by Hyde, Robin
Rada was the first expert at the game that Starkie had ever known. Drilling at Zitoun next day, the sergeant said, ‘Rada, Rada!’, which was odd; but not so queer as it would have been had the sergeant been able to read Starkie’s mind and see his meticulous orders transformed into silly phrases, bearing no relation to the arts of war.
Starkie stuck to Rada until after the battle of the Wazza. In this he was luckier than some who wandered farther and fared worse. One of the mates who had gambled and drunk and wrestled with him disappeared ignominiously behind barbed wire. Starkie had one day—visiting the missing friend in hospital—his first glimpse of real pain. He had thought of the figure eights and the Dummy as hard experience, but they, at any rate, came to an end; they weren’t unclean and they weren’t incredible. He saw men lying in cots of canvas, with nothing but cotton wool sheathing their tortured skins. Faces blotted out by sores; eyes that cried and had no sight in them…. Cold panic wormed its way into his heart. But Rada was all right. Rada pretty near loved him. If he liked he could stay with Rada till the end of the War; she and her mother were keen on keeping him. But he wasn’t looking for a job in that profession. Nobody but Rada. He went away and drew the shouting and the two-up schools in camp over his mind for protection.
The El Dorado was the French girls’ place, and cost twenty piastres.
The officers seldom if ever came to the Wazza, but congregated in one of the hotels. According to the officers, this place was a perfectly respectable restaurant; according to the men, it was the same as all the other houses, but it cost fifty piastres, and didn’t admit privates. Its reputation had a mark against it as a nest of international spies, some of them very attractive. But the feature of the place was really Abdul, the chucker-out. Abdul was a huge fellow, reputed to be an eunuch, coal-black, shiny, and with biceps that would have made Jack Dempsey cry. Starkie saw Abdul pick up two of his tent-mates, one under each arm, and carry them to the door of the hotel kicking like two-year-olds. Abdul didn’t spank Paddy or Goliath. He deposited them gently in the gutter, wiped his hands on a silken handkerchief, gazed serenely at the sky, sighed, and proceeded indoors, his ponderous legs swinging like tree-trunks.
In the noon heat everything in Cairo slept except the very old women and the male defenders of the prostitutes’ quarters, known to the dictionary as souteneurs, and to the troops as bludgers. The siesta lasted until four or five in the evening—the girls in their scanty wisps of clothing, limp as rag dolls among their brilliant heaps of cushions. In the streets, under steps, under arches, in the shadow-nooks of old buildings, in the gateways of the mosques, lay curled in sound slumber the Egyptian children. Everywhere on naked or near-naked bodies crawled the great black flies—not hundreds but millions of them.
Once, in Crusading days, there was a place of an evil name, the Tower of Flies. All ill was supposed to spread from there; and Satan, who was stoned, in the East is the Lord of Flies. His satellites, with their scaly wings and big convex ruby eyes, have taken for themselves the flesh of the Egyptian people. They crawled into the eyes of the sleeping children, into mouths and nostrils, where their greedy little suckers drained the moisture from delicate membranes. The children never woke, never cried, never lifted a hand to brush away their persecutors. The Lord of Flies owned them, they raised no dispute with him. Many of them were beautiful children, their limbs lithe and rounded, bronze-skinned, their heads as noble as those graved in the battered statuary of the Cairo Museum. When the sun matured them, the fierce sun, the stink and din of the Egyptian streets, they found their niche in the balconied houses of the Wazza, the little girls as prostitutes, the boys as parasites and thieves.
It was ten o’clock of a brilliantly sunlit morning when the battle of the Wazza began without one word of warning. Starkie was staring at the goldfish in a great marble fountain set in the square. These bore no resemblance whatever to the homely little red fishes to be found in the lakes of his native land. They were exaggerated in size, colour, and shape, marvellously burnished, like creatures from some Arabian tale of Sultans, viziers, and the lopping off of heads. Everything was fantastic in Cairo, and most things were cruel. The red-gold fish, now a foot long if they were an inch, looked as fierce as dragons.
