Chapter 10 Christmas cavalcade; Song of the censor; Timor souvenir

CHRISTMAS CAVALCADE

Soon we are to taste again the happy festivities of another Yuletide. Few of us of the Second A.I.F. will remember our first Christmas celebration in the Army, that of 1939, when we were but raw recruits with less than eight weeks' service to our credit. We strutted around the big cities keenly conscious of a drab and ill-fitting uniform, which, as the years rolled by, we were proud to wear.

Those were exciting days when we awaited with intense anticipation the date of embarkation. Every one of us angled for positions on that first contingent. Little did we realize what was in store for us.

Christmas 1940, under fire in the Libyan desert. To many it was a grim and tragic initiation. It may well be associated with the howling desert winds; the unsavoury grit which filled our eyes, ears and mouths; the long, weary, straggling columns of Italian prisoners, seeming to stretch from the very horizon to the wire "cage" at Capuzzo; the fine young chaps of the Seventh British Armoured Division, standing resolutely in the turrets of their tanks moving into position for the coming battle of Bardia.

Christmas 1941 was celebrated with all due respect to its historical significance, in the cities of Syria: Beirut and Damascus. In reality we commemorated a years' campaigning in Libya, Greece, Crete and Syria. Enjoying ourselves immensely, we were inclined to forget such things as Wavell's rapid advance into Cyrenaica, the demoralizing effects of the evacuation of Greece and Crete, and the peaceful penetration of Syria.

Christmas 1942-New Guinea, and units of the Second A.I.F. extended from Port Moresby along the slippery defiles of the Kokoda Trail on the Owen Stanleys, and were prodding the "Nips" positions on the other side. It was hot and humid, cicadas chirped from the undergrowth and mosquitoes were everywhere. It drizzled constantly, damping everything, including the spirits.

What a difference from past Christmases in the Army.

Our fifth Christmas in the A.I.F.? It is best left in the hands of Providence.

"NX3008"

TIMOR SOUVENIR

So I'm going out of here to-morrow. The doc came along yesterday and said, so casually that at first I didn't believe him, "You can go home Friday. We're giving you six months' leave." Yeah, I know this sounds as if I'm dreaming this instead of writing it. But it's true. I'm going home to-morrow for six months and then I'm coming back for a few more operations on this face of mine. There was a time when I had only half a face and I thought I'd never go home. I'm no oil-painting now but I was a real horror-man when I came in here fourteen months ago. The doc has done a wonderful job on me and-well, I'm here to say that there are miracles in modern surgery.

It all started a long time ago. There were eighteen of us camped just outside of Villa Maria in Timor when we heard that some Japs were coming to occupy the village. Just for the sheer hell of it we decided to go down, have a crack at them, and then skip.

It went O.K., too-up to a point. There were about 170 of them and we knocked over thirty or so and then somehow one of them got up amongst us. He suddenly popped up from nowhere and let fly with a sub-m.g. I felt something hit me in the jaw and suddenly my belly had butterflies in it and I wanted to run. Then the panic went and I sat down and I didn't care a hang-all I wanted to do was lie down and die quietly. But the others put me on my feet and told me to beat it while they continued to fight a retreating action.

Honestly, all I wanted to do was die but it looked as if I didn't have any guts so I thought I'd better make a show. The pain had gone numb now and all I had was a hell of a headache. So I began the four-mile walk back to our R.A.P. I can't remember much about that -i only know I left a trail of blood for the boys to follow home.

I didn't quite finish the journey. In the home stretch my legs got rubbery and abruptly I folded up and down I went flat on my half face. A couple of boongs came down and carried me up to the hut where our R.A.P. corporal was. He didn't recognize me at first and when I looked at myself in his shaving mirror I couldn't blame him. The bullet had taken away the complete lower jaw of my face. My tongue was the bottom of my mouth and later when they started to feed me I had to lie on my back while they poured it down my throat. Have you ever tried chewing anything with your tongue and your top set of teeth? Fortunately, when I was shot I was carrying my top plate in my pocket so I had the laugh on the Nip there.

The corp. fixed me with a temporary dressing and then he put me on a stretcher and the boongs carried me for six days over the mountains to Ataleer where the company doctor came up to look at me. He had no equipment and all he could give me was a new dressing and advice how best to keep the wound from getting worse. He looked very tired. There had been a few of us wounded and he was caring for us with no more equipment than you'd find in a medicine-chest.

