Authors: Bryce Courtenay
The platoon turns to look at Crow Rigby, a country boy from Gippsland who carries the all too familiar badge of recognition of a volunteer from the bush, a permanent squint from staring into the sun. The young private, not yet twenty, blushes furiously and the fresh crop of acne covering his neck and jawline brightens visibly, his elbows rest on his bony knees and he looks down between his legs. It is obvious that he is not accustomed to praise or even to being noticed in a crowd.
‘Good on ya, Crow,’ someone says.
Crow Rigby has earned his nickname because of an incident on the very first occasion the platoon is taken onto the firing range. All of them are sprawled on their bellies in the standard firing position, legs apart, feeling awkward and anxious, the butt of their Lee-Enfields unfamiliar, tightly tucked into their shoulders to prevent the legendary kick few of them have yet experienced. Each man has his own target which is about to come up in the target butts three hundred yards away. Their instruction is to fire at a rate of fifteen rounds a minute. There is a great deal of nervous anticipation, every man hoping to give a good account of himself while not quite knowing what to expect. Each has his finger lightly on the trigger waiting for the musketry sergeant to give the command to fire. Moments before it comes, a crow cawing and flapping its wings suddenly alights on the top of a flagpole a good twenty yards beyond the end of the firing range. The bird is still wobbling slightly on its new-found perch when a lone rifle shot rings out and the crow explodes in a cloud of black feathers. At three hundred and twenty yards it is a truly exceptional shot.
Placed on a disciplinary charge and marched in front of his company commander, Rigby is asked if he has anything to say in his own defence. ‘Er yes, sir, it come on me like automatic, it’s the lambing season back ‘ome, crows’ll peck the eyes out a newborn lamb, can’t ‘ave one o’ them buggers hangin’ ’round the paddock, can you, sir?’
Rigby was given only six days’ picket duty and then selected to do a special training course as a company sniper. This is his first day back with his platoon.
‘Private Rigby, how many times do you think you’ve fired a rifle, not a S.M.L.E., a rifle of any sort?’ Ben asks him.
Rigby is too shy to look up and keeps his eyes on his boots as he thinks, then answers carefully. ‘Crikey, Sergeant, I dunno, I been doin’ it since I were knee ‘igh to a grasshopper.’ He squints up at Ben briefly, ‘Thousands and thousands o’ times, I s’pose, I reckon ’bout six shots a day, though maybe that includes a shotgun, I been doin’ it since I were five year old. Awful lot a crows, snakes, and rabbits ‘anging about on the selection, Sergeant.’
At the mention of crows the platoon breaks up.
‘Thirty-two thousand, eight hundred and fifty times he’s fired a rifle against our possible hundred and twenty,’ Cooligan shouts out, sending the platoon into fresh gales of laughter.
‘Thank you, Private Cooligan, that’s very encouraging. Right, now let’s be serious for a moment.’ Ben, crooking his forefinger, beckons to Cooligan. ‘Come here, lad.’ The young private gets to his feet from the back and steps between several of the men, zig-zagging his way forward, placing his hand on their shoulders to get to Ben. ‘Righto, take your cap off, Private Cooligan.’ Numbers Cooligan removes his cap, placing it on the ground. Ben takes a clean handkerchief from his pocket, twirls it into a strip about two inches wide and blindfolds the infantryman.
‘Oi, what’s ‘appening?’ Cooligan cries.
‘Right, Private Rigby, c’mere!’ Ben says not answering.
Crow Rigby unfolds his legs and, rising, walks over to Ben. ‘Take Private Cooligan over to the tree, stand his back and head against the trunk.’
‘Righto, Sergeant, will I tie his hands?’
There is laughter. ‘No, he’s going to need them to cover his goolies,’ Ben says calmly. ‘Now, Cooligan, don’t move a muscle, that’s an order, ya hear?’
‘What you gunna do, Sergeant, shoot me?’ Cooligan asks tentatively.
‘No, lad, you’ll be as safe as if you were in your mother’s arms.’
‘Do I have to, Sergeant?’ the young infantryman pleads, instinctively knowing that somehow his courage is to be tested. ‘I promise I’ll shut me trap next time!’
The platoon all laughs uproariously. ‘Yes, I’m afraid you must, Private Cooligan, it’s an order.’
Crow Rigby takes him by the hand and leads him the twenty or so feet to the trunk of the large old gum tree and positions him as Ben has directed.
‘Now hold your hands over your privates, lad. Don’t want you catching cold, do we?’ Ben’s voice is perfectly calm. ‘Don’t move until I tell you. You understand, don’t even twitch yer nose?’
‘Yes, Sergeant, but I ain’t happy, Sergeant.’
