THE STAGE IS SET

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 51, Issue 3151, 3 August 1942, Page 6

THE STAGE IS SET

BACKGROUND FOR BATTLE THERE IS NO GLAMOUR PICTURESQUE PORT MORESBY In all the accounts of all the battles I have ever read, I have always suffered a feeling of frustration because the historians failed to describe to my satisfaction the stage setting, writes Osmar White, the Melbourne Sun’s war correspondent. I have always wanted to know about the scenery against which the battle pageant moved'—what the trees were, the colour of the earth on which men were to die? Whether it was hot or cold, cloudy or clear, what was the appearance of the men who did the fighting? This morning it is raining—gently out of a lead-grey sky. For three afternoons now, thunderstorms have swept magnificently down the river valley from the hills, the rain advancing like an army of dark giants through a barrage of thunder, obliterating all the blue mountains and all the green land.

Grass Knee-high and Emerald Green In the gardens, soaking up the rain, oleanders and blue convolvulus are flowering. The untended grass is knee-high and emerald green, and so it is in gardens from Aitape to Samarai, Salamaua to Daru. Wherever men are to die here, there will be oleanders and blue convolvulus in the gardens. The frangipani will bear its stars of pink and cream, and the poinsettias flame. If the battle comes to Port Moresby our soldiers will contest a Japanese landing on narrow, stony, pale beaches. The sky will be silky, calm with palest emerald' over the reefs. Or ruffled with the reef lines white with surf.

At their backs will be high, rounded earthworks. A coarse, poor grass grows luxuriantly there, scarred with red and yellow stones thrust through it.

Between the folds of these hills are small, fertile valleys and coves where cocoanut palms and patches of. bananas grow. The stumps and the broken fences are covered by purple and scarlet bougainvillea. If the battle begins by day the sky will be a hot, hurtful blue, broken by castled cumulus clouds. Or if it begins at night, the sky will be black

or a soft blue in which the stars burn, miraculously big and bright. Myriads of Butterflies

About and behind Moresby itself is a “dry” belt of sparsely timbered savannah, on which the predominating tree is a broad-leafed gum. But there are also startling patches of dense tropical bush and a siltladen river or two, flanked by wild sugar-cane and palms and reeds. Men here will stalk the enemy in the cover of head-high grass, with the butterflies about them. I have never seen so many butterflies as there are in the open country behind Moresby, drifting in jerky myriads through the sunlight. But it may be that strategy-—or fate—will reject this scene for the trial of strength. The battle may be waged on the flanks of Moresby’s savannah land, amid mangrove swamps that crawl torpidly up into dark jungle—a tangle of struggling trees whose trunks are knotted together in webs choked by vines and ferns and parasites—flooded by arsenic weed and wild tansy. To the players, waiting for their; call, there is no glamour here—only, work and discomfort and homesickness and fear—fear of forgetting the lines written for them a quarter of a century ago on the barren hills of Gallipoli and the blood-drenched 1 fields of France.