The Passing Bells (34 page)

Charles Greville is here! We met by accident in the lobby of Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, and I spent a day with him and Roger Wood-Lacy, Rupert Brooke, and some other officers. Drove over to Gezira and watched a cricket match, and then out to Giza in late afternoon to see the pyramids in the sunset. Brooke is a fine fellow with the ability to talk for hours without boring anyone. The most mundane, even shabby, things fill him with poetic delight—the narrow, crowded, dirty streets of Cairo, the tents of the army stretching for miles along the Nile, flags stirring lazily against the white sky, a frieze of palms along the horizon, the fellaheen working their fields, drawing water from the river, oblivious to the distant boom of guns as the artillery send practice rounds howling across the desert. The troops—French legionnaires, Senegalese, Sikhs, Gurkhas, British in khaki and pith sun helmets, Australians and New Zealanders in their broad slouch hats . . . “Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping . . .” Everyone in Egypt seems to know that poem of his. Don't care for it myself. Too romantic in concept. I can't look on war as being a blessing. Keep thinking of those poor bastards of infantry dying on that hillside near Hannogne-St. Martin.

Brooke is in the Naval Division, a marine unit that saw a little service at Antwerp last September. Roger Wood-Lacy was disappointed that he had not been able to enlist with Brooke, for some reason, but he's happy now that they are together in Egypt . . . a happy band of brothers—his words.
Everybody
, with the exception of my two glum colonels, is happy, all caught up in the magic of three words—Dardanelles, Constantinople, and Hellespont. Literary allusions abound. Keats and Byron are constantly being quoted, as is Homer, and the legends of Helle and the golden ram, Hero and Leander, are constantly being invoked. Men who a few months ago read nothing but the
Sporting News
and
Punch
now speak of “wine-dark seas” and say, “The winds are high on Helle's wave.” Brooke is writing a poem about the expedition; so is Roger Wood-Lacy and, I assume, ten or twenty thousand other men. Even the commander of this invasion force is a poet and writer of note. The sole occasion when General Hamilton condescended to meet with the press corp en masse turned out to be rather like a literary tea. There is something professorial about Hamilton anyway, and when he opened his remarks by saying, “Gentlemen, we shall shortly be embarking for the peninsula of Gallipoli or, as I prefer to call it, the Thracian Chersonese,” I had the uncanny feeling that I was back at the university. The poor Turks are about to be bombarded not only by fifteen-inch shells and field howitzers but by storms of anapests, dactyls, Alexandrines, and couplets as well.

April 12, 1915

Rupert Brooke is ill. A touch of the sun. Charles came up here and told me about it. Brooke assures everyone that sunstroke is not as terrible as it sounds, but his commanding officer thinks otherwise and he's being taken aboard one of the many hospital ships that have assembled at Alexandria. He will miss the Gallipoli landings, which must be a blow to him. I then went with Charles and the second-in-command of his battalion, a Major Thursby, to the Royal Navy dockyard to see a ship that three companies of the Royal Windsor Fusiliers will board next week. We took a venerable victoria drawn by four white mules, and a pleasant and quaint trip it was. On the way, Major Thursby told me a good deal more about the history of the Royal Windsors than I cared to know—this battle and that campaign and what “the ever glorious Captain Pikestaff” did at the storming of Badajoz. At one point in the narrative, Charles leaned close to me and whispered, “He's really a dreadful old bore of a man,” and I quite agreed with him.

The ship that the Windsors will board for the Gallipoli landing muted even the garrulous Thursby. It's a rusty old collier called the
River Clyde
, the type of ship that chugs about the sea lanes of the world carrying coal in her bunkers to feed other ships. A sad-looking scow, paint-flecked and forlorn amid a cluster of new destroyers. Two square openings are being cut in her hull on both sides, and wooden ramps are being built that will be swung out on the cargo booms over these sally-ports when the ship is run close to shore. Two thousand men will be aboard her for the assault—the Windsors, Dublin Fusiliers, Munster Fusiliers, and two companies of the Hampshire Regiment. Officers from those units were on the dock, and they seemed no happier at the prospect than Thursby and Charles.

