1915 (19 page)

The words, a gummy mumble, had been addressed to the captain, who now called for attention by striking a mess tin with a spoon. “Okay?” he sang in the wake of the bearers as they departed with Mullens, “Right-oh?”

Walter squeezed between Bluey and Frank on the ledge and picked at a crust of snot. “Don't do that,” said Bluey, who was moralistic as well as cheery, “it's a filthy habit.” Walter's fingers still held the smell of grubby leather, which was like the smell of potatoes — all that was left of the dead man's living thoughts.

After announcing his name — Captain Veegan — the speaker said: “The fellow who died was Private George Mullens. We mustn't blame him.”

“No,” ruminated Major Mason at his elbow.

“He took his rifle just now and tried to climb the parapet but was stopped by a bullet. A chance shot, it caught him
here
” — he raised an arm and cupped a ghostly blowfly. “Now look, the idea at present is to hang on without stirring things up too much. That's the word from the heads.”

This consignment of Mullens's actions to the realm of tactical error was accompanied by a look in the eye for each newcomer. “Do you understand?”

A real fly now entered the chamber, fumbling in front of the captain's belly, then weaving dozily out of reach. He handed over to the major, who said “Um, er” cleared his throat and poked his hat a half-inch higher. The fly's yellow stomach bumped along at dirt level, pursued through powdery dust by Captain Veegan's whacking bootleather.

The major at last found his voice. “Until very recently it was the vogue round here to hold your rifle above your head and fire from the ‘surrender' position. That method doesn't work any more. We lost a man called Broome at lunch time yesterday. You'll get your chance …” He went on for some time telling them what to do about water, ammunition, when to duck off to the subsiding slit of earth at the back of the trench
— a place of weeping stains he called the regimental latrine — how overcrowding in the front line was to be avoided by a few men at a time going forward with guides, how bayonets were to be kept at hand, voices kept low, wits about them.

At the end of this speech their lieutenant slid alongside Frank. “I had a bash at the dirty arseholes,” he boasted. The major had just then consulted his watch, tapped it to show he'd be right back, and disappeared. Frank sniffed the black nostril of Charlie Bushel's rifle. “I threw it in the air and fired — like he said not to.”

“Good for you.” The two had joined up together at Moree and Frank showed no regard for his mate's lately acquired commission.

“I'll stick with you, eh?” proposed Walter to Bluey. Frank combed his hair using the pocket-polished underside of a tobacco tin as a mirror: “Count me in.” Nervously they shifted the dull rhomboidal weights of full magazines from one hand to the other, then with a clatter fitted them. Back and forth went a dozen bolts.

Across Walter's knees Bluey said, “I wonder what they're doing at home?” and Frank replied: “It'll be cooler.” The two were not especially friendly, therefore it gave Walter a calming sense of importance to exist for a while as the transmitter of one's inconsequence to the other.

“I joined the army to get away from the wife and boy,” said Bluey, giving his ginger locks a rapid scratch. “Now I can't stop worrying about them.”

Across the way Boof Lucas sat stolidly awaiting the fateful order. Long ago, at Rosebery on the first day, no-one had been able to guess what use a heavyweight clod like Boof would be to a troop of mobile horse. He
ambled around butting into arguments, then as quickly settled himself into bland reverie. He weighed over sixteen stone, almost as much as Colonel Ryrie, the brigade's heaviest, and complained when confronted by any task requiring effort. But in the riding test they had given him a malicious stallion and watched amazed as he glided over the jumps and pivoted at the turns with the contour-line steadiness of a ballet dancer. Another surprise: he played the violin … But at rest these fiddler's hands were bunches of sausage, their meat boiled near to splitting inside lustreless grey tissue. Once, half a year ago, Boof had stirred and ventured a thought out loud to Walter. It had come during their endless wallow through the Indian Ocean, when both had agreed that war meant somebody had to die, but not us. Privately Walter had added
not me
, and then and there had killed Boof off to save his own skin while they gasped in the canvas shade of “B” deck. But why did it have to be Boof? Thick-armed, thick-chested, thick-legged, thick-headed: yet with something that ensured his value as a hostage — a soul like a tidy red fish drifting against a bloated lens of aquarium glass.

Pinned to a corner by Charlie Bushel the captain yawned: “Is that so? Ah — hmm? The devil! Yep-yep, yair, yep. Oh? Hawp!”

