The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [53]
Even Keast, the former star athlete, found the trail grueling. In a letter to his brother Bob in Lansing, Michigan, he wrote, “We are…in the clouds about 20 hours out of 24. You can guess from that that it’s pretty wet most of the time. The sun is really hot when it’s clear. The country here is supposed to be the most geologically disturbed (25 cent word) in the world. Most mountainous country is continuous ranges but this is many short ranges and cross ranges. There is absolutely no flat ground…. Mountains all around with deep valleysin between. There are no roads…just a narrow ‘goat’ trail that winds over the mountains or along the streams with steaming jungle growth on all sides.”
The march to Imiduru, the patrol’s fifth day on the trail, gave Medendorp reason to hope. The patrol climbed three thousand feet in four hours of hiking, and platoons stayed together.
But that evening Medendorp’s hopes were dashed. The men’s feet were shot, and their backs ached. Medendorp knew he could not afford to lose any of them, so he instructed Sergeant Schmidt to let the men who were worst off use the abandoned native huts instead of their leaky shelter halves (later in the Pacific war, soldiers would use jungle hammocks with a rainproof cover and mosquito netting). At first, the men were relieved to get out of the rain. But once they turned off their flashlights, rats nibbled at their toes and cockroaches as big as mice crawled over them. Even so, the men hardly moved a muscle—rats and cockroaches were a price they were willing to pay to have a roof over their heads.
The next morning, Medendorp had to contend with more bad news. The native huts had been teeming with fleas, and the men who had slept there were now infested. To make matters worse, all but twenty of the patrol’s carriers “went bush,” fleeing in the middle of the night and hiding with other villagers in secluded jungle caves. Their pay—a shilling a day, plus rations, a stick of tobacco, and maybe some salt—was not enough for them to overcome their fear of the mountains. They hailed from societies governed by an intricate web of magic, myth, and sorcery, and the sight of Buckler’s emaciated men trudging out of the darkness confirmed their superstitions; the mountains were a place of bad spirits—masalai—and ghosts. The carriers warned that anyone who ventured into the high country would go blind, that his nose and ears would rot away, and his teeth would get so cold they would shatter in his mouth.
As Medendorp later noted, the carriers were also concerned about the patrol’s supply of food. They had no concept of an airdrop. According to them the patrol was marching “straight into starvation.”
After losing the bulk of his carrier force, Medendorp was livid. Who was going to lug the food through the mountains? How was he going to feed his men? Could he ask them to carry more? Could he hope for an airdrop at Laruni?
Medendorp made the only decision available to him. He instructed his men to shoulder as much extra weight as they felt they could. Then he told the remaining carriers that anyone caught trying to desert would be shot on sight.
Two days outside of Arapara, and fifty miles from the south coast, the Wairopi Patrol stopped near the village of Laruni on the banks of the Mimani River, which, fed by daylong rains, now barreled out of the mountains. No one could have been more surprised that Medendorp had made it that far than General Harding’s intelligence officer, who had just taken part in an aerial reconnaissance of the trail. On October 9, he wrote in his diary, “never saw such mountains…all jumbled together in no arrangement of ranges—just a tangled mass with ridges and spurs running in all directions, a creek in every draw and the whole thing covered with jungle so dense that the ground was nowhere visible.”
Standing at the banks of the river, one of the carriers pointed to the clouds. Medendorp