1915

by Roger McDonald

  “I’ll take one of them too,” said Billy standing. “My bladder’s a joke.” He drained his rum and set the mug down with a clatter.

  He left the dugout, and though they waited, and twice went outside to search, he did not return.

  Of all the deaths stored away in Walter’s memory that of Diana seemed the least cruel. He gave no thought to the unborn child and the thwarted prospect of life for an intelligent girl — that potential he mourned for himself — nor did he grieve for Billy’s sake: and he knew the reason. Diana had died in Australia, where a body, even though there was a chance it would never be found, still was fated to be welcomed into a landscape adapted since the beginning of time to the safekeeping of faint spirits. He envied her, and longed for a grave near to where his grandparents were buried — in that clump of writhing white-limbed gums on a knoll above the creek.

  Then he had an idea.

  He pulled his wallet from a side pocket and unfolded a slip of paper. He took up the slim brass-capped pencil he had stolen from the effects of George Mullens. He smoothed the paper on a taut knee and was about to start writing when a dull object lying next to a dislodged brick caught his eye. It was his tobacco tin, fallen from a pocket during his plunge into the trench. So with relief he rolled a cigarette and drew deep giddy-making lungfuls of smoke as he wrote.

  “To the finder: please record position of body and write to below address stating last wish of Walter Edward Gilchrist — To be removed from this place to Australia for burial at his home.”

  Then he signed his name and wrote the date: June 28th 1915. He tucked the paper away, and lay back uttering a deep sigh, feeling luckier than anyone he knew, than any of the dead, that is, whose names along with their forms rotted as they sprawled on each other in “God’s Acre” or unknown lay out in the scrub. He knew that his father was the man to respond to such a plea, and would spare no effort to meet the request of a dead son whose wishes he had so stubbornly blocked in life.

  But what if it was different, and souls went marching on into eternity? “If there’s a hell,” Ollie had said after the final disaster of the night, when the rum was wasted and Pig Nolan dead, “then you and Pig will fight there.”

  Mick had upended the pannikin of rum and obtained a few drops for each which they licked, complaining about the time Pig was taking. Then they sat back and lit their pipes.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard,” said Ollie. “But Walter Madox got killed at sunset. Nugget came by with the message. He was running to catch up with the others and that was that.”

  “A sniper,” said Mick. “A confounded lucky shot.”

  Madox? Walter tried to hold in his mind a clear picture of a man he had known for nine months, but nothing showed except brown hair, a deferential stoop. It had always been a source of irritation to Walter that the two had shared a name.

  Mick let out a stream of smoke and said: “What is it, a month to the day since we lost Frank?”

  “Six weeks,” Walter calculated.

  “Nugget and I’ll have the job of visiting his family when we get back. I ain’t looking forward to that in the least.”

  “Who were Marjorie and Mossie?”

  “Ask Nugget, he knows ’em all,” Mick said diffidently.

  “I met one of them once,” said Walter. “Marge. Do you know the other?”

  “All right, but don’t tell Nugget I told you. They were always very thick, those two.”

  “Mossy was the mother of his kids, she lived with him up at Moree for twelve year or more. But Marjorie, just a kid herself, was the one he almost made it legal with, only a couple of years back. She refused to go bush with him. So Frank went back to Mossy while Marjorie stayed in Sydney. You know what a stubborn mule Frank was. Marge was the same.”

  “Why didn’t he marry Mossy early on?”

  “A few reasons.”

  “I’ll bet she was black,” said Ollie.

  After a pause Mick said: “She was, but you could never’ve met a nicer woman.”

  “Oh, my!” said Pig, stepping through the doorway and setting a stone jar down on the box.

  “You keep quiet about it,” said Mick, startled.

  “I don’t talk. But what if I did? Frank’s dead. Does it bloody matter anyway?”

  “Like hell you don’t talk,” Walter heard himself say. In the early days Pig had gone around saying anything he liked, nudging people in the ribs, waving a fist.

  “I’ve been leaving you alone,” drawled Pig, placing both palms on the box and causing it to sway creakily. “But I could change my mind like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Leave off,” said Ollie.

