On Dangerous Ground

by Bruce Scates

  ‘And, Corporal, was there a god for you, for soldiers I mean?’ Elsie at last had spoken. Drawn from her grief by a man enamoured of the ancients.

  ‘Oh yes, miss, Wepwawet – jackal-headed war champion of the pharaoh. Strong and brave and clever he was too, miss,’ Curtis again imagined marble statues sleeping in the dim light of the museum. ‘Led you safely through the underworld to paradise.’

  To paradise. The phrase jolted in Elsie’s mind. In a world full of death it was difficult to imagine any hereafter. Perhaps the afterlife of ancient Egypt, peopled with all the strange beings Curtis described, was no less credible than her own battered faith. Perhaps the more gods one had, the greater the hope of something beyond. Her parents had told her that all she loved would be reunited in heaven. She closed her eyes tightly. No, that heaven was not for her. Her love for Roy was a passion. Like nothing that had touched her before or ever could again. That kind of love belonged to the living.

  Troubled by her friend’s sudden silence, Maggie took up the conversation. ‘So you mean anyone could reach paradise then, not just the rich, not just the pharaohs?’

  ‘Oh yes, miss, if they had led a good life. In a way, they believed much the same as we Christians. You’d enter the next life if you’d been good in this one.’

  Curtis slowed the car as he approached the entrance to the Roman ruins. He turned to face them both as he pulled on the handbrake, cranking the car to a standstill. ‘When you die there is a time of judgement. Your heart is placed in one pan on the scales of justice and a single feather is placed in the other. That feather is truth, you see, and if you’ve led a good life the scales will be balanced.’

  ‘And if not?’ Maggie was quite sure she had not always been good.

  ‘Oh, the gods of the underworld don’t muck around, miss.’ He slapped the wheel of his car as if it were a plaything. ‘They would throw the bad heart to Ammut – eater of the dead – part crocodile, part hippo, part lion. Must have had an appetite, I think, miss. Truly fearsome.’

  ‘Indeed!’ declared Maggie. ‘And I reckon you must be parched, Corporal. I think you’ve earned that cup of tea.’

  ‘Well thank you, miss, that’s very kind of you. But I’ll take my tea by the car. Kiosk is really just for officers.’

  ‘You’re with us, Corporal. Let’s just say you’re our escort – our – what was his name?’

  ‘Wepwawet,’ Elsie whispered without even thinking.

  ‘But, miss...’

  ‘That’s an order, Corporal.’

  In time, the three took tea in the corner of the kiosk. They hid themselves in a forest of broken columns shielded from the gaze of nosy sightseers and off-duty officers. Nurses had always occupied an ambiguous place in the military bureaucracy – nominally subalterns, but paid not much more than a corporal. Told not to fraternise with other ranks but hardly likely to be accepted as brother officers. That Maggie and Elsie were Australians made their status all the more problematic. It was what the Imperial authorities liked to call ‘a grey area’. Funny, Curtis thought, grey was the colour of their uniform. But by now he was feeling more at ease. He enjoyed Maggie’s friendly banter and a kindness seldom seen in wartime. Australia, he thought to himself, might just be a country worth visiting. Pity it was so damned far away from everything.

  As the afternoon drew to a close, they rambled across the ruins of forum and temple. They stood side by side with the statues of gods and maidens. Flesh and stone shared a stange companionship as if the passing of the ages had made them equals. By 4.00pm the three of them had reached the amphitheatre. Its circled seats of stone still awaited a performance. Maggie was quick to oblige.

  ‘Coo-eee!’ It was a cry loud enough and clear enough to reach all the way to Australia. ‘Coo-eee!’

  Maggie looked hopefully to her friend. At least now she was smiling. But Curtis shuffled uneasily. Bending the rules was one thing, trumpeting it to the world another.

  ‘Miss, I really think...’

  ‘You’re right, Curtis. Quite right. Behaviour unbecoming and all that sort of thing. Here. I’ll stand aside. Come on down and perform for us.’

  ‘But, miss!’

  ‘That’s an order, Corporal. Come on, you’ll enjoy yourself.’

