‘… I can’t … I thought … no …’ Rosalind could have been sleep-talking.
Her eyes flutter. She can hear her sister screaming.
Lizzie’s voice thins out – a long way above now. Because Rosalind is plunging, somersaulting into the earth. As when she went down with her father in a cage to see where her brother had died, and she sank in a clatter, the wind fanning her face, into a vast chamber of gleaming pin-points, of lead sulphides twinkling in the darkness, or stars.
Oliver is leaning over, looking down. He is close to her face. She can smell his breath, a faint perfume of peaches.
‘Gool …’
‘Ros …’
‘… so sorry.’
A vagueness enters her eye and then her shattered head falls sideways.
Gül and Molla Abdullah have chosen a good position to defend. The police are exposed and disorganised, dotted out in the open on the barren slopes below.
Sergeant Sleath’s first attempt to dislodge the two men from their hilltop is met with defiant shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and a brisk burst of gunfire. One shot chips a piece off the boulder behind which Sergeant Sleath skips to take cover. Another loose shot kills Ern Pilkinghorne, chopping wood in his yard; deaf, the impervious veteran of Pongola Bosch has heard nothing of the battle taking place opposite.
In town, dazed shock has given way to fear and then to fury. Tom Blows’s body has been retrieved from the cutting, his face still wrapped in his visor and with his sun-reddened ears poking above the strap. Also, the corpse of Jabez Herring; his coppery hair is matted with blood and a piece of gut protrudes from his back.
Argent Street is full of men charging about with rifles.
‘The bloody bastards!’
‘We’re not safe while they’re alive!’ another shouts.
The correspondent of the Barrier Miner notes that in their desperate determination to leave no work for the hangman, the mob have developed little mood for compromise.
By 11.30 am, reinforcements are streaming towards the Freiberg Arms Hotel to assist Sergeant Sleath. They arrive by car, on foot, in a slop cart, in any vehicle they can obtain. All eager to repel an enemy that no one expected.
The white rocks are on a rise less than 300 yards from the hotel. In a wide circle around the summit crouch fourteen policemen; forty-three volunteers from the Rifle Club; thirty-three passengers from the picnic train – some still dressed in white linen suits – including Roy Sleath and Alf Fiddaman, who have each run home and fetched their father’s rifle; plus fifty-three members of the 82nd Infantry Battalion under the command of Major Sinclair-Stanbrook.
The battle lasts two hours and fifty minutes. Still, it seems to take an awfully long time. How two men, both not very effective shots, are able to keep at bay a heavily armed party ultimately numbering several hundred is not a question that anyone feels much motivated to pursue. It is, though, generally agreed that each and every member of the attacking force behaves splendidly.
Major Sinclair-Stanbrook is confident that he can position the Turks by the black smoke from their guns. He knows the battles of the Peninsular War by heart. Buçaco, Vimeiro. This was Salamanca. He is Wellesley. After assessing the situation, he stands up – broad shoulders, aquiline nose, a scar on his cheek from a clash with a nail – and in a firm, imposing voice calls on them to surrender. ‘Come out with your hands up. We’ve got you surrounded.’
Two bullets enter the earth at his feet. Ducking, he hears a hoarse shout: ‘Australians – burn in hell!’
A pair of miners have brought along sticks of dynamite to chuck as hand grenades, but more shots drive them back.
For a moment, silence. The sun burns directly overhead as if gummed to the sky. Heat waves dance off the slopes. There is the firework smell of gunpowder.
Then voices are heard from behind the rocks, chanting. The two men have no water. Their croaked prayers resound over the battlefield.
‘… la illah illaa huwa wahdahu la sharika lah, lahu el mulk wa lahu al hamd wa huwa ala kulli shai’n qadir …’
Major Sinclair-Stanbrook, peeping with caution above a wool bale, spots through his field glasses a dark object flitting between the white rocks. He orders his men to fire at it.
