1915

by Roger McDonald

  Diana’s crisis had passed. She was cool to the touch. Her breath no longer caught but was peacefully deep. Robert left to tell his mother the good news: it was past one o’clock. When he returned Frances was asleep in the chair. He carried her to her room and whispered, “I’ll put you to bed. All right?”

  The events that followed alarmed her, but not until the morning. She awoke remembering Robert climbing in with her, his hands roving her body while despite herself she posed a whispery question: “Do you love me?” And his saying, “Yes, I love you.” So the uncaring body had as if in a dream allowed itself to succumb. She had no memory of pleasure, only of a deep but interrupted sleep. But now in daylight she was ashamed. What had she been thinking after her resolution of the week before? There had been no doubt to resolve in action, as with Walter. No longer, she knew, did she have the excuse of infatuation. He was dull, he told the same stories over and over: and if he ever again mentioned South America and the day he had sheltered from a bandit outside a dress shop she would tell him off.

  Frances told herself that her moral sense had been drugged by lack of sleep: but it had been something more shocking than that. In the letter to Billy, Diana had accused her of knowing her own mind better than she let on, and it was true. For in the night she had admitted Robert to her bed and now was cold to him for the most wilful of reasons — she had wished to punish his long indifference. And having done so, she allowed herself to despise him.

  At breakfast Diana sat up in bed and drank a cup of tea. “I feel that your whole week has been wasted,” she sighed. Her gratitude expressed itself in grotesque phrasing: “Baby and I say thank you.”

  “As soon as you’re well enough we’ll leave.” Frances leant close and whispered: “I can’t take another minute of Robert. I’ve gone off him, God help me.”

  “Oh, Franny.”

  “Last night when I was too tired to care — he took advantage of me.”

  Diana could not look Frances in the eye.

  “He seemed to take lots for granted. I wonder if he heard about me and Walter? The Hotel. Did you tell him?”

  “Me? Don’t be mad.”

  “I suppose his mother worked me out. She’s evil enough herself to be expert on the sins of others.”

  “Franny, who are you fooling?” Diana suddenly could take no more: “You threw yourself at him and now you must take the consequences. I don’t like you when you try to pretend.”

  Suddenly they were back in one of their breathless exchanges from the days of innocence. Only now the speculative had descended and was acting itself out in their own lives. Friend appraised friend; except both knew they were true friends no longer.

  “Neither of us has any sense,” Diana said dully.

  “Bother the rules. Their rules,” asserted Frances.

  “It’s so comfortable here.” Sunlight touched the edge of the bed. The floodwaters were still up, but around the house everything was drying out after two days of sunshine. Diana’s wedding ring glowed as she held it up to the light.

  “What’s ahead of us? asked Frances despondently.

  “Everything!” Diana announced.

  When Robert realized that Frances no longer felt the same he was puzzled then indignant. He accused her of leading him on. She could see that his sudden infatuation was real enough. Over the next few days he constantly tried to touch her. “Would you marry me instead of Rosa?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  But now he seemed so humourless and solid. His liking for dressing up which had made him seem so much fun (the gaucho outfit, and his insistence on dressing for dinner) she now saw as advertisement for a soul without depth. He liked best to talk about his travels and his success with money and stock. He had never been any different! She remembered February days when she had done nothing but sit in the window at home and watch for the ferries arriving in case he should come. And now? Rosa could have him.

  When he lost his temper and called her names she became angry and used insult as an excuse to leave. Diana was now well enough. Would he please arrange things? Or she would tell his mother how he crept into guests’ bedrooms.

  Mr Gillen took them down to the water in a sulky. He stamped around in the sour mud shifting bags to the boat and lifting Diana into the stern. Then Frances found both father and son looking at her. Who would carry her across? Quickly Frances turned to Henry Fleming who had come for the rowing: “Could you help me in?” But before acting Fleming asked, “Boss?” in recognition of others’ property: and was given the nod. As they pulled away from the shore Mr Gillen lifted his hat, and was still standing there when the boat, a hundred yards off, was caught by an unexpected current and disappeared through the trees.

  “This bloody river!” Fleming shouted. As light as a leaf the boat spun in circles while he wrestled with the oars. Though they were well away from the usual course of the river they had struck it in an aberrant mood. During the night it had surged across a string of drowned billabongs and now directed the force of its flow through what had yesterday been a peaceful lake. But what fun! There was suddenly no need to make conversation with Robert, who sat facing them. He took out a paddle and helped hold the boat steady while Fleming strained.

  “Go with the current.”

  “Can you hold her?”

  “We’re away!”

  They skimmed along without any need for oars, but in the wrong direction.

  Diana and Frances trailed their fingers in the water. Then there was a bump. The bows had struck a submerged branch protruding from a tree. Frances reached up and crushed a leaf in her hand, inhaling the sharp fresh smell of eucalyptus.

