhen) to the Middle East.

By the time Italy entered the war (June 1940) these had been joined by the cruisers Sydney and Hobart. Other units followed; and from mid-1940 to the end of 1941, there was never less than one Australian cruiser and four destroyers serving with the Mediterranean Fleet at any one time.

Three days after Italy's declaration of war, H.M.A.S. Voyager, outside Alexandria, became the first Australian ship to sink a submarine in World War II. Next day Voyager and Stuart shared the probable sinking of another.

In the same month Sydney sank the Italian destroyer Espero near the Sicilian Channel, and with Stuart, joined in the first British bombardment of Bardia, where Australian destroyers' guns were again to be given a target in August 1940 and April 1941.

On 9 July 1940 came the first major clash between British and Italian fleets-the Battle of Calabria. Without loss or casualties, the British force (which included Sydney, Stuart, Vampire and Voyager) sank one Italian destroyer and damaged the battleship Cavour.

In that month, too, Sydney crippled the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni (subsequently torpedoed by British destroyers) and put to flight the Giovanni Delle Bande Nere.

Evacuation of troops from British Somaliland by H.M.A.S. Hobart, Sydney's bombardment of the Dodecanese Islands, and the dispatching of Vampire, Voyager and Waterhen in the vanguard for the advanced base in Crete, brought 1940 to a close-with a tougher Job still to be faced.

The inshore squadron to support the Western Desert armies was formed early in 1941, and in this most of the Australian destroyers played their part.

They were among the original units of the famous Tobruk Ferry Service, which continued to have strong Australian representation throughout its hazardous existence.

On the Tobruk run the R.A.N. suffered its first loss of the war - H.M.A.S. Waterhen, sunk by enemy air attack on 30 June 1941, without loss of life. On similar duties Parramatta was torpedoed and sunk on 27 November in the same year; 139 of her personnel were lost.

Just as Perth, Vendetta and Stuart shared in the Matapan triumph of March 1941, so, in the months which followed, practically every Australian ship then in the Eastern Mediterranean played her part in the tragic epics of Greece and Crete.

With the veterans in the Crete evacuation were H.M.A.Ss Napier and Nizam, two of the new Australian-manned "N" class destroyers which, like their counterparts of "Q" class, found themselves in the Middle East not long after commissioning.

Meanwhile, up in the Persian Gulf, in August 1941, Yarra and the Australian manned armed merchant cruiser Kanimbla joined British and Indian units to capture a group of Axis merchant vessels and to immobilize Iranian warships on the Karim River.

Numerically the Royal Australian Navy's greatest contribution to the defence of the Mediterranean was made before Japan came into the war. But, although the ships which shared in the earlier phases of that work returned to the Pacific theatre, we continued to have substantial representation in the Middle East almost to the last.

Thus, after Crete, Napier and Nizam joined the Tobruk Ferry Service, and, with their sister-ships, ran the gauntlet of the convoy route to Malta when the enemy siege of the island was at its height.

It was on the Malta run, on 17 June 1942, that H.M.A.S. Nestor had to be sunk by our own forces after being severely damaged by enemy bombers. Four of her crew were killed.

Apart from individual Australians serving on loan with the Royal Navy, H.M.A.Ss Quiberon and Quickmatch gave us representation in the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942. During those operations Quiberon destroyed an enemy submarine, and was one of a British force which sank three enemy destroyers and four merchant ships attempting to run reinforcements to Tunis.

While the "scrap-iron flotilla" of the dark days had gone to give battle nearer home, it was fitting that Australian ships were present at that phase of the Mediterranean campaign which culminated, in July 1943, in the Allied occupation of Sicily.

These were eight Australian-built corvettes (Cairns, Cessnock, Gawler, Geraldton, Ipswich, Lismore, Maryborough and Wollongong), which escorted transports and naval craft, carried out general patrol and minesweeping duties, and provided anti-submarine screens.

By the time Japan came into the war, 66-4 per cent of the life of the major units of the R.A.N. (with only one exception) had been spent in service with the Royal Navy. In the majority of cases, most of that service had been in the Middle East; and, as has been shown, December 1941 did not see the close of our ships' work in that zone.

But the story of our Navy's link with Britain in war is a story of men as well as of ships. Through it the Middle East runs as the main thread; but the whole story is as wide as the world itself.

Here in Australia there were some people who were virtually neutral or, at best, "uninterested belligerents"-until Japan attacked Singapore and Pearl Harbour.

