Chapter 2 Tournament; Command; Palestine period piece; Blackout; ½ Dead marines

TOURNAMENT

MORGAN edged by the clearing. Reading, point scout today, was just ahead. What would Reading be thinking Of? Death, of course-death was always close to a point scout, death, the actual physical fact and also the premonition of it.

Morgan thought of last night. Reading beat him right and left on that chess board . . . what would be the result tonight? He smiled fondly . . . could that fellow play chess!

He peered into a clump of palms-though nothing moved he was suspicious. "Crack ... ! " With the speed of bitter experience he dived to the ground and lay still, his heart thumping, his hands trembling. Where did that shot come from? Brown was alongside him panting, his breath hot on Morgan's face. "Look! " he whispered. Morgan looked to where he pointed and in that split second knew desperately what had happened. Reading was down.

He sobbed hoarsely: "They've got him! -sobbed it a number of times, and was suddenly quiet, his eyes fixed on that clump of palms.

He muttered softly to Brown, "Must be in those palms, the swine . . . tied in the top most likely." He took a line-up and his sights were full of the foliage. He pressed gently . . .

"Look! " The muscles of his face twitched and he released the pressure on the trigger. The body of a Jap slumped from the fronds, toppled, hung limply. "Can you beat that!"

Brown let loose a bitter oath. "You're sure he's dead? "

Morgan spat viciously. "Sure!" he said.

He got up slowly and walked forward with Brown following and the silence in the clearing was absolute. Parting the bushes they emerged together in the hot sunlight and proceeded to where Reading lay still in the grass. The body above still swung from the green palm.

He was quite dead when they reached him and Morgan bent over him with bowed head, his eyes hot with misery. He mumbled something to God, finishing with Amen, and as he did so, a compelling force, some animal sense of self-preservation, swung him mechanically round and he landed flat on the grass as a bullet whined into the leaves beyond.

"Look out, Brown!" he shouted, maddened. "Cover! " To get out of that open space his body galvanized and he hurtled backwards into the bushes and lay like stone. He was sure that fire came from above, but where?

He brushed at the sweat in his eyes and kept looking at that hanging Jap body. He gasped. Was that movement? Was that body swinging? He wiped at the sweat again. It was moving . . . the swinging rifle was changing position! He clenched his lips and stared. A corpse . . . how could a corpse pull a rifle into position? How could anything dead move? He was going crazy; that was it . . . crazy!

But as the strung-up manikin levelled his rifle again Morgan elevated his Owen gun with the speed of desperation and thudded 2 long burst into the swinging body, and, to make sure, another. When the smoke cleared, red dripped on to the grass below.

He called Brown and pointed to the corpse and the fallen rifle on the grass. "Played possum, see! "

The boy's face blanched as he looked at the effigy slumped above.

Back in camp, safe, dry, Morgan lay on his bunk. He dared not think. In the comer was an empty stretcher - Reading's stretcher. Soon they would take it away. Reading was dead, but Morgan knew that under the bed was a wooden box and on top of that box were the chess board and chess men. Tonight they had been going to play - he would have beaten Reading for a change.

"He could play chess, but I could have beaten him!" Morgan thought wearily, uselessly, and turned his face to the blanket.

A. A. HOLLOWAY, SECOND A.I.F.

COMMAND

DAYLIGHT was a violet pulse-in the low east across the tumbling Pacific when the destroyer went to action stations.

Men came up ladders and stumbled in the dark over hatch-coamings, sulky and slowwitted from lack of sleep and the toxic exhalations of a mess deck sleeping with closed deadlights. They closed up at guns and torpedo tubes, each man answering his crew number with a querulous grunt. The long guns, sticking rigidly from the turrets in their camouflage paint, weaved slowly about the sky. Finally, checked and correct, the barrels shrugged again into the familiar fore and aft position.

In the director above the bridge the Gunnery Control Officer yawned tiredly and listened to the reports coming over his phones. He shifted the ear-pieces on his ears to a more comfortable position, cleared his throat and reported to the bridge: "Main armament closed up, sir."

A grey diffusion spread over sea and sky, the outlines of the destroyer becoming gradually visible through the murk. She had in creased to her precautionary dawn speed of twenty-five knots. A brown haze of smoke flat at her funnel lip, she splintered each comber into acres of white, slipped headlong into the deep hollow beyond and regained her pace with cataracts spilling from her fo'c'sle like long grey beards flowing in the wind.

