Solomon's Song (46 page)

‘It’s meat,’ Library Spencer explains. ‘Not enough protein in their diet.’

‘Meat? Don’t they eat meat?’ Muddy Parthe asks, astonished.

‘Well, not enough, that’s why they’re so short.’

‘Hear that, Numbers, yer mum didn’t feed ya enough chops when you were a young ‘un. That’s why yer such a short arse!’ Muddy says gleefully.

Numbers doesn’t reply for a moment and then announces, ‘Bullshit, I had a chop every mornin’ f’breakfast since I was two years old, that’s six thousand, five ‘undred and seventy chops I’ve ate, mate!’

‘Not enough, mate,’ Muddy says, feeling smug.

They pass the barracks and cross several bridges and then march along a long avenue built on a causeway, which starts at Gizeh and runs for five miles all the way to the flooded flats of the Nile. It is almost full moon and towards the end of the avenue when they approach the edge of the desert sand they catch their first sight of the Pyramids etched clear and massive as they rise from the desert. The causeway finally ends and they are marched onto a newly laid road, bathed in the light of a glorious moon, which seems to disappear into the desert.

‘Hey, you blokes, lookee there!’ Crow suddenly exclaims. ‘Flamin’ gum trees!’

Indeed they are passing a magnificent group of gum trees standing alone in the desert. A sudden breeze blows up and the sound of the wind high in the trees, like waves crashing on an Australian beach, makes them all suddenly terribly homesick.

‘How’d they get here then? Big bastards too, been there a while I can tell ya,’ Hornbill, the timber expert, says.

‘The eucalypt is the most adaptable tree in the world, it can grow almost anywhere,’ Library Spencer calls out. ‘They plant it in arid regions to prevent the soil blowing away.’

‘Righto, lads, keep the chat down,’ Ben calls.

They now see that the avenue of gum trees is planted as a part of the Mena House Hotel, which they soon pass and continue marching onwards until they come to the first valley of the desert and, in doing so, almost bump into the Pyramids standing majestic in the moonlight, taller than any building they’ve ever seen.

It is here, on a lonely stretch of sand, under a star-sprinkled sky, the great Pyramids casting dark shadows over the pale moonlit desert, that the battalion receives the command to halt.

They are sweating from the exertion of the ten-mile march from the centre of Cairo, so only after a while do they realise the night has grown very cold. They haven’t washed or eaten a square meal since they left Alexandria and they’re tired and hungry, but mostly tired. Several tins of bullybeef are opened to share around, but most are too exhausted to think of food and roll themselves in their grey army blankets preparing to sleep. Tomorrow they will begin the task of setting up camp in a place where someone has had the good sense to plant Australian gums in the desert.

‘Plantin’ them gums,’ Cooligan says suddenly, ‘I reckon it were one o’ them prophets they has round ‘ere, like in the Bible. He come to them Pyramids to pray like, you know, to one o’ them Egyptian Pharaoh Gods and he gets this message back, sorta like a prophecy, the Pharaoh God tells him about us comin’ ‘ere. So off he goes at the trot and plants them gum trees to mark the occasion.’

‘Jesus, Cooligan!’ Crow Rigby calls from his blanket.

‘Him too! He could’ve walked right where you’re lying, mate, givin’ out them loaves and fishes. Bloody old this place, I daresay every bastard in the Bible’s been here. Moses…’

‘So where’s this prophet of yours gunna get the gum-tree seeds?’ the ever pedantic Library Spencer asks.

‘He’s a prophet, ain’t he? He waves his stick and strikes the ground and says abra-ca-bloody-dabra and, there you go, flamin’ gum trees!’

‘Ah, shurrup, Numbers! Can’t yer see we’re all buggered,’ Woggy Mustafa calls.

‘I thought you said your lot was Christians an’ all!’ Numbers Cooligan says, wrapping himself in his blanket against the night chill. As always he manages to have the last word.

*

At the end of twelve days the 1st Australian Division, infantry, artillery, ambulances, transport and the divisional Light Horse occupy the site at Mena which stretches for nearly a mile up the desert valley. The New Zealand infantry brigade and mounted rifles with all their support companies are camped at Zeitoun, on the northern outskirts of Cairo, while Joshua Solomon’s regiment forms part of the 1st Light Horse Brigade, together with all its supporting units, at Maadi Camp on the edge of the desert south of Cairo.

