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Carelessly Hurst ran to him: “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” bubbled a voice, “do shut up.” A pool of blood lay still and deep in a fold of his trousers.

“I'll see you through, Alec,” murmured Hurst.

The fateful bomb appeared to have been the last. Now the Turks concentrated on shooting the hat, which shortly slipped to rejoin the man — the corpse — in an absurd trajectory of reconciliation.

“It's never me,” said Hurst wonderingly.

Except for the tut-tut-tut of distant machinegun fire, all was silence. Then, from the other lines, Walter heard shouted orders in an unknown language. He looked around with a query for Hurst, but something occurred suddenly to smear the man into invisibility. The words rattled against each other as if seeking the right partners … Of course! From the outside of an echoing bucket he understood their malicious intent —

 

Hands thrust his shoulders down. A stretcher bearer hung over him. He decided to sleep but the man said: “Here's an aspirin,” and a pannikin striking his teeth woke him properly. “You and Hurst are gluttons for luck.” The man spoke in a Welsh accent:
glue-tones
.

Where were they?

Blood, smears and slabs of it, covered Walter's unbuttoned shirt and stomach. The orderly gave him a rag and a dish of eucalyptus-smelling water. While he wiped himself clean he learned the explanation. A final bomb had lodged unnoticed between the dying major's legs and exploded while he and Reg Hurst knelt on either side. It had knocked them out, painted them with blood, but otherwise left them unhurt.

“This here's the late major's pozzie,” said the orderly. “You're to kip here till you come properly round.” He spoke resentfully. It hadn't been his idea. But he handed over a packet of papers and a generous pinch of tobacco. As soon as he left, a sealed cauldron in Walter's stomach blew its lid — he vomited hot amber-coloured liquid onto the hardpacked floor, where it wandered acridly close to his face (there was no ledge: he sprawled on the ground itself).

Only then did Walter take note of his surroundings. At first the place seemed vast as a shed, but detail after detail shrank it in, until a hastily-piled heap of sandbags, the “door”, nudged his elbow, the roof sagged dangerously low, and the back wall, an oblong gallery of harried pick marks, seemed close to collapse.

The gully outside echoed with wind, loose canvas snapping to a curve, a distant explosion. But echoes are never all sounded. Something fluttered at his elbow, someone, a face in a photograph — the major's wife — her picture propped on a shrine-like shelf where a stub of candle and three folded white handkerchiefs exuded the odour of beeswax and lavender. Dark hair (rang the echo) hooded eyes.

The same as Frances's.

The person who now spoke a lost girl's name in this cramped place was surely mad. The relic curled in his hand; he straightened it against the wall where light fell softly. He apologized to — nothingness — for the pride that had coolly siezed him when the dead prefect appeared, for the way he had gloated over being alive. The selfsame pride that had surveyed the crazed George Mullens, dispassionately scanned his notebook, and later raged at Reg Hurst …
Sorry
.

Gone was his competence for the simplest task of
hope, the placement of one thought forward of another. Frances rustled alongside — lavender, lavender and white — she took his finger as might a child and stifled a giggle at the enormity of their bumping climb upstairs to a hotel room hardly bigger than this one.

“Son?”

“Bugger off!”

“Sonny, I'm on my way.”

A bout of shoulder-shaking set in, when all Walter wanted was to lie nibbling the grass stalks of a dream. But reluctantly he threaded through trees at the base of a cliff, arm over arm climbed broken granite blocks, then emerged on a dark heath where Reg Hurst, a giant in khaki, reached out for his hand: “Good luck.”

His palms were powder dry. “Who's that?” Walter pointed to a pale officer paring his nails in the gloom.

“He's a toff from HQ,” Hurst whispered. “My second cousin, the aunty's boy. Well, keep your head down. Don't brood.” He handed Walter a piece of chocolate and a wrinkled orange.

“Is he a tanksinker?” A ridiculous shred of dream —

“Oh Christ! He's a barrister. How's your head tonight?
He's a silly arse
.”

