by Tom Remiger
They had embarked in long shuffling lines, ordered to throw away the spades and picks they had carried so far up that track. There wasn’t much else to dump by then.
The men played cards, at first, and then after the lights went out they lay smoking in the dark, laughing at jokes that Breen could not understand. Their heads were propped against their packs. Their rifles lay at their sides like crutches.
‘Cheer up, Bosky,’ Christie said to him. ‘We’ll have another crack at the bastards soon enough.’
They were lying in a row: Christie on the left, then Breen, Granny, and Major Faulding, the battalion’s second-in-command. The dark gave their talk a surprising intimacy; it was easier when you could only see their eyes—maybe—in the dark.
Breen was snappy with tiredness, and with a guilty conscience. He somehow couldn’t quite face the idea of lying beside Sinclair, so he had avoided him. ‘I get enough of being bloody jollied along from Tiger,’ he said. ‘Don’t you start.’
The same exhaustion in Christie manifested itself jovially. Nothing seemed able to diminish him; ‘a very gallant gentleman’, a new colonel would say of him a year later, after he had been wrapped into the desert with his rifle stabbed into the ground above his head and his feet only in socks because someone needed his boots. ‘If you must look glum,’ Christie said, ‘look glum where there’s no one to see you.’
‘It’s strange to think,’ said Granny, ‘that only twenty-six years ago I was going the other way. Do you remember?’
‘I remember, Russell,’ said the old major.
‘We should sleep,’ said Granny. ‘She was a long retreat.’
‘She always is.’
The old men were talismanic. There was nothing special about them, except that they had been through it all before. It was as if each was consciously playing the veteran’s part. They had done all this, and they had come out of it not much changed, even after they had made themselves into machines. Once upon a time they had been here, looking up at the unfamiliar stars, and they had heard the boats hitting sand and known that this was it. They had heard the sound of muffled boots in the early morning, like earth landing on coffin wood. They had been there at Gallipoli.
Faulding and Christie slept. Christie snored slightly, an intimate sound. Granny sat up with Breen. He produced a whisky bottle from some unsuspected pocket, and he talked about Gallipoli. Breen thought that he was trying to be reassuring.
‘You had to listen to the rats,’ he said, ‘and the way they scuffled through the mud and the wet soil. They would drag up the fingers of the dead, and gnaw at them. It was this soft little sound you’d hear at night, like a saw going somewhere a long way off.’
Around them lay sleeping men, crammed into the companionway. Their mouths hung open as if they were dead, and Granny talked quietly to avoid disturbing them. He talked into the dreadful night, soft and relentless.
‘It was the third day that I first killed someone. He was coming out of a trench and I shot him, and he looked like he’d fallen over and he rolled down towards us. His arms were spread all over the place. It didn’t feel like it mattered much at all. It reminded me of when I was with someone for the first time. It wasn’t much of a feeling as I rolled off her. It was, oh, that is done, and a good thing too. Now I know how it feels, even if the world hasn’t changed very much.’
He paused for more whisky. Breen poured it for him, into the tin pannikin Granny had preserved through the vicissitudes.
‘But then you started to think, the real feeling was in the moment before and that hour or so afterwards. You know, that slow feeling from your navel to your thighs, afterwards.’
Breen must have been conceived not long after Granny had this feeling. It seemed like it must have been longer ago. He didn’t know why he thought that.
‘I watched him roll down the hill, and I thought: But I have shot a man, because it seemed as if nothing had changed. I watched him roll into a little dried-up stream, and it didn’t feel any different from shooting a rabbit or watching a man fall down a hill. I had expected something like a splash of cold water onto the face. I went out there, a little later, when we stopped to bury the dead, and I looked into his eyes and it was strange. But by then the flies had got to him. There were little drifts in the sand where his legs had spasmed. It didn’t really seem to matter.’
