If Then (19 page)

Collinson takes out a pocket book. He licks his forefinger then flicks to the relevant page of algebraic formula.

“Our losses yesterday ought to have created an impetus for vengeance, under the reciprocal instinctive stimulation of combat.” He prods a particular portion of the equation twice. “Instead, the men are swimming.”

James says, “You are failing to take into account the inhospitable land.”

They gaze up at the high ridges encircling the bay.

Hector says, “We gained the ridge last night, quite by accident. Collinson is right. There is no logical reason for us to stay on the beach. But it does not follow that there is something strange about the war. Merely about our orders.”

“The soldiers should not be bathing.”

“They are not soldiers,” says Hector. “They are men and their uniforms are chatty with lice. If I were to swim now, would that alter your equation?”

“You are being perverse,” says Collinson.

Hector takes off his helmet, leans out of his braces and unbuttons his shirt.

“We are under fire! A man cannot be naked under fire!”

Hector kicks off his boots, and in a white flash, drops his trousers.

“You are being prudish, Collinson. You are using mathematics as a fig leaf.”

The young sergeant walks steadily into the sea, dives into the waves and swims out to join the bobbing laughing heads of other swimmers. Small piles of clothes dot the shore like worm casts. More men dive into the water from a rickety pier. Ammunition mules pause in their doleful progress, eyelids sticky with flies, their tails flicking, as they consider the swimmers. The sing and burst of a high explosive along the beach jolts the beasts back into motion.

The blue-green water is melted glass. Undressing quickly, James bolts to the water and dives immediately into the misty saltiness. The water fills his ears with the roar of his blood’s circulation. The surface shimmers with the sea breeze. He cuts across the water with a quick controlled stroke. Not all of the men can swim and some paddle up to their waists. He swims out to sea and away from the rickety pier so that, looking back, he sees that there are dozens, perhaps a hundred or so men, in the water. Collinson is wrong: swimming is logical. There is no cover on the beach. The shelling is intermittent whereas the itch of lice, the persistence of flies, the enduring stink of fear and exertion – these are constants.

His skin cools, then he turns onto his back, showing the sun the facts of himself. In the sea, boys shyly wash, cupping water over a jutting solar plexus and under the arms. The grossness of civilian life has been worn away from their naked bodies. James admires a handful of exceptional types in this otherwise average body of men: a navvy with overdeveloped upper arms; a middle-aged miner with a proud firm chest covered in clutches of grey curls; and Sergeant Hector, the figure of perfection without a spare grain of flesh on him due to his morning observance of calisthenics.

Hector swims alone with an expression of great seriousness, accustomed to setting himself private goals and then exceeding them. He told James that he had been a boy scout, though not one for parade, not for bugles and badges, but for summers in the countryside. Sleeping outdoors was vital for the future fitness of the human race, said the sergeant. James imagines him doing solitary star jumps outside a small one-man tent pitched on the banks of the Wye, followed by freezing dawn dips in an idle current, then hauling himself naked out through the reeds, his buttocks concave at the sides, his vertebrae a stack of marble pebbles.

Four beats on an iron crowbar. The men are being called back out of the water. Time for war. But what had he been up to before the war? Teaching genetics to the boys, publishing a thin volume of speculation concerning the future of man, and delighting in marriage. James floats upon the dip and swell of the waves. He remembers the newness of the domestic fug, a stock pot on the stove and Ruth’s warm hip under the cotton shift of her nightie. He had been so very attentive to life, had let books and experience fill him up. If only he had a gramophone that could record thought, inscribe the phantasmagoria of the mind directly into long vinyl grooves without lie or hesitation, then he could have dictated his civilian self to disc in order to preserve it, before war hollowed him out. Upon his return home, he would slip the record from its sleeve and restore what had been lost.

The men run naked from the sea, bending low to scoop up their uniforms, skipping over telegraph wire, and haring onward. Collinson waits for James, and when the private emerges naked from the water, the professor attends to cleaning his eyeglass and whispers, “Foolish… foolish.” In his wake, the sea gulps down two, three, four shells then violently expels them.

