1915 (34 page)

For weeks there had been no such time as tomorrow, only another today. Now there was just half a today, soon to be hacked clear of the rest by a means Walter dared not contemplate. But perversely his mind sprang ahead and showed him the darkness of night, and
through it a Turkish patrol creeping with bayonets.

 

A month before, on the day after the armistice, Walter had been taking his first swim when the battleship
Triumph
was sunk by a German submarine. From water level it had been like watching a city sink into the sea. One man was glimpsed clinging like a mollusc to a sunlit propellor, another ran down the sloping deck into a mirage that ringed the waterline like a rim of tears.

Then only two days ago Walter had almost been killed while swimming at the same spot. If only he had been, he would have been spared this torment. A moment of animal ignorance — that's what he needed now. Death without all this knowledge, without thought. The swim had come at the end of a week of heat which these Australians no longer pretended was “nothing” compared with the scorchers of home. When not digging, or crouching tense in a dusty gutter at the edge of shimmering scrub, they would eat, forcing down gobfuls of red melting beef and sweating cheese, and then they would sleep. The heat was so intense that at noon one day Ollie Melrose had punched a hole in a tin of Fray Bentos and derisively poured out a lurching stream that attracted green blowflies bigger than any seen at home. The meat gave off the odour of a tidal swamp. To swim after such experience was everything. Twenty heads like floating melons cheered when the brave mail boat chugged around the point pursued by gulping white shots. Then came a pause in which the distant Turkish gunners could easily have been loading up for the swimmers,
but who cared? They smacked the water, gargled and sculled peacefully around, diving like ducks to search for souvenir pellets of shrapnel from earlier salvoes.

This is what Reg Hurst had dreamed of: to be free of the body's prison after exertion. This thin remembrance, an exaggeration of feeling. Was that all Hurst had asked for — sentiment? Walter stroked six feet down to where he felt water pressure on his ears and thus failed to hear an explosion that sent the others splashing ashore. He groped for a large section of shrapnel casing, a real find, and stood there holding it, his feet on the stony bottom. After a minute he shot to the surface, took a series of noisy breaths while looking out to sea, then dived again. The next shot was closer: he wallowed out of the water to see his mates dancing and waving.

“We thought you were done,” said Boof when he reached them. Walter turned to see a burst of shrapnel churn to emery paper whiteness his swimming place of moments before. Ollie alone berated him for his carelessness — the Ollie who recognized but could not accept the Australian addiction to understatement.

After the next shot Walter raced back to the water's edge to collect his shorts and shirt which he had left weighted down with a stone in hopes of drowning the lice.

They agreed to go their separate ways and meet up later in a dugout belonging to one of Ollie's countrymen. Walter traded his souvenir for two tins of condensed milk from Pig Nolan, who set off to swap the ruptured shell for rum from the English sailors who would appear at the landing stage after dark. Walter then made his way through the gullies behind the beach until he emerged at a busy part of the shore several hundred yards farther on.

For the rest of his life, for how ever long was left to him, ten minutes? a second? he would hold to the miserable series of events marking that evening as the most wonderful holiday of his existence. From out in the scrub came a growl of noise, an animal cry, though what animal could be left alive in this place? It had nothing to do with his lying here, hands covering his face, it was not meant for him because no other cry came.

 

“Hey, Wally! Over here!”

Walter had doubled back that evening after his swim to find Ozzie Deep acting as guard at the water cart.

“So it's you, you bastard. You're always guarding something.”

“Go on”, said Ozzie.

When Walter asked about the
No Drinks
sign Ozzie looked quickly around and muttered: “Take your fill, but hurry.” Walter gratefully gulped the rare liquid but suddenly spat a mouthful into the dust. It tasted of chloride of lime, reminding him of the dead.

A chain stretched from the mug to the tank. Ozzie as he played with the dull metal links was like a begging monkey. He wore the defensive look that truly kindly people often adopt, a mixture of willingness and thwarted experience.

“A smoke?”

They talked while the sun sank into the sea. Past the sandbags protecting the cart Walter could see a busy stretch of beach, the part called Anzac Cove. He remembered Reg Hurst's description of how men had clung like cockroaches under the low cliff on the day of the first landing. Now they threw stones at each other,
stripped and swam, played leapfrog. Not the same men — a different generation with no direct memory but a fund of queer stories concerning the events of two months previously.