This was the only real talk that Breen ever had with Granny. It must have felt important enough that Granny mentioned Breen to his wife. Later there arrived for him a letter from her asking for more details about how he died, enclosed inside one for Faulding. She had somehow picked up the idea that Granny had lived longer than he did—and it was all far too difficult for Sinclair, the recipient in default, to explain. It was not that he had failed in any way, but it was hard to make his end heroic.
‘Do you ever feel guilty?’ Breen had asked Granny. But it was too late. Granny seemed to be asleep. He lay still.
The night passed slowly into a foggy dawn.
Christie moved in his sleep and his arms went around Breen. ‘Ruth,’ he said. Breen gently removed his arms. ‘Ruth,’ said Christie again, reproachfully.
After a while, Breen slept. He dreamed of his sister’s kitten. It walked along the grass in the direction of the washing line at his mother’s house, and then in the dream he was lying on the ground and it was leaping very fast at his face, growing larger, its mouth open and hissing, its face all eyes and teeth.
He jolted awake, and instinctively he found himself mouthing, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners…’
22
They landed in Crete in the afternoon. It was the twenty-fifth of April 1941, and the men coming off the ship looked about themselves in a strange way. Most of them had been asleep for a long time. They looked pale, and it was odd to see so many unshaven men. There was a sense of coming back into reality after the dream of Greece, reinforced by waking in a new place with a bustle of uniforms.
Breen’s and Bluey’s platoons were to be piled into one small boat. It sat heavy in the water, under the bright sun.
Waiting at the quay was a tall and strong-looking English sergeant with a country voice and shoulders like a bulldog. Breen wanted to sit and look at him and do what that English voice commanded. He was tired. He could hear the refugee lawyer saying sehr müde. He understood now. It would be so easy to sit in one place and wait. To hear unworried orders felt like listening to the heavy radio at home.
Parkinson was in front of him, still carrying his Bren. The man was a miracle: a Bren, a rifle, a spade. God knew how many rounds of ammunition, or how he’d smuggled a spade aboard.
The voice was becoming increasingly curt. There was a weary haze. Breen shook his head like a horse irritated by flies, feeling as if his ears were twitching. He knew he needed to listen.
Parkinson was looking beseechingly at him. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Heavy weapons to that pile, sir,’ said the curt English voice.
‘You’d best do as he says,’ said Breen.
‘Sorry, sir, but I’m buggered if I’ll do as he says.’
Breen looked at the English sergeant. ‘Look, what’s the point of this?’
‘I don’t know, sir. They’ll be redistributed to them as needs them.’
‘This man carried the beast up the highest mountain I ever saw.’
‘Mud from arse to breakfast,’ said Parkinson.
‘That doesn’t prove that he needs it more than others might.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Breen to Parkinson. ‘You must understand that we can’t have those who are in need going without. There’ll be an equitable distribution; I’ll make sure you get one.’
‘Fifth columnism, I call it,’ said Parkinson, in what Breen hoped was a grumble of consent.
Breen’s words were going again. He had fallen into an English pattern of speech. He wanted this: someone to tell him what to do and take the responsibility away. He felt like a lost dog willing to obey any comman
ding voice.
Parkinson looked as if he were about to submit, but before he could do anything Bluey was coming down the waiting line. The men turned to let him past, a stream rippling. His forage cap was askew; it looked as if he had been sleeping under it. He made the Englishman seem smaller. ‘Sorry, sergeant,’ he said. ‘We’ve orders to keep ours.’
‘Very good, sir.’ The Englishman turned to harass the next lot down the gangway.
‘First I ever heard of the orders,’ said Parkinson. He was grinning.
‘Get on with you,’ said Breen.
‘Thanks, sir.’ Parkinson was talking to Bluey, not to Breen.
The sergeant hadn’t given up. He gave a shout. ‘Who’s in charge of this lot?’
Sinclair came over, smiling. Breen tried to show affection in his expression in a way that he alone could recognise, but it was too difficult. The captain had appeared without warning. He ignored the sergeant. ‘You’re Parkinson, aren’t you? The one who carried a Bren up the whole pass. The rest of us put them on the bloody bicycles.’
