Captain

by Sam Angus

  Each man in that boat was standing, each man held a hand to his cap in a long and silent salute. The Lieutenant’s eyes rose to the sky, still wary of the creeping dawn, but there was a smile on his face as he gave me a great shove onto the boat to hurry me. Men held out fistfuls of chocolate, biscuit, cigarettes even as Hey-Ho tiptoed calmly between them, stopping to eat from each palm, making his way determinedly to the prow, having evidently decided on that as the most interesting option available. Captain followed, smiling through his tears.

  The rope was loosed. We turned and pulled away.

  As we left the bay, the Lieutenant checked his watch and nodded to us, and we all of us turned to the stern, men pushing towards the deck rails. In silence we watched the surf break on the shingle. Something of us all was left behind at Gallipoli, but for me it was my boyhood that lay shredded on the white shingle, fallen from me and lost like something dropped from a pocket.

  The Lieutenant checked his watch one last time and looked up, and I saw the sudden explosion of a mine, then another, and another, the hills erupting in a display of fireworks. The Turk guns spurted with fire. We turned to one another and smiled grimly. We’d landed on that unapproachable coast, over water that was wired and mined, in the face of enemy fire, we’d attacked uphill an impregnable natural fortress, we’d been outnumbered at every moment but we’d taken the beach. And we’d stayed there.

  A tent went up in flames, then another, and another, and then they were going up in the hundreds, the guy ropes wavering, the canvas loose and floating up like storybook ghosts. The stacks of stores on the beaches went up and soon the whole coast was one immense flame, and every Turkish gun was firing to stop the attack they thought was coming.

  I turned to the prow. The boat slipped through the starry sea, the moon broke through the clouds and smiled and it seemed that we were moving away into a better world. I saw Hey-Ho’s four neat hoofs braced against the boards, the tips of his ears silvered in the moonshine, his long head towards the open sea.

  I wasn’t guilty then, not at Gallipoli.

  I don’t like to look back, for the remorse that it brings, but if I do, I see Captain there on the boat, and I see the trust I’d won, shining and lucent in his face.

  PART III

  SINAI

  RAFA (AND OTHER TERRIBLE PLACES)

  1916

  Gallipoli was only the start of it all.

  We returned to Egypt and to Mena and to the Yeomanry horses. All the sounds of Egypt, the singing of the frogs and the creaking of waterwheels, and the warmth of it, were balmy and familiar after the cold of Gallipoli.

  At sundown on our second day there, when the Mokattam hills grew pink as Bredicot roses, the villages all adrift on silvery floodwater, their domes and minarets glowing white beneath the purple sky, we rode out together, Captain on Hey-Ho, I on a tall dark mare. The motion of that mare was silky and smooth—not as smooth as Trumpet’s but I think I was showing off a little, what with her high step and fine ways, and I galloped ahead so that Captain might admire her. I knew that donkeys don’t gallop—Captain had told me that a donkey must go at his own pace—but even at a walk, Hey-Ho, like any other donkey, was faster than a horse, and that pinched a mean nerve in me. When I turned, he and Hey-Ho had already headed home.

  At Mena we were near the railway, and there was mail for almost all of us. We formed a scrum around the mail station, Captain waiting, as always, at a distance and alone. There was an envelope for me, blotched and half disintegrated, across it the words:

  SAVED FROM THE SEA

  Captain was delighted by the miracle of that small envelope fished out of the sea, and he was beaming for me.

  “From Liza,” I told him.

  Dear Billy,

  I wish you were better at writing letters.

  I am learning about the pyramids in geography. I am glad Trumpet did not go to war with you. Trumpet is not at all the right sort of horse to take into a war. He likes clover and cow parsley and I know there is none in Egypt. Mother says the Egyptians are fearfully horrid to animals. She also says she is glad you are not in France, that it’s much worse there. Did you know Francis has finished school now? He is very bossy to us all.

  Geordie says he is going to sign up and go to war like you, but that he will go to a proper war like the one in France, not a small thing in the Middle East, where you are only fighting Turks. Francis says that is not the same thing at all as fighting Germans.

  Abel Rudge said you were having an easy time of it in Gallipoli, and Mother said that was just as well. She doesn’t talk about you much, but she is always reading the newspapers, so I think she does mind a bit.

