Leon Uris (60 page)

“Ohhhhh.”

“Ahhhhh.”

“Ohhhhh.”

“Ahhhhh.”

Blast! The Turks were firing Farting Ferdinand. Good, Farting Ferdinand was firing way up to Taylor’s Hollow.

We crawled into our hovel.

“Where’s Chester?”

“Chewing some colonel’s ass out. We’re short on hay and .303 ammo.”

I laughed. They were scared of little Chester. He exuded a hundred and thirty-five pounds of Tasmanian Devil authority.

Jeremy produced a bottle of rum from his kit.

“Jesus, should that be going to the lads on the line?” I asked.

“It’s all right, I deducted it from Godley’s personal stash.”

We partook. Jesus, wouldn’t it be great if old Sonya was fixing us up a hash pipe? Wonder if she ever got to the continent.

“The Major greeted me like he had sand up his ass,” I said.

“He’s angry because you had all the fun during the Turkish counterattack.”

“Men,” I grunted, “are fucking crazy. Why would any
sane human being want to get his stomach carved out?”

“E gloribus bellum,”
Jeremy said.

“Why?” I asked again. “I wanted to be at Quinn’s.”

“I suppose we all want to prove something to Daddy, what? With Christopher, it’s very important. Father came home from some doings in the Northwest Territory with a medal pinned on him. The lingering finger of family.”

Swig.

Swig.

“Ahhhhh.”

“Ahhhhh.”

“Yurlob’s gotten to me,” I said.

“He got to me a long time ago,” Jeremy answered. “This is his entire dignity, his Sikh mountain artillery. He sees the hour of his death clearly. It’s difficult to retain dignity when dysentery is killing you. He’s a beautiful man.”

“Yeah…all he wants is that his departure goes down honorably in the eyes of his battalion.”

“Did you know he has four kids?” Jeremy asked.

“No.”

“It came out at the odd moment. He has three sons and one of those other things. I don’t think they treat their women too kindly. He prays that his sons will become Punjab fighters.”

The contents of the bottle evaporated before our very eyes. Our conversation segued into Ireland and Conor Larkin because Jeremy wanted to talk about Conor and knew I wanted to hear. Jeremy wondered how Conor would have viewed these blood-soaked fields.

“Conor was the complete opposite of Imperial Man,” Jeremy said. “He saw war only in terms of fighting for freedom. He viewed the American Revolution as man’s foremost justification for war. I don’t think he would view Gallipoli as a noble calling for New Zealanders and Aussies. He would have seen the greater war as stemming from Ireland’s birthright to bear arms against the British. Namely, if Britain is in Turkey fighting for the freedom of
Belgium, then Irishmen certainly had the right to fight for their own freedom.”

Our tongues became gloriously loose.

“Something here must make sense,” I said. “Gallipoli can’t just go down as a forgotten page in history.”

“I think all of us have to come through it with our own meaning. Wouldn’t you say Christopher is evolving from something mucky to something fine?”

“Aye. I know the power I have to love a woman. Now I know I can love men.”

“How about knowing the magnificence of being a New Zealander?” Jeremy asked. “Quinn’s Post has defined the stuff of the men of your country.”

“At what a fucking price.”

“Everything comes with a price.”

“What happened after your last contact with Conor?” I asked. “After he escaped prison? Was he in Ireland all the time?”

“The rumor was that he was in America for a few years, then slipped back to Ireland.”

“Did he ever fall in love with another woman?”

“Very much so. It was a secret but quite an open secret.”

“How was that, now?”

“Well, him living underground. There was a woman named Atty Fitzpatrick. She was Anglo-Protestant ascendancy. That means Irish-born, but with British ancestry. My family is the same. We are the generations of inheritors after our English ancestors divided up the country. Many Anglos became republican patriots. Atty Fitzpatrick was somewhat sainted in that she distributed her family barony among the tenants and gave virtually all her money for humane causes. Actually, I saw her several times. She was a great actress on the Dublin stage. Tall, glorious bosom, stately in a Joan-of-Arc way, very commanding. She was a widow with a family. When Conor was imprisoned she was a one-man army in his cause doing street rallies from one end of the country to the other.”