On the bridge near the windbreak the Captain straddled his long legs like a pair of compasses. He was fifty-two years of age, more than six feet tall and he met the uneasy sway of his ship with the practised ease of a man long used to 300 feet of power-packed hull. He had spent all his life at sea since he was thirteen, so that the smell of funnel smoke and the sting of salt spray were the principal smells and feelings of his life.

He was a wiry, severe shape, with wide enough shoulders and a face tanned to the shiny toughness of old leather. He wore an old coverless cap with the peak tipped down and his eyes, always half-closed against sun and sea, were agate-grey. The personality of the man was unmistakable. There was but one definite mark of age on this naval captain-the two parallel streaks between chin and throat bottom. The skin on his throat was loose and grizzled.

In ten minutes the visibility was clear. He glanced across to the line of battleships disposed in line ahead on his starb'd quarter, noting automatically that his ship was in station. The officer of the watch knew from experience the Old Man could judge a bearing within five degrees. The line of battleships moved inexorably through the grey troughs of tumbling brine like blocks of flats against the horizon, taking the sea green over their mighty bows. On the nearest ship her superstructure reared in massy and steel-hardened strength above the fo'c'sle, a cliff of steel.

Dipping, ploughing, lifting, the Fleet moved steadily on to enemy sea . . . the descendants of the ships that long ago defeated the Great Armada, many bearing the same names. The Captain felt suddenly proud; he unconsciously squared his shoulders. It was a strong, a highly-disciplined force and it had such a glorious tradition of victory. And it had dealt with much bigger and more experienced foes than this one snarling at it today.

Satisfied with the tactical position, the Captain grunted "Fall out action stations, Number One", and went down the ladder to his cabin.

Here he rubbed his eyes, and took a deep breath. He was dead-tired and his bunk lay invitingly. Resting his head on the pillow he could feel against his ear the pulsation of the engines, like the beating of the ship's heart. They were the ship's heart, the engines working their steel limbs of pistons and pumps headlong or slow with a silent, determined smoothness; the turbines spinning in their casings with a faint, singing whine.

He lay there tallying his forces as a poker player would consider the laws of chance in a deck of cards. He had fifteen destroyers and 300 men of his own, half of them trained seamen, half of them recruits from Flinders. He had a set of tough petty officers, the backbone of his command. He had some good officers; he had a few who were green.

In a destroyer torpedo attack against the enemy battle fleet, as decided on back in harbour on the flagship as soon as the reconnaissance report had come in, he could ill afford greenness anywhere. But his Torpedo Control Officer, a lieutenant of twenty-four years, was almost as battle-wise as himself-at least, in this war.

This was how the Captain weighed his orders, the ability of his ship, the enemy in front. This was what command meant; not the flamboyant dash of a 3o-knot greyhound, but this insistent consideration of a hundred changing elements. At fifty-two it was a burden that kept him awake at night and formed his mouth into a long, thin line. It was a thing you couldn't tell anybody; it was something a man knew only after long years of experience.

By nightfall the sea had fallen and in the lee of a low coral shore to starb'd the Fleet moved on a sea as mute as a dream. The destroyer was ploughing a vanishing furrow upon the surface of the sea that had the surface and the shimmer of an undulating piece of blue silk. The young tropic moon was like a luminous grub spinning a cocoon round itself in the sky.

These waters were too close for the Commodore's liking, and he sent the destroyer pack screening twenty miles ahead, while he hauled further out to seaward.

They could expect to contact the enemy, covering his landing forces, at any time. The Captain remained on the bridge all night, dozing a little in his high wooden chair. Below him 300 men were sleeping, or sitting awake at their guns and tubes, awake with their memories and their dreams-and all these men's lives rested on a single command from his lips.

At four o'clock in the morning light stirred over the sea. The young officer of the watch stared carefully and conscientiously through his glasses.

He passed it at first and caught only the briefest glimpse on the return sweep. His mind was a welter of indecision; to wake the whole ship and the Captain for a speck on his glasses or a trick of strained imagination would be more than his life was worth. And then he had them, clear beyond doubt; above the horizon, two thin black masts, like pencils.

