by Tony Roberts
He set himself firmly against a convenient outcrop of rock, then unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged his khaki colored top off his injured shoulder. The wound was red raw and angry looking. It hurt like hell, and the bullet was lodged in there. It had to come out. He took a firm grip of the Turkish bayonet and held his breath, then plunged it into his flesh.
He groaned as the pain flared up again and waves of nausea flowed over him. Gritting his teeth he pushed the point in further and felt the point grate against a hard object. Blood began flowing from the wound and Casca uttered a low muffled howl of agony as the blade worked in alongside the bullet, then his finger took its place and he clawed in behind it, forcing the bullet out the way it had come in.
Suddenly it was out. He threw the bloody lump aside and sagged against the rock, panting hard, sweat dripping down his face. He slapped a bloody hand against the wound and held it there for a moment, eyes shut, while the intense pain subsided a little. Casca then looked for and found a piece of cloth he didn’t need – the bottom of his shirt. He sawed it off with the bloody bayonet. Folding it up, he rammed it against his wound and shrugged the jacket back over his shoulder.
“Let’s get going,” he muttered to himself and heaved himself up again. The path down to the beach was easier than it had been coming up, that was for sure. There were more men filing up, eyes full of worry. They’d passed the fallen on the way and the trickle of casualties coming down hadn’t inspired them much. But they were tough men and determined to do their bit.
The beach was chaos. Boats were beached up above the water line and one had been hit by a shell; it was in pieces and the timbers still burned, arranged in some grotesque giant circular sculpture. Two charred broken bodies lay amongst it. Men were coming to and fro, some in orderly groups, one or two dazed and uncomprehending, holding wounds that were going untreated.
Down by a particularly dense growth of scrub someone had set up a mobile hospital. Casca took hold of one of the wounded men and guided him along the beach towards the collection of boxes, crates and equipment that were underneath a wide awning, tied to rocks and the thicker trunks of the scrub. Doctors and medics could be seen feverishly working underneath the canvas roof, using hastily set up tables that clearly weren’t up to the job.
Bodies littered the ground as Casca pulled the dazed Anzac soldier into the hospital, and he had difficulty in stepping over the sprawled limbs. The smell was all too familiar to him; death had been a constant companion over the past 1900 years and he knew its odor. Young men and boys, all struck down far too early in life. Casca sighed. It would always be the way. In times of war, fathers bury their sons…….
“Yes?” snapped a tired and irritable doctor, who’d suddenly become aware of the two new arrivals.
“Uh, Doc, this guy’s hurt pretty bad.”
“I can see that – and you? You got a wounded shoulder? How bad?”
Casca shrugged, allowing the wounded man to be taken by the overworked doctor. “A graze, some blood loss but I’ll be fine.”
“Then go see the nurse over there, get it cleaned up and get the hell out of here and let us treat the really badly hurt. Go on.” The doctor was already peeling open the jacket of the wounded Australian, dismissing Casca. The Eternal Mercenary grinned, saluted the doctor’s back and drifted through the organized chaos to a flap where a quickly painted nurse sign had been hung.
A team of nurses were busy swabbing, cleaning and disinfecting minor wounds. Soldiers were sat quietly on chairs and upturned crates, stoically taking their none-too-gentle treatment, then obediently leaving once they were pronounced fit for returning to duty. The smell of alcohol and ether was almost like a physical blow as Casca stepped into the partitioned off area.
“Over here,” a female voice said. Casca turned his head to the right and saw a tall, willowy figure standing by a shaky looking chair. She was holding a bottle of what looked like some sort of antiseptic. “Sit down.” Very professional and authoritative, Casca thought. He looked at her, noting the smooth white skin, the large blue eyes, the strands of blonde hair. Very nice, he decided, smiled at her and sat down.
“Take off your jacket, please.” She had that nice, slow, sexy drawl that piqued his interest immediately. Gods! “I assume that’s where you’re hurt?”
“Yes, nurse, ah….?”
“Just nurse will do,” she said sharply. “You’re here to have your wound seen to, not to chat me up. I’ve had enough today with Australian sex maniacs.”
