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But otherwise the story has the same theme each time—and lots of our blokes believe it and repeat it seriously each time they hear it.
    These rumours and legends of the track and camp are the soldiers’ literature and radio and vaudeville show. Rumours of peace, rumours of leave—legends of death and miracles of chance.
    Most popular are the legends of the immorality and stupidity of officers—and a number of these are not rumours.
    *
    Finally, at three o’clock, disembarkation starts. A choppy swell has risen and we must go over the tall side of the ship and clamber down the wildly swaying scrambling nets, into the tossing barge below.
    It is a heavy climb with the full weight of equipment on your back. Your arms creak in their sockets and the net bucks like a steer. And your mates still on deck, and those already safely down, jeer and cheer as you ride the wild ropes and stumble into the barge.
    Dick the Barber is the last man down for our barge. We have to drag him off the net by force. He is white and shivering. Shells don’t worry Dick so much, but heights terrify him. All the way over Kokoda he crossed those little vine and log bridges across the ravines on hands and knees, clinging like a koala.
    The barge swings away from the ship’s side and turns for the land amid ribald jeers from up top and obscene warnings of improbable fates in store for us ashore.
    The section moves into the row of tents nearest the beach. The area had been a Yankee cemetery. The coffins were dug up only a few days before the battalion moved in and the area smoothed over with bulldozers.
    Slapsy Paint, our Loot, appears and gives his usual vague directions about bedding arrangements and meal parade and wanders off again.
    The heavy, leaden-grey casks of the Yankee dead are stacked over in one corner of the area. There are several hundred of them. A gang of American negroes, half-naked and glistening in the sweating sun, are loading them onto lorries.
    Pez and Janos go down together to collect their bed boards from the dump near the temporary kitchen.
    Jonesy, the thin cook, is idly inspecting the contents of blackened dixies ranged on the long trench fire. From time to time he pumps with his foot the roaring petrol burner that sprays a long, pent blue tongue of flame down the trench.
    Pez sniffs hungrily: ‘What’s for dinner?’
    â€˜Stew,’ says Jonesy. ‘A good bully beef stew.’
    â€˜Well,’ says Pez. ‘If it’s good you know what to do with it—a good thing never hurts you.’
    They trudge home through the black sand with their bed boards and wooden support frames. Home…a word that means many things to a soldier. It can be a two-man tent in the scrub or a hole in the ground.
    Those rows of tents in the naked square still have an unlived-in quality. The dirt on the floors is not even trodden down yet. There are none of the appurtenances of living that make a home—the food box in the corner, the water buckets outside the door, the blackened home-made billy for the inevitable brew of tea.
    Everyone starts the business of settling down to a new home—according to taste, once the first scramble for a bed is over. Dick the Barber has the story of the coffins—Harry Drew has been to the ‘I’ section up the road and has the good guts about the Fourth Battalion—Laird has located food among the wreckage of the deserted American camp down the beach and has marked out a wire and sentry protected ration dump over the other side of the road for future reference.
    The coffins belong to the Yanks who were killed taking this beach. They are taking them back down the coast and planting them until the war is over and then taking them back to the States.
    â€˜Why the hell don’t they plant ’em and let ’em grow,’ growls the Laird. ‘Another piece of dirt’s no different the way they are.’
    â€˜It’s respect for the