“I'm tired.”

“Save the chocolate. 'Bye!”

Hurst was determined to take a swim down at the beach. All day through their sandbag-filling and lugging he had talked about the cooling green pressure of the Aegean, where soon he would plunge.

After waking and being declared fit for duty, all that day Walter and Hurst had stuck together. At least
Hurst had stuck to Walter, bothering at something that only at the very end did Walter understand, or seem to, for perhaps not until now, at this fatigued moment, with Hurst gone (certainly for ever) did Walter properly grasp what had happened, what Hurst, gabbling, had spent the day trying to say. Trying to achieve —

“It's my last day,” he began. “I can teach you a thing or two that might save your skin, if you care to listen.”

“Well, no bullshit like before.”

The bomb blast had changed him. After their narrow escape he must have decided that impersonation, the least enriching of vanities, could no longer sustain him. At mealtimes he nudged Walter aside and spoke with nervous nonchalance, tugging his lower lip downwards with a loose-skinned finger to reveal melancholy teeth like those of a horse in extreme old age. He seemed to fear that whatever he wished to convey would be snatched from him and destroyed if eavesdroppers guessed at its intensity.

Bluey and Frank muttered about Hurst's being plucky but wriggly: and he overheard them. Later he slipped to Frank: “I've heard of drovers taking consolation with their flocks. Can you confirm it?”

Alone with Walter he clamped him by the upper arm in culmination of a tale or a confession, and threatening the pungent foreign embrace of the unwashed demanded a reaction … for at last Hurst had a true story to tell.

He had been praying, he said, when the war news came. Not alone (that he never did) but to an audience of three hundred. Each morning from nine till half-past the school hall fell to the charge of his father, who was both chaplain and deputy headmaster. Reg was
required to assist with readings from the gospels and to sincerely gripe his way through the endless sheets of typewritten entreaty concocted by his father. His real job was assistant groundkeeper. The closest he came to the teaching of maths and divinity was when he clattered a mower to and fro beneath the windows of his father's strict classroom.

“I was a failure,” Hurst confided to his toecaps. “Mind you, I had my hour. Believe it or not I was once school captain, and dux as well. What else could I do,” he asked wonderingly, “afterwards?”

His little brother Roy had been killed on April the twenty-fifth.

“He had a mind of his own— a good brain— he rowed in the eight for the varsity and was three parts through his articles with a dud-arse firm owned by a kind of uncle. He stood up to the old man on my behalf more than once. It was the old story. The worse I became, the better he liked me. But he didn't need me. Just once — once he got a girl in trouble and came to me for tactical advice. He used to call me a ‘thoroughgoing rogue', but I was just an idea of the nipper's, really … By Christ I was bored! If it hadn't been for the war I would have been in prison by now.

“I used to faze people. I'd mag, like the major said, mag, mag, mag, and then when I'd got them properly fooled I'd poke my tongue out and watch their hair frizzle. Just for the sport. Dad used to say that little Roy had all the will and pride. The two things I lacked. And did I kick to hear him tell it! But he was right … The war was made for the likes of us, Gilchrist, not for bloody Roy.”

At a dozen angles of that dust-filled day, as if sighting down the spokes of an intricate compass,
Hurst pointed to features that he and Walter in his view shared. At some late hour he ran them all together and rattled through the list in his surrogate preacher's voice. Only now the text was his own, and delivered without hypocrisy. And of course it was all wrong. Not a pack of lies exactly — the queer opposite, rather — a truth willed into being by Hurst that had naught to do with the facts. Both were young, he claimed, and shared a lack of religious belief. Hadn't Walter mentioned trouble with a girl? Hurst had had his share, by golly. What about their daring, eh? The two bomb stoppers. And their luck —

But then Walter stopped objecting and wearily closed his eyes. When it came to awareness of other people, Hurst's air of having slithered around on the one level since leaving school made him seem younger, somehow, than Walter himself.

