White Feathers (8 page)

Matiu gazed up at him with a stricken expression and cried, ‘He’s dead! My brother! They’ve killed him already!’

Sergeant Jones shook his head woefully and said, ‘Ah Jeez, I’m sorry, mate, but this sort of cock-up happens all the time.’

He didn’t even see the punch coming. Ihaka stepped up to him, swung back his fist and hit him full in the face. ‘Don’t you call this a
cock-up
!’ he raged as the sergeant fell over backwards. ‘The death of a
toa
is never a
cock-up
!’

‘Fucking hell,’ yelped Jones, his hand over his copiously bleeding
nose as he scrambled out of Ihaka’s way. ‘Get him off me! Fucking bastard’s mad!’

‘
Corporal Kerehi
!’ bellowed Joseph. ‘Stand down
now
!’

Ihaka stepped smartly back, coming dangerously within range of the sniper himself. He was panting heavily, not from the effort of punching the sergeant, which he already regretted, but from the shock of seeing Pare healthy and alive one minute then dead on his back the next. Always a man to whom honour came before anything else, he said stiffly, ‘I apologise, Sergeant Jones. You can put me on a charge if you want.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ said Jones, sitting up and dabbing gingerly at his nose with the tail of his already filthy shirt. ‘I bloody should, you know, but I won’t, long as my big-ears lieutenant doesn’t get to hear about it.’ He looked up at Ihaka, paused for a moment, then continued. ‘When you’ve been here for a while you’ll understand what it’s like whenever someone cops it. You don’t stop to think about it, you
can’t
stop, ’cos if you do you’ll start bawling and never be able to put a cork in it and then next thing you know they’ll be carting you off to the nearest mental hospital, mad as a two-bob watch.’ He sniffed deeply and hawked a gob of bloody snot onto the ground. ‘You just got to get used to it, mate. That’s all there is to it.’

Joseph held out his hand to pull the sergeant to his feet. ‘Joe and Hone, go and find the MO and the chaplain. Where can we put him, Sergeant?’

Jones, still holding his nose, replied, ‘There’s a spot down the hill a bit where we been burying people. He’ll go there.’ He didn’t want to add that the private’s remains would probably be blown sky high the next time a shell landed in the immediate vicinity of the makeshift graveyard: it happened all the time and, like all the other horrors that had assaulted them over the past months, the men had grown appallingly used to it.

Pare Black was buried the next day. His brother wept openly and unashamedly at the shallow graveside, and as many men from the contingent attended as could be released from duties. The chaplain, Reverend Wainohu, officiated at the funeral and the Tuhoe members combined in a soulful
manawa wera
to honour their dead brother. Joseph closed his eyes against tears as they sang:

From where comes the darkening of the heavens?

It comes from the mountain tops

Rest in peace on the sacred marae of the Big Fish, the Long Fish,

The Fish of Maui-tikitiki-o-Taranga

Lying here

Farewell, sir, the pride of our ancestors

The nobility of Tuhoe

The canoe is overturned

Indeed overturned.

Although he could understand that it was often too risky to bury the many corpses that were decomposing all around them, the prospect of the bodies of his own men lying scattered over the foothills of the Sari Bair Range bothered Joseph. Traditionally, and until very recently, his people had followed the custom of burying their dead in very shallow graves, and after a year or so when the flesh had fallen from the bones and been absorbed back into the earth, the bones were dug up, cleaned and settled in their final resting place. He imagined that, like him, his men would probably not mind if their earthly remains lay around for a while, as long as they stayed more or less in one piece, because
the flesh was not considered sacred. But who would collect the bones of the warriors after the weather had stripped the meat from them and bleached them white? Who would come back to this harsh, isolated corner of the world to carry them back home to New Zealand where they could be buried with honour and in peace next to their ancestors?

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

T
he day after the burial, Lieutenant McPherson came to Joseph and suggested he keep an extra watchful eye on Matiu Black, the dead boy’s brother: it would be shocking for his parents to lose both of their sons. Privately, though, both men were equally aware that if fate intended Matiu to die on the peninsula, there would be nothing either of them could do to prevent it.