The officer of the watch pressed the alarm buzzer as he called to the Captain, "Enemy in sight, sir! "

Instantly the older man was on his feet, glasses on the bearing, standing tautly near the wheelhouse voice-pipe. The officer of the watch breathed deep. It relieved him as though that man had, by simply coming awake on deck, taken the battle's weight upon his shoulders. Such is the prestige, the privilege and the burden of command.

Flags were hauling up the leader's halliards and astern the long swinging line broke into five spuming bows racing off at angles to come abreast their guide. The Captain looked carefully and quickly about him. Far to starb'd, as though standing in the tinted water, there was a lighthouse sticking up like a bleached bone. At the edge of a half-submerged reef nearer on the bow the running tide quickened smoothly into paws of water with white-streaming claws.

What a trap for a battleship and what a heaven-sent chance for torpedoes!

The Japanese ship had sighted them now and to the left and ahead a wall of discoloured water stood suddenly upon the sea. The speeding destroyer was shaking with eagerness, the intake of her engine-room fans a hungry roar. Clearer bulked the battleship ahead, battleship and destroyer closing on converging courses at nearly fifty knots. The enemy was plainly heading for a gap in the coral, through which lay maneuvering room and comparative safety. His screen of destroyers was nowhere in sight-probably close inshore bombarding and landing.

The Captain handled his pack like a squad on parade. A fluttering flag, and six slicing bows, dressed by the right, swung hard over to port. It was the run in.

Down aft the tubes' crews were closed up, tubes trained outboard, each end with its red warhead looking like a tongue-swollen mouth. Each of them packed in high explosive the blast .of a cruiser's full broadside. Beneath, the white wake whipped past in quick retreat.

The Captain took a bearing. He glanced at the range repeat. His brain acted with a cold, instant certainty. As the whole ship quivered with the sudden upthrust of a -straddling salvo, water spraying over her decks in a drenching cloud, he shouted above the lingering roar of the explosions.

"Stand by torpedoes! "

A moment, then "Hard-a-port! " She started to heel, and as the battleship's after part, then

funnel, then bridge bulked in his sight the Torpedo Control Officer pressed his switches.

Down aft ten tubes flamed redly. There came a whoosh of compressed air and the torpedoes, propellers already whirling, leapt roaring out and splashed into the sea. She was round now, astern of her the torpedo tracks stretching towards the target like an arterial road.

They lengthened, touched. A flash-coloured mound of water rose from the surface of the sea against the enemy's side. The mound swelled into a mountain, then broke into great columns of water and flying spray, high above her mast as the crash of the explosion came.

The stricken ship heeled under the terrific impact and the speed of her movement drove the sea through her open plates in a tearing avalanche. By the time the destroyer line had formed again, she was so low that the sea was making a clean breach over her, as over a deep-swimming log. Above her stretched a tombstone of smoke.

The Captain watched her go. His breath eased out, and the tenseness in his stomach uncurled.

That afternoon he was swung across to the flagship in a Bosun's chair-it was too dangerous to stop. The Commodore met him in his white-painted cabin, once rich in the soft glow of polished oak, now ugly with the chrome of fire-proof steel.

The Commodore said, "Well done", and extended his hand. When the Captain took it he met his Commodore's eyes and he knew that the Commodore understood. Not the spectacular, exhilarating dash of the destroyer's men, but the brass-bowelled courage, the dragging care and meticulous preparation of her Captain . . . for the Commodore, waiting, had been through it with him.

J. E. MACDONNELL, R.A.N.

PALESTINE PERIOD PIECE

BETWEEN the brown-smudged tents a man sat on an up-ended box that had once contained tins of bully beef. Another man moved slowly round him, snip-snipping at his hair with a rusty pair of scissors. Two other men squatted on the bare Palestinian earth, waiting their turn. The conversation drifted desultorily back and forth.

The big man with the floppy slouch hat said dreamily, "Wonder what Jim an' the boys'll be doing?"

"Gawd knows!" the thin man replied. His face was weary and lined; he was approaching middle age. "It's about time things started to move in Greece."

"Yeah, suppose it is. Reckon it'll be a bit different to the desert. Jerry's pretty tough."

"Wouldn't mind being over there, though," the thin man mused. His gaze wandered idly over the head of the man under the scissors. "By gee, you're not much of a barber, Shorty. Up an' down, like the teeth of a saw."

