The Passing Bells

by Phillip Rock

  “God pity them,” he murmured.

  CLANG CLANG . . . CLANG CLANG

  The ship trembled as the engines went full speed. The hazy sunlit bay drew closer.

  “Load all guns!” he called out.

  There was the clatter of ammunition boxes being opened, the sharp snap and clang as the coiled belts were locked into the breeches.

  “Open sights . . . one hundred yards!”

  They would fire at ghosts—at pulverized bone.

  The shelling ceased as suddenly as it had begun. The shore drew closer, palled in drifting smoke and dust, heavy with silence. He could hear the sigh of debris striking the waters of the bay like a gentle rain.

  “Away all boats!” an impetuous midshipman called out, his boyish voice thin as a curlew’s cry. “On to the beach!”

  The navy cutters slipped their tow ropes from the small steam launches that had pulled them in clusters from the transports and headed in a long line for the shore. The Dubliners were standing, bayonets fixed, the early sun catching the blades.

  “Up the Irish!” a Munster Fusilier shouted from the shadowed well deck of the River Clyde.

  Five hundred yards to the loop of sand. The cutters drifted apart, then regrouped slowly, fighting a strong current that boiled beneath the placid surface of the bay. Charles stared at his watch as interminable minutes ticked away. The collier was battling the currents now, surging with added power against the force of the Hellespont flood.

  “Blimey,” a machine gunner said as he glared past the barrel of his gun, “the shellin’ didn’t touch the wire.”

  Charles bent his head to a loophole in the sandbag wall. The man was correct. Thickets of barbed wire stretched the length of the cove and up the slopes. It was dew-wet, like a spider’s web.

  “The Dublins will have to cut it,” he said. “I hope they—” The keel grated against the bottom and the ship trembled and groaned, then came to a stop thirty yards from the beach. Footsteps hammered on the deck as sailors ran toward the stern to haul the big lighters around to bridge the gap of deep water. Charles looked through one of the side embrasures. The cutters were back in line and moving steadily toward the shore. It was so quiet he could hear the Dublin Fusilier officers and sergeants relaying commands. Thirty yards to go . . . twenty . . . ten. A bluejacket clutching a boat hook jumped into the surf.

  Was that a bugle? A faint brassy two-note call coming from the ruins of the village? Charles couldn’t be certain.

  “Did anyone hear—” he started to ask and then a haze of smoke sheeted the entire curve of the bay and the surface of the water was suddenly whipped into a white froth by the first blast of Turkish rifle and machine-gun fire. The soldiers packed into the boats began to scream as the bullets scythed into them.

  “Fire!” Charles yelled. The Vickers guns exploded like jackhammers, their noise drowning the cries of the dying Dubliners. Spouts of sand and clay traversed hillside and beach, but the Turkish fusillade didn’t slacken for an instant. There were no targets, Charles thought wildly. Not a Turk could be seen. There had to be trenches all along the slopes—narrow, well concealed. How in God’s name had the men in them escaped being blown to pieces by the bombardment? They probably had stayed back in the hills until the shelling had ceased and then had rushed down to their positions. There were only five beaches on the entire peninsula where troops could land. The Turks knew that and had had a month to fortify them and to rehearse their defense strategies. They had learned them well. In the water there was only death—the boats broadside to the beach, splinters flying from the wooden hulls, men tumbling into the sea or lying in heaps across the thwarts. A few soldiers managed to reach the beach and lay huddled behind a low embankment. A handful rushed the wire only to die among the strands.

  Bullets clanged against the steel plates of the River Clyde and thudded ceaselessly against the sandbags. The sailors trying to drag the lighters around from the stern were shot off the decks and catwalks. Other men took their places to haul on the tow ropes for a few seconds before the shrieking bullet storm dropped them where they stood or sent them flopping over the side. A few bullets were coming through the embrasures in the bags and two machine gunners fell backward. Other men instantly took their places, and the guns kept firing, belt after belt uncoiling from the ammunition boxes, the water starting to boil in the jackets.

  Charles slammed a fist against a bag and cursed under his breath. Why the hell didn’t they back off and signal the fleet to start shooting again? “Fucking goddamn madness!” He tapped the broad back of a Windsor Fusilier sergeant and shouted loudly to be heard, “Going to the bridge. . . . Take charge.”

