THE STAGE IS SET

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 05, Issue 90, 12 August 1942, Page 6

THE STAGE IS SET

BACKGROUND FOR BATTLE ITCTURKSQUK !'<) IIT M(>'l>KSlsY In all the accounts of all the battles I have over read. 1 have al - ways suffered a feeling of frustration because the historians failed to describe to my satis fact ion 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 Avere to die? Whether it was hot or cold, cloudy osj dear, what was the appearance ol the men who did the lighting? This morning it is raining—gently out of a lead-grey sky. I*or 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 ,'hunder. 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 lowering. 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 llamc. 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 Avill 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 ski will be a hot,, hurtful blue, broken by castled cumulus clouds. Of if it begins at night, the sky w<ill be fjliack or a soft blue in /which <t>;he stars burn, miraculously big and bright. Myriad's of Butterflies About and behind Moresby itself is a "drj r "' 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 fati —will reject this scene for the trial of strength. The battle may be; waged -on the ilanks of Moresby's savannah hind, amid mangrove swamps that crawl torpidly up into dark jungle—a tangle of struggling trets whose trunks are knotted together in web- choked by vines and fcrn.s and para-he.-.---flooded by arsenic weed uml v. :hi tansy . To the player-,, v. uitlnii for their call, there is jk. gia;no:;r hen -only work and discomfort an J homesickness and fear—fear of forgett'ing the lines written for" them a qiiarte:• <>, a century ago on the barren luilof Gallipoli and the blood-drenched fields of France.