by Bruce Scates
‘I say, Hammond, we’re all rather tired.’ It is the best I can think of. ‘Why don’t we take this up in the morning? Major, are you...’ He understands my signal.
‘I have my quarters prepared already, thank you.’ As Zeki Bey rises from the stool, the Australians leap to their feet.
‘Please gentlemen, don’t trouble yourselves. We will speak in the morning, insha’Allah. Goodnight Colonel, Captain, Monsieur Bean, Monsieur Lambert.’
We wait for the major to walk well away before any of us speak again.
‘Cheeky bugger knows who we are,’ muses Lambert.
‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘and what brings us here.’
I emerge from my tent not long after sunrise, stooping low to clear the canvas cover that serves as a doorway. Height has always posed a problem at Anzac: the taller the man the deeper the trench or the dugout. I look through the mist of grubby glasses and survey the early morning campsite. Vickers is already up, seated on a camp stool and stroking the embers of last night’s fires. To my left I can hear the commotion of the ‘native camp’ where a party of bickering Greeks and Turks are dividing their rations for breakfast. To my right, the Walers are being groomed and fed. They snort steam into their muzzle bags and stamp at the frozen earth. It is as if they miss the lush valley pastures of Australia.
‘Did they wake you, Charley?’
‘No, couldn’t sleep much last night anyway.’
‘Me neither – the storm I expect.’
‘Yes, must have been.’
Both of us knew that was far from the truth.
Vickers removes his jacket, turns one sleeve inside out and continues a task that has occupied much of his time. With quiet deliberation, he runs a burning cigarette slowly up the seam. It hisses with delight every so often.
‘Bloody lice, eh Charley,’ Vickers turns out the second sleeve. ‘I just can’t seem to get rid of them.’
On the ridges above us, the winter sun shines its lemon light. I wonder if it has warmed the waters of the cove, wonder how many times Hammond, Vickers and I had swum there summers ago, washing the insects and the grime from our bodies. The waters of the Aegean were really the only defence against the parasites of Anzac. Singeing them with cigarettes brought but temporary relief. Within the hour, the old enemy would rally, regroup, and resume their shabby war of harassment.
‘You’ll find the fleas an even greater challenge, Captain.’ Hammond appears brandishing a jug of rum. ‘In fact, I’d wager a whole colony of them have been camped here since Anzac.’ He moves towards a camp stool and stretches his feet towards the embers. ‘Nothing to be done about it, of course, can hardly drown the buggers in the Aegean this time of year. God, it’s cold this morning. Sakar! Fetch some firewood.’
And with that he takes a swig of rum, and offers it first to me and then, more reluctantly, to Vickers. Real men could take a drink at dawn but Vickers seems too soft – he could kill lice but could he kill the Germans?
‘Ah, hair of the dog, is it?’ Lambert’s instinct for alcohol has again proved infallible. He slumps down on a camp stool. ‘Army issue rum – how I’ve missed it. Pass it here, my good fellow.’
He takes a long deep swig from the jug, and I can sense the warmth flowing through his body.
‘Ah, that’s brought me back to life. Best have another dram before that Turkish fellow joins us. Now, Hammond,’ he turns to the old soldier without returning the rum, ‘what about breakfast?’
Breakfast this morning is much the same as it was four years ago. To the closing hours of the war, the military bureaucracy in London worked on the assumption that the fighting might never end and dutifully produced enough Peek Frean Biscuits to feed an army for a century. In the hands of Hammond’s Indian cook, the wood-hard wafers have been ground to powder and stewed to a kind of porridge. Dollops of jam are all that make it edible. The bully beef tastes much the same as I remember it. It is as stringy and as salty as the rancid bacon. Again, curry brings a better flavour to the meal, blunted, in Lambert and Hammond’s case, by the sharp tang of alcohol.
Zeki Bey joins us not long after breakfast. This morning he has taken dried dates and apricot, yogurt and honey, vine leaves stuffed with rice and a glass of apple tea sweetened with sugar. The Ottoman Empire may have lost the war, but in the culinary stakes the Turks conquered Britain long ago. He comes down to the camp on horseback. A kind of authority travels with him, what the Maori troops would have called mana.