There was a swirl of soldiers across the street. Nobody proffered much explanation as the khaki surged past. ‘Come on, boys, it’s a battle!’ roared a man with the voice of a bull. Then beyond the first row of houses, spreading across the skyline like an enormous blue umbrella, there appeared a writhing column of smoke. The shrieks began, tearing the morning in pieces, and aided by the sounds of splintering glass. In a moment the square where Starkie stood was jammed with the rush of soldiers. A man tipped over into the fountain and was hauled out, dripping, still shouting: ‘Come on, this way!’
Aimlessly, yet with the seeming purpose of a mad dog or a Malay running amok, the charge swept on down the streets. Starkie ran with them, yelling as they yelled, without the faintest idea why he ran and yelled. The Wazza began to glare with the pattern of flames against the windows of seven-storeyed houses. There were shrieks and crashes as women and souteneurs were thrown down from the upper windows of those tall-balconied ratholes. Furniture was tossed out and battered into splinters. A soldier reeled into a doorway with a Gippo knife sunk to the haft in his belly, and sat there retching and coughing, a bright red foam on his lips. One hand was pressed against his stomach. Nobody stopped to ease the death that had its fangs in his middle, but there was another roar, ‘Murder! Come on!’
Between two high buildings a ladder was run out. From the blazing house on the right a negro souteneur, his eyes rolling, his teeth gnashing white, started to crawl along the ladder to safety. In the left-hand house the bunch of soldiers laughed and cheered him on. When the souteneur was in the middle of the swaying ladder they put their weight on the end. The ladder wobbled, tipped up. With one howl the fat man disappeared into space. The sound of his fall was flung up between the gulf of the houses to the soldiers, who did not cease to laugh.
There was one Australian officer who tried to stop the wreckers. He was a brave fool. He set his back against a house towards which the mob were running—a silk-merchant’s place. Arms spread out like those of a crucified man, he guarded the silk-merchant’s door, shouting something unintelligible to the men as they charged. Starkie saw his brown face, angry, defiant, unafraid. Another moment, and no face was visible at all. The officer was down under the running boots, and men trod on his body as they burst into the store. The Egyptian fire-brigades came shrieking in, to be mobbed by the soldiers. The drivers were dragged off their engines, the hand-pumps smashed and the hoses hacked to pieces. It was so hot that they could no longer stand in the square, but they began to drag barricades of bolts of silk and furniture across the streets and set light to them, repelling the rescue parties who came in at the double from Zitoun Camp. The silk smouldered and then blazed, great piled bolts of it, ruby, China white, green, sky-blue. The flames shot up in a dense and maddening forest, and within that circle the scorpion of the Wazza brandished its sting against its own death. Naked women ran from their balcony-rooms to the damp ooze of their cellars. A soldier among the looters died, crushed under the weight of the grand piano that the prostitutes pushed out of their high window on the heads of the men below. Wherever a house offered resistance, soldiers posted themselves at the door-way and smashed down women and souteneurs as the flames drove them out.
With the flames and smoke still streaming into the air, Starkie made his way to Rada’s house. During the thick of the looting and burning he had never given her a thought. She was crouching in the cellar of her home, bedraggled and wet as a rat, but with her money in her stocking. He spent the night with her, and crawled back to camp in the morning, red-eyed, unshaven, singed about the eyebrows and hair. As soon as he got into camp he was arrested on principle, as were all the night’s absentees. Paraded before Captain Dombey, he swore that he had been hit on the head in the beginni
ng of the battle and rescued by a young lady.
‘Young lady!’ Dombey’s face was as drawn as his own, after a night of frenzied effort steering the defaulters back to camp. ‘You look like young lady, you do. Keep it up and you know where you’ll end.’ He turned away with more crime-sheets on his hands than any officer could hope to deal with unless prepared to decimate his battalion.
