Fools' Harvest. Erle Cox
they are boiling with rage about their beastly ship. I think they must have lost about seventy men as well, from scraps of indignation I hear."
"And we'll pay the price, more or less," I added. "But it's worth it."
Lynda put her hand on my arm. "Wally were you—"
But Fergus cut her short. "No questions Lynda. now or ever. By heaven! Wally I'll help—"
"You'll do nothing of the kind," I interrupted. "Remember the rule, and it is cast iron, we'll have no married men in the game."
"But—" he began.
"No 'buts' old man," I persisted, "It is too unfair to the women to let you in. Remember what they did to Harry Bell's wife to make him speak, and they say that until she lost consciousness, she screamed to him not to tell."
"Ann Bell only did what any of us would do," said Lynda softly. "Harry did a braver thing by keeping silent." Then she placed her hand through Fergus' arm and looked up at him with a queer little smile on her lips and went on, "Darling, if you ever bought my life at that price I would spit in your face before I died of shame for my husband." And we both knew she meant it. But that is what the P.P. had made of our men and our women.
"Anyway Lyn, dear," I said, "You must see that I have to keep clear of you both."
She nodded. "I'll have to practise what I preach. Good-bye, dearest, and God guard you." She put her arms about me and kissed me.
Fergus came to the door with me. "About that trailer of yours," he whispered, "You won't—" he paused.
"No," I reassured him. "I had thought of it, but it would be too obvious. Not to-night at any rate. I know who he is, and we can do it some other time. I'll take him a dance in the swamp, and with luck he might get pneumonia. Anyway, we have him on the list of pests, and it's only a question of time before his name is struck off."
He wrung my hand. "Good night and good luck old man. Try to get news of yourself through to us."
"It's a promise," I replied, and walked off slowly towards the camp to give my follower time to sight me. It is a remarkable coincidence that four evenings later he was accidentally run down and killed by a motor lorry on the Maitland Road.
Chapter II
When I made my boast that I would put the story of our tragedy into writing I had no idea that the job would prove so strenuous. Dodging the "blowflies," as we call the P.P. spies in our camp home at Carrington, with its barbed wire walls and primitive housing, has been the least of my troubles since I began. Although the average camp population is 5,000 men, the authorities did not include a writing room among its amenities. Much less did they consider a I supply of writing paper necessary. Letters from without are not regarded with favour by the powers that be. The few that reach us are carefully read and tested with chemicals for unauthorised communications before they are handed over—if ever. Letters outward bound are subject—few as they are, to an even more rigorous scrutiny. Such paper as I have collected so far has been obtained by methods which, in the early part of 1939, I would have regarded as criminal. To-day I look upon its acquisition as a game of chance with the odds against the player.
Now I have sufficient paper with which to begin, and two extremely illicit lead pencils, the problem arises to find a place in which to use them with any approach to comfort. Fortunately, I can trust my shack mates, though my excursion into literature does not add to their comfort—or safety for that matter. Perhaps a description of the camp will better explain the difficulties. Our shacks are laid out in orderly streets on low ground, that is a bog in winter and a dust pile in summer. Each iron shack is 10 ft. by 10 ft. and 8 ft. high. On the walls on either side of the door are fixed three superimposed bunks, 3 ft. wide. The 4 ft. space between them is bare. Since we own nothing but the clothes we stand in, the absence of wardrobes is no hardship. Although there are six bunks in each shack the registered inhabitants number twelve. They are conducted on the Box and Cox System. The day shift sleeps in them at night and vice versa.
To the north we would have had a fine view of the Hunter were not the wharf that forms the boundary occupied by a barbed wire protected platform decorated with machine guns. They added a wire netting screen after some choice spirits among us knocked out a few of the machine gun guards with stones during the hours of darkness. To the east a similar platform screens the town of Newcastle from view, while the machine guns provide for a cross fire down the streets of the camp should the need arise—as it has on three occasions. The south side is built up with a maze of electrified wire, and on the west are the works once known as the Broken Hill Proprietary Steel Mills. The 200 yard passage between the camp and the mills where we work is also heavily protected on both sides by barbed wire lest we lose our way between the works and our camp.
However, I have found that, by leaving the door of our shack slightly open at night, a ray from the guard light nearest us gives sufficient light by which to write. Beyond inventing new adjectives to qualify the word "fool" my shack mates raise no objection to my writing. Anything done against rules is something of an entertainment to them, and as my activities amount to a capital offence they are prepared to put up with any inconvenience to help me. Indeed, when they learned the subject of my work, most of them became enthusiastic helpers, and I am indebted to them for supplying personal experiences and information I would not have obtained otherwise. There are men in the camp from every part of Australia. From among them I have been able to collect many details beyond the reach of my personal experience.
Should this crazy shorthand of mine ever come to be transcribed, my sympathies go out to him who undertakes the job. Whoever he may be, he can take my word for it that in the writing of it and in the concealment of the manuscript, a dozen men are risking their lives daily, until the time comes when we can find means to pass it on to an American Commission of inspection, or failing that, convey it to the safekeeping of my brother-in-law, Fergus Graham.
One of the perennial sources of argument in the camp is the origin of our slavery. Strange as it may seem, there is very little bitterness in the disputes, nor is there much personal feeling. We have all gone beyond that stage. Hate and a cold implacable lust for vengeance there are in plenty, but it is all directed against the Paramount Power. Somehow, we all seem to recognise the fact that the blame cannot be laid at the door of any individual or any Government, or public body. As I said to Fergus Graham only a fortnight ago, each one of us must shoulder his share of the obliquy. Its root was in our own smug self-satisfaction. We wanted ease, we wanted a high standard of living, we wanted a white Australia, and we wanted to keep it for people of British birth only. We closed our eyes resolutely to the truth that the ease and the high standard of living had to be sacrificed if we were to hold the more precious portions of our heritage.
With that useless and tragic wisdom that comes after the event we can recognise now the warning after warning that went unheeded. Whoever tried to open our eyes was a warmonger or a scaremonger with an axe to grind. No public man dared raise his voice on the fallacy of high wages, vast expenditure on social welfare, or against our besotted addiction to sport. The Leftists, the "parlor pinks" and all their tribe arranged themselves with every form of pacifism—some sound, some rotten to the core—to oppose all attempts at adequate defence measures. In their minds defence represented militarism and profiteering armament interests. And we were caught in the storm almost naked. Gad! but they have paid the price of finding out since then.
Even though we had been told early in 1939 what was brewing in the north, I doubt if we would have accepted the story as being within the bounds of possibility. I think we were a people of fundamentally decent instincts then, who would not believe it possible that other peoples would commit acts we would not permit to enter our own minds. Had any one man known the truth, and preached it from end to end of Australia, he would have been branded as a scaremonger. Put into words the great plot would seem too fantastic for credence.
We know now it was true. But then, how was it possible to believe that three Great Powers would conspire to kill and rob one. Was it credible that by carefully