by Jim Haynes
An Anzac Muster was written in a very oddly stylised literary fashion to replicate Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and was issued in an edition of one hundred copies that are now exceedingly rare. Baylebridge never married and lived the last twenty years of his life in Sydney, where he died in 1942.
A DREAM OF ANZAC
WILLIAM BAYLEBRIDGE
This story is a fictional account of a soldier’s dream, which weirdly predicts how Australians would feel about Anzac decades after it occurred. Strangely it was written during the event and assumes that the Turks would be defeated, yet it predicts with eerie prescience the way we celebrate the Gallipoli campaign a century later.
***
By 8 August the gallant 29th Division had pushed well into the containing battle at Krithia. At Lone Pine the 1st Brigade of Australian Infantry had taken the Turkish positions, and the New Zealanders, the right covering column of the main attack, had charged and secured the almost impregnable old No. 3 Post.
The gullies, won at a bitter price in blood, were open to the two attacking columns which, even now, were advancing to the assault.
The Turks, threatened as they had never expected to be, put forth their entire strength to cut us off from the crests that meant final victory. Their reserves were brought up in great numbers to meet this threat which, had the odds not been insuperable, would have meant an end to their hopes.
The men of our right attacking column, paying with their lives for every foot of territory won, toiled up the gullies and formed a rough line up past the Table Top. Then they threw themselves into the confused struggle, which led on towards the stubborn heights of Chunuk Bair.
Our remaining column, the Australians and their comrades on the left, laboured up the crags and across the chasms of the Aghyl Dere. They had set their hearts on attaining the high ultimate goal—Koja Chemen Tepe. This peak, dominating the whole peninsula, was the key to make victory ours.
In this last column there was a Queenslander named McCullough. Because he was much given to dreaming queer dreams, men called him the Prophet. But, though his strange dreams and premonitions had run to many new and strange things, none were as strange as this delirious dream he was living now. To any sane man this advance seemed to be the nightmare of a madman.
With their blood up, and with a will that was more than human urging them on, these men struggled forward, cursing, killing, almost drowning in the billowing smoke and dust spread by exploding shells. Great masses of earth were torn away and entombed them. Men were spattered with the bowels and brains of comrades. The hungry wire raked at their flesh, and was left dripping with their blood. Bombs and bayonets dispersed them on the shaking earth.
Night turned to the agony of dawn, and day to night again, and those who were not dead still moved on. Many would think that those who had been left in the scrub below, now just shapes without human meaning, were the lucky ones, for they had done with all this agony.
And in the shambles down there—one of those countless uncommemorated souls—lay Pat McCullough. He had struggled on with that marvellous company of men till he was exhausted from his wounds, his sight had become confused and his senses had lost their reckoning. Then he had dropped in a limp heap beside that track, a track watered with the blood and sweat that shall give it significance, and sanctify it, to Australians forever.
***
When McCullough woke, he found himself among boulders in a small depression, shut in with scrub. He stretched himself, rubbed his eyes, yawned, and sat up. The air was clear, and almost without sound. There was some touch of freshness that told him it was still early in the day. Nothing looked amiss—a pair of doves sat preening each other on a fir bush. Up aloft an intent hawk cut lessening circles against a background of pale blue as if he had sighted some business in the neighbourhood.
‘Strange!’ thought McCullough. ‘How did I get here?’
He scrambled to his feet, took a few steps into the undergrowth, and discovered that the ground about him was the summit of an insignificant hill.
In a flash all that he had been through came back to him—all that had happened before this awakening—that mad scramble to death or victory up the blood-sodden gullies.
But what was this?
Pressing his hand to his forehead, as if to help his memory, he gazed about in an effort to understand. The place looked, he thought, like the discarded pit some artillery battery had used.
‘Strange!’ he repeated.
What struck him was the weird stillness of the place. The roar of our guns, the heavy rumbling of far-off howitzers, the bursting of shells, the vicious snap of rifles, the shouting of men on the beach, the human noise of men cursing, or singing at their work, or crunching along hard roads were all gone. The thousand sounds of war that once echoed through these hills might never have been.
It was so quiet. What did this mean?
And then, in a flash of perception, a reason came.
Deaf! Of course, he was deaf. Had he not been partially deaf many times before from the artillery and shrapnel? His hearing had gone now for good.
Yet, even as he asserted this, he knew that he was not deaf. A fitful morning was blowing in from the sea, flapping the leaves of a shrub nearby. That, beyond question, he heard. Yes, and he also heard, up in the silent air, a lark singing; and there were pigeons, in the scrub below, making an audible job of their wooing.
‘Surely,’ he thought, ‘I am still Pat McCullough, and this is Anzac; but, if that’s so, my wits are totally out somewhere.’
There was plainly need for some tough thinking; and selecting a spot for this, he sat down to do it. He felt his limbs, gingerly, with trepidation. They were as solid as a rail—the scarred but substantial flesh and bone of a soldier—and none, thank God, missing!
Then it struck him that he had no clothes on: he was bare. In the same breath he felt a queer tickling on his belly and found that a great bunch of hair had set up the titillation.
