Leon Uris (46 page)

On speaking that truth, a season of hell burst out of him! He was free!

“If Molly is to be found, I’ll find her.”

“Ah, and the moment you do, you get on a ship and come to New Zealand.” Rory saw that green gown of Georgia’s lying in the ship’s cabin. New Zealand green. “When it’s over, I’m going back and start up my own acres.”

“Molly sang for me all the time and the pure unvarnished Irish sentiment of it would bring me to tears. You danced for Georgia. She said so in one of your letters.”

“Bare-butt naked while she was on bended knee.”

“That’s smashing! Molly and I…well…we did a lot of quiet holding.”

“Nothing the matter with that. I’ve had more than my share of luck with the sheilas,” Rory sent on. “Started in when I was fourteen. If I were to describe my idea of the absolute ideal woman she would look nothing like Georgia. But don’t you know there is a particular feeling you get from only one person that makes her touch and words and mind and flesh and soul different from anything in the world? It pours into you and you suddenly know everything you didn’t realize you needed.”

He stopped suddenly. “I must forget Georgia,” he whispered, “but I know what I know and I know my spiritual fulfillment will be on South Island, on my horse, riding in to some girl.”

“New Zealand must be a hell of a place,” Jeremy said. “I read it in every letter the lads write home. And I thought the ultimate love of loves was Ireland.”

Ireland…New Zealand…Ireland…New Zealand…“Christ,” Rory said, “let’s consider our situation. In no way would either of us be practicing infidelity if we rehumanize ourselves. Only damned problem is, Cairo is a sewer.”

“Yes,” Jeremy agreed, “if we could only find our own oasis.”

“God help me,” Rory said, “but I know one, Jeremy!”

“Where?”

“On Zamalek Island between the Anglican cathedral and the Swedish Embassy. It’s a very smart rental. The Villa Valhalla. You see-Chester, Johnny, and I came here
loaded with money from bets on my fight in Fort Albany. Only problem…”

“What?”

“They won’t rent it to enlisted personnel, or even an officer below the rank of colonel.”

“You mean it’s available by the week or month?”

“Yes, but if you even try something like that it could ruin your army career and put us behind bars.”

“Jesus, Landers, I thought you had balls.”

“There’s balls and there’s balls. The three of us are ready to go home in chains, but you’re the son of an earl.”

“What about Modi? Is he in?”

“Absolutely. He’s our musician.”

“Yurlob?”

“I wouldn’t bring him in for a while. You know with the Sikhs it’s no smoking and liquor and…he’s real British Army. Wait now, Jeremy.”

“Give me the details and swear the other lads to secrecy.”

“You sure about this, Jeremy?”

“Yeah,” he answered with an infectious smile that had won him many miles in the past.

Jeremy welcomed himself into Farouk el Farouk’s office and, as coffee was ordered, he put on his father’s most deliciously nauseous attitude. Farouk el Farouk was impressed with Chester Goodwood, and now the Lieutenant, for their persistence. His mind raced through his listings on what else he could possibly sell these people…in their own allowed environment…in place of the Villa Valhalla.

“My cards,” Jeremy said laying a pair of them before the Egyptian. Farouk el Farouk squinted through his glasses and stared at the first one.

FIRST LIEUTENANT JEREMY HUBBLE SEVENTH NEW ZEALAND LIGHT HORSE

He was about to reject Jeremy when the second card caught his attention massively and his eyes became nailed to it.

LORD JEREMY HUBBLE THE VISCOUNT OF COLERAINE

“I have other credentials,” Jeremy said, gazing out of the window. “I am a vice president and member of the board of directors of Weed Ship & Iron in Belfast, and my father is the Earl of Foyle.”

Farouk el Farouk had to peer around gingerly to ascertain if this was real or a joke. Jeremy took it away from him by sliding a Cook’s Travel draft over the desk made out for three hundred sterling.

“My expression of gratitude for your future services. Mr. Garfield, the manager, has cleared me and is expecting you to cash it.”

Hand to heart, free arm extended like a baritone in mid-aria—“Lord Hubble, forgive me, but you know I must be extremely careful…I didn’t realize…we will get Villa Valhalla prepared immediately. Do you have any special desires?”

“Hummm,” Jeremy said nasally. “I want a tiptop hush-hush housekeeper, one who understands service to aristocracy.”

“Sonya runs the villa for exceptional clients. She is requested constantly. She is a delight. Very well connected for
anything
you desire…dancers and more intimate company. I give you also George.”

“Who the devil is George?”

“Only the best Terrier in Cairo. He is Christian, seventeen, and, I assure you, very well connected for
anything
.”

“Yes, I don’t want you to accept too much money from my lads. They may want to favor their girls but the food and beverage is on my account.”

