1915 (35 page)

Then upon these thoughts once more impinged the voice. Now it was like the echo of a stone tossed into a gorge that reverberates after the stone has rolled to a stop. The voice calling Walter's name — flint striking a spark that whizzes brilliantly towards the eye, but on arrival is nothing but a cold fleck of insensible matter.

 

“Billy!”

The familiar figure advancing along the beach, scuffing toecaps on shingle, was his friend after all. He had changed: white-faced with a troublesome set to his jaw. A listless wave.

“You just missed Blacky. He looks like being out of things altogether. Half his luck, eh?”

“Out of things? That's a laugh!” Billy threw himself down. The stones must have hurt, but from the way he acted they might have been soft sand.

“Are you all right?”

“I thought things had changed.” He tossed a handful of gravel towards the water. “But they haven't.”

“You look as if you've had a close shave.”

But it was something else. The breath of danger never affected Billy like this. The constant fear, the way under everything one never stopped being frightened: was this the trouble? Most men here were either glum, touchy, or wildy elated, yet whatever showed on the outside, within was the knowledge that all moved to the one commanding drumbeat. But Billy was different. Could it be bewilderment? He withdrew
a fist from his pocket, breathing noisily.

“Read this.”

It was the cable message announcing Diana's death by drowning.

An anguished half hour followed. Walter promised Billy rum, but could not find the dugout where he had agreed to meet up with the others.

“It's along here, I'm sure.” He dared not ask after Billy's feelings. They found themselves on a scrubby knoll that fell away to a shattered piece of open unoccupied ground. “Something about going
up
the track. They could have meant north.”

“Christ.”

Their retreat found them outside the chaplains' dugout. “Do you want to talk to Potty again?”

“Like hell.”

Walter was leading a bullock that might at any moment turn and gore him with a swipe of its troubled head.

Finally Walter gave up: “We're bushed.”

“
You
might be,” said Billy meaninglessly.

All this pounding ahead while Billy doggedly followed — it was a way of avoiding Billy's eye. But at last Walter ventured: “I wonder how it happened?”

Billy's response alarmed him because it was exactly as expected. He lunged from the darkness, and for a second seemed about to strike Walter on the face — but he knew what to do: he would take the blow, and if Billy knocked him down he would struggle to his feet and take more. But Billy did nothing. He just chopped the ground with his heels, spitting and swearing.

That was how Ollie Melrose found them, locked in wordless debate. The dugout, it happened, was around the next corner, its sandbagged entrance hidden in the
dark. They had passed it twice.

“Typical,” said Billy.

Pig had obtained a half-canteen of rum, but because a two gallon jar was in the offing as well he collected more money and dashed off. The remaining four crowded around the pine box that served as a table, a squat candle at its centre. Mick Aitcheson was there as well.

“Billy can have my share,” said Walter, and Billy accepted it without thanks.

In a dull voice Billy described his exploits. That very day he had shot a sniper. “C” squadron had been in the line then, and Billy said how it gave him satisfaction to know that he must have saved someone's life. He turned to Walter: “It could have been yours.”

The rum appeared to set him up. For a while he became the old Billy again, and when Ollie and Mick ducked out for a minute Walter dared to ask:

“Are you feeling any better about Diana?”

“I might as well be dead myself.”

Ollie and Mick stepped back, buttoning their flies.

“I'll take one of them too,” said Billy standing. “My bladder's a joke.” He drained his rum and set the mug down with a clatter.

He left the dugout, and though they waited, and twice went outside to search, he did not return.

 

Of all the deaths stored away in Walter's memory that of Diana seemed the least cruel. He gave no thought to the unborn child and the thwarted prospect of life for an intelligent girl — that potential he mourned for himself — nor did he grieve for Billy's
sake: and he knew the reason. Diana had died in Australia, where a body, even though there was a chance it would never be found, still was fated to be welcomed into a landscape adapted since the beginning of time to the safekeeping of faint spirits. He envied her, and longed for a grave near to where his grandparents were buried — in that clump of writhing white-limbed gums on a knoll above the creek.

