On Dangerous Ground
Page 18
Mark was taken aback. In 1933, Bean was preoccupied with the fourth volume of The Official History. What on earth had taken him to Central Tilba? But the answer was there in front of him. In another pixelated photograph, only a little clearer than the first, two figures knelt together by the roadside. Elsie cradled a eucalypt in her hand and Bean pressed the earth tenderly, reverently around it. He had seen pictures like this before, taken within months of the war ending, as grieving parents planted trees for sons who would never return to them. He remembered the country road Vanessa had driven down. Australia’s avenues of honour were also empty graves, sentinels of loss writ deep in the landscape, replenishing the colours of the earth. So they met, Mark thought to himself, finally met after all those years of correspondence. He wondered if it was the passage of time that had mellowed Elsie’s pain. Or was there something else, some secret shared between them?
Like a voice from another age, Mark’s mobile bleated from his pocket. He pushed his papers to one side and hurried from the sunlit spaces of the reading room. In the entrance hall, he almost bowled Miss Symons over. ‘Really, Mark!’ she called after him – her favoured researchers should know better. But there was an urgency in Mark’s step the young man hadn’t felt for days. The phonecall was from Vanessa.
Alexandria/Cairo/Sakkara, 1915
Elsie Forrest bore her injuries bravely. By day, she tended Gallipoli’s wounded, sick and dying, working till she dropped in the hurried heat of the hospital. By night she crept into her room, pulled the shutters to a close and tumbled, with the aid of Maggie’s brandy, into oblivion. Some nights Elsie woke in a heavy sweat. Only Maggie could lull her to sleep again, stroking her forehead, sweeping aside the nightmare. On the best nights, Elsie dreamt of times before the madness and slaughter of Anzac. On nights like these, she returned to the arms of her soldier.
***
‘There you go, my girl.’
Roy Irwin lifted Elsie into the saddle with the practised ease of a horseman. As his hand slipped away it brushed against her breast. Elsie sighed, wishing it would linger there. Then, at a single command barked by their guide, her camel jolted to its feet and Elsie lurched from one side to the other as the great beast pushed her along under the night sky. It was frightening and exhilarating.
‘I’m so far from the ground!’
‘Don’t worry, if you fall, you’ll land in a sand dune.’ Roy had proved himself quite a tease and Elsie wondered if this was quite a different man to the one she’d met on the wharf of Alexandria. Roy Irwin seemed older now, older and more worldly. Partly it was the confidence that comes to young men in love; partly the habit of command he’d acquired in his training. She struggled to regain her balance.
‘I’d better not fall!’ Now the guide was tying a lantern to the camel’s collar. ‘How would I explain that to Matron?’
‘About the same way I’d explain it to the major, I reckon.’
Their secrecy was planned and elaborate. Elsie had slipped away from the hotel in the dark hours of the morning. She found the young lieutenant waiting patiently outside the Mena, complete with native escort and a surly team of camels. Their plan was to set off for Memphis, visit the old city and then push on to Sakkara, the ancient necropolis of the desert. With luck, they would return soon after nightfall and slip back into their rooms. Maggie would cover for Elsie as best she could. Irwin, for whom the risk was even greater, relied on a close bound network of brother officers and the happily selective vision of a sentry – all of whom also longed to snatch a few hours of a woman’s company, craving respite from the rough male world of soldiering.
‘You know we could have gone by train,’ Elsie called out as Irwin lifted up perilously towards her. ‘Some of the other nurses have taken a taxi to Bedrashein, boarded the train there for Memphis and then gone on by donkey.’
‘And what would the point of that be?’ Roy shifted in his saddle as the camel lurched forward. ‘We’ll see the desert this way, and in the way the desert intends.’ Not all the sands of Egypt could quell a bush boy’s sense of adventure.
And with that the party set off, guided by the North Star, towards Memphis some sixteen miles distant. Already the silhouette of the pyramids cut sharp angles on the horizon. The sun rose as they entered the Libyan desert, colouring the dunes honey-brown. Roy was right, Elsie thought. The desert had a mystery all to itself.