At first the Australians discover that only eight and a half thousand tents exist for thirty thousand men. Britain, whose responsibility it is to see that they arrived on time for the A.I.F., has slipped up on the job. In the first few weeks most of the infantrymen are obliged to dig themselves dugouts, which they cover with their waterproof sheets. The officers’ messes consist of large, sprawling Arab desert tents contracted from Greek merchants, who seem to be in charge of many of the more prosperous aspects of Business in Cairo.

With the rainy season over, sleeping in the open desert doesn’t seem at first to be such a hardship. But there is a downside none of the top brass has foreseen - the desert goes from blazing hot during the day to bitterly cold at night and an unexpectedly high ratio of men are hospitalised with pneumonia until ordnance manages to procure and issue extra blankets to the men.

Over the next few weeks the tents arrive from Britain, pipes are laid to pump water around the camp and the general infrastructure required to create a large working army takes a surprisingly short time to build.

Soon the tents stand in long, straight rows, and to give the men a sense of some permanency in the desert sand and also to prevent it blowing into the tents, the fronts of these are often aproned with whitewashed stones and sown with green oats. ‘Desert lawns, mate, so’s you won’t be ‘omesick,’ Crow Rigby tells Library Spencer the first time they see one, whereupon they plant their own so that the platoon’s tents have a nice neat look.

The roads between the tents are also neatly marked out with whitewashed boulders. Whitewashing stones and roadside boulders becomes the local equivalent of kitchooty. Spacious mess-rooms are erected for the men and the ramshackle grandstand belonging to an abandoned racecourse is turned into the ordnance store. Finally the tramway is extended from the causeway to the edge of the camp.

In no time at all, an Arab shanty town grows up along the perimeters of the valley. And while no houses, brothels or grog shops are allowed, shops of every other description tumble along roads and appear in self-created alleyways. The shops are constructed of bits of tin and box wood, canvas and any material which can be brought to the site and erected in a hurry.

An Arab merchant will arrive in the morning with a donkey cart piled high above his head, and his wife and a helper sitting on the top of the impossibly secured load. By evening, with a bit of hammering, nailing, tying and stretching of canvas and the laying of Turkish carpets, a new shop will appear on the desert sand.

Every imaginable service is suddenly at the disposal of the men, laundering, dyers, tailors who can whip up a brand-new uniform in half a day from army cotton drill mysteriously obtained, news vendors, photographers with painted backdrops of camels set against the Pyramids when the real thing is only a matter of yards away, dubious antique dealers, trinket shops, restaurants with stove pipes jutting out of their canvas and beaten tin roofs with live chickens and ducks out the back, for the slaughter of, bootmakers, carpet sellers, and every few shops there is a tea-room with a crudely painted sign, ‘Australians System Afternoon Tea’, as opposed, presumably, to ‘English System Afternoon Tea’. Miraculously, scones and strawberry jam are available, the former somewhat leaden but the jam surprisingly good, though clotted cream is not on the menu.

Before the winter is over, the little valley that contains the vast tombs of a civilisation more than four thousand years old, and where Numbers Cooligan’s biblical prophet first smote the gum trees into existence some fifty or so years ago, has become a dusty, thriving, bustling small city with all the smells and sounds of the Arab bazaar.

Hawkers are everywhere, small boys shouting ‘Eggs-a-cook!’ ‘Oringhes!’ ‘Boots-i-clean!’, selling hard-boiled eggs or oranges and working as boot blacks. Some with dirty postcards call out ‘Jig-a-jig-a-look!’ The coffee sellers and lime-juice vendors shout their wares and merchants stand outside their shops and beg passers-by not to miss the opportunity of a lifetime and to come inside. On one occasion, when the six ‘Aden lads’, who are now such firm mates that they seldom go anywhere without each other, are ferreting around the makeshift alleys of the Mena bazaar they are approached by an urchin selling dirty postcards, announcing them as ‘Jig-a-jig-a-look!’ Hornbill suddenly shouts, ‘Betcha a bob Herman the German’s in ‘em all!’

‘You’re on,’ says Numbers Cooligan as they crowd around the young boy. Sure enough, there he is, the same fat-gutted, curled-moustached kraut, with his balding hair parted down the centre of his skull and brought to two little wings above his eyebrows, bollocky, except for his socks and suspenders and, as usual, chock-a-block up a plump black-eyed woman.

‘Told yer, didn’t I!’ Hornbill says triumphantly, holding his hand out for Cooligan’s shilling.

