by Greg McGee
Later, when Joe knew Harry better, he began to think that maybe indirectly the rosary had indeed saved Harry. That the last rites had ignited some small anti-Catholic spark that had flared into anger and brought him back from the brink. The following day Joe could see by the hour the infection releasing its grip as Harry Spence flowed back into the wasted husk. The fever had done its worst and was beaten.
One of the first things Harry noticed was the string of black beads hanging on the iron bedstead above his head. ‘Who put those there?’
‘The sisters,’ Joe lied. ‘You get better treatment if they think you’re a Catholic.’
Harry reached up a bony hand and lifted them off. ‘Bugger that,’ he said. He went to throw them away, but was too weak and the beads fell on the bed and lay in his lap.
‘I’ll get rid of them,’ Joe said.
Harry’s faded blue eyes bored into Joe, but he said nothing and Joe couldn’t tell whether there was any recognition in them before they closed again.
Over the weeks that followed, Joe watched Harry’s resurrection as the infection retreated to his thigh and the ulcerated wound gradually healed. Early on, Joe told him they’d played against each other at Ngapara on the footy field cut from a paddock at the edge of town.
‘Who’d you play for?’
‘Athies,’ said Joe. ‘Half-back.’
‘You’re a Mick.’
‘I was brought up that way,’ said Joe.
‘Which school?’
Joe shook his head. He’d desperately wanted to go to high school. When he was twelve, his last year at Ardgowan Primary, his teacher had argued that point with the old man but she had no chance. ‘I started in the mine at thirteen,’ he told Harry.
Although the coal mine at Ngapara was tough at first, he was used to hard work. He and Dan had always risen before dawn to get the cows in for milking by their sisters, then feed the horses, muck out the stable, put the team in harness. The old man made sure there was no time off: there were always jobs either side of school, from grubbing thistles to stooking hay to chopping wood. Nothing changed when he began at the mine except that he started earlier and finished later. The owner of the mine, Captain Nimmo, was a softie by comparison with the old man.
5
Despite Harry’s contempt for Catholics, the home link seemed to count for something. He would wave Joe over to his bed to talk, or ask him to cadge a smoke from the suore, who were different from the severe sisters he’d seen at Sunday school and at the basilica in Reed Street. These ones chatted among themselves and laughed. Harry, who had a nose for these things, had spotted a couple of the younger ones having a furtive durry out on the terrace and thereafter he was at them all the time for a smoke. He’d make them laugh then hit them up. When Harry first wanted to get out of bed, the suore said no, but he did anyway, with Joe’s shoulder supporting him as he hobbled painfully down the ward to a terrace with some chairs. There, Harry looked out at the drop of stone streets and houses to the wharves and the sea beyond. ‘Where’s this?’
Joe told him that he was in a converted barracks in Bari on the eastern seaboard of Italy, that there were a lot of Kiwi and other prisoners of war in a camp just out of town.
Harry didn’t seem very interested in the view, but Joe sat on the terrace a lot, looking out at the town. The buildings were the same colour as the earth they sprang from — no paint, no wood. Oamaru had some grand old whitestone buildings, banks, courts, an opera house, yet none of those looked as old as any one of the ordinary houses and apartments here. He could see a breakwater like Oamaru’s but much bigger, and a lighthouse and a castle with a moat. There were palm trees and a still fierce sun.
Joe wasn’t sure what day or even month it was. He knew the exact date they’d lined up for the advance on El Mreir: 21 July 1942. Time became hazy after that. Weeks had passed, but Joe had lost count of how many. He suspected that, despite the heat, it might be well into autumn. Bari reminded him of a smaller, tidier Cairo, and Benghazi, what little he’d seen of it when he was so sick. You could look out from Bari and feel North Africa just across the water. That gave him no comfort.