“Rather a seamy way to go to war,” Major Thursby said.

S.S.
Lahore
, April 18, 1915

Received a cable from Lord Crewe, informing me that not one dispatch of mine has reached London. Discussed this with Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a morose and faintly eccentric London newspaperman, who was not in the least surprised. He plied a censor with a few drinks one night in Alexandria and discovered that all civilian accounts of the military preparations for the Dardanelles expedition were being held back. He also expressed grave doubt that any press representatives would be allowed to go in with the assault forces. We are all being encouraged to stay in Egypt, but he is determined to go; so am I and a myopic guy from Reuters. That's it, the entire press corps. The others are on the beach. One elderly war correspondent told me that he was staying behind “so as not to interfere with the army in any way,” implying that I was simply being American and “pushy” for wanting to go along.

The S.S.
Lahore
is a P&O liner commandeered a few weeks ago to serve as a headquarters ship. Accommodations and service are the finest—Lascar servants abound, all dressed in sparkling white mess jackets with brass buttons. I sit on a deck chair sipping a planter's punch and watch the armada steam out of Alexandria. Horns blow, steam whistles toot, signal flags whip up the halyards, lights flicker back and forth among the two hundred or more ships sailing from Egypt. We are heading for the Aegean, to the island of Lemnos fifty miles off the southwestern tip of Gallipoli. A ship's officer tells me that Mudros Bay on Lemnos is large enough and deep enough to contain every vessel in sight, with a good deal of room left to spare. I assume the final sorting out for the assault will be done there. Everything appears to be so smoothly handled, so efficiently worked out, that success must be assured.

Charles Greville stood in the bow of the
River Clyde
and watched the men of his platoon fill and stack sandbags to form a loopholed wall four feet high and many layers thick, thus turning the fo'c'sle into a small fort where twelve machine guns could be emplaced. The collier drifted slowly at anchor in the dead-calm waters of Mudros Bay, the sun hammering down on the deck plates.

“Like old Vulcan's forge,” Roger Wood-Lacy remarked, wiping sweat from the back of his neck with a soiled handkerchief. He leaned against the rail and squinted toward the harsh treeless hills of the island. “Vulcan lived here, you know. His little paradise. One wonders what he saw in the place. Still, I rather like old Vulcan, solid type of chap. Never could understand why Jupiter kicked him out of heaven. Remember your Milton?

. . . From morn

To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,

A summer's day; and with the setting sun

Dropped from the zenith, like a falling star,

On Lemnos, the Aegean isle.

“Makes one think, doesn't it? The proximity of the past. Vulcan up there in the hills looking down on us all. Wonder what
he
thinks.”

“That we're a bunch of damn fools, I expect,” Charles muttered. “Don't you have anything better to do than hang about quoting
Paradise Lost
?”

Roger tipped his sun helmet to the back of his head and then pointed off across the bay.

“Not till A Company arrives. That's them now . . . just crossing
Swiftsure's
stern.”

Troops had been coming out all morning from the transport ships. There were twelve hundred men aboard the collier now, fretting in the stifling hold. Eight hundred more were due—B and C Companies of the Windsors and two companies from the Munsters.

“You don't seem very happy about things,” Roger said. “Anything the matter?”

“No, just tired. Talbot's supposed to be battalion machine-gun officer, but he's done fucking-all nothing since we came aboard.”

Roger put his hands to his ears in mock horror. “My, my . . . what dreadful language. Haven't heard such speech since Aunt Mary caught her tits in the wringer!”

Charles laughed. “Hop to it and get your chaps stowed away.”

He watched his friend go off down the deck toward the boarding ladders at midship. Not walking with languid grace any longer, the poet's stroll, but moving with a cocky swagger, a seasoned subaltern more than capable of keeping his platoon of tough South Londoners in line. He looked away and scrutinized the sandbag revetment.

“Pack 'em down hard with the flat of a spade, Corporal.”

“Right you are, sir.”

“Then start setting up the guns . . . and place bags on the tripod feet.”

“Very good, sir.”

