Legacy

by Whiti Hereaka

  ‘Steady on,’ Jack says. ‘How do we know if he’s correct?’

  ‘Why would I lie?’ Matatau says.

  ‘We’ll just have to trust that Matatau is telling the truth, Jack.’

  ‘Of course I’ll tell the truth.’

  They are silent as they wait for the first ship to sail into view. After a minute or so Jack says, ‘Battleship!’ even though no ship has passed them. ‘A point to me.’

  ‘Where?’ says Matatau.

  ‘It must have passed us so quickly that you missed it.’

  ‘There wasn’t a battleship.’

  ‘Why would I lie?’

  Riki laughs. Jack has spent all this time trying to get Matatau to like him again, only to pick a silly squabble and go back to square one. But the argument is good natured – at least from Jack’s side. Eventually, when they are all sick of the game, both Jack and Matatau have four points each, although Jack’s ships were never seen by anyone else.

  The afternoon is sweltering. Whatever shade there is on the deck has already been claimed by other men, napping with their hats covering their faces. Some men decide to organise a concert to stave off the boredom; the aft deck fills with bored soldiers. There are songs, which everyone sings along to, and there are skits, and impressions of various personalities of the Contingent. After feigning reluctance, Jack stands and makes his way to the ‘stage’.

  ‘Most of you have heard my recitation of “The Rhyme of the Chivalrous Shark” before,’ Jack says, addressing the crowd with a sweep of his hand. ‘But for your entertainment today, I give you the ditty of the Chivalrous Shark.’ Jack clears his throat and sings.

  The tune sounds old-fashioned to Riki, but it’s probably brand new. It’s gentle and cheery – better yet, it is funny. Riki hasn’t really thought about it before, but he never really listens to the lyrics to most of the songs he listens to. Does the music drown out the words, or have the words just become less important than the bass?

  Everyone enjoys Jack’s song: a sea shanty for those who are stuck aboard. The poem must be well known since some of the men shout out the punchline of each verse. Jack has come to the last verse, a reprise of the first; by now the audience has got the hang of the tune, so the men sing along.

  Jack gives a bow, and the audience cheer and clap. Riki feels really proud of him; proud just to know him. I can’t have made him up, Riki thinks. He can’t have made any of them, any of this, up. Now, suddenly, he knows. He knows – knows from his marrow – that this is real.

  ‘C’mon, Pūweto.’ Jack pushes Riki forward. ‘Give us a song.’

  And before Riki can protest that he’s not really a singer, he’s pushed to the front of the crowd and on to the stage.

  The only song he can think of is at once totally appropriate and totally inappropriate. He knows the lyrics: it is his karaoke go-to. He can’t remember how many times he’s picked it and belted it out badly: never quite reaching the high notes that Freddy Mercury could command. It is so surreal – here he is, standing on board a battleship in 1915 singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

  He’s only a verse or two in when he can tell he’s lost the audience: they’re respectful, of course, but he has none of the charisma needed to pull off the song, so he stops short of the really good part – which is only usually really good because everyone knows it and sings along. He takes a bow and is applauded, although no one catches his eye on his way back to anonymity.

  ‘That was …’ Jack hesitates.

  ‘Please don’t say “interesting”,’ Riki says.

  ‘That was bloody awful,’ Matatau says.

  Riki laughs. It is probably just the thing he needed to hear, and he slaps Matatau on the back. ‘It really was, eh?’

  It is a relief to have accepted this as reality. I’ll just forget about the past or the future, Riki thinks. I’ll just focus on the present.

  13

  3 JULY 1915

  Today is beautiful, clear and sunny; the kind of day that makes a person feel optimistic – even if the order to sail to the front line could come at any moment.

  Preparations are being made; stores and ammunition are checked. All of the men on board have checked their kits, and when the order comes at last they leave with whatever is strapped to their back or squirrelled in their pockets. Some have letters from home, or lucky talismans. Big Mo and Little Mo have each other, Rewai carries a photo of his wife, Jack has his brass ring and Riki has the diary. Matatau is secretive as usual, but Riki guesses that he has his bible, a letter from his sister and the scarab.