  Francis says he will have Geordie horsewhipped if Geordie so much as tries to go to war and Geordie cries when Francis says that. Geordie still doesn’t come up higher than the sideboard in the kitchen and he can’t tie his shoelaces, so the Army wouldn’t want him anyway, but he makes a face if you tell him that. Here is some clover from the field for the horse they give you as I can’t imagine what the Army is feeding them on.

  Try to write soon,

  Love, Liza

  Later, Captain went to the canteen and bought a postcard.

  “Write,” he said simply, handing it to me. “Write to your family.”

  He watched me as I sat scratching my head and wondering what on earth I could say to Liza, when really there were so many things I could have written about.

  “What is it like?” Captain asked. “Inside your house?” Then as I picked up the pen again, he asked, “Is there a kitchen? Are there tables and chairs?”

  I didn’t tell him there were tables, and rooms for the winter, and rooms for the summer, and a room for breakfast, another room for music, a library … Later Captain asked what color the cows were, and if there were more horses or just Trumpet. He could go on and on asking about my home, but there was no self-pity in the asking, even though in all the world he had only what he stood up in, only that and Hey-Ho.

  I told Liza that the newspapers said we Yeomen were the “most stalwart soldiers Britain has ever sent forth from her shores” and that she was to be sure to tell Mother and Francis and Geordie that. Also to tell Abel Rudge that the Turk was a gentleman, and a gallant fighter, but that he didn’t have the stomach for a bayonet fight. Then I scratched that last bit out with lots of ink and told Liza to tell Abel Rudge, too, that France was a stalemate and all the men there like rats in holes and in Egypt it would all be big open fighting and great charges at breakneck speed. I never told Liza about marching forward over the bodies of the dead and the wounded, or the flies and sand that got into their wounds as they lay out in the sun, crying like children for water.

  After this I was at a place called Oghratina. We were caught out there, mired in soft, deep sand, three and a half thousand Turks swooping down on us in a surprise attack screaming out to Allah. They always had the water, you see, so their infantry moved three times as fast as ours. Our wounded lay out there, delirious with sun and thirst, sinking into the sand, an arm rising here and there, begging for water.

  At Katia it was bad too. There at Katia, we were mad with thirst, each of us ready to cut the throat of another to get water. Captain and Hey-Ho crossed no-man’s-land to reach us, climbed dunes, fetlock-deep in that scorching sand while all around them the artillery roared and screamed. We formed a scrum around them, fighting one another to get at the water they brought, pouring it into helmets or hands, spilling it in our hurry. Captain and little Hey-Ho went about amongst us till there was no more water to bring up. Someone told the Lieutenant that there was water two feet under the sand by the palm trees and we dug for it with our bare hands, scrabbling for it like dogs.

  It was the Lieutenant who made sure, ever since Gallipoli, that Captain and Hey-Ho were looked after, that they were attached to Chips and to the mess section, and followed wherever we Yeomen went.

  At El Bitia we rested and swam in the sea every day, a whole regiment of us, all wrestling
and playing war games in the sparkling water. We had bell tents and pajamas and tables to eat at, and in the evenings Captain and I would make café au lait, smoke cigarettes, and lie on our backs, looking up at the moon. We’d talk about the things we wanted to do one day, the men we wanted to be. Just then, too, Captain was interested in the funny words we English use and we’d list them. He’d start, out of the blue, with “collywobbles.” He always started with that. “Collywobbles” amused him more than any of them.

  I’d answer, “Clobber.”

  “Canoodle.”

  “Mollycoddle.”

  “Fuddy-duddy.”

  And so we’d go on, and I’d have to rack my brain to think of more. We’d talk mostly, though, about the food we dreamed of eating.

  “Pancakes,” Captain would always say. That was always top of his list. My list was very long, and the first time I told him the things I longed for he looked at me with bewilderment: toad in the hole, bubble and squeak, jam roly-poly …

  We never talked about the things we’d seen, about the bodies of the dead or the battles. Captain was happy there at El Bitia in the sun and the sea, and with Hey-Ho growing strong and round again.

