I almost went back, almost didn’t leave there at all; she said I could wear the fiancé’s clothes and work on the farm with her, and no one in my army would know I hadn’t been killed at Pozieres. I tried to tell her there was Jane, waiting for me at home. She tried to tell me that when her fiancé came back we could stop loving each other and I could go home to Jane. There were a few hours, perhaps a day or two, when I thought it possible. But in the end I knew I couldn’t stay. If good things happened in this world I could see her again, maybe; find out she’s safe and happy, married to her bloke, and then I could go home to Jane and my son. But good things don’t happen like that. I even wonder sometimes if the farmhouse still exists. Or did some stray shell misfire and demolish the place — and her with it?
*
We’ve been stuck here in these trenches for over forty-eight hours. Eardrums shattered by our own guns firing at the Huns, followed by the sound of our aircraft overhead. New recruits are told this is a bombing raid to help soften up the enemy. What they aren’t told is that this is bullshit, the usual deceit for the mugs in the trenches handed out by the brass in their safe havens far from here. For instance, this morning when planes of the Royal Air Force flew over us they were not bombers but reconnaissance aircraft sent to view the result, and soon afterwards our artillery resumed firing. Which means all the shells and salvoes fired for two days and nights did not hit their targets; there are still blockhouses intact with machine guns waiting for us, like the machine gunners at Pozieres that scythed down Bluey and so many other mates.
No, not Bluey. Hang on, he died of a flesh wound. Those callous doctors, God I remember them, all right. Told me to clear off when I tried to ask how somebody could be allowed to carelessly die like that. I remember the one who shouted he didn’t give a fuck about the dead, he was too busy trying to save the living.
Well, none of them are living now. None of our platoon who left Melbourne in a flurry of streamers and such young dreams of glory and adventure. None left except me, and a corporal who lost his leg from frostbite the time it snowed at Gallipoli. Lucky old Bob Hargreaves. Still has one leg and two arms, and alive somewhere back in Australia. Tate and Dan Ridley were lost at Ypres. Others at Bullecourt. There are so many whose names I struggle to recall, so many forgotten. A platoon is three ranks of men — I can see them standing on parade in my mind, all gone except for one-legged Bob and me. Poor silly Duggie Chandler — Double-Trouble — boasting of his women and the four fiancées waiting to marry him. If they existed at all, which Bluey and I doubted. It wasn’t many kilometres from here that Double went out of the trench for a pee and a breath of clean fresh air. Sometimes I can still see the explosion when the shell burst and, worst of all, the moment afterwards when nothing was left, not an arm or a leg or anything…
‘What’s up, digger? Eee, y’ look a bit down in the mouth, matey.’
He was a young Pommy, a skinny kid with buck teeth and a voice like a cross-cut saw, one of the new recruits, staring at me because I’d started thinking what a lousy end it was to a joker who’d always been a bit of fun and given us plenty of laughs. If my eyes were a bit moist, it was none of his business.
‘What’s up, chummy? Look like yer was waterin’ the cheeks. Havin’ a bit of a blub, eh?’
‘I’m all right.’ I didn’t feel all right, but I didn’t need this kid to be intruding.
‘Yer don’t look all right to me, yer look shit-scared. Like you need a white flag to wave.’
‘Just sod off!’ I told him, but he didn’t seem able to take a hint.
‘You’re windy, yer bleedin’ are! Plain as day. I thought the ruddy Anzacs were supposed to all be such heroes.’
‘Shut up, you stupid turd!’
But he wouldn’t shut up. ‘Eee, lads,’ he called out, ‘get a fooking look at this! We got a bleedin’ Anzac here with the wind right up his Khyber Pass!’
I don’t know what I would’ve done next to get rid of him. But that was when an English corporal came and told the boy to clear out. He sent him to the far end of the trench. We could hear him as he went, still saying that one of their new reinforcements, a fooking Anzac of all people, was green around the gills and havin’ bleedin’ kittens. The corporal yelled at him and shrugged at me with what seemed like sympathy.
‘Stupid lad. He’ll learn.’
‘By the time they learn, it’s often a bit late.’
‘New reinforcement, he called you. As if you were fresh out from Blighty.’
‘Wish it was true, Corp. Wouldn’t mind being brand new and innocent, like some of them.’
‘Name’s Ted,’ the corporal said.
‘Stephen.’
‘Been in a few horrible places have you, Stephen?’
‘Too many. I was thinking of the mates I lost at Pozieres, down the road from here, when that kid saw tears in my eyes.’
‘I’ll sort him out. Sit and take it quiet for a while. Be a couple more hours, by the sound of it.’
‘That’ll mean the middle of the day, Ted. It’ll be bloody murder.’
‘Got no choice, day or night. If the officers start blowing their whistles, we have to go. Or the trench police shoot us from behind.’ ‘Trench police?’ It was a new one to me. I was puzzled by the term.
‘Maybe you Aussies never had ‘em.’
‘I don’t think we did. Are they coppers?’
‘Sort of. They often come as recruits, so we got no idea who they are till their revolvers come out before we go over. If someone cracks or holds back, they kill him. So he can’t panic the rest.’
