On Dangerous Ground

by Bruce Scates

  To Lambert the grey pool of water and mud seems drab and unremarkable. But veterans of the fighting at Quinn’s recognise the shape instantly.

  ‘A coffin hole, is it?’

  ‘Well done, Vickers, this must have been...’

  I am too excited to let him finish, ‘Must have been where the men first dug in: New Zealanders, the Royal Marines, the Fourteenth Battalion.’

  Lambert has taken the term literally and looks on mystified. I explain it as best I can.

  ‘Here men dug in the first days, George, scratching out a hole in the earth with their bayonets. Coffin trenches were just a few inches deep, they barely sheltered the body of a man. Men died as they dug, their bodies exposed to the line of fire...’

  ‘And others,’ Hammond resumes as he pushes the foliage to the side, ‘were killed because they couldn’t dig deep enough. Up there, left, right and straight ahead, the Turks dug in also.’

  The artist surveys the scene like a landscape awaiting painting. It seems every inch of ground has been torn up, buckled and pockmarked like one vast rabbit warren. And amidst this tortured earth one man’s shallow scratching has somehow survived. It is, as Hammond says, remarkable. And it is nothing like the war Lambert had known. In Palestine, the Light Horse had charged with reckless valour across the shifting sands of the desert – a war of exhilarating movement, fought across a vast terrain, not the cluttered immobility of Anzac. Lambert shivers as he feels mud seeping through his socks. Give him the desert, anytime.

  We pull ourselves up to the first line of sandbags. They are zigzagged and sited to deflect a stream of snipers’ bullets. Everywhere we look there are the remains of tunnel, trench and breastworks. Here at the cone of Monash Gully, two armies collided. There was no real field to occupy, so both sides simply dug into the ridgeline.

  ‘How many men were here?’ Lambert asks, looking for some pattern in the subsiding mass of earthworks.

  ‘About 250 in the garrison at any one time...’ Hammond has counted the casualties long enough to know, ‘...and about the same number of men waiting to relieve them in those trenches behind us.’

  Vickers coughs. There was never much relief at Quinn’s. Men fired and bombed till they dropped with exhaustion and then, knowing their lives depended on it, somehow fired and bombed again. At least in the frontline in France there were lulls in the fighting when men could snatch some rest. But there was no rest at Quinn’s from the landing to the evacuation, day or night. A soldier just stood there, cowering in the darkness of the cramped, smelly pit, madly shooting from the parapet and dodging bombs spinning towards him. It made me sick just to think of it.

  I climb to the parapet and prise the remains of a loophole from a rotting sandbag. Coated with mud and rust, the metal still glows where bullets had struck it. I peer through the slit and wonder what Quinn’s defenders had seen. Flickers of fire from Turkish machine guns? The bundled bodies of the dead? Perhaps the gleam of shovels as men repaired their trench lines and dug their own graves ever deeper.

  Hammond smiles at me. ‘You’d be dead by now, old boy, sniper would have potted you.’ He turns again to Lambert. ‘Most dangerous place in the firing line, those loopholes. We gave them names, y’know. Lemnos, Alexandria, England. Depending on which hospital your injuries would take you. This one,’ Hammond steps forward and runs his glove across the cold iron, ‘this one was just called Anzac. Worst of the lot, this little bastard.’

  I wipe mud from metal and jam the loophole in my pack. Then I take a tape ribbon from my pocket and hand one end of it to Vickers. ‘You held Quinn’s, Harry, will you hold this for me?’ I am surprised by the brightness in my voice, and how Vickers rallies at the sound of it.

  ‘Of course, Charley, mind how you go though.’

  And with that I throw my body over the mould of mud and hessian that still marks the line of trenches. My tunic tears as I slide, literally, into no-man’s-land. I pause to examine the fraying metal strands that caused it. Netting, strung across open trenches to stop the black bombs rolling into them. Quinn’s first line of defence. All that stood between life and oblivion.

  I look back behind me to ridges plummeting down all the way to the sea. The New Zealanders sited their machine gun somewhere on Russell’s Top, sweeping Quinn’s with fire wherever there was movement. I ponder the paradox woven into Anzac. Here in the close confines of the trenches men battered each other to death, swearing in each other’s faces, while at the same time soldiers killed soldiers from a distance, firing salvos from the sea or shooting sideways from the ridges. Death was angled everywhere. But Quinn’s copped the lot of it. I knew I would have to include that in the history. Somehow make hell itself seem credible.