  Before they disembark, each of them is given their rations; enough to last a day and a half in theory. Riki looks at his – half a loaf of bread, already stale, some sugar and some tea. How do the higher-ups expect their men to be at their best with food as poor as this?

  They climb down from their large ship to a small steamboat: the SS Prince Abbas. It seems too small to fit them all; there’s hardly any room to move. But Jack makes sure that Riki is not stuck inside in the middle of the rows of men.

  ‘He doesn’t have sea legs,’ Jack says. ‘Best he’s on deck, or near it, if you want to save your boots.’ The other men let them squeeze past – it reminds Riki of trying to make his way to the front of a gig. Matatau stays where he is – confident that they’ll not be separated when they finally land. Riki is not so sure – he remembers the stories of the Anzacs being picked off on the shore.

  The Prince Abbas departs in the early evening. As they sail past the warships, they can hear the men on board cheering for them.

  ‘Battleship,’ Riki says to himself.

  It takes six and a half hours to get from Lemnos to Anzac Cove.

  Six and a half hours is a long time to be sick to your stomach.

  Six and a half hours is a short time to live. Even if they are not picked off on the beach like the men who landed in April, there is still a chance that someone will die tonight. This is war – proper war – not just make-believe in the desert.

  It is well past midnight when they drop anchor in the cove. Riki can hear rifle shots up in the hills. The boom of heavy artillery is deafening, and shakes the little steamboat. Still, there is an air of excitement. They have arrived; they will finally have a chance to put all their training into practice.

  Riki and his troop are ferried from the steamboat to the shore by a steam launch. It looks like big, flat barge. They are packed tightly on the barge, standing shoulder to shoulder. Luckily, Riki is on the end again. They’re dropped off at a pier, and Riki watches the launch as it chugs back to the steamboat for another batch of men.

  Riki has seen photos of this cove in books. In the daylight, he knows, the land rises sharply above them. In the dark it is hard to make out the hills and ridges – it is just a big black mass. They march along trenches, up from the beach. It seems to take a very long time; the toll of the journey makes Riki’s feet feel as if they are dragging in mud. As the sun rises, it begins to rain, and so for the last few metres Riki’s feet are doing just that.

  Worse than the heat and the mud is the smell – a mixture of latrines and rotting meat. Riki tries not to think of the source of that smell: the death that surrounds them. He focuses instead on a mundane smell — plain old body odour: unwashed men and uniforms. A few years ago Riki had a teacher who would complain about the smell of Riki’s class when they arrived after P.E. No one bothered with showers or extra deodorant when they were thirteen — they didn’t think about it, or they didn’t care. The teacher would open all the windows in the class, even if it was the middle of winter. Of course everyone thought the teacher was just being a drama queen. Riki had thought so too – until he had a half-day off one day, and started his day in that classroom. The fug of the B.O. was overwhelming as he opened the door; he put his sleeve over his nose and choked for breath.

  Now he just has to hope he’ll get used to it quickly.

  As Matatau predicted, he, Jack, the brothers and Rewai have ended up together again.<
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  ‘A romantic would say this is fate,’ Jack says.

  ‘There is no fate, only free will,’ Matatau says, as he crosses himself.

  ‘And a pretty good administration system,’ Riki says.

  They arrive at their post and there is nothing – nowhere to shelter from the elements, or the enemy’s fire. Only Rewai seems to be on to it, the rest of them are frozen in terror.

  ‘Get to work, lads,’ Rewai says as he digs.

  And so, despite the rain and their tiredness, the men dig. Riki cuts into the earth, filling sandbags with the displaced soil. The sandbags will be piled up to give more height to the walls of their trench as they continue to dig further down. It is a hot day – too hot to be digging without water – but a bullet will kill you faster than dehydration. They need to dig until their dugout provides them with enough shelter to sit down and eat. As the time passes, they are all paying for their efforts – their shovels have slowed now, and it seems to take forever to fill a sandbag. Riki jams his shovel into the ground and sits down with his back against the wall.

