1915 (26 page)

Walter took a loud sip of his tea. God sounded like a foolish headmaster. And cruel.

“He works by appealing to free men. His whole life, Christ's, was an appeal for the absolutely free loyalty and love of people like you and me. He showed us what it might cost — there was no making things attractive and easy. Where good and evil meet, inside or outside, there must and should be war. This eternal fight, inside and out, isn't that the moral equivalent of war?”

“Are ‘they' all bad and are ‘we' all good?”

For a minute the minister had no answer. He threw
back the blanket at the door to show the drizzle lifting its dull curtain. Bluey now sat in a shaft of sunlight, pricked with glistening mist. He tossed the dregs of his tea away, but stayed seated, tossed pebbles at a tin, smoked.

“
En masse
,” said Potty at last, “I've heard it claimed that this is almost the first time Christian principles have been applied to international relations.”

It seemed they were all to be Christs at Gallipoli, devoting their lives to the enactment of a moral drama. But it didn't fit. Mankind was more a writhing garbage heap, dead or alive — feasting, competing, stealing one from the other. The rank discharges of the dead showed it last night, as did the living on the heights as they sought out the living of another race, and increased their self-esteem by killing them.

Yet there was one person who fitted the picture: Potty himself. But not now — last night when he played the healer on the hill, and later as the pilgrim breathing sane consolation on the track to the charnel pit.

Now? Bugger him.

Anything, any point to be proven, Walter believed, had to be done with few words and lots of action, otherwise it was conjecture. So now Potty was just a preacher again, dragging others up his own mental Calvary, potty all over again, all clarity obscured, a man who had lost the self-proclaimed honour of plain speech.

“There, does that clear things up?” And he left Walter feeling suddenly exhausted, desperate for a code of his own to put up against those who ran the world.

The track was busy again with tramping soldiers, one of whom asked Walter, now sunning himself at the
entrance, if he had seen Doherty.

“You mean a big vulgar bloke?”

“Vulgar? He'd kill you for less.”

“Then it must have been him I saw last night, tipping darkies off stretchers.”

“What are you? Some kind of clown?” The speaker (Walter stood, extended a hand) was Ozzie Deep, last seen punching tickets at the Forbes Mail. After mutual recognition set in Ozzie grew confidential, and grinning said, “Always, you never missed,” when Walter flashed out a hand and tipped Ozzie's hat over his eyes. It appeared that Private Doherty was one who never rested from money-getting. In the midst of battle he was rumoured to have knelt on the chest of a debtor and squeezed him for ten shillings. Ozzie knew for a fact that the chaplains had sacked Doherty from a burial detail because he was caught knocking gold fillings from the mouth of a Turkish officer. “I'm on his list,” said Ozzie, “Christ knows why. He's a savage. Well, if I keep moving …”

Bluey had been joined by another figure, a medical orderly with prominent red armbands. Walter was reluctant to close the gap and make it a threesome — he would have to thank Bluey for his words, and that would be awkward, for though it was a relief suddenly to find himself unsentimentally pitied and thus befriended, Walter was more at home with the edginess that prevails between those who are not quite mates. On friendship's other shore the true individualist sees a mire of disillusion. Bluey and the stranger were clapping each other on the back and shaking hands. The chap reminded Walter of Billy Mackenzie — his cap off-square in jaunty truculence, the stocky stance which even when relaxed and conversational carried an
air of resistance. A slightly frontwards-leaning man he was, with the habit of chopping a toe in the dirt to make a hole, and then wedging a toecap in it while the other foot employed itself on a similar project, as if to state,
This man will not be budged one inch. Try me
.

So when Walter snoozed in the sunlight wih his chin on his hands it was natural that his childhood friend should appear in the garb of the medical orderly. Walter tried to tell him about the burial detail, but memory insisted that his most recent experience was when his dog Ajax had hurt his nearside rear paw while following him to school. A blissful moment; though when he turned to look Billy was no longer part of it. Cream Puff, his school pony, a horse with a passion for Scotch thistles which usually she picked with her lips drawn delicately back to avoid the prickles, now munched them hungrily, spikes and all, while Ajax whimpered unseen. All this took place in a room, he now saw, whose walls (blink) suddenly fell back to reveal the real world and its confounded enclosures: a corridor of gully, a bar of shingle, a thin catwalk of horizon — and something else, a shoulder and a red cross, then a face bobbing across to confront his own.

“I'll be blowed.”

“
I'll
be blowed.”

“I just had a dream about you and me and Cream Puff. Only — I'll be damned — you weren't in it.”

“You had a dream about me and I wasn't in it ? Typical,” Billy turned to Bluey Clarke, “typical Walter Gilchrist material.”

The transformed Billy drew up a crate, planted himself on it, and beamed. “What do you think of my outfit?”

