Leon Uris (58 page)

“I’ve got an utterly clear message about something,” I said.

“Ummmm,” he rumbled.

“I know when the Turks are going to attack.”

“Sure you do.”

“It came to me, just like that.”

“Quinn’s Post does this to people. It may be the heat, Landers.”

“That’s exactly what it is, Colonel, the heat.”

Oh, that awful look of his. It’s not fair looking at a man when you can’t see through his eyebrows.

“The Turks are going to attack at midday.”

“You nudged me out of my sleep for this? Go play with your mules. They’ll attack at dawn as any God-fearing Moslem or Christian or Buddhist army would. An attacking force wants all the daylight they can get. If they attack at midday they’ll give away seven, eight hours of light.”

“Colonel, look at our lads at midday. The lot of them are seeing double and hearing weird voices. They can barely move a limb.” Thanking God I was talking to a New Zealander and not a pommy, I dared continue. “Suppose the Turks rest their men all morning in the shade, pump them up with water and a whiff or two of hashish. They’ll be able to hit us like a thunderbolt, and ourselves with less than no energy.”

Malone heard me.

The red-alert troops were put down in the trenches where it was apt to be twenty degrees cooler, but the observation posts were tripled and rotated so that our eyes never left the Turks. Observers were dead-on focused on the gullies running off Bloody Angle and the Chessboard, where we felt for sure the attack would begin.

“Watch for puffs of dust, particularly a line of dust. If the noise level drops, it could mean they are tensing up to make a charge.”

Each morning Malone snapped, “Looks like you’re right again, as far as today is concerned.”

Elgin, Spears, Stevens, and I were down to drawers again. In the trenches, the alert battalion waited bare-assed, sharpening their already razor-edged bayonets.

You know how you can sense…smell things…without a coherent reason? Yurlob Singh’s yoga had rubbed off on me. I knew it was the day. I mean, I really knew. And I knew that when the Turks didn’t hit us at dawn, it was going to be high noon. I knew it would be high noon because German and Turkish officers don’t have any more imagination than British officers.

What I felt must have started running through our trenches. Suddenly, the men who were going to lay up ladders to bridges over no-man’s-land began to tense up. The alert battalion, Otagos, South Islanders like myself, were on their feet.

About three minutes to noon, my squad and I went to our own observation post.

Look! Fucking look!

Turk Gully #3 had a strung-out cloud of dust a hundred yards long and it was drifting. The high racket of the shells audibly fell and fell till it became quiet like we were on the moon.

Colonel Malone tore up a ladder, crouched, and looked.

A whistle went off from Pope’s Hill Observation Post.

“Colonel. Pope thinks it seems Abdul ready to swarm.”

A second whistle blasted from Dead Man’s OP.

All noise from the Turkish lines stopped! Then, a droning sound rose on the air like a trillion bees buzzing.

“Let’s go, lads!” Malone cried. A bridge was lifted up from the trench and laid over its top. Malone ran across it into no-man’s-land but no one followed. I looked down in the trenches. The alert battalion was frozen. I grabbed my pistol and fired into the trench side.

“Get your asses up here!” I screamed.

Over the way, still out of sight, the buzzing swelled to a steady hum. Our men started up. I threw them bodily over the bridge.

“More bridges! More bridges! Follow the Colonel!”

The hum from the Turks exploded into “Allah Akbar!” Now our lads were coming…up, up, over, goddamnit, let’s go, let’s go!

I grabbed Elgin and shoved him at the bridge. He turned and hesitated and I kicked his ass over it, then snarled to Happy and Spears to follow me. All up and down the lines a haka battle cry arose as we surged into no-man’s-land.

We were not greeted by gunfire from the Turkish trenches. Clearly, they were assaulting in waves from the gullies behind their trenches.

Just like so! The gullies were emptying thousands of Turks, coming at us at high port.

“Allah Akbar!”

We had beaten them onto no-man’s-land by a full precious minute. Colonel Malone’s outrageous gamble was working! We were at the edge of their trenches when Abdul tried to cross to us. They were shocked to see us greet them. I emptied my pistol, tossed it aside. A rifle and bayonet were not hard to find this day. We gutted their first line of attackers down into their own
trenches. Their second line ran right up the backs of the first line.