As the party prepares to leave I fling the last dregs of my tea into the fire. It spits and steams in protest. Zeki Bey’s handsome stallion prances as we mount our stout and grudging Walers.
‘And where should we go this morning, gentleman? To Ari Burnu down Korku Deresi?’
‘Anzac Cove, more like,’ Hammond knows that war is always a matter of geography, ‘straight down Monash Gully.’ He kicks the Waler sharply in its side and we begin the jolting descent to the beaches.
The cove is peaceful. Last night’s storm has blown to a standstill in the gullies. Frost sits on the earth like an icy carpet. Rocks and twigs shine white in the sun, as if a child has sprinkled the world with icing sugar. From the slight rise of Ari Burnu, I can see the debris of war scattered on the seabed. There is the wreck of a landing craft, weapons and crates, even the rotting hull of a monitor that had strayed too close to the shoreline. Water seeps through shingle, a rushing sound mingling with a breeze. I remember plunging into the same Aegean what now seems an age ago. I wonder how so fearful a place can also be so beautiful.
‘Can I ask you something, Major, man to man, soldier to soldier, now that the war is over?’
Vickers pats his Waler as he speaks, as if the question might alarm the horses.
‘Of course, Captain, and I am bound to answer honestly.’
‘We came ashore at the wrong beach you know, too far north, right at the foot of these wretched ridges. Now, if we had come in at Brighton Beach, on that wide open bay, we could have made it across, couldn’t we?’ Vickers speaks quickly now, rushing to reassure himself. ‘We co-co-could have marched east, right across the plains, straight to the other side of the peninsula.’
Zeki Bey smiles and looks patiently into Vickers’ eyes.
‘But, Captain, that is where one would expect an army to land,’ he nods towards the south, ‘and we had fortified that coastline.’
A silence follows. Zeki Bey dismounts and lifts what would serve as a walking stick from the ground. A kind of unease spreads through our group. Some truths are too terrible to be confronted.
‘How extensive were the defences, Major?’ I reach for my notebook and pencil.
Zeki Bey smiles. ‘All the barbed wire we could find, Monsieur Bean, trenches of course, machine guns sited to enfilade the beaches. We had orders to open fire the moment the boats came within range.’ The major scratches a map in sand. His stick rubs furiously as if scrubbing out a battalion. ‘But most important was our artillery...’ now his stick pounds the earth ‘...mountain guns, Howitzers and the heavy battery at Gaba Tepe.’
‘Beachy Bill?’
‘Yes,’ Zeki Bey sighs disapprovingly, ‘that is what the English called her. Our gunners had the range of Brighton Beach,’ he takes a resolute breath and scans the horizon. ‘Shrapnel sprayed from those guns could sweep aside an army.’
‘So, what you’re saying then,’ Vickers pats his mount more sternly, ‘is that the landing wouldn’t have worked, not even if we came ashore in the ri-right place?’
Zeki Bey turns to his left and points out across the line of the cove. ‘What do you see, Captain?’
I am unsure of his tone. It is gentle, coaxing, much like a father teaching a son, and something else, something more familiar.
‘Well, nothing really, you can’t see much at all from here, the view of Bri-Brighton Beach,’ Vickers turns his head towards the cliff face as words begin to fail him. ‘It’s bloc ... blocked by the headland.’
‘Exactly, my friend. We might have
shelled this beach but we could not see it, not from Gaba Tepe or any position beyond. And the ridges you found so hard to climb blocked the fire from our guns.’
Vickers’ eyes run up the stubborn slopes. I can see he views them differently.
‘But this place was stoutly defended,’ I protest. ‘We had over 2000 casualties on the first day alone.’ I remember the faces of the men who’d rushed the beaches and the gullies, holding on when everything around them had gone wrong, fearing death, but even more fearing failure.
Zeki Bey had seen the same men on the other side at Anzac.
‘Casualties yes, but not so many in the early morning. Then, Charles Bean, you know the English had the advantage. Ari Burnu was lightly defended, not 200 men and at first no artillery.’