Barely two hours into their journey, with the hot morning breeze just beginning to blow, Elsie and Roy encountered a caravan of Bedouins, wandering the desert as they had done since time immemorial. Elsie knew they would still wander the world long after the pyramids had crumbled. She noted that their bronzed faces were wrinkled by heat and wind and their eyes seemed sharpened by the glare of the desert. Black turbans bound their heads. White robes cloaked their bodies. She didn’t feel frightened – not for a moment – though God knows Matron never tired of warning them about the natives. The guide exchanged a few words with a group of men. They were gracious if reserved, quietly accepting of their presence. No one owned these vast and shifting sands. Journeys cross all borders.
There was an exchange of gifts and greetings and the two young travellers were ushered into the largest and most ornate of the tents. Elsie smelt tobacco and sweat, perfume and incense. There was a clattering commotion as a group of musicians, kneeling on carpets in the sand, prepared their instruments. It was a queer, syncopated sound, quite unlike any music Elsie had ever heard before.
‘They’ve offered to dance for us.’ Roy stated what Elsie had already realised.
A young boy appeared from behind a screen carrying a golden tray of steaming coffee. There was a hum from the floor as the oud whined into harmony and the tabla boomed like a hastening heartbeat.
A single woman danced for them and, though not an inch of her body was revealed, she swayed with sensuality. The rich red of her veil wrapped around her face, accentuating eyes that promised even more. Irwin swallowed uneasily. But Elsie feasted on all she could see: a woman flexing every part of her body, charged with a desire she had barely begun to imagine, graceful and glowing.
‘She’s beautiful, Roy, beautiful.’
But Roy Irwin wished it were Elsie dancing now. He remembered her hair shaking free from her bonnet.
The dance ended abruptly. As the tabla rolled to a close, the woman flung her body prostrate before them. Roy watched the young dancer’s bosom rise and fall. He could hear her panting.
Only Elsie spoke. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. The woman’s eyes looked up at her, replying in a language that needed no translation.
The two young lovers were quiet as they set off to their next destination. The ungainly movement of the camels and the heat of the sun swayed both young travellers to the edge of sleep. Each dreamed of the caresses of the other. It was a full four hours before they reached the mud walls that marked the outskirts of Mena. In the desert, time passed unnoticed.
Eventually the stepped pyramid of Djoser came into view, rising up from the desert as if it were a part of it. At the base of rubble and stone the party dismounted. Elsie stretched and yawned. After several hours riding, she still swayed side to side with the camel’s sand-bound gait. A guide offered wet towels to wipe away the grime and sweat. Moisture evaporated the moment the towels touched their skin.
He motioned towards a temple not twenty yards ahead of them.
‘You will come in now, sir, view the paintings, many beautiful paintings. Then we will take food.’ He gestured to the ancient structure rising up behind them. Already two of the servants were carrying baskets up the first of the step pyramids – 200 feet high, 4000 years old, it commanded views across the desert. But as their guide insisted, the first and best of Sakkara’s sights lay deep beneath the earth, in a labyrinth of tombs and tunnels.
‘This way, sir, this way, madam, please follow me.’
The guide swung his lantern in the dusty air. Elsie and Roy wandered from one chamber to another. In each room the guide
held the lantern high against wall and ceiling. Lives from other centuries leapt out at them. Pharaoh-like figures hunted, fished and rode, their servants tilled the fields, their cattle, sheep and goats grazed in great abundance. The solid stone walls were embellished throughout with faded hieroglyphic inscription. Elsie wondered what the complex symbols said, how speech could be rendered through anything so intricate. But the message of the next chamber was obvious. As the guide swept his lantern across the stone, a nobleman and his favoured wife embraced. Their bodies twisted together while Amun the snake curled and flexed between them. The reds, golds, greens, and blues were rich and potent. For 4000 years the walls of Ti’s tomb had throbbed with fecundity; without these ancient images, the Nile would forget to flood, the sun would shine cold and babes in the womb wither and perish. Elsie pressed against Irwin. They stood tight in the tomb, pushed into each other’s bodies. She could hear herself breathing.
