He drove on, speaking softly, running through the stories of his first explorations in that landscape, which was becoming bleaker and more exiguous with each kilometre. Soon, in exact time with his narrative – so that the experience took on a strange, doubled stereophony – the eucalypts gave way to blue bush and twisted vine-thickets. They vanished too: we were on the beachfront now; the salt on the rocks sparkled; pale grasses and bindweeds ran down to the shore.
“I always liked the approach this way, across country. I remember one time, coming in, when the grass was very tall, with a friend of mine: a hunter. We were on the roof of his Toyota tray-back, both of us, just coasting along, letting the vehicle find its way slowly in the landscape and looking out for kangaroos. Then, suddenly, looming out of nowhere we saw a headstone: dearly loved, never forgotten. And see – this was the main avenue: these sand ruts here.”
A rock spit reached to the mudflats; the shoreline, marked by mangroves, curved away. He stopped. I jumped out.
“That’s it – and this was the bonded store, where those foundations are. And the two trees marked the end of Mystery Street.”
“A good name.”
“A fitting one. I pulled up here once – and camped right on the point, next to the inlet, was an old-timer who’d been born at Con-don. He walked me round. He showed me where the post office once stood, and the hotel, and the school. He was about ninety then. He used to come up for a few days at a time from his home in Bunbury. He said he’d never been happy since he left. The town was degazetted in 1909: they took it away to Hedland, piece by piece. In World War II engineers even came in and blew up the long jetty, for fear the Japanese might use it. But my interest in Condon really stems, of course, from an earlier military episode.”
“Of course!”
“I’m talking about the Emden. Do you know the story?”
Emden was a warship, a light cruiser of the German Imperial Navy, the last and finest of her kind. She was built a hundred years ago in the Royal Danzig shipworks, and was assigned to the Pacific Fleet. Once commissioned, she sailed for the naval base of Tsingtao, in the short-lived German Chinese colony, and soon became known there as “the Swan of the East.” But it was not her grace and elegance that had captivated Galvin, or her Oriental home, so much as the exploits of her commander, Captain Karl von Mueller, on his raiding mission in the first days of World War I. Von Mueller, who was a keen, not to say an obsessive student of naval history, steamed away from Tsingtao, fearing encirclement, the moment he received news of the outbreak of war. He made for the Indian Ocean, with vague, optimistic instructions from his admiral and a lone collier for support. The tales of his exploits still have the power to startle. He disguised the Emden with a fake smokestack to make her resemble a British cruiser; he used rain squalls as cover to elude the searches of his enemies, he terrified Madras and Colombo by his mere proximity, he cut the shipping routes between Ceylon and Singapore. In the first month of his raiding mission alone, he captured fifteen British vessels, which he sank or destroyed – but he guaranteed the safety and well-being of every prisoner he took, while treating the officers, and vanquished captains, with an extreme and mannered gallantry – a pattern of conduct which was much admired, and which ensured his later fame. British warships swept the Indian Ocean for him; he haunted obscure archipelagos: the Maldives, the Chagos, the Laccadives. He escaped a dragnet; he reached the Malay coastline, where he staged his boldest assault – a daylight raid, brief, convulsive – the so-called battle of Penang. In early morning, at top speed, von Mueller steered into the warship-crowded harbour, hoisted his flag and fired a torpedo at the Russian cruiser Zhemchug, sinking her, before fleeing, pursued by a fleet of French destroyers, one of which, the Mousquet, he also fired on and sank. From Penang, he took the Emden south, undetected, through the Strait of Sunda, bound for the Cocos Islands, with the aim of levelling the radio tower and cutting the Eastern Telegraph Company’s communication lines.
“But how,” asked Galvin then, leaning towards me – we had set up camp by this stage across the inlet, on the wide, bare shore – “how did he get there?”
His eyes burned into me.
“I don’t follow,” I said.
“It’s very simple. How did he get from Penang to the Cocos, to Direction Island and his appointment with destiny? Don’t you see? He didn’t have enough water to make that journey. He must have put in along the way, on the north Australian coastline – and I’m sure he did so here.”
“Why?”