The Turks were thrown from offense to defense. It was they who had to hold us off, then fight their way back onto no-man’s-land where they thought they had free access.

In an attempt to achieve surprise, the Turks had not preceded their assault by cannon barrage so there was no clouding and smoke. The field was clear. As Abdul saw his comrades scream and sink, guts in hand, his nerve was shaken.

The second wave of Turks, boiling after their long dash from the gullies, threw off their jackets as well and it was naked Turk and naked Kiwi stabbing and slicing with their pointed razors.

Now I was filled with the antifear. In the insanity of no-man’s-land, two things would get me out alive. I must not lock up my brains through maniacal rage. I must
think
about what I’m doing. My moves must be decisive and correctly drawn. I must also work like hell. This is harder than taking a barrage, harder than digging, harder than climbing a cliff. This is plain, bloody, hard work…think and work.

This was the gladiator’s pit blown up by ten thousand! In the midst of fury and heat and confusion there came the blackest of black humor. Our uniforms—both Turks and Kiwis—were nearly the same color. Naked it was even more difficult to tell us apart. I went for men with swarthy color and big moustaches. An opening of flesh and in the point went…sometimes sticking tightly between his ribs…bring the rifle butt to the man’s head. Take him fast, pop him off balance, and pounce.

Was I still human? I was human in the speed my mind was working. I was not human in what I was doing. We were a bit bigger and stronger than the Turk with a great deal of bayonet training in Egypt, but the main thing was the tide…we had the tide with us, we had outfoxed them, and they were digging out of a hole.

By their sheer numbers we inched back.

Colonel Malone then unleashed a second battalion of bayonets—Maoris from our trenches, and their sudden fierce arrival was like a hard wave bashing.

Turks fell into disarray, which only made us press harder until finally they broke off the engagement and scrambled back beyond their trenches.

Another wave of Turks was arriving from the far gully stumbling over their own men in retreat.

Three sharp whistles, repeated and repeated, signaled us to return to our own trenches and take up firing positions. I found myself behind an empty Maxim gun and pressed a pair of lads into duty with me.

The new lines of Turks were confused. They did not know if we were going to come out again and meet them with bayonets. Perhaps we were going to counterassault and crack their trench lines.

Whatever, the storm and fury had been taken out of their assault. They came at us again, but rather gingerly, over the narrow no-man’s-land filled with bodies, crying, moaning, still.

Colonel Malone had managed our maneuver brilliantly…may be the Turks’ steam was gone…we waited, waited, waited…then twenty Maxim guns went off at once.

Word from Colonel Monash’s sector!
It was brutally active beating back wave after wave of Turks who still had momentum. Monash called for every reserve machine-gun crew to fill in his line.

Again and again the Turks emptied the gullies. Now they came from another direction down from the Chessboard. Our troops, over the valley at Russell’s Top, hit them in their flanks.

Now the Turk appeared like a herd of stampeding cattle over Dead Man’s Ridge.

“Allah Akbar!”

Jesus, three bloody prongs coming at Quinn’s. Were there enough bullets in the British arsenal to halt them? Some were able to get within touching distance of our
trench, some fell on the antigrenade sheeting and crashed down into us.

My field of fire took a queer change. At first it had been wide open. Now, it was filled with corpses that slowed down the advancing Turks. The Turks had to climb mounds of bodies, slipping in their own blood, then making targets of themselves as they stood erect. Their charge in front of me became very confused.

It was a big battle raging on a front two miles long but it was a tiny battle, as it is for every soldier. All I had to do was take care of what was in front of me and watch my comrades on my flanks. These are the grand minutiae of war, tiny windows. If my squad and I held our ground and our flanks and everyone else did, they’d not break us.

My machine gun began smoking and jammed. The water in the jackets had boiled. Shit! I picked up a rifle and fired until it burned the palms of my hands, then picked up another.

On the Turks came!

A breech in Monash’s line!
He called for a battalion at Angel’s Haven Spa to come and plug it up. Runner in from the Aussies. Bayonet fight with the Turks at the breech. A second reserve battalion went up.

