On Dangerous Ground

by Bruce Scates

  ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’

  ‘Oh, I think you do. I could see that from our first ever lengthy conversation together. Wasn’t it after my lecture on appeasement? My last lecture to undergraduates, in fact. The year the bean counters first tried to put me out to pasture.’

  But this time Mark was not about to be appeased.

  ‘Really, Professor, your article has caused quite a bit of damage. It’s...’ Mark regarded the untouched cake on his plate, ‘Well, frankly it’s compromised some very delicate negotiations. The government believes we totally oppose all their plans – even maintenance of the existing roadway. They don’t see that they can proceed with any roadwork at all unless they agree to ridiculous conditions. And there’s Vanessa to consider too. She trusted us.’

  ‘Ah, now there are several interesting points there and we had best treat each of them separately.’ In a single sentence the professor has pushed their conversation back to the days of undergraduate tutorials. There was little doubt who would win this particular argument.

  ‘You see, the government’s plans aren’t really our concern, one way or the other. We have been asked to give evidence, Mark, evidence as historians.’ He leaned forward, unsettling a cup and not even noticing. ‘The question is whether or not a mass grave exists in grid 92, and your own work through those Red Cross files rather suggests it does. What was the name of that officer?’

  ‘Irwin, Lt George Roy Irwin – but his death was never confirmed.’

  ‘Yes, but most of his men are certainly buried there. And really, do you think any of the missing survived? Hardly likely is it? Missing means dead, doesn’t it?’

  It was said quite bluntly, spat out with uncharacteristic emphasis. And Mark realised why. As a boy of eighteen, the professor had watched a generation of men perish, school chums shot to pieces in the mountains of Greece, lost in the debacle on Crete, swallowed up by the Aegean just like the Anzacs before them. To him fell the lot of most survivors: to tell families wrestling with fear to abandon any hope for their loved ones. Missing meant the end. Their boys would never come home to them.

  ‘It’s strange you know, Dr Troy ... that newspaper made me out to be quite emotional, compromised, uncritical. In fact, both you and I must give our evidence without reference to our own feelings. We must see it as a kind of trial and we must always bear witness. It’s not for us to say what a jury will do with the evidence. Otherwise...’ the old scholar took a long and thoughtful sip from Bean’s teacup, ‘otherwise, we’d be rather like the queen in Alice in Wonderland, pronouncing the sentence first and conducting the trial afterwards.’

  ‘But we’re the ones who judge history, aren’t we?’ Mark pushed aside the fruitcake. ‘This is our call, our responsibility. Whatever we recommend, the government is likely to do, as long as we’re not too,’ he took a deep breath, like a patient awaiting the sting of a needle ‘...too extreme in our position.’

  ‘Is that what you really think, is it?’ And now the professor reached for his pipe as if there was some necessary link between tobacco and concentration. ‘I wonder. Perhaps we can only judge this by the standards of the generation who lived out that tragedy. It’s a poor sort of memory is it not, that only works backwards?’

  The professor paused for a moment. An enigmatic smile quickened his countenance. ‘And that does bring me to my next point, now, doesn’t it?’ The pipe flared as he puffed far too enthusiastically. ‘The conditions Mr Brawley describes as ridiculous are simply those the government agreed to. You put it rather well in the first days of the Inquiry I thought. It was a kind of contract. Each body recovered shall be marked by a name and a grave. That was and is our obligation and one that extends to the soldiers buried in grid 92. It is an obligation that precedes the new road. Perhaps in matters like this, we do best to remember Herodotus...’

  The professor paused portentously. He was disappointed.

  ‘He thought of we historians, Mark, as the custodians of memory, the few who should never forget. We are that, of course, but much more besides. We are the guardians of awkward facts, the past others would deny, all those rattling skeletons in the cupboard.’

  The professor smiled and pushed the plate of cake back towards Mark. He noticed the young man was now nodding. ‘After all, Mark,’ he concluded, gesturing again to a doting granddaughter’s offering, ‘It’s not as though there is only one right way of remembering.’

  ‘And bringing those skeletons back? Testing their DNA?’ Vanessa had barged into the room and into the conversation. ‘You’re on dangerous ground, Professor. Just how far are you willing to go?’

