No Man's Land (18 page)

from
Passport to Hell

W
HEN THE TROOPS FROM THE
REDWING
were taken off on barges to Y Beach there was no more sound to disturb the morning than an occasional whiplash crack, a rifle spitting far away, or a dull thud which sounded as though a gigantic muffled hammer had been brought down on the earth. They were told in whispers that this was the concussion of a shell; but the front line, six miles distant, was still a legend to them. Everybody talked in whispers; and it was rather amusing to see the giants of Tent Eight – and stouter men than they – walking like cats on hot bricks, afraid of a shuffle of pebbles among the sands. Three miles up from Y Beach they struck Anzac Cove and a standing-up breakfast – boiling water with a pinch of tea-dust thrown in, biscuits, and bully beef.

Against them in the pale rise of the morning was something which for the New Zealanders had especial significance. The Maori Pioneer Corps, passing this way, had stopped to carve out of the yellow clay face of the Gallipoli cliffs a gigantic Maori Pa. The men now passing quietly by saw carved stockade pillars with their little lizards, ornate whorls, and leaves of carving, top-heavy idols with their huge heads lolling on their shoulders, their eyes squinting, their tongues out. The work was still fresh, and recalled to the New Zealanders their few glimpses of that old world of different fighters – the red-ochred stockades, the wharepunis, the little store-houses standing on their high stilts and daubed with crimson to keep away the night-demons; a world which now and again, behind the bush-veils and the mist-veils of the New Zealand hills, had silenced their childhood with a memory of something that fought to the death. Those native hills pitted with the brown circles of the old Maori trenches, their wounds not yet quite hidden in the green softening of grass, were not unlike the hills of Gallipoli that now slid out of the sheath of the morning mist. But where New Zealand hills hide under the grey-stemmed manuka bushes, with their pungent flower-cups brown and white or delicate peach-colour, the Gallipoli hills were covered with a little shrub of somewhat darker green, its astringent leaves bitter with a flavour of quinine.

A splendid morning sunlight began to break over the cliffs. Paddy Bridgeman and Jack Frew, Fleshy McLeod and Starkie, proceeded together. After breakfast a bugler blew the fall-in, the thin notes thrusting like an arrogant silver spear into the silence of Gallipoli. The troops were lined up above the water-tanks on the beach. Before the men were in their places, the hills above them began to flash and rattle. The fall-in woke up every sniper in the world. Four hundred men stood in line to answer the roll-call. As they stood, a man in the front rank pitched forward.

‘Hullo, there's a chap fainted,' whispered Jack Frew.

Somebody turned the man over on his back. Right between his eyes there was a little blue mark, like a dot made with a slate-pencil. Death had given him no time to change the expression on his face – a boy's look of interest and curiosity. He was left lying where he fell.

The men fell into a column and marched four deep up Mule Gully under fire from machine-guns, rifles, and shells. Very few of them were old enough to be veterans of the Boer War. The way up Mule Gully was like the end of the world. Their warning of the shell's coming was a rush of air, a crash, a blinding blue flash amidst the chocolate fountain of the uptorn earth. Shrapnel burst in a dazzling hail of steel – a crash where it struck the ground, then rip – roar – and the fragments tore the sides out of skulls, cut bodies in two, dismembered men as they marched. Captain Dombey was in front of the column as the troops came in plain sight of 971, the entrenched hill of the Turks. In the harbour, British men-of-war, monitors, and destroyers began the barrage, dealing out to the Turks the death which was past the strength of the scanty British artillery. When a battleship fired a broadside at the Turk trenches, the men on shore could see her rock in a trough of smothering foam like a vast grey cradle. Those that lived, crashes and shrieks ringing in their ears as though the echo must last on for centuries, climbed blindly and helplessly up the Gully, and the cliffs pelted down death on them as they ran.

There was a tally of the men landed from the
Redwing
when they reached the top of the hill. Of about four hundred who left the troopship, less than a hundred men had come through unscathed. Some were sent straight to England, others went to the base hospitals at Lemnos and Malta, others rotted on Gallipoli. The survivors climbed into their trenches, and spent the next day chasing Turks out from the holes where an unsuccessful attack the evening before had stranded dozens of them in hostile territory.

