But Aubrey persisted, his palm glued to the wet clay wall which overnight drizzle had converted to the consistency of “greased egg”. He spoke so that all could hear:
“We’ll give the blighters a minute or two to think things over, then I’ll have another go.” With his accomplices he shifted back into the mouth of the communication trench where again they made polite noises in the direction of the men, lit up, waited.
“Electricity is the queerest stuff imaginable,” ran Boof’s conversation with Mick. “It’s kind of nothing.”
Captain Naylor tried to intrude on the HQ group, who in turn attempted a word with the poms, who in their turn, like all officers of their race, seemed perpetually on holidays.
“Last night Kyriakides heard a nightingale. And I swear the cuckoo had changed his note, worried by the shrapnel.”
“Ellis took delivery of more champagne yesterday. But do you think the bounder will share? There ought to be a rule in the mess.” The speaker was definitely unpleasant. He had none of Aub’s air of quick interest in things.
Frank chose this moment to give a recipe for damper to Sergeant Madox: “The secret is to use a scant cup of milk instead of water, then add two handfuls of chopped sage and one of onions. I always carry a tin of Glaxo on the road.”
“The secret to brownie is dripping,” contributed Madox.
“By June you’ll find the Balkan flies a treat,” Aub told his mate. He then swivelled round to the men and raised his voice a half-octave, endowing it with an almost feminine sinewy strength: “I hope you boys are keeping your shit covered, otherwise in the hot weather we’ll all be sick.”
“What’s the game?” asked Bluey.
The rumour had been right: both sides were finding the stench of dead bodies unbearable. Worse, they were a health hazard. After several false starts with white flags flying on sticks and both sides firing on emissaries from farther up or down the line, he, a commander of RN Intelligence, was attempting to make proper arrangements. One day of No Shooting would be enough.
They asked him the Turkish for Good day, How are you? and Do you have a sister? Also they politely wished to know where he had picked up the language.
“This is my old stamping ground. I’m a journalist by trade. Don’t underestimate the Turk. He’s a stubborn fighter.”
Bluey started on a cigarette, the slow balletic ritual involving papered lip, hands working like silent millstones, an elbow turned in, prehensile wrist curved out — the process occupying the attention of the English as might a native custom in a remote annexation. “We don’t have nightingales at home,” said Bluey between licks, “nor your kind of cuckoo either, except in clocks.” The cigarette remained unlit, swinging like a lazy pendulum: “Ours is the pallid type.” He then unclipped the cigarette and whistled two haze-coloured notes, perfect steps on a scale never completed because they started again, ah-sip, ah-sip, imitating the cuckoo’s eternally blunted attempt at a regular series.
“Very beautiful, don’t you think?” said the second Englishman to his boss without reference to Bluey, who seemed to serve as an inanimate colonial phonograph.
“You hear him at his best in the wheat, towards evening.”
At the commander’s request Bluey then imitated other birds — a plover, then a currawong, filling the crowded pipe where they hunched with abrupt sad sounds. Then he began on the wonga pigeon, wonk-wonk-wonk, a call he said could be heard up to half a mile away and was often repeated more than a hundred times in succession. Bluey started repeating it but Frank interrupted, saying how delicious the bird was stuffed with minced veal, covered with buttered paper, and —
The officer raised a hand. The firing had stopped altogether and in the distance a Turk was shouting. The Britisher listened, scuttled forward, listened again and made an entry in his notebook, echoed the phrases in his piercing alto and declared the job done: “They want to parley.”
As he left, Walter hurriedly asked in a voice not his own (the voice of reason): “Is there any chance they might decide to stop for good?”
“You mean stop the war? Not without a diplomatic motive. And there’s none to hand. This is a strictly military moment. Do you undestand?”
He did. And it was crueller, crueller by far, than just barging on, bloated bodies and all.
The officer left the way he had come, with a nod to each and a handshake for Bluey, heading for the beach where soon a Turk would take a lonely blindfold walk along a strip of shingle and the arrangements would be properly made.
