IN AUGUST 1943, when it was known that Australia, still very much in mid-struggle, had nonetheless been definitely rescued by the valour of its citizens and the strength and gallantry of their great ally, Darragh was stationed as a corporal medical orderly at a hospital in Popondetta in New Guinea. It was a beautiful place on the northern side of Papua New Guinea’s central spine of mountains. It possessed a foothills charm. The Australians had driven the Japanese from the southern shore of New Guinea back over these mountains and into the northern lowlands. Americans had landed on the Solomon Sea shore to take the Japanese from behind. The latter seemed no longer miraculously ordained by God as victors and punishers, but were still strongly dug in on the kunai grass plains which characterised the north coast of New Guinea. North of Popondetta, dreadful, intimate conflicts occurred along the roads driven among the giant grass of pre-war plantations. Men stumbled back from these encounters with bullets through their shins, or lumps of shrapnel in their bandaged heads, or raving with killing infections—dengue fever or cerebral malaria. New Guinean natives often guided them along, as they winced or raved, to the hospital of the 2/14th Field Ambulance. Gangrene and effulgent tropical ulcers, concussion, shell shock, and dizzying fever temperatures had taken their minds from them. In that condition they were often terrified, expecting attack at any second. The Japanese and they had inflicted dreadful, rampant fear on each other.

By the time they reached the hospital to which Darragh was almost inevitably attached—since he had been honest about his background, and since being a medical orderly seemed to be the best thing for a priest on sabbatical—many of the soldiers no longer knew where or who they were.

The climate was so much more pleasant here that sometimes Darragh, off-duty, would climb the hill above the tented hospital, where—for reasons known only to engineers—the deep latrines had been dug. Recuperating men, waiting to go back to the viciousness in the long grass, called it Shit Hill, and its minder was a sullen orderly who sat on oil drums reading American comics and, when he considered the disease peril from the pits had reached a certain point, throwing in gasoline and setting fire to it. Men swore that he had done it when they were occupying the seats, and burned the hair off their arses—but that was merely a story, for the fellow lacked the capacity to make a myth of himself.

Darragh sometimes went up there to look at the vaporous mountains behind, and the hazed vistas stretching away across the plain to the Solomon Sea. At some moments, far from the wards and the airstrip, Shit Hill was a tropic idyll, and could even, in the evening’s advancing blue light, seem a backwater. But now and then he drove down with other orderlies to collect medical supplies from the airstrips at Buna and Gona, where terrible battles had been fought earlier in the year, and Darragh would inspect the faces of the black soldiers who unloaded the planes and looked after the aircrew messes there. His letters to Camp Kenney had never been answered, nor his letters to the Corps of Military Police. An Australian corporal did not merit such replies.

From Shit Hill one afternoon, Darragh saw yet another damaged soldier being walked up the trail by a New Guinean in a loincloth, for delivery to the 2/14th. The soldier, it became apparent as he got closer, was not so much walking as being directed and carried, as was the normal procedure anyhow. His faced seemed blackened with ash and sweat. Darragh descended the hill to go on duty.

The medical officer diagnosed the soldier, a second lieutenant, as suffering from well-developed cerebral malaria, and put him on a drip of saline and sulfa drugs. Darragh was to take his temperature at three-hourly intervals. The man’s body was washed by Darragh and another orderly and as he was settled by flickering generator light on his hospital cot, his features became distinguishable to Darragh. He was at once recognisable as the brother—Howley, or some name of that nature—who in the days before the fall of Singapore had fled his superior and his confessor. Since he became disturbed when Darragh tried to place a thermometer in his armpit, Darragh took his temperature anally, and it was 105 degrees. There was already peril that if he should live, his brain might not return to him.

The man was not clear-headed enough, or even strong enough, to say much. His protests were many, but they came in murmurs. One day two ragged soldiers with slouch hats and lean bellies came to Popondetta to visit him, and seemed depressed by what they saw. As Darragh changed a saline and sulfa bag, one of them said, ‘Look after him as well as you can, mate. He’s the bloody best platoon leader we ever saw.’

‘Complete bloody madman,’ said the other soldier with approval of the patient. ‘In the right way, I mean.’

One night a brief remission occurred, a phase of calm and clarity, or what resembled it. The lieutenant grabbed Darragh’s hand when he came with the thermometer, and declared, ‘Father …’

Darragh said, ‘I’m just a medical orderly, son.’

But the lieutenant said, ‘Father.’

‘I can recite the Act of Contrition for you,’ said Darragh.

‘The rites,’ said the young man. ‘Please. The rites.’

Though all fluid was voided from the young officer’s body, by way of hectic sweats, as soon as it entered his system, there were somehow compelling tears on his cheeks. Where did they come from? They were summoned by profound contrition, by urgency on a ferocious scale.

Darragh had been suspended, by archbishop’s decree and by becoming a soldier, from giving absolution. He was far removed from the holy oils. Some chaplain or other down towards Gona would have them, but would take a greater time to get here than the brother who had disgraced his order but honoured his uniform had left. Yet the urgency and distress in the man were compelling.

The distant cautionary stories recurred in his imagination. The drunken renegade priest who consecrated the contents of a bakery shop. Who anointed the prostitute, in ironic charity, with butter.

And yet, Christ, bending and writing in the dust as they taunted Him with the woman taken in adultery. Christ who sanctified the dust with His Aramaic hand. Who made a sacrament out of banal things.

In any case, Darragh absolved the young officer, and for lack of chrism, and depending on the spaciousness of Christ, got some lard from the cookhouse and anointed all the lieutenant’s organs of sin behind the pulled mosquito nets of a night-time military hospital.

Men perished suddenly of such diseases. You visited once, and there was some way to go. You visited them an hour later and some sort of quiet paroxysm had run through them and left them vacant. It proved to be the case now. As he cleansed the body, he thought of the lard and wondered, how can I get back to what I was from here? Later, he would need to go to Shit Hill, and look out in the clear dawn for signs and indications.