  “Bugger. Sorry ladies. Bugger!” grunted the red-faced Fleming. They giggled. Diana reached for a spray of leaves but missed, then tried again. The bows resting on the branch rose slightly with the force of the current pushing at the stern, then suddenly they lifted steeply — it was as if the branch formed a greasy slipway and the boat was being winched aloft — and though Frances managed to reach forward and grip Robert’s outstretched hand Diana missed and plopped into the water. Miraculously she stood only waist deep, her feet by chance having found another part of the log. She balanced herself by at last grasping a fistful of grey gumleaves, and giggled. Robert clambered down to haul her in, but she said: “Wait a second, my foot’s caught. In for a penny, here we go!” and took a deep breath before ducking to release whatever it was that held her.

  At that moment the branch where the boat rested made an ominous shearing sound and sank, and the boat floated free, propelled for a few feet backwards against the current by the force of the branch’s sinking.

  “Diana!” screamed Frances, while the lightened craft drifted sideways across an unbroken surface. Fleming wildly lashed a rope to the tree while Robert dived. “It’s deep!” he gasped.

  Diana had disappeared.

  Then Fleming was in the water too, and Frances found herself alone in the boat hearing a crow flap and caw feet above her head, seeing Robert’s boots float away escorted by swirling thumbprints of current in the mustard-coloured flood.

  “Diana, Diana can you hear me?” Frances called, in the hope that she had drifted downstream and somewhere lay gasping within earshot.

  Then a terrible half hour passed during which the searchers broke the surface countless times, one after the other, but always with the same report:

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing.”

  20

  The Balkan Gun Pits

  Before anything, when God was considering how the world might be brought into existence, when the earth was without form, and void; when darkness was upon the deep and only the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, before the words formed themselves and the Creator spoke, saying, “Let there be light”, a different word must have been in his mind.

  Surely the word was “perhaps”, thought Walter.

  Otherwise why did thousands lie dead whom life had selected for three score years and t
en? The rattle of dice and the hum of a gambler’s glee answered every prayer. Why else had Boof made it back to the lines one morning after a night patrol, bellowing with pride for the doctor after inching up and down gullies for seven hours, a human sled with the inert form of Lizzie Peters gripped to his chest, Boof creeping upon the earth, believing he had won a reprieve for his mate who at some time in that struggle had silently died.

  Otherwise how had it come to pass that Walter, having sprinted four hundred yards this day intermittently within sight of men with rifles who tried to kill him, now found himself exhausted but still alive, face-down breathing painfully but unscathed in a foul smelling pit?

  Then came a shock of realization: he was in the wrong place.

  He had reached there by going on all fours after leaving the main trench, but at the brigadier’s shout had stood as ordered and sprinted, recklessly leaping the ducked head of the foremost man of the foremost covering party, almost booting him in the ear, sprinting blindly at first and then for this blur of trench and at last making it — to find it empty, stinking of urine, a cigarette butt still smouldering, a dented light horse sun helmet lying where it had fallen.

  Then he sat up and fitted the helmet because it was his own, knocked there as he had dived. So the men he was carrying a message to had already gone. They had retreated anyway, without waiting to be told. Somehow he had missed them in that frantic run over tangling heath when he had thought only of himself, watching his boots dance across blurred ground as he reeled into his lungs coil after coil of unexpected air. But now his lungs hurt. His pants were wet! He loosened them and squatted like an animal, watching a yellow puddle enlarge.

  He thought he heard his own name being called from the low ridge just visible in the direction of the sea, and swore he had seen a flash of fabric there like the rump of a small creature slipping into the scrub. Then he bit his thumb, tugged it clear and sobbed, because he wanted to stand and shout Hang on, this is no wasted body writhing.

  But machine guns with their long wandering streams of reprimand began firing, and bitterly Walter realized that it was because of his presence in the trench, in these old earthworks and brick-shored hiding holes from some forgotten Turkish war, that the gunners were sending their wavering banners over. And after a while he calculated that not just the Turks, but the Australian gunners too were keeping an eye on this spot and every minute or so chattering their fire across the rim of the brick-edged hole in case he forgot himself. The most disheartening predicament for a soldier to find himself in had befallen Walter: he was under fire from his own side as well as the other.

  How stupid he was to have thought that someone out there on the surface of the doomed earth had called his name. The men he had been sent to contact were from a different regiment, Queenslanders who even if they had turned to witness his leap as they scrambled to safety would not have known him from Adam. Then he realized that he faced a brick wall, one he had actually dived through: real, not imagined in the dim departed fertile brain of a Reg Hurst. But there was no dusting himself now and picking up where things had left off. A lid of blue sky fitted over the top of the trench as surely as a slab of stone secures a grave.

  Then came the voice again, with no “perhaps” about it. Someone out there was calling his name.

