On Dangerous Ground

by Bruce Scates

  They looked out on a stark, blank sky beyond the ridge knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.

  As Irwin prepared to shout his final order, a shell flew in towards them. A second later, he felt his body lift into the air. Sightless, weightless and strangely unafraid, he soared above the chaos of the battlefield.

  In the mad din of battle, the world seemed strangely silent.

  Ten

  A Gathered Radiance

  meanings stacked one on another like the deranged arches of Thiepval...

  Perspective sketch by Edwin Lutyens, on a sheet of his office writing paper.

  Nek/Quinn’s/Lone Pine, 1919

  ‘Wait up there, Major.’

  With anger in his step, Zeki Bey has bounded up the ridgeline.

  ‘Wait please, Major.’

  I finally catch up to him. Without thinking, I grip his arm, softly but firmly. The major comes to a halt. The urgency of my hold clearly surprises him.

  ‘I must apologise for Lambert. He...’ I fumble for excuses. ‘Well, he lost family here, boys he was close to. Their bodies never recovered. He has taken this whole business about the cemeteries very badly.’

  Zeki Bey says nothing. He looks away, up towards the heights of Sari Bair. Clouds race across the summit, burying the ridges in shadow. I wonder just how many of the major’s family were also lost at Gallipoli.

  ‘Come, Monsieur Bean. Let me show you something.’ He places his arm around my shoulders and turns me gently towards the Pine. There is a warmth in his touch I hadn’t expected. ‘We will go there together.’

  We follow a path cut across no-man’s-land. Neither of us says a word as we pass our old positions. We walk where two armies had once laid in wait to kill and maim each other. But I feel none of the excitement that gripped me on my last visit. Pope’s, Courtney’s, Steel’s Post – all were still and deserted, bled of the dreams men had bled for. Somewhere in the quiet unseen, a lark sings out a requiem.

  At Quinn’s we pause for a moment to catch our breath and watch a team of Hammond’s men level the terrace. Most of them look no different to the peasants tilling the fields. Colonel Hammond has insisted they mount an Australian flag over the worksite; its bright colours flash against the grey rags of uniforms.

  ‘You did not fly your flag in 1915.’ Zeki Bey looks directly at me. This is not an innocent observation.

  ‘No, well, you would have shot it down. And anyway,’ I watch the way the flag flexes and flounders in the gusty breeze, ‘it would have given you the range for your artillery.’

  ‘That is not what I mean – you know that, Charles Bean. You flew an English flag.’

  ‘It was our flag too.’

  ‘And now?’

  The Southern Cross strains again against the sky. I think of Vickers and say nothing.

  We resume our walk along the track. Mud smears our boots as we trample the gorse. The morning wind rustles in the scrub. It seems to rattle the bones littered around us.

  ‘Where are we going, Major?’

  ‘To where you asked to go, my friend.’

  For a moment, I’m puzzled. Then I remember our conversation cut short on the beach. The major had promised to show me how far the Anzac forces had reached. It was the greatest mystery of the campaign. I can barely wait to solve it.

  But there is something wrong.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be going the other way? Lalor and his men were sighted up there, up on the ridges.’

  ‘So they were, Monsieur Bean, but they did not go the furthest. And there is something else, a wonder I will show you, insha’Allah.’

  We walk on, history under heel. The brittle earth crunches beneath our feet, like seashells breaking. I look to the horizon. Silver light is breaking from a pitch-black sky; at last, the weather is turning.

  We reach Lone Pine late that morning. The shallow plateau is quiet and deserted. No pine stands here now. Like the soldiers on either side it had fallen in the early days of the campaign, swept away by an inferno of artillery. Try as I might, I can’t remember the lines of the lovers’ tune ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ that it was named after. I smile quietly to myself: Just like the diggers to call a place of carnage something so lyrical. But today, in that winter light, the Turkish name for Lone Pine echoes in my mind: kanli sirt, bloody ridge. I can’t begin to imagine how much blood was spilt there.

  We stop where the first of the Turkish trenches plunges into the earth. The major and I peer into the shadows, as had so many soldiers before us. Lemony sunlight shines at angles through the breastworks, patterning earthen walls, rusting iron, rotting hessian.