‘God Almighty.’ No, I certainly didn’t remember us ever having friendly persuasion like that behind us.
‘They’re all conscripts now, see. They didn’t want to come here. That stupid kid, he’s more scared than you or me.’
He was in his twenties, the corporal, a compact build and rather keen face. On edge like all of us, but making a better fist than most.
‘What exactly are we doing?’ I asked him. ‘Does anyone know the purpose of this attack?’
‘Not really. But it seems the brass need them trenches the Huns are in, to mount a big push. The attack should’ve been at dawn, but the guns got the wrong targets.’
‘Nothing changes, Ted, does it?’
‘Not much, mate.’
‘So many mistakes. Bullecourt, our own guns got quite a few of us there. Thirty tanks we had in support, twenty-five of them broke down, and our bloody guns were behind, shelling the shit out of us. Nothing ever bloody changes.’
‘Relax, Stephen. I know it’s impossible to sleep, but try to rest a bit. We’ll get a tot of rum before we go.’
A tot of rum, I thought. Dutch courage. I tried to rest. The guns were silent after a time, and I began to feel my stomach knot with expectation. Then more aircraft flew over, and soon afterwards artillery fire resumed again. The whole morning went by, and we were told to line up with our mess kit. A watery stew was served, but who the hell had any appetite? I threw mine into the oozing mud, and saw the sludge stir as rats fought over it below the filthy surface.
For two more hours our composite battalion of rejects and recruits sat obediently waiting. While I could vividly recollect the nightmare of hand-to-hand combat, I’d almost forgotten the sheer tedium of the trenches. Hours, sometimes days, of waiting. No chance to relax because of nerves that were so on edge, yet we were supposed to sleep in these waiting periods of daylight. The nights were reserved for work, digging latrines, guard duty, as well as laying down more duckboards and repairing the damaged dugouts.
The next predicted two hours passed. My mind seemed to be a turmoil. Maybe another hour, someone said, and that was when I knew I couldn’t wait any longer, or fight any more. There were steps set up for us to climb when the signal to attack came. I stood up, climbed them and I was out of the trench. It was so quick and casual that hardly anyone was aware of it until the rifle fire started from, the German trenches on the far side of the wire. I hear
d a shout; it was the same young Tommy.
‘It’s that dopey fookin’ Anzac!’ he yelled.
I just stood there for a moment, oblivious to him and everything else. I must’ve been silhouetted against the sky, somehow not hit by the shots from the enemy rifles, while rejecting the shouts from my own platoon to get back in the trench and take cover.
I ignored everything, told the whole world to go straight to hell and walked away from both sides. I’d come to the conclusion the French had been right; this war was no longer worth another single life, and I was going home to my wife and child. Even if I had to walk all the way.
TWENTY
It was late at night but Claire and Patrick continued to read.
Lying in bed, their minds were focused on the events of that extraordinary day eighty-two years ago, when a young man’s life changed forever. Miraculously spared by the enemy fire, Stephen Conway walked away from the conflict and tried to explain why. Perhaps it was the example of the French mutineers, or the savage reprisal that followed. Perhaps the angry poems of Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, volunteer officers now bitterly against the war. But more likely it was too many bloodstained metres, too many lives squandered for so little gain, and most of all too much time spent in the awful state of rage that he knew lay ahead, a state he and his mates had always labelled the slaughterhouse.
Claire and Patrick read these attempts in which Stephen tried to clarify his feelings, the fumbled sentences, the misspelt words scratched out, the raw pain exposed in the scribbled pages. There was a veracity that kept them reading, although they felt nauseated.
The slaughterhouse is what we call it… that’s the hard bit, the worst part… the hand-to-hand combat where we fight and the sound you hear is grunting. We grunt like pigs. It’s a wild sort of madness that lasts a long time after… a long time… hunting out the enemy after we reach their trenches… hunting and killing the bastards. No prisoners taken… not yet… not a chance of that, not till the blood starts to cool down, till the mind gets a bit calmer. It always takes an hour or two to be sane again… then we stop knifing them in the guts with bayonets or shooting them in cold blood while they’re helpless. We stop enjoying it, and the slaughterhouse is over for another day. When we cool down we can bear to escort them as prisoners to a lockup, knowing they’ll be safe to see out the war in there. Hating them for being able to survive, when we’re not sure if we will. It’s sick, horrible… but that’s how we are, we’re like animals till the slaughterhouse ends.
It’s what we were taught… they trained us to be murderers… taught us on dummies, on wheat sacks stuffed with straw back home at training camp… if you didn’t scream and yell as you shoved the bloody broom handle — pretending it was a bayonet — into the dummy’s straw gut, you got leave docked, or made to peel spuds in the cookhouse, or else empty the putrid stinking dunny cans. We fought first with broom handles — when we got real bayonets we were in shit if the dummies weren’t ripped apart. That’s how they taught us. You learn it, then you find you’re killing people… the dummies have become flesh that screams and blood that spurts…you can’t stop because you’ve been taught too well.