But when Walter reached his post things were so unexpectedly peaceful that he relaxed in the Reg Hurst position with his back to the enemy. So easy and quiet was it with only the odd dutiful bullet swiping overhead that he let go, lulled by a shore breeze that lifted the pong and rolled it out to sea. Lulled also by the sunlight, still not so very hot, he removed his shirt and began “chatting”, picking tiny lice from the folds. When a trail of escapers set off in a dotted line for his trousers, dispassionately with blades of fingernail he killed every one.
An instant later he heard a peculiar dull clang which seemed to rise in the air before rooting itself in the earth. Then drowsily he selected another job: cleaning the sights of his rifle.
But the clang turned out to be no passing oddity.
Farther up the line Frank and Bluey had been digging with short-handled shovels and picks when Frank forgetfully raised his shovel too high and collected on its curved face one of those desultory bullets (desultory in a crowd, fiercely vengeful on its own). It deflected downwards, harmlessly grazed his forehead but ploughed a wild furrow across chest and stomach.
It was this gash that Walter stared at ten minutes later when the bearers carried Frank past, and found horror compounded by greedy curiosity: the phenomenon he witnessed was that of a friend unmasked to show an inhuman geography of peaks and hollows where arêtes of upright torn shirt were hung with ruby snow.
Frank, you are one of us …
“Wally?” The eyes black and shiny, mouth dry, lips streaked with little frayed strings of dough … a hand exploring outwards like the searching tendril of a still-growing plant. “Where’s Nugget?”
“He’s around.”
Boof appeared and tactlessly blurted, “Nugget’s down at the beach or somewhere, with the others.” But Frank seemed to have passed out again though still he gripped Walter by the wrist. The bearers resumed their waddling progress. The front line was too narrow for stretchers.
Six more steps and Frank moaned, “How’s my dial?”
“Clean as a whistle.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want Marge or Mossy to see me with a busted dial.” At the mouth of the communication trench they loaded him onto a stretcher. Blood seeped through the canvas and hung beaded there, rusty and wet, like something vile from an abandoned waterbag. Frank’s right hand crawled across his stomach to search amid the mess in a vain attempt to smother the pain.
“Why ain’t Nugget here?”
“He’s coming.”
“For Christ’s sake, he’s down at the beach!”
“Aw, Frank.”
As they negotiated the turn into safety and shade Frank’s moans intensified. He let go and bellowed, “They’ve butchered me!” Between blubbering intakes of breath and intervening gusts of loud surprise he said, “Fucking shit, fucking shit, fucking shit.”
Walter thought: I know it must hurt, but why doesn’t he shut his teeth on it? He’s letting himself down. Frank … Our father aged thirty-two who wields a silent spindle. It’s not like this is it? For you are brave, Frank, your soul is a flame of silence and you will snuff it by bawling.
Charlie Bushel, white-faced, knelt eye to eye with Walter and issued an order: “Back to your post.”
“I can’t, he won’t let me.”
“Frank?” said Charlie. “It’s me, Charles. Let him go. I’m sorry you’re hurt.”
“Get me a priest.”
The grip tightened.
“How do
you feel now?” They all waited for an answer to Charlie’s stupid question.
“Help!” Frank tugged Walter’s arm like a bellrope.
“There’s no priest up here,” said Charlie. Then cruelly he repeated it, shouting. “There’s — no — priest!”
Along the communication trench Frank’s voice cleared. “I had a good horse,” he intoned, “and I sold it.” With every lurch of the stretcher he repeated himself. “I had a good horse, had a good horse, and I sold it.”
They carried him through places turning darker and darker until it seemed the nursery rhyme intonation would stop and with a cry, enveloped in a red egg of nothing-but-pain, he would shrink to a baby and die.
But in the support trench that served as a casualty clearing station he came to himself. The bearers found a ledge and bandaged him as best they could.