  ‘Are you all right, Skipper? Vickers and I can’t see a thing from here,’ Lambert’s voice, loud and resolute, echoes down the gully.

  ‘Fine, fine. I make it...’ I pause to check the measurement, ‘about ten yards, ten yards between the trenches.’

  Lambert wonders why historians crave such precise measurement. But I know ten yards is just the distance to throw a bomb. Day after day, week after week, bomb duel after bomb duel annihilated either garrison. For most of the campaign, Quinn’s had looked and smelt like a slaughterhouse. It still does.

  I clamber back over the parapet. ‘This must be the old Number 3 Post, closest point to the Turkish line.’ I sweep the mud from my tunic pocket, and pull out my sketchbook. A frighteningly familiar sound rustles ahead of me.

  ‘Yes, it’s digging, Bean,’ Hammond seems to know what I was thinking. ‘We’re digging one last time at Quinn’s. Not trenches though, not saps, not tunnels. We’re digging a cemetery and we’ll bring those bodies up soon from the slopes down below us. It might not look much now, but one day...’ he drives his swagger stick into the yielding earth. ‘One day, Lambert, this will be something worth painting.’

  Lambert takes a hefty gulp from his hip flask and offers it in turn to each of us. I imagine what it must have been like, rolling the bodies of your mates down from the ridge and burying them at night where they landed. At Anzac, not even cemeteries were safe. Men sheltered in the graves they dug as the shells whistled over them.

  ‘But why there, sir, why so far forward?’ Vickers has taken his bearings now. ‘That’s not where we fought, not where our mates b-bought it?’

  ‘No, Captain, but at least it’s ground we can terrace. Too much of this slope’s already slipped down the gully, carrying corpses with it. We’ll set them up there firm and safe.’

  For Hammond this is much more than an engineering imperative. It is a powerful political statement. And I realise that instantly. ‘So they’ll still hold Quinn’s, eh Hammond?’

  ‘Oh yes, Bean,’ he knew abandoned trenches made deep and convenient graves. ‘They’ll take the Turkish line and they’ll hold it forever.’

  ‘But they are not alone, are they, Colonel Hammond?’ Zeki Bey climbs down from the Turkish position. He steps gingerly over posts and wire, weaving his way through a half-remembered labyrinth. His uniform looks as though it has just been pressed. Not a spot of mud has settled on it. The major stops a few feet from Quinn’s, standing in the same place he had stood in 1915. Steam rises from his mouth as he speaks to us: ‘You call it “Quinn’s” but I think our Turkish name is more telling. This is Bomba Sirt, gentlemen, Bomb Ridge ... and more Turks than English died here.’

  Zeki Bey would know. Holding Bomba Sirt was as costly and difficult as holding Quinn’s, and for exactly the same reason the Turks could never yield an inch of it. Here our two armies had bled each other dry: the Verdun of the Dardanelles, a place of execution. But something else as well. I knew that. And so too did the major.

  ‘We all suffered here, died here,’ Zeki Bey nods at the ruined trenches, ‘and here we became brothers. Remember, gentlemen,’ the major again seeks Vickers’ eyes, ‘it was not just bombs and bullets we threw at one another.’

  Hammond grimaces. When lines are as close as this frate
rnisation with the enemy is inevitable. Troops shout and swear and then, as the months wear on, strike up broken conversation. Listening through the wind, I can almost hear them. A medley of schoolboy French, pidgin English and poorly pronounced Arabic drifts to and fro across no-man’s-land.

  Language is a subversive thing in wartime: it reminds men it is other men they are fighting. I recall the time Turks threw their cigarettes over the parapet, remember our own men hurled back their bully beef and tobacco. Notes were exchanged, sometimes even compliments. And yes, they had a sense of humour – even Hammond would give them that. I remember a note reading ‘Bully Beef non’ written, presumably, by the poor beggars who had tasted it.

  Hammond clears his throat and spits. All this talk of brother soldiers clearly appalls him. And so Colonel Hammond goes to war again. ‘Yes, Major, many Turkish troops are buried here ... I can still smell them.’

  Zeki Bey says nothing in reply. Above everything else, Bomba Sirt had taught a Turk to endure injury.