Preoccupied with the struggle against the new enemy, they forgot the earlier chapters of the saga of our Navy's war: forgot the Mediterranean; forgot the eight bleak months of H.M.A.S. Australia's work in the Atlantic and her contribution to the Dakar operations. They forgot the ships which convoyed the A.I.F.- without loss - to the Middle East and home again.

And if these "isolationists" could forget the existence, and the significance, of whole ships' companies, they could scarcely be expected to have heard of another little band of Australians-a group whose individual members brought R.A.N. representation to every naval battlefront and to practically every type of ship.

These were the men who answered the call, made as soon as the war began, for R.A.N.V.R. personnel for "outright loan" to the Royal Navy, serving outside Australia.

The first batch left for Britain in January 1940. By D-day (6 June 1944), there were approximately five hundred Australians on loan to the R.N., and of these, more than four hundred were members of the R.A.N.V.R.

In the months and years of action which culminated in the great invasion, these Australians served not in groups but as individuals, scattered throughout the fleets. There were few naval engagements, great or small, in which they were not represented. They were to be found in the submarine service and in the Fleet Air Arm, in everything from battleships to the smallest motor craft. Those of them who chose bomb and mine disposal work brought to the R.A.N. its highest decorations of the war.

The courageous ambassadors of a young country's Navy were assigned to work extending from the blockade of Western Europe to the Murmansk run; from the Battle of the Atlantic to the Allied landings in North Africa, Sicily and Italy.

The world's seaways were their training ground for the assault on Hitler's "impregnable for-tress"; and when D-day came they were ready. There were Australians in the minesweepers whose work began twenty-four hours before the initial landings; in the cruisers and destroyers on bombardment and escort duties; in the first and subsequent waves of landing craft; and, particularly, in the M.T.Bs and similar craft which did so much to thwart enemy attempts to penetrate the invasion area or to evade action.

But war-time collaboration with the Royal Navy - was not confined to the campaigns against Germany and Italy. One vital factor - often overlooked - in the stemming of Japan's advance, and in her ultimate defeat - was the strength of the naval forces which Britain was able to concentrate in the area stretching from Ceylon to the coast of Africa.

A linking of Japanese and German-Italian arms in that area might well have brought disaster to the Allies; and the first move to counter it was the British occupation of Madagascar.

In that surprise piece of far-sighted strategy the R.A.N. was represented by "N" class destroyers. These, with the "Q's", later became part of the Eastern Fleet, sharing in its bombardment and patrol work until the time was ripe to form the British Pacific Fleet.

The task units of the B.P.F. included six Australian-manned destroyers (H.M.A.Ss Napier, Nepal, Nizam, Norman, Quiberon and Quickmatch) and the eighteen corvettes of the 21st and 22nd Minesweeping Flotillas. With their aggregate complement of three thousand personnel, they helped to screen the carrier-borne strikes, or to form the fleet train, in the final operations against the Japanese homeland.

So Australia had its place in the Allied Armada which stormed Nippon's ramparts, just as she had contributed to the still more cosmopolitan final assault on Hitler's citadels.

Among the Australians whom the long road of war at last brought to Tokyo, were some who had fought beneath the White Ensign since the dark days of Dunkirk. There was something symbolic in that-just as there was something symbolic in the fate of those other Australians who went down, against overwhelming odds in the Java Sea, the Mediterranean or the Atlantic.

Those who lived and those who died learned how to live and how to die in a young Navy schooled in the tradition and technique of an older service. That tradition and technique has been weighed many times in the exacting scales of the battle for self-preservation, but has never yet been found wanting.

J. A. BLAIKIE (R.A.N.)

FOUNDATION GARMENTS, TROOPS

EXCITEMENT was intense among the nursing staff of the Australian General Hospital. A paragraph had appeared in orders that the Army had obtained a supply of foundation garments from America and the women's services, after years of going officially corset-less, were to have once more the doubtful pleasure of squeezing themselves into correctly slim outlines.

The first cloud appeared on the horizon when a notice demanded that anyone who wished to be issued with corsets was to state the required size. A.A.M.W.S. who had put on a mere stone in weight while serving their country simply added a couple of inches to their pre-war measurements and hoped for the best. In many cases the difference was more than a stone and more than a matter of inches. Tape measures appeared as if by magic and girls who had not measured their hips for some years gasped with horror as the tape figures mounted into the thirties.