“I’m sorry for letting go. It’s like I was kicked in the guts by a bullock. It’s like there’s cods in there that won’t stop hurting.” With horror Walter saw a silk-sheened tube of intestine shining through.
“We can’t take him any further like this,” said the leading bearer. Charlie drew him aside.
“A priest or a doctor?”
“Flip a coin. There’s a doctor around, but only the angel Gabriel could rouse him now.”
“Well fetch a priest. And hurry.” He justified his concern: “We’re from the same town.”
“Any bastard’ll do, won’t he? Any religion?” The orderly picked dry snot from a black toothbrush of nose-hair, ignoring the extrusion of fingernail dirt (blood?) that travelled up a nostril, wiggled crankily, and emerged for examination. Then he gave Frank a morphine injection and entered the dose in his pay book.
“He’s a Mick. Take care you fetch the right brand.”
Officers came and went before the orderly eventually departed. Captain Naylor sent Charlie off on a job (he went willingly) but asked Walter to stay.
“I can’t do anything.”
“Aren’t you his mate?”
“Yes. But Nugget Arthur’s his closest mate.”
“Arthur’s with the other mob, and look, son, it’ll make no difference. The truth is he’s not going to live. He won’t even come round again.” Together they checked Frank’s face for signs of life in case he made a liar out of him, a face so pale that dark shades flickered underneath as if a smoky dusk had come at the end of a cloudless day.
The dying man said: “Is that you?”
“It’s Walter Gilchrist.” So ravenous is self-pity that he wanted Frank to see his tears. “Nugget’s around,” he added despairingly.
“Nug, remember Wally at the Cri?”
“This is Wally.” But he drew back when Frank’s eyes opened. What if the intact brain in its torn container condemned him for his shameless self-regard? So in order to appear honest he was required to lie, and play along at being Nugget. He stared at the wall where someone had glued a newspaper clipping, all ribbed and still wet — an advocacy of the six golden rules of outdoor hygiene. Frank said, “Let’s have a last drink, a rum, after the girls go. What do you say?”
“All right.”
“The only trouble is, I can’t remember why we came to town. Was it the horses?”
“The war.”
Because of the diminished firing, noises from the farther distance thundered long and dramatically. An exchange of artillery on the lower slopes boomed with the sound of two trains noisily approaching each other on a railway bridge. The wash of their impact came later, less importantly. All vigour and threat was contained in their passage across the lower sky, a journey that commenced over and over. Frank’s eyes alertly traced the source of the sound. Though fate was writing a conclusion and signing it personally his, he seemed unconcerned. Or felt no fear. Or was a sick man who a minute before had been hale, who understood only that pain was drawing him aside from his old self, but nonetheless fought that belief. With eyes closed he said:
“You never did like Marge, did you.”
“That’s not true. She’s — lovely,” Walter breathed. He took a draught of breath and spun Frank’s life out. “She’s a lovely girl, Frank, with such a serene face. As soon as I clapped eyes on her I knew she was happy. Not many girls are calm like she is. I liked that button on her dress. She’s got a nice laugh.”
“She’s not to know how I copped it.”
“Come on, Frank, you’re just knocked around a bit.”
“Tell Mossy, though. Write to her uncle.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Tell Marge I died fighting.”
“Sure”.
“There’s a gate … a gate …” Frank’s eyes opened greasily as he peered at Walter and tried to speak more forcefully. For a second it seemed as if he was trying to sit up, to look at something. A gate? The gate of heaven? Was this how death crept over a man, one world fading out while the next showed up ahead? This time Walter really did lean close, close enough for Frank’s sour milk breath and blood-filmed spittle to reach him, close enough for a stubbled cheek audibly to scrape Walter’s sleeve, and for the inert lizard skin of the nine parts dead to state its condition with cold factuality. “There’s a gape … a gaping hole in me, ain’t there?”
“They’re fetching a doctor. The ambulance chap went. I’ve been in a hospital, Frank. They can do wonders.”
“I met my brother in Perth,” said Frank. “He’s got no kids. Do you know how to mend a watch? He’s a grocer.”