Boof raised his hat and rustled a bull's-crown of fibrous hair.

Bluey. Listen to Bluey.
Listen
.

Lazily Bluey's nasal voice drifted through sheets of mountain haze: “When the holes were dug this Marcus Dent character said, ‘If you ever needed to get rid of a body you could chop it up and put it under the fence posts'. And that's what he done.”

“There was a similar case at Pokataroo,” drawled
Frank. “Only this fellow, he … he … Christ bugger me.”

Frank, who never swore, fell silent, for with a grin and a cocked thumb the major had appeared in the doorway and issued his order:

“Ready?”

It was simple. You grasped your rifle and shuffled forward. It was a dance to the beat of water bottles banged on dry clay, feet shuffling — yours among them: a dance to your own dance, to the loudening frogs' chorus of small arms fire, the jab of elbows, and slithering nervous yawns. While the entire line halted in a damp neck of tunnel, Lizzie, next in front, tugged at the coiled plasticine of his ears.

Walter busied himself by gnawing hairless knuckles, licking them as once he had Frances's. By this means he experienced a feeling of lifting away … to Cremorne. Time was so short — life was so short, halting halfway down a finger, midway through an oarstroke — he leapt to a rock and sprinted uphill to the Reillys' house where he smacked the flimsy letter and demanded an explanation. Why had she written:

Not a moment passes when I fail to think of you in your great struggle
…

And so on; whereas before she'd enclosed black sprigs of secret hair, and babbled wildly for pages.

Why?

From grey darkness they inched to lighter shadows of smoky blue, then ascended toe-stubbing steps until far ahead a box of sunlight appeared, so bright that one half seemed to detach itself and oscillate against the other. Here the order was passed down to wait, so they
clung to their gear for yet another alarmed minute: cockroaches in the murky recesses of a cupboard.

Then a fresh order flushed them out, and they entered the front line.

A whistled waltz (Lizzie's) hung in mid-bar, the sunlight hurt, one man was directed to the left, another to the right; Walter's arm was gripped and pushed by a paw dotted with bristling warts. Part of the rear wall of the trench had collapsed, the white sun flitted harshly between sandbagged horizons, the stench, the dust's arid penetration. Later Walter would coolly reexamine a dead man's face that suddenly loomed left of his knee, a face dug clear from the broken wall of trench where during the night the Turks had blown a mine and the man had suffocated. He would recall a fist pathetically bared next to an ear, and study the rigid record of feeling thus imprinted — the shock of a mouth crammed with dirt, the resentment of dented eyelids, the desperation of fingernails black and split from suffocated scrabbling.

Somewhere Major Mason had hailed them from a recessed shelter, the kind used by fettlers in railway tunnels, then slipped out to follow, but that was one, two, three bends back: now Walter's companion butted him to a halt with a bony shoulder, said “Reg Hurst” bartering for a name in return, withdrawing from their handshake with a definite wiping action, adding in a controlled educated voice, “This was my spot, now it's to be yours. You're welcome to it,” between times rubbing eyes translucent as sliced veal. The others, also halted, peeked from the wings. Walter saw the major with the grinning heads of Frank and Bluey sprouting from each shoulder, and in the upward direction, just short of where the trench climbed and turned a corner
to nowhere, he saw Lieutenant Bushel and Sergeant Madox conferring humourlessly with Captain Veegan.

 

Walter immediately felt calm. He waved right and left. The feeling strengthened. Ordinary details met his eye: a feather-tucking bird, a file of black ants, capillary shrub roots in cross-section, and Reg Hurst, the placid organizer, domestically occupied.

Idiotically Walter smiled: “What's all this for?”

Hurst had been rummaging through a pile of blankets. “They're in case of bombs. When one comes over we use 'em and hope for the best.” The blanket he passed to Walter held a clear marble of condensation dropped from his nose, through which a nest of safe silvery hairs was magnified. “If there's time I'll demonstrate.” Then, spine against the forward wall, he folded his hands around his shins, rested the bristled planes of his face on his kneecaps, and snoozed.

“All set?” called Madox.

“All set?” Walter mimicked along to Frank and Bluey.

After a while Hurst stirred from his doze: “Have you heard of the third of May?”

“Who hasn't?” No, that was the wrong tone: “Not much,” and located a match to clean his teeth. The place still seemed to have exaggerated its effects. Even the sun had softened, the stink had wandered away, and gosh! it really had been a bird hopping around in the open, a little scrub bird no bigger than a sparrow holding still on the parapet, peering at him, working a delicate note out of its tweezer-like beak.

