1915 (25 page)

But the chaplain remembered himself, just when most lively and interesting. He donned his specs and
they showed again the secretive opaque lenses remembered from home, only now the effect was dim and smoky. He stood and swirled into darkness, hailing the Sikhs who had at last materialized with the dead from Waterfall Gully. He fetched Bluey, returned for Walter, and they set off in a file towards the cemetery.

 

As they shuffled along Bluey told Walter that while poking around during the wait he had found a neat stack of rifles and bandoliers beside apparently unused though properly packed haversacks. On asking an officer who they were for he was told “it would be tragical to enquire”. He stopped Walter at one point and said, “That sky pilot friend of yours gives me the creeps.”

“He's all right. He's better here than he was there.”

Bluey had few dislikes. But when he fixed on one, that was it. His cheerfulness never faded, it just became blithe hostility. When the line halted at a wider part of the gully he clamped Walter by the shoulder: “Haven't you noticed? He don't give a fuck about exposing us. Listen!” Along the length of track just traversed they heard the clatter of a spent bullet denting and sliding through boxes and tins abandoned on either side. “I don't trust him. He's like bloody Reg Hurst. Hang around him too long and we'll be smeared all over the place like a mad woman's shit.”

They came to a shelf of land behind the beach near the exit of Shrapnel Gully, a spot the chaplains had started calling “God's Acre”. After the Sikhs had set the bodies down in rows and departed, Potty gave the night's work a preliminary scan. Other dead were here
from earlier. They stretched off into the dark, a tangled skein increasingly decomposed. Among them Bluey found someone he knew: he pointed, uttered a drowning syllable, and vomited. Bluey had reached his breaking point. Walter feebly placed a hand on his back:

“What's up?”

“Piss off.”

He strode to a gravelly depression, a hole the size of a bathtub, squatted and refused to move. “This is not human work,” he complained when the chaplain remonstrated. Then he said: “Aw, shit. Give me a minute. I knew Wiley Banks and I've got to think.” It was not just that he knew the man and grieved. Banks's face had been half torn away and was infected with maggots. “Wiley often used to sing for us. You should have heard his voice.”

“I have,” said Potty. “I knew all these men. Don't tell me about Wiley Banks. His favourite song was
The Trumpeter
. I can hear him singing now.” He took Bluey's elbow and helped him to his feet, the thin torchlight at his waist contracting for a second to a faint moon that wandered back and forth across Bluey's stomach.

“‘Tread light o'er the dead of the valley'. Isn't that the one?”

After wiping his mouth Bluey set to work in the stinking graveyard.

Then it was Walter's turn to vomit. For this was not like the stink of a dead animal in the bush with its furry, coppery stench easily breasted. Nor even like the smell of the dead on the heights, which fell back now and then before a breeze. Here one was compelled to walk to the mucked heart of matter, reach out a hand,
plunge it into the black pulp and grasp for a slimy bone which itself was only the outer casing of something deeper, darker, more horrible and endless. And all the while to go on, deep breath after breath, breathing as in a nightmare a medium fit only for another species.

Yet thankfully not only the body emptied itself of pure scruple here, but also the mind. After taking a mouth-clearing swill from his water bottle Walter set fiercely to work. Bluey grabbed the leg of a recent somebody and Walter an arm. Could the grazing of lately immobilized backsides possibly matter? At first with respect they manoeuvred the bodies from their lines, and then roughly. Bluey remembered the broken stalks of herb — it was thyme — a pungent green stain that showed on their handkerchiefs in the dark and restrained the clinging odour until, like poison, the stench rebuffed sweetness and entered the blood.

After each two or three bodies had been lain in the ditch they raided a bag of chloride of lime and frantically powdered the corpses until the air became sharp with a smell like laundry bleach, and the dusted shapes of men revealed themselves as in a photographic negative. Then they sprayed earth from alternating shovels, paused, and were lulled by Potty's words: “I am the resurrection and the life … Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower.” Once he threw in a text for his helpers: “Be not weary in well-doing, for in due season ye shall reap, if ye faint not.” This was when Frank, his stomach wound smelling like bad meat, was covered as quickly as any other. The thrill of holiness in these pauses overcame revulsion, or else it was the thrill of ghostliness … “What if one of these poor saps is still alive?” asked
Bluey. Walter swore that a cold hand had moved in his: but Potty checked and found that the man had been shot through the heart.