“We are well connected with only the best markets and alcohols.”

“And, no problem with the police.”

“I am very well connected with the police.”

“I will pay you a hundred and fifty a week. I will pay half the week in advance and the other half at the end of the week, provided we continue to be satisfied.”

“I am very well connected and I am your humble servant.”

“Yes, so you are.”

FIELD MANUAL FOR MULE TRANSPORTATION

Foreword

“
Oh my God!
” Major Christopher Hubble shrieked. “Oh my God!” he repeated, beating his fists on the desk top, wild-eyed. “Oh my God!” He pulled at his hair.

A clerk from the next office tumbled in. “Are you all right, sir?”

“Get my fucking brother…get Lieutenant Hubble in here.
Immediately!
”

By the time Jeremy arrived, Chris had calmed to a light simmer, gurgling under his breath. “You sent this ludicrous travesty to Corps?” he rumbled low.

“I wasn’t going to leave it sitting here and lose six days while you were at staff school.”

“Charming, charming, bloody fucking charming.”

“Something wrong?” Jeremy asked.

“It reads,” he gnashed out, “as though it were written by some low comic in a sleazy song and dance hall in Soho.” Chris tore it in half. “You’re bloody mad trying to pass this shit off as a British military manual.”

“I turned pages in to you every night. You were too damned busy to read it because of your mania that everyone ate, slept, marched, saluted, and shit by the numbers.”

“My clear intention was to read it in one sitting when it was completed and go over it with the gaffers. I did not instruct you to send it to Corps!”

“You told me that this book was entirely my responsibility.”

“I did NOT, NOT, NOT tell you to send it to Corps!”

The Major’s phone interrupted. Chris lifted the receiver and jumped to attention, swooning as he listened. “That was General Brodhead’s office. He wants me, now.”

“I’ll go along with you and explain him what happened.”

“You’ve done enough. You stay right here. Don’t you move. Your gaffer squad is under barrack arrest.” He paused. “Executive Officer! Captain North!”

“Coming, sir.”

“Captain North, write up an order for the battalion to prepare and stand by for a route march tonight to the Wadi Muzzam and get it over to Corps for approval, at once.”

“Fifty miles in the sand!” Jeremy cried.

Chris slammed the door and was on his way.

“Be seated, Chris,” General Brodhead said.

Oh Lord, the manual was on the General’s desk.

Brodhead held up the instruction book. “Who wrote this?” he asked.

“The gaffer squad, sir. I can explain.”

“Explain? Yes, go ahead and explain.”

“The ultimate responsibility is squarely mine. I should like to say that there was a real bollix in communications. You see, sir, I have been drilling my battalion as a first priority to whip them into fighting shape before their mules arrived and left the manual up to the gaffers with full intention of reviewing it personally. It was finished and sent to Corps without my approval when I was at staff school.”

The farther from the green fields of Ulster and the closer to battle, the saltier Llewelyn Brodhead became. He banged his fist on the table several times and Chris blinked in unison.

“Give these gaffers some time away.”

“You mean put them in the stockade before court-martial?”

Brodhead roared with laughter. “Well, you do have a sense of humor after all, Chris.”

“I’m not quite certain…”

“Give them four-day leave. Best damned manual I’ve
read in thirty-two years! Cuts through all the shit. Just the kind of thing you need to get to the point out in the field. Clear, explicit, humorous-that’s what these fucking manuals need, humor. Too bad some twat in the War Office will assign some prig to rewrite it with a corkscrew. Captain Ellsworth has ordered seven hundred copies for the Zion Mule Corps.”

“Well,” Chris said, breathing more freely as he removed the noose from his neck, “I do admit I was just a tad nervous.”

“God, these boys must have really burned the midnight oil. Old Jeremy has come through for us, big!”

In a cheerful mood and with his favorite young officer before him, Brodhead wanted to lift his own loneliness and apprehensions. Say a few things aloud. Things that had brought on insomnia. Things that…oh, better stuff it in, he thought.

“How soon will your battalion be ready?”

“Two or three weeks of intense schooling. A month to two months when we get our mules.”

“Good,” Brodhead said, not containing what he had just tried to contain. “The opening naval salvo on Gallipoli is a matter of a few weeks away. The
Queen Mary
, our top new super-dreadnought, has completed its shakedown cruise and will be en route shortly to join our fleet. The French are forming up at Toulon.”

“Does give one a bit of a start, doesn’t it, sir?”

“Our troops are not ready, Chris. My Anzacs in particular could use a solid three or four more months of training. Fortunately, Darlington—”

“I understand your feelings about Darlington.”

