Leon Uris (56 page)

Armies dig. Armies never stop digging.

We shored up the entrances to our troglodyte cave homes with sandbags and whatever timber we could locate. We covered the dirt floor with brush so it would not turn to mud on our bedrolls. It turned to mud anyhow. We wrapped the roofs and sides in is in glass and rubber sheets and canvas to cut down on leaking.

What the hell, it was home. It got a little bigger and fancier each day. Photographs we had purchased in Cairo went up on the walls, a few trinkets taken off the Turks, a little tea fire, piss pots, all made it homey.

Yurlob and Modi never left the paddock. Chester and Jeremy bunked in with me.

Jeremy Hubble and Chester Goodwood ran a good part of the beach operation. Jeremy proved himself to be an officer of quality. I’m not saying it because he’s my cobber. What he gave, what every good officer gave, was a feeling that he knew what he was doing. He moved thousands of tons of war supplies to the men who needed them with very few screwups.

The wounded coming down from the lines were set into Widow’s Gully for the night in a safe area Jeremy had carved out, and he had them evacuated, two, three, four hundred a day, gently and quickly.

Jeremy was responsible for keeping the piers operating. Repairs were done constantly under Turkish fire. He went through the heartbreaking exercise of getting big cannons ashore and into emplacements, only to have the Turks destroy them in three days.

Naval gunfire, you ask? Well, sometimes it was “go” and would pin the Turks down and cover an advance. Sometimes it didn’t work. Too many of our men were taken down by our own guns.

If Jeremy was smart, Chester had to be credited for half the brains. Chester Goodwood knew where every box of gear was warehoused, which company was on the lines, what each post required on a daily basis, whether the mules had hay, and whether we had our foul stinking rations; he screamed for more water tankers, demanded clean boats to evacuate the wounded, sensed a shortage coming up, and headed it off. Can you imagine, a seventeen-year-old officer and a former drunken lord, beach-mastering such an operation!

I’d manage to see one or the other for a few minutes a day, and if we were lucky enough to go off duty together for a few hours, we’d hunker down in our bunker, review the world situation for a minute and a half, and fall dead asleep.

Yurlob’s arrival freed me from the yard. I took on the most urgent detail. We had landed with maps so obsolete they must have been surplus from the Homeric period of Ancient Troy. Corps had a good team of cartographers correcting the maps and detailing every hill and gully, but what I had to do was NOW.

I needed to mark all our forward positions, number
them, and draw a route map from Mule Gully to each post citing landscape peculiarities and Turkish hot spots.

For a tad of relief I put casual comments like, “This is your lucky day” or “Congratulations, you made it again” or “Spectacular view of sunset, a must” or “Make pee-pee before crossing open ground.”

Major Chris admonished me to quit the editorials until Lieutenant General Brodhead found them amusing. You might get an idea now of how the battlefield ran. Starting at Mule Gully there were some thirty-five fingers or routes, each of different length and over different terrain, leading to our perimeter. We did not have a solid front line. Some forward positions were heavily dug-in trenches, some were observation posts, some were along ridges, trenches, and others were nests to cover gaps in the line. The perimeter was zigzag, a disconnected labyrinth. My route maps
became invaluable in pointing out hot spots, detours, cliffsides, dead ends.

Spears, Happy, Elgin, the machine gun and I were off at daylight and we became
the
team. Only trouble was, it never really stopped or started. As soon as we got back to battalion headquarters at night we’d have to work out two or three new route maps with the cartographers through part of the night. There was never a night that an extra hand wasn’t needed at the paddock or with the wounded or something got crapped up with the boats in the cover or the Turks hit a dump of supplies.

I was getting down to the last of the trail maps when a new duty was added. I suppose my squad was doing its job too damned well, because General Brodhead took a liking to us, or possibly he thought we were charmed because we’d gotten through so far without a casualty. The General made daily sweeps of the front lines. Many of the places were simple to reach, so simple even his staff officers could find the way.

