1915 (33 page)

“Who's game?”

Billy stepped forward and scrambled atop the clattering mare and found himself digging his heels in her flanks hardly knowing where he was or what was happening. A distant voice shouted a warning:

“Watch your head!” and Billy realized that each jolting arch of the animal took him to within inches of thick steel plate, and threatened to crack his oppressive skull like an egg.

He was better after that, as if something had been drained clear.

Then what about the Cairo dealer in silverware who had cheated Tip Markworthy? Billy had beaten him around the face until the others were forced to drag him clear, still swinging punches.

Upon their arrival at the Dardanelles Billy had given no thought to these interior attacks of malice. The high point had been learning of Diana's expectant motherhood, which made him feel as if he had been lifted out of himself entirely and another and better self was in the making.

But now that he was isolated, away from the main trenches and their hectic trouble, he wondered. He had allowed himself to think that God was taking a direct part in his life. But the voice that hovered around his most secretive inner person prompted nothing but evil.

All Billy's concentration now worked at holding on to the happiness he needed. If only he could lift it to a spot in his mind where it would never fade! For the first time in his life Billy approached a conscious philosophy. How was he to live?

Imperfect parts of these thoughts he attempted to set down in letters to Diana. Now, his hat sprouting leaves
and his face caked with mud to make him indistinguishable from the surface of the earth, he took out his stub of pencil and grubby notebook and tried again.

And all the while the news of Diana's death having left Australia a week before lurched across half the world before striking a shore where its voice almost drowned in the reverse traffic of other such fates. But still it persisted, lying for a while in a grey mail pouch, disappearing under a sheet of official forms, then at last leaping into the hand of someone who knew where Billy might be found.

 

Billy drowsed on through this hot noon in a thorny thicket surrounded by pungent wild thyme. The way to safety lay across the bared shoulder of one of the ridges that ran like buckled cardboard parallel to the sea. He would have to wait for darkness before crawling in.

In despite of his nickname Billy had not yet killed a fellow creature face to face. They called him “The Murderer” because of the zealously flushed shadow of General Bridges's supposed assassin fluttering from the pine tree on Russell's Top, and for the dozen or more glimpses vouchsafed him of unwary headshapes fatally exposing their mortality to his snap shooting along the upper part of the line. But Billy did not feel as he knew a killer must. Nothing but a practical equation arranged itself in his mind: the death of the enemy equalled the security of his place in the world.

This common enough solution to the soldier's predicament meant more to Billy than just his own survival. To the army, righteously flung on the shores
of a foreign land but not seeing itself as an invader, closing with a foe produced the supreme justifying platitude of its existence: we are not whole until sundered. But Billy as an individual had arrived on the peninsula still in pieces (though he hardly knew it) and was now earnestly engaged in making himself whole. Billy's rarity as a soldier came from this atypical union of private thoughts and military function. If such inner conjunctions were visible he would have been declared a prized oddity even in this most individualistic of armies.

Now as he shook himself awake and scanned the baking gorse for anything unusual, the two streams of purpose ran inseparably. There was no doubting that the aimless diversions of youth were done. Billy unsheathed his telescope while lying on his side and fitted it to a makeshift tripod of stones. He was on the edge of things here, lying out in unclaimed ground where daily he had watched the opposing lines extend their fragile hold, each seemingly in response to the other. Nourished by death, only the inanimate was truly alive.

Suddenly on the heights a terrible row erupted. Machine guns seemed to be attempting to stitch together a ball of chaotic noise — rifle fire, bombs, what might have been the subterranean thump of a mine. It was a concentrated event, with loose ends of noise being whipped back into the heart of the blaze by the invisible tongs of an enraged blacksmith. Something panicked in the bushes over Billy's head. It was not a bird but an “over” from Lone Pine. Wild firing ran up and down the line, but with this one exhausted exception nothing further came his way.

