On Dangerous Ground

by Bruce Scates

  It was several seconds before anyone spoke again. The room grew darker as early evening pressed in on the committee room windows.

  Mark said what everyone else was thinking. ‘Rather puts the lie to “open government”, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Good government isn’t necessarily open government, Dr Troy.’ Brawley beamed at Vanessa.

  Mark looked out to a line of distant gums sinking into shadow. The bush was still outside as evening gathered in around them. The land seemed as tired and as disappointed as he was, spent with a thousand centuries of wind and sun, bleached of hope, sapped of nutrients. Normally he didn’t see the bush that way, normally he loved its shabby, sinewed splendour. But not today. Today the world had grown old and weary.

  The old professor looked at the ceiling as though the heavens themselves were about to fall on them. ‘So ends the bloody business of the day,’ he mumbled from The Odyssey.

  Aegean Sea, approaching Lemnos, 1915

  Corporal Henry Curtis was buried at sea a hundred nautical miles from Lemnos. The hospital ship slowed its engines as officers and crew assembled on the deck. The captain said a sailor’s prayer over the body sewn into a blanket and draped with a Union Jack flag. Its colours ran as the board tilted upwards and Curtis’ remains quivered into the ocean. Elsie gave a shudder. The ship’s engines fired again and a ripple of foam was all that was left. Curtis was lost to them now. As lost as the men scattered in the gullies of Gallipoli or buried in the mud of Flanders. As lost as Roy Irwin.

  ‘I feel so empty, Maggie. So empty – so afraid.’

  Her friend slipped her arm around her. ‘Don’t be afraid for him, Else. He was,’ she paused and remembered all the words she’d written to grieving relatives, ‘...he was peaceful, accepting. We’ll write to his girl back home, it will help her.’ And Maggie knew it would help Elsie as well.

  She remembered the length of Maltese lace folded gently in the corporal’s pay book, a treasure from another land chosen for a sweetheart, set beside the final letter written by every homesick soldier. She remembered the fragments of Rossetti’s verse the dying soldier had committed to memory:

  Remember me when I am gone away

  Gone far into the silent land;

  When you can no more hold me by the hand,

  Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

  They were the last words Henry Curtis would leave the world. A world that had already forgotten him. Maggie and Elsie watched as officers filed back to their cabins. Colonel Reginald Bell was nowhere to be seen.

  Late that afternoon the island of Lemnos drifted into view, shining on the surface of the sea like a white boat plying the ocean. From a distance it seemed quite beautiful. But Maggie knew it was full of camps of dying men – soldiers stricken with typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia, wasted from too little food and too little rest, soiled with the filth of the trenches. By October more men were evacuated from Gallipoli with illness than from wounds. They took them to Lemnos to recover or die. As they drew closer to the island, the nurses saw little wooden crosses cut the lines of its hillsides.

  Elsie lowered her head onto Maggie’s shoulder. Like generations through war immemorial, from the battles of Troy to the carnage of Flanders, war would wrest men from women’s lives and leave them with only each other.

  ‘When do you think we’ll see Australia again, Maggie?’

  ‘Next year,’ she looked down at a wine-dark sea running fast and deep beneath them, ‘I’m sure of it. The war can’t go on forever.’ Maggie was determined to forget Curtis’ warning, that awful truth bellowed in Roman ruins back in Egypt. ‘Soon, they’ll call an end to it, they have to. Soon, we’ll go home, Else, I promise you.’ Maggie looked out on the sandstone outcrops far ahead. She imagined Sydney Heads jutting into the sea and the brilliant bright blue of that ever-glistening harbour. The sea, she told herself, touches every shore. One day this same ocean would carry them both home. It had to.

  But Elsie thought of thousands who would never go home: farmers from Tilba, boys from the coast, old men from London’s slums swallowed up by the Aegean. Then her thoughts wandered on to others she had nursed. Black troops conscripted by the French, Indians dragooned to fight for England, starving Ottoman soldiers from the edges of a crumbling empire, their bodies weaker than a whisper, waiting quietly for a god to come. And what, she wondered, had become of her Roy? Perhaps one of the men waiting in one of those wretched camps would tell her.

  Twelve

  Endings

  all that was left of him...

  Mr and Mrs Irwin take a rubbing of the inscription of their son’s name from the Memorial to the Missing, Lone Pine, Gallipoli.