The Turks branched off and went after Pope’s Hill, a small but vital observation post. How many guns at Pope’s? Not enough. Malone dispatched a platoon to Pope’s. Only half of them got through but the post held.

Abdul charged at us unabated for nearly seven hours until the sun began to fall into the Aegean. The night was flooded with flares. One more charge and the battle slowed to a trickle….

Runner from Monash. Their line was straightened and held. They were bleeding with casualties. We had reached very deep into our reserves but Monash had to have them. His line was thin.

Quinn’s Post had held! The cost was seventy-five percent
casualties. Over half our weapons had burned out from overfiring.

Quick, Malone ordered, get new weapons and ammo out of the dumps behind the trenches.

Our dead had turned the trench floor into ankle-deep blood-mud. The night was amoan from the cries of thousands of wounded out in no-man’s-land. We made a try to bring some lads in, but it was impossible. They were totally intertwined with corpses, ours and the Turks’, and any illuminated movement in no-man’s-land drew instant fire.

A few men managed to crawl back to our trench. We took them in—Kiwis, Aussies, Turks.

Yurlob and Modi brought mule trains as close as they dared, and throughout the night came up Monash Valley and carried the wounded down into Widow’s Gully for daylight evacuation.

By midnight the dead had been removed from the trenches, reinforcements and supplies set in place, and we grabbed a quick, delicious meal of bully beef shit and hard biscuits, a fitting belly-warming dinner for the working lad.

My own anxiety level dropped to a point where I realized that my hands were blistering from burns from the gun barrels and I was bleeding from my sides. Christ, I had taken some bayonet cuts. No use using up a medic on me. They had their hands full. Can I tell you, I was aching so much all over I could hardly feel the pain of stitching myself up.

Happy Stevens, Dan Elgin, Spears, and I often got separated during the day up at Quinn’s but always gathered near Malone’s dugout come evening.

I could hear the Squire complaining to me…“Rory, you get into a punch-up just because there’s a punch-up to get into, whether it’s yours or not.” I had no business on the line and I fucking threw away the lives of my friends.

“Colonel Malone wants to see you,” a runner said.

Colonel Monash and Malone were ending a meeting as I came in. They both looked like ten-ton boulders had
fallen on them, they’d got up, and been hit by beer wagons and then punched out in a pub.

“Did you get the machine-gun ammo distributed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How much?”

“Sixty boxes…sixty thousand rounds.”

“Any in reserve?”

“Twenty thousand rounds up here. Some more is coming up from the beach tonight.”

“Move the twenty thousand down to the north dump on Artillery Road.”

“It’s already been done, sir,” I said. Maybe I was totally out of line or too tired to care or too hurt to care but it just came out. “Shall I send some more artillery shells up to Russell’s?”

What I meant was clear. After the first Turkish charge, our howitzers were to turn loose on the gullies behind Bloody Angle where the enemy had massed. Not a single round was fired this day.

The Australian, Brodhead’s “competent Jew” Monash, looked at the New Zealander, Colonel Malone. Either Godley or Brodhead at Corps had made a monumental fuckup.

The barrage might have severely slowed the subsequent Turkish charges. As it was, we held on by a hair.

“We have plenty of artillery ammo at Russell’s,” Malone appeased me. “As you know, none was fired today.”

“Well, back to the office,” Monash said. “They won’t wait till midday to resume the attack tomorrow. Good night, Joshua…good night, Landers. You did a fair day’s work, I’d say.”

As Monash left, leaving the door ajar, the wind blew the moans of the wounded into the dugout. I suppose my legs must have wobbled. Malone told me to close the door and have a seat. What the hell do you talk about after a day like this? Colonel Malone…learned just now Joshua was his first name…seldom talked unless it was in the line of duty. He seemed to want to say just any damned thing.

“Think they’ll come back tomorrow?” I asked.

“We killed an awful lot of Turks today. This must sound ridiculous, Landers, but is anything wrong?”

“One of my father’s prophesies came true.”

Malone laughed heartily. “Funny, in the middle of a punch-up we had today and we’re thinking, ‘Will my old da be proud of me when the day is over?’”

Out came the rum. We on the supplies always saw to it Colonel Malone was taken care of. He was growing very tall in the Kiwis’ eyes.