On Dangerous Ground

by Bruce Scates

  A few hundred yards from the shore, a soldier by Vickers’ side let go of the cliff and slipped down towards the gully. His body bounced through low scrub, tumbling and careering down the slope. The bleeding bundle came to a halt abruptly, slamming into another pile of flesh and khaki. Then a sharp push from behind.

  ‘Get your fuckin’ head down, you fool. It’s a sniper.’

  Vickers lay almost vertically on the cliff face. A clump of thyme was torn apart by his chin. He felt the stems scratch against him as the smell of wet earth welled up in his nostrils. It was a minute before he dared to move at all and only then to tilt his head sideways.

  ‘Can you see anything?’

  There was fear in Collins’ voice but also fury. Trust a bully, Vickers thought, to take the place behind him. He blinked against the sun and began to swing his head upwards. Again Collins tugged at his body.

  ‘Stay down you silly bugger, he’ll have his sights trained on us.’

  But he hadn’t. In the second Vickers looked up he had seen the forward party stumbling down on their quarry. Men seemed to come from all directions, suddenly exposed, bitterly determined to flush out the enemy. For a moment it seemed the sniper had laid down his rifle and raised his hands in the air. If so, it made little difference. Collins loosened his hold on Vickers before a single shot rang out. Another body thumped the same wild course towards the shoreline. It landed face upwards on the ridge above them.

  The enemy did not look anything like Vickers had expected. The Turk was not much more than a child. His complexion was strangely pale, his writhing body no larger than his own. Vickers had expected a big man with a curved sword, a pirate in a fez, a brute for whom killing was a pleasure. Not a clean-shaven boy crying for his mother.

  ‘I’ll have ’im,’ Collins cried out and pushed Vickers aside. He lifted his rifle and paused, the cold steel of the bayonet famished for flesh, blue with malice.

  ‘Imshi yalla, you bastard!’

  And with that Collins drove the long straight steel into the heart of the already dying youth. Blood shot up into his face and the lifeless body careered through the bushes.

  ‘Fuckin’ snipers! Murderous Turkish bastards!’

  Vickers looked into the eyes of his comrade, ablaze with a kind of madness. So unlike the soft blinking eyes of the boy Collins had just killed. Quite unexpectedly, Vickers found himself admiring the young man who shot at them from a shallow trench on a cliff face. Lying there alone, knowing that sooner or later the massing enemy would close in on him. And he must have known men like Collins would show no mercy. Vickers had prepared himself that morning for fear, and pain, and hardship but not for this.

  The party resumed their stumbling journey up the ridge, but there was a reluctance in Vickers’ step that he had not felt before. This was Turkish soil. They were the invaders.

  Ahead of them lay a small plateau, a level stretch of ground bordered by cliffs and gullies. And beyond that, the massive ridges that formed the back of the Sari Bair Range. He longed to stretch and straighten himself as they found their first secure footing. But a soft humming above his head persuaded him otherwise.

  It was almost eight in the morning. Time had evaporated in the hurry and confusion. The men stumbled on through the scrub and slumped to a halt in an abandoned Turkish trench line. Around them lay a dozen or more wounded. A single stretcher-bearer moved quickly among them. Vickers knelt down beside them, reached for his canteen and raised it to the mouth of a gasping soldier. The wounded man clutched the flask and the precious fluid splashed over his tunic. Vickers steadied his hand and guided the bottle towards him. The water caught in the wounded man’s throat and he coughed it, choking, into the clay.

  The medic tugged the bottle away. ‘Not for this lot, Private, you’d better hang on to it.’ He caught Vickers’ eye – a single glance said it all. No point wasting water on dying men. But Vickers had not yet accepted the callous economy of war. Fighting could turn men into animals or lend them the compassion of an angel. And it could make the hardest of men a coward. Corporal Collins was shivering now. You could smell the fear on him.

  ‘You’ll need a hand now, won’t you?’ It was Collins who spoke. ‘I mean to get this lot back down to the beach.’ The medic looked back angrily.