The barrage does not let up for five minutes.
Shots echo back and forth. Chips of granite fly. The red cloth crumples to the ground, the branch snapped by a bullet.
Molla Abdullah hurls himself after it, shouting ‘… la ilaha illa Allah …’ He staggers down a little from the rocks on the other side, and stands still, clasping his rifle, staring with abject eyes at his flag.
Major Sinclair-Stanbrook is momentarily nonplussed, but Sergeant Sleath bellows, ‘Fire! Fire!’
They all shoot at the same time.
Molla Abdullah flings up his arms and collapses, not moving.
Sergeant Sleath has run out of ammunition. He scrambles back behind the Freiberg Arms Hotel to obtain a fresh supply.
When Gül sees Molla Abdullah fall, he says another prayer.
‘Allahumma inni astaghfiruka li thanbi wa as’aluka rahmatuka ya Allah!’
The skin below his eyes has a sunken look. He is still not afraid. Only for Rosalind, who might have died an infidel.
He pushes a cartridge from his bandolier and reloads. Twenty-two cartridges left. He wipes his brow with the end of his turban, lifts his rifle.
Gül keeps firing for about an hour and then his shots become less frequent, less threatening. He is evidently badly wounded.
Just before 1 pm, he is observed rising to his feet. Short of breath, exhausted, he holds his arms out with difficulty. They are not carrying any gun. But in one hand he clutches what appears to be a white handkerchief.
Someone shoots at him and misses. He flattens himself against one of the rocks, glances around, and withdraws behind it.
‘Reckon he’s trying to surrender?’ Sergeant Sleath asks.
‘No,’ says Major Sinclair-Stanbrook. The muscles show on his jaw.
When no more shots are heard, Major Sinclair-Stanbrook directs twelve men to advance in an open line. They wheel in from the left, climbing the hill in a series of nervous rushes, twenty steps at a time, rifles ready to butt.
Several bullets are fired in quick succession as they reach the top, before Sergeant Sleath calls out, ‘Stop!’
A mixed mob of police, military and civilians then surges up the slope – to find the two turbaned men lying motionless on the ground a few yards apart. They trot forward like wild cattle to examine the bodies.
Molla Abdullah, still holding onto his rifle, has been shot between the eyebrows. Gül has sixteen bullets in his body – in his chest, neck, right forearm, and left thigh. The fingers of his left hand are lacerated, and his right hand is wounded, wrapped around by a dirty handkerchief with blood on it.
Sergeant Sleath notices a movement. Gül has opened his eyes and is trying to speak. A water bottle is put to his lips. He is barely alive, but he smiles as though he might have recognised the person who has appeared out of the heat to nurse him, and even has expected her.
Four
Weeks later, in the Saxon town of Freiberg, the manager of the Berzelius smelting works opened the Leipziger Volkszeitung and read the following:
We are pleased to report the success of our arms at Broken Hill, a seaport town on the west coast of Australia. A party of troops fired on Australian troops being transported to the front by rail. The enemy lost 40 killed and 70 injured. The total loss of Turks was two dead. The capture of Broken Hill leads the way to Canberra, the strongly fortified capital of Australia.
Not long afterwards, a force of 20,000 Anzacs lands on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey. The Third Australian Brigade consists largely of miners from Broken Hill. One of the bullets from the ore he dug up goes into the head of Reginald Rasp.
In Broken Hill, on the opposite side of the world, the confused happenings of that Friday morning take the rest of the summer to unpick. A narra
tive of sorts emerges in the Barrier Miner, which publishes interviews with survivors. Each survivor tells a slightly different story. Not only that, but they seem to reweave it with every recital, so that strand by strand the previous pattern of events unravels to be reworked into a fresh version, and the ritual repeated, pushing the experience past living memory and out of language.