Walter scratched his head.

“I'm an ambulance-wallah. Not a bad sort of life.”

“What made you change?”

“Wipe that look from your face. It's the real me. Say, when will the reverend be back? Him and me don't see eye to eye.”

“Stay for a cup of tea,” said Bluey, and busied himself out of earshot.

“If Foxy sees me I'm done,” whispered Billy. “Keep it under your hat, but this ambulance stunt is just for today. The bloody chaplains won't have a bar of it.”

“Too late. Here he is.”

Mr Fox strode around the corner of the gully. But he found a stone in his boot and stooped to release it.

“I've always got the old place on my mind, haven't you? Cook-a-poi,” he pronounced nostalgically, and edged off a couple of paces, gauging the minister's next move. “Let's have a yarn sometime later.”

“Where can I find you?”

Billy smartly surveyed a line of escape through the slum of sandbagged dugouts on the hillside. “Ask for Lieutenant — I'm one of his — haven't you heard?” He took a deep breath and braced himself for a standing start, waving cheekily to the lumbering Potty. After a second he lowered the arm and aimed it like a rifle. “I'm one of Lieutenant ‘Skipper' Fagan's snipers, I was in your vicinity the other day — where were you?” He triggered a “click” with his tongue, said “Cheerio”, then sprinted across the pitted hillside and disappeared.

Potty pursued him for fifty yards, stumbled twice, and returned examining grazed palms. “I don't know why I bother. He's the devil for taunting a man. They want him at headquarters, a Captain Benedetto there has been seeking him for days. I've a suspicion its news to his advantage, but the young fool won't stop for
me.” On a silk handkerchief bearing an embroidered
D
the minister dabbed his hands, blew his nose, then stuffed a pocket until it bulged like an outsized carbuncle, which he stroked.

“Have you seen much of him?”

“Not till today.”

“The few times we've had words I must say he never mentioned you, though you must have heard of his doings, surely.”

“Nothing.”

“But he's the one who killed the Turkish sniper in the pine tree the day after General Bridges was shot. It made him instantly famous. He's killed many since.”

“That can't be right. It's not
Billy
they're talking about …”

“Billy and ‘The Murderer' are one and the same,” announced the minister.

After the unceasing din of battle the silence of the armistice seemed to whisper. It was like being in a cave, only a cave with a painted roof where clouds hung motionless over modelled gullies and a plaster beach. The faces of men as they climbed to vantage points and dumbly stared gave the impression that this inexplicably intact landscape was no illusion, but that everything that had passed before had been. Only an hour or two ago the horizon had hovered just above a man's scalp and to gaze at it however briefly had meant death. The enemy appeared to feel the same — that bewhiskered peasant working without bitterness alongside the stringy invader of his motherland.

But the world they now saw was not the one they had stepped from brief weeks before. On finding themselves free for the first time to take a good look round they felt uneasy. Untroubled haze and immense glassy vistas — what world was it? They wore the uniform of custodians, and by forthright exercise of responsibility had won the right to a vision — but when it came it was a vision of a world that ignored their presence. Heartbreak and sacrifice revealed nothing but a beauty disdainful of effort.

From ruptured earth clambered Turkish officers in pale blue uniforms who raised braided arms to direct their burial parties or salute Australian counterparts. At
intervals they too gazed across unruffled water to the islands of Imbros and distant Samothrace. Hitherto sunken horizons had been cranked up to show vistas undreamt of in a night where morality had one outcome only — a result so vile and narrow with its bloated and decomposing judgments that surely it would not be permitted to recur. Among stripped and shattered twigs lay a torn face, a knee, a haversack with tatters of canvas streaming oddly out, as if in a stiff breeze. Bushes sparkled from an early shower, and a bird flew up demanding that the eye return to locate another, such ordinary events being miracles.

 

Billy reached the heights untouched by the elation of the stopped battle. Not for him the rectangle of cardboard stuck to his hat with the name of his home town printed on it in large letters, nor the fretful hunt for conversation up and down a line warily released on an unexpected holiday. After escaping the chaplain he had climbed with his camera folded flat in a pocket where it was no more conspicuous than a tin of herrings. Others were out for souvenir snapshots, but not Billy. Box Brownies and Vest Pocket Kodaks appeared from nowhere to memorialize the true preoccupation of the soldier at rest — shutters gaped wide on ham actors straining under the weight of empty canisters, on grim-faced frauds lining up unseen targets of clowning mate or blank wall … And in one such group Billy found Walter, now freed from his jobs with the minister. They arranged a meeting place for later on, then Billy asked:

“Which way did Foxy go?”

“North.”

“Then I'll go south.”

