No Man's Land (17 page)

‘A beard!' he exclaimed. ‘Verily, the Prophet hath his beard!'

So grotesque did this transformation seem to McCullough that he again questioned the identity of that shape he was. Good God, had those coal-scuttles hit on the truth then? Had he died down there in the dere? And was this mystery to be explained by the transmigration of souls? Had he put off his former flesh and gone, by some dark process, into a new circumscription of earthly tissue? Good God! Well no matter – it would perhaps serve just as well.

For all that, the idea was perplexing – till it flashed on him that this point, at least, he could clear up.

He felt under his left breast. Saints and grace – the old scar was still there! A piece of shrapnel, he remembered, had knocked two teeth away on the right half of his jaw. He put his hand up, and found the gap. It was like checking off a brother, long lost, and at first doubted. He brought to mind other marks by which he could make sure of that flesh he had worn – marks that had cost the foe something – and these he went through carefully till the truth shouted at him. He
was
McCullough; and this was the skin, and the same bone, and the hair – at least some of it was – that had gone shearing with him from the Carpentaria to down below Bourke. Having settled this point, he breathed easier.

The next question to clear up was the identity of the place. Though the soil and the scrub it carried were certainly just as at Anzac, this silence – how uncanny it seemed! – was this not entirely out of keeping with the stir, and above all with the ear-shaking noises, that never gave over at that circus? It was.

McCullough got up, and made for a little spur which, as he expected, commanded the country about there. Skirting a couple of dwarfed firs, he pushed carefully through the gorse, a nasty neighbour for bare flesh, and came out on to a crumbling pinnacle, running almost sheer to the ravine below. The land beyond this ravine lay fairly flat; it was patched with crops, and carried groves of grey-leafed olive. This part he did not know well; but that hill in the distance, that stubborn-looking lump on the skyline, might easily, he thought, be Achi Baba, a hill of many memories.

But, to McCullough, the weightiest thing in life now was to make sure. Picking his way to another spur, he again sought his answer – remembering that the point of view was new to him. He looked hard and long. Before him, now, lay a confused mass of broken hills, here thrust up into abrupt spears, there dropping away into chasms – a rough waste of savage country, leading, in a tangle of ravine, precipice, and compact jungle, to a crowning peak in the distance.

McCullough rubbed his eyes. Surely he knew that accurst landscape, and that peak! Hell and death, he ought to! But what, in the name of all things elect – what was that great, that imposing mass, stuck there on the top of it? The peak should be Koja Chemen; but the building, or whatever it was, that caught the rays of the ascending sun on its bright surface, and threw them out in a refulgence across the land – what was that? And what were these other marks – that looked so odd here – these structures (if they were indeed that) which had cropped up where, in his time, the sniper crawled? Was it Anzac, and yet not Anzac? Or was he mad? Or was this dreaming ripe?

Noting the position of the sun – an act that had its ground in habit rather than necessity – he pushed over to that side of the hill which, if the place was still what it had been, must look out to the Aegean. What he should see there would fix it. As McCullough hurried across, the life he had himself moved with at the Cove stood plain before his mind's eye. There would lie the swarm of multi-shaped barges, laden with munition for both guns and men; there the hooting pinnaces would be busy – what a fuss they made! And the longboats, lined with the wounded, would be putting out in tow to the hospital ships – coming, and waiting their turn, and going, these were there always. The blunt trawlers, the fidgety destroyers, the battle-ships, ready to comb the hills inland with their long-reaching claws – these would be there, old friends all! And the bones of wrecked shipping, things that had died bravely, these too! A few steps now, and one glance would decide it. He would soon know how his case stood; for was not that spot as well known to him as the soil he had worked on at home? Hurried forward by these thoughts, he shoved his way through the brush, and stood breathless on the hill's edge.

If McCullough had found marvels before, was there now nothing to gape at? What, by the lost in Sheol, did this mean? There, indeed there, was the Beach he had fought up in that ghostly dawn of the Twenty-fifth. He knew every foot of that. There, before him, was the first ridge – heaped, when he had seen it last, with almost its own weight of stores, and honeycombed with dug-outs. Of those stores, it is true, there was no trace whatever now, and the bareness had been cultivated in an amazing fashion; but he knew it. There, in the near distance, lay the scarps under which they had fought that bitter fight in August – last August? – or what August? The question served merely to reveal another blind spot in his brain; at once, he put it from him. And there lay those hills on the far skyline, in a country unguessed; the shape of that land, also, he knew. His eye, still in quest of a solution to this riddle of the like and the unlike, travelled back to the Beach. Running round, in the form of a boomerang, to Suvla, it was the Beach, positively, beyond doubt, where men had laughed, and cursed, and swum, and died. Ah, what soldier who had taken his baptism there could mistake it? The waves of the blue sea broke gently upon it as they did often of old. Yes, Anzac, Anzac in truth, it was; but yet not the Anzac it had been – not
his
Anzac.