Casca chuckled, awkwardly taking off his jacket. “I’m not one of those. I’m a Canadian sex maniac.”
There came a long pause, and Casca wondered if she was considering where to hit him with the bottle, then he heard her make an amused sound. Not quite a laugh but close to it. “Well, that makes all the difference!” she said, then noted the bloody crude wadding Casca had shoved against the wound. “That been seen to by a doctor?” she queried, peering at the injury. It didn’t look fresh, as in today fresh, but there was blood around it that had only just hardened. It was all wrong, she thought.
“No, it’s not too bad, just needs a dressing and I’ll be fit to return to the fight.”
“A medical expert now, soldier?” the nurse asked, before applying a little of the contents of the bottle she had on the wound. Casca sucked in his breath as the ointment stung. “Oh, now,” the nurse chided him, “a big boy like you shouldn’t find this too painful.”
“I’ll survive,” Casca said shortly, eyeing the ointment. “This some sort of anti-septic?”
The nurse looked at him for a moment. “Yes. You know medicine?”
“Some.” Casca smiled to himself. Two thousand years of warfare had taught him as much about dealing with wounds as killing had. It didn’t make him any kind of expert in medicine, but he did know some treatments.
The nurse applied a new dressing and pushed him off the chair. “There you go, Mr. Canadian. By the way, what’s a Canadian doing in the Australian army?”
“Fighting,” Casca said, shrugging on his jacket. “What’s a pretty girl doing here in Gallipoli?”
“Get going.”
“Sure thing. The name’s Sandy Roman,” he said smiling.
“Sounds like a beach bum from Italy,” she said.
Casca laughed, then picked up his rifle. “Still not going to give me your name?”
The nurse stood there silently. Casca shrugged and pushed the flap aside. “Alison,” he heard her say, and he turned once and pursed his lips in a kiss before leaving. The main tent was getting full of bloodied casualties. Red stained bandages and clothing lay in a heap by the exit, and outside the rows of corpses was increasing.
Casca flexed his shoulder. It felt good enough to carry on. He looked up at the rising cliffs and listened to the gunshots echoing back and forth, melding into a single continuous roar. The fighting was intensifying. He was needed.
“You there!” a curt voice snapped close by. Casca saw a young lieutenant with a group of silent men behind him. “What unit are you?”
“Third battalion, First Brigade, sir.”
“Colonel Owen’s unit?”
Casca nodded. He wondered what these Anzacs were doing here. None seemed hurt.
The lieutenant cleared his throat. “At last! We’ve been looking for one of our men. We were separated at the landing and want to know where our unit is.”
Casca pointed up along a gulley to a point where a large ridge rose up like a huge terrifying wall. “Up there, sir.”
The men, about twenty in all, looked up and their faces went grim. “Well, lead on, Private,” the officer ordered, pulling out his six-shot revolver.
Casca set a stiff pace, plunging into the gulley and climbing fast. Two hills rose to the right and a secondary gulley ran away to the left, but Casca ignored these, as he ignored the huddled figures lying along the route. The men behind him glanced at them and their faces set even more grimly. Ahead, the ridge Casca had indicated loomed and men could
be seen on the lip firing ahead.
The gulley turned to the left and entered a steep-sided valley. A steep path led up to the right, and Casca led the group up. Bullets began striking the rocks close by, and the men began to duck and look warily about them. The lieutenant ordered the men up and they scrambled in a loose line up towards the firing. Casca crawled the last few yards to the summit and saw the captain who had arrived earlier organizing the defense of the ridge.
“Sir!” Casca announced his arrival. “Private Roman reporting back from medical treatment fit for duty. Another group from the beach has arrived with me, sir.”
The captain turned in surprise. “Thought you too badly hurt to carry on.” He examined Casca quickly. “Very well, your platoon is off to the right. Go careful, they’re getting bloody accurate. We’ve lost a fair few men.” He looked at the lieutenant and his men. “A bit late, Lieutenant, but you’re welcome all the same.”
“Lieutenant Becken, sir.”