At the end of the last row ten Turks were lumped together for interment after the forty-two Australians. Bluey told a joke about a cave in no-man's-land at Cape Helles that had been abandoned by the English on arrival of a goat. But when a Turk looked in the goat had departed in disgust. “These here smell better than our chaps,” said Walter, “because they're smellier alive than dead.” Bluey said: “Return to sender — hey, mother!
Chop-chop!
” But Potty shut them up.

Then they set the crosses upright, hammered them in, and were told by Potty of a place at the beach where they could find a cup of tea and sleep for the night. By then it was one thirty, and they were beginning to see strange shapes — a bush became General Hamilton and strode forward with a hand extended for shaking before its whitish tips settled; a group of wounded lying on a vast and lumpy tarpaulin awaiting their shift to a hospital tent was transformed: real men, right enough, but the way their blood-soaked lint glistened under the sweep of Potty's torch made it seem, for an alarmed second, that a chest of jewels had been tipped over them, and they had no knowledge of it, except that the colours weighed them down in rubiate slabs, and they knew they would never again rise with the power that had been so easily and recently theirs. As the three filed closer to the sea they heard a frog croaking in the intervals between bullets. Its voice came from another world again, where nature, not man with his hatred and cruelty, ruled the earth.

The scene at the chaplain's dugout also had its hallucinatory aspect. They were greeted by a colleague of Potty's, a tall wakeful man wearing a clerical collar and a brown neck-protector suspended from his cap. He produced fresh tea as promised and served it from a china teapot. “Uncracked,” he proudly pointed. Then he showed the sleeping place to Walter and Bluey, a roomy, clean-swept hutch, iron-roofed, with sandbagged walls half-set into the hillside. Along the rear wall of earth ran a bowed wooden shelf where wildflowers, purple and white, luminous as felt in the candlelight, were bunched in empty jam tins. Between each lot of flowers were stacked Bibles, hymn sheets, communion cups and wine. It would be like sleeping in the vestry of a church. Outside, a giant kettle dangled above red coals, and there were sweet biscuits as well as the usual dry. “This sea,” said the other chaplain, a Reverend Ray, indicating darkness from which could be heard, faintly, the slap of wavelets, “is where St Paul passed by ship from Troas to Neapolis. Plainly in sight of this spot.”

Bluey and Walter kept swaying forward from exhaustion, but Potty eagerly spouted the text: “Therefore loosing from Troas, we came with a straight course to Samothracia, and the next day to Neapolis.”

“Can't you readily picture the little boat?” asked the tall minister of Potty.

“Oh, yes,” said the wide-awake other, as if this was what made everything cheap at the price, these glimpses of Christian contiguity. You could tell they had been though this ridiculous but not stupid conversation many times, these men, who of all those stranded on the peninsula were doomed to moral agony
whatever the physical comforts they snatched for themselves or thrust, brave palliatives, on others — cocoa, magazines, writing paper, or a night's rest in safety. Even Bluey, on the point of wading in, could see that.

“I'm for dreamland,” he said, and the ministers, wanting to talk a while longer, smiled a motherly goodnight. As Walter tipped his tealeaves to the ground he heard Chaplain Ray mutter, not without bitterness, “There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, come over into Macedonia, and help us.”

Bluey called back: “Should we snuff the candle?”

Then, when they were settled, he said to Walter, “We could have done better by Frank. How can we tell the boys we just — dumped him.”

“His funeral was as good as the rest's.”

“Still —” He reached out and pinched the candleflame.