‘What’s this?’ he began and then, breaking off, stroked his chin and burst suddenly into a laugh.
‘A beard!’ he exclaimed. ‘Verily,’ he laughed, ‘the Prophet hath his beard!’
So grotesque did this transformation seem to McCullough that he questioned his very identity. Had he died down there in the gully? Was this mystery to be explained by the transmigration of souls? Had he left his former flesh and gone, by some dark process, into a different body?
It flashed on him, at this point, that he could clear up this question easily.
He felt under his left breast. The old scar was still there! Another piece of shrapnel, he remembered, had knocked two teeth away on the right half of his jaw. He put his hand up, and found the gap.
He brought to mind other marks, marks that had cost the foe something—and these he went through carefully till he was convinced he was McCullough. This was his skin, and the same bone, and the hair—at least some of it—that had gone shearing with him from Carpentaria to down below Bourke.
Having settled this point, he breathed easier.
The next question to clear up was the identity of the place. Though the soil and the scrub were certainly just as at Anzac, this silence was uncanny. It was entirely out of keeping with the stir and ear-shaking noises that never stopped on the battlefield.
McCullough got up, and made for a little spur which, as he expected, commanded a good view of the country round about. He pushed carefully through the gorse, taking great care to protect his bare flesh, and came out onto a crumbling pinnacle, running almost sheer to the ravine below.
The land beyond this ravine was fairly flat; it was patched with crops, and carried groves of grey-leafed olive trees. This part he did not know well; but that hill in the distance, that stubborn-looking lump on the skyline, was surely Achi Baba, a hill of many memories.
To McCullough, the weightiest thing in life now was to make sure.
Picking his way to another spur, he looked hard and long. Before him, now, lay a c
onfused mass of broken hills. McCullough rubbed his eyes. Surely he knew that landscape, and that peak! Hell and death, he ought to! But what was that great, imposing mass, stuck there on the top of it?
The peak should be Koja Chemen; but the building, or whatever it was, that caught the rays of the ascending sun on its bright surface, what was that? And what were these other marks—that looked so odd here—these structures (if they were indeed that) which had cropped up where, until now, only snipers had crawled? Was it Anzac, and yet not Anzac? Or was he mad? Or was this dreaming?
Noting the position of the sun he pushed over to that side of the hill which, if the place was still what it had been, must look out to the Aegean Sea.
What he should see there would fix it. There would lie the swarm of multi-shaped barges, laden with munitions for both guns and men, and longboats, lined with the wounded, would be putting out in tow to the hospital ships. The fidgety destroyers and the battle-ships would be there, and the bones of wrecked shipping, too.
A few steps now, and one glance would decide it. He would soon know how his case stood, for the scene was as well known to him as his own home. Hurried forward by these thoughts, he shoved his way through the brush, and stood breathless on the hill’s edge.
If McCullough had found marvels before, now there was really something to gape at!
What could this mean?
There was the beach he had fought up in that ghostly dawn of the twenty-fifth. He knew every foot of that. There, before him, was the first ridge—heaped, when he had seen it last, with almost its own weight of stores, and honeycombed with dugouts. But, there was no trace whatever now of those stores, and there, in the near distance, lay the scarps under which they had so recently fought that bitter fight, on the seventh, eighth and ninth of August . . . this August? . . . last August? . . . or what August?
His eye, still in quest of a solution to this riddle of the familiar and the unfamiliar, travelled back to the beach, curving around, in the shape of a boomerang, to Suvla.
It was the beach, positively, beyond doubt, where men had laughed, and cursed, and swum, and died. Ah, what soldier who had taken his baptism there could mistake it? The waves of the blue Aegean Sea broke gently upon it as they did often of old.
Yes, Anzac, it was Anzac in truth, it was; but yet not the Anzac it had been—not his Anzac.
For there he saw a pretentious pier, and a smug modern hotel was perched where the field hospital had once perched on the hill! A hotel it must be, surely. But for what? For whom?
There were also different trees, which looked well established. Many of them, in a blaze of gold, threw the perfect colour across the drab landscape before him. What trees were these?
As if to answer his question, the breeze carried up a perfume, which he sensed, with a sudden wonderment of delight. Wattle!
Well, that was something. The men there would at least sleep among their own trees, the trees they had slept among so often in their own land. But all these things that belonged to a world so remote, how did they get there?
To McCullough there was something about the whole business that was more than uncanny. It was as if he was living in two worlds, and was a lost soul in each.
God! If only he could but shake off the obsession of either world and struggle back somehow, as a complete and satisfied entity, to one of them—no matter which!
He saw what he saw; all the life of the place as he had known it, from the beach to the top trenches, had disappeared. But why should it? That strip of shore, where men had loafed, or hauled guns and lumber to land, or shouldered ammunition, and beef, and biscuit or waited their turn for water, had become his whole existence.
These things were no longer on the shore. They had given place to this—the antithesis of all that had been there formerly. But why? How?
McCullough could make nothing of it.
So absorbed was he in all of this, trying to save his wits from a collapse, that he did not hear the footsteps of a stranger who just now arrived, after a stiff climb, at the summit of the hill. The newcomer, mopping his forehead, and peering in all directions as he did so, saw McCullough half-hidden in the scrub.
