by RA Williams
Nobody expected Hamish Taggart. Particularly the onbaşı on whom he’d crept up. Leaping onto the terrified Turkish corporal, he wrapped an arm about his shoulder, covering his mouth and forcing the French Nail he held in his other hand into the back of his head where it met the neck. Just a slight crunch as the spike pierced the pioneer’s skull, and a few wiggles. That was that.
As he removed the French Nail, a welter of warm blood gushed over Taggart’s hand. He left it there, as though cupping a hand beneath a tap. Life in his hands. In no man’s land, he felt himself a god, the wild savagery offering ephemeral relief from his pain.
Rolling over the onbaşı, his hand fell upon a wooden handle. Sliding the hatchet from the corpse’s belt, he smiled, tossed the French Nail away and tucked the acquired melee weapon into his own belt. Collecting the pioneer’s identification discs, he began the journey across his personal slaughterhouse to W Company’s trenches.
Magnesium flares meandered across the sky, cradled by their parachute tethers. Taggart lay doggo, the piles of rotting bodies almost surreal under the flare’s glow. No man’s land was overlooked by knuckled ridges, bent wire piled in the nullahs to deny the British crossover points. Habitually, Taggart crossed lines in different places. Never did he return by the same route. At any moment, he could be under the eye of Turkish marksmen, but the blanket of night and his sodden khaki uniform offered protection. If there was a marksman looking for a snipe, all they could find in their crosshairs were ripening dead. Taggart, just another corpse.
His cutting blue eyes examined the terrain as the flares slowly sank to earth. The Turks had four machine-gun positions emplaced between Gully Spur and Fir Tree Spur, directing fire down on Gully Ravine – Taggart’s section of the line. For the moment, there was naught he could do but linger among the stench of death – an odour to which he had long since grown accustomed.
Darkness finally fell as the last of the flares burned out. Taggart waited an extra minute. Too often he witnessed Turk machine guns wait until the flares extinguished before scything entire companies with brutal efficiency. Worming his way along a dry creek bed, he crawled to a point halfway between Turkish and British lines, where the Royal Navy’s big guns had targeted a Turkish counter-attack across the meadow months earlier. Where once purple and yellow wildflowers bloomed, the shells had left a moonscape of deep crump holes in the tawny earth.
Staying to the lip of the bomb craters, he avoided the stew of decomposing bodies at the bottom.
Thunk.
A flare ignited where he had been only an hour before.
Remaining in the shadow of a crump hole, he waited for the light to sputter out. He was just about to move off when he heard distant sweet voices carried by the breeze, like a hymnal choir.
Surveying the ground ahead, he saw nothing. The choir resumed, closer, innocent and adolescent, like a boys’ choir.
Crawling to the crest of the crater, he heard it more clearly.
More flares popped. By their sullen glow, he saw it: a naked goblin, devoid of hair and brindle-coloured, it flopped about amid the corpses. Membranous wings struck out from a stickleback spine. Spring-heeled Jack. Like in the penny dreadfuls. The pain in his head must be playing tricks on him now.
Sliding the hatchet from his belt, he watched the little goblin crane its neck; the flickering of the flares revealed a ghoulish face. A pudding-like rash covered its head, festering sores surrounding its chewing mouth. As the light waned, the goblin turned away.
Taggart moved closer to observe its doings. It dived headlong into a mash of decomposing bodies.
‘Black shit and buggery,’ he whispered.
Spring-heeled Jack was necrophilous. Adjusting the hatchet in his sweaty hand, he scraped it against his belt buckle. The goblin thrust its head up, chirping. The boys’ choir sang out again. The fiend stared directly at him now, eyes black. The music ceased, replaced by a wretched howl as its spindly wings batted against the earth. Stumbling across the uneven terrain, it came at Taggart.
With a wraith-like movement, something collided with the goblin, a glint in its hand. The pair tumbled down the far side of a crater and out of sight. A miserable quark was heard, like a seagull in distress.
Then silence.
Thump. A lazy whistle – from Turkish mortar bombs. An impact showered him in clods of dirt and human muck. More thumps. The air rent with incoming bombs. Climbing to his feet, he made a mad dash for a crump hole to his right. Leaping forward, he landed on its lip as a hot whirlwind rushed down upon him. A stray leg bludgeoned him in the back of his head as he rolled down the side of the crater.