  “Why did you come to Egypt?” I asked him once. We were lying on our backs on the beach, a band somewhere playing a tune from Gilbert and Sullivan.

  “They made a camp for us there and we had nowhere else to go.”

  His people had been chased out of Russia and Eastern Europe and all places, booted from one place to another, until they’d thrown in their lot with the English when the war broke out. Long before the war, Captain had known the violence that men can have in their hearts. His father had taught him—his own life had taught him—to trust only family, only kith and kin. Hey-Ho was all that was left to him of that. For Captain, there was only family and Hey-Ho, and in all the world, I was the only exception to this rule.

  Too soon we were moved from El Bitia to Romani, and that was a hard-fought battle. We had orders not to drink till noon. I never told Liza about how it was at Romani, and I hope she and Mother never read in the papers about how bad it was there. How the horses had no water and were staggering from the want of it, how we’d stumbled back, finding our way in the dark through the sand, past carts, columns of prisoners, camels, and mounted troops, fighting our way to the troughs.

  Sometime later the pack animals came in. Hey-Ho’s head was tired and low, his feet sore. Flies clustered in the corners of his eyes, but he hadn’t the strength to blink them away as Captain fed and watered him. There was a train of camels approaching to water too. Captain watched them.

  “A camel is good for here,” he said, stroking Hey-Ho. “Better.”

  When they came into water, I eyed their loose, slavering lips and baggy, wrinkled chins, and all the primitive intelligence of those prehistoric and savage heads, and wondered at Captain’s thinking.

  There were no tents that night, and no blankets, and we slept in holes we dug in the ground. From there we went on, and the going was terrible for the horses, the sand soft and deep, and my mare was in up to her fetlocks at every step. Poor Hey-Ho, somewhere, would be in up to his knees. Then, from whatever place it was we got to that day, we had to push straight on. No rest or sleep at all. We trekked all through the night, navigating by the stars, only to find at the next place that Jacko had retreated, and we had to chase on after him. Liza would have wept to see the state of the horses that morning, to hear they had to go on another twenty-five miles. By dawn we had the next place, and its stinking wells, but two nights later we were on the move again. There was no water, you see, until we reached Maghdaba, so we had no choice but to keep going. In silence but for the jingling of harness and firearms, we set off again over those sand waves, ocean after unending ocean of them.

  When dawn came and scraped away the stars, we were in sight of whatever garrison it was we were after. We circled the stronghold while Jacko went scrambling around in his pajamas to mount the guns in his redoubts. I didn’t know where Captain was, if he’d come up yet or not, nor how Hey-Ho would have coped with so many long marches, one after another through the night.

  “Dismount!”

  A dismounted attack.

  When you’re on a horse, he dances and jigs and strikes the ground, carries you forward, knee to knee, caught up in the rolling wave of the whole thing, and it’s the horse that takes you forward, whether you like it or not, but it’s not the same at all if you’re on foot, it would be my own legs, my own will that would have to take me onwards, one foot in front of the other.

  After a twenty-mile night march, we left our exhausted mounts and trudged up on foot, with rifle and bayonet, towards a natural fortress held by a well-armed enemy. We formed a line and prepared to attack.

  “Bayonets out! Advance!”

  My fear of a dismounted attack was tempered that day by my exhaustion, I think, because I went forward with the others, though I didn’t cheer as they did.

  Jacko’s fire was a wonder that morning. It spun mercifully high overhead, hopelessly high. He was marvellously sleepy and erratic, and our bayonets rattled from one end of the line to the other, and glinted in the sun, and we made a race of it, dashing over the open ground, and one by one white flags appeared in the redoubts and the day was ours. Somehow or other I got through, and I never used that bayonet.

  We watered the horses at the wells in front of the wadi and turned their faithful, drooping heads back to El Arish. For the third night we went without sleep. Slumped in my saddle, I trusted my mare to follow the straggling train, a line that stretched as far as you could see across the horizon. The Service Corps didn’t catch up with us that night, but I hoped that somewhere out in that dark night Captain would be walking beside Hey-Ho and that he’d be wondering where I was and how I’d fared that day.