  “There’s more rum where this came from,” Pig straightened himself. “At least another jar, maybe two. So come on, who’s tossing in?”

  Ollie contributed a shiny Turkish coin minted that very year. He had obtained it in exchange for two tins of beef on the day of the armistice.

  “Yes,” Pig breathed, turning it in the candlelight, “they’ll like this. What’ve you got for me?” he asked Walter.

  “Nothing.”

  “Not even a decent shit, I’d say.”

  “Now look —”

  Mick took out half a crown: “It’s all I’ve got, so make sure I get a full share.”

  “It never stops, does it,” said Ollie when Pig had gone. “You should have shaken his hand at Ma’adi,” referring to a time in Egypt when Pig had tried to make the peace but Walter suspiciously had refused. Rightly, too, because it had all been a sarcastic joke on Pig’s part.

  Mick poured the rum and this time Walter took some. The taste did not even make his mouth feel clean, it seemed oily and burnt. His heart was beating fast with an inner panic that rum could not touch.

  Mick, who had fallen into a reverie, suddenly sat up. A sound like wind puffing through a tree filled the air outside. Walter was about to part the flap for a look when Ollie’s hand restrained him. A remote muffled explosion was followed by nearby tearing and flapping sounds, as if a dovecote had been split open and a thousand pigeons struggled to escape. “One down, ten to go,” said Ollie. Another shell exploded in the sky. This time the hills echoed with the sound of wet sheets flapping in a gale.

  A third explosion was followed by a gap of peculiar silence. Even the popping guns on the heights seemed to pause. Walter heard Mick nervously click his jaw, a habit of his at such moments. Then footsteps abruptly sounded on the track outside. “That’ll be Pig,” Ollie sniggered in relief. He slid Pig’s pannikin across the box and placed a hand on the jar ready to start pouring. But when the flap was wrenched aside the face that appeared was not Pig’s at all, but Nugget Arthur’s.

  “Was Pig Nolan with you blokes?” Nugget breathed noisily through his battered nose and horsebreaker’s lumpy cheeks, “Was he? Because he’s out there,” he continued, jerking a thumb over his shoulder: “Hit,” he gulped at last.

  Ollie half-stood, Mick scrambled to his feet beside him. Walter reached for the beam over his head and was about to haul himself up: “Don’t go,” said Nugget, “it happened right outside the hospital.”

  “Is it bad?” asked Ollie.

  Walter attempted to cram back into his mind a thought that demanded: Make it bad, Lord, bad, bad, bad.

  “There was blood all over him and broken stuff. He stank of rum. But the doctors dragged him inside as soon as it happened.”

  Walter’s prayer altered: Make it bad enough to take him away from here for ever, but don’t kill him off.

  When the shelling stopped they went to look. “He’s in there,” said Nugget, pointing to a halo of light that shone on the white canvas of the medical tent. “Who’s his best mate?”

  “I’m his worst mate,” said Walter nervously. He could smell the rum somewhere about, and also the whiff of chloride of lime being used as an antiseptic.

  “It’s me, I s’pose,” said Ollie. He followed a pair of stretcher bearers into the tent.

  While they waited,
ramming black tobacco into their pipes, Walter realized that the hostility he felt flowing from Pig was equally of his own making. Pig had biffed him first, but the days for vengeance had passed and here was Walter still determined to carry it on.

  Ollie emerged from the tent laughing.

  “Pig’s all right!” declared Nugget.

  “The rum,” said Ollie. He rested his elbows on the sandbags and giggled. “The poor bastard. He wasn’t hit by the shrapnel at all. But the jar got hit and he must have fallen over on it.”

  “But he’s all right,” insisted Nugget.

  “No, he’s dead.” Then Walter saw that Ollie’s cheeks were streaked with tears. “The sharp edge did for him. He died just now, while I was in there.”

