by Sam Angus
We flooded across the plain through screaming shells and whistling bullets. On either side horses blundered and fell. The line thinned as men fell from saddles. Then suddenly Ballard was laughing and yelling and everyone was laughing and picking up still more speed—the shells were falling behind us and we were all roaring for joy that Jacko couldn’t lower his guns in time to keep pace with the Worcestershire Yeomanry.
Jacko’s gunners were setting the fuses at zero—firing point-blank—and we were in the gaping mouths of their guns, the muzzles flashing. I glimpsed a horse on his knees, a Sergeant slumped in the saddle, more horses going down. Over the rim of a trench, through the dust and confusion and tongues of flame, I saw a Turk abandon his gun, more of them turning and running.
The flash of our swords, the thunder of hoofs, and the pace of our gallop terrified those Turks, and I don’t think they’ll ever hang around and wait for the charge of the Worcestershire Yeomanry again. Sweat ran in rivers down the horses’ flanks, splattering into the dust, their nostrils wide and pulsing.
Oh, it was a glorious charge all right, the kind of charge of which every boy dreams, a day to make all the cavalry in France and Belgium weak with envy—the big, fast, open riding that was in our minds when we’d stood around Abel Rudge’s desk. As I spurred my mare on, I thought, God help me, of Abel, hoping he’d read about us in the papers.
Jacko’s men were running from cover to cover now, abandoning their positions, Yeomen leaping to the ground, fighting hand to hand, riderless horses racing along the parapet of the first trench, frothing and sweating, spume flying from their muzzles. Roaring and shouting, we burst through the battery position, riding down any of Jacko’s men still manning a gun. Just a handful of Yeomen we were there, up at the first trench, and I was up beside the Lieutenant, and his arm was out and level, motioning us on to the rifle pits. With desperate bravado, Sparrow and Hadley leaped those trenches—and I followed—great plunging leaps over those guns—and there’s nothing like the feel of flying over Jacko and his guns anywhere, even in the Grand National.
We were over the second rifle pit when I screamed—my mare landed badly, stumbling, a foreleg buckling. She went down with a sickening lurch, both forelegs doubled to the ground, and I was catapulted over her neck.
* * *
When I came to, there was white linen over and under me, a line of cots stretching out on either side. I flexed each leg, then each arm, and ran a hand over each limb. No matter how many times you go up to fight, after every battle you’re surprised to find yourself still alive. Every time.
Two days passed before the throbbing in my head stopped and I could focus my eyes. The sign on my table read:
SEVERE CONCUSSION
An orderly came to take my pulse, and check and measure all the usual things, then sat beside me and wrote some notes on a clipboard. He put down his pen and went to fetch some water. I was feeling fine, so I picked up the pen.
“MILD,” I wrote, crossing out the “SEVERE.”
“Does anyone know I’m here?” I asked.
“He comes every day, your friend Captain. He watches and he waits … every day.”
“Has anyone else come?” I asked.
“No … no one else. But your friend said to tell you your horse is just fine, that she got up and went on without you and charged all the way to Huj.”
The Major—Straker was promoted after Huj—came to see me. Sparrow was now a full Lieutenant.
“Lance-Corporal Bayliss,” said Major Straker. “Congratulations.”
Lance-Corporal.
I was rather pleased even though I knew we’d lost so many men at Huj that there were promotions being handed out all around the place.
The Major told me we’d had a message from the Commander-in-Chief, that we’d “upheld the best traditions of the British cavalry,” that “for sheer bravery there’d been nothing ever like it.”
Ballard and Firkins came later too. A parcel post had caught up with us there at Huj, a lot of mail all in one go. Firkins had a bag of goodies from home and we had a jolly time, all sitting round my bed, with cake and cigarettes and all kinds of luxuries, and we talked of Hadley and of Farmer, both of whom had fallen, and drank to ourselves, to the talk of all Palestine. It was different after Huj—or I was foolish enough to think it was different. You see, from that visit onwards I didn’t feel like little Billy Bayliss—they didn’t treat me like little Billy Bayliss anymore. I was so buoyed up they’d come to see me and share their parcels with me that I never asked how Captain was.