"Why, I'm practically O.S. now and I never used to be more than a twenty-four! " wailed one lass.

"I wonder what is the biggest size they have?" said another. "Anyhow, we can always let gussets in-it's too good a chance to miss!"

All the female personnel of the unit, though divided on other subjects, were of the same mind when it came to step-ins, and long was the list that finally went in to the quartermaster.

A few days later Dame Rumour got busy. "Isn't it super - the corsets have arrived! They're in the Q already. I wonder when they're being issued - next issue day, probably."

"No, I don't think it will be an ordinary issue day - it would take hours and hours to issue them, with all those girls wanting them.

"I believe the men in the Q store are tossing up to see who will be in charge of the fitting room! "

The eventful day arrived. Long before the appointed time A.A.M.W.S. and sisters could be seen converging on the Q store from all points of the compass with the light of battle in their eyes. Some thoughtful souls had provided themselves with attaché cases to carry the loot in. ("They just hand them to you raw. I can see myself trailing through the ward with a pair of step-ins in one hand and a thermometer in the other!") Those who had not thought of this would not, however, forfeit their hard-won places in the queue.

The queue, reaching from the door to the roadway, was a source of much amusement to the passers-by, but that did not daunt the girls in search of glamour. One by one they emerged, some with the garments respectably concealed in cases, others with suspenders dangling from tissue-paper parcels, but all with satisfied smiles on their faces.

The incidence of latecomers to the early parade next morning was high, being made up mostly of A.A.M.W.S. who, in the unexpected constriction of their new garments, were a little slower than usual in dressing. During the day, too, several cases of suspender-trouble were reported, though not at the R.A.P. In a few days the unit had once more settled down to normal, apart from a disinclination to bend and a certain uprightness of bearing that had not before characterized the female members.

The morale of both the male and female staff rose about ten degrees, with svelte and fashionable lines appearing in all directions, though some slack and lazy spirits could be heard remarking as they thankfully removed their foundations when retiring, "I think I'd rather be fat and comfortable, even if I do look like the rear view of an elephant."

Joy GERRARD (A.A.M.W.S.)

QUEER CATTLE

The hut is wet inside. It's pretty miserable. The smells of damp thatch mingles with the sweet scents of jungle flowers. Outside, with the relentless fury of a tropic downpour, the rain comes screaming down.

Me? I'm heedless of all this - I'm a very worried man. I'm crooked on the world. I'm crooked on the missus; I'm crooked on Darky -above all I'm crooked on myself. I'm a damn fool!

It all started months ago down at Waigani. Darky and me, being old soldiers and knowing that, if we hang around camp, we'll cop a job or two, we mooch off to a little hide-out we know. It's a real paradise this spot. It's down the valley where the small peaked houses of a native village stand in a row under a canopy of palm trees with their green and pale gold, standing thickly together.

Women dressed in short grass skirts are seen bending double over cooking pots; smoke drifts lazily through the tree-tops and savoury smells of sweet potato and taro rise as they bubble on the fires. Boongs, brown, almost naked, sit and loaf about, some smoking, some chewing betel nut. Some are talking, one or two lazily singing-that and the incessant roar of the nearby river are the only sounds to be heard.

With cigarettes aglow, each with his own thoughts, we sit there for hours and breathe it all in. It's a tired man's dream of peace. But Darky breaks the silence-in fact, he shatters it.

"You know, Burky," he says, "wives are queer cattle."

I don't know what the hell he is talking about so I don't say anything. I just wait and wonder what's to come next.

Darky has evidently summed up and pronounced judgment upon his own thoughts, but he is in no hurry to explain. I find subsequently that it is a long story. He just relapses into silence and gazes moodily ahead, intent, it seems, on the capers of two brown kids, fat and naked, as they waddle in pursuit of a playful mongrel dog. Finally he pinches out his cigarette and he turns and says, "This is something I wouldn't mention to any living soul but you. Burky - it's about Janey.

I get an uncomfortable feeling that I'm going to hear something unpleasant, so I just give a non-committal sort of grunt and keep quiet. Darky doesn't seem to notice my embarrassment, however. He is apparently in search of sympathetic advice.

"Maybe," he says "I sort of keep these things to myself a bit too much- but you know how it is with me and her. I worship the very ground she walks on.

He looks embarrassed and pause light another smoke. I'm sort of embarrassed, too. The kids, I notice, have caught up with the mongrel dog and are busy trying to pull its ears off.