  Gallipoli/Australia

  I kept all of Elsie’s correspondence. Like the letters of a first love, I bound them carefully with ribbon and locked them safely away. Even as I turned the key on the old oak cabinet, I knew that someone, one day would find them. History cannot keep a secret for long.

  Among the last of her letters was a cutting from a Sydney weekly. It showed Roy Irwin’s parents bent by the memorial to missing at Lone Pine. The date on the cutting was 1926, eleven years after their boy had vanished. I wondered if Hammond had helped them find that place on the panel, wondered what he said as they gazed on letters chiselled softly into the stone. I realised the Irwins were among the first Gallipoli pilgrims. Unable to lay the body of their son to rest, they took a rubbing of all that was left of him – a name.

  I cannot say with any certainty what they were thinking that day, their thoughts sealed forever in the photograph. But I believe they whispered a prayer, finishing the prayers of dying men, in every corner of the killing fields.

  The Irwins returned with a relic from Gallipoli. They could have taken a pebble, lifted wet and shining from the shores of Anzac Cove, or one of the poppies which blaze blood red beside the trenches. But their choice was a handful of soil, scraped from the land where their son was buried. A proud Turkish major had pressed the clay into their hands and told them to take their earth and his own home to Australia.

  In time, Roy’s spirit was laid to rest beneath an avenue of trees planted in his honour. The women who loved him, the men who searched for him, returned him to the soil. Bar an old general who died out at sea, no more of our dead came back from Gallipoli. And no more ever will.

  You can imagine the picture now, as you will never find such a thing in the archives. Elsie and Maggie stand beside me. We carry offerings of flowers – a tiny spray of violets, a sheaf of golden wattle, poppies entwined with rosemary. Lambert and Vickers are absent from this photograph. George had died some years back: the artist’s heart never as strong as his brandy. And Harry Vickers? Harry had taken his own life. He’d limped into the mud of a dam out west and drowned in its still, stale waters. They say he threw his medals in first. I imagine him watching them sink to the bottom like those sacks of men we dumped in the Aegean. All that pain, all that sacrifice and now none of us can see the point of it. It is autumn 1933 and Hitler has just come to power in Germany. Soon our sons and daughters will march to war again. Soon a new list of names will glisten on the memorial.

  I watch as Elsie buries her ring in that same soil – a treasure Roy chose for her from all the treasures of Egypt. She slips the golden band from her finger and pushes it gently into the earth. She will never marry.

  April leaves tumble quietly to the ground. Mid-fall, wind swung, weightless, they are captured by the camera. Brown and brittle, they whisper of decay. And they signal the coming of winter.

  North Beach and Lone Pine, Anzac Day, 2025

  The new road to Lone Pine was built just as Howard Brawley had always said it would be. Dr Troy and the professor had brokered a series of compromises with the government. They protected the site as best they could and avoided many of the mass graves Mark had warned of. Even so, bones snapped to powder on the blunt blades of dozers. The dead of a dozen nations worked their way to the surface and were covered over again by bitume
n and road fill. It was Vanessa who had first suggested an ossuary for any scattered remains unearthed – those the dozers could not re-bury fast enough or that were inconveniently documented by the mobile phones of visitors. Vanessa, Mark knew, was always a lateral thinker. Her solution saved embarrassment for the government and secured the first of many overseas postings.

  Ten years after the Centenary the two met again at Gallipoli. Vanessa arrived, as all the officials did, in a sleek black limousine driven far too quickly through the crowd. As it pulled into the memorial site on North Beach, Mark wondered again who these new roads were really built for. She recognised him as she climbed from the car.

  ‘Of course, it’s Professor Troy now, isn’t it?’ Vanessa had always relished the trappings of authority. ‘And I believe the minister’s asked you to address us this afternoon?’ She leaned closer than any of her diplomatic minders thought prudent. ‘Quite right I say. If you and Professor Evatt hadn’t come to your senses this road wouldn’t be here. Pity, the old guy didn’t live to see it.’

  Mark wished he could have that time all over again. Vanessa wondered if that same black suit he had worn ten years ago could ever swing back into fashion.

  The Australian ceremony at Lone Pine began well after the scheduled time of 11.00am. The official party had returned to their hotel immediately after the dawn service. Thousands of weary travellers awaited their return; but for all their talk of mateship and endurance Australian politicians have always valued their comfort. They took a leisurely breakfast and then rested to fortify themselves for the afternoon of photographs and speeches.

