Captain

by Sam Angus

  When the mail had arrived that morning, there’d been a great shouting and yelling and hurrahing and men rushing along the trenches, and in all the excitement and row it was impossible to hear the Sergeant yelling out the names. I’d been glad Captain wasn’t there. I didn’t like him to be there when we got our mail, him having no one to send him anything. A Sergeant-Major had gone along the line, throwing each of us a parcel. There were socks and vests and paper and pencils from the Girl Guides, and I’d taken one extra for Captain. There’d been a parcel from home, too, for me. In it were two jerseys and I smiled to see them because on one of them the stitching was loose and bobbly with lots of loops and holes. Mother had pinned a piece of paper to it: “Knitted by Liza!” She’d added two pairs of socks, with another label, “Knitted by your mother!,” and the stitching in those was perfect, though I thought it was odd because one pair was bigger than the other, and when I looked, one jersey was bigger than the other too. Perhaps they didn’t know what size I was now and they’d sent different ones to be sure one would fit. Anyway, I gave the smaller socks and the smaller jersey to Captain and never stopped to think how Liza and Mother knew I’d be in need of socks and warm things.

  Firkins had socks too, from his aunt Alice. They were wrapped in an old copy of the Malvern Gazette and I picked that up because it had a picture of the county cricket on the front. We didn’t get any newspapers at Gallipoli, so they posted news in the form of telegrams on the notice board at the foot of HQ gully. There’d always be a crowd around that board, but I never stopped to read it, the telegrams being mainly about how the Germans were having a bad time of it and other snippets meant to encourage us.

  I’d never have read the Gazette back at home but that afternoon, as I waited up there, I read everything in it—the weather report, about the harvest and the hay, the stock sales, the carriages for hire, the advertisements for the Kodak cameras that cost thirty-two shillings and sixpence, the announcements, the births and the deaths, and the new window for the cathedral, the donations of woollens to the hospitals. Then I turned back to the page with the cricket and stared at that picture till I was far, far away, lost in the haze and humming and fresh-cut grass of an English summer, and tears were pouring down my cheeks. I didn’t notice Captain was there till he took the Gazette from my lap. He studied the picture carefully.

  “Like this?” he asked. “Your house?”

  It wasn’t the cricket that caught his eye—it was the row of houses behind the cricketers, along the far edge of a village green. They were of red brick and stone, and I nodded.

  “Yes, more or less.”

  He looked at the picture again. Fresh tears welled in my eyes at the thought of Bredicot, but I was dunderheaded and didn’t stop to think why Captain might be so interested in houses.

  “Look.” He put a tin of condensed milk in my hand. You had to pay a fortune for it on the beach and I was always dreaming of it.

  “My house,” said Captain. “Father said it was made of stone.”

  Captain had no one to send him mail, no home that he could remember.

  “Your father?” he asked. He’d asked me before, but he liked to hear things again, to be told more.

  “A doctor, like yours,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Both doctors.”

  “And a soldier,” I said.

  Again he smiled.

  “Both doctors and soldiers.”

  Perhaps it was because we’d both lost our fathers that we drew so close to each other. Sometimes we’d talk, in the way boys do, men do, reluctantly and briefly, of the things that matter most, but that afternoon he just asked, “Cows?”

  I nodded. “And Trumpet.”

  He nodded too. “Your horse. Two brothers?”

  “Yes, and Liza.”

  “So many,” he said.

  * * *

  The days were now monotonous: long and slow and quiet. All hunger and heat, sweat, stench, flies, filth, dirt, and digging. You’d be woken by the sentry at four, stand to arms, then stand down when it was fully light. Then you’d be sent off on a wiring party or some other fatigue like digging. We were always digging up there and now my trench was good and deep, perhaps ten feet. All along the bottom of its winding course, we had dugouts now to lie and rest in, other dugouts for food and ammunition. We had roofs too, and sandbag parapets, and blankets to pin up against the sun. We spent long hours in there together, Captain and I, when things were quiet, and I remember how he used to howl with laughter when the walls collapsed and showered us with torrents of earth and stone. They were prone to do that, you see, at any sudden noise or movement.