Hunched away from his mates pursuing a stubborn mission of unity, it was as though Hurst had flung his arms around the shoulders of two ghostly figures, one with his own name, the other bearing Walter's, and drawn them together to shape an indivisible third. “We both had nothing to lose by coming here. So why should fate pick on us?”

Then came the whisper and chat of cards being shuffled by a bored quartet of infantrymen awaiting the order to leave. Which card was to be dealt cold onto wood? Which to stay warm in the dealer's fist? Chance conversed with itself in the language of the card pack, the language of the whetstone, a rhythmical stroke and strop.

“Hurst, when did Roy die?”

Hurst did not know. At least not exactly. Possibly even before the sun came up on that first day, because
one of his mates reported seeing him in the half light dash off after a fat Turk and fail to come back. Another said Roy had been sighted “taking a snack” in a gully. Yet the biscuit-munching Roy at that moment might have been already dead, the hand supposedly seen in the act of conveying food to his mouth already frozen with lucky youth's astonishment at the betrayal of its gifts. When the body was identified three days later who needed to ask such questions? He was dead like the rest. Arriving later on that first day Hurst remembered thinking how queer it was that small bodies should be sent to attack such steep slopes. Some were draped on bushes where they had tumbled after being shot. He knew then that Roy must have been among them. He was so damnably
keen
. Trust Roy to rush forever upwards — only this time, for once, he ran not into the arms of a prizegiving committee but over hurdles of pointed steel and through criss-crossed tapes of invisible lead, and was slung into a yawning hole for his pains.

“Poor bloody Roy.”

Hurst claimed to have captured a Turkish soldier who could easily have been his brother's killer.

“My mate Stubbings had his bayonet fixed — when up jumped the Jacko like a rabbit and threw his rifle away. He tried to go all ways at once: he shitted his pants. Stubbings went at him like a steam train, bayonet flying, and do you know I actually closed my eyes?”

Hurst paused for effect.

“I thought he was done. But Stubbings's blade had only gone into his haversack. When I opened my eyes we had a prisoner. If I'd known for sure about Roy I
would have shot him as a last favour. I did worse later.”

 

Hurst tapped his teeth tunelessly while Boof spaded gravel into the drooping mouth of Walter's sandbag. Frank knelt wiping sweat from under his chin after a bout of listless shovelling. The time swirled somewhere in mid-afternoon.

“Roy was religious,” Hurst said as they plodded again from A to B.

So am I
, Walter wanted to say. Rebellion stirred at the daylong imposition of one person on another. “So'm,” was as far as he reached, because in the next breath Hurst livened things up with some news:

“I didn't suffer myself because of Roy's pious streak, but he gave hell to a school chaplain who went off the rails. They discovered him naked one night in the Founders' Fountain — poor old ‘Potty'.”

Potty Fox, he explained.

“Fox was the name of our minister at home.”

“David Anthony Fox? He's the one.”

The sincere bone in a cassock. Potty? The glinting specs.
Potty
.

“He moved to New South Wales after S.A. His little boy was trampled to death by a horse. Rolled on and then trampled. But listen, he's here with the army. He buried Roy. They swear by him in the tenth.”

“It can't be. He's all nerves.” But it could have been him. It
was
. For in the month after Walter left home his mother had written with news of the Foxes' abrupt departure.

“When Potty lost his head I'll never forget how Roy
snubbed the both of them. Our Roy was dainty in patches. Potty gave up being a Christian and went in for the Greek gods. But of course it all straightened out in time. They were good to me. And now Potty has buried Roy …”

They had arrived at the rear of the trench where an empty sniper's post provided sanctuary for a hurried cigarette. In silence they filled the furtive dome with fumes. After a minute Reg twisted around cautiously to align his face with a slit of grey light from the outside.

“Take a look.”

A rumpled view unfolded upwards in the sun's glare like a long strip of rag. Then the rag fluttered away (eyes adjusting to the glare) to show the landscape as if in a dirty mirror, the kind one might find domestically surviving in a rubbish tip, its flaked and dusty frosting still working insanely to prove the wholeness of the world: here crusted, rough, and hopeless, but there lucidly deep.