Because Billy was remote from the fight he felt
something of the power of a creator. He heard the contained chaos rise and fall to a pattern, whereas to those clambering to face its storm for a brief moment of bewildered glory it was something else entirely: and nothing would ever be able to convince them otherwise.

Under ordinary circumstances the average soldier sees or knows little of what goes on around him. But Billy gained the feeling that the turmoil of those individuals battling aloft was but a minute detail in the unfolding of a great pattern. It could not be otherwise. Even to contemplate the thought brought him close to a glimpse of the darkness he feared. So Billy settled himself into a mood where he presided over the invisible importance of the battle like a hen protecting an egg.

“Steady … Freddy,” he breathed as he held the telescope to his eye. The blue and silver of the lens filled with underwater light, a round window of blurred shapes. Then as he twisted the instrument into a moment of focus he thought he glimpsed the face of a man. A vegetable man, or a clay one embedded in the soil. It was no illusion. When he relocated focus the man was still there. By an extraordinary chance the telescope had fixed on the face of another sniper, like Billy lying far out on the flank commanding a wide view of the new Australian trenches threading their way down Harris Ridge.

At first Billy peered at him as might a scientist viewing a threatening microbe under a microscope. But he was also overcome by admiration. The Turkish sniper was perfectly still. A curlew frozen to the earth could not have been more invisible, nor a mopoke in a tree. “Bad luck,” Billy told the other. Fragments of
character shimmered through the condensed air — the steady eyes, the finger raised with steely slowness to cautiously seek out an itch, an action that made Billy's ear itchy also. He stared for ages at his enemy until the bond of unknowing that divided them disappeared.

Later, when his shot had been fired and he was making his way back to the lines, he would begin to consider again the million to one chance that had enabled him in all those acres of nothing to unveil the hidden threat. Then he would see the discovery as a sign, and choose to set himself apart from ordinary men because of the swift token of recognition granted to the aspiration of his soul. The thought would buoy him up for hours — until that moment, not so very far into the future, when Potty Fox would thrust into his hands the telegraph message with its news of Diana's death.

Then Billy would make another discovery. He would learn how the reversal of morality need not alter behaviour. After eruptive news people often go on doing what they did before, only with new and more terrible sets of reasons.

In the dawn light he had already marked various ranges: a discolouration in the scrub to the left of his target set it just short of five hundred yards. When he slid his eye from the telescope a mere dent of shade showed the hidden place where another human breathed and plotted in blissful ignorance. He took a deep breath and listened to his heartbeat. A steady mind means a steady body, as “Skipper” Fagan put it. Your rifle and Mother Earth will be your two closest friends when the whips begin to crack.

Billy angled his body a little to the left of the line of fire, clasping the weapon loosely in his hands, allowing the ground to take the weight. He imagined a taut wire
stretching along his line of sight to the mark opposite. At this moment of preparation Billy was always able to look away, and again look back to find the wire still there. He slowly worked the bolt. The faint metallic slide and click blended with the noise of insects. The insides of his feet gripped firmly against the hospitable ground. He wriggled for ease and comfort and firmness, and for the pleasure of what he was about to do. Now came the moment for absolute steadiness when he would become vulnerable to any unseen watcher who might happen to stare at his hide and see the unnatural straight line of the rifle lift against the scalloped curves of nature, and the man-shape declare itself like a figure in a picture puzzle book.

As he raised the rifle his chest, head and arms rose in obedience. His entire being moved to the imperatives of the rifle. As always he was held by the magic of its weighted but manoeuvrable length, its invisible power over nearby horizons. He jutted his left arm slightly outwards so that his elbows formed stays, as in timber work. He was ready, alert in that state where the devoted marksman knows the whole visible world subservient to his next move. As Billy felt the first pressure of the trigger he took a deep slow breath and held it. It was a moment for tasting the perfect stillness of death as he had never tasted it before. Excitement like the tickle from a low voltage battery sat at the tip of his tongue. He wiped it away with a quick pointed lick. What other name but “murderer” was there for a person who in the eternity before the second pull found satisfaction for a deep appetite?