When Lieutenant Sparrow came, he took the sign off the bed next door:
FIT FOR SERVICE
and swapped it with mine. Then he added a few words so that it read:
THE LANCE CORPORAL IS FIT FOR SERVICE
“We need you, Billy,” he said.
There was to be a race meeting, with relays and all sorts, and to put on a good show, the Yeomen needed me to be fit and ready.
Chips came to see me later, and I thought he’d be proud of me too, like the others seemed to be.
“Lance-Corporal Bayliss,” I told him proudly. I told him about the charge, the speed of it and the thrill of it, the leaping of the Turkish trenches. I was carried away by the glory of it all, and never noticed Chips’s irritation until his jaws took the unusual step of stopping their chewing in preparation for what was, for Chips, a great peroration.
“He never stopped looking till he found that ’orse o’ yours. That boy queued with her all night, from dark to dawn he and his donkey stood with ’er in a line that went from here to kingdom come, all night they waited for her turn to water. Not that you asked.”
PART IV
PALESTINE
AFTER HUJ
NOVEMBER 1917
After Huj, the Generals gathered the largest convention of camels of all the centuries. They were everywhere—garlands of the rudimentary creatures around every telegraph pole—trains of the absurd, splayfooted animals along every horizon. Fifty thousand of them were purchased for the Cavalry and Transport; the stink of them was everywhere, and you could have heard their roaring for miles around. I’d put money on it never, ever occurring to Abel Rudge that I’d end up riding into battle on one of the brutes. No horseman has much liking for a camel and we Yeomen had laughed at the slobbering and the stink of them, and their kicking and gurgling. Firkins said that a camel is made up out of all the leftover bits of all the other animals; the head of a sheep on the neck of a giraffe on the body of a cow and, stuck on at the kicking end, the tail of a donkey; that their necks were bent in shame at the way they’d been put together like that for a joke at the end of the day and at the way they’d been sent to live in the desert where no other animal can live and we’d all laughed at that; laughed until just then, after Huj, we were suddenly separated from our horses and transferred to the “Camelry.” For the great Race Meeting we were to ride bits of all the other animals loosely held together instead of fine Yeomanry horses and we were all very put out about that.
My mare was noble, and fast too, but I never deserved her because I was always longing for Trumpet’s strength, for the chunkiness of him and his reassuring bulk. It was good, though, to think that she would have a break from the sand and blistering stones and thirst, because a horse isn’t made the right way for that sort of country. The Generals knew that, and they were all in favor of the humpy-backed camels just then, because they could go so long without water.
They had a strong preference for bull camels, but in the train that came for us there was one cow camel, a great cream-colored Amazonian with the usual rickety camel legs and a roar like the Day of Judgment. The very first thing she did was to give Firkins a well-aimed kick of a monstrous hind leg just when Firkins was at the height of a long speechification about the prominence of the camel in Genesis and Zechariah and all the other books of the Old Testament. Firkins might know a lot about the genesis of a camel, but he didn’t know that they can kick with all four of thei
r legs and in all directions. I was laughing the most when Firkins was doubled up in the dust with his pipe spinning down after him, so he squeaked out, “Let young Billy have her, then.”
At this moment the beast began to put her lips together and pout in an ominous sort of way. I didn’t know then what the pursing of the lips of a camel means, but I can tell you now that it portends the dredging up from the very nethermost corner of a camel’s digestion an indescribable blend of fermented spittle and cud that it intends to spout with all the considerable force it can muster in your direction. She hadn’t liked me laughing and wanted to show me a thing or two, I think, and decided to aim that mouthful at me. So I was standing there, feeling foolish, not laughing at all and dripping with camel spit, and the men were all laughing like drains. I was laughing too. The only one who wasn’t laughing just then was the camel because a camel takes itself very seriously.