“What do you see?”

“A mess.”

“Look to the right.”

“Nothing.”

“There's a Turkish trench somewhere. Higher …”

Hurst described a glimpse of this lofty enemy trench before the last Turkish attack, when dozens of bayonets like the sharpened points of pencils had rattled into view before being tipped out.

“See?”

“Nope.”

Hurst advanced a stiff finger along which Walter sighted. Charred blots on the glassy vista bloomed into three dimensions. The illusion of a mirror faded, but its frame (the dark slit) held, daringly balanced on the rim
of the ascending ridge and then giddily sliding over the invisible heads of converging gullies, advancing itself higher to a treacherous gash (“
There
, by the sprouty hump”) where for weeks the Turks had been able to look down on the rear of several Australian trenches and on the human sheep tracks staggering up from the sea. Hurst spoke of rudimentary sandbagged shelters whose names sounded already ageless as those of medieval towns: Russell's Top, Pope's Hill, The Chessboard, Bloody Angle, Quinn's Post. And their denizens were men hurled onto those various elevated points where they dangled as if under a giant's chin, and could not drop free neither could they worm deeper in …

Soon Hurst announced that the place was dangerous, and they ducked out, catching up with the detail in its new workplace, a chamber of wordless half-naked forms toiling in the queer dusty light of a ruined gymnasium.

More of the same malodorous food at dusk.

“What do you know?” said a full mouth, “I haven't heard a gun all day.”

And it was true that the mind had taught the body to behave as if each nerve were not straining constantly towards the sound of battle like a field of brittle sunflowers locked to the passage of the sun. As if.

“I ran into Potty down at the beach. He was with my cousin Chuck and the headquarters crowd, but he's nothing like Chuck. The word I'd use is game. He goes everywhere with the men. Did you ever notice his wild streak?”

Walter recalled the minister standing in the varnished prow of his pulpit, a weirdly garbed fisherman gesturing to God or the tide. But when he
transferred him to a longboat with oars creaking like church timbers as it glided down an aisle of polished water, a congregation of blank-faced soldiers on either side, the picture would not fit. Whenever danger loomed the minister panicked.

Captain Veegan grabbed them for an emergency. They filled a dozen sandbags and lugged them to the mouth of a communication trench, then passed them forward to the front line where Hurst and his unhappy mates as their last detested duty supervised the hefting aloft of these gravelly pods. Back in the bombproof chamber they submitted to a lecture from the captain on the art of modern earthworks before Hurst found the chance to go on.

It emerged that he believed in some sort of religion after all. Only it was not religion exactly, but a kind of psychology that came to lose all the cold notations of science and branched into a fantastic series of tunnels, most of which were walled off with solid dead-ends. Then it became clear that for all his talk Hurst was expressing nothing more than the battered realism of the survivor. Dead ends were part of the game: you had to throw yourself at them, said Hurst, and take your luck. At one point he said, “All survivors are entitled to a belief in miracles”. At another, “I'm the only member of my section left alive. Snowy and Bert and Cedric Pearson, they're all—” And he tapped his forehead. “
In there
.”

There was more of this, but eventually Hurst's philosophy reduced itself to a simple appeal:

“When I shove off,” he said, “spare me a thought, eh?”

Walls
. Later Walter was to recall nearly everything Hurst said, and chant it to himself at the edge of madness. He was to restructure Reg Hurst, replace his wart-blighted hands on punished knees, build again the crossbeam of his shoulders, drape from them his grimy shirt, and set above all the whiskered stain of his skull with its bright living eyes. When Walter came to throw himself at a solid wall and through it and lie on the other side listening to his heart with its worn piston restarting, stroking up — he spoke to the image of Hurst again, and again took in that meagre thing that Hurst had imparted to him: Hurst's brief life to store with his own. By then there would be others. A ghostly troop: arms and legs of them, hollowed chests, gaping backs, and blue faces.