How can you turn it off, that frenzy, when a whistle blows? But that’s what they expect, the bastards who trained us. You’re supposed to stop, the game’s over lads, shake hands. Another game real soon. Perhaps tomorrow… more murder tomorrow.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Claire said shakily, ‘no wonder Mrs Greenfield at the home thought of burning this.’
They continued reading. They felt close to the truth, the reason Stephen Conway had never returned home. The explanation was here somewhere in the last tortured, unstable pages.
It was that ferocious aftermath of battle, Stephen’s notebook insisted, the dreadful hour of triumph when they stabbed and shot and murdered the enemy so indiscriminately that caused it. The killing was what he could no longer bear, and the thought that it would happen again and again. For during that period of time it seemed they were not human, not amendable to reason; afterwards, when a sort of sanity returned, there was always a sense of horror and shame.
Whatever the cause, he had to get away.
Four years was more than enough. Nobody, four years ago, had expected to be here this long. If they had there would have been no volunteers, no brass bands or recruiting rallies that enrolled the thousands of lads who were afraid not to join — afraid of being called cowards and singled out to be humiliated by being given white feathers.
If any of them had had the least idea what it would be like, most would’ve braved the jeers and feathers and never left home.
Surely he had done enough. Done what they called ‘his bit’.
More than his bit.
What about those people back home on the beaches; blokes his age playing cricket and football; what about the crowds at race meetings? What kind of fair go was it, if he was not allowed to go home and join them?
He described walking along the road that led towards the town of Peronne, and looking for a field hospital where he intended to report he was ill and needing treatment. He had no real idea of his whereabouts. It was a British command area; General Monash’s Australian headquarters was miles away, too far to walk for his feet were blistered and he was already limping badly.
Thus what happened from then on could not have been foreseen. Without those blisters he could have marched into more friendly terrain, or so it seemed to Patrick reading this more than eighty years later.
Stephen Conway was stopped and questioned by two British military policemen. As a result of his confused answers and his futile attempt to run away, they drew their pistols and tried to shoot him. The bullets missed, but his confusion grew into muddled panic. He had come along this road, trying to seek sanctuary from the war, but it seemed he had brought the war with him.
Falling to the ground, a quivering wreck, he was caught; his arms were twisted as the police forced his hands into shackles they locked behind his back, then he was frog marched to a detention barracks and accused of being absent from his post, disobeying orders and resisting arrest. He was incoherent and angry, hence unwisely abusive, which brought a savage beating by the military police, after which he was shoved into a cell and held there for further interrogation.
That night, after more questions — hours of questions — after being provoked into yelling back at them by the throbbing in his head and the explosions inside his mind, after sobbing and telling them to all get fucked, that he would never fight again, he was formally charged with desertion in the face of enemy fire and arraigned to face a court-martial as soon as possible. Nobody thought to advise him he could have a legal representative. His mind was so addled by years of bombardment while living in mud, it did not occur to him that being a law student he could even attempt to defend himself.
His feelings were scrawled in wild sentences, but precisely when they had been written was unknown. It had to be after the trial, Patrick felt, but how long afterwards? Until they knew the totality of what exactly had happened, it was impossible to tell.
Sometimes he and Claire had to reassemble the scrambled words, to assume some events from a phrase or two as they tried to construct the happenings of so long ago. The court-martial, for instance, seemed to have been delayed while the British authorities discussed the protocol. A question had been raised: should Private Conway be tried by his own senior officers of the Australian force? Not if that could be prevented, seemed to be the answer.
For they knew that because of political differences at home, Australian military courts did not enforce the death penalty. Hence Allied Command was determined to deal with the problem of Private Conway itself. One British colonel in particular was most insistent. He pointed out many Canadians had been tried for serious crimes by High Command court-martial, and these soldiers had been executed without protest from their government. In his opinion, the Australians were not a separate force at all but British Empire troops, and the accused had been serving
in a unit that was under British command. It therefore established a clear precedent for the matter to be dealt with by them, and it should occur without delay. This war must be won, he declaimed; if soldiers could escape the penalty for desertion, thousands would run away! Morale would suffer, the war could be lost. In the colonel’s opinion this was no routine case, it was a matter of crucial concern.
It was Claire who realised the colonel’s identity, by delving back a few years into Stephen’s diary.
‘Carmody,’ she said. ‘Major Carmody! Remember him?’
Patrick realised she was right. This relentless colonel was the former Major Carmody, who declared the accused was a known troublemaker, — a sergeant reduced to the ranks for insubordination. He announced he could personally testify to that crime. The Australian was also a shirker, hiding from the war at Netley Hospital, which his fellow officers would agree was a well known bolthole for malingers and cowards.
His fellow officers declined to air their opinions on that, but they did concur on the jurisdiction. They favoured the notion they should try the case. After all, if Canadians had been court-martialled by the British military when circumstances warranted, why not Australians? Both countries were dominions, both under the supreme command of Field Marshal Haig. Why should special privileges be granted to any Australian criminals? If they were able to escape the ultimate penalty, then what was India, South Africa, New Zealand and the rest of the Empire going to say?
The Colonel’s rhetoric prevailed. It was agreed Private Conway would face a court-martial of British officers.
Barbed Wire and Roses Page 23