15

T
heir dugouts are
shallow dents in the side of a hill half a mile from the waterline. The section fall out in various aspects, some curled up, others face down. Jordison kicks off his boots, loosens his puttees and throws himself thankfully upon the ground. Collinson mutters in his sleep while James lounges on his elbows, feet stretched out before him. Duties will resume after sundown.

Hector measures the last of the afternoon light. He has a little water in his canteen. He takes his set of paints from his knapsack, wets his brush and considers the men in their repose.

“I thought you only painted birds,” says James.

“Have you seen any birds? There are tracks on the beach made by a sand bird, some kind of martin. The cliff face has nests but they are empty.”

“Isn’t there some other wildlife you could paint?”

Hector dabs at the air with the brush. “Do you object?”

“There must be a more edifying subject than soldiers. Women. Paint me a woman.”

Hector is silent.

“Paint me a woman from memory,” says James. “And not your mother.”

“I have a sweetheart,” says Hector. “My Sparrowhawk.”

“Another bird!”

“Sparrowhawk is her camp name. She comes up to about here on me…” He draws a line level with his chest. “I could paint her in her uniform. A skirt of coarse brown Indian silk, tie and headdress.”

“Is that what you do at home? Play Cowboys and Indians?” asks James.

“Just Indians,” says Hector.

“Aren’t you a little old for all that?”

Hector smiles.

“We’re the new barbarians,” he says. “Men and women living close to the land away from mechanical civilization.”

James holds up his hand.

“Please, no more philosophy. I just want to talk about women. Do you and Sparrowhawk share a tent?”

“We do.”

“That’s very forward thinking of you.”

“I am a strong potent well-knit man.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“A woman who finds herself with an impotent man – male wreckage – should be free to find a good male animal. Sex revulsion and inversion spells death, in the long run.”

“Please, no talk of death. Only sex. Isn’t that right, men?”

The rest of the section listen to the tired banter, their heads down, the whites of their eyes shining brightly from faces grimy with sweat and sand. Private Brilliant makes a fire of the sickly-sweet thyme and heats water in a mess tin to make tea.

“You are married,” says Hector. “What kind of marriage is it? Are you equal, in a sort of co-partnership, or do you embrace polarity of the sexes?”

“What does that mean?”

“Is the marriage well setup with a vital sexual contrast?”

“Do you come up with all this at your camps?”

Hector puts his brush aside, turns the page of his book, and shows James a symbol: it is a yin-yang within the outline of the Greek symbol Omega. “Before the war, we camped every fortnight to debate… well, everything, I suppose. It all seems up for grabs.”

“My marriage is sound,” says James, “but we’ll all return changed men. Then we’ll see what new bargains have to be made. If we even survive another day like today.”

The day has been without respite: the squad worked three-mile humps across a parched and burning land between the casualty clearing station and the regimental aid post, little more than a half-dug trench beneath a blasted oak tree on Chocolate Hill.

The men named it Chocolate Hill for its charred brown scrub. It rises steeply from the plain to a height of a hundred and sixty feet, the air thick with smoke and iron. At the aid post, there were never less than thirty wounded waiting to be carried. More wounded than they could accommodate. The corporal ordered that the regulation bearer squads of four be split up and so they worked in twos. Then came the downward stabbing light of shrapnel. Man and horse fled in every direction. When the smoke cleared, there was a figure lying prone on the ground, the corporal. James and Hector dug his grave and then James made a cross from a plank torn from a Fray Bentos crate.

“Why don’t you paint the shell bursts?” says James. “Every type of shell has its individual bloom. There is one I particularly like: it comes down in a hail of hot iron then disperses in pale blue smoke.”

“If I had thick oils I would paint the high-explosive as it ploughs a deep furrow in the clay then belches a black and khaki cloud.”

“And what of the call of the bullets? Every sniper’s rifle has its song; in the absence of birdsong, I will learn to whistle bulletsong.”

The squadrons had advanced steadily in parade lines across the scrub plains; here and there, men were flicked out of formation, their vitality subtracted neatly by a sniper’s bullet. Shells exploded like the tedious inspiration of a machine mind. “Mechanical death,” grunted Hector.