Zeki Bey pauses a moment, well aware of the scale of the myth he is challenging. ‘You say Anzac was the wrong beach; I think, Captain, for you it was the right one.’
I feel a shiver run down my spine. From the day of our defeat, a generation of British generals had acquitted themselves of the landing. Some argued that currents had drawn the landing craft north. Others that cunning Turks had moved the navy’s markers. But in truth there was no need to move them. If the Anzac forces had landed further anywhere else, it would have been a bloodbath. At one and the same instant, soldier and historian drew exactly the same conclusion. The wrong beach wasn’t the reason the landing had failed. From start to finish an attack anywhere on that coast was doomed to failure.
‘It was all just m-m-madness, then,’ Vickers gulps his words, ‘f-f-futile madness.’
I wonder how I can say that in the official history.
Department of Foreign Affairs, Canberra; Road en route to Sydney, 2015
Vanessa’s office was one of the oldest in the building. But she didn’t mind. There was a worrying trend in the public service to encase all offices in glass, subjecting their occupants to the prying gaze of supervisors, receptionists and a steady stream of students on work experience. Senior colleagues down the corridor worked through their days in a kind of fish bowl – sheltering behind flimsy barricades, tightening their ties and tidying desks fanatically, fearful that tilting the blinds a fraction more might cause tongues to wag. Why management had insisted on glass offices was anyone’s guess. It was modern, Vanessa supposed, a kind of make-over for the aging bureaucracy of Canberra. Perhaps someone had read some memo about transparent process far too literally. Or maybe the public service had morphed to a kind of prison. A twenty-first-century panopticon for white-collar criminals. Whatever the reason, Vanessa neither knew nor cared. Her office was different.
Office W809 had one great advantage. Most of the offices on the eighth floor of Foreign Affairs were vacuum sealed, but through some happy oversight her window could be still prised open, just a little and just enough to feel the hot sun or a cooling breeze and hear the real world rumbling on outside. Vanessa loved the dry dusty wind warming her neck as the erratic thermostat plunged the rest of Foreign Affairs below freezing. She smiled to herself. However high she climbed the corporate ladder she’d never find an office quite as good as this one. Outside, a flock of rosellas flashed red in the sunlight, their wings belting on nothingness. They passed from view as quickly as they appeared, leaving an empty blue sky behind them.
Vanessa sat there in splendid isolation. She wondered why she had bothered helping Dr Troy. Academics weren’t her sort normally. Truth was, she was far more comfortable with the powerful bureaucrats who’d colonised Canberra. At least she knew where she stood with them. Even so there was something in his enthusiasm she admired ... or was it perhaps his naivety? Vanessa had always had a weakness for young country boys. She imagined the scruffy lad chasing a football across Jeparit’s oval, straining to catch it. She sighed. The bookish young man had probably never played footy. Vanessa studied her nails. She would have to fix that chip on the varnish. Image mattered to Vanessa. For a woman in her position, it had to. Perhaps that explained why she was helping Mark and Evatt. If the department were faced with a real challenge, she’d be the one to solve it. And how good would that look?
Her mobile phone buzzed aggressively on the desk. It lurched this way and that, turning around itself in a kind of minor earthquake. She picked it up, flicked it onto silent and dropped it in her handbag. She then straightened her skirt and walked out into the corridor. Vanessa had a feeling today could decide everything.
Mark and the professor were late for the committee meeting, forgivable – often mandatory – in academia but hardly acceptable to the military. General Grimwade glanced again at his watch. Already 1410 hours. It was annoying enough that the committee had relocated to the Foreign Affairs offices, but a delay like this was simply intolerable. He had made too many allowances for age and youth already. He picked up his pen, scanned again the agenda and began to rule a neat line through the names of Dr Troy and Professor Evatt the exact same moment that both men lumbered into the committee room.
They carried a pile of papers almost the size of them. The professor staggered underneath his load – transcripts of the proceedings at Lausanne, Sèvres, even Montreux, flagged and highlighted for the benefit of the committee. Mark struggled with an assortment of maps, their pink borders drawn in more confident and expansive moments of Empire.
‘Oh dear,’ Howard Brawley grumbled, his voice lowered slightly but still clearly audible, ‘whatever are we in for?’