  As the crowd reassembled at Lone Pine, Mark assessed the damage. Ridges had been cut away, hills and gullies levelled, isolated posts – once legends in themselves – bridged by a bulwark of bitumen. In Bean’s day, Anzac had been set aside to commemorate the missing. Now the landscape, like the men who died there, had vanished forever.

  Mark looked out across the sea of backpackers. Their bodies were draped with Australian and New Zealand flags, their faces fraught with too little sleep, far too much drinking and wet trails down their cheeks. Several, he noted, wore the medals of long dead men. He recognised them instantly. They were the same medals his grandfather had worn. Symbols of a war the old man wouldn’t speak of, fought in the fevered jungles of New Guinea and in the misty skies above its mountains. A long, hard, desperate struggle against fascism. A ‘good war’ Mark supposed, if any war warranted that title. But what war had these young people come to commemorate?

  Mark knew that for the young people gathered, one world war merged seamlessly with another. The words of the minister in the grey light of dawn confirmed that. At Gallipoli, men died ‘for democracy’, ‘for freedom’, ‘for the good lives we enjoy in Australia’. He could see why these proud, homesick people wanted to believe it. Why there was a need to salvage something noble and good from the shabby, sordid tragedy.

  Mark thought of Roy Irwin and an epitaph he had read that very morning in Shrapnel Valley cemetery.

  I’ve no Darling Now,

  I’m Weeping, Baby

  and I You Left Alone.

  Words written for a boy from St Kilda back home. But they could be the words of any wife, any mother, of any nation. He wondered what words Elsie Forrest would have chosen for Roy. Australia had just built a road over his remains. Remembering, it seemed, had become an act of forgetting.

  Vanessa nestled her cheek against his and whispered, ‘Well, Mark, it’s your turn now.’ Mark smelt the rich alluring perfume. She placed her hand encouragingly on his arm. ‘I know the minister is so looking forward to this.’

  Mark rose from his seat, adjusted his tie, and turned back to collect his papers. Vanessa already had them, and offered the folder to him with a smile and a wink.

  ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, will you?’

  The PA system echoed oddly. ‘Here history was made and now it’s time to hear from a historian. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Mark Troy.’

  Mark walked unsteadily by the memorial to the missing, past lines of names etched in stone and a field of plastic poppies sprouting between them.

  The applause subsided as the small, somewhat bedraggled scholar adjusted the height of the microphone at the podium. Sweat broke out across his brow, his hands shook, a fear that so became Lone Pine sat at the pit of his stomach. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the ground on which you stand today...’

  REFLECTIONS

  At one level, this book is a work of fiction: characters are evoked and invented, conversations are imagined and the historical record enlarged and sometimes altered.

  There is no avenue of honour at Tilba though they stand on the outskirts of hundreds of country towns just like it. Bean landed at Anzac slightly later in the morning than this account suggests and the Australian pilgrim Mr T.R. Murray (in all probability the first to visit Gallipoli) arrived there in 1921, a full eighteen months after Bean’s departure. To this day the name of Murray’s son (who was killed on Walker’s Ridge) is carved in gold on the war memorial at Meeniyan. George Roy Irwin served as a sergeant at Gallipoli and joined up at Katoomba. To make his liaison with Elsie more credible, this work has promoted him to a lieutenant and given his birthplace as Merimbula. Had he survived Gallipoli, Irwin would almost certainly have been made an officer. The ancient wooden index cabinet described in chapter five is to be found in the Mitchell Library rather than the State Library of Victoria; George Lambert certainly enjoyed his drink but there were fewer opportunities to ‘imbibe’ at Anzac. Zeki Bey did serve with the 57th regiment at Lone Pine and did lead Bean across the battlefields, but of course the two conversed in French rather than English and almost every conversation here is fictitious. Like several other characters in the book, Elsie, Vickers and Maggie are literary inventions – though their words, character and even their appearance are drawn from historical testimony. Dr Troy does not exist, nor does Howard Brawley, Professor Evatt or Vanessa Pritchard. Any resemblance to persons living today is unintended and circumstantial.