The troops had been split up into divisions, and Starkie was properly numbered with Southland Eighth; but Paddy, McLeod, and Jack Frew were all Dunedin men, and Starkie beguiled Captain Dombey – who was half-conscious now after the terrible concussion of the shells – into letting him join up with Otago Fourth.

Silver was the first of Tent Eight's giants to go, shot clean through the head by a Turkish sniper. The sniper is the aristocrat of No Man's Land, the cold killer; and against him Starkie began to develop a murder hate, not decreased by the fact that the Turk snipers were more numerous and better than the British ones. The shell hail, even the death song of the Maxims, gives you warning to keep your head down. But the sniper isn't human. Soldiers are only men. There are times in the trenches when they forget the whole bloody, cruel gambit, stretch their legs and arms, dare to show their fool heads over a mound of earth. That's the sniper's opportunity. When the troops start to relax, from his bush-screened hole in No Man's Land he picks the play-boys off. He won't allow them their decent modicum of rest; and in consequence, where the shell gets a curse and is forgotten except by the men it cuts to pieces, the sniper starts death-feuds. Hunting snipers was a game on Gallipoli, and it wasn't played according to any known rules of sportsmanship.

The Otago trenches turned out to be holes about four feet six inches in depth, with high mud embankments screening them from the hills.

‘How in blazes do you see the Turk?' grumbled Starkie.

An old hand passed him a periscope. For one moment Starkie saw the Turk all right. Then the periscope was shot out of his hands, the palms burned where the brass tube had been ripped out of them, and a howl of laughter went up along the trench at sight of the greenhorn's stupefied face. Two minutes later Charlie Saunders wanted to have a look at the Turks. He jumped up, visible above the embankment for just one moment. Then he fell back like a sack into Starkie's arms. There was no blood, just two little blue marks the size of slate-pencils. The body writhed for a moment, as if anxious to express something. Whatever it was, Charlie never got it out. His body was a corpse before his mind had stopped wondering.

In the trenches men lived like rabbits, the mud walls pitted with the little holes where they slept – or tried to sleep. These provided earthen benches, not long enough for a grown man to lie down, but of a size sufficient for him to cram his body into shelter. At night the trenches, from above, would have presented a strange sight, like a grotto illumined by thousands of pale glow-worms. The men improvised candles, half-filling kerosene-tin lids with fat and dirt, and in the middle fashioning wicks of twisted rag soaked in grease. These fluttering little candles, evil-smelling and burning with a spluttering bluish flame, were the only trench lights after dark on Gallipoli.

In the morning the troops were issued a dixie of water to each man – about two-and-a-half cups – from which they could shave, wash, and make themselves a cup of tea. A grimy towel served months long for wiping faces and bodies. It was hot on Gallipoli.

‘Aw, hell!' said Fleshy superbly. ‘It's only dirty chaps that bloody well need to wash.'And he tilted the dixie to his lips.

‘And it's only scrubs go shaving themselves,' added Starkie.

Thereafter, Disraeli's maxim that water is good only for washing with was disregarded in the trenches. The men drank their water issue and let hygiene go where it belongs in wartime. Not that you could call the water drinkable. There were two wells between the trenches and the beach, but both were reputed to be poisoned by the Turks – which left the New Zealand trenches with the chlorinated beach water-tanks to draw upon. The water was carted up in benzine tins, and the men drank shandies of chlorinated lime, benzine, and water. For the rest, they were issued biscuit, bully beef, cheese – they didn't know where the cheese came from, but some of them had a pretty fair idea; jam – instantly covered with swarms of black flies; blocks of black seaweed-like pipe-tobacco known as “;Arf a Mo”, and an amplitude of cigarettes – Red Hussars, Beeswing, Havelock, Gold Flake, Auros, and Woodbines. The boys used to get a real smoke by tying five Woodbines together and puffing them in a bundle.

There were – besides the voices of the guns – two inevitable sounds in the trenches: the yells of the muleteers, driving their stubborn little grey mokes up Mule Gully under cover of darkness; and the long-drawn-out floating cry from the Turkish trenches: ‘Allah, Allah, il Allah'. The Turks – all furnished with fine leather equipment from German stores, muffled up in balaclavas, scarves, and mittens pulled over grey uniforms – came over the top with that great cry of ‘Allah!'When, after dark, their wounded and dying lay out on the Gallipoli hills, all night long the same cry would rattle up to the British trenches – groans of ‘Allah', from lips that would never taste the cup of life again.