  ‘Please,’ Zeki Bey gestures inside. ‘It is safe now.’

  We step down into the galleries. It smells damp and cold. We blink and strain as our eyes adjust to the shadows.

  ‘So quiet now.’

  Zeki Bey had fought at the Pine. He knows the terrible clamour that had erupted in these galleries. He nods. ‘Quiet – not peaceful.’

  ‘We pulled a thousand dead out of this trench that first week,’ my voice shakes as does my footing, ‘God knows how many poor beggars were left out in no-man’s-land.’ Zeki Bey’s soft blue eyes turn to me in reply.

  ‘We did the same from our trenches. Thousand upon thousands.’

  We step cautiously forward. Despite the struggling sunlight it is bitterly cold in the trench. Ice-laden air presses in on our faces. It still carries the taste of death four years after the fighting.

  ‘Can you be more specific, Major? How many thousands?’ I stand there in the mud, pencil at the ready. My question seems obscene in the silence.

  ‘Really, my friend,’ Zeki Bey nods at my notebook, ‘can a figure tell you the cost? One man’s death is equal to a thousand.’

  ‘It’s my job, Major. It’s what I’m here to do.’

  ‘To write it all down, or to understand it?’

  ‘Both, surely.’

  Zeki Bey raises his eyebrows. He reaches out and pulls aside a sheet of hessian blocking our path. Dust drifts down, sparkling in the splintered sunlight. We move towards the shadows of the gallery.

  ‘Here, come – this way.’

  The deeper we descend the colder it feels. Lone Pine is a great silent tomb. Fear trapped in its tunnels.

  ‘And now, Charles Bean, look above you!’

  The major strikes several matches at once and holds them high. A gathered radiance sweeps away the darkness. Above us, a great pine log still straddles the trench, sealed in place by earth. Zeki Bey runs the flaring light across it. Years ago, bayonets had peeled away the bark and scratched soldiers’ names into dark, seasoned timber.

  ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ I mumble. Name after name, like ancient markings on the pews of my old school chapel. And beneath that, letters chiselled hard and fast in the wood, deep enough to outlast the ages.

  24th Batt. AIF. August. 1915.

  Perhaps no other monument is needed.

  ‘The Mehmetçiks did not even have their names to leave.’

  Now it’s my turn to nod. Surnames were unknown in an Empire made of villages.

  ‘Perhaps though,’ Zeki Bey runs his finger along the names of the Australian dead, ‘perhaps my countrymen left something more precious than bones. Come.’ Again the major places his hand on my shoulder. Again I feel a kind of warmth I’ve not known since a schoolboy. ‘Let me show you.’

  The two of us climb awkwardly from the trench, blinking in the steel cold light that greets us. Zeki Bey motions ahead.

  ‘There!’ he says. ‘Life returns to a wasteland.’

  Just a few feet away an apricot tree has taken root. It grew from a single stone cast aside by a homesick Turkish soldier. Its branches stretch like praying hands to the sky, each bearing a cluster of buds longing to burst into colour. A line from the mystic Rumi runs across the major’s lip, ‘O Lord,’ he whispers barely loud enough for me to hear him, ‘please render your love to me!’ I recognise a prayer when I hear one. ‘Amen,�
�� I add. The dead were all on the same side now.

  ‘There is one last thing, Charles Bean.’ Zeki Bey extends his hand. ‘But, first, I think Captain Vickers is waiting.’ The two of us turn and retrace our path across the battlefield. Far beneath us, at the foot of the valley, a tireless sea is rushing to the shore. We had come further than either of us thought possible.

  Harry Vickers had ridden on alone to Lone Pine. His leg was giving him more than the usual trouble. He tethered his Waler by the stump of a shattered tree and limped with some difficulty and more pain to the base of the Turkish memorial.

  It is hardly what you would call an impressive structure. For as long as men have felt the need to remember, they have assembled cairns like this one, stones stacked one on another, pointing upwards to the heavens. The Turkish monument is set near the edge of ‘the cup’, a saucer-like depression to the south of the battlefield. Surrounded by six-inch shells, it marks the point where Ottoman forces turned back the English Army.