“It’s obvious. Von Mueller knew what he was doing. The British and the Australians were scouring the seas for him, of course; they were watching everywhere across the north-west. At Hed-land, they were on red alert. But there was Condon. It was on the charts; it was deserted – and it had a well: fresh water, ample supplies. I love to think of that sleek, low-slung warship, slipping in and anchoring offshore, in this horizontal landscape. Have you noticed how space is organised differently here? There are no verticals at all: time and height are in a special dialectic.”
“And what happened?”
“It was quite an opera. The Emden steamed on. Von Mueller thought he’d be safe. He knew the main allied fleet was in Albany, waiting to take on its contingent of men for the Dardanelles campaign. He reached Direction Island in the Cocos on 9 November – he sent a landing party onshore, under the command of his first lieutenant, Hellmuth von Muecke, to destroy the radio tower and the base. It was all very amicable. The civilians at the telegraph station co-operated; the Germans agreed not to bring the tower down onto the tennis court. But the raider had been spotted; her luck had run out.”
Galvin’s voice had become shallow; he hurried on. HMAS Sydney was close at hand on a troop-convoy mission. She reached the Cocos in less than three hours and at once engaged the Emden. She was much more powerful: in ninety minutes the raider was struck by more than a hundred shells; it was the end for her – she began sinking. Von Mueller beached her on North Keeling Island.
The Sydney pursued the German collier, then circled back. Von Mueller refused to lower his battle flag, despite repeated demands for his surrender. The Sydney opened fire again.
Now Galvin gave the story full atmospherics. I reeled under his assault: he put me there, I was on the Emden’s gun deck as the shells came blasting in. By chance, a detailed, rather triumphalist sketch of the disaster survives. It was transcribed by Banjo Paterson, who encountered the Sydney’s Captain Glossop in Colombo less than a week after the event, and records their talk in his Happy Dispatches, Chapter XII. Glossop had gone with the rescue boats to board the stricken cruiser. “My God,” he said, or Banjo has him saying. “My God – what a sight! Everybody on board was demented – that’s all you could call it, just fairly demented – by shock, and fumes, and the roar of shells bursting among them. She was a shambles. Blood, guts, flesh and uniforms were all scattered about. One of our shells had landed behind a gun shield and had blown the whole gun crew into one pulp. You couldn’t even tell how many men there had been. They must have had forty minutes of hell on that ship, for out of 400 men, 140 were killed and 80 wounded, and the survivors were practically madmen. They crawled up to the beach and they had one doctor fit for action; but he had nothing to treat them with – they hadn’t even got any water. A lot of them drank saltwater and killed themselves. They weren’t ashore twenty-four hours, but their wounds were fly-blown, and the stench was awful – it’s hanging about the Sydney yet.”
So Glossop– but his victory was incomplete. On Direction Island, the members of the Emden’s shore team were just cutting the underwater cables when the two warships engaged. Once the outcome was clear, Lieutenant von Muecke commandeered an old, half-rotten barquentine which was anchored in the lagoon. And in that frail three-masted craft, with all his men and weapons, he made for Padang in the Dutch East Indies, a neutral harbour, which he reached unscathed after more than a month at sea.
“The Captain?”
“He spent th
e rest of the war in captivity, in Malta, I believe. Of course he had become famous. He was the last shining prince of Prussian chivalry, and his record stood out against the darkness of the time. But he suffered gravely from malarial attacks, and that illness, combined with his natural reserve, led him to retreat from public life. I find it quite in keeping with his character that he wrote nothing about his experiences on the Emden, nothing at all, in the five years remaining to him after the war’s end and Germany’s collapse.”
Galvin stopped. The chunks of burning driftwood hissed and sputtered on the fire between us. The ashes gleamed. The stars began to show.
“And you don’t sometimes worry,” I said, “that it might be wishful thinking?”
“The idea that von Mueller put in at Condon? All I can tell you is that when I was ill, while you were away, I would see this coastline quite clearly. I’d be lying at home, at night, awake, and in my mind’s eye I’d glimpse this scene – as clearly as a photograph, in perfect resolution: the silhouette of the ship on the horizon, its grey hull merging with the mudflats in the dawn – its funnels, and its low gun deck, its twin masts, the curved raking of its prow.”
“Heavy symbolism,” I said.