‘That’s me, sir.’
‘And this man’s causing trouble?’ Sinclair was speaking to the sergeant, but just for a moment his eyes slipped sideways towards Breen, and Breen smiled for him.
‘No, sir. Only there seems to be confusion. I’ve orders to collect Brens and Boys and mortars for redistribution, but these men are saying that—’
‘We’re to keep ours. The ones who held on to them are most likely to make the best use of them.’ He turned to Parkinson. ‘Carry on.’
Breen went on down and sat next to the growing piles of heavy equipment, waiting to hear what his platoon should do next. The men bunched together under a row of almond trees, looking dirty and defensive. There were faces missing. But there was nothing Breen could do about it.
He poked a finger at the reddish earth, dry and crumbling. There was an electric crackle of cicadas, going furiously, and a resinous smell, like eucalypts.
Tiger came over to him. He and the colonel had been first off the ship. ‘It’s Anzac Day.’
‘Yes,’ said Breen, not wanting to engage with Tiger or with the ghosts of history.
‘Will we be doing anything?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘That makes sense. It’s a pity.’
‘It’s our day now.’
‘I suppose it is.’
The captain reappeared. He had a sketch map in his hand. He pointed at it, to the side of a hill just out of the town. ‘The colonel says to report here with your men in two hours.’ Then someone was talking to him, softly and quickly. He laughed and turned away. ‘It’s a transit camp,’ he said as he was going.
‘I’ve never seen a transit camp worth seeing,’ said Breen.
‘There’s no hurry to get there.’
‘Bombs,’ said Tiger. The wreck of a ship was in the harbour. ‘I hope my boys get ashore soon.’
They were ordered away by a presence of ambiguous rank.
Breen moved away. ‘I’m waiting,’ said Tiger. ‘I’ll see you and the boys up there.’ He looked young and stubborn.
They were swept up and harried along. Each time they tried to stop to reorganise themselves, another hectoring voice arrived. There was a rabble of men pushing past them, looking for their mates, slowing down as the hill steepened, wandering dozily as they looked at a new country. A placid chaos wandered the roads.
A familiar platoon went past in perfect order, their giant of an officer at the head of them.
‘Trust the jammy bastard,’ said Breen. He tried to keep his voice light.
‘You can’t help but admire the boy,’ said Bluey.
Tiger hadn’t even turned to look at them.
They found a creek and ordered a halt to wash socks before they were pushed onwards. They could see nothing ahead of them, but there was a surge of enthusiasm through the crowd as word came back of something. They rounded a corner.
‘You beauty,’ said Bluey. ‘Hold the bloody line.’
There was a row of little trestle tables like school desks. There were some of the Welch Regiment behind them. On the tables were oranges and chocolate, cigarettes and—this was the beauty—hot sweet-looking tea.
The river of men began to develop eddies.
Parkinson was there. ‘An orange wouldn’t have been a fair swap, would it now?’
‘You’d have been quicker up the hills,’ said Breen. ‘Dance on up and check there’s more of the Welch doing their bit for the empire. We’ll never get a look-in here.’
Parkinson reported there were more.
‘Sir,’ said Gibson from close behind him, ‘you’re almost as cunning as a corporal.’
‘Gibson,’ said Breen.
‘Sir?’ The sergeant knew what the order would be. He was alert and birdlike, with hungry eyes.
‘Get the lads together here, but don’t let them make a start of it. We’ll take them further up.’
It was a miracle how loud a sergeant could become, when he wanted.
‘Tell them why,’ said Bluey.
After some tea the going seemed much easier. It was generous to call the place they arrived at a camp rather than a map reference. There were no tents, no blankets, no mess gear.
Tiger’s platoon was there already, all of them. At first they looked like a family brushed up for church, but a closer inspection revealed discordant themes. Their uniforms were rumpled and some of them were cutting down petrol tins to cook with. They still seemed disciplined and fit, but their faces were stony.
