If Then (17 page)

“That’s a long carry.”

“The mules can’t handle the sand and neither can the motor.”

“What about the other beaches?”

“I don’t know. From the ridge, it all looks like war to me. We came across a squad. They were dead but their bodies were intact, with no sign of injury. They were lying around as if enjoying an afternoon doze. My sergeant thinks they were killed by a compressive blast. Have you ever seen anything like that?”

“It could be gas. But you’d smell it. Nurses can turn yellow from merely removing the uniforms of men who have been gassed. Who is your sergeant?”

“Hector, sir.”

“And you are?”

“James, sir.”

“Private James.”

“I prefer just James, sir.”

The doctor looked askance at this breach of military code.

“You must meet the padre. He’ll like you. You’re one of his types. A freethinker.”

Before James can disagree, the doctor stands and returns to the shade of the tent, organizing the orderlies and attending to the wounded. The rain has stopped and the tarp dripped dry. Out to sea, battleships at anchor shell the ridge and their firing is a constant rolling noise. The shells the Turks toss back come in various forms: the whining whirring ones, the crashing iron kitchen sink ones, the high explosive ones that stop time for a silent moment in which the rocks, rifles and limbs float weightlessly and then noise and time devastatingly resume. Honour, in the face of such blunt mechanical force, is impossible. Honour is absurd. A man does not have to be a freethinker to understand that.

The squads fall in. The lieutenant colonel orders the men to pool their canteens, every man adding his water ration to a big empty petrol can. It’s the only way to be sure that no one is hoarding water. They trek back up the ridge in Indian file, with the lieutenant colonel leading, followed by Sergeant Hector, then the squads with folded stretchers and finally the corporal bringing up the rear in case any man should fall out. Salt lines streak his shirt and his pith helmet reeks of sweat. The cry for water goes up along the shore, where the Aegean breaks against the gentle rise of the sands. Nothing else is worth saying.

13

J
ames sips juice
from a cold tin of peaches, the sharp edge dithering under his lip. He has to concentrate. It’s hard to concentrate. Did he sleep? Has he slept? In the ravine, Jordison cooks up salty beef and biscuits but he can’t stomach it, not in the middle of the night and not without water. Digesting that lot will take more effort than the food puts in. The ground is painfully cold even through the sheeting and his greatcoat, and his shoulder feels like it has been packed in ice. The sea mist rolls over him and it tastes of salt and cordite.

Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.

Overhead, a single star is visible through the layered vapours. He had expected the sky to be full of stars and is disappointed that the atmosphere is so thick. When will he be able to drift above the clouds? When will he see what the Earth looks like from space? Or gaze into the Beyond without the gauzy intervention of the veil? By concentrating his will into an astral entity, it ought to be possible to escape the boredom of gravity, turn back and see the sun reflect off the Aegean, the atmosphere tinged with sunrise, a land of gauzy greens and bluish browns bounded by mountain ranges and dark coastal waters, and nothing of man visible. Space would be cold and airless, and overstocked with stars. Positively stuffed with stars. The sun would not be yellow, but a round heart of livid whiteness fringed with a searing red corona. Space would be lethal, and of a blackness unknown to the Earth. His spirit would traverse the void powered by will. The fundamental unit of reality is will. The stars are burning engines of will. The stars desire his ascent, and he responds in kind; why does this not happen? How preposterous that the talent to bend space to his own will is denied to him! What ridiculous futility! He wants to see the universe. He must. Visions are near, just over the curvature of the Earth, curved like a dining table. Thoughts branch of their own volition, form decision trees with variable outcomes.

He sighs.

He is asleep again. If only he could concentrate.

His hand droops but does not let go of the can of peaches.

“Why must I always wake you, James?” asks Sergeant Hector through narrow lips. The sergeant is younger than him, an NCO promoted for excellence on the parade ground before they had even got to the Dardanelles. A natural leader, yes, but also a loner. Northern chap. Not particularly clubbable. Three inches short of proper officer class.

“I’m awake,” he mumbles. Emerging from their bivouacs in the ravine, the stretcher squad forms a shivering Indian line behind the sergeant. James falls in and the line jogs out into the night, past Alligator Point. His heart beats quickly, from the shock of being awake and nicotine starvation, and his legs are yet to find their strength. The stretcher bearers run along the wet ridged sand, alongside the florescent fizz of breaking waves and the slide of the sea back into fathoms of heavy shadow.

The hike is too bloody much. A cigarette would help, a pinch from the plug of filthy twist in his pocket. He is not permitted to strike a light until dawn; the big guns may be silent but snipers haunt the ridges. The Munsters pilfered dark clumps of baccy from the Turk when the sentries bolted from their piquets at the first sign of the landing and declared it superior to the twist issued in their rations. They found the coffee pot still boiling away too. Talk about a spot of luck.