Regaining his senses, he slunk up the crater’s edge, squinting through the burning cordite vapour for another glimpse of the goblin.
‘Oi!’ A voice rang out.
Taggart went still.
‘Is that a Tommy there?’ the voice then asked.
After a moment’s pause, Taggart replied, ‘Oi.’
‘Johnny Turk has you ranged. There’s an abandoned communication trench fifty feet ahead. For God’s sake, come towards our line.’
Taggart wondered who on earth could be madder than him to be so far out in no man’s land. Making for the abandoned trench, he squirmed through a break in the bullet-riddled sandbag line. A sure hand pulled him through.
‘Who’s that then?’ Taggart asked.
A shadowed figure crouched on a fire step, pistol drawn. ‘A British officer.’
‘What you doing this far from our lines?’
‘I could just as easily ask you the same.’
‘Sorting Johnny Turk,’ replied Taggart, regaining his puff.
‘You nearly bought it out there.’
Trying to work out what he’d just witnessed, Taggart asked, ‘Did you see anything odd just now?’
‘Besides a daft Englishman dodging mortar bombs?’
The officer had brave balls, he had to admit. ‘There’s nothing out here,’ replied Taggart. ‘I’ve established a sap at the top of Gully Ravine already.’
‘With a pair of corporals brewing up their tea in it.’ The officer tucked his Webley away. ‘Inspecting no man’s land gives me an idea of what the enemy is up to.’
Taggart nodded, but he wasn’t listening. ‘I think I must be going barmy.’
‘Oh?’
‘Vagaries of battle,’ he decided to say. ‘I don’t fancy being questioned.’
Crouching on the fire step, Taggart looked out across no man’s land. ‘Which company you looking after?’
‘Y Company.’
‘I’m W Company,’ said Taggart. ‘You’re on my right.’
‘Captain Hadley,’ said the officer. ‘Balthasar Hadley. The lads call me Buster.’
‘Unless you want to be dead, Buster, I recommend you regain our lines. It’ll be dawn shortly.’
Taggart moved off, still troubled by what he’d seen.
Dawn blushed at half past four on the peninsula. Approaching British lines, a volley of rifle fire zipped over Taggart’s head.
‘Hold your fire, you useless gits.’
‘That you, Mr Taggart?’ came a distant voice ahead.
Crawling under a gap in the wire entanglement, he slipped over the sap, his most advanced listening post in the line. Manning it were Corporals Dodds and Davies, fusiliers of W Company whom Taggart shepherded like children. They stood on the fire step, rifles smoking on the sandbag parapet.
‘Cor blimey,’ muttered Davies. ‘We could’ve slotted ya. Why did ya not give us the password?’
‘We still do that, do we?’
The corporals stared blankly at Taggart. Looking down at his khaki drill jacket, he realised he was caked with a slurry of earth, decomposed flesh and squashed bluebottle flies.
‘Johnny Turk didn’t half give me a bad time of it,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘I’d kill for a gasper. Dodds,’ he added, eyeing Dodds’s tobacco tin. ‘Dig us a shag, eh?’
The corporal obliged, rolling him a cigarette. T
aggart put it to his lips, his hatchet shown in the flame Davies held for him.
‘What’s that ’orrible thing?’
‘Pioneer hatchet,’ he said, admiring the blade and its flat-backed head. ‘Johnny Turk’s engineers carry them. Perfect melee weapon. Brutally simple.’
‘What’s it for?’ Dodds asked.
‘Doing bloody murder,’ chimed in Davies.
Taggart shot them a sour look. ‘Murder is death without purpose. There is purpose to my butchery, so it can’t very well be murder, can it?’
Taggart made his way from Gully Ravine, dodging heavily laden mules carrying the wounded down winding dirt trails to the regiment’s narrow beachhead. Dugouts honeycombed the hillside. Something between a cave and a grave, dugouts were used as command posts, casualty clearing stations and lower-ranks bunkhouses. Every inch of bloodied ground was taken up.
It looked like a brigade slum.