“Doherty has stopped bothering me,” said Ozzie.

“How's that?”

Ozzie looked awkward: “He got himself killed. It turned out he weren't so mean after all. He went up the gully behind Pope's Hill to bring back a wounded man. The Jackos let him have it but he kept going. He's somewhere over there.” Ozzie nodded at a row of stretchers queueing for a hospital tent. “So's the one he saved. Did you know Keith Fryer at home?”

“The station manager? There was a scandal with an English governess.”

“That's him. He lately worked for the Gillens out Condo way. Don't go,” Ozzie grabbed Walter's arm: “He's dead too.”

The wounded lay in an alleyway of sandbags awaiting their moment. Abandoned here by overworked bearers they took on the aspect of groups of sick in Bible pictures. Limbs dangled from the edges of stretchers. A man sat up and called for water. Bandages emphasized the startling brightness of seeping blood.

The man who had called for a drink now waved an arm and yelled: “Come on, you lazy bludger!”

“He's been there an hour and I've given him two drinks already. Don't go, he's a whinger.”

“But I know him.”

“Don't we all.”

“Walter! Hey Wally!”

“Shut up! This stuff's like gold!” yelled Ozzie. Then he relented. “All right, take the swine this but make sure you bring the cup back.”

The wounded man was Blacky Reid.

“Wally, old pal,” said Blacky as he gulped the water. “That weasel —” he pointed at Ozzie. “I've been hit,” he explained, and drew back the blanket to display caked blood and old rags. “My piles are killing me and I've got some sort of fever. Then this, a touch of shrapnel, just as I was getting ready to come down here about my bum. My arse is killing me!” He dropped his voice: “We're going to be friends when we get back, aren't we? You and me?”

“Like always,” said Walter.

“He thinks I'm putting it on. Just you wait!” he wheezed at Ozzie. “Did you know it was safer in the trenches than in the hospital? They say a doctor died during an operation.”

“Go on, you're lucky. You'll be well out of it.” He now saw the problem — Blacky was desperately afraid.

“You remember Martha Bryant, don't you? She and I got married, secretive like, the day before I left. Her first old man kicked the bucket, so it was now or never.”

“Congratulations.”

“Ah, well, it was what she wanted.”

Walter watched as Blacky the reclining farmer cupped a hand and tried to light a cigarette.

“How's old Pig to you now?”

“He's changed. He's polite. I don't know why — what does it matter?”

“Nobody likes him any more. It ain't right to profit from your mates. He needs friends.”

“Like you?” ventured Walter. His intended meaning was moralistic — “as you, Blacky, have decided you need friends.”

“I'm no friend of Pig's. You think I'm worse than sin, don't you. You believe all that stuff Ma Pepper
goes on with, ‘Blacky oughter hang', and so forth. No, I'm not like that. Bugger this cheroot, can you make it work? Light it for me, there's a pal. You've never seen me plain, have you. But you've changed too,” he rambled on, “you're not such a biting whelp any more. You used to bristle all over the place.”

“Did I?” Walter passed Blacky the cigarette. A different part of the beach was visible from here. A sergeant smoking a pipe walked to a position just in front of the lapping waves, seated himself on a folded newspaper, and took up a book that had been all along lying on the rubble.

“They're mad,” said Blacky, referring to the throng on the beach. “Five minutes ago the bloody place was shelled.”

“It never falls in the same place twice.”

“Like hell it don't. Where've you been all this time?”

“Keith Fryer was here,” said Walter, gazing around.

“He still is. That's him under the blanket.” Blacky indicated a stretcher on the other side of the alley.

“I knew the English woman he took up with. I met her in the hospital when I was sixteen.”

“Edie Davis? Poison.”

Blacky was an expert on district gossip, old and new. Even now he raised himself on an elbow in a dark rush of interest: “Y'know, they always reckoned she —” But he weakened, and lay back placing an arm over his eyes.

“By the way, how's your love affair?”

Walter scraped the tin mug in the dirt. Mere talk could no longer touch him. Besides, Blacky's tone was sad and wistful. Each slow word of the question sought an image of a disappeared world. While inhabiting that
world both had believed they shared nothing. Yet now it was not only all they had in common — that departed world was all they had.

