No Man's Land (19 page)

The Turkish trenches curved in circular formation around their hill. Their aerial torpedoes came flaring over the British lines, looking like big tin canisters with six-foot tails. Little flanges kept these missiles straight, and when they struck earth there was an enormous concussion. The English lyddite shells made more row than any of the other fireworks, and Otago was supplied with Japanese lyddite shells – deadly little blackberries to be fired from the trench-mortars. But the British artillery was a very poor second compared with Johnny Turk's, and barrage was left for the most part to the ghostly grey shapes of the men-of-war riding at anchor along the coast.

They witnessed from their trenches the attack on Suvla Bay, about five miles off, across flat land broken by the cone of Chocolate Hill – a patch of brown in a green land. The Tommies attacked three times, barrage whining and splintering from both sides. The advance and retreat of the little figures was a scene in a melodrama. At the second attack, the Turks, reinforced, chased the Tommies back down the Gully. The third assault drove the Turks out of their position. The attack in all took about twenty-five minutes, and an advance of thirty yards was made by the English troops. When it was over, hundreds of corpses and wounded men – limbless, gashed and slashed and blown to pieces – lay where they had fallen. The blue flashes of the shellfire continued for a while after the main attack. The concussion rang all night long in the soldiers' ears. In the morning they helped to bury the Tommies. It didn't greatly distress them any more.

Men in the British lines were going down with dysentery; but for the most part it was only known as dysentery in the case of the officers, just as nervous breakdowns were unheard of in the ranks. The ranker got two little white number nines from King, the doctor's assistant. Number nines were used to cure the troops of headache, heartache, stomachache, malingering, laziness, cuts, scabies, shell-shock, and dysentery, and on the whole acted fairly well. But the bad cases hadn't a chance, the disease worked in them too quickly. If you were dying of dysentery, you were pulled out after medical parade and got your chance in the Lemnos Hospital. If you weren't dying, it was a long time before the next parade came round. The men crept away into their dug-outs and bled to death. Their mates, coming round with a drop of soup for them, found them stiffened up in the rabbit-holes, just as they had stretched themselves on the cramped earthen benches.

Night-patrol was a queer and furtive prowling in the pit of No Man's Land. Starkie made one of a patrol a little after the Tommies drove back the Turks. With ten others he was taken to a hole in the trench and down into No Man's Land. There was very little barbed wire on Gallipoli. Down in the throttle of the valley lay hundreds of Turks, many of them wounded men who had died after twenty-four hours' exposure – the burning heat of the day, and at night the chill hand of the frosts. Every face on which a light flashed bore the blackness of death upon it. There were bodies piled up in heaps, like logs brought down the waters of a mill-race to lock in some nightmare dam. The ghastliness of this place and its unburied dead became a legend in the lines. The men christened it ‘Death Gully'.

By and by there were rumours of an Australian officer lying out in No Man's Land with a whole battalion's money on his back, and so dead that he certainly couldn't use it. Next morning Starkie took up Jack Frew's bet, and crept out from the lines to have a go for it. He had almost reached the little figure pointed out as the late Australian Croesus when the Turk sniper spotted him. Then began a game of cat and mouse, with Starkie for mouse. His lucky star had landed him in a fold of ground behind a rock hummock. Move backwards or forwards, and the sniper splashed dirt into his face. The sniper played marbles round his head, the little jets of soil and pebbles hitting him every now and again just to remind him that he hadn't been forgotten. The men in his own trench watched him through periscopes and yelled encouragement to him; but nobody formed a rescue-party, and Starkie didn't blame them. He lay where he was, stiff as a ramrod, from ten in the morning until after dusk. Then he crawled back to the trenches on his stomach, the vision of the gilded corpse very dim indeed. ‘Money-belt? I think the Turks got it, eh?'

Rifles were wrapped in blankets in the front line and inspected every little while by querulous officers who didn't like anything about the troops' kit and appearance. Captain Smythe, after one glance at Starkie's rifle, told him he was a disgrace to Otago, no soldier, and a bloody pest. On this occasion he spoke truer than he knew. Starkie, injured, prepared to clean his rifle. Ten rounds were allowed for, and by mischance eleven had been thrust into the breech.

‘Never mind, Starkie; maybe he's missed his bottle from the store-ship,' murmured Paddy encouragingly.