Darky puffs away moodily for a while and then says: "Well the truth is, Burky, I've been worried stiff with some of the things she's been writing lately. She-she-oh, damn it all, I don't know how to tell you about it. In the first place she wants me to write her love letters! Me! Now, fair dinkum, Burky, can you imagine me writing tomfool tripe like that? Can you?"

Up to this I haven't said a word and now I'm incapable. I'm fit to die laughing. I try hard not to imagine anything so ridiculously impossible. Somehow or other I manage to keep a straight face.

Darky, however, is too full of his subject to notice anything amiss with his listener and, with a touch of defiance in his voice, he says, "Well then, I do. Leastways I reckon I do."

I'm scared stiff I'm going to offend Darky I'm starting to rock, tears are coming to my eyes and I know if he goes on much longer I'm going to laugh outright.

The shadows have come stealing up the valley, the threatening hills fade behind a veil of purple mist, and ravenous hordes of persistent mosquitoes come swarming into action. It is time we headed back to camp and the shelter of our mosquito nets. I say so to Darky and thus relieve the tension.

On the track back Darky unburdens himself, but I've got a hold on myself now so everything is jake. Insects are noisy, the jungle gives out sounds of nocturnal life and Darky, having broken the ice, eagerly pours his woes into my apparently sympathetic and understanding ear.

It appears that Janey, in her wisdom, or more probably her loneliness, has seen fit to question the sincerity and depth of his feeling towards her.

"Why, if you really love me," she has written, "don't you at least tell me so once in while~"

Darky is hurt down deep.

"Can you beat that?" he complains, "and me flat out writing letters fairly dripping with sentiment. I tell you straight, Burky, it's got me licked properly. Then again she writes: 'Why don't you send me lovely letters like Jean gets from Bob?' "

This, evidently, is a particularly sore point with Darky - he is very indignant.

"That Bob," he snorts. "He used to be a pretty good cobber of mine but I've had him thrown up at me so often as an example of all that a good husband should be that I'm getting so that I hate the sound of his flamin' name. Him and his sloppy letters!"

There's no doubt about it, Darky is very cut up over the whole works. He writes to explain that he doesn't like to expose his true feelings in letters because he can't bear the thought of the censor perhaps getting the wrong idea about him.

No good!

Janey cracks back: "What are you - a man or a mouse?" Darky decides that he is a man and that the censor can go chase himself.

"And the funny thing is," he confides to me, "every time I write a letter from then on I really feel like a man - excepting," he adds apologetically, "that, whenever I stop to think of some mug reading what I've written, I sort of break out into a cold sweat."

That sets me off again. Apparently intent on picking a way through the deepening gloom of the jungle, I have difficulty in smothering a gasp, but heedless of interruption Darky continues:

"Yes. I really feel like a man - sort of reckless - if you get what I mean - so I decide I'll let myself go properly. I'll write a letter that will outdo all the Don Juans that ever lived. I'll give the little lady at home a real thrill."

I discover suddenly that we are off the track, which is no joke. We plunge through a nightmare of matted vines, fallen logs and pliant unbreakable trailers that seep down from above to claw at our faces with inch long thorns. After a period of lurid cursing, we somehow manage to find our bearings again.

It seems that Darky has not noticed the interruption; he takes up the conversation where te had left off:

"And so I write a letter. Yes, I write a letter that licks any other letter ever written by a dashing lover to his lonely sweetheart. I'm so proud of this effort that I put in the next few weeks trying to picture her as she reads the tender passages-I see her in a sort of pensive mood; she smiles, she looks entreating. Gosh, how I love her! Fair dinkum, Burky, I've just lived for her reply."

A deep sigh and he relapses into moody silence. Night-birds with their raucous bickering are making a hideous bedlam of the tropic evening; fireflies flicker fitfully against a background of impenetrable foliage; but Darky is in no mood to take stock of the beauties of nature. His troubles are too real for that.

We reach the camp and I'm just beginning to wonder if I'm to hear the rest of the story when Darky, breaking the long silence, grinds out:

"I got my reply today," and then, miserably, "I'm still a mouse."

He fumbles in his pocket and drags out a letter. "Read it," he says.

I take it and read: "Received another letter from you today but, although it reads very nice, I know that you don't really mean all you say. You only write those things because I asked you to. Oh, Bill, I do wish you could write lovely letters like other chaps do."