  ‘We’re historians, madam.’ The professor took on Vanessa as he would any other disruptive student. ‘We think historically. DNA and repatriation – these are the sensibilities of today’s generation. They pose ... how can I put this?’ he touched a match again to his pipe and watched a cloud of smoke billow towards the ceiling.

  ‘An anachronism?’ Mark volunteered.

  ‘Precisely!’ The professor smiled widely – he took pleasure in a word that conveyed a precise meaning. And it confirmed he had not lost his student after all.

  ‘You see, Miss Pritchard, young women of much your own age watched their men sail off to war,’ he blinked a little, as if remembering someone in particular, ‘then heard of their deaths on some distant foreign field, places further away than they could possibly imagine, buried, if indeed they were fortunate enough to be buried, in places they could never afford to go to. Think of it, Miss Pritchard. Mothers, wives, and daughters all left without the men they loved. They had a right to ask for something.’

  ‘We’ve been through all this,’ Vanessa growled, as if truth would not bear repetition. ‘Do you really think you can tidy this up? Make it all better? Do you know how we “bury” those “men” we find in France? Half the time there isn’t enough left of them to fill a shoebox.’

  Mark flinched. That image of bones swimming in the mud sprang rudely to mind again.

  ‘The alternative’s another Fromelles,’ she went on. ‘Speeches, ceremonies – and all those photos of the minister consoling grieving families. And how can you call that grieving, anyway? How can people still feel that hurt, a hurt that never really belonged to them?’

  Neither scholar replied. They knew history couldn’t answer everything. Vanessa shook her head slowly from side to side.

  ‘You know what they’ll do, don’t you? They’ll make your commemoration into a media circus. A big story for the tabloids: “Brave Diggers Honoured”, “Graves Saved from Roadworks”. Is that really what you want?’ She looked now only at Mark. ‘You call that history do you, Mark? You two ought to be ashamed of yourselves.’

  The chimes of an ancient grandfather clock echoed down the corridor. They waited for the tolling bells to stop. Vanessa found herself counting the slippage of time, putting the past behind her.

  ‘Besides, gentlemen,’ it was time she put an end to this, ‘there is no way you’ll stop those roadworks now. They’ve already decided in Canberra – and Ankara too, for that matter. The new road at Gallipoli is in the national interest.’

  ‘That’s what they said about war too, isn’t it?’ The professor considered his pipe. ‘But what is a nation, Miss Pritchard? Isn’t it just families, communities, loved ones?’

  ‘Oh my God, I don’t believe this.’ She raised her voice again as if Tuggeranong was a nursing home. ‘Don’t–you–realise–what– you’re–saying? What kind of precedent will this set? There are thousands of unknowns, thousands of missing. And have you thought of the cost of all this?’

  Economics, Vanessa knew, was usually the most persuasive argument. But not this time. She took a deep breath and tried to pat her hair back into place. Her eyes prowled around the room, seeking endorsement from the bric-a-brac.

  ‘Besides, it’s the Turks’ land! They’ll build the road if they want to. There is not a single legal impediment you can place in their way.’


  ‘Isn’t there, Miss Pritchard?’

  The professor tapped his pipe against Bean’s desk, catching the ashen contents in his saucer.

  ‘And to think it was you who first reminded us of Lausanne.’

  ‘I ... I thought we could do a deal ... find a ... a sensible compromise.’

  ‘Can one compromise a promise, Vanessa?’

  Mark was not at all sure he should have said that. Behind them, the dull red spines of Bean’s The Official History stared down from their glass cabinet. In the morning light they looked like the colour of dried blood. The professor filled his pipe but paused before lighting it again. A line of Latin tumbled from his lips, the same lines C.E.W. Bean would have memorised as a schoolboy. Fiat justitia et ruant cœli, let justice be done though the heavens fall.

  Aegean Sea, en route back to Lemnos, 1915

  The October wind changes suddenly, the warm air of a lingering summer pushed aside by icy blasts from the Balkans. White caps whip up on the Aegean, a prelude to storms that will lift and roll the ocean.