  Who would shed tears for Walter’s death? It would come remote from human sight, it would be reported uncertainly, and by the time it was confirmed, if ever it was, the response, even of his loved ones, would be a shrug. Thus he told it to himself as the walls closed in …

  Nugget took Ollie by the shoulders and guided him compassionately to the ground, thrusting a pipe between his teeth and inviting him to smoke his fill. Mick slid his back down the tight-packed sandbags and squatted with his knees touching his chin, a hunched beggar in the pale light of the hospital tent. As Walter joined them he envisaged the Australian troops around him squatting in similar positions — leaning on posts, lying on their backs in dugouts, balanced under the dangerous lips of trenches in deceptive postures of relaxation. Then one of them toppled to the ground. And then another. And another.

  Ollie spoke in his measured, English way: “I saw the doctor lift a shard from his groin. It was smeared all over with blood.”

  “Take it easy,” said Nugget.

  “He mentioned you,” Ollie turned to Walter. “We had a laugh. Pig said, ‘When I get up I’m going to cook that smart-arse Gilchrist’s goose.’ Then the blood poured out like a fountain. There was nothing they could do.” Ollie giggled again: “If there’s a hell, you and Pig’ll fight there.”

  Instead of relief Walter experienced a kind of numbness about the night’s events. Yet how truly alive he had been ! Angry, envious, sad — with companions who shared in the same emotions. Feeling implicated and helpless they had moved through the night in a state of freedom they were unaware of.

  “It’s time we thought about sending some money to Mossy,” said Nugget in a low voice, “or those kids’ll go back to their natural state.”

  “Marjorie’s the one who won’t have taken the news calmly,” said Mick.

  “You don’t consider what it does to them, or else a bloke would have thought twice about it.”

  Wedged against the uncomfortable angle of the Gun Pits, almost dreaming under a baking sun, Walter recalled how they had felt their way through the night and finally reached the rest area where the remainder of the squadron, gathered in shadowy excited group was speculating on the action they were to be involved in the next day, the day that had opened with Walter’s run and would close with his —

  He rested half-asleep with his head on an arm, and tried to convince himself that there was something attractive about the inevitability of it all. In his tiredness he found nothing left that he wanted to understand. But his mind ceaselessly tortured him, and suddenly there came upon him a vision of the interlocking hostilities of the world — nation at nation’s throat, friend grappling with friend, the grid of hatred descending to impose its heartlessness on the peninsula. Lord, he began … but there he finished. Exhausted, he felt that the walls of the trench were creeping closer, and raised his head in a panicked realization that life had thrown him into the living proof of the stone tomb that had horrified him during his stay in the hospital at Parkes, when the doctor had loomed over him and the matron or somebody had grabbed from behind when he sat bolt upright in a living nightmare. He had found himself in that place where pain was endless and struggle futile, but to fight against it a compulsion imposed by eternity.

  So he raised his head higher, scrabbled to his knees, tensed his throat ready to shout Here! in reply to the familiar voice that just now rang out again. Why hadn’t he picked it before? He drew himself almost erect in the act of launching himself forward and out of the trench, elated at the discovery that all this time someone really had been out there in the scrub watching over him, and that someone was Billy! Billy’s voice the whole time calling … Then a shot crashed against his ears, and hands closed around him from behind, human hands with dust-caked scabs and black hairs. In the shock of seeing them and of finding himself unable to move while his will struggled to be free, Walter wondered if it was all a dream again; and as a second shot rang out a rush of oblivion assured him that it was so.

  After leaving the dugout the previous night Billy had gone straight to headquarters. Here, hardly speaking, he had collected his orders for the next day and disappeared. Skipper Fagan had chased after him a few minutes later because something new had come up, but by then Billy was over the parapet in the pitch dark and making his way determinedly through the undergrowth, far from human contact.

  He had been out on the extreme right since well before dawn. When the sun came up he was lying among wild thyme that hummed with bees. A clump of low scrub protected him from sight, but did not give complete shade. Had he slept? It was quiet where he lay but from the direction of Cape Helles to the south came the constant rumble of guns, indicating that an attack was in progress in the area held by the British and French. Billy’s orders were to watch for changes in the Turkish trenches to his front, for although Cape Helles was miles distant, and the only line of communication between the two armies was the sea, the activities of one invariably had an effect on the other. And Billy was now ready for anything.

