In Port Moresby they had seen the wretched state of the New Guinea natives, and if they couldn't stand the climate without developing yaws, beriberi, malaria, pneumonia, chronic skin diseases, enlarged livers and spleens, there wasn't much hope for the white man. There were survivors of Kokoda in Port Moresby as well, victims not so much of the Japanese but of New Guinea, emaciated, masses of sores, delirious with fever. Ten times as many had died from pneumonia nine thousand feet up in freezing cold wearing thin tropical kit as died from the Japanese. Greasy dank mud, unearthly forests which glowed with cold pale spectral light after dark from phosphorescent fungi, precipitous climbs over a gnarled tangle of exposed roots which meant a man couldn't look up for a secondand was a sitting duck for a sniper. It was about as different from North Africa as any place could get, and the Ninth wasn't a bit sorry it had stayed to fight the two Alameins instead of Kokoda Trail. Lae was a coastal town amid heavily forested grasslands, far from the eleven-thousand-foot elevations of the deep interior, and far more salubrious as a battleground than Kokoda. Just a few European houses, a petrol pump, and a collection of native huts. The Japanese were as ever game, but few in number and impoverished, as worn out from New Guinea as the Australians they had been fighting, as disease ridden. After the massive ordnance and extreme mechanization of North Africa it was strange never to see a mortar or a fieldpiece; just Owen guns and rifles, with bayonets in place all the time. Jims and Patsy liked hand-to-hand fighting, they liked to go in close together, guard each other. It was a terrible comedown after the Afrika Korps, though, there was no doubt about it. Pint-size yellow men who all seemed to wear glasses and have buck teeth. They had absolutely no martial panache.
Two weeks after the Ninth landed at Lae, there were no more Japanese. It was, for spring in New Guinea, a very beautiful day. The humidity had dropped twenty points, the sun shone out of a sky suddenly blue instead of steamily white, the watershed reared green, purple and lilac beyond the town. Discipline had relaxed, everyone seemed to be taking the day off to play cricket, walk around, tease the natives to make them laugh and display their blood-red, toothless gums, the result of chewing betel nut. Jims and Patsy were strolling through the tall grass beyond the town, for it reminded them of Drogheda; it was the same bleached, tawny color, and long the way Drogheda grass was after a season of heavy rain.
"Won't be long now until we're back, Patsy," said Jims. "We've got the Nips on the run, and Jerry, too. Home, Patsy, home to Drogheda! I can hardly wait."
"Yair," said Patsy.
They walked shoulder to shoulder, much closer than was permissible between ordinary men; they would touch each other sometimes, not consciously but as a man touches his own body, to relieve a mild itch or absently assure himself it is still all there. How nice it was to feel genuinely sunny sun on their faces instead of a molten ball in a Turkish bath! Every so often they would lift their muzzles to the sky, flare their nostrils to take in the scent of hot light on Drogheda-like grass, dream a little that they were back there, walking toward a wilga in the daze of noon to lie down through the worst of it, read a book, drowse. Roll over, feel the friendly, beautiful earth through their skins, sense a mighty heart beating away down under somewhere, like a mother's heart to a sleepy baby.
"Jims! Look! A dinkum Drogheda budgie!" said Patsy, shocked into speaking. Perhaps budgerigars were natives of the Lae country, too, but the mood of the day and this quite unexpected reminder of home suddenly triggered a wild elation in Patsy. Laughing, feeling the grass tickling his bare legs, he took off after it, snatching his battered slouch hat from his head and holding it out as if he truly believed he could snare the vanishing bird. Smiling, Jims stood watching him.
He was perhaps twenty yards away when the machine gun ripped the grass to flying shreds around him; Jims saw his arms go up, his body spin round so that the arms seemed stretched out in supplication. From waist to knees he was brilliant blood, life's blood.
"Patsy, Patsy!" Jims screamed; in every cell of his own body he felt. the bullets, felt himself ebbing, dying.
His legs opened in a huge stride, he gained momentum to run, then his military caution asserted itself and he dived headlong into the grass just as the machine gun opened up again.
"Patsy, Patsy, are you all right?" he cried stupidly, having seen that blood.
Yet incredibly, "Yair," came a faint answer.
Inch by inch Jims dragged himself forward through the fragrant grass, listening to the wind, the rustlings of his own progress. When he reached his brother he put his head against the naked shoulder, and wept.
"Break it down," said Patsy. "I'm not dead yet."
"How bad is it?" Jims asked, pulling down the bloodsoaked shorts to see blood-soaked flesh, shivering.
"Doesn't feel as if I'm going to die, anyway."
Men had appeared all around them, the cricketers still wearing their leg pads and gloves; someone went back for a stretcher while the rest proceeded to silence the gun at the far side of the clearing. The deed was done with more than usual ruthlessness, for everyone was fond of Harpo. If anything happened to him, Jims would never be the same.
A beautiful day; the budgerigar had long gone, but other birds trilled and twittered fearlessly, silenced only during the actual battle. "Patsy's bloody lucky," said the medic to Jims some time later. "There must be a dozen bullets in him, but most of them hit the thighs. The two or three higher up seem to have embedded themselves in pelvic bone or muscle. As far as I can judge, his gut's in one piece, so is his bladder. The only thing is . . ."
"Well, what?" Jims prompted impatiently; he was still shaking, and blue around the mouth.