  A month before, after the one day armistice, in late May and those early weeks of June while flies multiplied daily in the rising heat and the first men started falling sick, Walter had taken to hard work as to a narcotic. He went-to fiercely as he had at his last harvest, when Billy’s mother lay dying and every living thing had seemed to carry a sentence of death. In the new lines near the sea, where daily they dug, a dusty bubble of safety existed in the steadily deepened ground. But every bite of the pick, each chew of the shovel kept him alive just for the day when his fate would at last be fixed. He had known it all along: there was no forgetting rubbed skin even though it formed a lump of callous. The tools of war permitted no relinquishment. Long ago death had ceased to be a matter of speculation. In these weeks of labour, and in the tense period of waiting that followed, nothing happened that did not signal the inching closer of the incident that would so spectacularly mark him off from the living: his wild run to the Balkan Gun Pits in full view of friend and enemy; which marked him off as others had been marked off, sometimes with a heartening flash of magnificence as when Boof hauled Lizzie home against all odds, but mostly not.

  Death had become a fact of geography. Here and there a twig was bent, then it snapped. Blood could be sighted on the rim of the hills not just at sunset and dawn but at any time: midnight struck, and by light of star or candle the black shine of departing life unceasingly flowed.

  Movement was suffocatingly limited. In many places death came from standing upright, for the sky was invisibly deadly even when holiday blue or inhabited by gliding spinnakers of cloud. The sky varied in height, sometimes unpredictably — at certain spots lifting with a sudden rush of freedom to show mile after mile of idly wind-ruffled sea; but mostly hugging the whipped scrub that in patches was nothing more than charred earth where low brushfires had raced up dry gullies and expired. Here earth and sky were composed of the same deadly mix.

  As they trudged back to Rest Gully at evening, or broke off for a swim at the beach, odd funnels of mortality would suddenly ram down from nowhere and a peppery maelstrom leave a streak of blood in the water, or a man collapsed on the track clutching a shattered arm, or just limp, as happened with Captain Filbert the regimental vet, who had no business with animals at Gallipoli but had desperately wanted to see what it was all about. In death the large nose and delicate white hands of his quizzical modesty were so apparently alive that those who paused to look expected his lips to part and the officer to speak to them in his very proper Melbourne manner.

  With the hot weather, half the men found themselves squatting innumerable times a day at the fly-infested latrines. Here Mick Aitcheson had been found one morning having fainted the night before, his stained trousers wet and stinking from diarrhoea. But thus far Walter’s health held. It had to do with the condensed milk he got from Ollie, though Boof claimed that all three were fit because they dipped into his supply of homeopathic pills, a leached and crumbly collection he kept in a baking powder tin.

  Those who were sick did their work, tried to eat, and slept. None had the will for argument, let alone fights: so one day when Ollie and Walter suddenly fought there was no audience, except for Boof intervening to break it up, the three friends grappling foolishly on a gloomy hot evening before the worst of the digging was done.

  Ollie started quietly, and in a friendly tone, his danger sign: “I’ve just been talking to that parson of yours, and he tells me you’ve got ideas.”

  “About what?” Walter had scrounged a white biscuit, the favoured kind that did not dry the mouth and break the teeth, and was about to take a bite. But Ollie astonishingly dashed the food into the dust.

  “He didn’t know you were bullshitting.”

  “You’ve ruined my bloody tucker.” That was all Walter could think of, the biscuit lying where fat iridescent flies descended from above, and from below writhed maggots in their ribbed dustcoats.

  “My books,” Ollie sneered. “Christ, you wouldn’t have known what they meant without me. Beauchamp’s bloody Career!”

  “I just said I’d read them.”

  “You had to tell him you were ‘going in for the writing game’ when all this was over.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “No,” and here Ollie tried to grab Walter’s collar in his white fist: “You had to go one better. You crippling well told the preacher I was no good at it and you planned to beat me at my own game. Well let me tell you, chum, you couldn’t hold a candle to the pucker of my arsehole.”

  It was then that Boof broke things up, when Walter was casting frantically around for a weapon because Ollie had already grasped a shovel and was waving its flat face dangerously close.

>   Boof … who later that night produced his violin from God knew where, and roused an astounded crowd.

  “What’s your pick, Ollie?” asked Boof after running through a string of others’ choices.

  “Ask Wally first,” said Ollie jerking his thumb, with this gesture possibly apologizing for his outburst, though he was never to say “sorry”.

  But then nor was Walter.

  “Jerusalem,” Walter at last requested. He had been thinking of home and church and a thousand details of existence far from here. “The hymn,” he added, in case Boof had not understood, “And did those feet”: but Boof was already playing, sawing the first sonorous bars into an Arabic wail before settling into the glorious notes that were nothing now but sensation devoid of any object, because the promise contained in the hymn had already been cruelly curtailed.

  Yet there was something pure in the despair they all shared. It was the very opposite of hope and fruition yet it was palpably part of the world as God had made it. Suddenly Walter saw, and so must have Ollie, that the things they held in common were more real to them now than their differences. It was not any one of their shared difficulties that achieved this, but their sum: the way all movement through time had been cancelled, and in the perpetual present moment the reliance of others on one’s own strength and quickness became the lone hostage each possessed against the utter extinction that might come even before the heart truly stopped beating and the eye seeing. So this was the mystery of armies, the secret of glory, and the trick of personality that transformed querulous youth into creatures of self-sacrifice.