‘Not supposed to be, you’re in the army now.’
Ben stoops over his kitbag as he speaks and from it he removes Tommo’s fighting axe. Before anyone can quite realise what’s happening, he has straightened up and the axe has left his hand in a whirring blur. It lands with a soft thud, its blade buried in the trunk of the tree no more than half an inch to the side of Cooligan’s head and directly above his left ear.
‘Shit, what was that!’ Cooligan howls as the remainder of the platoon gasps in collective astonishment. To his credit he has not moved.
‘Right, Rigby, remove his blindfold,’ Ben instructs.
The lanky country lad plucks at the blindfold, his country calm gone, his hands trembling from the shock of what he’s just witnessed. Cooligan opens his eyes. The axe handle is sticking out beyond the left side of his nose, but he cannot see the axe clearly as it is so deeply embedded that only the head and a small section of the blade are exposed.
‘Jesus!’ Cooligan yells. His knees give way under him and he collapses to the ground.
There is complete silence from the rest of the young infantrymen, then someone says softly, ‘Jesus and Mary!’
‘Right, Cooligan, well done, lad, stand up,’ Ben commands.
‘Can’t, Sergeant,’ Cooligan whimpers, the after-shock of the experience bringing him close to tears.
‘Come, come, it wasn’t that bad, what you can’t see can’t hurt you, stand up, lad,’ Ben says soothingly.
‘Sorry, Sergeant, I mayn’t, I’ve pissed me trousers,’ Cooligan says in a distressed voice.
Cooligan’s confession that he’s wet his pants breaks the tension and the platoon roars with laughter, though as much from relief as mirth.
‘Shut up! That’s enough!’ Ben barks suddenly, bringing the platoon to instant silence. Then turning to Cooligan he says, ‘Don’t blame you, lad, a lot of blokes would have shit themselves.’ He rummages around in his kitbag and pulls out a spare pair of khaki trousers. ‘Here, take these, lad, get to the latrines, clean up, then back here on the double.’ Ben’s sharp, emphatic orders help to jerk Cooligan back into action. ‘Eyes left, all of you!’ He hands Cooligan the spare trousers. ‘Up you get, nobody’s looking.’ Ben turns back to the platoon. ‘So what do we do about that, gentlemen? We give our comrade in arms three cheers for being a bloody good sport, eh?’
To the cheers of the platoon the miserable Cooligan, covering the wet patch to his front with the help of Ben’s spare trousers, legs it for the latrine block.
‘Private Rigby, fetch the axe,’ Ben now commands. The country lad retrieves the axe, though not without some difficulty. Ben goes to stand where previously Numbers Cooligan stood blindfolded. ‘Righto, Rigby, you’ve got a good eye, now do the same to me,’ Ben says evenly.
Private Rigby hops from one leg to the other, his head buried into his right shoulder and appearing to be all bones and acute angles. ‘I can’t, Sergeant,’ he says at last.
‘Why not, lad?’
‘I might miss, Sergeant,’ he says, grinning.
The platoon, a moment before brought to a nervous silence, now cracks up again.
Ben steps from the tree and, going over to his kit, he removes a small cork dartboard of the type a child might get as an inexpensive extra in a Christmas stocking. It is about half as big again as a human head. He walks back to the tree and fixes the board to the trunk at roughly the same position occupied by Cooligan’s head.
‘You first, Rigby, and then the rest of you. Take the axe and throw it at the target, see how you go, eh? Ben has now reached the position where he previously stood to throw. ‘Imagine it’s your only weapon and that there dartboard is an enemy head. Fritz is coming at you in a bayonet charge and he is no more than a few feet away, ten, fifteen feet, you’ve got maybe two or three seconds. Righto, Rigby, go for your life.’
The young blokes are clearly taken with the game and, with some jostling to get to the front of the queue, quickly form a line behind Crow Rigby, who now takes careful aim, not bothering about the imaginary bayonet-wielding German advancing. Taking a great deal more time than the three-second maximum, he sends the axe flying and they watch it tumble head over handle through the air. To his credit the blade actually fixes into the tree trunk, though almost three feet above the dartboard and somewhat to the side.
‘Better hope he was a very fat German sitting on a horse, Private Rigby,’ Ben says.
‘German general, Sarge, big ‘orse, seventeen hands,’ Crow Rigby says.
