1915 (22 page)

“Don't brood. Brooding's no good. The sensitive type and the clod end up the same.”

So what did all these hot heaped-on thoughts matter? Ceiling-starer or snorer, they were all 100-1 leapers whose cogitations had not the slightest effect on their fate. Still the sheets of corrugated iron slid, rasped, fluttered over the chasm without cease.

 

Behind the pulpit of the mosque a propped-open door led to a portico that resembled a narrow and low hayshed, satisfying to walk under because of the excessive number of columns supporting its light roof. They strolled to the end and sprawled on a cool marble bench. Walter remarked on the resemblance to “things at home”, and Ollie, the approver, disapprover, and educator of his listeners, deigned to approve. “Ah yes, Gibbon maintains that it was from the portico the
Romans learned to live, reason, and to die.”

“Like our verandas,” offered Walter.

A persistent tapping could be heard from a nearby lane. After leaving the mosque they investigated, finding a road mender sitting on a one-legged stool, a brief spike topped by a wooden disc, levering fractured paving stones from the narrow thoroughfare. The smell of wood fires gave the place the air of having been stumbled across in a gully in the midst of weeks-long stump burning, so much a part of the earth did this tang seem. But not so the sweaty spices, nor the effortlessly foreign way the workman slid an entire piece of stone one-handedly through the air and bedded it at his toes, all the while gazing about with a half-smile and maintaining a questioning wail of conversation with half a hundred passers-by. A tar-chinned cauldron smoked within reach, and nearby stood a horse and dray, the dray almost shattering under its load, the horse repeatedly nodding as if stunned but swimming to stay upright.

“Excuse me,” Ollie pointed from horse to man as he advanced, “that's no way to treat an animal.”

Walter thought so too, but worse was the threat of a scene. Ollie made them by habit.

The road mender stood. “Scusame?” His unsupported stool dropped dead like a top at the end of its spin. He was no music hall Gyppo, but the gap-toothed smile had many times been snitched from such eastern alleys to be guffawed at on the stage.

“The nag! The nag!” shouted Ollie.

“Ter Nog?” the man seemed to ask. He had thrust a miniature crowbar through a knotted rope supporting baggy trousers.

“Cruel. Crew-all.
Crool
!”

“Cruel?” An exact replica of Ollie's sour British exasperation. The crowd pressed close for this burst of inadvertent theatre.

“All right all
right
,” Ollie barked. He shouldered his way to the near-side shaft, where he hammered a confusion of knots and buckles on the horse's flank. The road mender now understood the situation. Ollie wanted his horse. Ollie was taking his horse!

Transformed, he appealed to the crowd, using his midget crowbar as a demagogue's rod of office. It was also a weapon —

A deadly weapon, raised, advancing on Ollie, bobbing high on a wave of moans, Ollie-killing moans, a chorus of offended Muhammedans.

The way out of the situation suddenly unfolded like a set of picture postcards, a concertina of Alexandria streetscenes wobbling free of their stiff envelope. A happy, silly, blotched brown sequence of escape.

First, the horse showed its dislike of Ollie by attempting to bite and kick. The road man brandished his iron bar: and this was the opening souvenir scene, captioned
Baksheesh?
in honour of the word uttered by the man in the midst of his dangerous hesitation.

He was willing to sell.

Walter pressed a fist-wet ball of notes into the fellow's hand. When the crowd saw this its hostility dropped to a curious hum. So Ollie was clear with Walter bracing his elbow before any one of the fifty locals raised his eyes from the money. Curved awnings, a glimpse of melancholy horse, and a huddle of merchants crammed the frame of this second remembrance. Only the brown eyes of urchins in fancy dress stared away from the centre of interest.
Pyjamas worn in street (daytime)
Walter's indelibly arrowed
message to the family would say.

Ollie permitted himself to be shunted to safety, but threw obscenities down the generations at the nameless names of the quadruped's forbears — a curse on the “fucking four-footed elongated brains of their sottish species”.

