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cook-fires in the camps.
    You could pick out ant swarms of activity where they were loading cases on trucks at the food dumps and the flow of movement in the marshalling yards on the beach where they were loading men and equipment into the barges.
    Inland, the hazy, fanged, green mountains piled up into the mist of distance. Thick white cloud lay in the valleys and trailing scarves of it clung on the climbing jungle trees of the mountainside.
    Pez turned to find where the sunglow was growing—got his bearings and turned to gaze down the long green shore.
    This was the way they were going—down there where the trees and the foam and the beach faded into the perspective of sea and sky.
    Down past there was Nip country…
    Janos joined Pez at the rail.
    He yawned: ‘Christians awake and greet the happy morn!’
    The order is to disembark at ten o’clock sharp. So at eight everyone has been herded up out of the hold and crushed into company lots on the deck with all their gear.
    At twelve, we are still there in the open sun on the burning steel deck. At half past, word comes round: there will be no meal—we’ll get that ashore—but there is a cup of tea down the galley for those who want it. There is a general scramble for chipped enamel mugs.
    The troops are used to this old army habit: run like hell to the start point and then sit on your backside for two hours—move two paces and sit some more.
    They are sprawled over the deck, some squatting on their packs playing cards, some reading paper-backed novels, a couple scrawling letters home.
    Old Whispering John is still in the poker school. He is still winning and grins delightedly as he shuffles the greasy pack.
    Some are slouched over the rails, checking up on landmarks and trying to establish the position of our troops and the Nips: ‘Down there, just past that far headland—that’s where the Fourth Battalion’s holding them.’
    Rumour and information—positive if not factual—comes scrambling aboard a troopship along the anchor chain as it drops into the shallows of a new harbour.
    The young reinforcements are cocky and elated. They confidently pass on to each other the news that the Nip is starving and disorganised and half-armed. They make profound military assessments. They see this is going to be a snack, with all the glory and no danger. Some of them are condescending and almost sorry for the enemy. They begin to doubt, in their self-mesmerism, whether it is really worthwhile taking the trouble to defeat such a sorry foe. If they go on like this, they will be feeling offended that the brass hats have offered them such a menial glory.
    But the old hands are not so complacent. Mud is mud and here they make mountains of it. And a starving animal or a starving man is fierce.
    We hear that up the river the Fourth Battalion has struck some opposition from our ‘unarmed’ foe: three killed yesterday, a couple wounded.
    It is the Yankee armada in the bay. They are leaving, sailing north, tomorrow.
    We hear for the first time the legend of the nurses—the legend that goes with us down the long green shore. But it is always on a different track—over the other hill.
    The Fourth Battalion brought out some Yankee nurses that the Nips had captured in the Philippines, we hear. The Nip officers brought them over with them and have been using them. One of these nurses is in a bad way—rotten with the pox. She begs them not to bring her back. She wants to shoot herself. She smashes a bottle and tries to cut the veins in her wrists. They’re down at the hospital now, we are told. You can see it—that long native hut and those tents back behind that wooden tower—you can see the red cross through the trees.
    God knows where this legend comes from, but every week or so it revives. Sometimes there are four nurses, sometimes seven. Sometimes the Fourth rescues them, sometimes the Fifth or First.