Ah, that was my Uncle Conor with a woman like that, I thought.

“So, Conor was able to love again after the tragedy of Shelley?”

“We don’t know for certain. He was a diamond with many facets. I think he had the capacity for many kinds of love. My mother never got over him. Yes, I think he could love again because he could trust again.”

All I was hearing now made me very warm. No doubt he blamed himself for Shelley MacLeod’s murder. It meant that I might get over Georgia some day.

“She went from Dublin all the way back to his village with his funeral cortege with crowds gathering and weeping at every town along the way. They say she lay on his grave for days. Hard to believe that this all happened just a few months ago.”

Jeremy became terribly pensive and gave me a look to say, “We are brothers.”

“You asked for a meaning about Gallipoli,” he said slowly. “I think I’ve found my meaning.”

“What did you find, Jeremy?”

“Maybe there are justifications for this war, that the other side is uglier in their intent than we are. But Gallipoli is wrong. Imperialism is wrong. Empire is wrong. It’s Conor’s voice saying to me that no one has the right to send men to places like this when the final objective is greed. Oh, we cloak ourselves in democracy, but the war here is not about democracy.” He waited a long moment, never taking his eyes off me. “Rory, when I return to Ireland, I am going to join the republican cause.”

“That’s awesome,” I whispered. Jeremy had gone from pitiful drunk to a man of worth onto a path of clarity.

“If I were Irish,” I said, “I hope I’d come to the same conclusion.”

“You’re as Irish as I am,” he said.

We stared at each other.

“I wanted you to know of my deepest secret because I want no further secrets between us.”

“You know, don’t you?” I asked.

“Rory Larkin, is it?” he said.

“God, I’ve wanted to hear the sound of my name for a long time. How did you learn?”

“From the first, I suppose. I knew there was a Rory Larkin in New Zealand. Conor had spoken to me about you. You have used the word Ballyutogue inadvertently a half dozen times. I didn’t think it right to question you until you were ready to tell me and mostly, until I was ready to say out loud that I am going to be a republican.”

“Gallipoli is filled with secret meanings,” I mused.

“As my mother is wont to say, aye mon, indeed it is.”

Chester Goodwood, the best of us all, entered. “Yurlob is gone,” he said.

Modi followed in a moment, carrying Yurlob’s body. He was not very heavy, anymore. “I didn’t want to send him out on the boat,” Modi said. “I thought, maybe, we’d like to bury him.”

“Aye.”

“Here, have a drink, first.”

“I’m drunk already enough,” Modi said.

“Don’t they put their dead on pyres and burn them?” Jeremy asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I think it’s a good idea. That way the bloody flies won’t get him.”

We put on our shoes. Damn! I knew I shouldn’t have taken the goddamn shoes off! Fuck it!

“You going to be all right, Rory?”

“No, I’m not all right. Let’s send the lad off in a blaze. There’s another bottle in my kit. Bring it.”

I pushed into my boots but couldn’t see to lace them. No matter. I lifted Yurlob Singh, fucking raghead Buddha-worshiping bastard…oh God…he doesn’t weigh a thing now, does he…he doesn’t weigh a thing.

I actually enjoyed my hangover. We had given Subaltern Yurlob Singh a send-off fit for the Maharajah of Lahore.

I was doing a hoof check at the railing when I saw a new officer, a light colonel, followed by an entourage of a half-dozen Ghurkas, leave Corps and go to battalion headquarters.

Chester came over with a list of the morning’s shipments.

“Who’s the new man?” I asked.

“Some mucky-mucky from Alexandria.”

“Looks like he’s traveling with his own private bodyguards. Maybe they’re entertainers, sit on nails, charm snakes.”

“You’ll find out. You’re to see him at Battalion HQ.”

“Come with me will you, Chester?”