  Vickers is clearly pleased it is here. This sorry place has need of memorials. He studies the rough stonework. Hammond would have called it crude and shoddy. And yet the simplicity of the monument gave it grandeur. It said so much because it said so little.

  For weeks now Vickers has carried a wildflower pressed and dried in his tunic pocket. He found it the first day we landed back at Anzac, a bright blaze of colour in the mud. He had picked it with more care than became a soldier, determined to take just a single flower, leaving the plant unharmed, knowing in time new life would spring from it. He had intended to take the flower home. Back to the land his mates had come from. Now, he drew it carefully from his tunic and placed it at the foot of the memorial.

  I knew Vickers said no prayer for that first man Collins had killed, whispered no eulogy for all the other men that followed. He had already wept for the boy he had strangled, here at the Pine, in the murderous darkness of the galleries. He’d told me it was like throttling the life from a baby. As that child died I fear a part of him died also.

  He presses the tiny flower into a crevice in the stonework. In generations to come men will stand by memorials like this and speak of pride and sacrifice and bravery. But only one word springs to Vickers’ lips. The wind lifts it up and plants it on every corner of the ridges.

  ‘The major said I’d find you here, Harry.’ I know enough to say no more. We stand close together, as close we had on that first grey day on Lemnos, eyes straining to a distant shore, thoughts lost somewhere in the gullies and trenches.

  ‘Do you remember the songs, Charley, the songs children would sing to us in France?’

  ‘Of course,’ I whisper, unsure where Vickers is heading.

  ‘They sang as we mar-marched off, off up the line, s-sang and waved to us.’

  I notice the tears streaming from my friend’s eyes. We both pretend it is the wind biting our faces.

  ‘So many ch-children, Charley. So many or-orphans. And yet they sang so beau-beautifully. Like angels – angels from heaven.’

  Vickers begins to weep. I place a fatherly hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s all right my boy. France is over. It’s all over now.’

  Vickers looks back at me with eyes that stare straight to the horror. I let the last of his sobbing pass away, knowing I am powerless to prevent it from returning. I’d always thought of Vickers as a brave man. In four years of war I’d never seen his courage fail him. And now here he was, a hero of the Menin Road, blubbing like a baby. I risk an embrace. The collar of his greatcoat pushes into my shoulder. Courage, I think, is rather like a fine suit of clothing – proud and handsome at first, but donned day after day, week after week, gradually wears threadbare. Vickers’ courage is in tatters now. God only knows what was holding him together. I look towards Zeki Bey and the journey that awaits us.

  Tuggeranong Homestead, Canberra, 2015

  The black Lamborghini cut a swathe through the gravel of the car park. Dust rose as chromed wheels ground to a halt. As a thin smear of grey settled on the windscreen, Mark clambered cautiously from the vehicle. One of his shoes slipped on the rubble. He turned back to face Vanessa.

  ‘Coming?’

  ‘Later, maybe. You and the ancient professor will want to confer first,’ she snarled the word with contempt. ‘Anyway,’ Vanessa snapped open the lock of her handbag. ‘Time for the first one of the morning.’ She drew a cigarette from its packet, scanning with disinterest the regulation warning.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Mark was not sure if he felt relief or disappointment. ‘See you later then.’

  Vanessa struck a match, pretending she hadn’t heard him. Last night had not been good. Not for either of them. She would not pretend otherwise.

  ‘Will I leave the door open?’

  Vanessa blew smoke against the windscreen and turned up the air-conditioning. ‘Don’t bother.’

  Mark walked across the car park towards the old homestead. Just like the professor to want to meet there, at the place where Bean himself had penned The Official History. Tuggeranong was a relic of Canberra from days gone by, a colonial mansion once set deep in a thousand acres of sheep run. Now the old homestead was surrounded by suburbs. Project homes were colonising the Murrumbidgee plain. A thin stretch of bush marked a feeble border with modernity.

  There was no one at the entrance. He opened the door and walked inside the building. A creaking floorboard announced his arrival. He blinked once or twice into the cool shaded corridor.