  He dropped down the fo’c’sle hatchway into a fetid gloom, skinning one knee badly on the iron ladder. Bullets slapping the hull made the interior of the ship ring like a bell. He stumbled through the fo’c’sle, which was stacked high with wooden boxes of cartridges and the belted rounds for the machine guns, brushed past the sweating ammunition handlers, and half-ran, half-stumbled out onto the well deck. A platoon of the Hampshires was kneeling in tight masses against the high iron sides as bullets passed over them, cracking like steel whips.

  “What the bloody hell’s going on?” a white-faced subaltern said.

  There was no point in answering him. He’d find out soon enough for himself. The wooden ramps were being lowered over the sides; the operation was directed by Lieutenant Colonel Askins and a navy commander standing on the bridge, both men exposed to the fire storm and totally oblivious to it.

  “What the hell you doin’ here?” Colonel Askins said as Charles reached the bridge. The colonel was staring at the shore, lips compressed to bloodless slits.

  “We . . . can’t . . . dampen that fire with the machine guns, sir. Can’t . . . make a dent in it.”

  “I know. I can see that.”

  “Need . . . artillery . . . the fleet . . .”

  “Too late for that . . . committed now . . . bloody ship’s fast on the sands. Second wave coming in . . . now.” He moved his right arm in a jerky fashion, pointing over his left shoulder.

  Charles glanced aft. A string of launches and cutters packed with men were fanning into the bay.

  “Signaling them to bloody well stop,” the colonel said in a flat, tired voice. “General Napier’s leading ’em in. Thinks he’s Admiral bloody Nelson and turning a blind eye. Every son of a bitch wants the VC today.”

  The navy commander suddenly leaned over the totally inadequate barricade of boilerplate and sandbags that lined the bridge, roared orders to the sailors on the steam winches, then darted for the ladder.

  “Have to do it myself, damn it!”

  “That Unwin,” the colonel remarked dryly. “He’ll get his cross today . . . or a pine box . . . or both.” He looked at Charles with distant eyes. “It’s a bloody ball-up, Greville, but we have to stick it . . . get the men ashore . . . bayonet the Turk up the beach. No other bloody way to do it now. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good lad. Get back to your guns and keep—”

  And then he was dead, the top half of his skull spinning away toward the ship’s funnel, hair and cap neatly together, brains splattering the wheelhouse with a pinkish gray slime. Charles dropped to his knees and pressed his hands to his eyes to shut out the horror. There was no point to it. He knew that. Anyone seeing him would only mistake his cringing attitude for cowardice. He wasn’t afraid. He was far beyond fear. Terror created its own unique form of courage. It was just that the colonel’s death had come with such explosive suddenness, he hadn’t been prepared for it. The death itself was meaningless. What of it? He could have died at Tugela or Spion Kop during the South African war. Boer bullets had missed him. Turk bullets had not. He glanced at the long, sprawled, blood-draining body and stood up. A navy signaler crouched with his back against a slab of boilerplate and stared at him with hollow eyes.

  “Keep signaling the boats to stop,” Charles yelled.

  The m
an’s stare was fixed, like an epileptic’s. There was no point in telling him to do anything. He ran humpbacked from the bridge to search for the adjutant and tell him that the colonel was dead. He found the man at the bottom of the starboard bridge ladder, flat on the deck with Mauser holes across his chest.

  The broad, flat lighters had been lashed together in front of the bow; the debarking platforms sloped down along the ship’s sides from the sally-ports cut in the hull. Whistles blew, and men of the first platoon, A Company, the Royal Windsor Fusiliers, started down for the beach, running hard, the starboard platform rattling at their pounding feet.

  “Stick it, the Windsors!”

  Charles caught a flashing glimpse of Roger, revolver in hand, whistle in his mouth, leading his men down. Bullets slapped against the ship or ricocheted off with a whirring howl. It was like standing in a blizzard of lead, the ferocity of the storm increasing as the troops ran down to the lighters. Charles flung himself to the deck and lay flat behind the slim protection of a lifeboat davit, the boat long gone, rifled to dangling shards. He looked over the side under the bottom rail and saw to his horror that the ramp was empty, the platoon gone. A few men lay in the lighter in a bloody heap, the others in the water, motionless clumps of dark brown, sinking slowly, trailing plumes of scarlet. A whistle blew—the second platoon of A Company ran the gauntlet and withered away to six lone men before they reached the lighter. A platoon of the Munsters followed instantly and died as they ran, tumbling head over heels into the sea.