“Why?”

“Ah look, they’re fixers. We’re getting the greatest specialists in the world these days. They always need to know numbers.” I wiped my hands and looked over the duty roster.

“Flynn.”

“Yo.”

“You’re the big man here till further notice.”

I nodded to the Ghurka convention outside the Major’s office and entered.

“There you are, Landers,” Chris said, standing behind his desk. The light colonel was a slender chap with a thin
varnished moustache and slick black hair, as one would have if he were a dandy officer in Alexandria. Well, he’d get that uniform messed up if he hung around here long enough.

Next to him was a Ghurka captain.

“Subaltern Landers, I’d like you to meet a fellow New Zealander, Lieutenant Colonel Calvin Norman. His assistant, Captain Shurhum.”

“Doctor will do fine,” the colonel said. I clamored to get a grip on myself.

I winced aloud and maybe got to trembling.

“Damned stitches from the bayonet wound sort of cramp up on me at the damnedest times. Sorry, sir, pleased to meet you, Doctor. I would say welcome aboard, but this place hardly warrants it.”

Calvin Norman cracked a tenth of an inch smile at the corner of his lip, which lasted a second and a quarter. His steel-spring handshake told me he was a surgeon. My chest felt crushed. Air was hard to come by. I needed to settle down and regain my composure.

“Lift up your shirt,” he commanded, and as I groped for it he pulled it up.

“Frightful, sloppy work. Who did that?”

“I sewed myself up. The medics were very busy.”

“You’re fortunate this didn’t go septic on you.”

“Oh, I poured a whole bottle of iodine into it,” I said.

Doctor Norman winced. “See me later. I’ll tidy it up.”

“Landers has been recommended for a citation of valor during the Turkish counterattack. The legend goes that he chopped down nearly a hundred Turks with pistol, bayonet, rifle, and machine gun,” Chris said in that fucking pommy way.

“You’re embarrassing me now. How can I be of service to you, Doctor?”

“Too many men are dying between the evacuation and the time they arrive in Alexandria.”

I wanted to shriek. Damned nice of you people to take
notice.

Norman obviously caught my expression. “Let’s understand something, shall we? As a New Zealander I am disgusted with what was probably the most inept evacuation plan in British military history. There are arms, legs, torsos, heads, and mules from Gallipoli floating across the entire Mediterranean and washing up by the hundreds on the beaches of Egypt and the coast of Africa. Let’s see if something better can be done.”

It was a sobering but clear moment for me. No matter what my personal animus, he was here on the most needed mission we had.

Chester knocked and entered. As I introduced him, Norman gazed at him as if to say, “Didn’t realize we had little drummer boys here.” That was…until Chester spoke up.

“Colonel Norman,” Chester said.

“
Doctor
would be preferable.”

“Doctor, I suggest the first thing we do is sit down and familiarize you with the big picture by map. I can also provide the average number of daily casualties from the major posts, types of wounds, and evacuation procedures.”

“That will be helpful. I didn’t realize you kept a ledger, what with all the chaos and casualties.”

“I don’t, sir. I carry it in my head,” Chester said.

As we continued to the Corps map room, Norman introduced his Ghurka surgical teams, good fellows all. I could envision Dr. Shurhum trailing Norman as he walked through the hospital ward, hands clasped behind him, snipping out orders.

Norman’s eyes played over the paddocks and the cave dwellings, a concentration of flies and stink and dung and filth, with bloody waters just beyond.

“We’ll see if we can’t start by instituting basic field sanitation.”

Christopher took Norman by the arm and nodded for me to come with them. “Doctor, I respectfully submit
that you don’t break your skull trying to change what cannot be changed. We are in the most difficult military situation on the planet. I think your energies best be concentrated in your stated purpose of getting more men alive to Alexandria.”

Calvin Norman’s expression could break rocks, but Christopher Hubble was a British aristocrat speaking to a colonist.

“Major, I have fought my way through a bureaucratic nightmare to be able to come here and I have been given carte blanche. I do not quake before English generals.”