  Vickers ran his eyes along the line of groaning men. He knew in an instant it was hopeless. ‘Let’s get a move on, Corporal, they’ll be sending help up later.’ It was what the medic wanted to hear and for a moment it seemed to still the cries around him. But as Vickers, Collins and his men moved on, the cries for water seemed to follow them. It was the most piteous thing Vickers had ever heard. Now every step he took filled him with a kind of loathing.

  Beyond the plateau, the land plunged steeply into the scrub and gullies that crisscrossed the peninsula. Vickers had no map. In any event it would have been useless. As the bush deepened he lost sight of the second ridge, their immediate objective. At times they followed tracks left by men who, just a few hours before, had scratched through the same landscape, sometimes in pursuit of the Turk, at other times their quarry. But mostly the paths led to nowhere.

  More than one track halted with the body of a soldier. Leading the party, Vickers would be first to stumble across them. Some were turned up to the sun, sprawled out as if the bullet had knocked them senseless. Others were twisted wrecks. Dried foam sat on their lips; brown clay caked their fingertips. At first he would pause a moment to close those eyes, or cloak a torn tunic around the body. But as the sun rose higher and the buzz of flies betrayed each waiting corpse, Vickers did his best to avoid them. Death seemed all the uglier for being so hurried.

  Less than an hour from the beach, the men staggered onto another ridge enabling Vickers to see his position clearly. A little over half a mile wide, it looked out across the crumpled landscape to a third ridge about a mile distant. To the north, the land rose steadily, towards the summit of a mountain. The rise to their left was Baby 700, larger and more foreboding than the close-knit lines of the sketchy ordinance map. Beyond it was Chunuk Bair, almost the very peak of the peninsula. From windswept heights, a small party of the advance force already looked down on the Narrows. There was a burst of shrapnel overhead and Collins and Vickers flung their faces into the gravel. As the dust slowly settled a pair of polished boots blurred into focus.

  Major Charles Brand was a professional soldier. Tradition and training taught him that the most important duty of an officer was to set an example to his men. All that morning he had stood proud and erect, barely bowing his head as bullets whizzed around him. Nor had Major Brand removed his Sam Browne belt. The most conspicuous part of an officer’s uniform, it marked him in the sights of every Turkish sniper. His manner to the men was calm and self-assured, but Brand lacked confidence in his own slim chance of survival.

  ‘What unit are you men from?’

  ‘D Company, sir.’ Collin’s voice was softer than the first time.

  The major turned away. ‘And you lot?’

  ‘A Company, sir.’

  Major Brand drew a deep breath and surveyed the line of panting men before him. Then he turned and looked out to the ridge some way distant. The full sun shimmered in the olive scrub, flashes of red sparked on the horizon. For over an hour Brand had sent each party on, keeping a rough note of their unit and number. As his eyes squinted against the glare he could see none of them. Each lot in turn had been swallowed up by ridge and gullies. Only the echo of gunfire and the occasional puff of shrapnel suggested anyone was out there.

  Major Brand already knew that the landing was a failure. Instead of driving inland several miles, the Anzac forces were barely half a mile from the beach. The third ridge lay a further mile away, a murderous mile of cliffs and gullies. Another bullet slapped the bare clay.

  Vickers’ voice shook Brand from his thoughts, ‘We’ll push on, sir?’

  It was a brave offer from one so young. Brave, the major knew, but also pointless.

  ‘No, Priv
ate. Corporal – you and your men dig in. Sergeant,’ Brand swung about to the man beside him, ‘take your platoon and tell the advanced parties to withdraw. We may need you to cover us as we...’ he paused, reluctant even then to concede retreat was a possibility, ‘consolidate.’

  ‘The platoon is down to seven, sir.’

  ‘Then take a dozen of these stragglers!’

  The sergeant barked out a series of commands.

  Brand wished there was someone else to bear the burden of his decision. Another burst of shrapnel showered snow-white death on the ridges.

  ***

  Lambert and I follow the track from Shrapnel Valley and find Vickers near the graves of men he’d helped to bury. On the summit of Plugge’s Plateau, twelve soldiers lie side by side, much as when he had left them.