Other times, Harry seemed happy to have Joe sit by his bed. As they talked, Joe realised that the easy egalitarianism of the footy field had its limits, because the Harry Spence who came back from the dead was the sort of man that Joe had never really known before. It wasn’t just that Harry was five or so years older, mid-twenties to Joe’s just-turned nineteen, though that was significant. Nor was it just that Harry had some stripes — Joe wasn’t sure how many currently, because in Harry’s stories from Crete he’d been a sergeant, but by the time of El Alamein he was a corporal. Harry never overtly pulled rank yet everything he said had an unstated authority that might have come from his rank or experience or age, or might have come from home.
In Ngapara, hunched at the end of the Waiareka Valley before the hills rose up to Tokarahi and Danseys Pass, there’d been a geographical and social distance between the town and the upland farmers and Joe had heard the villagers, who mostly worked in the flour mill or the mine, say that the hill country people thought they were a cut above. Joe didn’t know whether that was true, but the country beyond Ngapara was certainly different — huge limestone ridges that ran along the skyline like hand-hewn battlements — so it stood to reason that the people might be too.
Harry didn’t give the impression of thinking he was a cut above, but maybe he never needed to. It was embedded in everything that he was, all the props and struts and joists of background that went into the construction of the man Joe was gradually piecing together.
Harry had been a boarder at Waitaki Boys’ High School down on the foreshore at Oamaru, whose famous rector, Frank ‘The Man’ Milner, seemed to know a war was coming. The stories were legion of boys having to sleep in huts named after the battlegrounds at Gallipoli, like Chunuk Bair and Lone Pine and Anzac Cove. These huts had no glass in the windows, just canvas blinds that would be lowered only in the worst weather. The boys would be woken to a trumpeted reveille, then had to muster in the quad in footy jersey and shorts and run to the end of the avenue where it met the main road and back, before stripping off, summer or winter, to swim a width of the school baths naked, encouraged by prefects with sticks. The school’s Hall of Memories was draped with military flags and the rector made impassioned speeches about serving King and Country. The old man told Joe and Dan that if they thought they had it bad at home, he’d send them to Waitaki Boys’ with the rest of the heathens for a bit of hell on earth. They never took his threats seriously because old Malachy Lamont didn’t have the money, but from what Joe knew of Waitaki, it seemed like a school for soldiers and it was no surprise that a man like Harry would take to war like a duck to water.
Joe could see that the expectations arising from a background like Harry’s were very different from his own, even though they came from farms that were less than thirty miles apart. Malachy Lamont’s land at Devil’s Bridge was a small-holding won in a ballot during the enforced break-up of the big estates late last century. Its name came from the way the water in the local creek disappeared into a limestone cliff on one side of the hill and reappeared on the other. The children had been forbidden to go into the cavern where the water came out, but Dan and Joe had once walked a little way in, until a gurgle of water from the darkness ahead had sounded like the devil clearing his throat and they’d run. Joe had gone straight from dux at Ardgowan School to the mine at Ngapara, because the Lamont farm couldn’t support any more mouths in the aftermath of the Depression.
Joe had missed school. Since he was five, he and Dan and the three youngest of their six sisters, Betty and Agnes and Ida, had ridden to school together on an old horse, retired from the team. They’d followed a track established by their older sisters up a long valley and under the wooden aqueduct that brought water in an open race thirty miles from the Waitaki River to the Oamaru reservoir, just acro
ss the valley from the school. Ardgowan School never had more than forty pupils. It was just a big room with a steeply pitched corrugated iron roof set on a ridge that looked back west, past Devil’s Bridge and the Waiareka Valley to the Kakanui Mountains on the horizon, the hill country where Harry farmed. Beyond the mountains was the basin of the Maniototo. Plain of Blood, someone said it meant.
Joe had always loved that view of blue hills and white tops. Sometimes in Benghazi hospital he’d tried to use that memory to help keep the molten sky of El Mreir at bay. But El Mreir had leached its way in one night when Joe was particularly desperate to leave it behind. The grand peaks of the Kakanuis had begun to melt and Joe felt something awful stirring behind them on the Plain of Blood. He tried not to think of it again.
Maybe Harry knew more about the Lamonts than he let on. Maybe it was just that Joe was a coal miner, or a private, but the difference between them was clear mostly in the way Harry talked about the war.
