The Darkness and the Thunder

by Stewart Binns

  Serjeant Gough has heard the story more than once but answers no, knowing full well that it will improve Winston’s state of mind to let him tell it again.

  When the story ends, by which time they are deep into the gaslight gloom of Hyde Park, Gough turns to Winston. ‘Sir, no matter what anybody says now, they all wanted to go to the Dardanelles. And if it’s been buggered up, one thing’s for sure: it wasn’t your fault.’

  Winston turns away, anxious lest Gough sees new tears forming in his eyes, and tries not to let him hear the anguish in his voice. ‘You are so kind … and perceptive! I should have had you on my Admiralty Board instead of those ancient mariners calling themselves admirals.’ He increases his pace. ‘Are you armed, Mr Gough?’ he asks.

  ‘I am, sir. My Webley is tucked away discreetly.’

  ‘Good. You never know what we may find in Hyde Park – Zulus, Fuzzy-Wuzzies, the Kaiser’s spies …’ Winston pauses and turns to see Gough two yards behind him. ‘Come on, Serjeant, keep up. No slacking.’

  Gough smiles. He knows that Winston will be content if he can turn their casual stroll through Hyde Park into a do-or-die military mission.

  ‘Now, Serjeant, Omdurman – that was a battle to chill the blood. There was I, sabre drawn, my Mauser C96 revolver primed – we called them “broom handles”, you know, a very powerful weapon, saved my life more than once …’

  Part Six: June

  * * *

  HEAT, DUST AND DIARRHOEA

  Friday 4 June

  RMS Essequibo, Dardanelles

  After a relaxing journey by train to Marseilles and an equally pleasant crossing from France to Greece via Malta and Salonika, Margaret Killingbeck and Bronwyn Thomas have gone from the frying pan of the Western Front into the fire that is Gallipoli. The naked, searing heat of the flame will be much worse than the hiss and spit of the pan.

  They are about to board the Essequibo, a packet steamer that has been requisitioned from the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. Packet steamers have been hired for the military operation on Gallipoli because they are small enough to get close to the shallow shores of the Dardanelles Peninsula. This will, in theory, make it easier to get the sick and the wounded transferred from the beaches to the large hospital ships at anchor in nearby Mudros Bay on the Greek Island of Lemnos.

  They had an all-too-powerful taste, or, more accurately, smell, of what they are about to confront when they boarded the Essequibo in Salonika, where the harbour was covered with endless neat rows of men on stretchers waiting to be put on board hospital ships bound for Alexandria, Malta or Cyprus. The men were suffering from all the injuries and ailments they had witnessed in Pop-Hop but, in the hot, cramped, fly-infested and insanitary conditions of their minuscule bridgeheads on Gallipoli, dysentery and enteric fever have become the biggest killers.

  They are relieving Sister Mary Fitzgibbon, who has been working non-stop for over a month. She is physically and mentally exhausted and is being given leave in Egypt. When Fitzgibbon first sees Margaret and Bronwyn clambering aboard the Essequibo, smiling and cheerful, she is sceptical.

  ‘Welcome, Sister Killingbeck, Nurse Thomas.’

  Margaret and Bronwyn respond jauntily, but Fitzgibbon looks at their pristine QAIMNS uniforms with disdain. ‘Have you just come from England?’ she asks.

  Margaret senses the resentment and smiles as broadly as she can as she offers Fitzgibbon her hand. ‘No, Sister, Belgium. A major trauma hospital near Ypres.’

  ‘I see. Since when have you been there?’

  ‘Since the beginning.’

  Fitzgibbon’s face softens; her voice loses its English stiffness, allowing her soft Irish brogue to blossom. ‘Then you don’t need me to tell you what you’ve let yourselves in for.’

  ‘No, Sister, please don’t do that – just your medical report.’

  ‘Yes, well, where to begin? I have no notes. No time for that.’

  Margaret notices that Fitzgibbon’s hand is trembling and that she is looking very thin and pale. ‘Come on, Mary … May I call you Mary?’

  ‘Yes, of course you can.’

  ‘Come on, let’s sit and have a cigarette.’

  Margaret and Bronwyn help Fitzgibbon to the benches that line the outside of the cabins on Essequibo’s deck. The cigarette helps her relax.

