The Last Post

The Last Post is the bugle call through which Jimmy Bigelow carries the dead of the jungle camps into the rest of his life. First sounded after a funeral service conducted by Dorrigo Evans, it is at once a physical ordeal, a duty to the men who will not return home, and a mystery resistant to comforting explanations. Jimmy keeps playing it even while rejecting the idea that its familiar ceremony can make death meaningful or finished.

The call at the funeral

After Dorrigo commends four dead men to God, Jimmy steps forward with his bugle. Before raising it, he shakes the instrument to dislodge any scorpions or centipedes that may have taken shelter inside. The gesture places the call in the material world of the camp: even the instrument must be checked against the jungle before it can sound. Dorrigo, meanwhile, has just admitted that he does not know what God has to do with the dead. The solemn service and the uncertain belief behind it frame a performance that will not offer easy consolation.

The call is already painfully familiar to Jimmy. He has played at five funerals the previous day or the day before, and this performance follows another gathering around the burning bodies. Yet he feels no special emotion as he begins. His distress comes instead from the condition of his mouth and the effort required to make the instrument work. The scene sets the public meaning of a funeral call against the private cost of producing it: the ritual may sound composed, but its player is struggling simply to complete the tune.

A performance made through pain

Jimmy's mouth has been badly damaged. The palate has shed its skin in rags, his lips are swollen, and his tongue is so enlarged and sore that rice tastes to him like hot grapeshot. The Big Fella has identified the condition as pellagra caused by the lack of vitamins in the men's food. Jimmy understands the immediate musical consequence: his tongue blocks the air his mouth must pump into the bugle.

At first he can manage the slow notes. The difficulty sharpens as the melody quickens, particularly at the point where he believes the Last Post gains its terrible power. He must force his whole body to make the short stops that shape the tune as it rises and falls. In his perception, his tongue seems gone; he imagines tapping the mouthpiece with a piece of four-by-two, trying to stop the notes and articulate the melody by another means. The image makes musical technique feel almost like carpentry: a broken instrument-player relationship patched together through effort.

He improvises by sliding breaths around his swollen tongue and concentrating on striking the notes. His nerve endings scream, his body feels aflame, and tears come from the physical pain of playing rather than from an emotion he recognizes. He turns away quickly, embarrassed that anyone might mistake those tears for softness. The performance is therefore both a private ordeal and a service to the survivors: he holds the tune together for the men who will remain in the jungle and never find their way home.

A duty that refuses closure

Jimmy does not accept the conventional reassurance that the dead soldier can now rest or that his task is done. To him, those claims only raise questions: what task, and why should anyone be able to rest? He continues playing the call, but understands it through refusal as much as through observance. He hates the music because it is music of death and because the men have died; nevertheless, he is determined never to stop.

That resolve outlasts the camp. Jimmy plays at Anzac Days, gatherings of former prisoners of war, official functions, and sometimes at home late in the evening when memory overwhelms him. He hopes listeners will understand the questions he is playing, but they make other meanings of the music, beyond his control. The call becomes a meeting point between an individual survivor's unresolved experience and public ceremonies that can assign it a settled significance. For Jimmy, each breath and note reaches toward a shared human transcendence, only for that possibility to perish in the sound itself, just beyond reach until the next phrase.

Forgetting and return

Immediately after the war, its experience seems to recede. It returns occasionally like a bad bump in a mattress, disturbing the night, but ordinary life fills the years: work, partners, houses, friends, family, children, illness, death, and retirement. Jimmy finds it difficult to place Hobart in relation to the camps and the Line, and at times doubts that he ever went to war. Other men's accounts of fighting at El Alamein and Tobruk, in Borneo, or in a North Sea convoy seem more incredible. The war becomes an interruption to the life that follows, even as the call remains one of its stubborn traces.

In old age, the balance reverses. Jimmy has good years and grandchildren, but as his health declines, the war increasingly occupies his mind while the other ninety years of his life dissolve. He comes to think and speak of little else, as though little else has happened. For years, then decades, he does not play the call. At ninety-two, dying in hospital after his third stroke, he raises the bugle with his good arm. The smoke and the smell of burning flesh return to him, and the wartime funerals become, in his final perception, the one event that had truly happened. The last performance does not resolve the memory; it shows how completely it has come to define him.

The meaning left to his daughter

Jimmy's daughter Jodie encounters the call through an Anzac Day school project. Her father has seemed absent through much of her life and never offers himself as a veteran with a substantial story to tell. When she presses him, he retrieves an old bugle, wipes the mouthpiece, and first makes a few comic, farting noises to amuse her. Then he finds real notes, drops the instrument, coughs, swells up, and raises his head in a martial manner unfamiliar to her before playing the Last Post. The abrupt passage from comedy to ceremonial posture gives Jodie a brief glimpse of a self she has not known.

When she points out that the performance is not enough for a school project, Jimmy insists that it is all he knows and about all anyone needs to know. Asked whether the experience was hard, he minimizes it: the men only had to suffer, and they were lucky. His answer does not disclose the history behind his performance; it withholds it, in keeping with his long difficulty recalling the war. But when Jodie asks what the music means, he eventually calls it a mystery, adding that the greater the mystery, the more it means.

That answer captures the call's unresolved place in the novel. Jimmy's performance can be heard as commemoration, duty, bodily endurance, or an expression of questions that public listeners may not recognize. His daughter receives no full account of the war, only a sound, a gesture, and an admission that meaning cannot be made entirely explicit. The call persists not as a tidy message about rest or closure, but as a form in which remembrance and uncertainty remain bound together.