‘Here, sir, here,’ the guide curled the torch again across the ceiling and thrust it forward to the edge of the next chamber. ‘Very good, you’ll see, excellent caricature.’
Roy Irwin wondered whether French, German or British archaeologists had offered his guide the most fulsome vocabulary. They lowered their heads and crept into the small, airless room. As the torch flared with movement, a new host of images sprang into life but this time the scene was terrible and ugly.
‘Underworld,’ the guide spat out. ‘Wepwawet, Hathor,’ he lifted the torch higher, ‘Ammut.’ Elsie gasped as the creature that devoured men’s hearts stared heartlessly down at her.
***
‘It’s all right, love, you were dreaming, only dreaming.’ Maggie pressed her face against that of her friend. ‘Hush hush, I’m here now.’
And with that the sobbing slowly died away. Out on the same desert, a dull dawn was breaking.
Nine
Into Cleanness Leaping
clinging to rifles as drowning men cling to a life raft...
George Lambert, The charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915, 1924.
The Nek, 1919
The winter dawn breaks slowly this morning. Like an old man too weak to rise, it slumps its shallow light on the horizon. Lambert prepares his paints and easel by lamplight. He has come to capture the first rays of morning sun on the small wooden panel that serves as a canvas, come to paint the dawn the way men who charged the Nek would have seen it. In his pocket he carries a notebook; a record of an interview with one of the battle’s few survivors.
4.30am. Light – dim, flat, diffused, stars just fading, sky – soft lavender. Turkish machine guns firing from the flank. Dead men falling back in the trench.
It isn’t hard to imagine.
Down in the gully Lambert can hear the jackals howling. Shrill demented cries, the hungry sound of evil. The artist’s lips begin to quiver. He knows what grim feast brought the wild dogs together. The scavengers had dragged a body from its shallow grave. They snarl as they eat, breaking bones with their teeth, sucking dry the marrow. There is a rustle in the bush to his left and Lambert reaches for his rifle. An instant later a shot rings out. A clamour in the scrub, and a wounded creature limps away. Lambert swears and swigs from his hip flask. He had only winged the bastard.
The moment the shot is fired the valley plunges into silence. It is as if the landscape remembers. At the height of the campaign the longest stretch between gunfire was just a few seconds. Now, a single shot echoes all the cruelty that was done here.
Lambert looks around him. In the sickly light of dawn, the first thing he can see is bleached and broken bones. The jackals must have had a field day. He takes another swig from his flask, moves the rifle a little closer and picks up his brush. He knows the first stroke can either make or lose a painting. A deep swathe of red moves across the willow board. Red for the baked earth of August, red for the blood that flowed there. He looks out across no-man’sland, noting each crucified bush, each crumpled hollow. Across this stretch of ground, four waves of the Australian Light Horse had charged to their death, nearly 400 men cut down by machine guns within a few feet of their trenches. Directly ahead of him, Lambert can see where the Turks fired from. ‘The Chessboard’ was aptly named: nine rows of trench and breastworks made the Nek a fortress. Men sent out to face that fire didn’t stand a chance. And they knew it. They shook hands and said goodbye before diving over the parapet. Like swimmers into cleanness leaping? No, Lambert knew better than that now.
The artist waves his brush again. Another splash of red marks sun on a distant ridgeline. They would have charged into the frail morning light; the promise of dawn on the horizon being the first and last thing they saw. Lambert reaches for another swig but stops. He knows he has to keep his head clear and his hand steady. The men who fell here deserved some small sacrifice. His hands look numb with the cold. He rubs his chest as though to soothe a dull ache; perhaps the strain of overwork, perhaps the pain of being there.
He stops for a moment and sniffs the still air. Pipe tobacco. The smell of London’s streets and clubrooms, a cosy studio in Regent’s Park, a drinking hole in Soho.
He turns at last and sees me seated on a camp stool. I have sat here twenty minutes. Watching. Waiting. ‘Don’t mind me, George, you keep painting.’