  ‘You’ve chosen a bloody awful day, that’s for sure,’ she begins. ‘There’s going to be another big push at lunchtime. It’ll be their third crack at Krithia, a little town just inland, a place they were supposed to take on the first day! It’ll fail, of course, every bugger knows that, except the silly sods back on Lemnos giving the orders …’ She pauses to look at her nurse’s fob watch. ‘Ah, nine o’clock. They’ll just be having breakfast at HQ: scrambled eggs, bacon (shipped in specially from Gib), orange juice; no smoked salmon – there’s a war on, you know – but fresh coffee from the French and lots of nice pastries baked this morning. Bloody generals!’

  She takes a deep draw on her cigarette and throws her head back. ‘Where are you from, Margaret?’

  ‘A little valley in Yorkshire called Swaledale.’

  ‘Thought so. Didn’t think you were a swell. And you, Nurse?’

  ‘I’m a farmer’s daughter. I’m Welsh and proud of it.’

  ‘Good, then I can say what I really think. I’m Irish, from Cork – proper Ireland, not that bloody English city, Dublin. My father’s a vet and a staunch Fenian. He says England’s like a cow’s arse, nothing but shit and hot air comes out of it. So, let me tell you, the truth is the generals are fucking useless. Tosspots, the lot of them!’

  All three laugh loudly. It is not often that they are able to break free from the strict conventions by which they have to live every day.

  ‘So, we’re quiet now. We’ve unloaded our last lot and will wait here to see what this afternoon brings. The orderlies, most of whom are very good, are cleaning up below decks. It’s taken us three weeks to get rid of the horse shit down there.’

  Margaret and Bronwyn look puzzled.

  ‘The Essequibo brought horses and mules from Egypt – mangy things, but very useful. You can’t use motor ambulances on the mainland – too hilly, no roads – so everyone has to be carried by wagon or on stretchers. We lose orderlies to snipers and shellfire almost as quickly as we lose soldiers. You’ve seven nurses. They’re all good girls: five Brits, three a bit snooty but not bad; and a couple of Irish lasses. They’ve been here for three weeks. Three more to go before they get a break. We have no doctors. They’re on the hospital ships. Our job is to dress them as well as we can and give whatever medication is necessary. The orderlies and sailors help. Some of the Jack Tars have become very good. Our biggest problem is fresh water, especially now it’s hot.’

  Margaret is horrified. ‘We have to have water in these temperatures!’

  ‘You know that, I know that, but the bright sparks in Alexandria didn’t get their chain of supplies right. They sent five big lighter-ships full of thousands of gallons of fresh water. Two were sunk by submarines; two more couldn’t get close enough to shore because of the shelling. One that did get fairly close got stuck on a sandbank and had no means of bringing the water ashore. Like everybody else, the quartermaster’s planners assumed that all the bridgeheads would be taken with ease, allowing the water to come ashore by hose from jetties.’

  Bronwyn has taken to carrying a beautiful, oval-shaped, silver and crocodile-skin hip flask in her bag. It was given to her by an injured officer just before he died. The flask has a simple inscription on it, ‘PD’ in copperplate, and several dents from the same shrapnel that killed its owner, Major Peter Dawson of the Green Howards. Its contents, replenished many times with whatever is to hand, often revive Margaret and her. ‘Have a gulp of this, Sister,’ she offers.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘French brandy – not cognac, just brandy … Actually, it might be Spanish brandy.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you …’

  ‘Bron. Short for Bronw
yn.’

  ‘Bron, right now, a swig of poteen would do!’

  ‘So what happened to the water?’

  ‘They tried to run the hoses as close as they could to the shore, four of them. The lads on the beach saw them and waded out with their little canteens, buckets, whatever they had. There was chaos; most hadn’t had a proper drink in three days. Their officers couldn’t keep order. Most of the serjeants were as bad as the men. Fights broke out; shots were fired. The hoses were too big for their containers, so most of the water went straight into the sea. When they saw what was happening, other men ran further up the hoses and starting cutting holes in them with their bayonets. Eventually, they lost the lot.’

  The weary sister’s hands have stopped shaking quite so much.