“What the Major is trying to tell you,” I jumped in quickly, “is that once you are familiar with conditions, a concentration on priorities might be the most rewarding path in the long run. In short, Doctor, no fucking way we’re going to get rid of the flies, the smell of the corpses, the lice, the dysentery, the heat, and the Turks, so let’s work on the wounded.”

Calvin Norman did not tip off a yes, a no, or a go to hell.

I’m sorry some future military historian wasn’t there to record Chester Goodwood’s dissertation before the big map. From the northern reach opposite Turkish Hill #80 right down the line to Chatham’s Post hinged to the beach, Chester explained the strength and reason of every post and trench. Calvin and his people followed the book of forty trail maps with their individual quirks and unseen dangers. As he spoke, members of Brodhead’s staff, including Colonel Hugh Markham, listened as though it were Napoleon lecturing.

Chester’s voice had not taken on its final tenor or baritone designation, but without saying it in so many words, blunders and communications of the general staff became apparent. He had to answer many questions with, “I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Corps staff that, sir. I’d rather not speculate.”

“There seems to be one overriding question,” Norman said at the end. “Why in hell did anyone ever land you in
this place?”

“That will be an interesting question for future military symposiums,” Colonel Markham said from the rear, and departed.

Dr. Norman’s air had gone from his balloon. He shifted about uncomfortably with the first smell of a reality that Anzac Cove was in Turkish jaws.

“How do you suppose we should carry on?” he asked Christopher. “I think, perhaps, I should make a round of the frontline positions.”

The Major nodded. “Landers here is the man to take you around.”

“Major, the paddock is quite hectic since Yurlob died,” I said with a knee-jerk reaction.

“Jeremy can cover for you. Can you manage without him for a few days, Goodwood?”

Chester felt a sense of dread. “The beach is under control,” he answered.

Speak of serendipity! I didn’t like the sense of menace dripping into my thoughts. I didn’t like the way my mind was working. When the others left I tried to justify what wanted to force its way out of me.

“Doctor, here’s my suggestion,” I said. “We can’t run your entire staff around the hills. I suggest, if they need familiarization, that they go out with the mule trains beginning tomorrow. If we rotate them properly, they’ll have a very good general picture in three days.”

“Go on, Landers.”

“There are all kinds of nuances on the terrain,” I said. “The two of us alone can give you a better detailed picture of things. Now, I warn you, it is bloody hot and some of the climbing is rough.”

“I am perfectly fit,” he snapped.

“Good,” I said.

He was pretty much as Georgia had described him. A cold number covering childhood pimples. What was his motive for coming to Gallipoli? If he was looking for glory
and colonel’s pips, he’d win them here. Whatever his motive, his objective was humanitarian. So, why the hell should I care why he came? He’s probably a hell of a surgeon. Around Christchurch he sees a lot of bashed-up cases: timbermen, miners, ranchers, sailors.

I felt annoyed that I had hoped for his death. I could see him, all right, in a big-time London clinic putting his hands up the ladies’ thighs.

Each time I began to doze, I’d see him making love to Georgia…MY Georgia. Prick, bastard!

It would be so easy in the hills with just the two of us. Maybe I wouldn’t have to do it myself. Maybe some Turkish sniper would do it for me. Get a grip, Rory. The Anzacs’ need for Calvin Norman is greater than your desire to murder him. It better be. What a queer world.

Odd moment, the first time I offered him my hand while we were climbing our overlook at a rock formation called the Sphinx. It protected the valley of Angel’s Haven Spa, where men tried to rest and delouse after being rotated off the lines.

He was not a frivolous man. His conversations with Colonels Monash and Malone and other frontline commanders were keen. He gave off no sympathy, but he got the gist that merely living through a day of Turks, heat, lice, rations, dysentery, and flies was about all a human being could manage.

At the end of a hard first day, he thanked me tersely and dismissed me, ordering me to continue at daybreak.