He watched the Fusiliers and some Royal Marines clamp the Vickers guns to their mounts and uncrate the boxes of belt ammunition. The men knew what they were doing and needed no further direction. He leaned against one of the sandbag walls and gazed out at the host of ships in the vast harbor. Lemnos in the Aegean! The phrase rang through his head like poetry. Looking at the warships and the myriad transport ships floating so serenely on the bluest of waters under the bluest of skies, he thanked God for His mercy in not sending him to France. He could have conjured up a hundred images to dwell upon—Xerxes and his fleet sailing toward Salamis, Jason and the Argonauts seeking the Golden Fleece, Ulysses and Achilles tarrying here on their reluctant journey to Troy. And Byron, of course, seeking Hero's tower overlooking Homer's wine-dark sea. Well, the blind bard had been wrong about that. An ocean like any other, blue or gray depending on the sky. But it
was
the sunlit Aegean and not the muddy wastes of Picardy that he looked at over the sandbag rampart. He whispered a silent prayer.

“Mr. Greville, sir.” The megaphoned voice of Lieutenant Colonel Askins. “Kindly come up to the bridge.”

The colonel stood timber-straight on the bridge wing, one large brown hand toying with his sun-streaked mustache. Charles faced his commanding officer with a clear conscience.

“Yes, sir?”

“Ah . . . Greville . . . Damn fine job of sandbagging there.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What the deuce is wrong with Captain Talbot? That's his bloody job, y'know. Told me he had the cramps. Don't believe a word of it. Shirking, I call it. That's the trouble with the special reserve . . . too much time on civvy street and they go soft on you. I'm putting him ashore and making you acting captain and battalion chatter gunner.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The colonel's eyes became distant, and he looked away toward the nude brown hills of the island.

“You're a friend of that poet chap, Rupert Brooke. You and Wood-Lacy.” Charles felt his stomach contract. “Yes, sir.”

“Wood-Lacy more than you.”

“He knows him better, yes, sir.”

“Chap died yesterday. Sorry to be so blunt about it, but the message from General Hamilton was as brief as that. It was directed to Wood-Lacy, but I thought I'd better tell you about it. We up anchor at midnight and draw into V beach at six in the morning as planned. Young W-L has a damned important job to do tomorrow, and I don't want his thoughts to be wandering about. You can break the news to him after we're safely ashore at Sedd el Bahr. I'm sorry about this, Greville. I know what it is to lose a friend.”

The sun seemed to lose its heat, as though a great deal of the light had gone from the sky. The sea had turned sullen and oily. Charles stood at the bridge rail and looked down at the lighters coming alongside with their dense cargoes of men. Two thousand troops for V beach. Only the Lord and General Hamilton knew how many for W, X, S, Y, and the Anzac landing at Gaba Tepe. There seemed little point in grieving for one dead poet.

It lay ahead of him in the darkness, unseen except in the mind's eye, the sharp semicircle curve of Sedd el Bahr bay. Charles had memorized the map statistics: four hundred yards of narrow sand just west of the ruins of a medieval castle, the land rising gently behind the beach in a series of terraced slopes, a village of stone huts beyond the old fort. He peered through a narrow embrasure, his cheek resting against the cold metal of a Vickers gun. Nothing to be seen but the dark bulk of the land, nothing to be heard but the throb of the
River Clyde
's engines and the rush of water past the prow. He straightened up and glanced toward the stern. The two empty lighters that would form a causeway to the shore were trailing in tow, dark shapes in the phosphorescent wake. Behind them, only dimly seen, were twenty cutters manned by naval crews and filled with Dublin Fusiliers. They would secure the beach while the
River Clyde
grounded herself in the bay and the lighters were warped around from the stern to make the bridge. Fifteen minutes after grounding, the whistles would blow, and the two thousand men in the collier's hold would pour out of the sally-ports, race down the wood platforms suspended against the hull, jump onto the lighters, and run onto the beach without getting their feet wet.

One hour to morning. A bell clanged and the ship slowed. From out of the dawn behind them came thunderclaps and chain lightning, stabs of intense orange and red light along the horizon. Then the heavy shells of the fleet roared overhead and screamed in their plunge to the land. The half-moon coast from Sedd el Bahr to the tip of Cape Helles exploded in flame.