Joe had seen only terror and confusion in his one action, the night attack at El Mreir. Three infantry companies from the 24th Battalion, about three hundred and fifty men, had fought their way towards a set of co-ordinates on someone’s map, cutting a line through minefields, then making close-quarter assaults on nests of machine guns and isolated defensive strongpoints. As they waited for the off, fuelled by adrenaline and fear, seconds had seemed to stretch to hours, then compress again when they walked into a steel mesh of bullets. Joe had cursed the darkness to begin with, until the night lit up with flares and tracers and mortars. In those brief explosive brightnesses he could see the splaying and ripping of flesh and bone but was mostly spared what followed as his eyes tried to readjust to the blackness. For most of the advance they couldn’t see the enemy until they were upon them and then thankfully it was all in monochrome: the faces Joe shot at, some as young as his. That had surprised him. In his imaginings the Germans had all been hardened veterans. Reason suggested that because he was still alive some of those Germans he had shot at must be dead. One of them might have been putting his hands up, or not. Maybe he was reaching for something. His mouth was open and he looked surprised when he fell.
By the time they reached their objective it was about 2 a.m. and fewer than a hundred of the three hundred and fifty were left, shocked by the hand-to-hand savagery of their first engagement and by the loss of so many of their mates. They lay battered and exhausted in what seemed like a sandy hollow as the trucks and mortars caught up. They were ordered to dig in while it was still dark and wait for the British tanks to arrive at dawn.
The sand proved superficial — six inches down was unyielding rock. They didn’t have to wait long for the tanks. The British never arrived but just after 5 a.m., in the pre-dawn darkness, a Panzer division appeared on the lip of the low cliff just in front of them. The Panzers were shooting blind but the Kiwis were so close it didn’t matter. What no one had told Joe about battle was the noise. He’d thought the sounds of close combat were horrific enough, the cries and screams, the expulsions of air and blood when the body was punctured by bullet or bayonet. He was used to explosions in the mine, the dull whump of dynamite drilled deep into the face and packed. But when those Panzers had opened up with their big barrels so close, his ears popped with the shock-waves of air from the shells as they hit the rock and fragmented and went right through flesh and blood and metal. The ammo truck took a direct hit and if the Germans had been struggling to see in front of them, that fireball solved the problem. Their machine gun tracer scorched the last pockets of air and Joe stopped looking, dropped his rifle and tried to burrow his way back home through the rock. Until mercifully he’d been hit by a piece of shell, it must have been.
El Mreir was all Joe knew about the real war, but Harry had come over in the Second Echelon — said he’d pulled a favour with an old Waitaki mate in Wellington to get into the 22nd Battalion so he could get to the war sooner. He’d fought in every battle the New Zealand Division had been involved in, from Greece to Crete to North Africa. According to Harry, every one of those, until El Alamein, had been either a SABU, a self-adjusting balls-up, or a GAFU, a general army fuck-up. It seemed the stronger Harry got, the angrier he got, but not with the Germans, whom he always referred to as ‘Jerry’.
‘What happened to you at El Mreir had already happened to 4th Brigade at Ruweisat Ridge the week before. We reach our objective by night, then come dawn we’re sitting ducks for the Panzers because the Pommie tanks we’ve been promised are nowhere to be seen.’
In Harry’s view, most of the Div’s defeats — and they were all defeats from Greece through to El Alamein — were GAFUs and could be laid at the feet of Churchill or the English commander of the 8th Army, ‘that twit Auchindick’, who’d split the New Zealand brigades up into digestible portions for Rommel’s benefit and had left the Kiwi infantry to fight battles against entrenched enemy positions that should have been attacked by British tanks. Sidi Rezegh made Harry particularly bilious, the way the Kiwis were abandoned and nearly five thousand men killed, wounded or captured in two days. Joe had heard about that. The 20th Battalion, which included most of the South Island intake Joe had trained with at Burnham, had been pretty much wiped out.
Joe had no idea what communications had taken place at El Mreir while they were waiting in that wadi for dawn and the arrival of British tanks, but Harry’s suggestion that the British tank commander might have spotted a grammatical mistake in the Kiwi request for support, a misplaced comma, perhaps, into which ambiguity could be read, seemed to make a bitter, futile sense.
