The Long Green Shore by John Hepworth

Regan where he sat huddled on the bed: ‘Fear can hurt, too. Are you feeling all right, lad?’
    There was silence in the tent and all eyes turned to Regan—some things a man has to say for himself.
    â€˜Yeah, I’ll be OK, Doc,’ managed Regan.
    â€˜I thought maybe he should come up to RAP for the night. We could send him to sleep, make sure he got a good rest.’
    â€˜I think he’s better here, Doc,’ said Pez. ‘I think he’s better with us.’
    The Doc looked round the tent: ‘Yes—maybe you’re right.’
    There was a long pause. The Doc didn’t offer to go. A decision was made and approved by all without a word being spoken.
    â€˜Would you like a cup of coffee, Doc?’ said Pez. ‘We just made a quick brew.’
    â€˜Sure,’ said the Doc. ‘Thanks.’
    â€˜Here’s a mug,’ said Bishie, emptying the dregs of his coffee.
    Pez sloshed some water from the bucket and washed the grounds out. The Laird had the billy ready and filled the chipped enamel mug generously.
    â€˜Milk?’ said Pez, reaching for the condensed milk tin.
    â€˜No thanks, Pez,’ said the Doc. He sat on the edge of the bed beside Regan and ladled sugar from the biscuit tin container that Pez presented to him with the air of a host.
    Medals and strips of ribbon are hard-won things and you can wear them proudly if you have that sort of pride. But there are other things—more common, more generously given, but harder to win—particularly for officers, harder to win. We are brothers, we are men. Our words will never say the things we mean—but living we will drink to you. Dead—our hearts will weep for you.
    The Doc sat on the edge of the bed and sipped from Bishie’s chipped enamel mug.
    â€˜Bloody good coffee,’ he said.
    The Nip was down the road too far to do any damage to us but you could get the scent of him—that rotten-sweet incense smell he left behind him in the jungle.
    His burned, shrapnel-pocked trucks stood along the side of the road—under some of them a crumbling skeleton. Rusting iron push-carts, jungle carts, were scattered round in the undergrowth with pieces of rotting webbing equipment. There were scores of Nip rifles—mostly broken and half-burned—and clips of ammunition half-buried in the sand.
    There seemed to be a strange foreign significance to all this junk. You never actually thought it, but you felt: ‘This was the enemy; he lived here; he used these things. This rising sun laid out in wood, with the heart burned black and dead—this was his cook-fire.’
    The enemy is always strange and there is a faint awfulness about the place where he has been. For you can never imagine the enemy as just a man—if you could, perhaps you would never kill him.
    The poker game was going one afternoon; Laird was darning a pair of socks and Deacon was contemplating his letter to Margaret, when Dick the Barber stuck his head in the flap and announced:
    â€˜They ate the bookie from the Fourth Batallion.’
    He was a nice bloke, the Fourth Battalion bookie. He laid fair odds and you could always be sure of the dough come settling day. Not like Scottie of the Second who welshed on a good book and went through sooner than pay—even though he had plenty socked away at home, money that he’d made from the game. A loud-mouthed alec, Scottie had always been. But the bookie from the Fourth—he was a quiet sort of a guy; he’d done a bit of pencilling before the war and set up in business for himself when he enlisted.
    A patrol had gone out across the river and run into an ambush. They had two killed and hadn’t been able to get the bodies out with them when they withdrew. Next day they attacked and recovered the bodies; but when they got them they found the brains, kidneys and liver had been cut out and slices of flesh cut from the buttocks.
    Harry Drew sucked strenuously