Jordison has the other end of the stretcher. The 10th Division was formed as an Irish regiment, with the numbers in the ambulance division made up from the all sorts and odd sorts you didn’t want in the line: the weak-chested cranks, piratical Boer veterans and pacifist intellectuals and – in one case – a professor of mathematics who could not abide the shame of the white feather. Even the sergeant was a Quaker, albeit a Quaker with the holler of a warmonger.

And then there were the nonconformists from the northwest, like Jordison, a gardener from Morecambe or thereabouts; he described the visibility balloons tethered to the ships as being like great yellow marrows. On the pier at Lemnos, they had coaxed Jordison into smoking his first cigarette but he absolutely refused the rum. A man of principle. Salt of the earth.

“And what is your creed?” Jordison asked James, coughing behind his coffin nail. “If I carry a stretcher with a man, I’m owed an account of his beliefs. There must be something wrong about you to end up in the ambulance. What do you believe in? What do you strive for?”

I would like to drift above the earth and embrace the naked stars.

Jordison has more wind in him for the climb up the ridge than James can muster and keeps glancing impatiently back at his fellow stretcher bearer. The moon is a thorn sunk deep in the cloud and the meagre light of a single star is not much to work by, never mind navigate. The maps are of the wrong scale for this kind of work and do not accurately represent the torturous routes they have to take.

The air cools as they climb. At a hundred feet, the vegetation is jungly. They mustn’t get lost again: he reminds Jordison not to lose track of the others.

“Here’s one,” says Jordison. They set the stretcher down and get a closer look. In the dark, you can’t see where they’ve been hit. How beyond help they might be. This one has flies in the wrong places and a queer scent, a mix of putrefaction and the perfume of wild thyme, sage and mint gathering in the hollows.

“God help him,” whispers Jordison. They leave the body behind.

They climb on, but the gully does not open up into a clear view of the surrounding country. Rather, it leads them deeper into the spiky overgrowth. The path is narrow and steep. To keep up with the squad, Jordison drags them through a palisade of bullrushes. They break through waist-high scrub and nearly go headfirst over the edge of a cliff. Jordison rears back no more than two feet from the cliff edge. The two men breathe in the sheer grey drop down to black waves.

“What kind of mad country is this?” asks the Lancastrian. “This is not the way we were heading.”

“You got lost.” James turns around. It’s his turn to lead. They have lost the squad. Their training in signalling was better suited to advancing across flat terrain than this broken country. Back down the narrow path he goes, then quickly up a hillock to get a broad view of the work at hand. A nullah to the other flank, a steep narrow dried watercourse, down which it would be easy for a man to lose his footing and fall. A likely spot for a carry. He holds his hand up. Wait. Listen. Yes, from somewhere down the bottom of the nullah. Voices. He beckons Jordison close and points down.

Jordison listens too, then shakes his heavy head.

“You don’t hear them?”

“How do we know they are our men?”

They listen again. Oak branches stirring. The voices may be English, or they might not. They could be accents from another part of the Empire: Welsh or Irish, Australian or Indian. Jordison is not convinced. He is a doughty man but cautious. Surely, over the next rise, there will be easier carries than this one? The men discuss it in agitated whispers. James points firmly to his chest. I’ll go. I’ll go alone. Jordison agrees, and settles down on his belly, hands to the fore, to lower James and his tentative boots into the sliding slipping earth of the nullah. He does not want to go pounding down there only to discover a squad of Turks, nor does he want to be mistaken by his own soldiers for the enemy. The Turk respects the red cross but cannot see it in the dark.

James takes out his regulation twist, rolls himself a cigarette, and lights it in the bowl of his helmet. With the lit end still covered, he drags softly upon it, feels the smoke settle the inner dispute of his nicotine craving, and then exhales blue and grey smoke down the course of the nullah. He descends, and every yard or so, exhales another mouthful of the noxious twist. Any man on his side would recognize it. He slides another four, five yards. He puts his hands up and steps through the scrub expecting to see men huddled ahead. But there is no one. Just two dark patches on the ground and the ferrous tang of bloodsoaked earth. The spot is so peaceful and reflective it reminds him of home. He strains to listen. The injured men may have retreated at his approach, a sure sign that they are the enemy and could, right now, be crouched in the scrub. Watching him. Aiming at him.

The oak branches stir; between these branches, quivering silver webs, six in a row and glistening with dew, each with a big spider at the heart of them. The mind is inclined to spot faces in nature; when afraid, every man is a pantheist, alive to the spirits within rock and tree. He looks again at the blood on the ground; his squad must have attended to the injured men, and the voices he heard were their reassurances as they carried the wounded away. There are only phantoms in the bush.