“I knew what it was, of course, in that sense – a ship of fatality, gliding near – but it was also something else: an echo, an innuendo, a memory – one that stemmed from being here.”
And Galvin, in a calm, even manner, proceeded to tell me something of the experiences he had gone through during my time away, when the majestic pattern of his life – a life that had seemed, in every detail, balanced, geometric – began to fray, then fell apart. It started in the clear, hot weeks of early summer: he noticed a slowing of his reflexes, he felt a touch of weakness in his limbs, and this was all the more noticeable because he had been careful, always, to preserve a high degree of fitness and strength. At once, he put himself on a regime of strict exercise; he made full-pack climbs in the hills outside the city. Nothing worked. He had to begin rescheduling his cases and his court appearances. Eventually, he went to see a doctor friend and had a complete medical. The signs were obvious: he had liver cancer: his readings were sky-high. The discussion the two men had was brisk. It had a surfeit of reality about it. It was at once a caricature of what such scenes should be, and the perfect version. The doctor broke down, and sobbed, and told him he had between two weeks and a month to live. Grimly, Galvin went about putting his affairs in order: he left his chambers, he sold his most prized paintings, and embarked on a stringent, intensive course of cancer drugs. He was given syringes and a supply of chemicals, and sent away. It began: he fell into the pits of suffering; he could barely drag himself from room to room. His dreams left him first. They had been his mainstay. They went back into the wider world, they had no wish to be dreams of his any longer, they had no feeling for him: don’t summon us, he heard them saying: we can’t help you now. Soon, sleep went as well: he began writing – each night, he poured out shards of memory, shaped into linked episodes, and they became his therapy, his contact with the wider world. Often, he sent them to me, by email, and I would receive them, in the internet kiosks of the Green Zone, and read them hurriedly, and delete them. Then, on some patrol or military flight, their glinting accents would come back to me, and I would feel the vanity and artifice of every word I wrote. Months passed for Galvin in this way; the treatment bit. Slowly, a large, reddish-purple weal began to form directly above his liver – for one unpleasant effect of the chemotherapy was that every sore or wound he had ever suffered re-appeared and turned into a hideous lesion or boil. Eventually, in desperation, Galvin lanced the weal with one of his syringes in the shower. A stream of pus and rotten tissue came out, and there was a little metallic click on the tiling of the floor – it was a fleck of shrapnel.
“Shrapnel,” I echoed.
“A few days later, I lanced it again; another piece came out. After that, the liver readings began to fall at once. My health slowly recovered.”
“But what were you doing with shrapnel in your body?”
“Didn’t you know,” said Galvin, looking sideways, half at me and half at the fire, “that I’d had an Indochina experience?”
“No!”
“I suppose you didn’t – and I suppose, in a way, this is the beginning of what I wanted to tell you.”
He got up, walked over to the troop-carrier and flicked the music back on – it was a west-coast compilation CD that had been playing in the background for hours.
“Again!”
“Music was quite important,” said Galvin, “over there: it helped you to cling on to something, to define yourself. I hated Dark Side of the Moon, for instance. That came out in the last years of the war, and it was everywhere – those trapped, cloying chords. But I still remember the first time I heard ‘Layla,’ in Luang Pra-bang – and it spoke to me, especially the slide guitar. That was part of the soundtrack when we spent that year being sent out on missions to places people never came back from alive.”
I absorbed this sentence, and listened to my own breathing, and his. There was no movement round us: no wind; no wave. The night was still.
“So why go on them?”
Galvin moved his hands faintly, as though to suggest a domain of laws beyond my grasp.
“You wouldn’t have gone ahead with a single one of them if you’d stopped to think about it for a moment – you were living constantly in a state of denial – but in the years since, I don’t see the slightest change in the tenor of existence. I look round, and I see us all, navigating the stream of lies and fantasies we keep telling ourselves. We go with the flow – just the way we did then, when we heard the music, the hits of the day – ‘Gimme Shelter,’ ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – and they were easy to fold into our lives. Sometimes I think we almost lived for music. Once, I remember, when we were in Vientiane, we heard that Gladys Knight and the Pips were giving a concert at Da Nang, and we desperately wanted to hear them play a long version of ‘Midnight Train to Georgia.’”
“A top priority!”