Because of the smell Walter smoked his pipe until his tongue burnt. Otherwise he tried to give no thought to tomorrow. But not so Billy, who continued working his way along the lip of the parapet wearing a white armistice armband in addition to his red crosses. He saw dead Turks with wounds just as gaping as those deplored on dead Australians, and decided therefore that the enemy had not been using exploding bullets as many had thought. He was neither shocked nor stirred by the inhuman scenes, though he gagged at the stench. His sense of purpose was a remedy for mental disruption. When he found a useful landmark that gave a line on a vulnerable Turkish position he dropped into the trench, marked the spot on his map, and noted down the details in his large hand (“there reinforcemants might be got at from humpleft of X”). Where possible he unfolded his camera, scrupulously calculated the exposure, and framed a shot through a loophole. Photography was banned — so what?

Towards two o'clock he was adjusting the camera when a shadow fell across his view and then a pair of legs blocked it. He shouted to no effect, so climbed up to find an officer standing there. The man had been staring down gullies to the sea. He waved aside Billy's apologies and accepted a cigarette. He was tall and olive skinned with round dark eyes and a brown bald head. He mopped under his hat with a faded purple handkerchief. Did he also dab at a tear? He was a South Africa veteran, he told Billy, and was hardened to all sorts of sights, though he had never witnessed anything like the scene before him, where the battlefield, all save a few unfinished burials, had become a graveyard, and
in a few hours would become a battlefield again.

“Where are you from?” the officer asked vaguely. At that instant Billy read the name stamped in gold on the leather of his binocular case:
Benedetto
.

“The Hunter Valley,” Billy hastily lied, then changed his mind. The man took him for a stretcher bearer; it would have been easy to walk away unrecognized — but bugger that.

Billy was about to introduce himself when Captain Benedetto said: “I have a daughter at home in trouble.” He spoke softly: “I've been thinking about her.”

“Trouble?”

The officer climbed into the trench and invited Billy to follow. They lowered themselves from ruptured sandbags onto a firestep amid a torrent of dislodged gravel, and then stood at the mouth of a communication trench like chance acquaintances at the corner of a city street while crowds swirled by.

“I can't talk about it.”

“No?” Billy thrust his pay book into the man's hands. “I'm not who you think. I'm on a stunt for Mr Fagan.”

The captain licked a finger and turned a page. “So you're Mackenzie. I've been looking for you. They said you were a rough diamond with little respect for the niceties. Well, you've done yourself proud this time. My daughter is to have a baby in August.”

“Diana?”

“I've been wanting to meet you, Mackenzie. I've sent messages everywhere.” He handed Billy a slip of paper on which was lettered:
Wm. Mackenzie trooper ALH please contact Capt. C. Benedetto HQ Beach
. “Do you know what I've had in mind? A thrashing.”

“I wouldn't have come,” Billy smiled at the message, “not for a thrashing.”

“You're a caution, lad.”

“I'm not ashamed.” Billy threw in a
sir
. “We're planning to get married.”

Suddenly Captain Benedetto's hand darted out and Billy feinted, raising a bared forearm. Then it was the captain's turn to smile: “I'm not a violent man. A thrashing? No, but I like to sum a fellow up. You're not my choice for a son in law.” He made the movement again, this time more slowly, picking at Billy's armbands. “What's all this? It looks like shabby tricks.”

“Orders,” Billy mumbled.

“I've always let my wife and daughter go their own way. And whyever not? Women's world and all that. This is the last trouble I expected.” Billy could have told him that there was no such thing as a woman's world that did not include men. “Look, call on me at Headquarters. We'll have to talk. Marriage? I've never understood my daughter.”

“She's made me happy.”

“I've always got something — rum, tobacco — you chaps take so many risks.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Billy waved as he turned the corner. It was intended as a salute but changed halfway through to a farewell between equals.

 

A father! thought Billy. All right, that's good, I'm to be a pa. He made one of his songs out of it, feeling happy. Yep, he'd go to the captain as invited. But not yet. He'd wait for the crowning touch. He'd wait until he was a hero. To think a captain could be such a mug.
“The last thing he expected, etcetera.” But he was a likeable cove, without any bullshit. A father! All right, that's good, I'm to be a pa — and he was still humming this ditty several hours later when he reached the rest area where he and Walter had agreed to meet. The first person he saw was Blacky Reid. All right, that's good:

“Hey! Blacky! I'm to be a —”

“How's things?”

“What a day!”

“Do you think so? It's the first time I ever saw so many dead. It's knocked the shit out of me.” Blacky was standing in a peculiarly stiff pose, legs apart and knees slightly bent reminding Billy of an inexperienced rider after a long day in the saddle. “To cap it all I've got the ringer's complaint. Piles. They're real humdingers.”

“If you get shot in the arsehole you'll be right. Ha, Ha! Clean you out.”