  He wanted to release the power and pressure he felt barely contained within: he wanted an explosion. He was disgusted with himself for having bargained, on and off, with God. In the past there had been times when he felt an understanding had been reached: God had put Diana in his path, and given him the capacity to see what his life had been like before her arrival. But it had all been to make him look a mug.

  As Billy lay on his back with his forearm across his eyes he heard the nearby snap of a twig that set his heart racing, and then a hiss of breath. Slowly he shifted his arm and found himself looking into the snout of a revolver. Kneeling beside him was the scout Freame, steady as a snake.

  “That ain’t funny.”

  “They said you’d be out here.”

  “Don’t do that. Not ever!”

  “You’ve been asleep.”

  “Like hell I have, I’ve been awake since before first light.”

  “It’s now twelve o’clock.”

  “Bullshit!” But Billy was forced to fumble for his watch.

  Freame’s face looked cool in the great heat. He was part Japanese, and had the silky unruffled look of someone constantly at the centre of important events. Though he asked for a drink, only the faintest shine of sweat showed on his forehead. He wiped his mouth and said: “There’s to be an attack.”

  “Ours?”

  “At one o’clock the boys will be coming through. Do you think you can get down for a closer look?”

  He explained. A feint was required to convince the Turks that a big attack was under way from the Anzac area in support of the one at Cape Helles. He handed Billy his binoculars and pointed obliquely to the rear, back towards Chatham’s Post, the position Billy knew was occupied by Walter’s regiment. Through the glasses Billy saw bayonets shuttle in a blue chain just above ground, and at one spot a line of men seemed to be leaping from one hole to another: an obvious ruse, but almost immediately earth flew up as the defences came under artillery fire.

  This was more like it. Billy was no longer on the outer. This time no-one’s will but his own would be responsible for what followed. There would be no throwing away of himself at the crucial moment.

  “What do they want me to do?”

  The scout wriggled
forward and Billy followed until the Balkan Gun Pits became visible about half a mile farther along, in a dip to the left of the scrubby ridge. Across on the right could be caught a glimpse of the sea, a long sweep of bay concluding at the low headland of Gaba Tepe. Through the glasses the Gun Pits looked harmless relics. At some time in the past they had been partly roofed with brushwood. But fifty or a hundred yards farther back from these trenches were another lot, with sinister fans of freshly dug dirt tossed out in front. Now and again a glimpse of head could be seen as someone jogged along a communication trench. Billy lowered the binoculars.

  “Have you sniped down there before?” asked Freame.

  “No.”

  “The new works are what they call the Echelon. You’re to get as far around to the right as you can. Try and line up with the communication trench. Our boys will be attacking the Gun Pits. It’ll look serious, and if the opportunity presents they’ll go farther on. But when they’ve livened things up they’ll be getting out. If you get into a good spot you’ll be able to fire over their heads and never be seen in the fun. All right?”

  It took Billy only half an hour to move into position. Although alone, all the way through the scrub he talked, wriggling where there was a chance of being seen, sprinting bent double on the seaward side where there was dead ground — talked not out loud, and not to himself, but to Diana, the companion of his extremity. “I’ll lie down here. Take a breather. Now, up we go!” He elbowed his way to the crest of the ridge and sure enough, just as he had guessed, his line of sight lay along the communication trench and revealed the moving heads much clearer now, as if stones were rapidly whizzing to the surface and drifting for a foot or two before burying themselves from sight — Turkish reinforcements, their headgear the dry dirty colour of their country.

  Billy unpacked his telescope and spent five minutes marking the ranges. More detailed now, the Turkish heads dropped smoothly from sight, and idly Billy imagined them swinging upside down for a reappearance, as if the Turks too had their bag of tricks in full play, and only Billy, between the two armies, was seriously dedicated to the proper business of the military. Suddenly he felt lighthearted. Death itself was an ambition, therefore what did he have to fear? He felt Diana to be no longer a separate being.