“Finished,” said Walter.

“Sorry to hear it.” But the old malice flickered like a bed of coals in the early hours of morning: “Perhaps she was too quick for you. Women are like that, always out ahead somewhere. Sometimes I think we marry 'em just to slow 'em down.”

This effort of Blacky's to be his old self showed how far gone he was. He turned even paler, those black brows pathetically huge.

“Hey, Ozzie!”

“You come here.”

Walter cadged a last drink for Blacky and asked Ozzie to keep an eye on him.

“I can't be sure, but he seems about to faint all the time.”

“That's nothing.”

“Will you watch him?”

“If you ask me to. No other reason. All right?”

Over on the beach the book-reading sergeant stood, dusted the seat of his pants, and yawned. A slight breeze stirred the pages of the pink-covered paper which he left carelessly behind. “There's a
Bulletin
over there,” Walter told Ozzie, “I'll be back in a second.”

Two Australian privates, each carrying a tin can, moved at a slow walk along the edge of the water with their heads turned intently downwards. Every few seconds they swooped on small objects in the water and placed them in the cans. Any moment now they would sight the
Bulletin
, more prized than any shell, stone, chip of wood, spent bullet, or even money — and grab it before Walter could get there. So he
sprinted. The
Bulletin
was rich with tales of an existence that once had belonged to all three. They lumbered from opposite directions, the two soldiers like clumsy seabirds in their heavy khaki with damp rings on their trouser cuffs.

“Hey, that's ours,” one belatedly whined. Walter clutched it and retreated.

“Where's my cup?” called Ozzie.

“C'mon Wally,” contributed a remarkably recovered Blacky, “give us a look.” But a doctor arrived and Blacky was carried off groaning.

The first item Walter saw in the
Bulletin
was the last he read, for the news it contained set him thinking. “Son killed,” ran the headline: “The son of a Paddington identity Mr M. Milojevic, a teacher of languages, has been killed in action. The son enlisted under the name of George Mullens. He died, said the father, for his beliefs.”

There was no truth in this. Mullens had been trapped just as Walter was trapped. Held for an eternity below ground with the only way out an ascent to heaven through the blue corridor above. Heaven!

In the stinking Gun Pits Walter dozed for a while, feeling nauseated from the endless nervous waiting. He searched all pockets but discovered his tobacco tin gone. Then it occurred to him that he had been in this trench before. Mad as it seemed, once before in this life, or an earlier one. The idea strengthened. Here was proof that the inexorable process of finalization was not all-conquering. Chinks appeared in the bricked-up solidity of the world.

Yet on the beach that evening a scene had presented itself that showed the inexorable process all too visibly, with no fanciful routes of escape. After putting the
Bulletin
down Walter had seen an officer, a New Zealander, sitting beside a pack with his back turned resolutely to the sea. He seemed to be listening for something that would never come to this part of the world — the whistle of a train, the clang of a tram, the honk of a motor bus. For a minute the military purpose of things stepped back from the stacked stores, from the barges, from the stepped dugouts climbing the slope, the water tanks, the men gathered around the brigade depots like crowds outside a ticket office, from those who strolled along the beach in convivial groups — authentic holidaymakers.

But then it advanced: the reminder that nothing here, not even the stones, was free from a military purpose. The stink of decaying flesh.

The privates with their tin cans looked up and spoke. The officer took out his pipe and puffed busily. Walter remembered the ramshackle theatre of his dream, where he had laboured in a terrifying atmosphere of love. Now he saw a broad moving belt that inched its way up the beach with a load of men and stores, and deposited them at the grinding face of the front. There was no waking from this vision, for it was the truth. If a man's mind pulled away to one side it made no difference. He was in the service of a momentum not his own, a machine that finally spewed him out, used up, as waste. Only a faulty part could win respite, a broken but not destroyed body. No matter which way he turned the idea over Walter saw that a price was required for being part of the contrivance of war. And that fact made being here not just cruelly unfair, but mad. No other activity in life took away completely what was offered without giving something back. It was a dead end. Here hands clawed
gravel or clay, clutched at slithering tree roots, or ran desperately across the face of ancient brick — as if hands could take the body where the mind demanded.