  The Kyarra tossed from side to side. The captain’s course was nothing if not erratic, a precaution against German U-boats that prowled the southern Mediterranean Sea. At this stage of the war the Hun was unlikely to fire on a hospital ship, despite all the propaganda. Even so, the Red Cross markings were not always visible. Glimpsed through the thin slit of a bobbing periscope, one form of enemy shipping looked much the same as another. The captain was not the kind of sailor to take chances. Running the gauntlet, his storm-battered ship twisted and weaved its way northward.

  The British had already bargained with Kyarra’s safety. On board the Lemnos-bound vessel there were nurses, doctors and much needed medical supplies. But the Kyarra also carried the elite of the Allied general staff, Colonel Reginald Bell included. They knew they could make the four-day crossing far more safely on a hospital ship than on the navy’s proudest and fastest destroyer. This was a breach of the Geneva Convention, deliberately concealing military objectives with humanitarian ones. But Colonel Bell cared little for legalistic niceties. Truth would always be the first casualty in wartime.

  The needs of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps were even more secondary. On boarding the vessel, Colonel Bell and his colleagues occupied the best of the cabins, relegating the hospital staff to steerage. Bell had also commandeered a goodly supply of hospital morphine. It might just come in handy in this queer part of the world.

  By preference Bell was a whisky man, but anything would do to relieve the tedium of his command. The fog of battle had a very literal meaning in the Dardenelles campaign. Gallipoli may have been a young man’s war but it was commanded all too often by the drunken dinosaurs of Empire. And of these the monocled Colonel Bell was a conspicuous example.

  ‘Another drink, Curtis! And hurry up about it man.’

  Curtis noted the colonel slurred his commands. A film of spirits and saliva shone in the old man’s moustache. He already looked the worse for wear from the afternoon’s drinking. The colonel thrust the glass forward and Curtis poured the whisky.

  ‘Now, fill my flask and then you can go and see when dinner will be ready.’ The colonel waved his hand dismissively.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Curtis’ reply was strong and confident – quite unlike his shaky attempt to direct a wide stream of whisky through the narrow lip of a hip flask. The Kyarra rolled, lifting high in the swell, and collapsed again. The decks were awash with seawater, the corporal and his colonel awash with Scotland’s finest whisky.

  ‘You dammed fool, Curtis!’ The colonel downed the last of his drink and flung the glass at his batman. ‘Bloody idiot, just look what you’ve done.’ The colonel was less concerned by a damp uniform than the slim prospect of replacing a single malt on Lemnos. Fortunately a hospital ship provided an alternative.

  ‘Wait outside till I need you!’

  Curtis hurried to the door. The colonel drew a glass phial from his travelling case. He shook his head and drew a breath deep enough to summon sobriety. He rolled up his sleeve, tugged his tie tight around his arm and rubbed the first blue vein he could find. The colonel’s arms tracked the marks of a dozen such injections.

  Like many of his generation, he’d first encountered opiates as a baby. Godfrey’s Cordial sounded innocuous, but in truth the sure-fire calmative for teething was largely made up of laudanum. Later, through long afternoons of Latin verbs, short, sharp snorts of cocaine had helped him to concentrate. Some of his more eccentric school friends still carried a snuffbox. Though Colonel Bell preferred the sociable haze of wine and spirits, the solitary paradise of the poppy also had its attractions. And today he was in need of oblivion. The Kyarra was still three days’ sailing time from Lemnos. The storm showed no sign of abating. The dreary prospect of a hospital base command loomed before him. The Dardanelles, the colonel knew, was not the real war. That was being fought in France against the Germans. Gallipoli was just a squalid sideshow, particularly now the August offensives were abandoned. On days like these, Bell seriously considered resigning his commission. At least Cairo had offered pleasurable diversions: bars, the theatre, and an ample supply of exotic and obliging women. There was not much prospect of any of that on Lemnos. Still, there was something. Bell tapped the syringe, pushed it gently into a blue swelling vein and felt that warm tingling pleasure surge though his bloodstream.

  Corporal Curtis stood on the deck of the Kyarra. The wind whipped his face. Rain and sea spray, each as cold as the other, drenched his clothing. He stood by the door in the paper-thin costume of a military valet and shivered. Within a few minutes he had begun to pace the deck, wrapping his arms around himself to hold a little warmth in.

