The Passing Bells (35 page)

“Stuff it to 'em!” someone called out in the gloom. “Bugger the Turk!”

The pale sky was sullied by sheets of dun-colored cloud. Grit settled on the deck, the dust of Gallipoli borne on the wind, the soil uprooted by the hammering shells. Explosions blinked and twinkled, sharp points of fire beneath fountains of yellow earth. Squinting over the sandbags, Charles could see the village on the high point of the cove disappear under the shock-wave blasts of the navy guns. He held his wrist close to his face and looked at his watch. Six o'clock. The guns of the fleet had been firing steadily for nearly an hour. Nothing—not a mouse, not a bird—could be alive in that boiling, churning, cordite-reeking stretch of land.

“God pity them,” he murmured.

CLANG CLANG . . . CLANG CLANG

The ship trembled as the engines went full speed. The hazy sunlit bay drew closer.

“Load all guns!” he called out.

There was the clatter of ammunition boxes being opened, the sharp snap and clang as the coiled belts were locked into the breeches.

“Open sights . . . one hundred yards!”

They would fire at ghosts—at pulverized bone.

The shelling ceased as suddenly as it had begun. The shore drew closer, palled in drifting smoke and dust, heavy with silence. He could hear the sigh of debris striking the waters of the bay like a gentle rain.

“Away all boats!” an impetuous midshipman called out, his boyish voice thin as a curlew's cry. “On to the beach!”

The navy cutters slipped their tow ropes from the small steam launches that had pulled them in clusters from the transports and headed in a long line for the shore. The Dubliners were standing, bayonets fixed, the early sun catching the blades.

“Up the Irish!” a Munster Fusilier shouted from the shadowed well deck of the
River Clyde.

Five hundred yards to the loop of sand. The cutters drifted apart, then regrouped slowly, fighting a strong current that boiled beneath the placid surface of the bay. Charles stared at his watch as interminable minutes ticked away. The collier was battling the currents now, surging with added power against the force of the Hellespont flood.

“Blimey,” a machine gunner said as he glared past the barrel of his gun, “the shellin' didn't touch the wire.”

Charles bent his head to a loophole in the sandbag wall. The man was correct. Thickets of barbed wire stretched the length of the cove and up the slopes. It was dew-wet, like a spider's web.

“The Dublins will have to cut it,” he said. “I hope they—” The keel grated against the bottom and the ship trembled and groaned, then came to a stop thirty yards from the beach. Footsteps hammered on the deck as sailors ran toward the stern to haul the big lighters around to bridge the gap of deep water. Charles looked through one of the side embrasures. The cutters were back in line and moving steadily toward the shore. It was so quiet he could hear the Dublin Fusilier officers and sergeants relaying commands. Thirty yards to go . . . twenty . . . ten. A bluejacket clutching a boat hook jumped into the surf.

Was that a bugle? A faint brassy two-note call coming from the ruins of the village? Charles couldn't be certain.

“Did anyone hear—” he started to ask and then a haze of smoke sheeted the entire curve of the bay and the surface of the water was suddenly whipped into a white froth by the first blast of Turkish rifle and machine-gun fire. The soldiers packed into the boats began to scream as the bullets scythed into them.

“Fire!” Charles yelled. The Vickers guns exploded like jackhammers, their noise drowning the cries of the dying Dubliners. Spouts of sand and clay traversed hillside and beach, but the Turkish fusillade didn't slacken for an instant. There were no targets, Charles thought wildly. Not a Turk could be seen. There had to be trenches all along the slopes—narrow, well concealed. How in God's name had the men in them escaped being blown to pieces by the bombardment? They probably had stayed back in the hills until the shelling had ceased and then had rushed down to their positions. There were only five beaches on the entire peninsula where troops could land. The Turks knew that and had had a month to fortify them and to rehearse their defense strategies. They had learned them well. In the water there was only death—the boats broadside to the beach, splinters flying from the wooden hulls, men tumbling into the sea or lying in heaps across the thwarts. A few soldiers managed to reach the beach and lay huddled behind a low embankment. A handful rushed the wire only to die among the strands.