  Curtis stood beneath a small cross chiselled in the stone a thousand years earlier. It marked the acoustic centre of the amphitheatre. From that point even a whisper was audible from every corner of the auditorium. He coughed and became instantly aware of an audience. A party of English tourists, wintering in Egypt for the duration of the war, had taken their seats in the circle above him.

  ‘I – I don’t recall any speeches, miss. Not like the officers.’ Curtis remembered standing where Maggie stood now, and how Kipling, Shakespeare, Latin verse and old school song had been bellowed out by his betters.

  ‘But you could tell us another story,’ Elsie suggested. ‘Another tale from ancient Egypt.’ Curtis saw how much the young woman longed for distraction. He retraced his path through the galleries of antiquity and ended at the apex of all the sun god manifestations. Then he stumbled into a story.

  ‘Ra – symbol of the Sun – he took the form of a falcon mounted by a scarab or a cobra.’

  ‘But what did he do, man?’ One of the party of tourists demanded entertainment. Curtis’ thoughts sped along the corridor of Cairo’s museum.

  ‘Ra created mankind from his tears, sir,’ Curtis was a man born to serve and he would take this task seriously. ‘It’s a symbol you see, because the gods weep for all the bad things men do, so much so that Ra decided one day...’ he paused to gather his thoughts, ‘... one day Ra decided to be rid of us.’

  Curtis moved forward and raised his voice up to the auditorium. The words flowed more freely than they ever had in the museum. The sun glared on the stone, as if Ra himself was watching. Then the tale slid into darkness.

  ‘Ra ordered the god Hathor to destroy us. Hathor took the shape of a lion, he did, a terrible lion,’ he howled out the words as if they were a warning, ‘a beast that tore men’s bodies to pieces. The slaughter went on and on until the whole wide world was a wasteland. Nowhere was safe.’

  Curtis’ voice was racing now, echoing across the ruins, ‘There was nowhere to run to. The earth became as cold and as cruel as the underworld.’

  The audience fell suddenly silent, alarmed by the soldier’s raving intensity.

  ‘It’s as if they are drunk, you see, drunk with men’s blood, drunk with the pleasure of killing.’ And then Curtis stopped, alert to the slippage that had carried his story from one millennium to another. The crowd shifted uneasily in their seats. There was a rustle of conversation. A few voices rang out, buffeting an echo across the stage.

  ‘What man, how does the story end?’

  ‘Yes, how?’

  ‘Tell us!’

  ‘I, I...’ And in truth Curtis couldn’t tell them. Like armies all across Europe, his story had bogged down in a senseless round of killing. There and then, Curtis had reached a terrible conclusion. The war would go on forever. It could end only when there were no men left to feed the monster.

  Laughter rang across the high seats of the auditorium. Curtis looked down. Elsie had folded in Maggie’s arms and once again was weeping. A sacred ibis ambled around their crumpled figures. Slow, cautious, sinister – as if peering in from one world to another. Curtis shivered. Surely, he thought, that was a symbol for something.

  Eight

  The Colours of the Earth

  sometimes a picture can speak to you, whispering a message across the ages...

  Dedication of Tilba’s War Memorial, Mitchell Newspaper Cutting.

  Anzac Cove to Quinn’s, 1919

  ‘No, the landing wasn’t madness.’ Lambert has listened long enough to the Turk’s view. ‘And how can you say all this was futile?’ He snorts in the sea air, puffs up his chest and prepares, as only an artist can, for a goodly bout of oratory.

  ‘Here by the plains of Troy, land
of their fathers far away, our men claimed their place in history. They died here, yes, but they gave birth to something greater than themselves, they gave birth to our nation. Up there, Major,’ Lambert points towards spurs of the Sari Bair range, ‘our men fought with backs to the sea and they carved Australia’s name on the ridges. Up there, I tell you...’ he raises his hand as high as Chunuk Bair and stumbles just a little, ‘...they won greatness and they found glory.’

  Vickers and I look out across Anzac Cove. There’s a school of dolphins weaving through the sea, their warm, sleek bodies, plunging in and out of deep cold waters. Black dorsal fins splash a moment in the foam and then just as quickly slip away again. A flock of seagulls squawks and reels above them. We turn away as a last sheet of rain flies at right angles to our faces. Both of us trace the line of the razorback running jagged up the gullies. Neither Vickers nor I want to look at Zeki Bey directly. Much as we both treasure Lambert, performances like these are just an embarrassment. I fear this will not be the last time men plied with rum will shout patriotism at the landscape.