Still, they were well-away. Number three's composition, bare of locals, showed two military figures sauntering down a weirdly empty street.
An afternoon of leave
.

What a circus!

But where were the parcels? Whisked away through the thieving crowd … At this realization Ollie let fly with his most obscene string of curses: a complicated and blasphemous proposal involving the bared and willing hindquarters of Christ and Allah. Few Australians were as inventive as Ollie when it came to swearing, and none offended so carelessly. And between them how much had they paid? Adding it all up, translating it into Australian money, all of one and ninepence halfpenny.

“Come on Ollie, it was only fruit.” And in an aside: “People will hear.” Ollie really ought to be more careful — but too late: a pulse of the gritty desert
khamsin
had collected the foul-mouthed load and slapped it against the ears of two English nurses who were advancing, heads down, hands on hats to battle the wind.

“Oops,” said Ollie, fingering a tooth. When the nurses drew close he saluted.

“Hello Australians,” snapped the brisk unpretty one, while the other searched ahead.

Ollie swivelled and tried to tag along. “I'm from home, y'know.”

The older one's face said: So it was
you
. Their pace quickened, and they rattled up the station steps with the precision of wound-up toys.

There in the final wind-slapped
View from the Bab el Gedid Station
was fixed Walter's last look at Alexandria. Without Ollie his experience of the place would have been flat. No tiled spectacle to dream about, no brothel he supposed, and no fun of the chase, which was why the difficult Ollie stayed his friend, and why Alexandria when he thought about it glowed beneath the horizon.

 

When they returned to the camp on the outskirts of Cairo the world turned upside down. Did they want to go
now
, bellowed the brigadier at a mass assembly of regiments, did they want to leave their horses in Egypt and sail as infantry to the Dardanelles, did they want to join the
fight?

From their thousand apprehensions they had replied, and heard an echo clap between the desert's endless nothing and the green world of the Nile.

Even though he lent his own raw-throated yell to the rest, and indeed was mad to go because of a pounding expectant heart and an animal's hunger to wheel and run and savage the imponderable future, the living voice that was now Walter's whole self muttered a helpless condemnation. Now, with dawn soon to sicken with its grey soapsud light, his lips once more moved to frame the dry exclamation: “What a damn fool I was to get into this!”

He must have slept after all, because Mick Aitcheson instead of lying on the ground next to him shifted to
the wall and hung there, an immortally alarmed example of the taxidermist's art. This same Mick who in Egypt had punched a dozen biceps and prodded a score of stomachs in delighted endorsement of the brigade's fate, who had leapt like a spider monkey (bright glass eyes) into the arms of Boof, dropped from there and flung himself at — of all people — Blacky Reid.

And Blacky and Walter had talked.

“How's Ned?”

“How's your dad?”

“Good enough.”

In the same regiment but assigned to a different squadron, Walter had long since been relieved to discover that even so narrowly separated he and Blacky hardly ever saw each other.

“Old Pepper put an axe in his foot.”

“Bad?”

They searched the horizon standing side by side, hunting blinding hillocks of sand for a sight of the stone haystacks of the pharaohs … or anything.

“Douggie finishes school this year. For good.”

“The devil.”

“It's the war.”

Blacky chewed a match. Who was going to yawn first?

“I hear you've been on a jaunt.”

“There and back. What a place!”

“Alexandria.” (A statement.)

“Alexandria.” (An echo.)

And so on, the sentences exchanged with the polite tap-pock of a game of French cricket, neither needing nor wishing to run for the ball because if they did there might just be a wrangle.

“Things won't seem the same at home after this.”

“There'll be a lot of changes. When we get back.”

Had Blacky been about to say “if'?

Never.

“Do you know Pig Nolan?” The question signalled a change of pace. Blacky disposed of a flayed wet match and selected a fresh one. “A good bloke, Pig.”

“I don't see a great deal of him.” Yet he did: Walter saw the bastard all the time, plotting, insinuating. “Pig and I — we don't get along all that well.”

“No?”

The soaring slowness of the question meant that Blacky had adjusted the angle of his bat ever so slightly to deal the ball a subtle hook.