  ‘Is that you, Mark?’ The professor’s feeble voice called out from the living room. It was clear that the old man had been drowsing. ‘Come straight down will you?’ Mark sealed the door against Canberra’s heat and flies and walked, somewhat self-consciously, down highly polished floorboards. He felt like an intruder – as if the long dead occupants of the house watched on resentfully. Some homes weren’t quite ready for heritage.

  He entered the study and stepped back in surprise. In the revered home where history was written, the professor had pushed old Bean’s desk items to one side and instructed a secretary to lay out cake, tea and sandwiches. A trustee of Tuggeranong, Evatt had little difficulty in gaining access to the place and its staff. But hosting morning tea using several prize exhibits was surely a breach of that authority. Professor Evatt smiled as the steaming brown fluid gushed into a china cup once treasured by Bean. He pulled a brightly coloured shawl over his knees and rubbed his hands briskly together.

  ‘You take milk, don’t you, Mark?’ Without waiting for a reply, he splashed creamy liquid into one cup and dropped a thin slice of lemon into another. ‘Do try the fruitcake. My granddaughter made it especially. Sugar?’

  It was a strategy the old don had perfected at Cambridge. For decades, young scholars had called on him in his room, keen to announce some fervent truth, bristling with theories and argument: all too young, all too eager, all too earnest. Tea and cake brought them to their senses.

  ‘Thank you, Professor.’

  The old scholar smiled. Some conventions transplanted quiet nicely from one hemisphere to the other. He would push this a little further.

  ‘How long have we known each other, Mark? Must be, what – ten years at least? You see, I noticed you as an undergraduate long before you became a research student.’

  Mark was flattered. He recalled with a little embarrassment his faltering attempts to ‘present’ a tutorial. Mark was the first of his family to finish school, let alone go to university. For country kids like himself, picking up the patter had been an uphill battle.

  ‘Perhaps it’s time you called me by my Christian name.’

  It had never occurred to Mark that the professor might have one. A.G.L. Evatt was written on the spine of every book his mentor had written.

  ‘I don’t know what your first name is.’

  ‘Algernon,’ the professor announced stirring his cup of tea. ‘Yes, I know, it does seem a rather unlikely name here. It didn’t seem so back in England, not at Hampstead Heath anyway. My parents were great
theatregoers and Oscar Wilde one of their favourites. It could have been much worse you know.’

  The professor sensed Mark’s discomfort at this sudden new intimacy, or perhaps the gamut of names he was even now imagining. ‘Call me A.G.L. if you like. Most of the chaps did when I was your age. You know, I haven’t been called that for years. Not many of my year survived the war, I’m afraid.’

  It hadn’t occurred to Mark that the professor was once a soldier. He had never thought of him as that old. But of course he was. Mark struggled with the arithmetic and wondered if a mind as strong and sharp as his could possibly outlive its brittle body.

  ‘Yes, bad business,’ Evatt had again noted Mark’s surprise. ‘Terrible business, in fact. Killed in Greece most of them. Such promising young men. And all so pointless a sacrifice.’

  And so they had arrived there, at the point their conversation was always destined. Greece had been Churchill’s idea as indeed was Gallipoli. Both campaigns had failed even before they began; both were based on high hopes, grand rhetoric and a complete disregard of military reality. Mark and the professor were all too aware of the parallels. Indeed, most conversations had by most historians groaned beneath the weight of allusion, meanings stacked one on another like the deranged arches of Thiepval.

  ‘I think you know why I wanted to see you,’ Mark couldn’t quite bring himself to add Algernon. ‘Your piece in the paper has caused quite a stir.’

  ‘Ah, has it?’ the professor cut a piece of cake and offered it to him. Fruitcake, in his experience, muffled the most earnest orator. ‘Well, really that isn’t our concern is it?’

  ‘But, Professor,’ Mark noticed Algernon tried his best to look rejected, ‘the Inquiry, our work, and our relationship with the government – so much could hinge on this.’

  ‘In the short term, yes. But you and I, Dr Troy, we have higher loyalties. In times as sad as these, we must speak what we feel,’ another slice of lemon plunged into the tea, ‘not what we ought to say.’