The Long Green Shore by John Hepworth Read Free Book Online Page A

orders are an eternal mystery to the troops.
    Dick the Barber supposes that the skulls must earn a living and justify their existence in some manner.
    Every morning and afternoon there are route marches in the blazing sun with full packs.
    They are brokenfoot marches. For a start our feet are tender from shipboard. And the air seems light in the tropics—it leaves empty aching spaces in your lungs after you have been marching a while. The pack straps cut deep into your shoulders as you march and after a few hundred yards you are panting like a fat poodle. The sweat squirts from your skin, saturating the jungle green shirt and slacks.
    The only pleasure in it is to stumble in from the march and line up with your dixie at the cookhouse for a quart of tepid, sweet tea—you suck at it, blowing like a horse, and feel it soak down inside of you.
    â€˜I think you’re being too hard on them right off,’ Doc Maguire told Connell.
    â€˜Too hard, hell!’ said Connell. ‘I’m going to march them till they start to drop. Anyone that can’t stand this pace won’t stand the going further up. I don’t want any weak sisters—I want them hard and tough and hungry when I take them in.’
    â€˜You can march them in the morning for one hour, Cliff,’ said Maguire. ‘There’ll be no route march in the afternoon.’
    They were standing beside the table in the RAP tent. There was no one else in the tent; but young Cliffie, the orderly, who was painting the dermatitis on Brogan’s backside in the adjoining tent, heard what was said.
    Connell stopped for a moment as though he wasn’t sure what he’d heard.
    â€˜What the hell do you mean?’ he said.
    â€˜An hour in the morning, Cliff, no marching in the afternoon,’ said Maguire calmly. ‘You’ll break those men if you keep on running them like you are—you won’t harden them, you’ll break them.’
    â€˜I’ll march them how I want.’
    â€˜Not while I’m the Doc, Cliff.’
    â€˜Keep to your lousy pills—that’s your job—mine is to make these men ready for the track.’
    â€˜That’s my job too, Cliff.’
    â€˜I’m the Colonel!’
    â€˜I’m the Doc, Colonel.’
    â€˜Not when I’m through with you, you won’t be,’ snarled Connell.
    The thin red veins had sprung into a scarlet web on his white face. He picked up a thin glass beaker and smashed it on the table: ‘Like that you’ll be—from tomorrow!’
    Connell was on his way out of the tent. He couldn’t have heard, but the Doc murmured to himself, almost with a quiet certainty and satisfaction: ‘An hour in the morning—none in the afternoon.’
    After a while the Doc came into the tent where young Cliffie was practising his impressionist art on Brogan’s haunches.
    â€˜How are you, lad?’ he asked. ‘How are you feeling?’
    There was something new in the Doc’s voice—he really sounded as though he cared how a buck private was feeling with the island itch around his backside.
    â€˜Not bad, Doc,’ said Brogan.
    Brogan had never before called Maguire anything but ‘Sir’—with politeness as insolent as was safe.
    Next day we marched for an hour in the morning—there was no march in the afternoon.
    A good deal of the day we surf and sunbake naked on the sand. Soon we are nearly as brown as the native boys.
    Equipment is checked and issued. We line up at the grindstone in the pioneer tent and sharpen our bayonets—they’re handy for opening tins.
    Rations are pretty light on at our cookhouse but we live well by scavenging on the Yankee rubbish dumps down at the old camp and by raids on the ration dump through the barbed wire.
    The Yanks always seem to have too much of everything—compared to us—and they always seem to leave half their gear behind them when they go.
    Down past