Bullets clanged against the steel plates of the
River Clyde
and thudded ceaselessly against the sandbags. The sailors trying to drag the lighters around from the stern were shot off the decks and catwalks. Other men took their places to haul on the tow ropes for a few seconds before the shrieking bullet storm dropped them where they stood or sent them flopping over the side. A few bullets were coming through the embrasures in the bags and two machine gunners fell backward. Other men instantly took their places, and the guns kept firing, belt after belt uncoiling from the ammunition boxes, the water starting to boil in the jackets.

Charles slammed a fist against a bag and cursed under his breath. Why the hell didn't they back off and signal the fleet to start shooting again? “Fucking goddamn madness!” He tapped the broad back of a Windsor Fusilier sergeant and shouted loudly to be heard, “Going to the bridge. . . . Take charge.”

He dropped down the fo'c'sle hatchway into a fetid gloom, skinning one knee badly on the iron ladder. Bullets slapping the hull made the interior of the ship ring like a bell. He stumbled through the fo'c'sle, which was stacked high with wooden boxes of cartridges and the belted rounds for the machine guns, brushed past the sweating ammunition handlers, and half-ran, half-stumbled out onto the well deck. A platoon of the Hampshires was kneeling in tight masses against the high iron sides as bullets passed over them, cracking like steel whips.

“What the bloody hell's going on?” a white-faced subaltern said.

There was no point in answering him. He'd find out soon enough for himself. The wooden ramps were being lowered over the sides; the operation was directed by Lieutenant Colonel Askins and a navy commander standing on the bridge, both men exposed to the fire storm and totally oblivious to it.

“What the hell you doin' here?” Colonel Askins said as Charles reached the bridge. The colonel was staring at the shore, lips compressed to bloodless slits.

“We . . . can't . . . dampen that fire with the machine guns, sir. Can't . . . make a dent in it.”

“I know. I can see that.”

“Need . . . artillery . . . the fleet . . .”

“Too late for that . . . committed now . . . bloody ship's fast on the sands. Second wave coming in . . . now.” He moved his right arm in a jerky fashion, pointing over his left shoulder.

Charles glanced aft. A string of launches and cutters packed with men were fanning into the bay.

“Signaling them to bloody well stop,” the colonel said in a flat, tired voice. “General Napier's leading 'em in. Thinks he's Admiral bloody Nelson and turning a blind eye. Every son of a bitch wants the VC today.”

The navy commander suddenly leaned over the totally inadequate barricade of boilerplate and sandbags that lined the bridge, roared orders to the sailors on the steam winches, then darted for the ladder.

“Have to do it myself, damn it!”

“That Unwin,” the colonel remarked dryly. “He'll get his cross today . . . or a pine box . . . or both.” He looked at Charles with distant eyes. “It's a bloody ball-up, Greville, but we have to stick it . . . get the men ashore . . . bayonet the Turk up the beach. No other bloody way to do it now. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good lad. Get back to your guns and keep—”

And then he was dead, the top half of his skull spinning away toward the ship's funnel, hair and cap neatly together, brains splattering the wheelhouse with a pinkish gray slime. Charles dropped to his knees and pressed his hands to his eyes to shut out the horror. There was no point to it. He knew that. Anyone seeing him would only mistake his cringing attitude for cowardice. He wasn't afraid. He was far beyond fear. Terror created its own unique form of courage. It was just that the colonel's death had come with such explosive suddenness, he hadn't been prepared for it. The death itself was meaningless. What of it? He could have died at Tugela or Spion Kop during the South African war. Boer bullets had missed him. Turk bullets had not. He glanced at the long, sprawled, blood-draining body and stood up. A navy signaler crouched with his back against a slab of boilerplate and stared at him with hollow eyes.

“Keep signaling the boats to stop,” Charles yelled.

The man's stare was fixed, like an epileptic's. There was no point in telling him to do anything. He ran humpbacked from the bridge to search for the adjutant and tell him that the colonel was dead. He found the man at the bottom of the starboard bridge ladder, flat on the deck with Mauser holes across his chest.