Then he had an idea.

He pulled his wallet from a side pocket and unfolded a slip of paper. He took up the slim brass-capped pencil he had stolen from the effects of George Mullens. He smoothed the paper on a taut knee and was about to start writing when a dull object lying next to a dislodged brick caught his eye. It was his tobacco tin, fallen from a pocket during his plunge into the trench. So with relief he rolled a cigarette and drew deep giddy-making lungfuls of smoke as he wrote.

“To the finder: please record position of body and write to below address stating last wish of Walter Edward Gilchrist — To be removed from this place to Australia for burial at his home.”

Then he signed his name and wrote the date: June 28th 1915. He tucked the paper away, and lay back uttering a deep sigh, feeling luckier than anyone he knew, than any of the dead, that is, whose names along with their forms rotted as they sprawled on each other in “God's Acre” or unknown lay out in the scrub. He knew that his father was the man to respond to such a plea, and would spare no effort to meet the request of a dead son whose wishes he had so stubbornly blocked in life.

But what if it was different, and souls went marching on into eternity? “If there's a hell,” Ollie had
said after the final disaster of the night, when the rum was wasted and Pig Nolan dead, “then you and Pig will fight there.”

Mick had upended the pannikin of rum and obtained a few drops for each which they licked, complaining about the time Pig was taking. Then they sat back and lit their pipes.

“I don't suppose you've heard,” said Ollie. “But Walter Madox got killed at sunset. Nugget came by with the message. He was running to catch up with the others and that was that.”

“A sniper,” said Mick. “A confounded lucky shot.”

Madox? Walter tried to hold in his mind a clear picture of a man he had known for nine months, but nothing showed except brown hair, a deferential stoop. It had always been a source of irritation to Walter that the two had shared a name.

Mick let out a stream of smoke and said: “What is it, a month to the day since we lost Frank?”

“Six weeks,” Walter calculated.

“Nugget and I'll have the job of visiting his family when we get back. I ain't looking forward to that in the least.”

“Who were Marjorie and Mossie?”

“Ask Nugget, he knows 'em all,” Mick said diffidently.

“I met one of them once,” said Walter. “Marge. Do you know the other?”

“All right, but don't tell Nugget I told you. They were always very thick, those two.”

“Mossy was the mother of his kids, she lived with him up at Moree for twelve year or more. But Marjorie, just a kid herself, was the one he almost made it legal with, only a couple of years back. She refused to
go bush with him. So Frank went back to Mossy while Marjorie stayed in Sydney. You know what a stubborn mule Frank was. Marge was the same.”

“Why didn't he marry Mossy early on?”

“A few reasons.”

“I'll bet she was black,” said Ollie.

After a pause Mick said: “She was, but you could never've met a nicer woman.”

“Oh, my!” said Pig, stepping through the doorway and setting a stone jar down on the box.

“You keep quiet about it,” said Mick, startled.

“I don't talk. But what if I did? Frank's dead. Does it bloody matter anyway?”

“Like hell you don't talk,” Walter heard himself say. In the early days Pig had gone around saying anything he liked, nudging people in the ribs, waving a fist.

“I've been leaving you alone,” drawled Pig, placing both palms on the box and causing it to sway creakily. “But I could change my mind like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“Leave off,” said Ollie.

“There's more rum where this came from,” Pig straightened himself. “At least another jar, maybe two. So come on, who's tossing in?”

Ollie contributed a shiny Turkish coin minted that very year. He had obtained it in exchange for two tins of beef on the day of the armistice.

“Yes,” Pig breathed, turning it in the candlelight, “they'll like this. What've you got for me?” he asked Walter.

“Nothing.”

“Not even a decent shit, I'd say.”

“Now look —”

Mick took out half a crown: “It's all I've got, so
make sure I get a full share.”

“It never stops, does it,” said Ollie when Pig had gone. “You should have shaken his hand at Ma'adi,” referring to a time in Egypt when Pig had tried to make the peace but Walter suspiciously had refused. Rightly, too, because it had all been a sarcastic joke on Pig's part.