Are we about to get stuck into it? Should I let fly with a sizzling return?

In the event Walter just plucked the question from the air and pocketed it briskly.

“I'd better be off.”

They shook hands as if one or the other meant it.

As Walter ploughed through the crowd to find his friends he took comfort from the thought that the clash of nations would do away with the contest of individuals. But he was wrong; for as early as their second evening on the peninsula he caught Blacky and Pig with their heads together. Or rather they caught him, because crouched in a plot of three or four around the belly of a cooking stove Blacky had seen him pass, and flung a long looping whistle, as to a sheep dog.

“Hey, boy!”

And in the shadow of danger to all could plainly be seen a venomous ulterior struggle more lasting, more ingenious than that of armies. Hatred, less capricious than friendship, survived. Friendship needed warmth
and light, also protection and containment, which was why the city glowing at the butt of the Mediterranean had seemed a proper vessel for life — not this shattered lidless hive where men flew off one by one into darkness.

He had been among friends when after the handshake with Blacky he and Ollie recounted their experiences to those who had missed out on the trip to Alexandria. Walter affected a knowledge of the waterfront life engaging in a contest with Ollie's. Then Ollie announced that he had inside knowledge of the city, mentioning for the first time that he had visited it twice before, once in 1909 and again three years later.

“Wally big-mouth,” observed Boof. But what did it matter? Ollie for ten years had kicked around the world (including a war in Mexico). He was odd, well-read, and at thirty-one older, tough and moody. He struck out at an angle from all that was was expected of an Englishman. He and the half dozen others strolling against the tight blue scrim of the desert morning formed a confederation of souls (Walter thought) each to the rest — when all was said and done — clear as polished glass. They were friends, marked off from characters like Pig and Blacky, from all whose souls blocked light with the sullen black-windowed secretiveness of a funeral parlour. Friends who kicked sand chiacking their way to hypothetical glory, Frank, Nugget, Bluey, Boof, Ollie, all of them, at that moment of dispersal, hearing the regimental bugler in the palms down by the horse lines poop-poop two blurry notes from proud cavalry brass preparatory to uttering the long and pure morning call.

Lying in the bombproof chamber in the grimly whizzing hours of early morning Walter waited for a burst of meaning to flow at this memory of the bugler in Egypt about to sound his serious music.

He remembered the men breaking off and heading for the horse lines, each wrapped in his own response to the sad tones of “Stables”, the most beautiful and domestic of all bugle calls: “Come to the stables all men that are able and give your poor horses some hay and some corn …”

They had vaulted heels-down on sanded slopes or crunched across wind-scoured stones. Passing through the tent lines they twanged guy ropes and ran whining fingers along taut canvas. They walked away from the purpose that had brought them half way around the world and the decision just taken to go into battle without their horses; away from the human, the raw-tongued, the alarm and misapprehension that was their unseen but true uniform, and were forgiven — better, transported from — the sulking weight of their bodies by the brass rails of the bugle as they set off to do their grooming for the last time, gracefully absolved and released from all they had done and were about to do, draped by the wandering ribbons of intricate bugling, which began now somehow to echo among its own earlier notes, entire phrases leaving for the silken distances of the sand-ocean only to return thin but recharged to wander above the men as might glass rods (deep tinted blue) in a serene experiment of fate, creating a faint electricity to which the men thoughtfully submitted, scraps of hair rising under its power to attract the light and the harmless, scraps of wool, silk, feathers, paper, bran, gold leaf, and then all this movement joined by the sad brown heads of
hundreds of horses in their picket-lines, heads shaking and bobbing with elastic polyphonic rhythm up up down as the men arrived and were greeted, nuzzled, ushered in to a last ritual embrace with the living things they had been called to care for.

Reg Hurst died at dawn.

Poised for his dip at the wharf he had been clowning when shrapnel flurried across purple water and then cruelly lifted, slicing his legs off. His trunk, according to a witness, entered the sea with arms outflung in the manner of a man delighting in a headfirst dive. A minute later he surfaced, and when the shelling stopped they fished him out with a pole.