  The central truths of this story remain. C.E.W. Bean did return to the Dardanelles in 1919. His ‘mission’ was to solve the riddles of the campaign, investigate rumours of desecration and recommend the form our cemeteries should take. The commemorative landscapes we know on the peninsula today are a product of his labours. Bean suggested we plant rimu and wattle in the gullies of Gallipoli: symbols of Australia and New Zealand in the foreign field that claimed our countrymen. Seedlings were promptly despatched from the Kew Botanic Gardens. All perished in the freezing winds of an Anzac winter.

  Shortly after Bean’s return, the Turkish memorial to the dead at Lone Pine was destroyed by Australian and British forces garrisoned at Gallipoli. Shards of the memorial were sold on the streets of Sydney to raise funds for crippled soldiers. For all the outcry over wooden crosses plundered for camp fires, Australians quickly forgot their own great act of desecration.

  Whilst to date, there has been no inquiry into roadworks at Lone Pine, a Senate select committee did examine equally damaging roads carved through the Anzac coastline in 2005. The damning testimony of the same is cited word for word in chapter eleven. Many of the debates and dilemmas canvassed in the chapter are confronted by historians and the question of how we commemorate our war dead will continue to trouble future generations. The recent exhumations at Fromelles – and the denials and debates surrounding the same – are evidence enough of that. Australia has yet to acknowledge its responsibilities under the Treaty of Lausanne and, despite repeated requests, legal opinion provided to the Commonwealth Government has never been made public. With the approach of the centenary of the landing, roadworks will also certainly resume at Gallipoli. They will probably mar the landscape more than eight bitter months of fighting.

  Zeki Bey’s closing words were first uttered by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1934, reassuring ‘mothers from far away lands’ that their sons lay ‘in the bosom of a friendly country and have become our sons
as well’. The same words are set in stone on the shores of Anzac Cove, a tribute both to the dead and those who loved them. Most important of all, George Roy Irwin did vanish in the carnage at Lone Pine, as did countless thousands of others. Where his remains rest today, along with other bones of Zeki Bey’s generation, will always be Gallipoli’s secret.

  In 1926 Mrs Sarah (Jessie) Irwin was one of the first Australian pilgrims to stumble across the shingle at Anzac. Her journey had taken her 12,000 miles from Australia, first to Britain, then to Italy and finally across the Mediterranean to Turkey. They travelled in the company of 300 others, mostly grieving parents and returning soldiers. All were united in a common quest; all knew a part of them was buried there. Ninety years on, Australians and New Zealanders (and, of course, the children of Atatürk) still follow in her footsteps.

  In any creative writing, storytelling must take precedence over the dry facts of history. Even so, archival and contemporary sources are woven through this text and (in the interests of authenticity) sometimes quoted directly:

  For the description of the Dardanelles and their defences see C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli Mission [1948] (Sydney: ABC Books, 1990) pp.34–6; the phrase ‘nameless names’ is borrowed from Siegfried Sassoon, ‘On Passing Menin Gate’; his vivid account of a flare in no-man’s-land appears in the poem ‘A Working Party’; and the phrase ‘some gallant lie’ is taken from ‘The Hero’, Sassoon, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1961); Bean’s account of the Gallipoli landing can be found in Kevin Fewster (ed), Bean’s Gallipoli: The Diaries of Australia’s Official War Correspondent (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2007) ch. 3; Professor Evatt cites Marc Bloch as he sends his student off to search the archives, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Vintage, 1953) p.8; the Turkish view of the trenches is drawn from Hansan Basri Danisman (ed), Lone Pine (Bloody Ridge) Diary of Lt. Mehmed Fasih 5th Imperial Ottoman Army Gallipoli, 1915 (Istanbul: Denizler Kitabevi, 2001) vols 2 & 3; a bayonet’s ‘hunger for blood’ is captured by Wilfred Owen, ‘Arms and the Boy’, and for men in the trenches standing at the end of the world see his ‘Spring Offensive’, Edmund Blunden (ed), The Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931); the fraught negotiation over ownership of Anzac reproduces extracts from the Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs 1922–1923, Records of Proceedings and Draft Terms of Peace (London: HM Stationery Office, 1923), League of Nations Archives, Geneva, 1923, 949.9:063; Alexandria’s streetscape is evoked in Lawrence Durrell’s timeless study of love and grief, The Alexandria Quartet (London: Faber, 1962) and the beach at Lemnos captured in Carolyn Bock’s and Helen Hopkin’s dramatic recreation of women at war, ‘The Girls in Grey’; for Lambert’s racist view of the ‘unspeakable Turk’ see Amy Lambert’s anthology of letters, Thirty Years of an Artist’s Life (Sydney: Society of Artists, 1938) p.118; to draw Zeki Bey true to life I have drawn on Bean’s own vivid description, C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli Mission (Sydney: ABC Books, 1990 – first published 1948), p.125; for the description of Gallipoli graves see Bill Gammage’s innovative study of commemorative landscape, ‘The Anzac Cemetery’, Australian Historical Studies, vol.38, no. 129, pp.125; the horror of Quinn’s is best described by the soldiers who fought there, Cecil Malthus, Anzac: A Retrospect (Auckland: Reed, 2002), p.89; Lambert remembers Rupert Brooke as he gazes on the killing ground of the Nek and the chilling description of the attack is taken from Lambert’s own interview with Lt. Robinson, Mike Read, Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream, 1997), p.233; Andrew Motion, The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), pp.77–8; Thomas Hardy’s lament for the unknown dead appears in ‘Drummer Hodge’, Samuel Hynes (ed), Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p.34; and Mark Troy remembers a passage from James Joyce, Ulysses, in the Mitchell; Bean’s conversation with a Turkish officer in no-man’sland is based on Aubrey Herbert’s recollections, Mons, Anzac and Kut (London: Unwin Bros, 1919). A tiny Koran was taken from the hands of a dead Turkish officer, along with a treasured collection of prayers. It was souvenired by an Australian soldier and has yet to be repatriated to Turkey (Papers of Sgt Alfred Morris, Mitchell Library, ML MSS 2886). Professor Evatt’s grappling with Herodotus draws on Peter Burke, ‘History as social memory’ in T. Butler (ed), Memory, History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p.210; Albany’s closing remarks in Act 5 of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Stanley Wells (ed), The Oxford Shakespeare: King Lear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.275 and the White Queen’s musings on memory in Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: Random House, nd), p.198; Bean’s old school poem appears in Ken Inglis’ carefully crafted biography, John Lack (ed), Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of K.S. Inglis (Melbourne: The University of Melbourne, 1998), p.68; I owe the metaphor likening courage to a threadbare suit of clothing to Ken Inglis’ compatriot, Jay Winter. Winter described war memorials as at once ‘intimate’ and ‘universal’, and observed that Lutyens at once said so much and so little; Sites of Memory: Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.112. The image of Australia’s monuments ‘glitter[ing] with their names’ is taken from Les Murray’s ‘Lament for the Country Soldiers’, Poems Against Economics (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972). For the refusal of the Department of Foreign Affairs to make public legal advice re our obligations at Anzac see Senate Committee Report, Matters Relating to the Gallipoli Peninsula, October 2005, p. xxiii; for the final letter to a loved one see Christina Rossetti’s ‘Song’, R.W. Crump (ed), The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, vol 1, (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p.58 and for Maggie’s protest ‘they don’t deserve to have a man fighting for them’ see Kit Ridley’s correspondence from France, 7 January 1918, State Library of Victoria, Ms 103 30 MSB 210; the Irwin family’s anguished search for their son is based on his mother’s letters, File for George Roy Irwin, Papers of the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Bureau, Australian War Memorial; a fuller account of their 1926 pilgrimage can be found in Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.210–213. Contemporaries viewed Gallipoli through the lens of Homer and this book has drawn extensively on his timeless portrayal of war. The image of black ships freighting death is based on Book 2: 706, 811 and is threaded throughout The Iliad. For the ‘bloody grind of battle’ and the ‘shocks of war’, 1:333; 5:1032; for men ‘dead as they fell’, 16:489 and the earth ‘black with blood’ 20:599; Zeki Bey takes up Agamennon’s quarrel with the dead, 6:69–70 and Lambert echoes the war cry of Ajax, 15:856–7. I have used Robert Fagles’ translation mindful that this abrupt language best portrays the butchery of men, Homer, The Iliad (New York: Penguin, 1990). The chapter titles of this novel are drawn from Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘1914’ heralding the outbreak of the Great War. Brooke died en route to the Gallipoli campaign, just two days before the landing at Anzac, Edward Marsh (ed), The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke with a Memoir (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1920).