The broad, flat lighters had been lashed together in front of the bow; the debarking platforms sloped down along the ship's sides from the sally-ports cut in the hull. Whistles blew, and men of the first platoon, A Company, the Royal Windsor Fusiliers, started down for the beach, running hard, the starboard platform rattling at their pounding feet.

“Stick it, the Windsors!”

Charles caught a flashing glimpse of Roger, revolver in hand, whistle in his mouth, leading his men down. Bullets slapped against the ship or ricocheted off with a whirring howl. It was like standing in a blizzard of lead, the ferocity of the storm increasing as the troops ran down to the lighters. Charles flung himself to the deck and lay flat behind the slim protection of a lifeboat davit, the boat long gone, rifled to dangling shards. He looked over the side under the bottom rail and saw to his horror that the ramp was empty, the platoon gone. A few men lay in the lighter in a bloody heap, the others in the water, motionless clumps of dark brown, sinking slowly, trailing plumes of scarlet. A whistle blew—the second platoon of A Company ran the gauntlet and withered away to six lone men before they reached the lighter. A platoon of the Munsters followed instantly and died as they ran, tumbling head over heels into the sea.

Dead. Roger was dead. The realization materialized slowly. Dead and gone. One of the corpses in the lighter . . . or one of the bobbing sacks of khaki in the water. Gone. Vanished without a goodbye, a parting word. The insanity numbed him. He became oblivious to the fire and stood up, made his way slowly back to the fo'c'sle, and took his position again amid the steaming, clattering Vickers guns.

“Blimey,” the Fusilier sergeant said, “I didn't give you a snowball's chance in bloody 'ell of makin' it.”

They were snug and safe here, Charles thought dully. The wider embrasures had been plugged with bags. The gunners were no longer bothering to aim their weapons because there was simply nothing to aim at. They lay on the deck and pressed the triggers while Turkish bullets cracked and hummed or thudded into the heavy sacks of white Egyptian sand.

A major in the Hampshires crawled up from the well deck and shouted to Charles over the stuttering roar of the machine guns, “No more . . . chaps . . . going in. . . . Waiting . . . till . . . nightfall. Keep . . . the guns . . . firing.”

Charles nodded and rested his head against the sun-heated bags. Through a peephole he could see the bay—the drifting boats of the second wave, filled with dead, countless bodies rolling in the surf, blood staining the water a rose pink . . . a Burgundy red. God, he thought, old Homer had been right after all. It
was
a wine-dark sea.

12

There were six officers seated in the first-class carriage when Martin Rilke got on the train at Southampton. All of them were back in Blighty after months in France, and they eyed Martin with icy contempt, taking in at a glance his age, state of health, the tanned color of his skin—and his civilian clothes.

“Back from a nice holiday?” a major in the Durham Light Infantry remarked with stiletto politeness.

“No,” Martin said as he struggled to place his bulging briefcase in the netting above the seat. “Gallipoli.”

The thaw was instant. Cigarettes and stories were exchanged. Martin told the officers about conditions at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove; they in turn told him about Neuve-Chapelle and Aubers Ridge—a somber discussion of massacres as the train rumbled through the summer countryside of southern England.

London sweltered in the July heat, but it felt cool to Martin after Lemnos and the peninsula. There were more travelers than taxis outside Waterloo Station, and, as he waited impatiently on the curb for an empty one, a young woman in a pale green dress approached him, eyed him disdainfully, and handed him a white feather.

It was odd. Nothing had changed. The message capsules hummed over the ceiling wires and plummeted down on harassed editors and rewrite men, the Teletype machines chattered away, copy boys raced back and forth among the multitude of desks, and the presses rumbled in the distance like the engines of some great ship. It had been a year since he had sat at his desk in the glass-walled cubicle writing glib copy about English manners and pastimes. He wondered if the theater reviewer still came in each evening wearing white tie and tails. No, little had changed. A few new faces . . . another man at Jacob's old desk.

There were still shilling maps pinned to the walls of Lord Crewe's sumptuous office, a map of the Western Front next to a landscape by Constable, a map of the Mediterranean pinned beside a Turner. Lord Crewe was as burly as ever, but his face was no longer bronzed. Ocean yacht racing was not a possible sport in wartime England.

“Well, Rilke, I'm glad to see you back.”