However, when it came to the “fun” places like Quinn’s Post, we’d escort him. Quinn’s was nightmare land. When Colonel Malone had taken it over, it was the most miserable shithole on the face of the earth.

He forced the troops to make the place livable, for as long as one remained alive. The no-man’s-land in front of Quinn’s Post ran from twelve to twenty yards from the Turkish lines. I do not lie—twelve to twenty yards. We and the Turks could hear each other complaining about rations.

My lads were feeling mighty haughty about the “honor” of taking Brodhead to worse places on the line. I felt it no great honor and I must have worn it on my face once too often.

“If you don’t like the detail, Landers,” he said to me, “we can assign you to General Godley.”

That was the second time I realized Llewelyn Brodhead was more or less a human being, after all.

A little over two weeks into the campaign we’d had one
of those really sorry days. We were drawing up our last map and what should have been an easy route map from Camel’s Hump. The fucking Turks liked to dress themselves with brush, so they’d look like mulberry bushes. They sniped at us all day. We crawled on our bellies for at least seven hours.

As we entered our command area, our nightly salute from Farting Ferdinand, a big mobile Turkish gun, hit too close to make it funny.

The route to Camel’s Hump was full of nuances, like that weird angle from which the Turks sniped at us today. I suppose all cartographers are humorless or they’d be something else. We finally finished our work and remembered we hadn’t eaten all day.

Happy to draw rations we retreated to the squad’s cave.

“What the hell’s this?”

“New ration tonight. The regular bully beef ration had rotted in the sun. Half of headquarters has dysentery.”

“I’ll be. Chicken in aspic. Well, well.”

“What’s aspic?”

“Aspic is like a high-class jelly you float fancy dishes in, I think,” I explained.

The label didn’t quite explain that by chicken, they meant chicken feet. By feet, we got it with feather points, foot padding, tiny knuckle bones, and claws. It was Elgin’s lucky day. He got crushed chicken neck.

Strangely, it occurred to me at this moment that I was one-fourth of a thing…a squad. We moved about in the hills with the deftness of ballet dancers, great lovers, movements of beauty through stony, ripping soil. A look into Spears’ eyes told that he knew there was a sniper on our left. A quick hand signal and Elgin…the best gunner on Gallipoli…had his piece firing inside seven seconds. We’d go hours without passing a word, yet if one man was missing for a time…it was like the other three limped. We were a whole only when we were together.

Yet we didn’t know a damned thing about each other. I
knew their towns, professions. I knew they all hankered to get laid. But I didn’t know anything about them. Only that we were four New Zealanders drawing maps together in a very stranger place.

Well, I’d arranged a surprise for them. A real surprise! No, not a woman, but the absolutely next best thing. It had taken some doing to put it together, but today was the final route map and it was time to celebrate.

Well, maybe we’d celebrate tomorrow, instead. I suppose we hadn’t slept for…maybe…let me figure…maybe like forty hours, and today was a real pisser.

“I’ll run this map over to the Major,” I said.

They were all asleep. Elgin was asleep sitting up, two chicken claws dangling from his mouth like upper fangs and oozing aspic.

“Map number 42-A,” Major Chris said. “Good go, Landers. So, Abdul’s set up a sniper’s alley there. I’ll get the information to the General. Think we can get them with one platoon?”

I propped my head in my hand and closed my eyes but continued the conversation. “No. They’re shooting from over five hundred yards. They’re not trying to hit anything just make us miserable…anyhow, I’m letting my lads sleep in tomorrow and then taking them to the beach to get cleaned up…and I got a surprise for them.”

The Major clenched his teeth together in just that particular way. Bad news was coming.

“Blast the luck,” he said.

“Don’t tell me.”

“Afraid so. You and your imperial guards, myself included, are to report to command at 0500. The General wants you to take him up to Quinn’s Post.”

“That’s a serious place.”

“I’m only the messenger.”

“Oh, I have that position,” I said.

“Colonel Malone also requested us.”