  Mitchell Library, Sydney, 2015

  The ibis moved reluctantly to one side as Dr Troy approached the steps of the Mitchell Library. On a bench to his left, an old dero shuffled in his sleeping bag. The bird moved beneath the crumpled bundle, slipped its beak into a bottle and emptied the last of the fluid. Then it staggered slowly away, rocking gently from one side to the other. Mark wondered if all Sydney’s swaying ibis nursed intolerable hangovers.

  He paused a moment by the dull bronze doors which sealed the library from the city and took one last glimpse at the Botanic Gardens opposite. Their shimmering green softened the concrete edges of the city. He breathed in deeply and tasted the smell of the harbour. Then the young scholar removed his earplugs and folded his iPod into his pocket.

  Bracing himself for stone-cool silence, Mark stepped into the building. He trod carefully but quickly across the coloured mosaic set into the floor – ancient ships sailing to the edges of the known world and skirting the broken coastline of Australia. Sea monsters snapped at his heels as he skipped towards the reading room.

  ‘Dr Troy, a pleasure to see you, and on a Saturday, too. My, you must be busy!’

  Mark offered Miss Symons his hand, a courtesy not extended often enough to librarians. She shook it and smiled just as warmly. There was a twinkle in her aging eyes as she scanned the books lined impressively in the stacks above them.

  ‘Great discoveries today?’

  ‘Here, Miss Symons, I always find something.’

  ‘Just call for me if you’ve any problems, Mark, but I’m sure the duty librarians will help you.’ She turned to go and then looked back, remembering something – as is the wont of all librarians. ‘Don’t forget the young scholars forum next week.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mark replied. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’ And with that the Mitchell librarian glided quietly from the reading room, entrusting her treasure to the researchers. Mark felt suddenly privileged to be there, and to be welcomed into the fellowship of what Miss Symons called ‘her historians’. Miss Symons, he thought, was as wise and as stately as the building she cared for. Here the records of the nation rested, safe and secure in her keeping. He glanced at the inscription carved deep in the Mitchell’s sandstone walls: In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past ... Mark knew it was the motto Miss Symons lived by.

  By a curious coincidence, Mark had come to examine the labours of Miss Symons’ predecessor. In the 1920s, as communities raised their monuments, the Mitchell librarian set about his own act of commemoration. Every day he scanned the papers that made their way in triplicate into the library’s reading room and every day he compiled careful accounts of the making of the state’s memorials. Item Q940.939N is now a tattered, dusty volume, fraying with age, buckling beneath the weight of its binding. But as Mark turned the pages he imagined the moment it was lovingly crafted. With scissors and glue in hand, the Mitchell librarian selected sketch and photograph, feature item and editorial. He pasted them solemnly into his scrapbook, a sharp-nibbed pen scratching time and place for posterity. Item Q940.939N may not stand as long as obelisk or arch, broken pillar or marble upright soldier, but it is surely no less a gesture of remembrance.

  Tilba was the town Mark searched for. A small country community in the south of the state, set beside hills draped with mist and valleys, green and fertile. It was the town Elsie Forrest came from – the mysterious author of all those letters weaved through the Bean correspondence, the woman in search of her soldier. What was his name again? That’s right, Mark remembered, Irwin. Roy Irwin. One of the legions of the missing.

  The pages crumpled as he turned them. Towards the middle of the volume, barely a year after the end of the war, was the evidence that Tilba had lay to rest its soldiers. The photo was of a simple stone cenotaph, raised on the edge of the village, looking out across fields and mountains. There it stood in its own state of timelessness, glittering with names.

  It was only appropriate that Sister Elsie Forrest spoke from the dais. Mark read the caption with the hurried eye of a researcher. Sister Forrest has done more than any single citizen to raise the funds for this fine memorial and many of the men she nursed have their proud names inscribed for all time on this cenotaph. They sleep in heroes’ graves, in Flanders fields, in the valleys of the Somme, in the deserts of Palestine, on the ridges of Gallipoli...

  Mark’s lip began to twitch. How the big words sanitised the grim business of death and killing. Sleeping in heroes’ graves indeed. The men who buried them there had told a different story. Bloated corpses slung into shell holes, parts of bodies scavenged from battlefields, dead men who still moved, alive with vermin. But Mark could also understand the need for such memorials. He’d tried to explain that to Vanessa. The lonely pillar of stone was a surrogate grave for all the men who left that country town and all the families who loved them. The most intimate, also the most universal.