I stayed at Ataleer for a fortnight and, just to make things a little more comfortable, I got a bad attack of malaria. Me and job! Then the Nips came over and bombed the place so I thought it was time to move on. The R.A.P. corporal had come through to Ataleer so we commandeered a couple of koodas - mountain ponies to you - and we made a two-day trip over to Atsabi where the doc was.

For the next ten weeks we moved about the island, one jump ahead of the Japs all the time. I had become used to having no feeling below the level of my ears-we'll skip the obvious crack there-but I used to find it an annoyance having to lie flat on my back every time I wanted a drink.

And then they told us there was a chance of getting back to Australia. That, I think, is about the queerest feeling I've ever had. You get quite light-headed when news like that comes to you. Relief and thankfulness and excitement and disbelief all mingle to make you feel you could be sick with 'Joy and you want everything to happen quickly, right now, this very minute, before it all disappears in the haze of just another dream.

We moved down to the beach and we waited there for f our days and time was an agony. Our eyes got sore from looking, and when the third day had passed we gave up hope and started to make sour jokes about our near-homecoming.

Then hope came to life again when they told us we had to move further along the coast. You never saw gear packed so quickly in all your life as that morning. The doe took the main party away and, because I knew the track and was the only wounded man who could walk, I stayed behind to bring the boongs on. But then the doc sent word back that I had better leave the boongs to come on in their own time and hurry along in case I might be late. Holy Slithering Nellie, we couldn't have that happen! So I grabbed a kooda, slung a leg across, and galloped off up the trail.

The extent of my riding before the war was confined to merry-go-rounds and somehow the pony and I couldn't get synchronized. I pulled him to a walk and when I saw a boong coming down the track with the best looking kooda I saw all the time I was on Timor, I slid off my nag and after a one-sided argument with the boong took his kooda and left him mine.

So I'm on my way again and then trouble pops up. I came to a cross-road and for the life of me I couldn't recognize any landmarks by which to know the night track to take. I spent half an hour riding up and down each of the tracks and still was uncertain when suddenly the pony decided to take a hand. He bolted and-I don't expect you to believe this-after we had gone a mile or so I found he'd taken the right track. With the bumping as he tore along, my face had begun to pain again and when he finally tired himself out and dropped to a walk I was pretty sick.

I caught up with the party and 'just on nightfall we met with a setback that would have made us weep if we hadn't become used to disappointments by now. We knew we had a river to cross but when we came to it, it was in high flood, a full two hundred yards wide and as angry-looking as we were when we saw it.

A man can get just so low in feeling and then he stops and the bottom can fall out of the world and all he says is, what the hell?

That night I'd have sold out for a packet of PKs and gone back to the mountains for the rest of the war.

But during the night some runners arrived from H.Q. up in the mountains to say that the rescuers had been delayed twenty-four hours. Our emotions were having a hell of a ride on the Big Dipper. The river had gone down during the night and so we decided to attempt to cross it. Luck was with us and after a great deal of trouble we all made the other side, taking the stretcher cases across on rafts with the boongs swimming alongside.

That night, just on dusk, they came in. I've seen sunrises and sunsets and full moons but nothing ever looked as beautiful as their arrival.

Trouble was still with us. The sea was very choppy and after we had managed to get aboard with the greatest difficulty, the captain was worried that he might not get off. But we couldn't afford to wait, the Japs often patrolled up this way. I was more scared than I had been all the months I was on Timor. But at last we all settled back, still a little disbelieving of the fact that at long last we were on our way back home.

I could make another story about my feelings when we just landed back in Australia. We'll pass all that. I'd only be repeating how all you fellows felt when you came back. The thing I think of most now is my gratitude to the doctors here at this A.G.H. I've been here fourteen months now. That's a long time but in that fourteen months they've given me a new face and new hope for the future. I began to dread the thought of ever having to face people again, smashed as I was. And then they set to work on me.

They took bone from my hip and skin from my chest and they have replaced the lower part of my face. It looks pretty awful now and it will for a long time yet but when the full series of operations is finished they tell me that my face will be so normal again that nobody will ever believe I've been through all this. I'm going home tomorrow for six months, six months just to loaf and rest in, and I wish that I had the ability to spend that time writing a book about the wonderful job the doctors are doing in this war.

"WX13013"