While they are in Egypt, the name Anzac is born out of circumstances less than romantic. General Sir W. R. Birdwood, a British general stationed in India, is appointed by Lord Kitchener to be in overall command of the Australian and New Zealand troops and leaves India immediately to take up his posting. His job is to train the Australians and New Zealanders into a concerted and united fighting division. Before departing he writes to General Bridges and asks him what he proposes they should call the Australian Division when it is united with the New Zealand Brigade under his overall command.

Bridges proposes ‘Australasian Army Corps’, but the New Zealanders object to this. To them it smacks too much of Australia and not enough of The Land of the Long White Cloud. They finally settle for the rather clumsy mouthful, ‘Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’. Soon afterwards, the clerks in ordnance take to identifying goods received by the initials Anzac, which soon enough becomes the accepted acronym. Thus, in a simple and uncomplicated way, a legend is born.

General Birdwood, as it turns out, is an excellent choice as the commander of the two forces, for he lacks much of the fuss and nonsense and the reliance on due ceremony to which most of the ageing British generals are accustomed and which they demand as their God-given right. His easygoing outlook and genuine regard for the troops under his command will make him popular with the Australians and New Zealanders, who resent the rigid authority the British troops accept without questioning. He seldom if ever judges a man by the shine of his boots or deprecates him for the roughness of his voice or whether he salutes or addresses an officer with the right amount of respect, and actively discourages this form of sententious bullying.

He clearly understands that, in the Australian and New Zealander, he is dealing with a different sort of man. The antipodeans possess a genuine abhorrence of taking pains with their appearance beyond what is tidy and functional.

As General Birdwood once remarked to General Bridges, ‘They’re tall enough and big enough and, I daresay, more than brave enough, to make splendid guardsmen, but they’d never tolerate the spit and polish!’

To the amazement of their British counterparts, the Australians love fresh air and cold water and, together with their refusal to adopt an obsequious attitude to officers of almost any rank, this distinguishes them from a great many of their counterparts in the various armies collected under the Allied banner.

But it isn’t all sweetness and light at Mena camp. Never at heart regular soldiers, Australians off duty consider themselves civilians, full of high spirits and looking to amuse themselves by taking every opportunity to make the most of their time away from home. Like Napoleon’s troops and those of earlier British regiments stationed in Egypt, the Australians write their names on the Pyramids. They have money in their pockets and, after two months of being cooped up in transports without being allowed ashore at Colombo or Aden, they have adventure in their hearts. This makes for a highly combustible combination as they invade the bright lights of Cairo and Heliopolis, which proves not to be a city designed for the entertainment of young men and is lamentably lacking in respectable diversions such as sport, theatre or outdoor recreation.

Shepheards and the Continental Hotel, the only two sources of any sort of European culture, are, by tradition, reserved for officers, which leaves only the cafes, the bazaar where some are taught to smoke hashish, and the brothels and sex shows for the men. In the cafes the mostly Greek proprietors serve them poisonous arak and gut-wrenching meals and the brothels, with few exceptions, are diseased and dirty. Fired up with arak and a sense of being out on the town, the young men willingly follow touts to ‘exhibitions’ of the vilest nature.

The Clicks, led by Numbers Cooligan, set off in search of grand adventure. The tram from the camp is so overloaded with laughing and boisterous men that soldiers are piled onto the roof and bunch out from either of the two entrances, clinging to each other for dear life, all the way to the centre of Cairo.

‘If you think Aden was good wait till we get to Cairo,’ Numbers Cooligan promises those in the platoon who hadn’t been fortunate enough to be present at the now legendary Belly Dunce and Snake performance in Aden.

‘How do you know it will be better? I thought you said Belly Dunce and Snake couldn’t be bettered?’ Library Spencer reminds him.

‘Yeah, the best of its kind. But here they’re real serious, mate. It stands to reason, don’t it, Aden’s a pisspot city compared to Cairo. The bigger the pot the more piss it holds, get my drift, gentlemen!’ Which is about as close as Cooligan has ever come to a serious aphorism.

Carrying two months’ wages in their pockets they show not a scintilla of resistance when an oleaginous tout, with a pencil moustache and dark rings around his eyes deep as a boxer’s bruises, persuades them to see a woman copulating with a donkey. On a second occasion, another local low-life leads them to a large room which is more or less in darkness, with a single spotlight positioned over a small stage, under which and, in the presence of several hundred troops, a woman with pantaloons made of a diaphanous net material with the crutch missing, does the splits, picking up shilling coins which the troops throw onto the stage using only her ‘it’ muscles.