‘Seen a platoon of turkeys about here, mate?’ he called out.
McCullough turned sharply and there, looking human enough, was the shape which had addressed this question to him. He came out of the scrub and confronted a stout fellow, very red in the face, attired in shorts, and carrying a shot-gun.
Both men stared in surprise. McCullough, clothed as Adam had been, gave the newcomer a queer sensation about the spine. The gentleman held his gun ready for emergencies.
‘Seen some turkeys about here, mate?’ he repeated, edging off a little.
McCullough found no words to reply with. His ideas got confused again. If this fellow was looking for the enemy with a weapon no better than that in his fist, he was mad.
‘They’re the best table birds the boss has,’ the man went on, evidently confused too, and feeling himself under the necessity of saying something. ‘And he’ll want them soon. Sure you haven’t seen them?’
‘I’m a stranger here,’ answered McCullough, swallowing a lump which, for some reason, came into his throat.
‘How’d you get here? And where’s your gear?’
‘The truth is,’ McCullough replied, scratching his head, ‘that’s just what I’ve been trying to find out.’
The man with the gun, though plainly a bit suspicious, could not question the doubt expressed in the face before him, for it was sincere enough. Men, he knew, could lose their memories; and in such cases anything was possible.
‘You’d better hop down to the pub,’ he said at last, ‘and see what the boss’ll do for you.’
‘Then that building is a pub?’
‘It is—the best on the peninsula.’
The best on the peninsula, thought McCullough. Then there must be others! He was again seized with a passionate desire to have a solution to this mystery.
‘D’you know this place well?’ McCullough questioned. The cloud of a few minutes back had already lifted magically from his spirit; and he felt a little of his old confidence again.
‘Know it?’ answered the man, with obvious pride. ‘I know every turn and crack, every peak and precipice, of this patch—every foot of every trench, the ground of every engagement, of every victory—every boneyard I know too. If you want the history of this glorious battlefield,’ he went on, with a flourish, ‘I’m your man. That’s my job. I’m a guide here.’
That puzzling construction on Koja Chemen, his companion explained, was a monument to commemorate the deeds of those who had fought, and those who had perished, on the peninsula. Housed in it, in a small temple, were the great books in which their names were recorded. This monument could be seen a long way off, and from all sides—it must have impressed, McCullough thought, the shipping of all nations in the Straits.
These records were the duplicates of similar records—housed also in a national temple—which were kept, for eternal remembrance, in the Australian capital. The peninsula, from Helles to the lines at Bulair, was British; and many thousands, Australians mostly, made pilgrimages to the place. Hence the large number of hotels and the guides for the battle-ground and all the paraphernalia for the use of sightseers.
Wattle had been planted and coaxed into growth, till the spot, in parts, looked a true piece of Australia. Military pundits had been busy there; and their many volumes, of many opinions, had been duly presented to the world. Every memory of that place, in short, was treasured as a national possession; and all existing records of the occupation were preserved as things sacred. These, and many other matters perhaps not so relevant, the man made plain to the astonished McCullough.
‘And does Australia think so much of the job those fellows did here?’ he asked, with a modesty lost on his companion.
The guide whipped out his book—for he always carried it—and, opening it with the skill that comes of much practic
e, he struck an attitude, and began an oration in this style:
‘In these hills, on this holy ground, the sons of Australia, in deeds of the noblest heroism, achieved much in one of the greatest labours ever given to men. Here they fought and died in a way that shall grip the imagination, yes, and thrill the heart, so long as men walk upon this earth. Here they won that heritage which shall be prized, and not least by their own people, so long as nations are nations; for it was here that Australia first proved herself and became a nation. If all the great—’
‘Hold hard!’ McCullough interrupted. ‘Got a smoke on you?’
The speechmaker, a little piqued at the interruption, felt in his pocket, produced a couple of cigarettes, and handed them over with some matches. He was about to return to his book when they heard the whistle of a steamer.
‘Strike me!’ said the late orator, thrusting the volume with haste into his coat, ‘there’s the Australia Comes putting in, full of tourists, I’d better look smart—guide business.’
At this the man’s mind appeared to return suddenly to the present; and the incongruity before him—of this naked man. What could he do with him? The expected guests would have to be considered. At this juncture he could hardly take him to the hotel, clothed, as he was, only in whiskers.
‘Hide yourself up here till I send some togs up,’ he shouted, waving his hand; and he hurried off to be in place for the trade promised by the steamer’s arrival.
McCullough pinched himself to make sure that he was thoroughly awake.
It seemed to him that he was thoroughly awake.
‘So this’s what it’s come to!’ he said to himself; and there was some bitterness in the reflection.
‘Somehow I’ve lived long enough to see this. I’ve lived long enough to meet someone who knows this place better than the men did who made it . . . Well, he’s had a better chance than we had.
‘Or has he?’ he went on, after a moment. ‘After all, he’ll never know it. Only those who were here in my time will do that. We had the substance; others have but the shadow—though no doubt they’ll be the richer ones.