His mates absorbed the impact of Pare’s death in different ways. His brother was grief-stricken for a matter of days then seemed to pull himself together, remaining quiet but apparently determined to ensure that the name of Black would not disgrace itself by demonstrating any form of weakness, emotional or otherwise. The others were upset but philosophical, and had learnt a lesson in self-preservation that knocked the edges off their collective bravado. Ihaka, on the other hand, was angry and remained so, which made him impulsive and at times blatantly careless of his own safety.

The contingent was put to work enlarging the sap up which they had traipsed on their first day, so that eventually it was eight feet deep and wide enough for two stretcher teams to pass each other with room to spare. Digging, carving terraces out of the heavy clay, clearing freshly excavated dirt from the ever-expanding trenches and dragging supplies and huge water tanks up from the
beach was exhausting work, made even more gruelling by searing heat, permanent water restrictions and poor food. But the Maori soldiers adapted quickly enough and soon took to working shirtless in the high temperatures — only they and the Indian Transport Corps could do so without risking severe sunburn after a matter of minutes. At times it rained with torrential force, turning every gully and ravine into a raging watercourse, then the sun would reappear, its heat sheathing the ground in warm, steaming mist, and workings that had taken days to excavate would have to be redug.

Joseph lived in a recess gouged into the back of one of the terraces at Number One Outpost, an area that soon came to be known as the Maori Pa. His cave went back about six feet, providing just enough shelter from shellfire when he was lying down, and was extended at the front by a canvas cover held up by sticks and fortified against blast by sand bags. He shared his possie with Jack Herewini and two other sergeants, although there was little segregation of ranks on the cliffs. The same could not be said of the heavily reinforced bivvies just above the beach which accommodated most of the commanders and those lucky enough to secure a ‘soft’ job away from the trenches. Beach-dwellers had first pick when new supplies were landed and the opportunity to buy or trade for black-market items offered by sailors working the barges, not to mention comparatively easy access to the sea for bathing and cooling off between shell bursts.

Although there was plenty of it, the food that reached the upper slopes of Anzac Cove was extremely basic. After only a week Joseph had grown heartily sick of bully beef, bacon and cheese, and longed for a piece of succulent chicken or fresh fish. The meat was salty and stringy, and did nothing to assuage a man’s thirst, and the cheese ponged and melted every where in the heat. The almost indestructible biscuits, four inches square and rock-hard, were occasionally employed to write home on when paper ran out, and
generally accepted as being more useful left in their boxes and piled up around bivvies as protection against shell blast. Some men threw their biscuits at the Turks, and it was rumoured that more often than not they were hurled back. Now and then there was bread, although usually stale and never enough to go around, and jam to go on it, and, on memorable occasions, eggs, but otherwise rations remained soul-destroyingly predictable. Fresh fruit and vegetables were non-existent, and Joseph and his men agreed that they would have traded almost anything for a bushel of
puha
or even a single
kumara
.

They soon succumbed to signs of the malnutrition that afflicted most at Anzac Cove: even minute cuts and scratches developed into great infected sores. Nugget Dawson developed huge boils on both buttocks and was unable to sit down for days, and in a matter of weeks Hone Reti had three of his back teeth pulled by a sweating and harried young man from the New Zealand Dental Corps, while Billy Parawai lost four in the front, giving him a very nefarious look whenever he smiled.

Then there was diarrhoea, followed more often than not by dysentery or even enteric fever. On the way back from the vile and reeking latrine pit one day, Joseph calculated that of the time he had spent at Anzac Cove to date, at least a fifth had been wasted crouching over a stinking hole in the ground while his bowels emptied noisily and extremely painfully. So far he had not become ill enough to be considered a casualty, and for this he was truly grateful. Every day men, groaning in agony in pools of their own green slime, were carted by stretcher down to the beach to be evacuated. Even worse were the blanket-wrapped bodies awaiting burial. But he had lost a lot of weight and had resorted to a length of twine threaded through his belt loops to hold his shorts up. Like many others he had forsaken underwear some time ago — it was almost impossible to keep clean and only made a man hotter
when he was working — but he was uncomfortably aware that he stank, although he doubted his body odour was any worse than anyone else’s.