James took the front poles and Hector the rear, at the sergeant’s insistence. Blood dripped through the canvas stretcher and onto their boots and into the sand. As fatigue set in, the blood lines and blood trails grew more haphazard. Not all the stretchers had slings and some of the wounded were big, fourteen stone or so. Between carries, they swapped places to give Hector a breather. One case hemorrhaged with a gasp and a whimper, and they set him down gently to fix his dressing. James’ toes tingled as he lowered down his end of the stretcher, anxious that the wounded man would break open if put down too heavily. When they had him wrapped up all nice and tight again, the soldier thanked them and died.

Hector had to cut two dead mules from the ambulance wagon. James and Jordison restrained their mates; the animals had the same blazing white-of-the-eye fear as the men. The wheels sank in the sand and the wagon listed to one side; the shelling got so hot they had to abandon the beasts with the intention of retrieving them at night.

At five o’clock sharp, the Hun sent over a spotter plane.
Dab, dab, dab
went the anti-aircraft guns on the blue sky.

“You should paint the landscape,” says James. Never paint the wounded. The head cases and the leg cases and the groaning abdominals; the one who got it through both cheeks and had his tongue taken off; the one who was coughing blood and wouldn’t lie down; the one with the loose bandage around his head and something unspeakable beneath; the one who shivered and wept.

Even after a day under a roasting sun, Hector’s face remains pale, the skin tight over his cheekbones, a layered ironic cast to his eyes. The lower half of the sunset is obscured by sea cloud. Night settles in the dugout. Over the Aegean, gilded clouds hide dark hearts. Hector glances at the sunset, then returns to his study of the men as their faces turn to shadow.

The Turk ceases fire so as not to give away the position of his big guns. The battle cools and condenses. Silhouettes duck out of trenches. Word is sent back that the soldiers at the front are suffering from terrible thirst. But no vessels to transport water made it through the landing, or if they did, none have been found. The rumour is that ammunition boxes are being emptied of bullets, filled with water, and sent up to the fighting men. Hector’s eyes sink further back into his head.

At the pier, a lighter brings in condensed water from Lemnos. The stretcher bearers join the queue. It is a few hundred yards long. After an hour or so of slow shuffling they reach the large canvas trough into which water is being pumped. The men dip in their various unclean vessels, drain them, and dip again. Getting water takes so long that by the time the two men return to the dugout, the squad has already received new orders to search the Karakol Dagh.

Beyond the blue bulk of Imbros, there is a livid crack of lightning upon the horizon.

Collinson falls in, fiddling with the arms of his round glasses.

“I’ve been watching the storm out to sea,” he says. He makes them hunker down and gaze out into the darkening waters until they are rewarded with another breathtaking silent fork of lightning.

Before the war, Collinson explains, he was superintendent of an observatory in Scotland, where hourly readings of terrestrial magnetism were taken. “Atmospheric electricity also,” he says, with a Cambridge enunciation rarely heard among enlisted men.

“The instruments had to be removed from Kew with the electrification of London. The other observatory was on Valentia Island where the transatlantic cables were landed.”

“Vital work, then,” says Hector.

“Yes, well, the instruments are automated but interpretation is not. A large storm like this one would produce disturbances of two classes. A Class K – in which the direction of the disturbing magnetic field remains constant while the magnitude of the field changes – and Class L, the remaining disturbances in which the direction of the field changes at a rate comparable with the rate of change of magnitude. Magnetic disturbances would be just one part of predicting the weather.”

Behind them, a crackle of rifle fire forks horizontally across the ridge.

“If you could predict the weather, could you also predict the war?” asks James.

“Yes. Exactly. The question is, can we use quantifiable methods to predict the behaviour of complex phenomena? Could we quantify war? It would be complicated. There are many factors at play. Today we’ve observed that the intensity of a conflict is inversely proportional to its frequency; after an indolent first day, the Turk is reinforced and neither side will be able to maintain their vigour for long. Fatigue is a factor.”

“What about water?” asks James.

Hector asks, “What about hate?”

“The vigour to war would be constituted by a number of motive powers. The loss of land, for one. Honour. Ideas of national pride.”

“Propaganda,” says Hector. “The influence of a few great men who have been persuaded to put their talents to the service of war. Could you quantify their role?”