"Do better y'self," Shorty said mildly.

A man carrying half a dozen big oranges came drifting down the hill.

"Look who's here," the thin man greeted him. "Thought you'd be flat out to it, after yesterday."

"M.O. gave me no duties," the man with the oranges exulted.

"Well . . . " the man with the floppy hat breathed expressively. "Have a good time in Jerus, Slim? "

"Not bad," Slim replied in a judicious tone. began to peel an orange. "You boys should been with me. Got on to a real nice little

"Don't know how you do it," the man in the floppy hat sighed. "When I go on eave, I can't land a thing."

"It's hard,

I admit that. But if you've got he right technique, you can't go wrong."

shed peeling his orange, threw

SECOND A.I.F.

the peel into the open mouth of a tent, and began to gulp the rest of the fruit. When his mouth was free again, he said, slobberingly, "I picked up a bit of a souvenir up there."

He produced a small dagger, carved and ornate. "Kid sold it to me down near the Jaffa Gate. Reckoned it'd been in his family for donkey's years. Might be valuable."

"Shufti," the barber demanded. He stopped clipping, and his customer craned round to see the dagger.

"How much you give for this?"

"A quid Palestine."

"Give y' a hundred mils for it," the barber said derisively. "Slim, you were had. They make these by the dozen in England, an' ship 'em out here."

"Fair dinkum?" Slim asked.

"Fair dinkum," the barber assured him.

"Well . . . " Slim exploded. He seemed incapable, for the moment, of further comment. He balanced the dagger in his hand, seemed about to throw it, then, with a sigh, put it back into his pocket. The other men grinned at him.

There was a short silence, then the man with the floppy hat said, "Must be nearly time for mungaree."

"Can't be far off it," Slim said. "I could eat a horse."

"P'raps that's what they put in the stew," the thin middle-aged man laughed, shortly. "What'd y' have to eat in Jerus? "

"Steak and eggs," Slim gloated. "Then some more steak and eggs. All right, too."

"I bet it was," the thin man said. "All we seem to get here is stew, or a boiled goog, or beans."

A man carrying a mess tin came into view as he walked past the long line of big tents that had been joined to make a mess tent.

"See that joker," the man with the floppy hat volunteered. "He's always first in the lineup. Soon's he's finished one go, he rushes back to the end of the line, and has another whack. They tell me you've got to watch him, or he'll grab~ all the butter on the table and stick it on his bread."

"Go on?" The other three suitably expressed wonder.

The man in question was wearing service dress trousers, British type gaiters, presumably pinched, and a ragged khaki shirt.

"They reckon he's going back to Australia," the barber said. "Got an ulcerated stomach, or something."

"Wish I'd get something like that," the thin man grumbled.

"Well, how are you? " the man with the floppy hat demanded. "One minute you're bellyaching because you can't go to Greece, the next minute you want to go back to Aussie. Fair dinkum, what d'you want?"

"Yeah, I know," the thin man shrugged. "But waitin' in this dump gives you the willies. A man was better off up the desert."

"Aw, the desert was all right, I s'pose," the other said. "I wouldn't like to be stuck up there all the time, though, like some of those English Armoured Divvy boys."

"You talk as if the war was going on forever," Slim sneered. "How long you reckon it's going to last?"

"What's this ... nineteen forty-one? Aw, give the Jerries another coupla years."

"What about Russia?"

"Dunno. What's Russia got to fight about, though? Why should she come in?"

"What d'you jokers know about it?" the barber asked jeeringly, taking a last snip at his customer's hair, and deftly whipping off the once-white cloth. "Anybody'd think you were Blarney, or Wavell, or somebody, the way you talk."

"I don't reckon they know, even," Slim said.

The barber kicked a few clippings into a slit trench. "Even if you were Blarney or Wavell, you wouldn't get a haircut now," he said. "Dinner's on."

Timeless things, the desert and the cobalt sky, soldiers and soldiers' talk. They are forgotten now, but then they were real, in nineteen forty-one, when the wind blew the wisps of cut hair across the ground, and their minds were full of leave and food and a war in Greece as they got up slowly and went towards their meal.

R. T. DAVIE

THE (HALF) DEAD MARINES

THE war was not yet a week old and the Navy was in the throes of gathering in drafts to man the more distant War and Port War Signal Stations. Every "rocky" on whom hands could be laid at short notice was being mobilized and drafted before he knew what had happened to him.