  The photograph that headed the column was black and white, the contrast poor and the picture itself coarsely grained. Even so, the figure of Elsie Forrest stood out. Small, thin and attractive, Mark thought. She had not worn black that day but dressed in the same grey uniform worn through five long years of nursing. Was there something in that, he wondered? While others laid their dead to rest did she still hold out hope, still believe he’d sail home to Tilba?

  Mark thought back to what she had written to Bean. And yet for all you have done, and all you have found, my faith is unshaken. I still believe he is alive and I will go on praying and hoping. He knew it was like that. Some families never gave up hope. How could they when they had no body to bury? All through the war, they kept rooms the same as their sons had left them, wedged back doors ajar, lighted a thousand pleading candles. He remembered stories of women in black – flocks of them gathering on the wharves, swooping down on troops returning home, thrusting crumpled photographs in blank, denying faces. ‘Have you seen him? Were you there? Did you know him?’ And sometimes, just sometimes, the lost were actually found. Years after the war, men were still drifting back from prison camps, hospitals and asylums. Gradually, they recovered their memories, eventually families found them. Was Irwin one of them?

  Mark looked up at the glassed ceiling of the reading room and his thoughts floated to the ever-tranquil brightness. He recalled a particular file from the Callan Park Asylum records. A man found wandering the battlefields in 1916 – incoherent, shell-shocked, unable to identify himself, dressed in the shreds of an Australian uniform. That man was locked away in an asylum until 1928, when a family from New Zealand finally claimed him. But well before that, hundreds had peered into that dark squalid cell, praying that the unknown soldier might be theirs, that their missing might be returned to them.

  He looked down again. A second picture. The photographer froze the lens at the moment Elsie Forrest laid a sprig of rosemary at the base of the memorial. Not a wreath, Mark noted, but a single sprig of rosemary. Sometimes a picture can s
peak to you, whispering a message across the ages. Rosemary is for remembrance, Mark thought. Pledged to remember that day, but not to accept the death of her soldier.

  He read through the column time and time again, slowly, carefully, analytically, just as Professor Evatt had taught him. Speaking from the dais was unusual for a woman, even governors’ wives were seldom accorded that privilege. In ceremonies like these women usually stood on the sidelines. They wept for the dead while men made the speeches. Mark wondered if that wasn’t as it should be. Men had sent their sons to war; here and in France, Belgium, Palestine and Gallipoli they gathered with stern resolve to bury them. Perhaps being a nurse gave Elsie special licence to speak. She and others like her had heard the last words of the dying, wiped the last beads of perspiration from their brow, written their last farewells to Australia. She had served with them. Yes, that was it, Mark thought. Yet another reason for her to dress in her nursing sister’s uniform. What had she said, he wondered and turned, ever hopeful, to the next page of the album. ‘Oh shit,’ he whispered, as the ghostly thin spire at Wallendbeen looked up at him.

  He turned back the page again. A neat copperplate hand had traced out a message to future readers. See Central Tilba, Town Views, 1930. This particular Mitchell librarian had written the direction eighty years ago, but Mark trusted it as if it had just been given by Miss Symons.

  It took over an hour for the file to come down from stacks. But Mark didn’t mind the wait. In time, all town views would be digitised, available to researchers online, a bold new initiative of the New South Wales government. Mark knew that when every manuscript, every image was filtered through a machine, libraries like this would be no more than museums. It wasn’t a day Mark looked forward to. History had a place. It belonged here.

  He collected the file from the desk, carried it across to the reading area, and joined a circle of silence as a gathering of Mitchell regulars pored over ancient text and faded manuscript. At first the file seemed a disappointment. Like every country town, Tilba had faithfully recorded a pantheon of firsts: first bakery, first buttery, first bandstand. It was only a matter of time, Mark thought, before someone with a sense of history captured the inauguration of Tilba’s traffic lights, though not for a while yet he hoped. There was also a series of pictures of the flood of ’28, the rising waters of the river measured by the immersion of the main street’s buildings. Then, turning the page, Elsie Forrest again looked up at him. Anzac Day 1933, the column read, Nurse and war historian plant first tree in avenue of honour.