Men tramped up and down outside, and from the beach came muffled shouts, the whinny of donkeys, the bang of iron on wood, the flop of tin. Earlier, a brief glimpse of the beach in the faint grey mist of distant searchlights propped between battleships and shore had revealed a kind of confused bayside goods yard, long and narrow, with soldiers instead of stevedores milling around purposelessly. But by now their tasks must have been sorted out because either side of the dugout resounded as thoroughfares must have … where? … in ancient Cairo … before the invention of the wheel. Nothing was older than Cairo. Nothing … and Walter pursued the thought, age melting into age down echoing archways of weathered stone on which the generations registered as shadows,
if at all, and the individual was naught but the sound of a footstep fading before the space of life was done.

Bluey was still awake. “I couldn't wash properly,” he complained.

“Nor me.”

“They ought to let us off after all we've done …
Wally
?” Bluey was crying. To cover himself he gulped, “Christ, what a joke.”

Walter tried to find a word to encompass the day just finished, something to throw to Bluey in expiation of its terrors. But if the right word existed it was wandering white-faced in shocked circles far from memory. Before Walter finally fell asleep he piled up extra blankets and burrowed in, also wanting to cry but unable to do so. If ever there was a night when nightmares would rack his mind, this was it — but he slept dreamlessly and woke refreshed.

 

In the morning Bluey was gone, and Potty's palliasse in the corner lay neat as an unused hospital bed. Why were things so quiet? The hour was late (he sat up in alarm:
past stand-to
), already sunlight pressed into the gully and with its beachside intensity brightened the cave where he lay. From far away came the lazy pop of rifle fire, and was it just his mood that made him decide that the shooting lacked heart? For seconds at a time nothing at all could be heard. Then it started again … the rattle of a switch of peppercorn absentmindedly flicking leather. Settling back on his blankets, making a pile under his head for a pillow, he filled a pipe and resolved not to move until ordered. After a minute he heard footsteps and then the voices of Bluey and Mr Fox at the fire.

“Oh, I know what you're driving at, padre. At home I used to go to church and all that, but this bloody war has knocked it all out of me. How can you believe in a God of love? He don't
love
no-one. Look what happened to Wiley Banks. And what about young Wally? One bloke dropping dead after another, practically in his arms. He's had the shit knocked out of him.”

Then the voice of Chaplain Ray cut in, raised in objection to the swearing, and was pounced upon by Bluey's reply: “
Shit
to bad language.”

Potty's response was unclear, but his tone scolding, and Bluey's words then fearfully angry: “Go and complain to your God about the buggered bodies,” (he was yelling now, moving farther off). “Don't mamby-pamby me about my lip.” Through a gap in the blankets that served as a door Walter saw Bluey seat himself on a knoll and face the sea.

This defence of his feelings by Bluey surprised him. He looked again — Bluey the guard. True friends sprang up when least expected, and from the foulest muddles.

Mr Fox brought Walter a cup of tea and Walter shrugged, smiling feebly. “Bluey's not himself.”

“Another hard day ahead.” Yet the minister spoke almost gleefully: “
Listen
.”

“They don't seem too keen on it. What's up?”

“The armistice is agreed to. At seven thirty everything stops.”

Walter sat upright and splashed tea: “Go on!”

“There'll be lots to do, I'll need you and Blue again.” The way he said “Blue” was wrong, in the manner of someone overfamiliar to mask dislike.

“I don't think so,” said Walter. “I mean, hadn't we
better get back to our mob?”

“It's all fixed. I had an inkling of this yesterday.”

“Oh.”

“Don't get up. There's ages before we start.”

Potty's hand strayed along the shelf and plucked a fat little Bible. He riffled the pages and became absorbed. The morning had clouded over and a drizzle began.

Well, why should Bluey be left undefended?

“I heard some of what Bluey said.”

The minister left a finger marking his place and looked up slowly, uttering an “Mmmm?” of irritation.

“There doesn't seem much to be said for the other side.
Your
side. Not after what we saw last night.”

“I thought we'd talked this through yesterday,” said Potty, abandoning his text. “But never mind.” The snug Bible went
phut
as he slapped it down.

“If He's all around, how can He let this go on? He could have easily stopped it before things got bad.”

“God limited His own power when He made man free. There's no freedom to do right without a freedom to do wrong. See what I mean?”