In one instance a bunch of "last joined recruits" were just finishing their first thirteen days' annual training when war was declared and they found that their thirteen days had suddenly extended to the duration of hostilities. Half of them were so newly joined that they had not yet received uniforms and consequently on mobilization reported for duty in the face of the King's enemies in a weird assortment of civilian clothing ranging from three-piece suitings to lumber jackets and jodhpurs.

The officer of the day cast a jaundiced eye over them, shuddered and, to relieve the strain on his sensibilities, brought all the uniformed personnel into the front rank and relegated to the rear the gentlemen who had so lately and apparently left pen and plough. He then consulted a nominal roll and, checking off, found that he had a complete muster. He commenced to look portentous and the draft, realizing they were about to learn their destination, began to lean forward expectantly. It came.

"You will sail for Port Moresby at the end of the week. In the meantime you will report for duty daily." Turning to the petty officer alongside him, he continued with instructions regarding kitting up, medical examination, vaccinations and inoculations. The draft was then turned over to the petty officer.

No sooner had the officer of the day retired from the scene, than the questions began to fly. "How are we going, chief?" "What ship?" "What are we doing when we get there?" "Who will be in charge?" and so on. The "chief", beyond remarking tersely that he was going also and that their guess was as good as his, had no information to vouchsafe and shepherded his charges off to be kitted up at the clothing store.

The supply chief was one of those people who always have an eye to future contingencies and you could see that it hurt him to have to disgorge so much of his stock, so carefully built up and nicely balanced in, the pi ing times of peace. That it was nearly all a Tree issue made it far more painful.

"Expect a man to kit up the whole flamin" Navy, do they! What in the hell will they do if they use up all me stock in the first week of the ruddy war? Expect me to pull some more out of the blinkin' air." The supply chief turned half belligerently, half ingratiatingly, on a rating of the draft who was asking his assistant about a raincoat.

"'Ere, who wants a raincoat? You don't need one, cully. It never rains up there."

But "cully" was not so easily put off and in the end the supply chief sorrowfully superintended the passage across the counter of no fewer than sixteen brand-new raincoats. When they finally left the clothing store, one of the new entries was heard to inquire innocently of his neighbour:

"What upset the old cove so much? Does he have to pay for any of it himself?"

The next day the draft paraded at the sick bay, where a harassed doctor ran the rule over them and pronounced them fit for duty overseas. He gave orders for them to return to him the following afternoon for smallpox vaccinations and inoculation against typhoid. When the time came for them to receive these, the draft heard him say that they had to receive a second anti-typhoid inoculation in about a week's time, but at the moment no one regarded these words as a portent and the remark excited little attention.

Later the draft found that they were sailing in a passenger vessel on its normal run

to the island territories and also found out that they were in the charge of a R.A.N.R. lieutenant, who that day appeared on the scene newly mobilized and "raring to go".

Some of the draft were disappointed when they found that they were to proceed to the ship for embarkation by launch from the depot; they thought they should be given a march through the city. However, as an older hand pointed out, they were in the "Silent Service" now and pomp and ceremony were left to such institutions as the Army and Air Force while the Navy got on with the job.

The ship sailed soon after the embarkation of the draft, who found themselves installed in comparatively luxurious cabins and fairly free to do as they liked for the moment. However, the next day their shepherd, who turned out to be a conscientious, well-meaning soul and fired with war-winning zeal, got to work on them with a vengeance.

I By arrangement with the ship's master signalmen spent an arduous day working on and practising with the ship's signal equipment while the telegraphists were put into the hands of the ship's radio operator, a cheerful soul, who bounded up to one O.S.C.B. (W/T), gave him a pad and pencil and said:

"Take this down, son."

He proceeded to send on a buzzer at something like thirty to thirty-five words a minute. On perceiving the O.S.C.B. (W/T) wilt, he said:

"What's up, son? Can't you read it?

"No, sir," stammered the youth.

"Aren't you a radio operator?" the radioman asked.

"Well, no, sir, not yet. I can send and receive five words a minute but I have only been in the Reserve about a month," the lad replied.

It was the radio operator's turn to wilt, but he stuck nobly to his task and geared himself down to cope with his class's limitations.