I opened my eyes. How do I break this to my lads?
“Fuck!” I cried, unbeknownst to myself. “I am not going up to Quinn’s Post until I wash my feet.”

My care was right close to my squad. I took the surprise box and walked over to them guided by their snores. No matter how deeply they slept, the mere words “Quinn’s Post” awakened them.

“On your feet,” I commanded. “We’re taking a swim…RIGHT NOW!”

There are flashes of golden moments in a lifetime. Suddenly you’re in a situation of mind, taken wholly by surprise, and something is happening you never before knew existed. A moment like that was with Georgia on the boat to Auckland. Another night was at Villa Valhalla, just sitting and talking to Jeremy.

Now, in this bloody hole, I’m suddenly smitten by euphoria. The beach was fairly quiet this night with only an occasional shellburst, sort of like the fireworks on the King’s birthday. Chester had told me of a place where the bottom was sandy and the water clean.

I gave my lads their surprise. “Take off your boots,” I ordered. They gaped as though I were crazy. “Sincerely,” I said. I picked up the box and opened it. Four new pair of boots, new socks, and three varieties of foot medication. Happy was the only one who carried a rifle and bayonet. I had told him to bring it to the beach. Fortunately, he had had it sharpened by the Maori lad who had the grindstone and was going to go home rich making the bayonets razor sharp.

You see, this was an enormous moment. We hadn’t taken off our boots in over two weeks. Using extreme care, Happy sliced the laces, and from the tongues down to the toes, I pulled the boots apart.

Take the best instance of your entire existence…now triple it. That’s what it felt like. We stripped down and waded into the water giggling like my sisters at a slumber party.

We sat in chest-high water with a sense of happiness never to be duplicated. I know we hadn’t slept for two days
and we had to report to command in a couple of hours, but we talked that night.

Dan Elgin, our gunner—hell, he was a farmer, you could tell that from a mile away. But do you know, his hobby was watching birds. He had drawn over a hundred varieties from the woods by his farm near the Rotorua Volcano. Well, there weren’t many birds hanging around here except vultures, and we were thankful for them. They kept things tidy in no-man’s-land.

Dan was worried that many species in the NorthIsland were becoming extinct because of the logging. It was the first time I ever thought about the fact that New Zealand could run out of birds, although we’d nearly run out of our national bird, the kiwi, because it didn’t have wings to escape its human predators.

Elgin had a wife and daughter, as well, but hardly mentioned them.

Happy Stevens of Palmerston North was a shoolteacher. Here, I thought he was more like Cherster’s age and all along he was an elder in his late twenties. The grin—that’s what made Happy look young.

Spears didn’t say much, never did. One would have the feeling he came from a background of poverty and hid whatever family life there might have been. To his credit, he didn’t invent a nonexistent existence for himself, as many of the lonely do.

I was the only South Islander. God, I wanted to be able to talk about Ballyutogue Station. Anyhow, I laid it on thick about the beauty of the South Island.

It was a nice night, not from any secret revelations, but suddenly the four of us were New Zealanders, and somehow that meant terribly much to us.

We were nearly too tired to stand up but we got to wrestling in the water, then staggered back to our caves to catch the two hours and five minutes sleep due to us.

*  *  *

Quinn’s Post. A piece of land in hell so nasty the devil exiled it to Gallipoli. It nubbed forward like the prow of a ship hanging out as a standing invitation to the Turks all around to pour in gunfire.

Quinn’s Post was at the open end of Monash Valley, the most strategic position on our line. If, indeed, the Turks ever cracked it, they would be able to pour into Monash Valley to the sea and split our forces in half.

Abdul stacked his forces around Quinn’s Post in a series of positions with ominous names: Bloody Angle, which gave them a view to the sea; the Chessboard, a brilliantly conceived series of square trench works that blocked us from every direction; Dead Man’s-Ridge (there must be one in every battle zone), which had a series of hidden gullies funning off it toward Quinn’s.