He takes the long way back up the nullah, a zigzag path, clearer and not as steep as the way down. He gets a handhold of earth and a centipede runs over his wrist. It is the lull before dawn and the land seethes with anticipation. This soil didn’t seem to him to be fit for much but the maps showed a cultivated patch beyond the salt lake, perhaps olives, or even corn. Anything he could eat straight off the bough would be alright to him. Grapes. Something with a bit of juice in it. He comes across a hawthorn bush full of blackberries just like the ones at home. August is too early for ripe berries, and these are sharp and not as plump as the ones he picked with Ruth on the paths leading down to Alfriston.

They had ridden out to make love at the foot of the Long Man of Wilmington, as the old wives had told her it was a fertility symbol. Unlike the Cerne Giant, the Long Man was without phallus and seemed more to him like a spirit gripping the sides of a doorway, and about to step through. After they made love, she gathered blackberries in a basket and, when it was full, sloeberries in the train of her skirts.

Jordison hauls him up onto the path. They take hold of the stretcher again. Darkness was considered vital to the success of the landing, but it is of no help to a stretcher bearer. Going up and down the nullah has left him more disorientated. He could not even say, with any certainty, in which direction lay the sheer cliff of Saros Bay.

The war itself is no help, it is strangely silent.

“We have to find the aid post. We must rejoin the rest of the ambulance,” says Jordison.

But which way? James searches the sky for clues. The single star has gone out, obscured by thick immovable cloud. They walk on, uncertain, with the crawling sensation that every step will have to be retraced. After two miles, they realize that they have wandered beyond their own lines. They keep going. One mission of the landing is to gain and secure this ridge, and they have done so, accidentally, two stretcher bearers lost on the first night of their war. The terrain twists this way and that, manipulating them to its own ends.

They climb to gain a vantage point in this mad country. A searchlight beam divides the night in two. The triangular beam, with the apex emanating from a point that could be behind Turkish lines, advances across the topmost ridge. They drop to the ground, and Jordison shuffles backward. The searchlight stops ten yards to the left. Then flicks five yards closer. Jordison freezes; to stifle a cry, he bites down on the earth. The patch of illuminated ground slides closer and reveals a figure, two yards ahead. It is a body, one hand clutching the air in rigor mortis. James buries his head in the ground and turns his face toward his chest, and tucks in his legs, so that his breathing will not reveal him. In this foetal position, he waits in a prolonged quivering moment, hoping that whoever aims the searchlight will mistake their prone bodies for corpses. A last thought of Ruth, he owes her that much; to remember her at the moment of his extinction. A faint muscle memory of their lovemaking outdoors, the exultation of his bare arse between her splayed legs, the anxiety that they will be discovered giving the act a wanton urgency in which he selfishly pursued his own pleasure in a way that she responded to. Tighter, he tucks his knees up in anticipation of being bathed in light. As if he could fold himself flat and slip through the cracks in the earth.

“It has passed,” whispers Jordison. The searchlight flicks down the ridge. Opposite, the silhouetted hand of a dead body slowly closes into a fist and becomes a living shadow. Sergeant Hector. He slides down between them.

“We got lost,” says James. “I’m so glad you found us.”

“I’m lost too,” Hector replies. “I reckon we’re beyond the British outposts and not far from Turkish lines. I can’t see a damn thing. If that searchlight hadn’t swung up here I’d have gone right over the precipice. It’s a fair bet that it’s a Turkish searchlight which puts their lines somewhere down the ridge.”

All three men, shivering on the high ground, search the horizon for some sign of the bay: a grey streak in the distance seems the most likely.

“We’ll head that way,” says Hector.

“But when we get in that mad country again, we’ll lose our bearings,” says Jordison.

“We can’t stay here.”

“Staying here makes more sense than blundering around in the dark.”

“It should be sunrise by now,” says James

He has never experienced combat before. None of them has. He has been afraid before. Of course he has. Not like this though. A entire day of fear with more days of terror to come. Weeks even. How will they stand it?

“When sun comes up, we’re as safe here as we are on the beach,” says Jordison. Hector is not listening. He puts a subduing hand on Jordison. In the passing glare of the searchlight, in the centre of a clump of bushes, James sees a figure move: its helmet and uniform are interwoven with leaves and branches to form a pelt of vegetation, and in its hands, a rifle. The searchlight moves on. The night rushes in.

“He’s found me again.” Hector is riveted with disbelief. “He’s looking right at me.”

“Who is?” asks Jordison.

“The sniper. He’s after me.”

Hector slides down a steep stratum of the ridge, so steep that if they did not have a sniper at their backs, Jordison and James would never have followed him. The three men grunt and leap down through the broken stones. The descent ends in tall grass and thistles, through which they run crouching and cringing in anticipation of a bullet.