He laughed like a fool; but there were tears, too, in that laughter. Not his Anzac! His Anzac? Why, mark that pretentious pier, and that hotel there – with its smug modernity – perched where the squares of the Hospital, white and friendly, had once patched the hill! A hotel it must be. But for what? For whom? The trees, to be sure, looked well. Many of them, in a blaze of gold, threw the perfect colour across the drab landscape before him. What trees were these? As if to answer his question, the breeze carried up a perfume which he sensed with a sudden wonderment of delight. Wattle! Well, that was something. The men there would at least sleep among their own trees, the trees they had slept among so often in their own land. Yes, that was much. But all these things that had so busied him, that belonged to a world as remote now as any strutting it through space, how did
they
get there?

To McCullough there was something about the whole business that was more than uncanny – it began to open pits of apprehension from which he shrank in dismay. He lived in two worlds, and as a lost soul in each. God! if he could but shake off the obsession of either, struggle back somehow, as a complete and satisfied embodiment, to one of them – no matter which! He saw what he saw; but not yet had he faith to believe in it. All the life of that place as he had known it, from the Beach to the top trenches, had disappeared. But why should it? That strip of friendly shore, where men had loafed, or lifted a speedy foot this way or that, or hauled guns and other lumber to land, or shouldered ammunition, and beef, and biscuit – that strip where mules, that kicked like machines, and wounded men on stretchers, and sergeants sawing the air, and sappers with picks, and men brooding on telegrams, or waiting their turn for water, had all, with a thousand such sights, made up an ever-changing scene in a drama which, to him, had become existence – these things that shore knew no longer. The strong squalor of a soldiers' camp had given place to this – the antithesis of all that had been there formerly. But why? How? McCullough, desperately as he tried to, could make nothing of it.

So absorbed was he in all this, so preoccupied in trying to save his wits from a collapse finally, that he did not hear the footsteps of a stranger who just now arrived, after a stiff climb, at the summit of that hill of his. The newcomer, mopping his forehead, and peering in all directions as he did so, saw someone half-hidden in the scrub.

‘Seen a platoon of turkeys about here, mate?' he called out.

McCullough turned sharply. He thought his fancy must have tripped in another delusion. And yet there, looking human enough, was the shape which had doubtless addressed this question to him. He came out of the scrub, and confronted it – actually, a stout fellow, very red in the face, attired in shorts, and carrying a shot-gun.

Both men stared their surprise – McCullough, perhaps, more patently so. But the honours were even; for the hairy McCullough, clothed as his Adamic father had been, gave the newcomer a strong and a queer sensation about the spine. This gentleman held his gun ready for emergencies.

‘Seen some turkeys about here, mate?' he repeated, edging off a little.

McCullough found no words to reply with. His ideas got confused again. If this fellow was looking for the enemy with a weapon no better than that in his fist, he was mad.

‘They're the best table birds the boss had,' the sportsman went on, evidently confused too, and perhaps feeling himself under the necessity of saying something. ‘And he'll want them soon.'

Then, as if this outlandish figure would pass well enough for a chicken-thief, he put the question a third time. ‘Sure you haven't seen them?'

‘I'm a stranger here,' answered McCullough, swallowing a lump which, for some reason, came into his throat.

‘How'd you get here? And where's your gear?'

McCullough scratched his head.

‘The truth is,' he replied, ‘that's just what I've been trying to find out.'

The man with the gun, though plainly, and perhaps not unreasonably, a bit suspicious of his companion, could not question the doubt – for it was sincere enough – expressed in the face before him. Men, he knew, could lose their memories; and in such cases anything was possible – even such a mess-up as this.

‘You'd better hop down to the pub,' he said at last, chancing it, ‘and see what the boss'll do for you.'

‘Then that building
is
one?'

‘It is – the best on the Peninsula.'

The best on the Peninsula, thought McCullough. Then there must be others! He was again seized with a passionate desire to have such a solution of this mystery as would clear it up definitely; and here, as if sent for the sole purpose of yielding it, was this oracle in shorts – who was not, as he himself believed, a mere seeker of food, but an instrument of Providence.

‘D'you know this place well?' McCullough questioned. The cloud of a few minutes back had already lifted magically from his spirit; and he felt a little of his old confidence again.

‘Know it?' answered the sportsman, with the pride that comes of a possession undisturbed. ‘I know every turn and crack, every peak and precipice, of this patch – every foot of every trench, the ground of every engagement, of every victory – every boneyard I know too. If you want the history of this battlefield, of this
glorious
battlefield,' he went on, with a flourish, ‘I'm your man. That's my job. I'm a guide here.'

William Baylebridge
, Australian writer and poet, is the pseudonym of Charles Blocksidge, born in Brisbane in 1883, who died in 1942. This piece, taken from
An Anzac Muster
, was published privately in London in 1921 in an edition of 100 copies. At the outbreak of the war in August 1914, Baylebridge was in England. He was not able to enlist in the Australian armed forces, but there is good evidence to suggest that he was in Egypt during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. Baylebridge himself claimed to be doing ‘special literary work' there for the British secret service. Like
The Decameron
and
The Canterbury Tales
,
An Anzac Muster
uses the device of a band of storytellers to tell their twenty-seven tales over three consecutive Saturday nights. The fabular structure of
An Anzac Muster
, written only three years after the end of the war, gives it a powerful, literary distance. ‘The Apocalypse of Pat McCullough' is a surreal prediction of the sanitizing power of war tourism.

ROBIN HYDE

DAWN'S ANGEL