  ‘We now have our own water on board, but it has to come from Lemnos every time we make a delivery. We’re good for painkillers and bandages, but blankets are a nightmare because of the dysentery – but I’ll come to that. So, this afternoon you will get what you are used to: a lot of injured and dying, shot, blown up – the whole textbook of injuries. But when you get them off in Lemnos and come back, if the fighting has died down, it’ll be back to enteric and dysentery. And they’re just bloody awful.’

  Margaret tries to sympathize. ‘We’ve had some of that in France and Belgium, and it’s getting worse.’

  ‘Well, here it’s a curse. You’re going to need strong stomachs, girls. Johnny Turk has no use for latrines, so his trenches are swarming with flies and maggots. It’s like one of the Plagues of Egypt! Our lads try to dig latrines, but there’s no room, and the ground is hard. Then, of course, no-man’s-land is full of corpses putrefying in the heat. In some places, the Turkish trenches are only a few yards away. It’s a scene out of hell itself. Dysentery has taken control.’

  ‘How do you treat it?’

  ‘We don’t! We just try to nurse the men, give them as much water as we can and keep them cool. The strong ones live; the weak ones die.’ Fitzgibbon looks up to the sky, shaking her head. Tears begin to form in her eyes. ‘It’s an awful, terrible thing. Their insides turn to liquid; first their faeces is like porridge, then cloudy beer, then blood. When the orderlies bring them in they tie string round the bottom of their trousers to stop their innards covering the stretchers and everything else. It’s all they can do. We strip them down, cut off their trousers with scissors and wash the men in the sea. The sailors run hoses for us, pumped from the engine room. It works well and the men are so relieved to be clean – not that it lasts long!’ Her tears roll down her cheeks.

  ‘There’s not much dignity for us. I use a sailor’s boilersuit – no underwear, because you’d never wear them again – and wash it every night. Whatever you do, be careful with your own hygiene. Keep your hands away from your face when you’re working and wash from head to foot in saltwater at the end of every shift. The sailors will arrange that for you in your cabins, which are not bad and have portholes facing away from the shore. But I’m afraid you may never get rid of the pong of diarrhoea in your nose. When you eat, don’t eat anything with a fly on it. If you do, the odds are it’s just left a bloated corpse on the mainland! The men can’t avoid eating the flies; they’re into everything as soon as a tin is opened. That’s what’s carrying the enteric.’

  Even Bronwyn, who has emptied more bedpans and cleaned more soiled men and beds than she could ever count, shivers at the thought.

  ‘They don’t get any clothes after that. There’s no point,’ Fitzgibbon continues. ‘We just wrap them in blankets and put them on deck. Those who can bear it go below decks, in with the horse shit, but now that we’ve got rid of it you can put more down there if you need to. But, be warned, it’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

  ‘It’s a painful death right to the end. It’s as if they’re being desiccated like a prune; they have so much pain in their bellies, shitting is agony, but they can’t stop. Even the strongest ones scream and cry at the end. If they were horses, they’d be shot to put them out of their misery. By Jesus, at times I’ve been tempted to borrow an officer’s revolver and put an end to it for them, especially when they beg me to!’

  Bronwyn tries to lighten the gloom. ‘So, what about the good news? Saturday night at the pub, a few beers, shove-ha’penny, darts, a sing-song?’

  Fitzgibbon laughs for the first time. ‘Afraid not, sweetheart. There’s drink to be had in the messes on Lemnos, but stock up when you’re there – this place is a desert in more ways than one. There is one highlight, if you like that sort of thing: we sometimes get a few Turks if they’ve been captured. They think British women – and Irish, it seems – are fair game because we’re prepared to wash naked men. So be warned, they tend to take out their little willies – and sometimes not so little …’ She winks mischievously.

  ‘… Sometimes several of the men at once, and masturbate in front of you.’

  Margaret grimaces. ‘How charming!’

  Bronwyn smiles. ‘Anything to pass the time of day!’

  ‘The British boys don’t like it, of course. A Turkish çavus¸ – that’s one of their serjeants – was doing it the other day. A big, hairy brute; he stood straight up in front of me, grinning all over his fat face. He had such a big belly I could only just see the offending organ. Anyway, a corporal, a Lancashire Fusilier, went up to him and shot him through his nether regions, then put one through his head. We didn’t have any more problems for a while after that.’

  ‘Did the Fusilier get into trouble?’