More detested than even the Turks were the lice that infested the belongings and possies of every man at Anzac Cove. They filled trenches and dugouts, burrowed into clothes and skin and laid their eggs every where. The itching drove the men insane — more than one had to be invalided off the peninsula, pushed to mental collapse by a psychotic obsession with the tiny vermin. It was widely rumoured that one soldier, who had recently committed suicide by deliberately walking into the range of a Turkish sniper, had done so to rid himself of the incessant need to scratch. Joseph himself spent many of his off-duty hours sitting with his shorts, now cut off at the groin, around his ankles, patiently but determinedly running a lit cigarette up and down the seams in an attempt to kill the lice lodged there; this common and acceptable pastime was also useful because it gave the weeping and painful sores that many men had developed around their genitals an opportunity to dry out.

Occasionally they would be allowed down to the beach for a swim and a temporary delouse, usually when the Turks’ big gun, affectionately dubbed ‘Farting Annie’, was taking a rest. On such jaunts Joseph was as enthusiastic as everyone else, almost running by the time he reached the beach and naked well before he splashed into the water, not caring by then whether he was hit by a shell or not and leaving his filthy clothes to float about in the shallows until he was ready to get out. It was a comical sight, the array of generally undernourished bodies standing about in the sea, arms, legs and faces burnt brown but buttocks almost shining in stark, white relief. Except for the backsides of the Maori Contingent, of course. Joseph would float out beyond the gentle waves and swim parallel to the shore, relishing the feel of the salt water on his dirty, parched skin, stinging his sores and sluicing the dust and grease
from his hair. He would then swim back in to a point where the water was only waist deep, scoop up handfuls of sand and rub it all over his body in an attempt to remove some of the ingrained filth. After that he would climb back into his reeking shorts, shirt, socks and boots and trudge back up to Number One Outpost, on the way getting thoroughly covered in sweat and dust again.

Running a close second behind lice as a universal source of hatred were the flies, always plentiful in the area but attracted in even greater numbers by the filth of the men’s living arrangements and the presence of unburied corpses. They settled inches deep on and around the rotting remains, hovered and crawled over the latrine pits day and night, and tormented the troops incessantly. They seemed indifferent to swatting and dragged themselves with somnolent arrogance over everything and everyone; it was impossible to sleep with your mouth open without running the risk of swallowing at least one, and preparing food was a nightmare as they would immediately descend in great, buzzing droves, falling into stews and floating about in cups of tea. Joseph’s men joked that at least they were getting some fibre in their food but they, like almost everyone else on the peninsula — the Turks included — longed for the cooler weather to arrive in the hope that the flies would depart.

At the beginning of August Joseph was plodding along a trench below Quinn’s Post one morning when he stumbled and stood heavily on an oustretched ankle. When the owner of the ankle swore loudly Joseph mumbled an apology, then took a closer look at the bundle of rags he had inadvertently stepped on.

‘James!’ he exclaimed in delight. ‘How the hell are you?’

James squinted up from the bottom of the trench, then sat up properly. ‘Joseph! Bugger me, I’ve been wondering whether we might bump into each other!’

‘Yes, me too. I’ve had my eye out, but we’re usually stuck up
the other end.’ Joseph sat down next to his brother, waving in the general direction of the northern reaches of Anzac Cove.

James appeared to be utterly exhausted; his clothes were in an even worse state than Joseph’s, his eyes were hollow and shadowed and he had a filthy bandage tied loosely about one ear.

‘Have you been here the whole time?’

James nodded wearily. ‘We were in on the landing, but I’ve been down and back to Helles a few times since then. A sergeant now, eh? Not before time.’