Starkie worked his rifle-lever, chucked out ten cartridges, shut the breech and, thinking it was empty, pulled the trigger to pull the block out. The rifle banged.

Captain Smythe, his face beautifully patterned with gravel-rash, turned again and leapt at the horrified Starkie. ‘Did you try to do that? Did you try to do that?'

Starkie swore by all a soldier's gods that he hadn't done it on purpose, and Captain Smythe called him a liar. In this particular instance he was wrong. But to the end of the War, Captain Smythe maintained that Starkie had tried to shoot him.

Men from the Otago lines moved out on burial-party under Captain Hewitt, a tall and rangy disciplinarian who stood no nonsense. Some worked at gathering the dead, some at tipping the contents of the oiled sheets into the open graves. One corpse crumbled in Starkie's arms. Round the decaying body was a money-belt, and in it twenty sovereigns and a half-sovereign, in English gold. Starkie shouted his discovery to Fleshy McLeod. Something cold and round touched him behind the ear. He turned, to find Captain Hewitt's revolver nuzzling against his head.

‘Don't you know that I could shoot you for looting?' asked the grim voice of the Captain.

Starkie after that followed instructions. He put the gold back into the money-belt. He got down into the grave, lifted out three of the blackened corpses, laid the soldier with the money-belt face down in the reeking, seeping soil. Then on the four bodies he piled nine more. As the last one rolled over from the oiled sheet into his arms it broke in two. For one hideous second he saw the grave, the dead men, his own body trapped in that cavern of putrefaction, just as they really were. Then Captain Hewitt saved him, shouting to him to tumble out and thank his stars he wasn't in the Imperial Army, where corpse-robbers were shot on sight.

It was tremendously important, on the way back to the trenches, that he should think of the gold in the money-belt and not of the corpses piled up above it. If you start thinking of the expression on a dead man's swollen face, you being stowed away in a rabbit-hole where the next whirling, twisting fire-cracker coming down from heaven may be your own packet, what's going to happen to you? Back in the Otago lines he told the story of the money-belt with a swagger.

‘Where's he buried?' demanded Paddy.

‘Hi, anyone know where a trumpet is?' Fleshy McLeod chipped in.

‘What for a trumpet?'

‘I want to play the Angel Gabriel and make him hop up again.'

‘That one'll do no more getting up in the morning. Christ, if you'd seen the face –'

‘Chuck it, Starkie! One face is the same as all the rest. What's the use of a pile of gold to him? And half of us broke…'

The last was truth. In their rabbit-warren they had nothing to do with their spare time but gamble. The slick hands gathered in every penny that came to the green-horns, and then the soldiers who had made a hit with Gippo girls were left with their last stakes – gold bangles filched from the ladies' arms as ‘keepsakes'.

In the evening Fleshy McLeod tapped Starkie on the shoulder.

‘Come on. I've got a new game.'

‘What's its name?'

‘We call it raising the dead,' said Fleshy grimly, and slid out of his corner in the trench. After a moment, Starkie passed a hand across a face dripping with sweat, and crept after him. They raised the dead.

Wherever they put the gold from the dead man's money-belt, on cards, or dice, it couldn't go wrong. Even when chance gave them an hour or two to fleece the Australians, who as gamblers made the New Zealanders look like babes in swaddling-clothes, the twenty sovereigns and the half-sovereign came home bringing little friends with them. One day a Digger asked them where they got the gold, and they were injudicious enough to blab. After that their sovereigns were ruled out of the trench gambling-schools, the boys swearing that it was haunted gold. The Fourth Brigade of Australians barred their gold as well, and from lording it over the rest with their clink of sovereigns they were driven back to the same old sixpenny throws. Between them they had chalked up a profit score of sixty pounds.

The men still used periscopes in the trenches, and it was squinting through the tube one day that Starkie spotted the Turk sniper camouflaged by the scrub in No Man's Land. None of the New Zealanders loved a sniper; and Starkie, remembering Goliath and a few more – also the way the Turk had dusted the seat of his own pants the day he went hunting the Australian gold-mine – liked him a lot less than most. The Turk sniper had made a mistake this time. He was within easy range of the Otago trench.