“Did you know him?” asked the stretcher bearer who brought the news, the freak dive being his only reason for mentioning yet another death.

“Wally did.”

They kept on with their breakfast. It was easy to put this mangled Hurst out of mind. An image persisted of a living person who, so it happened, by commonplace dictate of chance would never again be seen.

He had been a cow to Boof. He had bothered the fair-minded Frank Barton, who now tried to put a finger on what it was about him. Mick Aitcheson in deprived but reasonable tones said, “He
owes
me a shilling” (debris of a bet). But forces other than economic ones kept Hurst alive. They all seemed to agree that he had been up to something. Was it exhaustion or bravado? He had seemed to
want
to go … he and the Mullens character — they were all of a piece. Amid the scrape of mess tins a circle of faces
looked to Hurst's mate for an answer:

“Wally?”

But as he groped for a phrase, clearing his throat, spoons clattered and living currents tugged out to sea the pale, paler, palest blood of Hurst, and curiosity rippled to indifference. One mentioned a racehorse, another a boxer, a third wondered about a girl who had sworn not to be his for ever.

Walter alone was left to contemplate the structures devised by Hurst for his own survival. Something else Hurst had said, Walter recalled, turned out to be true: “After the third or fourth man goes you will be amazed how easily you accept the idea of death without a pang, and feel delight at the sense of power this acceptance gives you.” And though he lacked Reg Hurst's zest for extremes, definitely a supple plating that had not been there before dented and returned when he touched it with memory. It was the first layer of nature's tougher grey after an eternity of rubbed and weeping thought. He said to Bluey: “The others think Hurst had reached breaking point. Not Hurst.”

“During the bombing, wasn't he the bloke who shouted, ‘Box on. They can't beat us!'?” Desultorily they chipped a memorial to the black sheep from Adelaide.

“He was a loser at home.”

“I could see a trace of the whip-shy cur in his manner.”

“What do you think you are, Bluey, one of Hurst's ‘hawk people' or one of his ‘rabbit people'?”

Bluey wielded a trowel of biscuit with craftsmanlike care, collecting bacon fat from each corner of his dish, then sucking it through thin lips. Walter leaned forward in a typical knot of puzzlement, allowing
Bluey to complete his meal in silence. Then he let fly with an explosion:

“My mind seems all speeded up!”

Bluey had turned to filing the point from a bullet … and why shouldn't he? The word was out that the shocking injuries inflicted on dead Australians could only have been caused by dumdums and exploding bullets. Walter blundered on while Bluey's face said:
Oh, put a lid on it
.

“We seemed to understand each other, though it was funny. Hurst did all the talking. He had the oddest ideas —” How could the business of walls be put to Bluey?

“For fuck's sake!” muttered Bluey, exaggerating a nicked finger.

Lizzie Peters suddenly turned every head by appearing in the doorway, skinny and taut, bleating, “They're gonna stop the bloody fighting.”

Lizzie had something important to tell them. The truth. Why else would he stamp his foot?
Listen
. Why else was he motioning leftwise with a becking arm like the neck of a mud-spattered swan, thus indicating a new presence? And why else would a queerly uniformed officer appear and nod casually to the men after shaking the hand of red-nosed Captain Naylor? British, he was, a naval commander. Followed by a gaggle of heads from HQ.

After they passed through, Lizzie repeated the news and Walter felt the settling into himself of a pleasant weight. The future! He had not properly understood that the future had gone. Now it was back. His agitated nerves sank down and fed on a rich fare framed and sealed like honey, the orderly combs of time and circumstance. An inner hum mounted to a —

“Yippee!” which accompanied his spinning hat as it flew towards Lizzie.

“Don't you realize,” said Frank Barton, “that once they've cleaned up the mess out there the whole shebang will start all over again?”

Walter and Lizzie, the fools, had been about to waltz.