Firkins was laughing the most, at this moment, and it was him who said again, “Give the sweet little dolly to young Billy. She likes him.”
Firkins was feeling sour, I think, about the kick he’d had, but then Skerret said, “Dolly. Give him Dolly.” And then they were all still laughing like drains and chanting, “Dolly!”
Dolly. The name stuck straightaway, being so comical when you took into account the height of her being that of a house. “Dolly, give him Dolly!”—while I was still wiping the noxious stuff from my face.
I was popular just then with all the men after the success at Huj, you see, and they liked to tease me, but I was easier with their teasing now, didn’t mind it in the way I had when I felt it was because I was so young and they were mocking me. You see, I’d been out there longer than most of them, and the way they treated me after Huj was very different. They teased me, but I’d been at Gallipoli and Gaza, and I knew my way about.
“Billy, she has good blood. A racing camel,” Captain told me later, and it was true that she wasn’t at all in the ordinary run of Indian brown camels the other men had. But Dolly thought me, from the start, far, far beneath her dignity. Chewing casually, she looked over my head and allowed her slaver to trickle carelessly from her rudimentary jaws down her many sagging chins. I approached her with an attempt at an open mind, smiling and sort of cooing at her, and in turn she bared her yellow fangs at me. Those jaws towered a full three feet over the crown of my head, and I stepped back in horror at them and at the slobber and stink of her. Captain laughed at me and I made a face. Dolly displayed her towering indifference to us all by continuing to chew and slaver right there over the top of me. She had a throat like one of the older drainpipes at Bredicot—a great burbling and gurgling going on at all hours, as if all the rivers of Worcestershire were inside it.
“A well-bred camel,” Major Straker told me, “has a gait so smooth you can drink a cup of coffee on it at a gallop.”
Well, you have to get on a camel before you can test that theory, and in order to get on it, you have to get the preposterous-looking creature to kneel. So there we all were on that first Mounted Drill saying “Duh-duh-duh,” because an Egyptian camel knows by “Duh-duh-duh” that it must barak, or kneel. I twitched at Dolly’s nose rope to encourage her to barak, but a good horseman never likes to pull too hard at a rein, especially if that rope is pierced through the nostril, so I did it a little gingerly. Dolly curled her lips and snarled and displayed a disquieting array of yellow-green gnashers. She smacked her lips and she bared those gnashers again and indicated, very clearly, that she had no intention whatsoever of kneeling or indeed of doing my bidding at any time. So now I pulled at the rope and at this she raised her lids a fraction and appeared to consent to give the idea of kneeling her consideration. I pulled again and again, but she went about such a lengthy consideration of my request that I began to forget about the matter of kneeling and was beginning to think instead about what there might be for lunch, when suddenly she decided that she did, after all, want to kneel. And she did this in such a way—lifting her head and lowering her lids—as to make it quite clear that her deciding to kneel had no connection whatsoever with my asking her to do so.
There is some majesty to the movement of a camel, and Dolly, being a most stately and leisurely sort of camel, was a great upholder of this general truth. Looking as though her thoughts were centered entirely on the most lofty and elevated of matters and not remotely on the business of what her legs were doing, she began to sink and double the lowest section of her forelegs, then to lower and fold the lower part of her hind legs. Then she embarked on the bending of the upper bones of her forelegs over the lower bones of them and on the settling of the lower bones of her hind legs over all the other bits, and all this was going with tremendous groaning and grunting, until finally every scabby, knobbly joint was bent and every section of every rickety limb was in a new position and folded up and arranged—almost—to her satisfaction. At this point, her very considerable belly subsided, much in the manner of the slow collapsing of a marquee, and engulfed the whole new configuration of herself. But even then she wasn’t finished, because she gave a terrific moan about the palaver of it all and then began quite a new rearrangement of all the various sections of herself.