I was near daft. I wanted to tell Jeremy, but I dared not. I had not brought under control my compulsion to do away with him. If I confided in Jeremy and I killed the man, Jeremy would be stuck with a horrible secret.

On the second day we worked the northern end of the line. There were three ways back to the next post. I picked the most dangerous one, in Malone’s Gully. God, I was serious.
Could I ever look Georgia in the eyes again? I understood why she did not like this man. Why was she taking him back?

Bastard, it was hot today. Bloody rocks were melting. I knew the right bush in Malone’s Gully that would give a speck of shade. He snapped at me for cautioning him not to drink too fast.

“I think I understand dehydration,” he said.

“I found a couple of cans of hash. A man has to have a diverse diet,” I said, “and some hard candies. Helps with the energy…as you well know.”

He ate in silence, except for running his tongue over his teeth to clean them, then popped to his feet suddenly.

“What the hell are you doing!” I snapped automatically.

“I have to urinate, if you don’t mind,” he answered.

“Well, go in the other direction, Doctor. Ten feet in the direction you’re heading and you’ll be in the cross hairs of a Turkish sniper.”

He blinked his eyes and peed where he was told.

“Thank you very much, indeed,” he said, coming back to the shade by me. I wondered what instinct made me send him in the proper direction. Oh, Christ.

“South Islander?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m from Christchurch myself. Trained in London, of course.”

Of course.

“You’re not related to Horace Landers from Kiwi Junction, by any chance?”

Maybe I was meant to kill him after all….

“In fact, I am.”

“I knew Horace off and on till he retired. Scotland, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Didn’t realize he had a son as young as you.”

“Long story, Doctor. I’m an adopted member of the family through my dad’s sister. Anyhow, I stayed on in the South Island. I worked the ranches.”

“Small world. Give him my regards when you write.”

“I certainly will.”

Norman suddenly heaved for breath. His skin turned sallow and the sweat gushed from him. He was floating…light-headed. “What the devil…?”

“Heat prostration. Lie back, Doctor.”

He had nothing to protest with. I stretched him out and dampened a cloth, wiped his face and the back of his neck, and fanned him. He mumbled his embarrassment.

“Close your eyes and don’t waste your breath,” I said, “it will pass.”

I opened his shirt and continued fanning him, cooling him down with his own sweat.

My own mouth went cotton-dry as I felt my hand unsnap my pistol holster. All that could be heard under the faraway gunfire was my breath and his breath, laboring. Oh, it was so simple now. Why in all this earth did I end up with him here if it was not a clear message to do away with him? What is one more dead man in this circus?

The pistol had dead aim at his temple.

“Your pain will be easier to bear if Calvin Norman is left alive. You know, Rory Larkin, if you kill him, he will destroy your soul day by day, year by year. Even in this savage land, a man cannot deliberately forsake his humanity.”

Fuck! Just what I needed! Words of wisdom from Conor Larkin.

“How many other men are you going to kill by taking his life, Rory lad? Can you live with that one? Suppose it’s Jeremy or Chester on the operating table…or yourself and no Calvin Norman to operate. Kill yourself, but don’t kill a surgeon in a battlefield.”

Norman groaned.

I replaced my pistol and sponged him again. He slowly became coherent.

There’s an easy walk to the beach, but it’s always covered by Turkish guns. The safe route was to make it to
Walker’s Ridge, but that was a hard climb. Norman was in no condition.

“Landers…”

“I laid a little more on you than I should have.”

“I don’t know if I can get back.”

“Sure you can. Suck these candies and slowly sip both these canteens dry. That will set your mind right. We’ll stay here till the sun is under us, then we’ll make it up to Post #1 and hole in there for the night.”

As the sun began to go for the sea, I helped him to his feet. He was a little better but didn’t have much stamina.

“I’m carrying you piggyback,” I said.

“I feel the fool.”

“Just grab the ride. Up you go. Put your arms around my neck. There’s my man. Not too far to go, down the gully two hundred yards and another two hundred up to Post #1.”