  It was a week later, I think, that I was up there in the late afternoon in a new dugout, composing a letter to Liza, my feet in the sun, back in the shade of the new rug canopy, the shimmering turquoise sea and all its tiny ships laid out below like a painting. It would be an hour or two still before Captain came up, and I listened idly to the crack-crack-crack of distant rifle fire and was thinking of how Captain loved the sun and the heat, of his horror of the cold, his deep dislike of winter. He basked like a lizard in the sun, played like a puppy in the sea; when we’d wash in the delicious water of the bay, laughing and ducking, as all of us did when the shrapnel rained around us, he was at his happiest. Jacko didn’t like to see us swimming and having fun in his bay at all and loved to pepper the water with his bullets if he saw us in it trying to get clean, but we none of us took much notice, the bay being so big and the Turkish guns being so inaccurate and difficult to aim at that distance. Hey-Ho liked the sea too and, like us, luxuriated in the feeling of being cool and clean, and he’d swim in circles round us, one ear bobbing comically, the other, droopy one floating flat on the surface of the sea.

  Things had been quiet in our part of the line that day, and for a while now. Listless shots came over, the bullets droning overhead, landing perhaps with a dull thud in a sandbag. Our rifles would snap back and Jacko would stop. Then he’d start up and the whole thing would begin again. With my left hand I counted out, only idly and approximately, the minutes between spurts of rifle fire.

  The grass and flowers had been beaten by thousands of steps into a scarred wasteland, no-man’s-land thick with rusting wire and the staring eyes of the unburied dead. A honeycomb of tunnels had spread along the ridge. We had a listening post now, and the engineers had terraced the ground so that reserves could gather in line behind us. Best of all, there were tunnels all the way up to the trench, wide enough for Hey-Ho to pass along, though Hey-Ho mistrusted trenches, devoid as they were of thistle and open sky.

  I continued with my letter to Liza. A shell wailed somewhere below. It fell and mushroomed on the beach in a cloud and a fireburst of falling fragments. For a while the dust stayed suspended until I saw, through it, figures getting back to their work and everything going on as before.

  I finished my letter and began to think about the two eggs. That day was once-a-month egg day and I could indulge in the luxury of dreaming about what to do with two eggs. I was heartily sick of dried apricots and figs, and longed for bread and jam. The rations were monotonous and dull—tea, sugar, and bacon; tinned milk, bread, cheese, potatoes, onions every second day. We still had to have a pal to muck in with, cook with, and share all we possessed with, and the Lieutenant didn’t seem to mind Captain staying round with me. You see, up there, we drew our rations raw and cooked them in the evenings. One of us would fetch the rations and the other get on with the cooking. It was good to be with someone my own age when Captain came up, and not with a fuddy-duddy like Firkins with his pipe and all the Trojans around him at all hours. At night, when the moon silvered the ridges of the trenches and parapets, we’d sit and cook and talk.

  I think mainly because I’d written to Liza, and Liza had a great love of them, I settled in the end on pancakes.

  Chips had a short, shallow trench in the stretch next to my dugout, and when I sealed my letter, I looked up and saw him turn his head to the tun
nel. Little fires were being lit all up and down the gullies and trenches, and it was time, he was thinking, for Hey-Ho to come up.

  There! Chips and I turned to the sacking door of Chips’s trench: Hey-Ho’s white muzzle was nosing the sacking aside, his long head, dark eyes, and now his ears visible. He squeezed carefully through the opening, laden as he was with clanking cans for Chips.

  Captain unloaded Hey-Ho. Then the little donkey was free to make his way alone along the trench collecting rewards. There was something about both Captain and Hey-Ho that made men want to do things for them, even if they hadn’t risked their lives to reach us each day, so we all saved our biscuit for Hey-Ho. You needed the jaws of a camel to eat the biscuit we were given, but it probably tasted good after thistle, and Hey-Ho didn’t make a fuss. Captain saw more provisions than any of us, ferrying them to and fro as he did all day, but he’d smile gratefully when we saved a biscuit for Hey-Ho.