  ‘We couldn’t get them down to the beach, you know. There wasn’t time. So they died up here. Cr-crying for water.’

  ‘I’m sure you did all you could, Harry.’

  Lambert places his arms around Vickers’ shoulders.

  ‘They were heroes, Harry, each and every one of them.’

  But as the rain falls softly around us I think of other lives snapped short here. No hero’s grave for them, just one corpse after another left to rot in the bushes. I look out across the ridges, shadowed by the coming storm. And from the corner of my eye, I watch Harry Vickers weeping. His face looks as white as limestone – brittle, worn, crumbling. I know there is something ancient in his pain, a grieving that somehow spans the ages.

  ‘We’d best get moving, Harry, there’s a good fellow.’ Lambert’s voice is gentle and consoling. ‘C’mon my son, must get back to camp before nightfall. Give me a hand will you, Bean?’

  And so we clamber down the track, one damaged man supporting another, much like the trails of the wounded that had once weaved their way through these gullies. Less than halfway down, we pass a shattered stone embankment – I make a note of its position – all that remains of the old Australian Battery. Just nearby, in a clump of motley scrub, something white and sharp has worked its way to the surface.

  Lausanne/Melbourne, 1923/2015

  Lord Curzon sipped his tea cautiously and returned the cup to its saucer. He frowned. Not even a Peer of the Realm could demand decent tea of foreigners. The Swiss had never quite mastered the art of tea-making. Tomorrow he would take coffee in the late afternoon. Calculated concession, as he so often told his subordinates, was at the core of successful diplomacy.

  But so too were principles. The Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs had now entered its third month. As autumn gave way to winter, the Turkish delegation had grown more and more intractable and, to Lord Curzon, that Ismet Pasha fellow seemed the worst of them. Wooing the sympathies of Russia and the United States, sniping mercilessly at the Greeks, even playing off the interests of France and Great Britain. Frankly, the man was impertinent. Or perhaps Curzon had grown too used to privilege – as Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, elite of Britain’s landed elite, eldest son of Lord Scarsdale and youngest ever Viceroy of India, few had ever challenged his authority.

  Now had it been India things would have been different. There, a timely show of force had put the north-west tribes in their place – British interests sharply secured by British bayonets. But negotiating international treaties had proved a much more difficult task for Curzon than governing all of India. And as far as he could make out, the Turks’ recent success in ousting the Greeks, that damned Chanak Crisis, had made Ismet Pasha even more cocky. To Curzon, the situation in the near East verged on the intolerable. A Turkish army had stared down the British garrison at Chanak and a new war contesting control of the Dardanelles had been only narrowly averted. Lausanne was called to put an end to all this nonsense, draw the borders firmly in the map, placate the Greeks and buy off that troublesome Ismet Pasha. The British Empire had taken four years to defeat the Ottoman army in war. Four years on they had yet to secure a lasting peace with Turkey.

  Curzon pushed his muddy tea to one side and studied the papers before him. Yet another cable from the dominions. Australia and New Zealand were not present at the peace table, so it was Britain’s task to represent them. Even so, such incessant lobbying seemed in very poor taste, an unseemly and, Curzon suspected, far too democratic breach of protocol. Australia and New Zealand were dominions after all. Their interests quite subordinate to the greater good of Empire. And why make such an issue over the graves of their war dead? Britain had lost 20,000 in the Dardanelles, France 10,000 and India a figure he had never really bothered to remember. Still, he would put the case as forcefully as he could, if only to put Ismet Pasha in his place. And the truth of it was, Lord Curzon had a soft spot for commemoration. Britain’s Empire was built on blood, and honouring the dead simply went with the territory.

  With that in mind, Curzon took his fountain pen and reached for a sheet of parchment. He had already outlined Britain’s principle demands: a demilitarised zone around the straits of the Dardanelles, free and unmolested passage for British shipping, the removal of that all-too-troublesome Turkish garrison. To these demands he would add one other:

  There is a further point which has not so far been mentioned in our discussion, but upon which the Allied powers will be compelled to insist. It is that we ask for the vesting in Allied possession of the ground in several parts of Turkish territory where lie the graves of our brave soldiers and sailors who perished in the war. To us this is sacred soil, and I am convinced there will be no objection on the part of the Turkish delegation, who have so frequently made an appeal to sentiment and national feeling, to concede this very natural request.

