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The 36th Battalion: a record of service of the 36th Battalion with the Third Division in the Pacific

Chapter Nine — In the Foxholes

page 68

Chapter Nine
In the Foxholes

Technically speaking, the fox-hole is a shallow burrow scooped out of the earth or sand in which one may lie flat for temporary cover before one moves again. For us, the fox-hole was any hole in the ground, whether as primitive as this or the more elaborate structures roofed with ten-inch coconut logs we built later on against the air raids. For the fox-hole dominated our lives, during those days and nights in the perimeter that followed the landing. Let us not now discuss the theory of the thing. One must first describe what was. Above all the beach-head must be defended and maintained, and to extend the perimeter only meant thinning out the line for the sake of a few extra yards of jungle. The discussion on night patrols and mobile tactics is still open, but for this occasion the fox-holes were our masters.

Of course it rains. Tropical rain which runs straight through your clothes, splashing on your skin, but brings little or no refreshment. With the rain comes the mud, mud up to your ankles and, where you go down to get the water, up to your calves. Even this sun cannot penetrate through the thickness of the jungle—fortunately, perhaps—and the mud remains, trampled by the boots around the fox-holes. Tree fern fronds you have spread on the bottom for sleeping sink beneath the mud where you sleep.

If you were not wet with the rain, you would still be wet with the sweat. For the most part it is the two combined. The thick jungle uniform coated with green paint and further proofed against the air with its new coating of mud, is a very different affair from the white ducks and silk shirts of traditional tropical wear. Your clothes are continuously soaked in sweat, and when you lie down page 69at night, huddled together in your little hole in the ground, you sweat again. Everybody knows how bad stale sweat smells, and each new day brings no improvement. The mud around the fox-holes smells of sweat and excrement and death. Even if nobody has died nearby, that smell seems still to be there, a third element in the total stench which can be described in no other way. After you have come down out of the perimeter, you will wash and boil and rinse the clothes you wore up there, but the smell still clings defiantly to them.

This is very noisy jungle at night, much more so than our New Zealand bush. As night falls, the hitherto silent jungle finds a multitude of voices. Then there is every kind of bird or insect or reptile that clicks or scuffles, whistles or hiccups, mockingly or threateningly. None of them is musical; all are unfamiliar and unfriendly. Probably you have heard them before, but they will sound different this time.

So, before night, you will prepare yourself against the noises. Perhaps there is a creaking tree or a stream that rustles the bushes. You will have them positioned during the daylight, for it is bad to make mistakes. You will observe the darkening outline of trees and shrubs and hummocks of mud around the fox-hole, noting where a tree-trunk might block the flight of a grenade and send it falling back into your own trench. For in the night that is coming there will be no outlines; only more solid lumps of blackness at best to guide you.

The last smoke and the last words of conversation. It will be eleven hours before the next. It may be decided to let one man watch and two sleep, one hour on and two off. Perhaps last night a grenade was thrown at your hole, so it will be two men on and one off, one hour's sleep in every three. So the silent, night-long watch begins, unbroken by a word, a movement or a cough. The weary knees crumple under you with sleep; the impending collapse of the body brings you up with a savage jerk that momentarily restores consciousness. Again and again this happens. You check up needlessly for the hundredth time. The LMG is pointing down that gully you were suspicious about; it is cocked, the action on automatic. The grenade is by your hand, and its pin is unsplayed. You loosen your knife in its sheath. Everything is arranged as it was the night before. So you wait.

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Our artillery has opened up, and the shells are whining over your head. The first explosion jars through your body; then it is relief, good to think of the Japs getting hell outside the perimeter, some' thing to break the monotony and the waiting. It is not the same with the mortars, though. You hate our mortars—even if not as much as the Japs do. You cannot hear a bomb coming. Perhaps it will fall short. You wish they would stop. After a while, they do, and the silence is bad too.

After an hour which spans eternity, it is your turn to sleep. You pull at the foot of your relief and he takes over without a word, taking care to make no noise. Lying down at the bottom of the hole, the heat is oppressive; there is no position of comfort, and it is difficult to sleep, even though a few minutes before you had struggled desperately against sleep. Just as your cramped body is beginning to relax, there is a burst of machine-gun fire not very far away. You listen. Then a grenade exploding. Then furious firing, and several grenades. Are the Japs attacking, or is somebody just 'trigger-happy'? Firing at night is infectious; it will spread like wild-fire along the lines.

Somebody is kicking your foot, and it is time to go on again. So the night passes, or stands still, until the unexepected dawn, long since posted as missing, and the first cigarette and the first words with friends who watched through the same night. The officer comes round, and inquires for ammunition expended and casualties. So-and-so is dead; such and such a company had trouble with the Japs trying to infiltrate; no, he doesn't know whether we will shift out of the perimeter to-day or not. So the pattern of the night is pieced together, in the greater freedom of the day. This is an average. If you had dysentery it was worse. If your nerves slipped the leash and ran away with you, it was unendurable. If you were wounded, and had to lie all night in the fox-hole without the slightest attention, it was only to be endured as death is endured.

Ours was only a small action, a tiny link in the chain of the fox-holes of Bougainville, of New Britain and of China. We were only apprentices in the school of the fox-holes, but we will assuredly master them and the night. For the struggle against Fascism is the struggle against the night; it is fitting that we should start here—in the fox-holes.