  Out on the high seas the memory of home held the only warmth for him. He stepped across the threshold of his favourite London bar, to a hearty fire, firm handshakes and cosy companionship. As the Kyarra plunged bow-first into the sea, he walked the glasshouses of Kew Gardens, reciting the name of one orchid after another.

  ‘For God’s sake, what’s that man doing there?’ It was nearly evening when Elsie and Maggie ventured onto the ship’s deck. ‘Look at him, he’s soaked, Else.’

  Elsie, never one to forget a kindness, was the first to recognise the poor bedraggled soldier.

  ‘Maggie – I think it’s that English soldier who drove us in Alexandria.’

  ‘Well I’ll be buggered!’ Maggie had picked up more digger idiom than Elsie thought appropriate. ‘The poor little beggar.’

  ‘Curtis!’

  ‘Corporal Curtis!’

  The two women called out together as they walked the rolling deck towards him. But Curtis didn’t answer. He swayed like a man in a trance.

  ‘Give me a hand, Elsie. You open the door. Let’s get him inside straight away.’ Maggie groaned as Curtis’ weight fell upon her. A blast of smoky air greeted them as they pushed their way into Colonel Bell’s cabin.

  Elsie reverted to the familiar routine of every nurse. Shifting Curtis’ body into an armchair, she searched for a pulse. ‘It’s weak, Maggie, but I think he’s still conscious.’

  ‘Let’s rug him up and get him down to sickbay.’

  Elsie pulled aside the wet clothing and draped the sodden corporal in the greatcoat of the colonel. As Maggie looked around she was taken aback by what she saw; her commanding officer collapsed at his desk, the empty syringe swaying side to side with the sea and a broken phial of opium. The same anger she had felt in Alexandria swelled inside her. ‘Bastards,’ she muttered to herself, ‘they don’t deserve to have a single man fighting for them.’

  As the door was flung open again the freezing blast stirred the colonel.

  ‘Curtis is that you? Curtis, another whisky!’

  The doctor pulled the blankets back over the soldier’s body. ‘I’m afraid it’s pneumonia,’ he announced, jotting something indecipherable in the chart. ‘There’s a good deal of fluid on the lungs and I suspect his heart is weak too. How old did you say this man is, Sister?�
��

  Elsie glanced at Curtis’ file, ‘Forty-two, Doctor.’

  He nodded his head. ‘Men like this don’t stand a chance. He should never have been sent here.’

  Elsie wondered if the deaths of young men were any more acceptable.

  ‘Look, I’ll call in later but there is really nothing we can do other than let nature take its course.’

  The latter phrase, Elsie knew, was usually a death sentence.

  ‘Keep up the fluids, Sister, and try to make him comfortable. He’s not conscious now and should he come to he’ll probably be delirious.’ The doctor removed the stethoscope from his neck and straightened his tie for dinner. ‘There’s a family you can write to, I suppose?’

  ‘His people are in London. No wife, no children.’

  ‘Yes, well, perhaps it’s best there are no dependants.’ Such a clinical term, Elsie thought, for wives, children, loved ones. ‘I’ll be at dinner should you need me. Carry on.’

  The doctor didn’t give a thought to what, if any, meal his nurses might be taking. He walked directly from the room and did not expect to return there that evening.

  Elsie sat down again by Curtis’ side and wiped a dampened flannel across his brow. The fever burned through to her hand. ‘Poor little corporal,’ she mumbled. ‘Our poor, brave Wepwawet.’

  ‘I’ll take a turn now, Else. You go upstairs. Get something to eat. Come down later.’

  Elsie nodded. Leaving her charge was necessary in order to sit with him through the night. No one should be alone when their time comes.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ Elsie stepped around the narrow iron bed, touched her friend on the shoulder and turned towards the door.

  ‘Call me if there’s any change, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course, Else.’

  Maggie placed her hand gently on Elsie’s.

  It was not long after Elsie had left the room that Curtis spoke. He took Maggie quite by surprise; no one really thought their patient would regain consciousness.

  ‘I’m cold, miss, cold.’