  The others stop too, and they sit, huddled under their newly built wall. It will do for now, but they must dig deeper, so that they can walk without fear of losing their heads to an enemy bullet. Then they will dig niches into their walls for sleeping quarters – although Riki cannot imagine that it will be relaxing to sleep this way. It seems to him to be almost a grave; to tempt fate a little too much.

  The break is not particularly restful. They chew on their bread ration with their shoulders hunched to protect their heads. The bread just dries Riki’s mouth further; he chews and chews to try to get enough saliva in his mouth to swallow.

  ‘So this is war,’ Jack says. ‘I expected less digging.’

  14

  9 JULY 1915

  It seems to Riki that their whole war will be digging; it’s relentless. They’ve been here almost a week. After they made their post habitable, they spent hours making the trenches that lace the hillside deeper. This is the route for supplies and water; too shallow, and you couldn’t walk without the probability of a sniper’s pot-shot taking you out.

  Just a few days ago, a Digger had been leading a mule laden with supplies up the hill. They came to a shallow trench, and both man and mule walked with their heads and shoulders exposed. The first shot missed. The second shot did not. The mule plodded on to the post without its escort.

  Another day spent in the sun, digging. It began with Riki and Jack lugging the day’s water from the beach to their worksite.

  ‘What I would give for a mule,’ Riki said as they struggled up the hill.

  ‘Too dangerous for mules,’ Jack said. ‘They’re too valuable. Plenty of us to spare.’

  It seemed like a lot of water as they carried it up the hill, but now it seems like it is barely enough to slake their thirst.

  They dig on their hands and knees at first, which makes the job harder – their spade falls have little power behind them. They dig with bullets flying over their position. They dig with war going on around them.

  ‘We volunteer for active duty and they still have us on garrison,’ Jack says.

  ‘This is garrison?’ Riki says. ‘This is way more dangerous than I thought.’

  ‘When they said it would be safe, did you believe them?’ Matatau says.

  ‘At least let us die with a gun in our hands; not shovelling dirt,’ Big Mo says, and Little Mo nods in agreement.

  ‘Let’s try not to die at all, eh?’ Rewai says.

  War is not like Riki expected. Sure, it is dirty and noisy; but mostly it is grinding work and boredom. In movies it’s exciting battle after battle. Even in boring history books it seems like everything built towards certain battles: there was a logical plan of attack, and everyone on the battlefield was in on the plan.

  Ever since they arrived six days ago, Riki has been digging or on fatigue, dragging water and supplies to other soldiers. Any spare time has been spent making the dugout more ‘homely’ – if a hole in the ground can ever be homely. The most exciting thing has been sneaking out past the safety zone to try to find wood for a fire. It was Jack’s idea, but Riki stopped him going out himself – still feeling superstitious about the fortune teller’s words. He went in Jack’s place, hoping that history is predestined: that since Te Ariki hadn’t died, Riki would not either. The first few times no one spotted him. It made Riki think he had nothing to worry about, and he ventured further where there was little cover. A war-zone is no place to be cocky. A near miss of a bullet made Riki think of Matatau’s words – there is no fate, just free will. Perhaps he ought to be more careful.

  The heat, the smell, the flies – Riki can’t decide which is worse. There are latrines nearby their dugout, which get riper as the heat of the day rises. The smell is disgusting, but not as stomach-turning as the whiff of rotten meat coming from no man’s land. A million flies are feasting on shit and carrion, and then they descend upon the living. To snatch a nap during the day, you have to take your shirt off and wrap it around your head to stop them crawling into your nose and mouth. They swarm around when you’re trying to eat the meagre rations – hard biscuits and bully beef. The biscuits threaten to break your teeth, so they’re mainly used as cutlery – an ‘edible’ spoon for the bully beef. Riki is disgusted by this meat – pink and glistening with congealed fat. He shovels it in his mouth as quickly as he can – so that he can’t see it, and so that the flies don’t have a chance to land.

  Each of them has their own method for keeping the flies away. Jack tries to cover his tin with an extra biscuit. The brothers take turns: one eats and one shoos. Rewai covers his with his hand, and Matatau tries to exorcise them.

  ‘Beelzebub – be gone!’