Rosalind’s undertaker delivered the coffin with her body in it to the Filwells’ bungalow in Rakow Street, where members of the Manchester Order of Oddfellows, in regalia, had gathered with members of the Master Dairymen and Milk Vendors’ Association, together with teachers from Rosalind’s school, and the staff of Stack & Tyndall’s. A sizeable crowd followed her hearse to the cemetery, to the sound of the Salvation Army band playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. At Rosalind’s graveside, the mourners lined up behind her sister and parents, and joined the Reverend Cornelius Hayball in singing at the top of their voices ‘Sweet By and By’ and ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus’.
Hayball gave a brief address, a tall, thin man with spectacles that sat uneasily on his nose. ‘No one can know when the golden thread of life might snap for us. No one can understand why this tragedy has happened.’ He paused, quite out of breath. Privately, he felt overwhelmed by what he had seen at the hospital on that outrageously hot afternoon. Naked bodies on tables. Rosalind and Gül lying side by side, their knees and hands almost touching. And the perspiring figure of Dr Large on the telephone, trying to get through to Leo Lakovsky’s refrigeration room in Blende Street, to order extra ice before the bodies started to decompose, so that witnesses might identify them and the coroner perform autopsies. Hayball could only tell the congregation that God understood and knew all.
Sergeant Sleath had contacted Rosalind’s undertaker to bury the ‘Turks’ as well, but he refused. The policeman next commissioned a municipal grave-digger to prepare two graves in the Muslim section of the Broken Hill cemetery. He began digging these on Saturday evening in a corner up against the fence, but being given no further instructions, beyond that the work should commence at once, he dug the graves at right angles to the fence, with no particular attention to where they pointed.
That night, a crowd roamed the western hills after torching the German Club in Delamore Street, and noticed a man digging. They protested: if these graves were for the Turks, they would tear up their bodies from the earth. The digger at once threw down his spade. He did not know who the graves were for, but if they were for ‘those damned Turks’, cowardly slaughterers of defenceless women and children, he was not going to complete the job.
The two half-completed graves in the cemetery, pointing not north to south, but north-west to southeast, remained empty until the next dust storm.
Over the years, the sand has filled them in. Still today, no one knows where the bodies of Gül Mehmet and Molla Abdullah lie buried. As if this strange and tragic event had occurred and then been blown away by the desert winds, until there’s nothing much left or remembered.
Author’s Note
Although inspired by events that took place in Broken Hill on New Year’s Day 1915, this is a work of fiction; the characters are, in large part, creatures of a novelist’s imagination. Gül Mehmet and Molla Abdullah did exist, but little is known of their background, and what information has passed down to us remains uncertain and contradictory. I am grateful to Murray Bail for introducing me to their story and for taking me to Broken Hill; to Brian Tonkin, Archives Officer in the Broken Hill Council; to staff of the Broken Hill Library and Railway Museum; and to Felix Ogdon. I would also like to pay tribute to Tin Mosques & Ghantowns: A History of Afghan Cameldrivers in Australia, by Christine Stevens (Oxford University Press: Melbourne, 1989). The quote from the Leipziger Volkszeitung is taken from Steve Packer’s article ‘The odd angry shot’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 January 1998.
Nicholas Shakespeare was born in Worcester in 1957 and grew up in the Far East and Latin America. He is the author of The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask Awards; The High Flyer, for which he was nominated as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists; The Dancer Upstairs, and most recently, Inheritance. His non-fiction includes In Tasmania, winner of the 2007 Tasmania Book Prize, and an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Literature.
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Oddfellows
ePub ISBN 9780857987198
Copyright © Nicholas Shakespeare 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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First published by Vintage in 2015
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Cataloguing-in-Publication entry (ebook)
Shakespeare, Nicholas, author.
Oddfellows/Nicholas Shakespeare.
ISBN 9780857987198 (ebook)
World War, 1914-1918–Australia–Fiction.
Australian fiction.
Broken Hill (N.S.W.)–Fiction.
823.914
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