“Vengeance would require an equation of its own derived from the number of casualties and the yardage set aside in the newspaper to inciting reprisals. It’s a fascinating notion. The equation of war.”

“Hector has been working on the art of war,” says James. “He painted a picture of the men, but I am yet to see it.”

“It’s unfinished. James did not think the men an edifying subject for art. But there is no wildlife here for me to study.”

Collinson treated all unqualified assertions with professorial disdain.

“Nonsense. There are some fine specimens of insect. Including ones I have neither seen nor read of before. What do you make of this?”

The professor carefully unwrapped a handkerchief to reveal what appeared, at first, in the dark, to be bark chips.

“This was an insect. Quite a large one. I had ventured with Father Huxley up the ridge. The insect traversed an arc ten to twenty yards south of our position and then there was the most almighty boom from a high explosive shell and the insect fell to earth. When I retrieved its remains, they did not appear to belong to an insect at all, rather some kind of device. Here, this piece has a ball and socket.”

Each man took a turn to feel the fragment and rub it between thumb and forefinger.

“It’s shrapnel,” says James.

“One end is tapered like a bullet,” notes Hector.

“The padre thought it was shrapnel too. Quite curious though. It dropped straight down, it did not veer away under impact.” With the point of his knife, he holds up for their inspection the head of the insect.

“It has been moulded in one piece from a material I do not recognize, hard with some pliability and very thin. It is not organic tissue.”

James bends close to inspect the remains.

“It’s too dark to see.”

“It is ridiculous of me to fuss over such a thing in the middle of war but I find, when the fighting is on, that my mind fixes upon the smallest details and images, and it was in such a moment that I saw it.”

Collinson wraps the handkerchief around the remains and returns them to his pocket.

“What was your position at the time?”

Collinson points to a square on the map near to the southwestern slips of Karakol Dagh, the high ridge that girdles the north side of the beach, into which they ventured far on the first night and encountered the sniper.

“It’s a particularly tricky spot. It’s very easy to lose one’s way,” says James, remembering the starless night.

Collinson says, “The Munsters found something up there while they were digging a trench, an underground chamber of sorts. Quite ancient. A Turk sniper had them pinned down.”

“I came across him. His rifle fire has a particular crack to it,” says Hector.

“There are wounded men up there. Once the padre is ready, we will head up.”

With night thoroughly bedded in, the singing spreads from dugout to camp; valley hymns from the Welsh Field Ambulance and, in response, a mournful full-voiced rendition of Loch Lomond from the Scots. In the dark, the highlands summoned by the song are almost palpable: the purple-hued heath, the gloaming, the striated mountain banks. James blinks. The moon is bright and naked and the pier is lined with silhouettes of stretcher squads. The dry scrub on a distant hill burns. There are unburied dead all along the beach, their uniforms tight and narrow.

Father Huxley arrives with the doctor, Blore, and together the men lead the hike back up the thorny ridges of the Karakol Dagh, the rocky hills running along the north of the battlefield. The doctor grouches all the way up about the conditions in which he is expected to work, the sand on his scalpel, the nurses without enough water to wash, and no shelter for the wounded; some of the men had to lie injured directly under the sun. Word has gone around that the ambulance will soon run out of stretchers, that they are not coming back off the hospital ships. He asks how the battle is progressing. No one really knows. Collinson is convinced that the entire landing is a decoy as there seems to be no clear plan. Why else did they not push on immediately upon landing? Why are they stuck on this interminable beach?

They struggle about a mile over the ridge and then approach the dugouts on the northern slope overlooking Saros Bay. Out to sea, the storm lightning is silent and distant; overhead, the cloud cover is thin and the first stars are out. In the trenches, the soldiers are unshaven and desperate for water. James shares his canteen among the squad, a dozen men, four injured, another eight dead. All day fighting with the Turk and then the sniper fire kept each man face down in the earth. There are four times as many enemy as when they landed, and each day that passes only brings more. Collinson curses the indolence of their general. With sundown, the sniper moved on, and the Turks retreated further into the ridge, scraps of blue uniform glimpsed between thorns.