  Dead. Roger was dead. The realization materialized slowly. Dead and gone. One of the corpses in the lighter . . . or one of the bobbing sacks of khaki in the water. Gone. Vanished without a goodbye, a parting word. The insanity numbed him. He became oblivious to the fire and stood up, made his way slowly back to the fo’c’sle, and took his position again amid the steaming, clattering Vickers guns.

  “Blimey,” the Fusilier sergeant said, “I didn’t give you a snowball’s chance in bloody ’ell of makin’ it.”

  They were snug and safe here, Charles thought dully. The wider embrasures had been plugged with bags. The gunners were no longer bothering to aim their weapons because there was simply nothing to aim at. They lay on the deck and pressed the triggers while Turkish bullets cracked and hummed or thudded into the heavy sacks of white Egyptian sand.

  A major in the Hampshires crawled up from the well deck and shouted to Charles over the stuttering roar of the machine guns, “No more . . . chaps . . . going in. . . . Waiting . . . till . . . nightfall. Keep . . . the guns . . . firing.”

  Charles nodded and rested his head against the sun-heated bags. Through a peephole he could see the bay—the drifting boats of the second wave, filled with dead, countless bodies rolling in the surf, blood staining the water a rose pink . . . a Burgundy red. God, he thought, old Homer had been right after all. It was a wine-dark sea.

  12

  There were six officers seated in the first-class carriage when Martin Rilke got on the train at Southampton. All of them were back in Blighty after months in France, and they eyed Martin with icy contempt, taking in at a glance his age, state of health, the tanned color of his skin—and his civilian clothes.

  “Back from a nice holiday?” a major in the Durham Light Infantry remarked with stiletto politeness.

  “No,” Martin said as he struggled to place his bulging briefcase in the netting above the seat. “Gallipoli.”

  The thaw was instant. Cigarettes and stories were exchanged. Martin told the officers about conditions at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove; they in turn told him about Neuve-Chapelle and Aubers Ridge—a somber discussion of massacres as the train rumbled through the summer countryside of southern England.

  London sweltered in the July heat, but it felt cool to Martin after Lemnos and the peninsula. There were more travelers than taxis outside Waterloo Station, and, as he waited impatiently on the curb for an empty one, a young woman in a pale green dress approached him, eyed him disdainfully, and handed him a white feather.

  It was odd. Nothing had changed. The message capsules hummed over the ceiling wires and plummeted down on harassed editors and rewrite men, the Teletype machines chattered away, copy boys raced back and forth among the multitude of desks, and the presses rumbled in the distance like the engines of some great ship. It had been a year since he had sat at his desk in the glass-walled cubicle writing glib copy about English manners and pastimes. He wondered if the theater reviewer still came in each evening wearing white tie and tails. No, little had changed. A few new faces . . . another man at Jacob’s old desk.

  There were still shilling maps pinned to the walls of Lord Crewe’s sumptuous office, a map of the Western Front next to a landscape by Constable, a map of the Mediterranean pinned beside a Turner. Lord Crewe was as burly as ever, but his face was no longer bronzed. Ocean yacht racing was not a possible sport in wartime England.

  “Well, Rilke, I’m glad to see you back.”

  “I’m glad to be here, sir.” He sat in an antique chair and placed his briefcase on the oak dining table that served as the press lord’s desk. “I have quite a few things for you to read, sir. Journals I’ve been keeping . . . observations that would never have passed the censors in Mudros.”

  Lord Crewe settled back in his Biedermeier chair and folded his heavy hands across his vest.

  “I don’t like reading personal journals, Rilke. I like to read your writing in print—on the fourth page of the Daily Post—along with millions of other readers. Let me tell you something that you may not know. Those who wish to read about generals and the high strategy of this war read Repington in the Times. Those who wish to read about the flesh-and-blood men who are doing the dirty, dangerous jobs at the front read the Daily Post—specifically, they read ‘Gallipoli Sketches’ by Martin Rilke, as do the readers of five American newspapers, three Canadian, two Australian, and Leslie’s Weekly magazine. You have been away three and a half months and you’ve come back a famous man . . . an innovator. I do not hesitate to say that you’ve invented a new journalism—a new form of war reporting—not so much the story of great battles, but the stories of men. Human interest, Rilke—human bloody interest—that’s your forte. Now you’re back and I take it you don’t want to return to Gallipoli. I can understand that. A sideshow, Rilke. The main blows will come in France this autumn. Sir John French and Joffre have a master plan in the works and I’d like your next by-line to read ‘Western Front Sketches’ by Martin Rilke.”