Below, the beach was littered with the squalor of war – crates, tents and bullock carts. In a slapdash corral, mules were fed before the day’s hauling of ammunition and water to the front. A ship’s hull lay abandoned, stripped of everything of any worth, while fresh troops disembarked from a collier tied up to a flimsy jetty. Stretchers with the night’s wounded waited in the blistering morning sun to be evacuated. In the turquoise shallows bathed scarecrow-thin men. Further out to sea, the Royal Navy sat at anchor, the generals on board awaking from their slumber with a cup of tea and a dollop of fresh cream.
Cape Helles was obscene.
Entering his dugout, Taggart stripped off his filthy clothing. Yesterday’s khaki drill was laundered and folded on his cot, the gore washed clean from the uniform, if not his mind. Filling an enamel mug with brandy, he drank it in one slurp. Naked, he turned to leave. First Lieutenant Cuthbert Muirhead stood before him.
Taggart’s immediate superior, Muirhead was staff adjutant to W Company’s commander. He benefited, both in timbre and vernacular, from the privileged world of hunts and punting. Taggart had experienced none of this. He was of a class neither here nor there. The working class scorned him for attempting to escape, while Muirhead’s ilk regarded him with derision and contempt. Taggart’s relationship with Muirhead was akin to a pork butcher informing a rabbi of his intention to open a market stall next door to his temple.
‘Quite the ragamuffin these days, Second Lieutenant,’ said Muirhead, his eyes drawn to Taggart’s naked body.
He did nothing to cover himself. He had not a clue which way Muirhead swung, but if blokes were his thing, there were hundreds of them bathing naked off the beach that very moment. ‘It’s unwise to swan around here like it’s the South of bloody France,’ Taggart replied bluntly, pointing out the first lieutenant’s polished tunic buttons. ‘Makes a nice target for a Turkish sniper.’
‘Captain Burrows asks for the pleasure of your company. He’s not seen a written report from your section of the line in weeks.’
‘I doubt Captain Burrows has the first idea where my section of the line is,’ Taggart tut-tutted, crushing a buzzing bluebottle with his palm. ‘Nor you, Muirhead.’
‘Lieutenant Muirhead,’ the officer snorted derisively.
Ignoring him, Taggart grasped an Enfield rifle, slinging it over his shoulder.
‘Where are you going with that?’ Muirhead asked.
‘For a wash-up, Lieutenant.’
‘An officer does not carry a rifle.’
‘If they did, officers like yourself might get a bit more respect from roustabouts like me.’
Muirhead bridled with anger, but Taggart was halfway down the trail to the beach already.
Leaning his Enfield against a rock, he waded into the Aegean, a dirty wake trailing behind him. Swimming to an outcrop exposed by the low tide, he climbed up, grasped a handful of sand from a crevice and began scrubbing his skin.
‘You could scrub your skin raw doing that.’ A slim fellow with a lean patrician face but with eyes as black as Newgate’s knocker swam up. ‘You never get all the filth off.’
‘Know something about it, do you?’
‘A bit.’
Mounting the rocks, he offered Taggart a block of coal tar soap.
Taggart was taken aback. Soap was hard to come by. Accepting it, he noted the colour of the man’s skin. Pale for a veteran of the Dardanelles.
‘Just arrived, have you?’
The fellow didn’t so much as crack a smile, his flinty stare ruthless but lacking in cruelty. Even the likes of Taggart found it disquieting.
‘Have we met before?’
‘Both our companies transited from England on the same ship. You’re the second lieutenant who goes about with a rifle.’
‘Perhaps I like stroking my stock.’
‘An officer carries a whistle and a Raj cane, and the ranks pray a sniper drops him. But an officer who carries an Enfield? Men give their lives for an officer like that.’
‘Got me all worked out, have you?’
‘Captain Hadley,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘Balthasar Hadley. 2nd Royal Fusiliers, Y Company.’
‘Buster?’ The penny dropped. Taggart shook his hand, Hadley’s grip hard as marble. ‘It was you.’
‘I find myself in need of an officer with your abilities, Second Lieutenant.’
‘And what abilities would they be?’
‘A man who doesn’t care for questions.’