‘Well done, anyway. Who’s next?’ Rigby and one other young infantryman are the only ones who manage to get the blade of the axe into the tree, while the others either miss the trunk or the head of the axe bounces off the trunk and falls to the ground. They have almost completed the exercise when Cooligan arrives back wearing Ben’s trousers. He has rinsed his own under a faucet and now carries them bunched up in his right hand. He sees instantly what’s afoot and can’t wait for his turn to come. With the rest of the platoon watching, he weights the axe in both hands, then gripping it firmly he takes careful aim, pulls it well back beyond his right shoulder and lets it go with a furious swinging action. Tommo’s fighting axe twirls several times in the air and comes to land about twelve feet up at the conjunction of the trunk and the first of its branches, but at least it bites in, the blade sinking solidly into the rough bark. The platoon claps and whistles.
‘Real big German on a ladder bird-nestin’, Sarge!’ Crow Rigby drawls slowly.
Ben thinks what a great temperament young Rigby has for a sniper. ‘Righto, gather around, gentlemen,’ he now says and waits until the platoon is once again seated on the grass in front of him. ‘Thank you, Mr Cooligan, you’re excused tent inspection in the morning and may kip in an extra half hour.’
‘Lucky bugger!’ several of them shout.
‘Thank you, Sergeant, that’s thirty minutes, precise, I take it?’
‘Aye, thirty-one and you’re on a charge. Now, what have we learned from that little exercise?’ Ben asks.
‘That it’s easy to get yerself kill’d with an axe, Sergeant?’ calls a private by the name of William Horne, the second of the country lads in the platoon, who is predictably enough known as Hornbill. He is a big, strong lad, six foot two inches with a pair of shoulders that would make him a good ruckman. He is also a reasonable shot, though not anywhere near the class of Crow Rigby. His chief distinction is that, using a pair of pliers and a length of baling wire or a hammer and nails, he is able to fix just about anything that gets broken in a mechanical or carpentry sense.
A small sample of Hornbill’s ingenuity occurred when Ben introduced Martha’s culinary ideas to his platoon while they were away on a four-day route march. The bullybeef hurry-curry was initially only a limited success as they had not yet been deprived for long enough of the memory of half-decent food to fully appreciate it. But the exception proved to be the billyjam tarts, although they almost came to a premature halt when someone pointed out that they had no way of rendering army biscuits to fine enough crumbs for the required doughlike mixture. That is, until Hornbill was consulted.
‘No rucking problem,’ he declares and promptly produces a six-inch nail from his kit. ‘Always carry one o’ these, best bloody tool there is after the one nature give you.’ Then, using the steel end of the haft on his bayonet, he hammers an empty jam tin flat. With the six-inch nail he soon pierces the flattened tin with dozens of holes, hammering the nail point through the tin plate and forcing a perfectly burred hole on the opposite side surface which proves to be no different in function to a normal household grater. Hornbill then takes out his wire-cutter which is standard issue and snips a small length of fencing wire from some farmer’s paddock and cunningly fashions it into a handle for the grater. ‘There you go, good as gold,’ he pronounces to one and all.
Private Horne’s Gallipoli grater will eventually become a stock item in every trench along the Gallipoli Front, although the Turks, finding them abandoned in deserted trenches, can never quite work out what the hell it is the Diggers needed to grate. They conclude that they can’t be bug rakes as the handles are not sufficiently long for them to be back scratchers for the lice they generously share with the enemy.
In civilian life Hornbill is a timber cutter and hails from Coffs Harbour up in northern New South Wales. It seems he was on a visit to Melbourne to help out his uncle when war broke out. His uncle owns a pie cart which he positions nightly outside Flinders Street Station. Or, put into Horne’s own slow drawl, ‘The old bloke’s rheumatiz was worryin’ him a treat and me Aunty Mavis took crook so she couldn’t push the pie cart from their ‘ome in Fitzroy of a night. So I come down to the big smoke ter give ‘em a hand ’til she got better again, then the ruckin’ war come and I joined up with you miserable lot.’
‘Yes, Private Horne, the fighting axe can be a lethal weapon in the right hands,’ Ben smiles, ‘but I don’t suppose there’ll be too many of them on either side in this war.’
‘Reckon I’d ‘ave one o’ them ’stead of a bayonet any time,’ Horne drawls. ‘Not much you can do with a bayonet, it don’t even chop timber good.’
Ben ignores this last remark as it will necessitate a lecture on the uses and abuses of the infantry bayonet. He runs his eyes across the sitting infantrymen. ‘Anything else we may have learned?’
‘Practice, Sergeant? Everything takes practice.’ The answer comes from a serious-looking lad named Spencer, with the stocky build, dark hair and obsidian eyes of his Welsh ancestors. He has a naturally scholarly look about him, enhanced by the fact that he is constantly found wearing a pair of reading spectacles and with his nose in a book. He passed the required army eyesight test simply by memorising the complete eye chart and is known in the platoon as ‘Library’, as he always seems to know the answer to every question they are collectively asked.