Starkie was cat now, and he enjoyed it. His first bullet just clipped the grass in front of the sniper's head; but the second one, before the Turk had time to break for cover, got him in the leg. The man tried to crawl away. Starkie sent little jets of soil up around him. He remembered a story which his father had told to frighten him a long time ago. A story of the Delaware way of killing a man with a small fire. This fire doesn't have to be more than six inches high, just twigs and grasses, but you light it over very close to one side of a man's head. Then you build the pile on the other side. Then lower down…

A man in the trenches cried, ‘Stop it, you dirty Hun!' Other voices began to protest. Then a voice Starkie knew said from behind him, ‘Give me that gun.' He slewed round to see Captain Dombey, and Captain Dombey wouldn't take no for an answer. He got the gun and stepped up on the parapet to finish off the wounded Turk sniper. Everyone knew he was one of the best rifle-shots in New Zealand.

Before his rifle had time to crack, he put a hand to his throat, said, ‘God, I'm hit; get me to the dressing-station!' and tumbled back into the trench like a sack of beans.

Starkie and Captain Dombey alike had forgotten that Turk snipers often went in couples, like snakes. In the scrub of No Man's Land the sniper's mate had been waiting his chance to get a shot in. The bullet had ripped through Captain Dombey's armpit and shoulder muscles, tearing a good big hole, but not low enough to lay him out for good unless gangrene set in.

He was fifteen stone if an ounce; and though Starkie and three others bore the stretcher that took him to the dressing-station on the beach, it was a rough passage, with the bearers stumbling as they scrambled down the scrubby hills, and Captain Dombey groaning about unlimited doses of C. B. The third time the stretcher was dropped he stopped promising rewards and fairies and kept up a thin blue line of curses. Starkie told him, with reminiscent sorrow, that it wasn't as bad as C. B., or latrines, or a job in the prison barracks; but then conversation was held up where the track was blocked with a crowd of Gurkhas and Punjabis, bent on slaughtering a goat. The Gurkhas lived on the other side of Mule Gully, sweet-mannered little brown fiends who kept their faces free from whiskers by pulling every hair out of their chins with tiny tweezers.

The Punjabis were fine, big-bearded fellows, and both the gamest fighters on Gallipoli. You couldn't shove past them while they were killing meat, for if a soldier's shadow fell on their food it became unclean, and on Gallipoli nobody wasted provisions. The stretcher was set down, and the corpse and stretcher-bearers both consoled themselves with a drink and a mess of blazing curry dished up with chupattis. Meanwhile, the goat, a gingery old Nanny bleating forlornly about her home and father, was led in to the circle of black watching faces and sacrificed like Iphigenia, the silver sweep of a Gurkha knife cutting her head off in a single blow.

‘Lovely ain't it?' Starkie said to Captain Dombey, his eyes fixed hungrily on the wicked curved blade of the
kukri
.

‘You get to hell, and hurry me down to the dressing-station!' querulously responded the gallant captain, and the jolting progress was resumed.

Down at the dressing-station Captain Dombey first cursed them roundly in several different languages, not all known to the secretariat of the League of Nations, then lifted himself up on his good elbow and grinned at them. ‘So long, boys; I'll be back in three months – and then look out!' He disappeared from their view, but kept his word. In three months to the day, the hole in his shoulder more or less satisfactorily plastered up, he was back on Gallipoli and seemed to think more of C. B. than ever.

At the water-tanks they lapped up as much as their stomachs could hold of lime, benzine, and greyish water. There was never an adequate water-ration on Gallipoli. They thieved a tin of it and started on their way home.

Captain Smythe met them with a scowl of ungenerous suspicion, Captain Dombey being his especial pal. ‘Been long enough, haven't you?' he growled.

‘So would you be,' retorted an exasperated bearer, ‘if you was carrying an elephant on a stretcher six miles!'

For carrying the elephant they got special rations – Fray Bentos – otherwise bully beef – and Blackwell's marmalade for their bread issue, which was doled out, one loaf to eight men. The marmalade-tins were used everywhere in the trenches for making steps, walls, and floors, and some of the designs in the little earth dug-outs were really clever. Marmalade was more of a success than cheese. Such a thing as cheese that refrained from crawling was unknown in the trenches, like a pacifist louse, but they got used to it… used to anything.