It wasn’t often Taggart was thrown for sixes, but Captain Hadley clearly concealed a secret. It was there, far back in the darkness of his eyes.
‘You can keep that chip of soap.’
Diving into the shallows, Hadley swam away from him. Surfacing, he called back, ‘In the meantime, keep scrubbing.’
Lounging in twill shorts and chula sandals he’d bartered off the Indian brigade in exchange for a German Luger, Taggart tried to make sense of what he’d witnessed in no man’s land.
Dropping a dollop of spittle onto a whetstone, he distracted himself by sharpening the edge of his newly acquired hatchet. He had no intention of reporting any of what he’d seen to his superiors. Burrows was but a scab needing to be picked away and bled. His quaint thinking had caused the deaths of hundreds of Taggart’s lads in ill-planned frontal attacks against fixed enemy machine guns. Killing Burrows would get him sent home and Taggart couldn’t have that. So, instead, he’d gone native, deracinating himself from the foibles of a proper British soldier.
He picked at his meal. Lentils and oats from the Indian brigade’s mess. He could smell the British spitters preparing the meals each day: bully beef stew covered with swarms of bluebottle flies just in from feasting on the dead. Nearly all soldiers on the peninsula suffered from dysentery. Not the Indians, though; they wouldn’t go near tinned beef and were all the healthier for it.
Muirhead knocked on his door frame, a stout Captain Burrows sauntering in ahead of him. Kitted out in a serge service jacket, riding breeches and ever-so-nicely polished riding boots, he was the very picture of colonial snobbery. Even his tie had the proper dimple.
Tucking his Wolseley helmet under his arm, he tweaked his perfect Kitchener moustache.
‘Stand to attention,’ Muirhead barked.
Leaving the hatchet on his cot, Taggart stood, arms akimbo, his stance slightly arrogant.
‘Surprisingly correct,’ remarked Burrows, inspecting the dugout. Knocking Taggart’s half-eaten breakfast with his Raj cane, he asked, ‘Issue with our messing?’
‘The beef smells like dead man. I prefer the Indian brigade’s petit déjeuner. Keeps the enteric away.’
Burrows’ moustache twitched.
‘I have received nary a report from you for weeks,’ said the captain, voice highly bred and pompous.
‘I’ve been busy.’
‘Doing what?’ Burrows asked, his cane tapping a glass jar filled with identification discs.
‘Giving Johnny Turk a bit of dreadful.’
Burrows turned to his adjutant. Muirhead responded with a slight nod, his gaz
e then darting to Taggart to gauge whether or not it had been seen.
‘No sniping. No reconnaissance. No enemy saps occupied. Yet in all the 29th Division, your four sections cause the most casualties to the Turks.’
‘I really cannot imagine how that information comes your way.’ Taggart gave Muirhead a look of daggers. ‘It certainly couldn’t be from you, First Lieutenant. I’ve yet to see you up the ravine once.’
‘I’ve duties here.’ He waved away a bluebottle snapping at his ear. ‘You would do well to remember that.’
‘I wish I had half a crown for every time one of those bloated brutes buzzed about my face at the front. You’d understand if you ever came round.’
‘Taggart, you are a rascal,’ Burrows replied, his disgust evident. ‘The most disreputable officer in the division.’
Taggart responded to this reprimand by taking up his newly acquired hatchet and testing its sharpened edge with his thumb, opening it up so cleanly it didn’t spout a drop of blood. Pressing against the slice with the knuckle of his index finger, his thumb began to bleed. Muirhead winced.
‘My sections have advanced one hundred yards in a fortnight. We occupy two of the Turks’ front-line trenches, have taken a hundred and fifty prisoners and killed twice that. We sent down only thirty-nine of our own – all with squitty bottom from eating that rubbish beef.’
‘How on earth can you claim such a remarkable figure when the rest of my line is stalled?’ asked Burrows, sitting his neatly pressed backside upon Taggart’s campaign chair.
‘I don’t send my sections out.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I don’t send my lads over the top. The Turk has four machine-gun posts commanding the heights beyond the ravine. As you know, they’re marvellously accurate. Your order for our aborted push on Krithia gave the chop to a hundred and forty of my lads, with no ground gained.’