  I try to put things right. ‘Can you tell us then, Major, how far our men did reach that day?’ It seems important not to exaggerate their achievement.

  ‘Of course, Charles Bean,’ he smiles and begins to scratch out the shape of ridges in the sand, ‘better still, why don’t I show you?’

  And with that our party retraces our steps up Shrapnel Valley. We walk towards the cemetery where Hammond and his men have already returned to their digging. Through the scrub I can make out the circles of stones that had once marked soldiers’ graves. Around them is a line of blankets, each heaped with shards of bones and shreds of uniform. The burial party pauses for a moment as Hammond drapes one of the bundles with a Union Flag and calls on his men to pull it forward. The bones then tumble back into the earth and a white wooden cross is hammered into position. Hammond marks the place on his chart and turns to the next shabby bundle. To his left, I can see the cart they dragged down that morning from the campsite. The tarpaulin is pulled back now, revealing a cargo of crosses shipped all the way from Salonica. There must be hundreds there, I reckon. In time they will need thousands. Anzac’s graves are already an industry. I know that eventually those white wooden crosses will mark the lines of the landscape, tumbling down ridges to the sea like whitecaps on an ocean. But for now they just lie there, jumbled and unsorted, much like the bodies in Hammond’s burial ground.

  For an engineer like Colonel Hammond, restoring Gallipoli’s graveyards requires unrelenting accuracy. Every name must be accounted for, each cross raised precisely in position. As his work proceeds, it’s clear Hammond finds it easier to think in terms of numbers rather than names. He scratches another mark on his clipboard. Over 7000 men are buried on Anzac. Every unknown brought in from the gullies makes his task a little more difficult. But for me they can never just be numbers no matter how much the history requires otherwise. Sometimes I wonder if I am equal to my task, if the bare and colourless story I am charged to write can ever hope to heal the horrors.

  Hammond looks up as the neighing protest of Lambert’s horse catches his attention. ‘I was wondering where you fellows got to.’ He wipes the grime from his hands. ‘Come down here, will you.’

  We turn our horses towards the cemetery and Hammond calls out again to us. This time the tone is less welcoming.

  ‘Just our blokes, Bean – this is an Australian cemetery!’

  I turn to Zeki Bey; we understand each other instantly.

  ‘It’s all right, Charles Bean. You go now.’

  And with that he turns his stallion back towards the beach. The major has his own ghosts to bury.

  For a time, Vickers, Lambert and I stand quietly at the corner of Shrapnel Valley Cemetery. We watch as the last bundle of bones is folded back into the earth and think of ever-distant, ever-grieving families. Most of that last row are unknowns. They could be anyone’s boy and because of that they belong in a way to everyone. They had come from rough shacks on the Mallee and fine colonial homesteads. They tramped off to war down broad suburban streets, vast, empty plains and narrow city laneways. Gallipoli’s unknowns were accountants from Collins Street and shearers from Canterbury, slaughtermen from tropical Cairns and pink-cheeked boys homesick for the slums of Manchester. I’d ceased to believe in God years ago – not many faiths survived the carnage of the Somme. But partly out of habit, partly for the need of comfort I find myself whispering a prayer: A prayer for a woman whose search hasn’t ended.

  We look back up the gully and notice a gang of peasants trudging towards us. Some are dressed in torn army grey, others in ragged coloured garments. They are driving a bullock wagon through the heavy clay. Its wooden disc wheels slip, and then jolt their way forward. I can see a pile of debris rocking in the cart. Now that the fields are fallow, the men are salvaging tin, wire and even bullets from the battlefield. Lambert suddenly goes tense. I can feel the hate welling up inside him.

  ‘You should drive them off, Hammond. Ring a good stout fence all around Anzac.’

  Hammond nods firmly in agreement. ‘Just give us time, Mr Lambert. Time’s all we need to finish our work here. Now...’ Hammond senses it is time to change the conversation, ‘...there’s something I want to show you, Bean, something a historian should certainly see.’