“We lost half our men,” said Hurst. He studied
Walter's face. “It all happened in a dream, beyond recall.” He sighed, a young man, then shifted on his haunches, glassy eyes searching for a window on sanity with the slick desperation of air bubbles in a spirit level.

Abruptly the scrub bird shrieked again. Then it fluttered from rear trench to front, describing a half circle over their heads: and a Turkish bullet smashed noisily along the curve's diameter. At this Walter leapt for his blankets, but after attentively cocking an ear Hurst reassured him. He loosened a grey silk handkerchief from his neck and draped it over his face: “Watch for the black cricket balls. Then you'll know the game's hotting up.”

Other trenches attended to the routine discharge of firearms, but here the task was simply to wait, and now that the breeze had swung once more around to the Australian line, to try not to gag on the renewed stench. Walter set his pipe frenziedly crackling and sought a return to the orderly illusions of a minute ago: “Do the birds come round all the time?”

No answer.

He wished Hurst would buckle down to an explanation of the trench system. He worried also that the prematurely balding soldier might be too tired and slow even to shift himself should a bomb suddenly flop over. Walter sat there. Fear nibbled and gnawed. That's all it did — fear had no intelligence, it never explained, nor asked, nor understood. It nibbled and gnawed, took a breather, then started all over again.

The silken mouth articulated: “What did you do before the war?”

“I helped my father on the farm. What about you?”

“I was a teacher. Can you imagine? When the war came I decided I was all books and no life. I don't
subscribe to that theory now.”

Away went the handkerchief, out came his pipe. They exchanged tobacco.

Hurst made a peremptory announcement: “I'm twenty-eight and I've got the clap. The old school would be shocked.” He named an eminent college in Adelaide. “Surprised?”

“No, plenty have it,” Walter managed. But the idea affronted him — Hurst's confession. A teacher.

“My case is not so bad. I got off lightly — for a Christian. I'd never kissed a girl. Never been drunk. Should I be sorry? Look at me, I caned boys who swore.”

Walter looked as instructed, and sure enough found himself frozen under the gaze of a schoolmaster. “I'll bet you taught science.”

“Maths and divinity. I wasn't a minister exactly, but near enough. What do you think — God or no God?”

“There's … something,” muttered Walter. He wanted to put it more strongly: but most of all he wanted Hurst to shut up.

“A cock and bull tale! The body is absolutely the end.”

This was no minister talking. “You must have believed something. Once.”

“I was an expert,” Hurst concluded doubtfully. “Then I looked behind the bloody scenes.”

The sky made new noises. Thunder curved up from the sea and spikes of rushing air descended on hidden gullies to twang horrendously. Walter in a panic said: “Don't you think we ought to be getting ready?”

“We are.” But even so Hurst sharpened his alertness, crouching and knocking his pipe, glancing left and right, and once even pressing an ear to the floor of the
trench. “Quiet as the grave.” The new noises he dismissed as “the Royal Navy's technique for transporting brass into Turkey.”

“
Listen
,” the man grabbed his arm: “All that I just told you — it's bull.”

“You're still a Christian,” Walter dumbly informed him.

“The whole business. I was never a … minister. It was someone else.”

“Oh.” This was shadow-boxing — shadow-wrestling — the way Hurst switched from silence to sincerity to a malicious twist of identity on the edge of a vast drop. Making a fool of Walter. Then raving ceaselessly.

“Do you read books?”

All right, if Hurst wanted to play games so would he, but seriously, and only to keep his balance. He feigned a recent self, the one he had donned in Egypt but feared he had already left behind like a change of skin. “Lately I've read
Beauchamp's Career
and half of Shakespeare, and lots of ‘light-weights'” (Ollie Melrose's phrase). He exhausted his new-found acquaintance with literature, but waved an arm in the air as if dozens more circulated where he had tossed them.

But who was Hurst now? He ranted as though from a platform.

“Books contain too many ideas. They're bad. A man has an idea, but on its own it's useless. Good for a laugh. So he sets it down in a book and before long there's Germany, here's Britain, great nations founded on great ideals. Have you ever seen a great ideal raise its head except in conflict with another?” He stabbed a finger on the open page of history: “Bang!” and after a
pause sniffed theatrically in the direction of no-man's land: “Books created that mess. Ideas on the move meet bodies that resist them — the poor saps.”