“Very well, Becken, put your men over to the left. The Turks are trying to sneak through the gap you can see over there. Keep them away. If they can penetrate the valley head there, we’ll be cut off.”
“Sir!” Becken saluted and the new arrivals scrambled off away in the other direction. Casca kept below the lip of the ridge and made his way round, carefully looking at the legs and backs of the men lying on the stony soil. Some had begun to scratch out rifle pits, making things easier for them to lie down and to keep cover.
He saw the familiar figure of Jeb. Spent bullet cartridges lay in a loose pile to one side. “Hey, what’s going on?” Casca said, crunching into the ground alongside him.
Jeb looked at him briefly. “You’re back. While you were gone Tom bought it. Shot through the head.”
Casca groaned and rested his head on the ground briefly. Then he worked a round into the breech of his Lee Enfield. “Well let’s pay them back.”
“Good chance of that,” Jeb said nodding ahead. “Think these drongos are preparing to attack.”
CHAPTER TEN
Dusk was coming, and sounds of the Turks across the ridge gathering in a hidden fold of the land came to all of the waiting Australians. Casca lined his rifle along a slight ‘v’ in the rocks ahead of him and peered into the gloom. Behind them the sun was setting and he cursed.
“What’s the matter?” Jeb demanded, glancing at his comrade.
“The sun’s highlighting us on this ridge.”
“So?” Jeb grinned, “it’ll be in their eyes when they attack. They won’t see a bloody thing!”
Casca nodded. He wondered if the Turkish officers would wait until dark in that case. He thought they would. He fumbled for his spade and slid it out of the leather loop it had been hanging from. “Keep an eye on things; I’m going to dig in.”
“Keep your head down; that’s how Tom got his.”
Casca nodded and began scraping the stony soil away from the surface. It was damned hard work. The rock was partly rigid, but in other places it crumbled away like rotten wood. Others, too, were scraping away the surface to make their positions more comfortable and to give them extra cover. Casca was done in ten minutes, having carved out a shallow scrape, sufficient for the moment, so he nodded to Jeb to swap. Peering down the barrel he assessed the area ahead of them. There was about a clearing of perhaps fifty yards to the ridge where the Turks were gathering. It was dotted with scrub, rocks, loose stones and undulated gently. It would be perfect to dig holes there but it was dominated by both ridges and it would be suicide to stay there.
Fifty yards of killing ground for whoever attacked. Not a prospect Casca looked forward to if the people in command of the expedition decided an attack was to take place. All very well prodding a map with manicured fingers; running across it wild-eyed clutching a rifle into the teeth of machine gun fire was something else.
“I don’t want to have to run across there,” Casca said with feeling. He glanced to his right where Archie was smoking quietly.
Archie took one look at the open ground and grunted, spitting down the slope behind him. “Bloody suicidal to try if you ask me,” he said. “But I think those jokers over there are going to try pretty soon.”
The firing that was still going on was mainly to their left, further along the same ridge they were digging into. About half a mile away a small hill rose up, marking the end of the ridge, and it seemed the Turks were throwing everything at that position. It was hard to see in the gathering dark but it was worrying to see the gun flashes slowly progressing in favor of the enemy.
The captain, a man by the name of McConaghy, scuttled crablike across the slope and checked on ammunition and the state of the men. Casca shook his empty water canteen at McConaghy. “Any chance of more water, Captain?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said and vanished into the dark.
The sound of slight metallic clinking and scraping of boots on stone came to the waiting men. Eyes peered anxiously into the night, waiting to see if the enemy came at them. If other sectors were anything to go by, then they would. “Fix bayonets,” came a whispered voice from the left. The platoon all clicked their wicked blades to the business end of their rifles and tensed. It was becoming unbearable, the wait. Casca passed the time by placing stones on the ridge top, forming extra cover save for straight ahead. Much of the life of a military man was spent waiting. It was no good worrying about what may come; Casca was resigned to whatever was going to happen was going to happen. But he wouldn’t let that spoil him trying his damned hardest to get out of it unhurt.