 

Twenty minutes later a glum file waited in the throat of the communication trench. Where darkness ended the British officer crouched and shouted in Turkish with his left cheek almost touching the sunlit wall. Head tilted back, he was a man demanding entry into a house occupied by a maniac: shouting, imploring, listening, wary. Confused responses could be heard from the other lines, a reminder that here the two sides were closer than anywhere else. All round, the firing seemed to drain away.

The Briton smoked tailor-made cigarettes from a tin, and at times the silence was so complete that the men heard the silken paper rustle. What was a sailor doing so far from the sea? No, he was not a sailor, said someone, but an agent: one day navy, the next a footslogger. He crosses back and forth to Turkey disguised as a beggar. Whenever he wishes he crawls on his belly to the other lines and walks around picking up information. He passes for one of their own. His name is Aubrey. Aub. He brings trouble with him when he comes to the front line, though, because if the Jackos don't like what he says they always try and wipe him out. So stand by for bullets and bombs. The Turks invariably take Aub for a deserter in the service of their enemy.

Under their feet, the Australians knew, miners, men from Kalgoorlie, Broken Hill, Ballarat, were busy digging secret tunnels. So were the Turks. In one place opposing shafts had come face to face forming a line of communication between the two sides. A forbidden line. Sandbags had been erected, guards posted: a kind of peace reigned — so what was Aub doing up here, when he could go down into the earth if he liked and shake hands with the opposition?

A kind of game was being played, that was the trouble, while below, where dwelt the breathless miners and the breathless dead, was completed the potential true arc of a handshake … Simple enough to make it real: We do apologize for bothering you. We just don't know what came over us. Removal of hats and caps, scratching of heads. Here, have a cup of tea, and (fingers in mouth to whistle up the cook) a brace of hot buttered scones. There's only one thing. Keep your mouth shut about all this, will you? We'll camp up here, you and us, till things quieten down in the old country. A game of poker? Are you partial to a little swy? Now tell us about this harem business up in the city.

But Aubrey persisted, his palm glued to the wet clay wall which overnight drizzle had converted to the consistency of “greased egg”. He spoke so that all could hear:

“We'll give the blighters a minute or two to think things over, then I'll have another go.” With his accomplices he shifted back into the mouth of the communication trench where again they made polite noises in the direction of the men, lit up, waited.

“Electricity is the queerest stuff imaginable,” ran Boof's conversation with Mick. “It's kind of nothing.”

Captain Naylor tried to intrude on the HQ group, who in turn attempted a word with the poms, who in their turn, like all officers of their race, seemed perpetually on holidays.

“Last night Kyriakides heard a nightingale. And I swear the cuckoo had changed his note, worried by the shrapnel.”

“Ellis took delivery of more champagne yesterday. But do you think the bounder will share? There ought to be a rule in the mess.” The speaker was definitely unpleasant. He had none of Aub's air of quick interest in things.

Frank chose this moment to give a recipe for damper to Sergeant Madox: “The secret is to use a scant cup of milk instead of water, then add two handfuls of chopped sage and one of onions. I always carry a tin of Glaxo on the road.”

“The secret to brownie is dripping,” contributed Madox.

“By June you'll find the Balkan flies a treat,” Aub told his mate. He then swivelled round to the men and raised his voice a half-octave, endowing it with an almost feminine sinewy strength: “I hope you boys are keeping your shit covered, otherwise in the hot weather we'll all be sick.”

“What's the game?” asked Bluey.

The rumour had been right: both sides were finding the stench of dead bodies unbearable. Worse, they were a health hazard. After several false starts with white flags flying on sticks and both sides firing on emissaries from farther up or down the line, he, a commander of RN Intelligence, was attempting to make proper arrangements. One day of No Shooting would be enough.

They asked him the Turkish for Good day, How are you? and Do you have a sister? Also they politely wished to know where he had picked up the language.

“This is my old stamping ground. I'm a journalist by trade. Don't underestimate the Turk. He's a stubborn fighter.”