“It's not funny!” This was the old snarling Blacky, but amazingly drained of his power to push people into line. “Why does everyone laugh?”

“Sore bums are funny,” shrugged Billy, sitting on a sheet of tin and taking out tobacco, “I don't know why.” He decided not to tell Blacky his news.

A man claimed the tin and Billy was forced to stand again.

“Anyway you shouldn't sit on hard surfaces. That's how I got them.”

“You're worse than someone's mother. What's got into you?”

“I bloody told you.”

“It's not the end of the world.”

“You wait till you get them, bugger it.”

“Then I'll wait. Have you seen Wally?”

“No, but wasn't he hit? I heard a rumour.”

“We're supposed to meet here.”

“It must have been someone else who got it,” said Blacky in a don't-care tone.

“Wally was there when Frank Barton got killed. The bomb knocked him cold.”

“Frank Barton? I never knew him.” Blacky winced, concerned only for himself. He always had been, Billy realized, who with two lives in his care wondered how he could ever have been taken in by the selfishness of Blacky's bluster. It was just as Walter's father had said — Blacky was all wind.

Billy caught sight of Walter lining up for a wad of tea from a dixie, and hurriedly excused himself. As he strode across the open area which was about half the size of a football field, dodging cooking fires and sprawled sleeping men, he heard a sound so unexpected it seemed a trick of some kind: the bleating of sheep.

“Ease up, I'm scalded,” said Walter as Billy grabbed his arm.

“Come over here where no-one can listen.”

“Did you hear the sheep?”

The serene evening air, cleared of battle smoke and stench, mocked and teased human susceptibility. The armistice was due to end any minute.

“What if we all held our fire,” said Walter, stopping and cocking his head: sheep, definitely sheep. Therefore anything was possible.

“Come
on
,” urged Billy, steering him to a spot under a bank. It was a safe position even when the guns were operating, but farther into the open, where Blacky limped among desultory fires, shells had been known to land. Though Billy desperately wanted to tell Walter his news he spent a minute explaining how the
ridge above “shadowed” them from Turkish artillery. Then he asked:

“What's the last thing you'd expect me to be?”

“I don't have to guess, Mr Fox told me. You're nicknamed ‘The Murderer'.”

“Not that. That's a joke.”

“Is it?”

“I just do my job. It doesn't feel like anything. The
last
thing you'd expect me to be. Come on —”

“I can't guess.”

“A father.”

Walter, bugger him, showed no surprise. He reacted slowly, reflectively: “It was bound to happen to one or the other of us, after the hotel. But have you only just heard?” He did some mental arithmetic.

“August,” said Billy. “It's due in August. What if we were home by then? She cares about me.
Me
.”

Walter stared at his boots feeling envious. Envy — one or the other never seemed free of its petty disgrace.

“You're lucky,” he managed. It was not that he envied Billy the circumstances — he hardly considered them — it was Billy's pure happiness that stung.

“Remember what Ethel told you? A wife and child. Now I
know
I'll be getting out of this place alive.”

 

From high in the gullies came a lone rifle shot. They stopped talking and listened. Those tending fires straightened themselves and looked apprehensive. An infantryman with a dish of stew allowed it to dribble and stain his trousers as he stared upwards. In a few seconds the first shot was joined by others — the popping of kindling at the start of a blaze. Blacky
limped across and was the first to speak:

“That's torn it.”

“Were you like me,” asked Walter, “wondering if nothing would happen?”

“I was,” said Blacky, “I surely was.”

They shook hands.

“We heard you might have been hit. Even dead,” Blacky said, striving to look concerned. He nodded at the low hill beyond which lay the beach. “Did you hear the sheep?”

“It was just imagination. Someone playing the fool,” said Walter. It had been a common practice among the Australians in Egypt to bleat when a well-liked officer made an unpopular announcement.

“Like hell it was. Pig Nolan's down there now, requisitioning a hogget. He never lets up.”

“I couldn't give a
fuck
about Pig any more,” said Walter with vehemence. He rarely swore like this: to do so was a mark of his ascendance over Blacky, over Pig, over all his acquaintance except Billy. Also a sign of his irritation at the fear that hummed through his body at the first shot: fear mournful and ominous like wind groaning through trees.

“All right. Don't lose a feather.”

This talk of Pig did not touch him as it used to. Enemies were everywhere now, and brutally impersonal. Somewhere in the past week Walter had woken from a nightmare in which people were turned inside out. Pink glistening bodies with corded veins and pearl rib bones jostled and crowded together, their skulls gristle-hard, eyeless, but somehow alive. What did personality matter in a movement where the individual had no place? Where was Pig in that horde with his rumoured threat of keeping “one up the
funnel” for those he disliked, Walter prime among them? Pig no longer mattered.