“I don't follow.”

“The end of thought — ideas in uniform. That's why we're here, books. The trouble is that books don't have bodies in them. That's the essence, young fella. Books haven't caught up to the modern world as yet. Put a body in a book. There's a twist.
Ideas
could then stroll round hand in hand.” His picture of a world where books did not exist became more and more fanciful. He dropped in bits from
Alice Through the Looking Glass
as if they were his own. Only nothing he said was funny.

Walter resolved that next time he would smother the sly swervings of the mad before they got started. He lost his patience, tried not to show it, but everything came out: “Hurst, we've been here for two hours. Christ, and all you can do,
you
—” he deleted an insult, “is rave. Put a sock in it!”

The major hopped past.

“Hurst, you magger. Do what the boy says.”

Hurst smiled: “It doesn't pay to lose your block. No sir.” He shared his water bottle, and the surprisingly rum-scented liquid did its work, forcing from Walter a shamed apology. Close up the man's face stank. His lips twitched when smiling as if strung from rubber bands. At the roots of his whiskers dirt lay in small clumps like scabs.

 

Suddenly a double crack of Australian rifle fire leapt from the upper bend of the trench. Straightaway the
Turks responded, sending maddened golfers to whip arid divots from the lip of the parapet. Where was fear? This was its antidote! Dust and splinters of gravel rattled downwards. Hurst explained that the shots had been fired by a light horse sharpshooter who after only a day spent ranging this part of the line was known as “The Murderer”. “Bugger him,” said Hurst, cupping his hands and shouting at the unseen sniper: “Stick your head up your arse!” In an aside he said: “No room for Methodists here.” From the supple enunciation Walter could tell he'd long since learned to swear.

“Blankets!” He was in control.

Out on the never-to-be-sighted surface of the earth a sound like the
woof
of petrol fires gave way to the terse ripping of tinfoil. “The major's motto is never hold back. I won't be the odd man out.” Action, it seemed, was the one test he had passed long ago. The strange tricks of his contemplative self were nowhere in sight.

“Hurst?” called the major, “You're opening bat.”

The first bomb dribbled in. A globe, black and absolute, with a smoking wick.

Hurst leapt and retreated, leaving a magical square of blanket on the ground. For a second the sphere huddled under it, a dangerous lump, while Hurst considered his timing. Then he jumped again to hold the blanket down and the end was announced in a defeated gush of wind and a suppressed sunset.

Though Walter was safe, his fright at the damped explosion caused him to leap and take refuge, foolishly erect, on the nearby fire-step. For an instant his hat appeared above the parapet, presenting to the world a surfacing khaki duck which Turkish snipers spotted from two directions and invisibly printed with X,
horizontally across, as it rose and dipped. The bullets as they scored past found an echo in Reg Hurst's darting whispers: “
Christ
” in one ear, “
Almighty
” in the other.

Then more bombs each. Black fruit greedily collected. Limbs in a tangle — once he and Hurst embraced, heads knocking, while fuses gloated.

A rule of physics: bombs roll towards, never away.

A photograph: Major Mason crouched like a circus monkey, blanket at the ready. And at the other swing of the lens, Madox and Bushel with anxious faces.

Hurst's insanity: “Eggs-a-cook. Hoop, la!”

And at last the trench setting sail: moorings slipped, the wharf sliding backwards. The farewelling bombers holding their length, yet the projectiles striking farther along, near the major's cubbyhole.

Now Bluey was in the thick of it, a ginger and tan scuffle. Where was Frank? Then Bluey scurried out of sight and the major waddled into view alone.

For a minute nothing happened. The officer found time to fiddle with a stub of cigarette and joke for all to hear that he'd light it from the next bomb. The bomb came, he snuffed it. But it was followed too quickly by a second one which thudded at his heels, then stropped itself out of reach. The major lunged, tripped, spun lengthwise, and sprawled beside the projectile which instantly exploded.

The walls of the trench lit up for a final photograph.

Walter and Hurst huddled unharmed as the fizz of lightning gave way to dust. They spat grit, then spotted a heap of discarded clothing thrown against the rear wall: it was the major. His hat blown clear had flown to the parapet where it sat uncertainly. And on looking closer, his head — bald, unbloodied, sickeningly smooth — balanced on a pulped chest.