The Climate of Courage

A sergeant, his thick black hair blown into a frightened wig about his small head, his lean body still bent from the wind, plunged into the carriage from the outside platform. He slammed the door behind him and leaned back against it, laughing and his eyes quick and bright in the brownness of his thin smooth face. Men looked at him for a moment, for Greg Morley was the sort of man everyone looked at, always expecting him to say something that would make them laugh or take their minds for the moment from their particular problem; but he had nothing to say this time, still laughing to himself because of his inner good feeling, and the men went back to finishing the game of Five Hundred, to staring out the windows, to waiting for the end of the journey. Sergeant Morley slapped a man on the shoulder and moved on through the carriage, picking his way none too carefully through the litter of bodies and legs.

Morley at last came to a vacant seat. He dropped into it almost gracefully; every movement was quick but there was never any awkwardness. He was the battalion swimming champion and had been a State champion before the war; nearly all his life had been spent close to the sea and there was the fluidity of water in every movement he made. There was also some of the unreliability of water in him. Strangers meeting him would note the faded sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves, there too long, and the purple ribbon of the Victoria Cross on his chest, and they would wonder that he wasn’t an officer by now; then after a while they would be aware of the lack of stability in him and would reason that the Army authorities were also probably aware of it. Morley himself was aware of it, but it didn’t bother him. Nothing bothered him, except getting home.

He took a cigarette from a packet flipped it into the air and caught it between his lips. He was full of such small vaudeville tricks: he should have gone on the stage instead of on to the clerical staff of the Water Board. In the Middle East he had even made the Arabs laugh with his antics and more than once had stolen the show from a street magician. He loved to be the centre of interest, but no one, except possibly the street magicians, had ever resented his conceit. It was hard to resent anything about Greg Morley.

He lit the cigarette, then abruptly sat up straight. “Where are we now?”

The lieutenant beside him turned from the window. “Relax, she won’t mind if you’re a little late. Haven’t you kept her waiting before?”

“Not two bloody years.” His voice was quick and light: a laugh lived in his throat. “And I’ll bet there’s a Yank just waiting for me not to turn up.”

“Two years,” said Vern Radcliffe. “I’m going to notice a difference in my kids.”

“Just so long as there’s none in the wife, that’s the main thing.” Morley grinned, then impatiently dropped his cigarette to the floor and ground it out with his boot. “Sometimes I used to be scared that by the time we got back I’d be too old.”

“You’ll never be too old for that or anything else,” said Radcliffe, and looked at Morley with affection. “You’ll be one of those eternally young bastards.”

Morley laughed again, glad and proud of his youth. He was twenty-five, but Radcliffe was right: he would never be old. Age never shows on water.

Radcliffe turned and looked out of the window. He was a thick-set man who looked short sitting down but would be of medium height when he stood up. His face was the type that is square when the man is in condition but is round when he falls into fat; the corners were a little soft now after the long lay-off on the journey home from Tewfik. His brows and moustache were thick and ginger and his hair lay like a heavy auburn pelt on his well-shaped head. He had a certain animal look, amiable but not finely bred. Some day when he had slowed down and all the corners were round he would remind people of a sleepy old bear. But now there was still strength and a hint of controlled quickness in him, something that appealed to women who met him; if later they were a little disappointed in him it was because they found there was also a good deal of caution in him. The unit thought him a good officer.

The train sped on: Sydney came up out of the past at fifty miles an hour. Stations rushed backwards out of sight: now there wasn’t far to go on the journey towards home.

It had been a long journey, beginning almost two years ago, in the winter of 1940, when the last farewell had been said; and it had included an ocean twice crossed, a desert, mountains, and these last two days the hills and plains they knew so well. They had boarded the train at Adelaide and had passed through Melbourne, and every mile had brought another remembrance. There had been the wide brown paddocks, the horses curving away in white-eyed fright like the chargers on a carousel, the nude corpses of the murdered gums, the shifting grey billabong that had turned into a mob of sheep, and the drab towns whose only beauty was the friendliness one knew one would find in the houses. The last stage of the journey had been the shortest and yet the longest, but above all the best.

There had been little to see at night, but Australia had been there outside the train. Some had stared out the windows seeking the Southern Cross, but the engine smoke had blown like a cloud across the sky. The train’s whistle had wailed across the dreaming countryside: somewhere an echo had been evoked in a heart and someone had felt the chill of sadness. Houses, windows of cats’ eyes, had crouched in the lee of invisible hills; a town had spun away, spangled with lights, beautiful at last in the darkness. Then the world had fallen past the moon and there had been the pale landscape stretching away as far as the eye could see and the heart remember: the hand of home had reached out and touched the sleeping brain, and the men, disturbed, expectant and yet frightened, had turned over to face the darkness of the racing train. In the morning their loneliness and their fear had been forgotten in their excitement.