  Martin opened the briefcase and removed his notebooks. The knowledge that he was known around the world, read in a dozen newspapers, had not sunk in yet. Even if it had, he didn’t feel like basking in the glow. His reason for leaving Gallipoli was contained in the notebooks that he pushed across the table.

  Lord Crewe rested a hand on them for a moment and then pushed them away.

  “I know what’s in these, Rilke. They contain everything that the censors would have tossed out had they read them. I’m sure that you depart from sketches and try your hand at comment.”

  “Lord Crewe—”

  “No, Rilke, not Lord Crewe. You’ve more than earned the right to call me Guv’nor.” He leaned forward and folded his arms on the table. His eyes had a sailor’s direct gaze. “I know what’s going on out there. Nothing you can tell me could possibly outrage me. A brilliant concept bungled very badly. The landings were a disgrace . . . a waste of brave men. Hamilton sitting on his arse in a battleship far at sea and allowing two thousand men to stand around brewing tea at Y beach while a couple of miles away men were dying in droves at Sedd el Bahr . . . and Hunter-Weston doing the same damn thing with the landing force at Eski Hissarlik . . . permitting them to lolly about instead of pouring more men into that spot and sending them on the double down to V beach to take the Turk in the flank. Botched! The entire enterprise mangled. And the insanity of the Anzac corps . . . all those men jammed on a cliff not fit for goats. It will take brilliant high-command thinking to pull a rabbit out of t
hat dark hat, Rilke . . . and there is no brilliance out there above the rank of bloody major! Now, what can you teach me in your journals that I don’t already know?”

  “Apparently nothing . . . but tell me, what does the average man on the street know?”

  “What he reads in the newspapers.”

  “Then let him read this, Guv’nor.” He tapped the journals with stiff, persistent fingers. “Run this on the front page . . . my observations and the comments of officers and men whom I’ve interviewed over the past three months. This is the real story of Gallipoli: a general staff that thinks the best way to go through a brick wall is headfirst . . . a government that’s playing politics with the battle, feeding just enough men into it to keep it going but not angering the Western Front generals by shifting all effort there. It’s a bloody mess, and the public has a right to know just how bloody and hopeless it is. If you people expect to win this war—”

  The lord’s fist came down on the stack of journals like a hammer.

  “We will win. We’ll win because if we do not, we cease to exist as a nation, let alone as an empire. The man in the street wants this war to be won. There is firm resolve on that point, and neither this newspaper nor any other will print stories that serve to undermine that determination by castigating our military leadership and eroding the people’s faith in the army to win through . . . eventually.”

  Martin smiled wryly and took from his pocket the tiny white feather and let it drift to the table.

  “Part of that resolve you’re talking about, I suppose. It was shoved into my hand outside Waterloo Station by a very pretty girl.”

  “It’s symptomatic, yes. I can’t say that I approve of that kind of badgering, but it does reveal what the civilian population feels about this war. They want an all-out effort—every young man of fighting age in uniform, the Boche and the Turk on the run, no matter what it takes. They read the casualty lists . . . no one draws the wool over their eyes on that bloody score. They know how many lads died at Aubers Ridge . . . Neuve-Chapelle . . . and are dying now in the Dardanelles, and they would hang any newspaperman in effigy who told them that those men died for nothing.” He leaned back in his chair and toyed abstractedly with his gold watch chain, threading the heavy links through his fingers. “I’ll tell you something, Rilke. Great changes are in the wind. This Gallipoli fiasco will topple many men and bring others to the fore. Asquith’s days are numbered as prime minister, in my opinion. Churchill’s career has been ruined. Kitchener’s powers are being blunted. Lloyd George and David Langham are on the rise. The conduct of the war will be taking a new turn . . . more statesmen and less generals calling the shots. I don’t know if that’s good or bad . . . we’re all feeling our way. There has never been a war to compare it with . . . no lessons of the past to guide us at all. I do know this, the war will go on until one side or the other breaks. This newspaper will report the war and that is all we will do. The day-to-day business of fighting it . . . the men and the events . . . the human drama as it unfolds. You write of those things very well, Rilke. You capture the bravery as well as the pain. I want you to continue . . . within the limits prescribed by the censorship regulations. Will you?”