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

the point there are hundreds of jeeps and trucks and amphibious craft rusting in the Yank car park. One company dumped twenty good jeeps in forty fathoms of water out past the reef because they had no one to hand them over to and they didn’t want to take them with them.
    There is good scrounging down at the old Yank camp. Rubbish is piled up in the deserted mess huts and kitchens—shattered crates and boxes seem to have been hurled together in a pile in the middle of the floor. Some of the tins have busted and are rotten, but most of them are quite good. Anyway we always listen when we puncture the tin to make sure the air sucks in and the vacuum seal still holds.
    Scratching around the camp one afternoon, Pez and Janos found themselves caught between sundown and darkness in the mess hut. It was a strange feeling—suddenly the light was grey and the beach was desolate. Everything seemed very silent, as though there were watchers in the fringe of the scrub and in the shadows of the sand dunes.
    The flywire door, torn off its hinges, flapped mournfully against the wall. It was some distance down the beach to their own camp—the tents were out of sight. No one was visible on the beach—it might have been the end of the world.
    â€˜What the hell are you running for?’ grinned Janos as they went back down the beach quicker than was really necessary.
    â€˜That place didn’t feel as though it liked having me there,’ said Pez.
    The Yank rations are so good that even their rubbish dumps have better food than we’ve got in our kitchens. Every tent is crowded now with tins of pineapple and peanut butter and assorted stews and hashes. In some of the field rations there are cigarettes and glucose lollies. At night we drink American coffee and munch American-issue chocolate (made in Australia, but not for us) and puff American cigarettes.
    There is a deal of discussion about the Yanks. They are all right—they fight well, when they can throw a couple of hundred tonnes of high explosive into a position. They live too well—compared with us, that is. They get too much money—compared with us. They talk as though no one else was fighting the war. They take our girls. ‘Over-dressed, over-paid, over-sexed and over here.’
    All that’s left of them here now is the sustaining rubbish dump of their food, and after a few days the Laird passes the general judgment on that: ‘It’s all right,’ he says, lifting his nose from a dixie of American corned beef hash and baked beans. ‘It’s all right for a change, but it’s too sweet and too soft. For the track—for the hard road—give me our old bully and biscuits. You’d go further on a tin of bully and a packet of dog biscuits than you’d go on a hundredweight of this stuff.’
    Things are pretty quiet here.
    Only one night Regan gets frightened by the shadows on the beach during his guard. Dick the Barber comes on as his relief. Dick comes up softly through the sand without him hearing and when Regan looks up and sees this figure standing beside him he drops his rifle and runs screaming along the beach.
    We found him a couple of hundred yards along where he had fallen in the sand and couldn’t rise again for terror.
    We got him back to the tent and Pez feeds him the quick cup of coffee Brogan put on. The Laird and Harry Drew are quietly recalling how frightened they’ve been from time to time by shadows: ‘I would have screamed then,’ the Laird recalls, ‘but I couldn’t.’
    Doc Maguire walked into the tent. There was a moment’s silence and no one seemed to know what to say.
    â€˜I heard someone,’ said the Doc. ‘Young Cliffie told me it was down here—I thought somebody might be hurt.’
    â€˜No,’ said Pez. ‘Just one of our blokes got a bit of a scare and gave a bit of a yell—he’s not hurt.’
    The Doc was looking at