  I uncurled my fingers, one by one, and held up my hands, keeping one thumb clenched. Captain smiled again and nodded. Nine was good. Nine was the longest, the most minutes that had passed between bouts of fire.

  I put our pot on the fire. Chips had two kerosene stoves in his trench, over one a pot for tea, one for lunchtime stew if he was making it. Captain crouched down and took up a stick and prodded our can of water, to keep it upright.

  “In my way again,” grumbled Chips.

  I cracked the eggs into a billycan and mixed up a batter, then half inched Chips’s frying pan. We grinned and took no notice of his grumbling, it being part of the fun for him, having something other than the Turks to be annoyed about. Chips mumbled a lot to himself and his jaws were always moving, but he rarely spoke more than three or four words at a time out loud if he could help it, and if he did, the words came alongside noisy chewing and swallowing sounds.

  Hey-Ho was a dainty animal to have in a trench, never tripping over the legs of sleeping men or knocking over the cans of tea that had taken hours to boil. In any case, he’d wandered away, most probably in the hope of more donations of an Army biscuit, so Captain left to fetch him.

  “Seen a bit of life…,” said Chips, folding his arms.

  I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Hey-Ho or Captain.

  “Handy with a rifle too…”

  Chips plumped his voluminous self down on a sandbag. It was lucky, really, that we didn’t rely entirely on Chips for our meals, for he showed as little enthusiasm in that direction as he did for any other kind of work. I put some fat in the pan, poured some batter into it, swilling it around the way Liza did to cover the base of the pan. Chips looked on skeptically. I flipped the pancake, rather well I thought.

  “Waste of good eggs…”

  When they returned, the pancake was golden and bubbling and I held the pan out to show Captain.

  He paused there in the entrance. Hey-Ho’s rope fell to the ground. Quiet and slow, Captain walked towards me and crouched at my side by the fire. He said nothing for a while, and even Chips knew something was up because his jaws ceased their perpetual motion.

  “I remember,” Captain said eventually, “my mother making pancakes. She always made pancakes…”

  I was still fumbling for a reply when Merrick came bursting into Chips’s headquarters and out the other side.

  “Enemy, sir, massing on the right.”

  “Where did the message come from?” we heard the Lieutenant ask. He had two pips now on his shoulder. After Chocolate Hill he’d been made a full Lieutenant and Sparrow was his Second. There were plenty of promotions around after Chocolate Hill, but there was no joy in them.

  “Mouth to mouth sir, down the trench, sir.”

  “Was that all the message? Was there nothing else?”

  There was no answer from Merrick.

  “Have you seen anything, Merrick?”

  “No, sir.”

  Straker called out to Firkins, who was on sentry duty.

  “Are you there, Firkins? Can you see anything?”

  “No, sir. Nothing, sir.”

  We waited tensely in Chips’s trench. Then, since everything seemed to go on much as before, I tipped the pancake onto the plate that Captain held out, smiling. I was relieved about the smiling, and him wanting to eat one, so I set to making another. Chips, having emptied Hey-Ho’s cans, was fixing them once more to his side, but Hey-Ho had other ideas and was exploring with his muzzle the shelves of provisions in the hope of more biscuit.

  Five minutes later we heard Merrick’s voice again.

  “Enemy massing heavily on our right, sir. Attack expected.”

  The Lieutenant called up again to Firkins.

  “Can you not see anything?… What? Nothing at all? No movement?”

  “No, nothing, sir. It’s dark, sir.”

  At that minute there was the roar and rush of a shell. Hey-Ho reared, wild and whirling with fear, his head hit and lifted the roof of the trench, and the clanging of the metal roof redoubled his terror and he bolted, hurdling Chips’s several scattered instruments, his water cans jangling monstrously in the confined space, and galloped, harness trailing, out into the tunnel.

  “Fix bayonets, fix bayonets!” Straker was yelling, and the men were all grabbing their rifles, leaping to the parapet, and Captain was making for the door, reaching out for the trailing harness.

  “Hey-Ho! Hey-Ho!” he called.