  ‘Some kind of relic?’

  ‘Like this you mean?’ Hammond tosses a thin disc of silver towards me. It is aged and worn but still glitters as it spins the edge of sunlight. I catch the coin as it tumbles towards the earth. The face of Alexander looks back at me, peering up from my palm as it has from a thousand others.

  ‘Actually, it’s something much better than that,’ Hammond kneels down to the recently covered grave, presses the earth firmly but gently down and then stands up again. ‘Although it’s not the sort of thing you can package in a crate and send off to Melbourne.’

  There is a dismissive tone in Hammond’s voice. For all my assurances to the contrary, gathering war relics has already proved a drain on Hammond’s resources. Over the last few days the detachment’s carts have resembled the bullock train that returns to camp daily, groaning with a cargo of rusting weapons and buckled trench beams. The Australian War Museum covets every ‘sacred’ artefact. But to an old soldier like Hammond, it is just the debris of war, broken beyond repair by age or the elements. He knows what is really sacred here. Graves like these – laid out like a fortress across a heathen landscape.

  ‘It’s something I found up at Quinn’s. It looks like this lot’s finished for the morning, maybe for the day. Fancy a walk up there?’

  ‘Rather!’ Even in a burial ground, I found it hard to disguise my enthusiasm.

  Vickers has heard none of this. For the last few minutes his eyes have been fixed on Hammond’s workmen who have gathered twenty feet or so away, beyond the strands of wire that mark out the cemetery. It is their second act of prayer for the day. In a single sweeping movement they kneel to the ground, lower their bodies to the earth and lift their hands up to Allah. Despite the grey sky a beam escapes from the heavens and bathes their ragged clothing in a glistening splendour. For that moment, the land they kneel on seems at peace.

  ‘I say, Vickers–Vickers, are you joining us?’ Lambert has already slumped his swag across his back. ‘Time to scale the heights, Harry.’ And so we set off again, up along a tangled path cut through Monash Gully. The earth beneath our feet is hard and frozen, nothing like the choking dust I remember. Vickers is limping badly now. I can almost feel the buried shard of metal cutting at tissue and tendon. Climbing Monash Gully has always been hard. It is hardest of all for men who return there.

  ‘You were wounded here, weren’t you Bean?’ Alongside reverence for the dead, Hammond prizes the bloodied brotherhood of the wounded.

  ‘Somewhere hereabouts,’ I pause to catch my breath ‘...just a scratch really.’

  One day, in the early days of the campaign, a bomb had bounced along this very track and ex
ploded just in front of me. The body of a dead Turk took the full impact of the blast – even so it bowled me over. I frown as I remember wiping the blood from my shirt, fearing it was my own. Soap, water, creosote, kerosene – nothing could shake the stench from those clothes. I had to burn them. I look up at the muddy track. For a moment, I imagine another black cricket ball rolling down towards us.

  ‘I’m afraid the going gets a bit difficult now,’ Hammond pulls himself forward with the aid of the scrub, gripping the thorns with leather gloves, tugging at the rooted foothold. Lambert gasps in exhaustion and dismay: ‘the going’ as Hammond likes to call it, is made no easier by paints and easel.

  ‘Don’t worry, Lambert, the view will make it worth it.’ The artist wished he had a shilling for every time he had heard that.

  A good hour from the beach, we stand, tired and torn, directly beneath Quinn’s. Its rambling fortifications still cling perilously to the ridgelines. A haunted house we had called it. That last outpost on the Anzac line is still manned by ghosts and demons. Wind and rain lash against the remnants of an old barbed wire entanglement. The landscape seems to be moaning.

  I loosen my tunic. Despite the bitter cold, the climb has left me hot and sweaty. I can feel the tingling moisture seeping through my singlet. Hammond, fitter it seems than any of us, swings around to face us.

  ‘It’s not far from here now, Bean. Look out for that wire, must have come down in last night’s storm. Come to think of it...’ he smiles first at me and then at Vickers and Lambert, ‘...that makes my little discovery all the more remarkable.’ Hammond bashes at a bush with his stick and pushes aside the tangled foliage. ‘What do you think of that then?’