The days passed and the ship made it was in perfect weather up the coast. The draft found that their taskmaster, once his first fine frenzy wore off, was inclined to let up on them a bit. Being the only naval officer aboard, he was something of a lion among the other passengers, with the result that he was much in demand and his absences on social engagements saw the draft relieved of their duties with time on their hands and joyfully joining in the pleasant side of shipboard life.

The day before they were due to arrive at their destination dawned dull and cloudy, with a chilly freshening south-easter whipping up the sea.

"This tub will catch it when we get outside the Reef," a member of the ship's crew told the draft, who, being at sea in most cases for the first time, began to speculate on who would and who would not escape the dreaded mal de mer.

Then their doom fell. The officer in charge of the draft, as has been said, was a well-meaning and conscientious soul. On leaving the depot he had been given a package of anti-typhoid vaccine in ampoules with a note from the medical officer that the draft were to receive a further inoculation in about a week's time. To the gallant lieutenant a week meant one hundred and sixty-eight hours, no more and no less.

As the ship left the shelter of the Barrier Reef, he had the draft mustered and led the way to the ship's doctor who proceeded to administer the vaccine.

By this time the ship was rolling and plunging and the doctor, who was past the prime of life, had great difficulty in maintaining his balance long enough to administer

each injection. In the end he had to resort to a form of dart-throwing with the hypodermic on each occasion when the ship momentarily steadied. The inoculation over, the draft dispersed metaphorically to lick their wounds and literally to nurse their arms.

The wind increased and the ship now began to behave with the grace of an un-streamlined brick. The seas were much heavier and were coming with increasing violence from the starboard beam. Members of the draft covertly regarded each other and the other passengers. They noticed some passengers sidle off below with blanched complexions, but at the end of an hour they themselves were all on the move and bandying jokes with the remaining passengers about seasickness and the Navy's invulnerability thereto.

Suddenly a very junior rating who was in the liveliest of the groups dotted about the promenade deck remarked in awed tones:

"Look at the chief! He looks crook, doesn't he?

All eyes turned in the direction of the petty officer; that worthy, looking, as someone subsequently remarked, "as happy as a chief stoker", was doubled up in a deck chair clutching his midriff, whilst his usually fresh complexion had assumed a particularly muddy appearance. Suddenly he shot over to the rail and commenced fish-feeding in no mean style.

A passenger turned round to the other members of the draft, to whom he had been talking, saying, "I thought the Navy never got seasick" and found he was addressing thin air. His erstwhile companions were without exception lining the adjacent rail and paying their tribute to the sea.

The deadly combination of the anti-typhoid vaccine and the heavy seas had commenced to work and the whole draft became horribly seasick.

For the next twenty-four hours the majority of them wished they could die and get it over.

However, they survived and next morning as the ship reached its destination and the calm waters of the harbour replaced those of the angry sea, our heroes, not quite so heroic and feeling as weak as kittens, braved the upper decks again.

They had to take a good deal of good-natured chaff from their fellow passengers, but were too dispirited to do more than grin weakly.

As the ship came alongside the officer in charge had the draft mustered on the boat deck. The sun had come out from behind the clouds and proceeded to show them what was meant by a "blazing tropical sun".

The N.O.I.C. of the port, who had been there for some time with a small party, came aboard to inspect the draft, who sprang to. The N.O.I.C. was heard to remark "they look pretty pasty" and ordered them to be stood at ease, whereupon with a sigh the petty officer sank down on to the deck in a swoon, to be followed by five other ratings. The heat on top of the seasickness had taken its toll.

The N.O.I.C. hastily sent for the port's only doctor who immediately ordered half the draft into hospital and decreed that the rest should take it easy. The N.O.I.C., with pardonable irritation, began to demand why he had been landed with a bunch of candidates for an old men's home when the doctor, who had been minding with his patients, came over and in his uninhibited civilian way wanted to know what nitwit had been responsible for the draft receiving anti-typhoid inoculations in a rough sea.

The officer in charge of the draft, that well meaning and conscientious soul, reddened slowly but blanched quickly as the N.O.I.C. pounced on him with a suppressed roar. However, little actual harm had been done and whatever befell, he had right on his side-a week's a week, no matter what language it's spoken in!

J. C. H. GILL, R.A.N.