On the second morning the survivors from the
Redwing
were taken out into No Man's Land as a burying-party. For this they were stripped of their uniforms, donned khaki shorts and singlets, and went armed with oiled sheets. The purpose of this they saw when they got to No Man's Land, each party breaking off under charge of an officer.

A few men found on No Man's Land were still alive. They were not always lucky. Some were stone blind and crazy with gun-flashes, others crawled near, leg or flesh wounds rotting after a night's exposure.

But the dead who waited in No Man's Land didn't look like dead, as the men who came to them now had thought of death. From a distance of a few yards, the bodies, lying in queer huddled attitudes, appeared to have something monstrously amiss with them. Then the burying-party, white-faced, realized that twenty-four hours of the Gallipoli sun had caused each body to swell enormously – until the great threatening carcases were three times the size of a man, and their skins had the bursting blackness of grapes. It was impossible to recognize features or expression in that hideously puffed and contorted blackness.

And how they had died! – some ripped to pieces by shrapnel – some of them in fragments; others having crept from the place of death to the hollow of some stunted green shrub, their arms crooked round the searching brown roots as though in a passionate, useless plea for the earth's protection against their enemies. Here and there one had found shade enough to escape some part of the disfigurement caused by the pitiless sun; and on these faces such a story was written as nobody on earth will ever dare to tell until the graves give up their dead. The Tommies from the next hill had been over in attack, and some of them lay here like the bodies of dead children, their pinched, sharp-featured little London faces white and beautifully calm. Sometimes the dead man bore only the blue seal of the bullet wound on head or breast, and the boys called that ‘the mercy death'. Sometimes a man's tunic was torn open where he had clutched at it with striving hands, and revealed along his swollen body a line like a row of nails driven into his flesh – the mark of the machine-gun's killing.

The burying-party, in squads of four and five, unrolled their oiled sheets and spread them on the ground. Then they lifted or rolled on the sheets the bodies of the slain. Dissolution had overtaken many of them; and as they were lifted their heads fell back in the sunlight, showing blackened mouth and throat, gaping nostrils, as caves for the little crawling life-in-death of ants and maggots. When they were rolled on the sheets the foul air which had gathered in their grotesquely gigantic bodies came out of their throats in one appalling groan, as though in that protest the dead soldier had told all the agony and outrage of his taking-off. The stench of that deathly gas struck into the senses of the burying-party.

Some of the living and moving men – mere boys of sixteen and seventeen – sweated like horses, and tears ran down their white cheeks.

Starkie heard Paddy Bridgeman groan, ‘Ah, blessed Mother of God – fine big men the one day, the next fly-blown and rotten!'

Holes were pitted in the Gallipoli hills, dug with the men's pickaxes. Then the dead were rolled in from the oil-sheets, ten or twelve men to a grave, the faces of some lying against the boots of others in a confusion of death. The living men who dug those common graves stood retching with sickness as they shovelled earth, brown and merciful, over the faces of the dead.

The burying-party were marched back to their trenches and crawled into the dug-outs. An old hand tapped Starkie on the shoulder.

‘Cup of tea, mate?'

Starkie looked at the man for a moment. Then he poured the tea into the mud of the trench. He was sick throughout the night.

In less than a month the men thought nothing of the burying-parties, and so little of the corpses on No Man's Land that money-belts were unbuckled as the rotting corpses were rolled into the pits of death.

It was only afterwards – after the War; after that outrageous libel on the normality of the human mind had been, for the time, dragged away – that every twisted limb, every blackened face waiting in those gullies, came back into memory once again, and for ever repeated the protest the tortured body uttered after its death.

In the trenches everyone was dirty and lousy – ‘five hundred' and louse-catching were the major sports of Gallipoli – but the lice were objected to considerably less than the swarming black flies. Sometimes the fighting between Turk and British trenches was like a dramatic, enthralling, and hideous scene shown in a great green-and-chocolatecoloured amphitheatre. From the apex of their trenches the Otago men saw a party of Turks blown sixty or seventy feet into the air above their fortified hill, grotesque little marionette figures violently jerked skyward by the unseen hands of death.