  ‘Why are you talking to the Devil?’ Riki says.

  ‘Beelzebub is not the Devil,’ Matatau says, ‘He’s a devil.’

  ‘Lord of the Flies,’ Jack says.

  ‘Oh. I’ve read that book,’ Riki says. ‘I don’t remember that. I thought it was a pig’s head.’

  ‘What book?’ Jack says. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s about a class of schoolboys whose aeroplane crashes on an island.’

  ‘Jules Verne, is it?’

  ‘No, I can’t remember the author’s name …’

  ‘It must be some fantasy. How would a class of boys fit in an aeroplane?’ Jack smiles.

  ‘Well, I guess it’s set in the future,’ Riki says.

  ‘Go on then. Tell us some more. What about the pig’s head?’ Jack chews his bully beef. ‘What I’d do for one of those.’

  Big Mo and Little Mo mmm in unison, imagining their mouthfuls of bully beef are roasted pig’s head.

  ‘Well, the boys crash and they don’t know what to do, but they know they need to be rescued. So they set up a signal fire and make shelter. They think there’s a monster, but it turns out to be a pig. So they hunt the pig and eat it. And then some of the boys go a bit wild after the hunt – they keep the pig’s head on a pike and they sort of worship it, and then they threaten the other boys …’

  ‘Sounds like a penny dreadful to me,’ Matatau says.

  ‘Mata,’ Jack says, ‘I thought you only read the good book.’

  ‘I read other things.’

  ‘And how many Hail Marys does a penny dreadful get you?’

  ‘It’s not a sin,’ Matatau says. ‘To face evil, you have to recognise it.’

  ‘Do you recognise this evil? War?’ Jack says.

  ‘No. This is not what I expected.’ Matatau looks down at his tin of bully beef. ‘I expected gallantry and heroics.’

  Jack stands up and places his tin on the wall above him. He straightens his hat, puffs out his chest and holds his arm across it, a fist at his heart. He gives an exaggerated salute with the other: ‘Reporting for duty, sir!’

  Big Mo and Little Mo snap into line with Jack, copying his manner and salute. Rewai shakes his head and keeps eating.

  But Matatau j
oins in. He plays a general well, his accent clipped as he marches up and down. Riki would be impressed with Matatau’s playacting – if only Matatau wasn’t such a dick.

  ‘Gen’lemen! We have come to the ends of the earth to do our duty for the Empire!’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Jack says. He looks over his shoulder at Riki. ‘Fall in, Private.’

  Riki stuffs his mouth with the last of his bully beef; his cheeks are puffed out with the volume of it. He chews, but it feels like he has too much in his mouth to swallow. When he does it feels as if he’ll puke it all up again. He tries not to think of the look of it, pink and cream, fat and meat. He forces himself to swallow: once, twice. Even though his mouth is empty it still feels full – coated in fat.

  ‘Yes’ – Riki burps – ‘sir.’

  Matatau scowls at him. ‘We have come to rid the earth of evil …’

  ‘Huns, sir!’ Big Mo says.

  ‘Yes! The evil Huns.’ There is a boom as heavy artillery fires.

  ‘I feel sick,’ says Riki.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Jack says, trying to keep the game going. ‘Who would not feel appalled at what evil the Hun has wrought!’

  ‘If left unchecked, the Hun will spread to our very shores, threatening the old, the young, our mothers and our sisters!’ Matatau says.

  ‘No, seriously,’ Riki says, holding his stomach. ‘I feel sick.’

  Jack picks up his rifle and aims it over the wall. ‘For the Empire!’

  A shot. At first they all think that Jack has fired it, but he has slumped down, his hat askew; it’s tipped down over his eyes.

  ‘Get down, you idiots!’ Rewai yells, and Matatau and the brothers crouch low.

  Riki keeps his head low too, and rushes to Jack. His tunic is covered with something. Riki doesn’t want to touch it – it is glistening pink and cream. It’s just like every zombie film he’s seen. He doesn’t lift Jack’s hat – he’s afraid to see the wound.

  ‘Fuck,’ Riki says. ‘I think he’s been shot in the head.’