Now they were almost home. The city closed about them and everything was suddenly, startlingly familiar. A church a bridge, even the posters on the hoardings were the same: Ginger Rogers smiled invitingly, Tooth’s KB Lager was a Man’s Drink; and the men wondered what had ever attracted them to brothels and arrack. There was the black smudge in the clear day, the railways workshops at Eveleigh overhung with their fog of soot; and for the first time the men saw them as a target and felt a sudden emptiness, as if they had seen an old friend stricken with an incurable disease. Redfern Station went by, the men’s shouts echoing back as part of their own welcome; the tracks multiplied, spread out like the silver flood of a river; and at last there was the tall clock tower of Central Station, the landfall they had all been waiting for. The train began to slow.

“I’ll lay five bob he pulls her up out here in the middle of nowhere. There! What did I tell you?”

“Hey, Mr. Radcliffe, go up and pull your rank on the engine driver. You must wanna get home as much as us.”

Vern Radcliffe turned from the window and smiled at the smiling faces. Good humour lurked constantly at the corners of his wide mouth like another, intangible feature; sometimes his good humour had been taken too much for granted and he had had to convince a few of the men that he also believed in discipline. But not now: the men didn’t need discipline this day. He smiled at them, then looked at Greg Morley, who shook his head and rolled his eyes downwards.

Radcliffe caught the hint. “Where’s Sergeant Savanna?”

“Here, sir.” Sergeant Savanna was stretched out on the floor, his head pillowed on a kit bag; he made no effort to lift his long bony frame into an upright position. “Always on hand for the call of duty.”

Like Radcliffe and Morley, Jack Savanna had come out of the ranks of these men and some of the old relationship still remained. But when it was needed, he could be as tough as any permanent army N.C.O. He was a born leader who had continually held back his own promotion by getting into scrapes; his waywardness was not a result of weakness, like Morley’s, but of a stubborn streak of rebellion in him. He had been reduced from a sergeant to a corporal twice, and had only been repromoted because he was so much better than anyone else available. But he had been born to lead revolutions, not the forces of tradition; had he been born a hundred years earlier he would certainly have had a say at the Eureka Stockade. He looked up at Radcliffe, one of the minor pillars of tradition. “You wanted me, sir?”

“Go up and tell the driver to get a move on,” said Radcliffe, enjoying the feeling of good humour that pervaded the carriage. “Private Brennan wants to get home to his girl.”

“Plural, sir,” said Private Brennan. “I’ve got seven of ’em waiting.”

“That makes it even more urgent, sergeant,” said Radcliffe.

Sergeant Savanna didn’t stir. “Corporal Talmadge.”

“Here, sarge.” The tall man with the close-cropped prematurely grey hair, turned from the window; there was no look of expectancy on his leathern face, he had another three hundred miles to go before he would see home. “Want something?”

“Go up and tell the driver to get a move one. Private Brennan wants to get home to his harem.”

Corporal Talmadge hadn’t been listening to the conversation, had been completely isolated from it by his own thoughts, but he moved immediately into the joking intimacy of the rest of the men. “Private Brennan.”

“I might of bloody well known it.” Private Brennan ran his hand resignedly through his fair curly hair as the carriage broke into the one easy laugh, the sort of laugh that comes from an inner spring of feeling and is ready to greet even the feeblest joke. “The flaming chain of command. Forget I mention it. I don’t care if we’re stuck out here all day. The sheilas can wait. They been waiting two and a half years for me.”

“Get a load of him! Six months longer than the rest of us. Tell us about your war experiences, dig. You were with the Sixth Div., weren’t you, dig? The mob that lost the war in Greece, weren’t you, dig?”

“I heard the bugle when they blew it the first time.” Joe Brennan had gone to the Middle East with the first convoy of Sixth Division troops in January 1940, and had transferred to this Seventh Division battalion after the Greece and Crete campaigns. He was the only man in the battalion who had tasted the sobering bitterness of defeat, and he was that much a better soldier because of it: he would never again underestimate the enemy. “They didn’t have to send me an invitation like they did you mugs.”