Lambert doesn’t mind at all. The Nek is a haunted place and he is in need of company.
‘Like a drink, old Bean?’ I wonder if that question isn’t Lambert’s standard greeting.
‘Better not. Zeki Bey’s taking me up to the Pine this afternoon. Are you coming?’
‘I don’t think so.’ There is disapproval in Lambert’s tone as icy as the air around me. ‘I have work to finish here.’ He strokes another swathe of red across his canvas. ‘You’re seeing rather a lot of that fellow, aren’t you?’
I don’t answer. In truth I’ve become rather fond of the Turkish major. I admire the frankness of his speech and the gentleness of his manner. And the major has taught me something else besides. Something the Oxford dons never mentioned. How to see the past through another’s eyes. How to gaze out from the Turkish side of the trenches. This is much more than plotting the disposition of guns or charting the course of a battle. I now know that for every one of our men killed at least three, perhaps four, Turks had fallen. Even here at the Nek poor bloody Mehmetçiks had died in their thousands. Like Lambert, I look out across no-man’s-land. Unlike the artist, I see Turkish bones mingled with those of their enemy.
Lambert looks up from the painting again and studies the open grave called a landscape before looking back at me. I know he considers asking me to lie out there. ‘Playing dead’ the men of the mission call it, and intent on recapturing the scene of battle Lambert has called on most of us at some time or other to act as models. But I look the other way. I am not keen to lie on that bleak earth. Instead Lambert asks the obvious.
‘It was murder here, wasn’t it, Charley? Sheer, bloody murder.’
It is not like Lambert to speak like that. I wonder if Vickers has finally got to him. But the historian in me wants to explain.
‘Wasn’t supposed to be, George. Ships’ guns were supposed to take out the machine guns and our artillery had the range of their trenches. But the bombardment ended before anyone expected, the guns had to shift their fire you see.’ I look back to where the batteries were placed, ‘...had to move on to the next target.’
Lambert sketches the first body withering in the blast. ‘Sounds like murder to me, Bean. And who do you think the historians will find responsible?’
I shudder. Allocating blame for the debacle at the Nek has already become a popular pastime. Blaming the British is probably the easiest course and one all too suited to the mythology of Anzac. The shores of Suvla Bay curl out beneath us. Here the British expeditionary force had come ashore, failed to advance and squandered any slim hope of victory. But history was seldom so simple.
‘It’s hard to understand why we kept sending men out there,’ I note another f
igure buckling into Lambert’s willow board. ‘Any fool could see it was hopeless. But they charged, George, to draw Turkish fire away from the New Zealanders on Chunuk Bair. If the Fernleaves had hung on there, we might have taken the heights, then taken Baby 700.’
‘And could they have hung on, Charley?’
I remember the men massed against them, a tide of steel sweeping down the ridges, remember the guns of British battleships blowing our men from the slopes, remember the wounded weeping for water beneath the pitiless sun of August. Canterbury and Wellington, Auckland and Otago, all butchered. Maori and Pakeha bleeding beside baby-faced boys from Lancashire. It would have been easier to lie out there in no-man’s-land. ‘Had to withdraw, George – as did the British.’
‘So it was murder then?’
A few weeks before I would have said heroism – now I didn’t answer.
I draw closer to Lambert and study the painting. Men plunge blindly forward, backs bent down under the withering fire, clinging to rifles as drowning men cling to a life raft. Their forms are shaped with firm horizontal brushstrokes. The paint sits heavy on the canvas, almost sculptural in quality. At the edges of the sheet, a man is lifted up like a puppet on a string, suspended in the air before he will fall down limp and lifeless. To the right, a blinded man stares at eternity. A single bullet has punctured his hand. It drips with blood like a stigmata. In the half-light of early morning, Lambert’s painting has summoned spirits up from the earth, as if those scattered bones have charged again across the canvas. He has perfectly captured the second their souls were lifted from them. Even so, I am bound to find fault with it. Lambert will be disappointed if I don’t.