Mick poured the rum and this time Walter took some. The taste did not even make his mouth feel clean, it seemed oily and burnt. His heart was beating fast with an inner panic that rum could not touch.

Mick, who had fallen into a reverie, suddenly sat up. A sound like wind puffing through a tree filled the air outside. Walter was about to part the flap for a look when Ollie's hand restrained him. A remote muffled explosion was followed by nearby tearing and flapping sounds, as if a dovecote had been split open and a thousand pigeons struggled to escape. “One down, ten to go,” said Ollie. Another shell exploded in the sky. This time the hills echoed with the sound of wet sheets flapping in a gale.

A third explosion was followed by a gap of peculiar silence. Even the popping guns on the heights seemed to pause. Walter heard Mick nervously click his jaw, a habit of his at such moments. Then footsteps abruptly sounded on the track outside. “That'll be Pig,” Ollie sniggered in relief. He slid Pig's pannikin across the box and placed a hand on the jar ready to start pouring. But when the flap was wrenched aside the face that appeared was not Pig's at all, but Nugget Arthur's.

“Was Pig Nolan with you blokes?” Nugget breathed noisily through his battered nose and horsebreaker's lumpy cheeks, “Was he? Because he's out there,” he continued, jerking a thumb over his shoulder: “Hit,” he gulped at last.

Ollie half-stood, Mick scrambled to his feet beside him. Walter reached for the beam over his head and was about to haul himself up: “Don't go,” said Nugget, “it happened right outside the hospital.”

“Is it bad?” asked Ollie.

Walter attempted to cram back into his mind a thought that demanded:
Make it bad, Lord, bad, bad, bad
.

“There was blood all over him and broken stuff. He stank of rum. But the doctors dragged him inside as soon as it happened.”

Walter's prayer altered:
Make it bad enough to take him away from here for ever, but don't kill him off
.

When the shelling stopped they went to look. “He's in there,” said Nugget, pointing to a halo of light that shone on the white canvas of the medical tent. “Who's his best mate?”

“I'm his worst mate,” said Walter nervously. He could smell the rum somewhere about, and also the whiff of chloride of lime being used as an antiseptic.

“It's me, I s'pose,” said Ollie. He followed a pair of stretcher bearers into the tent.

While they waited, ramming black tobacco into their pipes, Walter realized that the hostility he felt flowing from Pig was equally of his own making. Pig had biffed him first, but the days for vengeance had passed and here was Walter still determined to carry it on.

Ollie emerged from the tent laughing.

“Pig's all right!” declared Nugget.

“The rum,” said Ollie. He rested his elbows on the sandbags and giggled. “The poor bastard. He wasn't hit by the shrapnel at all. But the jar got hit and he must have fallen over on it.”

“But he's all right,” insisted Nugget.

“No, he's dead.” Then Walter saw that Ollie's cheeks were streaked with tears. “The sharp edge did for him. He died just now, while I was in there.”

Who would shed tears for Walter's death? It would come remote from human sight, it would be reported uncertainly, and by the time it was confirmed, if ever it was, the response, even of his loved ones, would be a shrug. Thus he told it to himself as the walls closed in …

Nugget took Ollie by the shoulders and guided him compassionately to the ground, thrusting a pipe between his teeth and inviting him to smoke his fill. Mick slid his back down the tight-packed sandbags and squatted with his knees touching his chin, a hunched beggar in the pale light of the hospital tent. As Walter joined them he envisaged the Australian troops around him squatting in similar positions — leaning on posts, lying on their backs in dugouts, balanced under the dangerous lips of trenches in deceptive postures of relaxation. Then one of them toppled to the ground. And then another. And another.

Ollie spoke in his measured, English way: “I saw the doctor lift a shard from his groin. It was smeared all over with blood.”

“Take it easy,” said Nugget.

“He mentioned you,” Ollie turned to Walter. “We had a laugh. Pig said, ‘When I get up I'm going to cook that smart-arse Gilchrist's goose.' Then the blood poured out like a fountain. There was nothing they could do.” Ollie giggled again: “If there's a hell, you and Pig'll fight there.”