“They didn’t invite us, they advertised. It was in the Positions Vacant column in the Herald. Good jobs, it said. Five bob a day and all found. Pensions if you survive, it said.”

“I’d of been in sooner. I was looking around for a good job on the home front, that was all. But I was too late. All the bookies and jockeys had ’em.”

“I was making three thousand quid a year, meself, at the time. But I chucked it all up——”

“Bull, you were on the dole like the rest of us!”

The chi-acking went on, anything to fill in the waiting minutes, long and unsettling as the minutes just before an attack. It was all the same, Radcliffe thought: farewell, war, return, all of it waiting and very little else. He had the sudden feeling he had been waiting all his life, that to-morrow was the only real ambition; from the slapping palm on the new-living buttocks to the gentle fingers on the new-dead eyelids, one spent one’s time in waiting. He moved uneasily, all at once feeling impatient and a little afraid; then seeking reassurance, he leaned across Greg Morley and looked down at Jack Savanna.

“How do you feel?”

“Like a girl on her wedding night.” Savanna’s face, though long and bony like his body, was not unhandsome; when he smiled it was surprisingly boyish. The smile belied the eyes and the drawling voice; a natural faith struggled hard against an acquired cynicism. He had seen too much too young: the cruelty in the dormitory, the stranger rising confusedly from his mother’s bed, his dead and bloody father; but some relic of childhood struggled through and made him liked even by those he insulted. “Although, being a bachelor, I can only use my imagination in choosing such a simile. You married wrecks would know better than I.”

“Christ, I wish they’d get a move on!” Morley’s voice was petulant with impatience.

“You expecting Sarah to be at the station?” Radcliffe was asking himself the same question: would Dinah be there, would she have changed? It was their first time away from each other and he was surprised how, now at the time for reunion, it had frightened him.

“Oh, she’ll be there, all right.” The petulance was gone from Morley’s voice immediately: any mention of his wife could only have the effect of wiping out the mood of a moment before. He had always been ready to talk about her and she was as well-known as any film star or racehorse to his many friends in the battalion. Her photo had occupied pride of place in the pin-ups in the tent he had shared with three other sergeants, above a line of anonymous nudes and between Rita Hayworth and, the choice of the orderly-room sergeant, Tamara Toumanova. “She hasn’t failed yet.”

“Sure of yourself, aren’t you?” said Savanna, and only Radcliffe detected the faint bitterness under the banter. “The conceit of the married man.”

“The poor kid’s probably been waiting there an hour,” Morley said.

“God, listen to him!” said Savanna. “It’s only you married bastards who believe women are so faithful.”

“It’s only we married bastards who know,” Radcliffe grinned.

“How far out are we?” said Morley. “Can you see the platform from here?”

“Better strap him down.” Savanna sat up, then slowly got to his feet, untangling his length. He was several inches over six feet and seemed to be all bone, though broad and heavy bone. Then one looked again and noticed there was also a good deal of muscle, and realised here was a man tough enough to battle a team of bullocks or a whole company of men. It was a shock to learn that in civilian life he had been only a radio announcer. He affected a thick Air Force type moustache and his blond hair was long enough to have begun to curl on his neck. He was a mixture the men had never understood. Several of them had seen him in civilian clothes while on leave before they had gone overseas, and he had been wearing suède shoes; but as Basher Hanna had said, there was no accounting for taste, for he had once known a bloke who wore gloves even when it wasn’t cold. The men had never understood him, but they liked and admired him.

Not that Jack Savanna cared much what people thought of him. He stretched himself now, his bones cracking, then slapped Morley heartily on the back. “We don’t want you jumping out the window and galloping up to the platform.”

The carriage had quietened down. Some of the men had begun to put on their webbing and packs as long as twenty minutes before, and now they were beginning to feel the effects of trying to move in the cramped space with such awkward loads. Their kit bags, packed with souvenirs for the kids and dirty clothes for the wife to wash, added to the congestion. The men sat uncomfortably in the seats, squatted on the floor, leaning back to back against each other like native porters.

Then the train began to move again, easing forward and moving quietly into the platform, as if it had pulled up to collect its breath and make a composed entrance, like a woman checking on her looks before going in to meet some old lover. Steam blew past the windows, then it had faded and there were the laughing, tearful, frightened faces. Fear hung on every face like a veil, only to be lifted when the man was seen to be unmaimed and unchanged as his letters had claimed. Relatives stood like customs agents along the platform, searching for the contraband of war: the hidden wound, the undeclared change of feeling. The train ground to a stop and this stage of the journey was over.