  ‘No, Bron. There were several officers nearby. Most were not very well, but one of them shouted out, “Put another in him for luck, Corporal!”

  Margaret and Bronwyn are beginning to think that volunteering for the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force may not have been a good idea. Fitzgibbon sees the concern on their faces.

  ‘There is one compensation. These men are suffering a living hell out there. When they see you, it gives them hope. There’s no finer thing you can do than that.’

  The two women smile at one another. Margaret touches Fitzgibbon’s hand. ‘Thank you for being so frank with us, and enjoy your rest in Alexandria,’ she says.

  ‘I will, thanks. I’m going down to Cairo to see the Pyramids. I’ve always wanted to.’

  ‘One last thing: who do we report to?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the other bit of silver lining: no one, really. The doctors ashore are young, inexperienced and too busy to be worried about you; those who survive, that is. The skipper here is a good old stick. He likes the ladies, so you can charm him into giving you whatever you want. Get young Bron here to show him a bit of Welsh ankle and he’ll swoon. So that leaves Captain Fothergill on Lemnos. He’s your CO, but you won’t see him; they’re swamped back there. In other words, you’re your own boss. You can suit yourself.’

  ‘What about going ashore? They must need nurses?’

  ‘Men only, orderlies only – strict orders from the top. “Too gruesome, too dangerous”.’

  Margaret and Bronwyn exchange a look. Bronwyn says what they’re both thinking. ‘Better than shovelling shite on this old rust-bucket!’

  The attack on Krithia began just an hour after Mary Fitzgibbon left for Lemnos. Counting the initial battle for the settlement on the day of the landings, it is the third Battle for Krithia. The second assault took place over three days, between 6 and 8 May. Australians and New Zealanders were brought in to help the beleaguered Lancashire Fusiliers, but it made little difference. One third of the men committed to the battle were killed or wounded. One battalion of Kiwis, the Auckland Battalion, lost 732 of its strength of 1,000, with only two of its officers still standing. Only a few yards of ground were gained, and at a cost of 6,300 British, Anzac and Indian casualties.

  Despite the enormous losses of early May, the attack of 4 June follows a similar pattern. It is not that Sir Ian Hamilton and his staff are buffoons or heartless men; it is simply that they do not know what else to do. As in Europe, war and its weaponry have
changed so quickly that they have outpaced the wisdom of those charged with leading men into battle.

  In the middle of a beautiful, blue-sky Mediterranean day, Margaret and Bronwyn stare wide-eyed from the deck of the Essequibo as the British battleships pour fire on to the Turkish positions. But they are short of shells and have recently lost their sister ships, HMS Triumph and HMS Majestic, to submarine attack, significantly reducing British firepower. It is, nevertheless, an awesome sight, one that the two women have never seen at close quarters before. In between the huge boom of their launch and the even louder crash of their explosion, they can hear the deadly Lyddite shells fly just over their heads with a piercing whistle.

  Bronwyn gasps as the hillside below Krithia erupts with multiple explosions. ‘Bloody hell, Mags, those poor Turkish boys.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but every one of them killed is one less to kill our men.’

  British HQ introduces a new but not necessarily desperately clever tactic. They pause the bombardment after thirty minutes: a clear signal that the attack by the infantry is imminent, which makes the Turkish defenders rush from their deep shelters to their trench firing steps. However, as soon as the Turks are in position, the bombardment is resumed, catching at least some of them relatively unprotected. The second barrage lasts for twenty minutes, until, with just a thirty-second pause, officers’ whistles, clearly audible from where Bronwyn and Margaret are standing, herald a mass over-the-top attack by the Allies.

  To the centre and the left of the attack the women can see flecks of British khaki swarm across Gallipoli’s parched countryside; to their right, pale-blue French dots flow over the ground. They can even see the garnet-red turbans of the Ferozepur Sikhs and the cherry-red Chechia fezes of the Senegalese Tirailleurs.

  However, the initial free-flowing movement of the men does not last long. The British artillery bombardment has done little damage to the Turkish trenches or the men in them. The chilling echoes of rapid rifle and machine-gun fire soon fill the air. They turn a smooth tide of men washing across the landscape into a macabre ballet in which bodies stagger, contort and fall until the specks of colour lying motionless on the ground far outnumber those still moving.