Free Amongst the Dead by Robert Gott

right, Bill. They’re expected.’
    The voice came from behind us. He must have followed us in. He was more formally dressed than his fellow sergeants, if the addition of a sweat-stained shirt can be called formal. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five-years old, but there was something about him that was grave and impressive, and it didn’t come from his rank. It occurred to me, as I saw the other men defer subtly and without rancour to him, that if he survived the war he’d amount to something.
    ‘Luther Martin,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘My parents thought it was amusing.’
    ‘I imagine the joke’s worn a bit thin over the years,’ I said.
    He smiled, and revealed a startling gold cap over one of his front teeth.
    ‘By the age of twelve I was choosing my friends on the basis of whether or not they resisted the temptation to say anything.’
    He didn’t sound like a soldier, but I suppose in a time of war the army is full of people who aren’t by inclination military men.
    ‘Sit down, please,’ he said. It was then that I noticed that the room was furnished with an eclectic mix of domestic chairs and sofas.
    ‘Bloody hell,’ Glen said. ‘I feel like I’m in somebody’s lounge room.’
    ‘In a way you are,’ Luther said. ‘It’s all looted from houses around here.’
    He shot the other two sergeants a glance.
    ‘Hey,’ the one he’d called Bill said, ‘I wasn’t even here when all that was going on.’
    ‘Neither was I,’ said his mate. ‘We all sit in them, though, don’t we?’
    Luther acknowledged the justice of the remark with a cock of the head, and explained.
    ‘Back in February, after the first raids, blokes went a bit crazy. The civilians had been mostly evacuated, so their houses were unprotected, and lots of blokes — army blokes, mind you — had a field day. You hear stories of bloody grand pianos being loaded onto trucks. What the hell would you do with a grand piano?’
    ‘Maybe it’s in the officers’ mess,’ Brian said.
    They laughed.
    ‘Well, anyway, it was a bloody disgrace,’ Luther said.
    ‘Better to be sitting on it than just letting it get blown to pieces,’ said Bill.
    ‘So it’ll be returned, will it, if the house survives and the owners come back?’ asked Luther.
    ‘The spoils of war, mate.’
    ‘As a general rule,’ Luther said calmly, ‘that’s meant to refer to stuff you win from the enemy, not old Mrs Whatever-her-name-is who lives in Cavenagh Street.’
    ‘Fair enough,’ was the response, and it was clear that no one was interested in pursuing the ethical ambiguities of looting. Luther told us then that we could expect an air raid, but that the barracks probably wouldn’t be heavily attacked.
    ‘Unlike the RAAF base,’ he said, ‘we’ve never been carpet-bombed. The odd high explosive job, daisy cutters, strafing, but they’ve chosen not to reduce us to rubble. Some bloke reckons he heard from someone in Intelligence that the Japs want to use the barracks after they invade. Makes sense, I suppose. It’s not like we’re hard to see.’
    ‘Those bastards bombed the crap out of the hospital,’ said the man who wasn’t Bill, ‘and it’s only a hundred yards away.’
    A few minutes later, the wail of an air-raid siren sounded, and we were bundled outside into the uncertain safety of a slit trench.
    I don’t know how many bombs fell, or even how long the raid took. The crump and thump of bombs and ack ack fire, the squall of shrapnel and mosquitoes, and a terrifying sense that I was about to die, all conspired to make time stand still. As the noise faded and I realised that all I could hear was the mosquitoes droning, someone gave me a small shove to indicate that it was safe to stand up. Spears of bright search-light flew upwards, and the air was thick with the awful smell of explosives. An incendiary had hit a building a small distance away, and men were already scrabbling to put out the flames. I was glad of the