Then Frank began to wheeze as prelude to another bout of pain, but before the agony gathered force he passed out. Was he dead? Perhaps it was just the morphine taking effect. Walter had to know. He scuttled to one end of the chamber, then the other. Someone had been here a minute ago when Frank was issuing his instructions. All right, I’ll find out myself … but Frank’s pulse was smeared with blood. His eyes — Walter raised a lid and a blind but living pupil met his. The lid settled back slowly like finger-printed tar on a hot day.
It was no longer true that everything seemed speeded up. Things were the other way round, sick and slow at the world’s tired end, a million years AD, when Walter smoked a pipe at the bedside of the last generation but one. Was it true that Frank had suddenly struck a wall as Hurst had fancied, falling back while Walter glided through? In Frank’s dying was visible a microscopic progress, as if clusters of memory were sliding clear of nutritive experience and gathering somewhere grey and cold for the final starvation.
Still nobody came, and Walter allowed this disagreeable thought to age in smoke until his pipe reduced to an acrid dottle. For the living there would be no more surprises. All tended down into the same vortex, with consolation nothing but word-play. So when Frank spoke yet again, Walter regarded him as already dead, and responded monotonously. Frank asked:
“Father?”
“Can you hear me, Frank? It’s only Wally.”
“Yes, Father.”
Oh, Christ. What now? The Catholic dead needed oil and Latin hocus pocus.
“Is it done?”
“Yes.” Walter gabbled a conclusion: “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.” It fooled Frank (he decided) but Christ was dead a million years past.
“Frank, may the Lord Jesus Christ give you — a decent place in heaven, Frank Barton.”
And a voice behind him said, “Amen.” A voice from the past.
Potty Fox!
“You’re too late,” (the world had ended).
“I’m not a Catholic priest, but —”
Walter reached out a hand to the khaki-clad minister, who (stupid man) failed to recognize him. A tired conventional smile played around thin lips. His handshake for Walter came straight from the chaplains’ rule-book: sincere but inhuman, meant for the agony of the multitude, ill attuned to the throes of one. But his eyes were remarkable. No longer the intense marble of home, they had softened. Yet it was a discomforting change. For the alteration appeared to have come about by the constant release of an inner heat, so that hot and restl
ess the eyes begged for sponging in cold water.
“What have we here? Oh, how terribly sad.”
But who did he think he was, just glancing at the nearly-dead and then applying all this false charity to someone he took for a perfect stranger. No, the hand grasped by Potty was not meant for shaking —
Oh no.
It was meant for striking the minister down. Hit him! this incarnation of bullshit.
But no blow came. Instead, a suppressed whimper, a string of sobs, for dizzy at relief in any form, the next few minutes for Walter passed in a kind of faint.
Somehow Potty guided him to a ledge away from Frank leaving the dying man faintly gurgling like a waterpipe, and from a creased paper bag took a glassy heap of barley sugar from which he levered a sticky lozenge and placed it on Walter’s tongue.
“I’m Chaplain Fox.” Still oblivious.
Slumped with curved spine beside the minister, staring with the dazed air of an apprehended miscreant, Walter cracked the lolly and heard it crunch with a dozen fractures. The sound flung him in imagination through a landscape of breaking nerves: grass made of iron pickets, a stubble of nails, vines of barbed wire, flowers of bursting steel, the shocking sunlight of signal lights and their successive waves of ghastly moonlight.
Here was the breaking point. Not one, but many, an endless run with no bucolic gasping on the far side of a wall. A maze, rather, beyond human capacity to solve, because it required the human for its building blocks.
Helplessly Walter accepted a pat on the back as Potty (how futile) strove to raise him up with practical comforts and cheering phrases. But what about Frank? Did he no longer matter because he was just bones now and a bag of blood, and a heartbeat (perhaps) performing its last weird somersaults? Walter found himself condemning the minister for taking the same view of the nearly-dead Frank that he had a minute before taken himself: that he was beyond comfort, already gone.
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