Vanessa noted Mark hadn’t shaved that morning – nor for some time she suspected. The two of them looked as if they had slept in their suits, perhaps not slept at all.
‘Good of you to join us, gentlemen,’ the officers’ mess had taught the general to deliver a welcome with a reprimand. ‘Now, I think we really must proceed to business.’
‘Yes, yes, by all means,’ the professor could barely contain his excitement. ‘Took longer than we thought, but yes we got there. These Turkish documents, painstakingly translated from the Ottoman script by my colleague Professor Çeli.’
General Grimwade’s annoyance bubbled to the surface. ‘If you don’t mind, Professor, you are quite out of turn. Mr Brawley,’ the general turned on his chair, ‘I believe you have the floor.’
‘Thank you, General.’
Brawley walked to the front of the room and fumbled with the cords of his computer. Nothing happened. There was the same awkward silence that attends every PowerPoint disaster.
‘I’m just having a bit of trouble here.’ Brawley seemed to be pressing the keyboard at random. ‘I won’t keep you long.’
A moment later, Vanessa moved with practised elegance to the front of the room. Her high heels clicked the parquetry floor. She was neither hurried nor slow but knew every eye was watching her. She leaned across Brawley, smiled politely and, without saying a word, assumed control of the computer. The room plunged into darkness and the first of Brawley’s slides was summoned from nowhere.
‘Thank you, Vanessa.’ Brawley said this as if incompetence was intended.
The first image showed the rusting ribs of a landing craft framing North Beach and Ari Burnu beyond it. The deep blue of the Aegean mirrored the oxygen sky above it. ‘Gentlemen,’ Brawley began, ‘the Gallipoli Peninsula is a place of great natural beauty and immense historical significance.’ A new picture jolted into focus: crowds of Australians and New Zealanders, many clad in their national flags, massed around the commemorative site on North Beach. Some held a bottle of Efes beer in their hands. It was the only suggestion that the huge makeshift campsite was actually in Turkey. Rubbish was strewn from one end of the beach to the other. The blunted face of the Sphinx looked down in disapproval. ‘It is also a major destination for Australian tourists, particularly on Anzac Day,’ Brawley raised his voice portentously, ‘and the Australian Government has a responsibility to facilitate this...’ he paused a moment, clearly wondering if the next word would be quite appropriate, ‘...this pilgrimage.’
What seemed like hours of statistics followed. Austral
ian visitors now exceeded 30,000 a year, most in what the Turks called ‘the Anzac Season’. Turkish figures were little short of astounding; inspired by everything from national fervour to Islamic fundamentalism, they now reached a staggering 2.5 million. All these numbers were duly allocated and analysed: tables measured the demand for buses, hotel rooms, first-aid facilities, even the number of portaloos required every Anzac Day. The conclusion was obvious, so obvious that Mark wondered why yet another ‘fact-finding mission’ was necessary to reach it.
‘The road on the Gallipoli Peninsula can no longer carry these numbers. We require the completion of our new access route, up from North Beach, past Anzac Cove to the Australian commemorative site at Lone Pine and the New Zealand memorial at Chunuk Bair.’
The professor grimaced at Brawley’s pronunciation as a dotted arrow severed the screen.
‘And of course the Turks’, shall we say, ornamental cemetery not far up from Quinn’s. Gentlemen, I am delighted to say that the Turkish Government, mindful of its obligations under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, is prepared to complete just such a road. As you can see, the new road – already half completed – will be a vast improvement on the current one.’
A series of images flashed across the screen including a picture of Brawley posing beside a bulldozer. ‘It is a full two lanes in width, there are a number of parking bays for buses and the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism is considering several scenic viewing areas for visitors. Work commenced early last year, and without further ... delays,’ the last word was mumbled reluctantly, ‘the new road can still be finished by early April. In a gesture of international cooperation, the Australian Government has contributed to the cost of construction and in return the Turks have suggested we might name the road itself.’ In his own gesture of cooperation, Brawley turned to Mark and Evatt, ‘We hope members of our committee might well suggest suitable possibilities. Well, that’s all gentlemen.’