“Fortunately, General Darlington insists he will not invade until the 29th Division arrives from England. It’s a veteran division, one of our best. Is Darlington playing it safe or is Darlington timid?” he wondered aloud. “Truth is, we haven’t faced a modern white army since Napoleon. Darlington may be too old school for this kind
of operation, too many new wrinkles in this landing from the sea. You’ve been in on many of the planning sessions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You see how he hedges. We haven’t much beach, particularly if we have to land from the Adriatic side. A lot of our thinking is based on the fact that the Turks are exhausted from the Balkan War and that their main army is tied up on the Russian front. But bear in mind—the Balkan union broke its skull trying to capture Gallipoli and lost a number of warships to the Turkish coastal guns.”

“Shouldn’t our naval bombardment pretty well reduce the Turkish guns, sir?”

“Too fucking much is being made of naval gunfire. The Germans have put one of their top men, General von Limon, in command of the Dardanelles defense. The Turks have opened an ammunition factory south of Constantinople. There are red hot radicals full of fight in the Turkish officers corps. From what little intelligence we can glean out of that Gallipoli wilderness, von Limon is going to stuff five or six divisions in there.

“As for the coastal guns,” he continued to unload, “von Limon will replace them with mobile howitzer batteries. The coastal guns are meant to play pitty-pat with warships. Howitzers can loop fire down on troops and keep changing locations.”

After a consideration, Brodhead dropped the bombshell. “We have to hit the beach running. The British must take the Achi Baba hilltop five miles inland and we must take Chunuk Bair, also five miles inland, in the first week. If Darlington dawdles we are in for one long hot summer. Chris, when the history of this war is writ, I absolutely guarantee you that more men will be killed and wounded by the machine gun than by all other weapons combined. The Gallipoli Peninsula has more places to hide machine
guns than any piece of ground the British Empire has ever tried to capture.”

“We’ll take those hills, sir.”

Proper stuff coming from a proper officer, Brodhead thought.
We’ll take those hills, sir
. Shit! He did not share his final thought with the young major that if he were defending Gallipoli with his Anzacs, he could hold out forever.

The general’s aide knocked and entered, then laid an order on the desk for his signature.

“I thought that as long as Major Hubble was here you might as well approve this for him.”

“Let’s see here,” Brodhead said adjusting his glasses. “Forced night march exercise, battalion strength, to…Jesus Christ…Wadi Muzzam…hummm.” He dismissed his aide with a wave of the hand.

“Bit drastic, what?” Brodhead said. “Shouldn’t your lads be concentrating on their mule training?”

“We don’t have any mules, sir. Until we do there is only so much schooling we can give them. Otherwise, I intend to have the Seventh the most battle-ready battalion in the Corps.”

“This wouldn’t be entailing some kind of collective punishment, would it, Chris?”

Chris held tight so as not to fumble his thoughts. He had laid them out as his lullaby night after night for just this moment.

“This is a cavalry battalion, sir, and not a very refined one. They are roughnecks. They were furious to be turned into muleteers. There has not been a single morning that I haven’t had to go to the stockade and collect dozens of them from their punch-ups in Cairo.”

“Maybe you’re caught in a vicious cycle. After a night march to Wadi Muzzam, aren’t they going to try to dismantle Cairo? Chris, before you answer, I was going to speak to you on this matter. You have invoked twice as many punishments as any other battalion commander in the Corps.”

“I daresay, sir, my battalion is twice as good as any in the Anzacs.”

“Chris, one of the reasons we held the staff seminar was to clarify our traditional role with the colonials. God knows there isn’t a more imperial man than myself, but we have to realize that each Commonwealth has its own system of social order. Indeed, we cannot go strictly by the book as we do with our British soldiers. Isn’t that your understanding?”

“I’d rather not say, sir.”

“I’d rather you do.”

Llewelyn Brodhead watched Chris turn into Roger Hubble right before his eyes. The words were the same, the look was even the same.

“My grandfather, Sir Frederick, was a Victorian entrepreneur…always proud of his humble beginnings…playing the game with the Orange lodges, marching alongside the lads on the Twelfth of August…made an art of knowing his workers by first name, pretended to share their sorrows. Well, he’s ended up with a public company and unions in his yards.”

“I think probably a new era has overtaken him, Chris. No one in his right mind would consider Sir Frederick Weed a soft man.”

“Perhaps,” Chris agreed reluctantly.

“Do go on.”

“I rather liken the Army to my father’s earldom. The people tilling his fields and operating his factories are his soldiers, in a manner of speaking. They are there to fulfill the mission of the earldom, to continue our way of life. We cannot get involved with sentimentality over the hard luck of this worker or that farmer and his family. If we were to cave in to sentimentality, we would have lost the earldom during the great famine. If we here now in the Anzac Corps cave in to sentimentality, we will lose the empire.”