‘Have a cigarette,’ said Gibson to Tiger.
‘What do you make of it?’
‘Tiger, sir?’
‘Crete.’
‘I’ve seen worse. What happens now?’
‘We’ll be back in Egypt quick as you like. It’s just a matter of getting the boats back to Greece more quickly if they dump us here.’
‘A week, you think?’
‘If that.’
The next day they learned they were going to stay on the island. They left the camp and marched to the west, towards an aerodrome named Maleme. It was not far. The landscape was much more like home than anywhere else they had seen.
Entrench first—sangar or slit. Don’t rest on arrival. The lessons on laying out a defensive position had been well learnt. They had read several pamphlets, and a Welshman stuck in the Home Guard had given them a lecture where he talked about Spain.
The battalion had three spades, a shovel borrowed from a local woman who dressed like a crow, and one pick. They thought they were pretty handy with a spade, but it wasn’t easy.
Once the slitties were dug—two-man jobs in the shape of a V, nice and narrow in the stony and root-wound soil—they fell into a dreamlike state where the same nothings happened as each day went by.
Rumours flew about, darting on scraps of fact and carrying them away. Mussolini died at least ten times; oddly enough, Hitler never did. The Canadians landed in more places than you would have thought possible.
Breen watched the Mediterranean from his platoon headquarters: a ground sheet, two blankets, and his and Moohan’s greatcoats. The sea really was blue. They had their ten days of perfect weather. The light had the piercing, liquid quality that he associated with New Zealand.
If Breen turned the other way he saw a valley split by a cold deep stream. At each bend water spilled over into marshy ground, blurring the boundary between stream and marsh. You stepped in the damp earth, and the water seeped into the boot prints. There were many frogs. Although it was difficult to see anything of them but ripples, they croaked their defiance. The sound would become as reminiscent of Crete as that—like two pebbles being lightly struck together—of the tortoises mating.
The revelatory light came lancing back at him from the glossy leaves of the lemon and orange trees along the base of the valley. The duller olive trees on the slopes were like native bush at home. Perhaps they were a little more grey. It was a long time since Breen had seen wha
t the trees were like at home.
For those ten days, each morning at 5.15 the patrol woke Breen and Gibson. At 5.30 was stand-to, the men armed and ready for an attack. Without encumbering tents, they would drag their blankets with them, and at stand-down dive back into them. Everyone kept an anxious eye out for rain.
Then there was a restless dozing until breakfast. The beginning of the day was symbolised by the lucky few who had shorts changing into them from battledress trousers. It was hot during the day.
The mornings were card games, and an unlucky few sent to make up water parties and ration parties. The platoon went to bathe in the Mediterranean by sections.
Then lunch, the same, and tea at 5.15 p.m., the fires starting up at 5.00 on the dot.
Another stand-to in the evening, and then to bed. Breen and Gibson and Moohan all shared the same groundsheet and blankets. Breen would lie awake smoking until the snoring got too much for him to think. Then he would sleep.
They were short of tobacco.
‘What you do,’ said Moohan, ‘is you take one of your papers, and you take a pinch of tea leaves, and you roll them up, and then you take big deep breaths like this to keep them burning, and it’s almost as good.’
They were short of firewood and had no stoves, no cooking gear and no dixies; so they cooked in the evening over open fires, worried by the columns of smoke rising into the blue.
Breen had grown used to a cup of tea in the morning, but it was food that became the great obsession. They ate oranges; they drank oranges. To him Crete meant that sweet citrus bitterness and the rim of orangey-white under his fingernails. Every day at about eleven the kids selling oranges would turn up, begging in a queer piping English. It was difficult to resist them and so every man ended up with a low-grade dysentery.
Most of their food came out of old tins: meat and vegetable stew mainly, but strangely in the middle of all this sun-warmed fruit, tinned pears. They ate and drank out of the discarded tins; the water carriers went down to the creek with old petrol tins from the aerodrome, so that every cup of tea had an unpleasant metallic tinge.