The sound of something moving up ahead clearly came to him and he raised the barrel. Alongside he was dimly aware of the others doing likewise. The starlight gave some illumination and dark shapes could be seen coming at them. “Here they come,” Casca muttered, lining his sights up on the shape directly ahead.
Captain McConaghy peered ahead. “Right boys, let them have it!”
Casca squeezed the trigger. His shot was drowned out by a rattling fusillade. Bullets blasted into the advancing Turks, cutting down the first row. Gun flashes lit up the tableau and the creeping enemy could clearly be seen, still thirty yards short of the ridge. Casca worked the bolt, ramming the second round of the five-shot magazine into the breech. He moved the barrel slightly to his right and centered on a second Turk. Cries of ‘Mohammed’ and ‘Allah!’ rose up and the Turks suddenly burst into a flat run, determined to get to the Australians. Casca’s shot smashed into the chest of the Turk and he flew backwards, his rifle spinning into the air.
Another round was worked and a third Turk picked out. The shot smashed into his shoulder and the man span round in agony. But the twenty yards they’d sneaked had told and the next wave was almost on them. “It’s going to be the hard way!” Casca shouted and rose up as yet another Turk approached, screaming loudly. Casca’s bayonet sank into his gut and the Turk continued screaming, but now in pain. The blade was jerked free and Casca caught sight of a mass of men writhing together on the ridge top.
Casca stepped forward and met the charge of another; the guns locked and both men stood straining at each other. The Turk was a dark-skinned, black mustached man with tobacco-stained teeth. Casca had met plenty of Turks in his time, and he was little different from many. Bulky, tough, and fanatical. He had to be killed fast.
Casca feinted to his left but then suddenly transferred his weight to the right leg and the Turk, off-balance, fell and Casca slammed the blade hard into him. The Turk screamed like a pig in a slaughterhouse. Casca stabbed again and again, making sure.
A shot cracked past his ear, fired from very close. Casca swung round furiously. A younger man was kneeling a few yards away, reloading. He’d tried to save the life of the man Casca had just dispatched. Without thinking Casca ran down the slope and kicked the rifle out of the stunned man’s hands, then slammed the butt of his down onto the cloth cap. The Turk collapsed with a grunt.
All along the ridge the Australians were putting the Turks to the
sword. Tough, no-nonsense men, they’d outfought their enemy. Panic swept the Turkish lines and they turned and fled back into the darkness. “Get back to your lines!” Captain McConaghy yelled. He didn’t want his men running off into trouble.
Casca grabbed the young Turk by the collar and dragged him back to his shallow scrape. Apart from a headache he should he fine, once he came round. Better to be a prisoner than left out there in no-man’s land.
The man wasn’t very heavy and Casca guessed he was nothing more than a kid. He threw him unceremoniously to the ground and wiped his bayonet.
“Trophy?” Jeb pointed at the inert man. “Or planning to sell him to someone?”
“Very funny,” Casca said. “He’s only a kid.”
“Good fer you,” Jeb said heavily. “Won’t get you a medal though.”
Casca grunted. He wasn’t interested in tin baubles. What did they mean to an immortal? This young man may die in this conflict; he may survive. Casca at least gave him a second chance, even if it meant being a prisoner for the next few years.
The sergeant slid over and prodded Casca. “Why take him prisoner?”
“Only a kid, Sarge; I knocked him out, so I guess I’m responsible. Wonder how any of us here would feel if we were left in no-man’s land?”
Jeb growled. “You think those bastards out there would be that thoughtful? From what I hear they don’t give a damn about us. They’re not even Christians. Think they think the same as us?”
Casca shrugged. “Depends on their officers. Some are crazy, some fanatical, some stupid, some intelligent. If you get the wrong type then they’ll slit your throat.”
“Just what I thought,” Jeb said, vindicated. He nodded at the now groaning youthful prisoner. “He’s going to do his damned hardest to kill you, mark my words.”
The sergeant called Captain McConaghy over. The officer took one look at the Turk now sitting up and clutching his head and shook his own head. “Private Roman, take one other and escort this prisoner down to the beach. While you’re down there get us some water.”