  * * *

  That year, 1916, was all like that: long night treks, one skirmish after another. We were on the move all the time, and Captain and I were often apart, each at the far end of the ghostly trains that moved across the desert sands, but there are two moments that stand out, two moments that chart the changes in our friendship.

  I’d been sent out on reconnaissance, somewhere to the east, because an English officer and four Yeomen had been killed. I had to go with Ballard and twenty others. The Lieutenant allocated us Captain and Hey-Ho to carry provisions. Our mission was to scour the wadis and the hills for Turks.

  We’d crossed a wretched piece of country, all rocks and holes, and were bivouacked right in the grip of the hills. Captain was picking scrub with his own hands and carrying it to Hey-Ho. Hey-Ho had lost condition again, was painfully thin; we all were, all of us, men and animals being on one-third rations just then. One ship after another had gone down, our food supplies, our mail, all lost. I was sitting with Merriman and this chap Ballard, and we were talking of cricket scores and hunting. I saw Captain pause and watch me, hearing all the Englishness of the English, and the small things of home that drew me to those men. I was turning more and more, you see, towards the men with whom the ties of country and county made companionship a ready, easy thing. Captain stood there, apart, in the darkness by the animals, a refugee, a camp follower, with no rank and no official role. He was carrying bits of grassy stalks to my mare. When the talk turned to hand-to-hand fighting, I felt Captain glance at me; he knew me as Merriman and Ballard never would. He knew that though I could turn a rifle on a man, I was paralyzed by the bayonet. You see, you’re right up close with a bayonet, and it’s a different thing altogether than using a rifle because you can see the other man’s face, you can see the fear in his eyes, and, well, I just couldn’t use the thing. But I turned my face away from Captain, and when Merriman laughed, I laughed, and Ballard laughed, and I made out that I could use a bayonet and kill with it and laugh about it afterwards.

  There’s another moment, too, that I remember, one that wakes me in the night and turns me clammy with shame, a moment that worms its way into even the most sunny
moment and wrings me to a twisted rag. When I think of Captain now, I think of this moment as much as what came after. It was at Rafa. We’d done a night ride up there so as to catch Jacko in his pajamas again at dawn. We had the Cameliers on our right, they were mostly Australians, the New Zealanders to our left—and they’re both fine folks to have with you in a battle. The enemy had a clear field of fire in every direction and we were making heavy weather of it, but the New Zealanders made a charge across a grassy slope and then we all pressed on the attack. It was a mounted charge—I had a fresh horse then, a young gelding, and I was alongside Merriman and Robins, three veterans of Gallipoli together. The Lieutenant had detailed the three of us to ride as a unit and to take one of the redoubts. It was a mounted attack and so I was caught up in the rolling wave of the charge, buoyed up by the courage of the other men, and their blood was hot, singing for the thrill of it all and they were laughing and shouting. Anyway, we were away, our arms glittering in the sun, hoofs thundering and pounding the dry ground, and we went at those Turks hard and fast; and I thought as I rode how poor Captain would be somewhere in the mess lines, with the donkeys and the water cans, while I galloped a tall fine gelding in a big open charge.

  We went so fast that morning that Jacko couldn’t alter his machine-gun sights in time to catch us—we were going right in under them and his fire was mostly hopeless and high above our heads. But Merriman went down, and Robins. I turned and hailed a medic. I thought I saw Captain and Hey-Ho, and I saw Merriman’s mare beside Robins’s mount, and the two of them were riderless and they’d paused together and turned for the back lines. Without Merriman or Robins, it was up to me alone to take the redoubt, the German Maxim and the dead-eyed gunner manning it; up to me alone to dismount, if necessary, and take it at point of bayonet. The Lieutenant was motioning me on to that redoubt and on I went.

  I got to the mouth of the redoubt. I held that bayonet, and at the entrance, I paused and gripped it and steeled myself. I went in and thought at first that there was no one there—that they’d abandoned position and that I wouldn’t have to use the bayonet, that I would just mount and ride on to the rifle pits. Then I saw, strapped to the gun, a young Turk, with staring ribs and eyes. He was no more than a boy, and he was strapped to that gun, tied to it with rope by his German masters. Even to me that boy was young, perhaps no more than twelve, and he was ragged and starving. The bayonet turned to lead in my hands.