  To my horror I heard the din Hey-Ho was making out there in the open—he was going towards the Turkish lines, hoofs pounding on the dry ground, and his cans were clanking and clanging and clashing and making all manner of noises, and the sound of it all rang through the night and echoed, and that little donkey was raising the noise of a whole cavalry brigade.

  There were spurts of fire just beyond our trench.

  “Good God!” the Lieutenant yelled. “They’re almost on us—a patrol—right there!”

  All the darkness ahead was shot with running fire.

  “Twenty of them—thirty of them—Prepare to fire … Fire!”

  We aimed at the spurts of Jacko’s fire that had given his position away and we fired roundly at it until his fire was quenched. When it was quiet, I heard Captain’s voice rising from the gully, calling to Hey-Ho. I thought of that terrified donkey, his little legs doing nineteen to the dozen headlong down, veering toward the beach, with that terrible ringing in his poor ears wherever he went.

  “Doesn’t like a shell when it’s in a trench,” observed Chips, settling down on his sandbag again. The Lieutenant came into Chips’s kitchen just then and he was laughing.

  “We’d’ve been dead to a man—Jacko was almost on us—he was at our door when that little animal went stampeding around. One single animal scared the living daylights out of them—they thought he had the whole British cavalry on them.”

  After that, Hey-Ho became a sort of mascot to the unit, but it was Chips who first took to saluting him and Captain. Then they all did, and I think that was their way of recognizing the courage of them both.

  SUVLA BAY

  NOVEMBER 1915

  Weeks ran into months and nothing changed, both armies stuck in a stubborn stalemate. We faced each other across perhaps seventeen feet of no-man’s-land. All any of us wanted was to survive and we scratched at that sullen ground and tried to bury ourselves in it. We listened to Johnny Turk’s digging, and Johnny Turk listened to ours.

  Our summer swims came to an end. For washing now, we were reduced to the bare centimeter of water measured out into our mess tins. Then the dysentery came, and ran like floodwater through our trenches, taking man after man—thirty thousand, they say now, were down with dysentery one time or another.

  The days grew biting and cold, and the land took on a melancholy feeling, like that of a wintry Sunday back home. Captain collected blankets and coats and I could sense the deep fear that lay behind the piling up of warm things that was going on in our dugout.

  In November the clouds grouped over Gallipoli and the winds growled around our dugou
ts. When the storms came, they smashed the piers to splinters. Our machine guns fell out of action, one by one, and the springs on our rifles failed.

  Rain fell as if through hosepipes. Sudden torrents poured off the steep slopes and roared down the gorges, turning the hard earth to mud. Our roofs leaked and trenches ran with water. On and on the rain came, raking the graves of the men we’d tried to bury, leaving their bones naked to the skies, washing away their names. The trenches were four feet deep with water in places, and we had to fish bits of food or rifles out of them, and had no dry coats or blankets.

  The wind got up, tearing the ships from their anchors, battering and breaking the barges and hurling them ashore. The rain turned to sleet, then hardened to snow. Still our winter uniforms didn’t arrive, still we had no heavier greatcoats. It was a terrible time. Men died, right there in the trenches. It was worse for Jacko, though, I think, and if we’d been strong enough, we could’ve just walked over and taken his trenches. Captain was near mute with horror at the cold. It haunted him, brought back memories of other times, and as he retreated into himself, the bruises and the scars in him were easier to see. When the freeze came and the mud turned to ice, men crawled down to the jetties, their feet bound in puttees, black with frostbite. In the early mornings you’d see the rows of dead on the shoreline being sewn up in sacking.

  Like two boxers in a ring, the two armies waited. The mail boats swung and pitched and tossed in the bay, unable, for weeks at a time, to come ashore. We felt forgotten and abandoned by the outside world.

  A whispered rumor went from trench to trench, tunnel to tunnel, up and down the gullies that spliced those desolate hills. We’d leave. Beasley was laying bets one night as to where we’d be sent: England, the Western Front, perhaps Egypt or the Balkans. The wound Beasley had at Chocolate Hill was healed now after his stint on Moudros, but he wasn’t well, and a terrible racking sound came from his chest.