“Indeed. We went round to see a young helicopter pilot we knew. He was a real cowboy: he loved the Indianapolis 500, that kind of thing, he’d always give commentaries on the mission as if they were races – ‘We’re turning down the main drag now …’ He had a stripped-down machine, with only a single door-gun – it was a real hot-rod. We forged our ID passes for the trip. The idea was to take the long way round from Laos – you couldn’t fly over jungle Vietnam: you’d just die, they had so many anti-aircraft guns. We had to fly south instead, almost to Phnom Penh, then across. We headed off, but just before we left I’d been given my first tab of LSD. I’d assumed the door-gunner’s job, and the acid had begun to come on: strongly, in fact. I decided to fill the whole of the machine gun with tracer rounds – usually you put in one round in four, so you can see where your bullets are landing, but I decided – you know how acid takes you to strange places – to load the whole machine gun. We flew over, avoiding all the danger points. I let off a few bursts. The idea is just to give the trigger a couple of blips, but I was firing constantly – I imagined that would show the Vietnamese how strong we were, and keep us safe. I got a pretty firm tap on the shoulder.”
“And did you get to see Gladys Knight?”
“Of course – we always got what we wanted in those days.”
Galvin looked at me, measuringly. I was leaning over, bent towards him. Beyond the fire’s gleam, the night was moonless. Low smoke clouds were spreading from the burn-off round Ettrick homestead, far inland. I settled back. Galvin resumed, in his smooth monotone – a voice that, for all its calm and cadence, was coiled now, and full of force. It was a delivery that enticed the listener in; it joined my act of hearing and his of recall. The dry season of 1970 was just beginning when he arrived in Laos. He was seventeen years old, although he passed easily for a man of twenty-five, and this duplicity felt natural there. He found a stage-set world, where every character and set of cir
cumstances seemed designed for conspiracy, and intrigue was the chief pursuit.
In the plateaus of the interior, the battle for control of Laos was at its height, but at that time Vientiane was still a neutral city, a listening post, a place awash with embassies and spies. The centre of this quadrille was the Constellation Hotel, where the photographer Tim Page and the cameraman Neil Davis, both documenters of the conflict, both already celebrities, could be found, standing at the bar, silent, like choric presences, playing themselves, sunk in the flash and shimmer of their lives. Soon Galvin fell into the company of the charming, well-connected Inez de Castro, a French Eurasian who had been married to a Corsican smuggler from the drug ring “Grande Indochine.” She knew the town; she knew its opium dens; like many residents of Vientiane, she was herself a creation of the city’s palimpsest-like past. In her villa on the outskirts of town was a library, which preserved many gems from the literature of French colonial days. Galvin was entranced by these accounts and memoirs. He immersed himself in them: he read them through with dictionaries, or Inez would translate them for him in his arms. He had a great sense that history had unfolded close by, and was now quite lost. He wanted to see the battlefields, he wanted to explore the trails where ambushes had been sprung, or track down the hill-forts where the French made their last stands. For months, he lingered in this realm, which had been so thoroughly, and so recently, forgotten, though it was vivid and alive in print and seemed to live more urgently because it had been captured in French and was being relayed to him in such lush circumstances, by a woman’s lips.
He read through the narrative of Dien Bien Phu and its desperate reinforcement by volunteer paratroopers, just days before the last redoubts of the fortress fell. Most of all, though, he was caught by the stories of the Man Yang Pass, between An Khe and the high inland. It was here that the North Vietnamese army entrapped an elite French f lying column – the Groupement Mobile 100, which was, at the time, already gravely weakened and worn down by its long campaigns. The GM special forces advanced with their armoured carriers, half conscious they were headed into a trap: a French aircraft overflew them. The transmissions from the men below reported tell-tale noises in the “nak-nak” grass – the tall, waving ground cover that always gave away an ambush in those hills. The enemy – 6,000 strong – attacked. A series of exchanges followed; almost all the members of the GM were killed. Just three days later a ceasefire, long planned, came into force. The French army, with their southern Vietnamese allies, regained the ground at Man Yang; they buried the dead standing up, facing towards France. Years later, Galvin made a pilgrimage. The battlefield was still untouched: wrecked tanks, broken half-tracks, stray bones, regimental insignias lying about.
The Red Highway Page 27