For the first time I begin to feel really sorry for Darky - as a matter of fact it had come as a bit of a shock to learn that Janey could act like that. She had always appealed to me as a particularly sensible type of girl. Still, I reflect, women do some funny things at times - they take a lot of understanding. Not my missus, of course - she is different. just a lovable, happy natured girl content with her lot - none of sentimental nonsense about Sue, thank goodness.

Darky interrupts my thoughts to explode: "It's that flamin' Bob again, blast him.' Burky, what the hell am I going to do about it:- .

Me- I want nothing to do with it at all. I'm satisfied to let Darky work out his own salvation, but do I say so? No I don't. He looks so miserable and helpless that, although I should know better, I feel I just have to give him the helping hand. Yes, I'm a damn fool! In my conceit I deliver a lecture on women and how they should be handled. Oh yes, I'm the wise guy! What I don't know about women is not worth knowing. Not much!

"Women," I stress, do take a lot of understanding. They need sympathy and love. Even though in their own hearts they know it is all blarney, they like you to tell them that they are beautiful."

What I can't get over is that this is me saying these things.

"It's not a bit of use," I continue, "for them to only know you love them; you've got to tell them that you do. You can't tell them often enough-they live for it."

Yes, I have the temerity to say things like that. You wouldn't read about it. What is more, Darky is lapping it all up as though eager to learn from one who evidently knows all the answers. Thus encouraged I impulsively plunge deeper.

"When next you write to Janey," I advise, tell her about her beautiful eyes and how you long to hold her im your arms - that sort of thing. She'll just eat it all up. Be thoughtful and considerate - above all you've got to be the eternal lover."

Bill is horrified with the suggestion.

"Strike me pink, Burky," he yells, "I couldn't do that! I'd feel like a gigolo or something writing that pansy stuff."

I don't let up - I'm so good I've almost convinced myself. I tell him that pansy stuff or not he has no choice - he just has to do it. I have him squirming properly but, by the hopeless look in his eves, I can see that he realizes I'm right.

"Why don't you pop into the Salvo hut and read a few of those magazine stories," I suggest. ..They'll give you an inkling on how to go about it. Make a note of a few things that you think sound pretty good and palm them off on to Janey as something you thought of yourself."

"Break it down, Burky, he groans, "this is damned serious."

"And so am I," I inform him, . "Why. even if she wakes up to you, you still can't be any the worse off than you are now and, as far as the censor goes, well, just forget him. Janey's happiness means more to you than a little thing like that, surely.

And, in the end. Darky is won over.

"O.K.," he resolves. "To hell with everything. I'll do it and I'll do it properly this time! "

The fury of the tropic downpour has eased somewhat but the steady dripping of water down the rafters has formed a small pool in the centre of the hut.

A huge rat, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the hut is occupied, scrounges inquisitively amongst some empty tins in the corner; the night-life of the jungle is strangely quiet; the camp sleeps.

Not me, however. I can't sleep. Many things, eventful and otherwise, have happened since those peaceful days at Waigani. The Nips have landed in Milne Bay and after a bloody battle have been pushed back into the sea; many of the boys have fallen by the wayside at Goodenough and Buna; Sanananda has come and gone. And Darky has long since been evacuated to the homeland with malaria.

To hell with Darky, anyhow!

Today I received a letter from Sue. For the hundredth time I smooth it out and read the offending passages whilst the rat, startled by the sudden movement, scurries to safety.

"I know you've been having a pretty tough time," I read, "but that is no excuse for not writing nice letters. If other girls' husbands can, I see no reason why you can't."

I swear in exasperation and the rat, having at that moment decided that it is safe to venture out again, hurriedly changes its mind and decides that discretion is best.

"You never think," she goes on in her letter, "to tell me how much you miss me; you never dream of saying anything nice about me. Why, you don't even say that you love me. Sometimes I wonder if you really do."

I'm dumbfounded. This is my missus writing this. Sue!

Somehow or other I seem to hear Darky talking as he did that day at Waigani. "You know, Burky," he is saying, "wives are queer cattle."

Queer cattle? By all that's sacred, I'll say they are!

With a muttered curse I blow out the lamp and turn in - but do I sleep? I do not! I'm seeing that last crack that Sue hands out in her letter. I see the words painted in luminous paint on the wall of the inky darkness.

"Why," they say, "can't you write me lovely letters like Darky writes to Janey."

J. RUTHERFORD (Second A.I.F.)