up that the public is interested in what’s going on. The battles we’ve had with them!” He grinned again, his red face bulging like a balloon that had been squeezed, and a chuckle rumbled somewhere in the mountain of him. “I look at it this way, Vern. You’ve been a soldier long enough to know what it’s all about, appreciate the purely military side. Right?”
“Nearly right,” said Vern. “No one fully appreciates the military side, except the generals who dream it up. It’s an esoteric passion denied to part-time soldiers like myself. But go on.”
“I see your point. Some of these Regular Army wallahs feel they’ve just descended from Olympus, now that war’s here again.” Fredericks turned and spat into a huge brass spittoon by his chair, an old-fashioned custom that disgusted his secretary, a girl who came from a Vaucluse family that hadn’t spat in four generations. “I think I can swing something where you can also work for a couple of the British papers. We’ll be overrun with Yanks pretty soon, they’ve got almost as many correspondents as they have soldiers, but the Chooms have practically no coverage at all out here …” Fredericks tilted back in his chair and looked more than ever like a mountain about to fall; people on the floor below went about their work unconscious of the danger overhead. “Well, how does the proposition sound to you?”
“Pretty good. It couldn’t sound otherwise.”
“You don’t sound over-excited,” said Fredericks.
“My excitement is the delayed-action type,” Vern said. “Tell you the truth, Happy, I’ve never really given a thought to being a war correspondent. I guess this sounds strange to you, as if I’ve been inoculated with militarism, but over the last two years I’ve got used to thinking of myself as a soldier, even if only a temporary one.”
“Bought your own drum and flag, eh?” Fredericks laughed, and Vern felt a flash of anger; then abruptly the editor’s round face was stiffly sober. “I’m sorry, Vern. I shouldn’t have said that. I think more of it than that, myself. And it’s a credit to you that you do think of yourself as a soldier.”
Vern moved a hand in a gesture of embarrassment. “I’m not being jingoistic. I’m just trying to point out that if you’d offered me this job two years ago, I’d have said yes right away. Now I’d like time to think it over.”
“Of course.” Fredericks lay back in his chair, crossing his hands on the mound of his stomach, looking like a wicked old bishop. After a while he began to fiddle with the old-fashioned gold watch-chain that hung like a small hawser across his waistcoat. “It will be the biggest story you’ve ever covered, Vern.”
“I guess it will,” said Vern, thinking Fredericks was stating the obvious.
“Bigger than you realise.” Fredericks seemed to be making up his mind about something, his forehead creased into rolls of fat and the twinkle gone from his eyes; then he let go the watch-chain, dropping the hawser with a clink against the bursting buttons of his waistcoat, and said, “Vern, the Japs could walk into Australia to-morrow.”
Vern sat quietly. Through an open window he could hear the nervous hum of traffic and the harsh cry of a newsboy, like a metropolitan crow, coming up from the street below. A clock ticked away placidly on Fredericks’ desk, then its sound was gone as three planes went overhead in a roar that drowned out everything. He looked out the window, almost as if expecting the bombs to be already beginning to fall.
Over the past two years he had become too accustomed to bad news to be shocked by it. But now suddenly it had deeper significance and was a good deal harder to comprehend. The fall of France, the debacle in Greece, Pearl Harbour, even the surrender of Singapore, had had a remoteness about them that made it hard to imagine the same thing happening to Sydney or Melbourne or, even though the bombs had already fallen there, to Darwin; even when the Japs had landed in Timor and New Britain, one had still had some blind faith that they could come no farther. What was to stop them, one really didn’t know: one just didn’t bother, or was afraid, to think. No enemy had landed in Australia before and it was just impossible to imagine its happening. Invasions, like earthquakes and pogroms, happened to other countries. One clung to the old bromide: it can’t happen here.
“I didn’t know things were that grim,” he said. “There’s little hint of it. So many of us on leave——”
“Camouflage.” Fredericks waved a hand. “Trying to keep the people from knowing. The truth is, we haven’t enough equipment to outfit the whole Army. We’re short all along the line: planes, artillery, transport, the whole bloody bundle.”
“What about the Yanks?”
“They’re coming,” Fredericks said, “but they’ve got a long way to come and I don’t know that they’re much better prepared that we are. Two years to get ready, and they’re still dragging their heels.”
“Maybe they’re like the people in the street outside.” Vern had often felt in the last two years that the Americans should have come into the war, but he had tried to be fair-minded about it. In 1938 he had spent a year in the New York office of the paper, and he knew how strong was the influence of the Middle West isolationists. “Just couldn’t believe the war would fall into their laps.”
Fredericks shrugged, a movement that would have been a convulsion in a smaller man. “Maybe. I shouldn’t talk about them in that way, not the coves who are out here to fight, anyway. Politics has been the whole trouble over there.”
“What happens if the Japs get here first?”
“Christ knows.” Fredericks shrugged again. “I’ll probably lose a lot of weight.”
Vern looked down at the blue overseas strips on his sleeve: they represented the stretch of time in which Australia had come from the outskirts of war into the very centre of it. He wondered if the country could see it through, and was suddenly frightened and disgusted at his lack of faith. “I think I’d have felt better if you hadn’t told me how bad things are.”
“Mind you, what I’ve told you is top secret. Or it’s supposed to be, as far as the general public is concerned. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t known what a close-mouthed bastard you can be. Anyhow, you’ll discover it for yourself when you get out into the field as a correspondent. Things are so bad, I don’t know how we’re going to keep it quiet much longer. Right now they’ve got MacArthur to hold their attention. You’d think Christ had come back to earth.”
“What’s he like?” Vern said. “The boys haven’t been impressed. His type of soldier doesn’t go down too well with the Aussie, all that grandiloquent bull of his.”
“Well, they’d better get used to the grandiloquent bull. He’s here as boss.”
“Blamey won’t like that.”
“Blamey will look after himself,” Fredericks said with a grin. “I’m no admirer of him personally, but he’s the bloke we want if we’re to have any say in the way things are run. MacArthur reckons he has God on his side. He’ll need Him, if he’s to push Tom Blamey around.” Then he tossed the two generals out the window and said, “How much leave have you?”
“Eight days. I report back next Monday morning to Ingleburn. Where we go from there, and when, I haven’t the faintest.”
“Righto, call me at home Sunday. It’s still the same place, Macleay Street, and the number is in the book. You just need an American visa to come up there now, that’s all. How are the wife and kids?”
“Fine. I’m like a stranger in the house, seeing them for the first time. I just sit back and admire the three of them, and feel bloody proud of myself.”
“Good for you.” Fredericks extended a plump hand across the desk; Vern had forgotten the strength, in the plump fingers. “I’m glad to see you got back all right, Vern.”
Vern said good-bye to Fredericks, promising to give a lot of thought to the war correspondent offer, and went out to the lift. It was operated now by a girl, instead of the