WELCOME VOICE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 74, 24 September 1943, Page 7

WELCOME VOICE

A JUNGLE ADVENTURE

(0.C.) SOUTH PACIFIC BASE, September 5.

Hungry, footsore, and weary, lost in the jungle at night 30 miles, as it seemed, from anywhere, after experiencing a landslide and being forced to abandon their peep, two young U.S. army officers, Captain Stanley Lambert and Lester Hofman, were relieved to hear a voice answering their calls in a strange tongue. In a few minutes a Melanesian native appeared out of the shadows, a palm leaf torch in his hand to light their way to his primitive straw-thatched treTlis-sided hut. The native threw some seeds in boiling water and made a brew that tasted something like tea. It seemed like home to the tired whites, who had set out in the morning to track down a report—the sort of report that has to be gone into—that two Japanese were hiding out in a certain cave in that area.

The preceding day they had ploughed along tortuous miles in their peep, their route nothing but mule tracks that looked impassable, with slanting hillsides above and deep ravines below. Then the landslide came, and the road itself gave way under the rear right wheel until the peep rested solidly on its axle. This meant abandoning it for a 32-mile walk in the pouring rain with nothing but 10 gum drops for food. So they were glad to hear a hospitable Melanesian \voice, and to be led afterwards by a native on horseback to a native village, whose chief amazed them by his knowledge of the American civil war, as well as of the present war and the ideals of the democracies. From this village they were able to get transportation back to camp, having established that the report of Japs in the vicinity was false.