Bluey started on a cigarette, the slow balletic ritual involving papered lip, hands working like silent millstones, an elbow turned in, prehensile wrist curved out — the process occupying the attention of the English as might a native custom in a remote annexation. “We don't have nightingales at home,” said Bluey between licks, “nor your kind of cuckoo either, except in clocks.” The cigarette remained unlit, swinging like a lazy pendulum: “Ours is the pallid type.” He then unclipped the cigarette and whistled two haze-coloured notes, perfect steps on a scale never completed because they started again,
ah-sip, ah-sip
, imitating the cuckoo's eternally blunted attempt at a regular series.

“Very beautiful, don't you think?” said the second Englishman to his boss without reference to Bluey, who seemed to serve as an inanimate colonial phonograph.

“You hear him at his best in the wheat, towards evening.”

At the commander's request Bluey then imitated other birds — a plover, then a currawong, filling the crowded pipe where they hunched with abrupt sad sounds. Then he began on the wonga pigeon,
wonk-wonk-wonk
, a call he said could be heard up to half a mile away and was often repeated more than a hundred times in succession. Bluey started repeating it but Frank interrupted, saying how delicious the bird was stuffed
with minced veal, covered with buttered paper, and —

The officer raised a hand. The firing had stopped altogether and in the distance a Turk was shouting. The Britisher listened, scuttled forward, listened again and made an entry in his notebook, echoed the phrases in his piercing alto and declared the job done: “They want to parley.”

As he left, Walter hurriedly asked in a voice not his own (the voice of reason): “Is there any chance they might decide to stop for good?”

“You mean stop the war? Not without a diplomatic motive. And there's none to hand. This is a strictly military moment. Do you undestand?”

He did. And it was crueller, crueller by far, than just barging on, bloated bodies and all.

The officer left the way he had come, with a nod to each and a handshake for Bluey, heading for the beach where soon a Turk would take a lonely blindfold walk along a strip of shingle and the arrangements would be properly made.

But when Walter reached his post things were so unexpectedly peaceful that he relaxed in the Reg Hurst position with his back to the enemy. So easy and quiet was it with only the odd dutiful bullet swiping overhead that he let go, lulled by a shore breeze that lifted the pong and rolled it out to sea. Lulled also by the sunlight, still not so very hot, he removed his shirt and began “chatting”, picking tiny lice from the folds. When a trail of escapers set off in a dotted line for his trousers, dispassionately with blades of fingernail he killed every one.

An instant later he heard a peculiar dull clang which seemed to rise in the air before rooting itself in the earth. Then drowsily he selected another job: cleaning the sights of his rifle.

But the clang turned out to be no passing oddity.

 

Farther up the line Frank and Bluey had been digging with short-handled shovels and picks when Frank forgetfully raised his shovel too high and collected on its curved face one of those desultory bullets (desultory in a crowd, fiercely vengeful on its own). It deflected downwards, harmlessly grazed his forehead but ploughed a wild furrow across chest and stomach.

It was this gash that Walter stared at ten minutes later when the bearers carried Frank past, and found horror compounded by greedy curiosity: the phenomenon he witnessed was that of a friend unmasked to show an inhuman geography of peaks and hollows where arêtes of upright torn shirt were hung with ruby snow.

Frank, you are one of us …

“Wally?” The eyes black and shiny, mouth dry, lips streaked with little frayed strings of dough … a hand exploring outwards like the searching tendril of a still-growing plant. “Where's Nugget?”

“He's around.”

Boof appeared and tactlessly blurted, “Nugget's down at the beach or somewhere, with the others.” But Frank seemed to have passed out again though still he gripped Walter by the wrist. The bearers resumed their waddling progress. The front line was too narrow for stretchers.

Six more steps and Frank moaned, “How's my dial?”

“Clean as a whistle.”

“Good. I wouldn't want Marge or Mossy to see me with a busted dial.” At the mouth of the communication trench they loaded him onto a stretcher. Blood seeped through the canvas and hung beaded there, rusty and wet, like something vile from an abandoned waterbag. Frank's right hand crawled across his stomach to search amid the mess in a vain attempt to smother the pain.