The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [63]
AS SMITH AND HIS PARTY of men hustled to overtake the rest of the battalion, Lutjens and Company E entered the high mountains north of Laruni. According to Captain Schultz, the trail became so narrow, with sheer cliffs on either side, that “even a jack rabbit couldn’t leave it.” The men kept plodding forward, oblivious to almost everything but the trail itself.
“One day, I swear, I saw gold nuggets in the bottom of a stream,” Lutjens would later recount. “There’s gold nuggets, but what the hell’s gold, you can’t eat it. It must have been a beautiful country, but all you could see was mud and the guy’s feet ahead of you…. The only time anybody really commented on anything would be when he fell down, and then he would cuss because it was so hard to drag yourself back up.”
In all likelihood, Lutjens was not imagining it when he thought he spotted gold. Adventurous prospectors had discovered gold in the mountains of the Papuan Peninsula in the early 1900s. Wau-Bulolo, northwest of the Kapa Kapa (in what is today Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands Province), was the scene of a two-decade gold rush that began to taper off by the start of World War II. The gold rush drew young men from all over the world, including Errol Flynn, who arrived in New Guinea in 1928. In addition to working as a patrol officer, a tobacco farmer, and a slave trader, Flynn managed a small claim in the mountains before landing in Hollywood and embarking on his movie career.
By late afternoon on October 23, Company E confronted Ghost Mountain. It was a day they had dreaded, and one that they would never forget. The native carriers, who had been such a great help on the jungle trail, now balked. Lutjens understood their fear. Ghost Mountain, he recalled, “was the eeriest place” he had ever seen.
The trees were covered with green moss half a foot thick. We would walk along a hog’s back, straddling the trail, with a sheer drop of thousands of feet two feet on either side of us. We kept hearing water running somewhere, but we couldn’t find any. We could thrust a stick six feet down through the spongy stuff…without hitting anything real solid. It was ungodly cold. There wasn’t a sign of life. Not a bird. Not a fly. Not a sound. It was the strangest feeling I ever had. If we stopped, we froze. If we moved, we sweated.
You can hardly realize how wild and ghostlike this mountain country is. Almost perpetual rain and steam…. We have been traveling over an almost impassable trail. Our strength is gone. Most of us have dysentery. Boys are falling out and dropping back with fever. Continuous downpour of rain. It’s hard to cook our rice and tea. Bully beef makes us sick. We seem to climb straight up for hours, then down again. God, will it never end?
When Company E finally dragged itself into Jaure late in the day on October 25, Lutjens regarded it as a small miracle. For the previous two days, they had not been able to march for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch without lying down to catch their breath. Their hearts felt like they would burst from the exertion. It took them seven hours to ascend Ghost Mountain’s final two thousand feet. Men were crawling on their hands and knees. According to Lutjens, by the time Company E reached Jaure, “We were down to a shadow. Our eyes were sunk deep in our heads. We were gaunt as wolves and just as hungry.”
By the time Company E reached Jaure, Company G was already in Laruni. At the dropping ground operated by the Wairopi Patrol’s Captain Roger Keast, whose knee was still mending, Company G picked up sweaters and replenished its rations. “God, what a gift the sweaters were” says Stanley Jastrzembski. “The jungle got so cold at night.”
The rations—soup, biscuits, and even chocolate D-bars—were a godsend, too. “We were hungrier than we’d ever been in our lives, but still we couldn’t eat the bully beef,” says Russell Buys. “Guys tried to choke it down, but they couldn’t; they’d just retch.” Worse