By then I was wondering why out of every animal that came from the ark I had been given this finicky, fractious creature, and was growing a little concerned too about the likelihood of her ever standing up again and staying in one piece for even the smallest length of time, because having seen what a profligate number of bits and pieces there are to the limb of a camel, I had begun to wonder how it ever stays together at all or moves anywhere without all falling to pieces.
Every day that I had Dolly, she would observe this joint-by-rickety-joint ritual with strict protocol and there was nothing doing, ever, to hurry her.
“Prepare to mount.”
At this stage in the game, you are supposed to pull the camel’s head round and position a foot on the curve of its neck. Now, Dolly’s response to the placing of a foot on her neck was to bare her teeth in a most villainous sort of way, as if to dare me to so much as dream of mounting, and then to smack her lips and pout. I saw that pout and knew what it portended and decided I was safer on her than off, so, fairly fast, I threw my right leg over the front peg of the saddle.
We were instructed to rise, so I gave the command we’d been told was appropriate in the circumstances.
“Goom! Goom!” I commanded.
At “goom-goom,” any reasonable camel will stand up. Dolly, however, put her lids at half-mast again and raised her nose and set about staring with cast-iron malice into the middle distance. I loosened her rein and goom-goomed her again, but she was particularly set on staying down. Every one of us Yeomen was goom-gooming and every one of those crabby, contrary creatures was looking elsewhere and chewing the cud as if there were no such thing at all as a Yeoman of Worcestershire on its back, and making every one of us just long for a plain old, good old horse. Then one or two of the creatures stopped their slavering and began to grunt and groan and to hoist themselves up. If a camel has to get to its feet, it likes to roar while it’s about it, and the roar of that whole line of camels that was hoisting itself to its feet in Palestine was a sound that might have been heard in Paris.
Dolly chewed and I goom-goomed and goom-goomed, and she chewed some more, and I tapped her on the nose, and tapped her on the nose again, and so on till suddenly I leaped with fright at the roar that erupted from the depths of her. Like the crack of doom it was. She lurched me back and pitched me forward, and it was like being hurled over the crest of a tsunami on a raft, and all the while she bellowed so broadly she could surely be heard in Damascus.
A camel’s saddle has no stirrups to it, so I gripped the handle of the saddle, but nothing in all my Old Testament reading had prepared me for the way the unfolding of a camel can throw you forward till you feel your teeth’ll hit the ground; because a camel is so perverse a creature as to like to stand hind legs first.
There I was, up there in the
stratosphere, realizing that you need a good head for heights to sit on a camel like her. Skerret and Ballard were laughing at me, and Captain was laughing at all of us, so I gripped my peg and hooked my shaking legs around the cantles of the wooden saddle, and I tried to forget that my head was almost at the telegraph wires.
I tried to muster some authority over her. I tap-tapped her on the neck. Dolly took one mincing step, lifted her head, and stepped forward in a mighty unpredictable sort of way, as though she were walking over hot coals. I could still hear Ballard laughing, so I tapped again, and Dolly decided to take up this raking stride, which is not in the reasonable way of a horse at all. I am almost certain that there are both spite and malice in the gait of a camel, both right legs going forward, then both left legs, much in the way of an elephant and, deliberately it seemed to me, so as to pitch the rider from side to side.
We mucked about like schoolboys, while they bellowed and slavered, leaped about like kangaroos and shied or swerved with shock at the slightest sound or flutter of a palm frond.
Later Captain found me trying to hobble Dolly in the lines.
“She’s a good camel, Billy,” he said.
He ran his hand along the swayed curve of her neck, tugged on her nose rope till her eyes were level with his, and blew into her terrifying nose holes in the way Liza liked to do with Trumpet. The hoods of Dolly’s eyes sank with all the majesty of the crimson curtain at the end of a great London show, and I was a little irritated at that, and annoyed with myself because I was still fumbling with the rope.