  Curzon felt no need to name the dominions, let alone outline the extent of the Anzac area they were claiming. Best to leave it at that and the Turks might just let it slip through. After all, Curzon thought to himself, even the French had surrendered their soil for British cemeteries, granting ownership ‘inviolate and perpetual’ to the Empire. Curzon slid the parchment across the polished wooden surface of the table. How clever, he thought, to appeal to ‘sentiment and national feeling’. Ismet Pasha could hardly argue with that, could he?

  ***

  Ninety years after the proceedings at Lausanne, Dr Mark Troy sat in Victoria’s state library and opened a file marked Secret: Conference Transcript. It was one of the original copies, marked up for the printer with its pages much annotated by clerk, diplomat, and proofreader. Mark imagined the typeface striking the paper, each letter following the other a little louder, a little angrier.

  Ismet Pasha roundly rejected the demand for British ownership of Anzac. The Allies could tend their graves, but Curzon had sought ‘a large expanse of land well outside the cemeteries’ – Turkish land which bore the bones of Turkish dead, a full three square miles of Gallipoli’s hills and gullies. The Turks, Ismet Pasha declared, venerated the abodes of the dead, but they would surrender that ground to no one. And such a demand was surely unprecedented.

  We have conceded all the ground being required for existing cemeteries ... But now a demand was being made not only for the cemeteries but for the battlefields. The method of consecrating battlefields by appropriation had hitherto been unknown. According to this theory the Turks, who had shed their bones copiously on many vast battlefields outside Turkey could ... claim similar rights. The Turks treated the remains of heroes with boundless respect, but it was repugnant to them to mix this question up with the interests of the living.

  In the quiet spaces of the heritage reading room, Mark imagined Curzon rising from his seat and thumping the table. Challenged by Ismet Pasha he proved all too ready to enlist the support of the dominions. At stake, after all, was the very stuff of Empire.

  I do not think that the Turkish delegation has any idea whatsoever of the depths and seriousness of the sentiments that are aroused by this question ... In this strip of land lie the bodies of the men who came from the distant countries of Australia and New Zealand to fight for the cause of the British E
mpire ... The ground is uninhabited and uncultivated. It is of no value to the Turkish Government or any human being save the Australians and New Zealanders whose sons and brothers lie there. Anzac is a place of the deepest historical and sentimental significance ... What we say is all this area should be treated as one whole and respected as sacred ground.

  And then, in breach of the practiced precepts of diplomacy, Curzon gambled everything on a single outburst.

  You cannot haggle over the dead. You can haggle over everything else, as you have during the last few weeks, but you cannot bargain with the corpses of the soldiers who have lost their lives in the service of their country ... We are only too anxious to remove our troops from Constantinople. We are equally anxious to remove the British troops from Gallipoli. But not a man shall be moved until this question has been settled in a spirit of honour and decency...

  Mark put the pages back in their place, lending a semblance of order to his busy desk. He then unfolded a large coloured map appended to the volume, attempting to bend the creases in the right configuration. The librarian grimaced as a corner tore; young impetuous researchers took far too little care with the records. In a matter of seconds, the hills and gullies of the peninsula stretched out across the table. An area was shaded in red. From Ari Burnu, it stretched all the way from Chailak Dere in the north, beyond the ridge at Lone Pine, and halfway along Brighton Beach in the south – where the landing was originally intended. Mark’s eyes ran down to article 144 of the Treaty. The land to be granted by the Turkish Government will include in particular the area in the region of Anzac shown on the map.

  ‘Christ!’ Mark exclaimed. ‘Ismet Pasha gave way. Australia owns Anzac’. No richer gift could he imagine.

  The duty librarian glared again in his direction. And as she did so, the young scholar reached for his mobile.