Only one explanation was given concerning the Wazza battle, though there was a vague rumour that a soldier had been locked in one of the brothels and had called for a rescue. To this no great authority attaches. The explanation shrieked at a fulminating officer by a man in the ranks of the New Zealanders consisted of only one sentence, but from the psychological point of view it was one of the most remarkable sentences spoken in the history of the War.
‘They was better off dead.’
Every civilized race of mankind, and many savage races also, regard with horror the loss of personal identity. Nations with no written history, such as the Maoris, have an elaborate and priestly system of memorizing every twig on the ancestral tree of the individual. In white society, to lose identity is a personal disgrace. One of the penal code’s forms of punishment—admitted a barbarous one by most criminals—is to deprive a man of his name and indicate him by a number. Often among the very poorest is witnessed dread of the pauper’s grave, the resting-place of which no man knoweth the name any more.
In the Wazza the men who went to appease curiosity or appetite found themselves confronted with the same loss of identity. Women with whom they could exchange no common word of language received them behind doors where, in many cases, they waited in processions for that curious relief. There was no pretence that one soldier’s face differed from the rest. The men were used, especially the colonial soldiers whose countries supported no licensed houses, to more regard for their vanity. Even those women who had played the prostitute’s part for them in their own lands had, for the most part, woven the little fables of individual romance and liking.
In the Wazza, they were nobody; male embracing heterogeneous female. The first shock of this faded from their consciousness, but it waited in hiding—a resentment that they hardly realized, but that could not be placated except by vengeance. The convict becomes accustomed to the loss of his name and citizenship, but the surface resentment wears down into his deeper hatred of Society. So it was with the soldiers in the Wazza. The place stole their sexual identity from them. They had to revenge themselves. The women who had deprived them, the souteneurs who shared the spoils, the houses where they had waited, were—in the phrase of that inspired and hysterical soldier—better off dead.
The Wazza battle was the end of Rada in so far as Starkie was concerned. Warmed by that night of creeping together after the storm, he left most of his gear with her—to find when he went back the next day that she had lavishly bestowed it on an Australian corporal. Black eyes, peach-flushed face, defied him. She was paying him back, maybe, for his share in the battle. Starkie said good-bye to kit and lady, being in affairs of the heart no communist.
The conjurer and the pigeon became of fading importance in Zitoun Camp. In the first week of August, 1915, a curious quiet fell upon the thousands of white tents. The men stayed in camp, the ordinary programme of lectures and drill seemed to slacken. A week later they were entrained for Alexandria. Not even a day’s leave was given them to see the city where once Cleopatra’s barge flashed its silver oars against the thick Nile waters. Without pause they were shipped to Lemnos.
Hundreds of battleships lay here at anchor, and big merchantmen took shelter among the grey cruisers and destroyers that showed the colours of every allied nation. Until evening the Fifth stayed ashore, drinking red wine at quiet little hostelries, strangely silent after Cairo, where Greek girls with black hair and splendid eyes served them. It was no interlude in a Grecian Wazza. The people of Lemnos seemed little interested in khaki. At sunset the Fifth were taken on board their troopship, the Redwing, and with an escort of four destroyers steamed out of the naval base towards Gallipoli. A submarine’s shark tooth had torn the side out of one of the transports a few days before, just outside Lemnos Harbour. There was a yell of ‘Submarine!’ as the Redwing slid into open sea, and the soldiers rushed to the side of the boat to take pot-shots with their newly issued rifles at a dark object like a periscope bobbing in the water near by. The splinter, after a lucky shot, proved them to have wasted their bullets on the neck of a cruising bottle; but that took nothing of the fervour of marksmanship away from the soldiers, most of whom were afraid that their heavy ammunition issue would pull them down if the ship were torpedoed.
Between Lemnos and Gallipoli the troops on the Redwing saw a strange sight. At midnight the whole of the sky was lighted with a vast aurora. The shimmering, trembling colours—apple-green, rose, tender violet, hazy gold—fringed the horizon with great jester-peaks of radiance. Many of the men on the troopship declared that the aurora was a good omen. The colours danced in the sky until early morning, and the Redwing cut through a black-and-silver sea, calm as a pond. The light of early dawn showed them only the vague outlines of cliffs when at four o’clock the Redwing lay at anchor off Y Beach, on Gallipoli.