Most days, towards evening, Harry would manage to cadge a smoke from one of the younger suore, and with a cigarette between his lips, seemed more reflective. Joe saw an opening to talk about something he was struggling with.
At Maadi he’d been separated from the southern Burnham intake and put into the 24th, an Auckland battalion, as filler. He hadn’t made any real friends by the time of El Mreir, but even so, almost all the faces he recognised were no longer there next morning. He’d seen some of them go down — one, Darby O’Neill, another filler from Dunedin, right alongside, calling to him, but he’d been ordered to keep going, told the medics would come for Darby. Joe heard later that Darby was among the hundreds who didn’t make it that night. Death became commonplace so quickly, so easily. Joe couldn’t mourn anyone, because there were so many. Where did you start? And the guilt. Because what he was thinking as his comrades died screaming or silently all around him was mainly ‘It’s not me. Yet.’ Joe worried that he wasn’t responding correctly to the death all around him, that there must be something wrong with him. How had Harry coped with so many more lost mates?
But for Harry, the dead had simply ‘copped it’ in an unquestionable cause. Hitler was evil scum and had to be stopped. He wasn’t interested in talking about the mates he’d lost, but only about his opinion of what had gone right or wrong, who had won, who had lost. He was particularly incensed that he’d been wounded and captured at El Alamein when they finally ‘had Jerry by the throat’ and had learnt how to beat him, with night attacks supported by tanks that could be relied on to turn up when they said they would.
Joe admired Harry’s strategic perspective on the terror and confusion of war, but was left wondering if he should be feeling something more than fear and guilt.
6
Joe’s wound was healing. The scar tissue down his temple and cheek had pulled the edge of his left eye up and open so it always looked a bit startled. From what he’d seen in the wards at Benghazi and Bari he thought it was a small price to pay.
One morning Joe said goodbye to Harry: he’d been cleared by the doctor to join the rest of the POWs at the camp on the edge of town.
‘Me too,’ said Harry. ‘I’ve had enough of this lark.’
Joe said nothing, certain the doctor and the suore would stop him, but when the carabinieri came to escort him to the camp, Harry was there too, propped up with one c
rutch in what was left of his fighting kit, his lemon squeezer hat, a shirt with the black New Zealand shoulder tab and boots. His shorts had been cut off him in the field hospital, but the sisters had found some trousers that hung baggy from the waist. With Joe’s regulation shorts and a borrowed singlet, they had the makings of one uniform between them.
The contrast with the carabinieri couldn’t have been greater. The older one, who might have been an officer, was an elaboration of dark blue serge and gold braid, with a three-cornered hat surmounting jowls and dewlaps that hadn’t been anywhere near serious work, let alone fighting. The callow youth beside him, who stared wild-eyed at Harry and Joe with his rifle raised, was more modestly uniformed.
‘You’re an absolute picture, mate,’ said Harry, as the senior carabiniere waved his rifle to usher them in front of him.
The man gave no indication as to whether he’d understood but when it became apparent that Harry wasn’t going to get far using a crutch and Joe’s shoulder, he said, ‘Stop.’
After a rapid exchange, the younger man hared off down the street and the older man said, haltingly but clearly, ‘We are waiting here.’
They were on a narrow footpath near a corner that looked out across a small square. There was washing strung out to dry above them, and a small shrine of Mary and baby Jesus set into the wall nearby. Joe was happy to stand there, watching the small intimate transactions of everyday life.
Harry relaxed onto his crutch and asked the carabiniere if he had a smoke. The man shook his head. Satisfied that the policeman would understand, Harry told Joe a story in slow and careful English, about finding an Italian tank in the desert, abandoned, not a scratch on it. The hatch was open and inside it was immaculate, the gun turret pristine, the magazine and gas tank full. Clearly this machine had never fired a shot in anger. ‘But you know the really amazing thing about that Italian tank?’ asked Harry. ‘When we started it up, we found it had one forward gear and four reverse gears.’