But there still seemed a chance for the distant Turk to shift an inch one way or the other and save his own life. Billy could never predict the crucial moment. That
was where the other man's chance lay. Split fractions of fractions of seconds were available, and it was then that Billy imagined another person's finger reaching down and flicking the pin forward — igniting the powder, jolting the braced shell, sending the spiralling projectile on its way.

The word “murderer” would never fit. It was as if Billy were the instrument of a greater power, the force that made the rifle and put a man behind it.

After firing he held the rifle steady, “following through” while an alarming echo lashed the still valley. Then it weakened against the constant battle rumble from higher up. Only then did Billy let out his breath. Everything had been done right and he knew, as always, that someone at the end of the taut wire lay dead. The trick now was to find the spot with the naked eye, but the wire had twanged towards the target along with the bullet, forming part of the destructive force now spent.

He lowered the rifle and set his eye to the telescope. He was now able to take a leisurely look at the target, an indulgence that the deadly fire on the heights during previous weeks had not permitted.

The man's head protruded only a few inches forward of its previous position. The face, having struck the earth, seemed to have ploughed outwards into a patch of sunlight. Just this detail of humiliation touched Billy. Blood gathered on a temple, black as the hair surrounding it, but catching the light.

It took Billy some time to realize that his killing of the Turkish sniper had taken place in one of those moods of personal obliteration he had sworn to be rid of. But the mood had changed its character. It now brought great elation instead of anger, a sense of time
lessness in the midst of necessity. The killer, having erased the object of his passion, thinks he will then be free from the burden of the passion for ever.

 

Walter had been tricked. The voice calling his name had been an illusion. He would never leave this hole alive.

He knew it was wrong to feel bitterness, but nothing else served. He huddled against the forward part of the trench saying to himself:
It's all been a waste
.

There had always been something further up ahead. Always. Since his first steps taken from one parent to the other the world had been calling out with its promise. Even as he had sprinted through bullets just minutes before there had been something.
Get there, get there
, prompted the inner voice.
Then you will see
. Well now he was there, stumped. Shut away ahead of time.

He had wanted to ride in the dirigibles when they started using them to beat the trains. He had wanted to say, at home, I remember this world of ours before it became as beautiful as it is now — before I went away. He had wanted to see the faces greeting him, he did not care whose — he would kiss the feet of an unwashed swagman and embrace the bole of a gum when back on unthreatened native earth, and shout for the bar at the Royal till his pay ran out, then turn for home and never again leave.

Ten minutes passed and the machine guns seemed to be losing interest. Walter's will stirred.
There's more
, he thought,
more!
So even at the finish came these heartless surges of promise. He decided to take a cautious look outside as soon as the firing properly sidled away. He
would raise his sun helmet on a stick and if that worked, why, he would climb out, scoot for the ridge, and make his way back along the beach. Somewhere down there was a stretcher awaiting his tired frame. He would climb onto it, and not shift until they carried him off, out to the ships, across the ocean. He would try his hand at journalism after all, Ollie or no Ollie, and make his mark. He would live by the harbour and when Frances called would show her in, and as they gravely recalled their reckless youth she would explain no, she had never taken up with Robert Gillen, it was all a mistake, and he would say Marriage? yet agree that though their destinies were entwined there was now this matter of Art.

But when he raised his helmet it was plucked from the stick and flung with an angry rattle against the rear wall of the trench, where it rolled over to reveal a gaping tattered hole where Walter's head would have been.

How difficult it was to look at his dirty hands trembling as they picked away at the rotted sandy mortar and think of them as stiff unmoving claws. Was there hope in the realization that he was unable to do so? Hands, whether active or helpless, have a special function. They are expressive spirits even when the spirit itself has nothing to say, nowhere to go. It is hands that beckon, hands that say,
Come, we are showing the way. You may despair but we shall never. Let that be your hope
.