7 Dawn’s Angel
WHEN the troops from the Redwing were taken off on barges to Y Beach there was no more sound to disturb the morning than an occasional whiplash crack, a rifle spitting far away, or a dull thud which sounded as though a gigantic muffled hammer had been brought down on the earth. They were told in whispers that this was the concussion of a shell; but the front line, six miles distant, was still a legend to them. Everybody talked in whispers; and it was rather amusing to see the giants of Tent Eight—and stouter men than they—walking like cats on hot bricks, afraid of a shuffle of pebbles among the sands. Three miles up from Y Beach they struck Anzac Cove and a standing-up breakfast—boiling water with a pinch of tea-dust thrown in, biscuits, and bully beef.
Against them in the pale rise of the morning was something which for the New Zealanders had especial significance. The Maori Pioneer Corps, passing this way, had stopped to carve out of the yellow clay face of the Gallipoli cliffs a gigantic Maori Pa. The men now passing quietly by saw carved stockade pillars with their little lizards, ornate whorls, and leaves of carving, top-heavy idols with their huge heads lolling on their shoulders, their eyes squinting, their tongues out. The work was still fresh, and recalled to the New Zealanders their few glimpses of that old world of different fighters—the red-ochred stockades, the wharepunis, the little store-houses standing on their high stilts and daubed with crimson to keep away the night-demons; a world which now and again, behind the bush-veils and the mist-veils of the New Zealand hills, had silenced their childhood with a memory of something that fought to the death. Those native hills pitted with the brown circles of the old Maori trenches, their wounds not yet quite hidden in the green softening of grass, were not unlike the hills of Gallipoli that now slid out of the sheath of the morning mist. But where New Zealand hills hide under the grey-stemmed manuka bushes, with their pungent flower-cups brown and white or delicate peach-colour, the Gallipoli hills were covered with a little shrub of somewhat darker green, its astringent leaves bitter with a flavour of quinine.
A splendid morning sunlight began to break over the cliffs. Paddy Bridgeman and Jack Frew, Fleshy McLeod and Starkie, proceeded together. After breakfast a bugler blew the fall-in, the thin notes thrusting like an arrogant silver spear into the silence of Gallipoli. The troops were lined up above the water-tanks on the beach. Before the men were in their places, the hills above them began to flash and rattle. The fall-in woke up every sniper in the world. Four hundred men stood in line to answer the roll-call. As they stood, a man in the front rank pitched forward.
‘Hullo, there’s a chap fainted,’ whispered Jack Frew.
Somebody turned the man over on his back. Right between his eyes there was a little blue mark, like a dot made with a slate-pencil. Death had given him no time to change
the expression on his face—a boy’s look of interest and curiosity. He was left lying where he fell.
The men fell into a column and marched four deep up Mule Gully under fire from machine-guns, rifles, and shells. Very few of them were old enough to be veterans of the Boer War. The way up Mule Gully was like the end of the world. Their warning of the shell’s coming was a rush of air, a crash, a blinding blue flash amidst the chocolate fountain of the uptorn earth. Shrapnel burst in a dazzling hail of steel—a crash where it struck the ground, then rip—roar—and the fragments tore the sides out of skulls, cut bodies in two, dismembered men as they marched. Captain Dombey was in front of the column as the troops came in plain sight of 971, the entrenched hill of the Turks. In the harbour, British men-of-war, monitors, and destroyers began the barrage, dealing out to the Turks the death which was past the strength of the scanty British artillery. When a battleship fired a broadside at the Turk trenches, the men on shore could see her rock in a trough of smothering foam like a vast grey cradle. Those that lived, crashes and shrieks ringing in their ears as though the echo must last on for centuries, climbed blindly and helplessly up the Gully, and the cliffs pelted down death on them as they ran.
