Solomon's Song

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Real big German on a ladder bird-nestin’, Sarge!’ Crow Rigby drawls slowly.

  Ben thinks what a great temperament young Rigby has for a sniper. ‘Righto, gather around, gentlemen,’ he now says and waits until the platoon is once again seated on the grass in front of him. ‘Thank you, Mr Cooligan, you’re excused tent inspection in the morning and may kip in an extra half hour.’

  ‘Lucky bugger!’ several of them shout.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant, that’s thirty minutes, precise, I take it?’

  ‘Aye, thirty-one and you’re on a charge. Now, what have we learned from that little exercise?’ Ben asks.

  ‘That it’s easy to get yerself kill’d with an axe, Sergeant?’ calls a private by the name of William Horne, the second of the country lads in the platoon, who is predictably enough known as Hornbill. He is a big, strong lad, six foot two inches with a pair of shoulders that would make him a good ruckman. He is also a reasonable shot, though not anywhere near the class of Crow Rigby. His chief distinction is that, using a pair of pliers and a length of baling wire or a hammer and nails, he is able to fix just about anything that gets broken in a mechanical or carpentry sense.

  A small sample of Hornbill’s ingenuity occurred when Ben introduced Martha’s culinary ideas to his platoon while they were away on a four-day route march. The bullybeef hurry-curry was initially only a limited success as they had not yet been deprived for long enough of the memory of half-decent food to fully appreciate it. But the exception proved to be the billyjam tarts, although they almost came to a premature halt when someone pointed out that they had no way of rendering army biscuits to fine enough crumbs for the required doughlike mixture. That is, until Hornbill was consulted.

  ‘No rucking problem,’ he declares and promptly produces a six-inch nail from his kit. ‘Always carry one o’ these, best bloody tool there is after the one nature give you.’ Then, using the steel end of the haft on his bayonet, he hammers an empty jam tin flat. With the six-inch nail he soon pierces the flattened tin with dozens of holes, hammering the nail point through the tin plate and forcing a perfectly burred hole on the opposite side surface which proves to be no different in function to a normal household grater. Hornbill then takes out his wire-cutter which is standard issue and snips a small length of fencing wire from some farmer’s paddock and cunningly fashions it into a handle for the grater. ‘There you go, good as gold,’ he pronounces to one and all.

  Private Horne’s Gallipoli grater will eventually become a stock item in every trench along the Gallipoli Front, although the Turks, finding them abandoned in deserted trenches, can never quite work out what the hell it is the Diggers needed to grate. They conclude that they can’t be bug rakes as the handles are not sufficiently long for them to be back scratchers for the lice they generously share with the enemy.

  In civilian life Hornbill is a timber cutter and hails from Coffs Harbour up in northern New South Wales. It seems he was on a visit to Melbourne to help out his uncle when war broke out. His uncle owns a pie cart which he positions nightly outside Flinders Street Station. Or, put into Horne’s own slow drawl, ‘The old bloke’s rheumatiz was worryin’ him a treat and me Aunty Mavis took crook so she couldn’t push the pie cart from their ’ome in Fitzroy of a night. So I come down to the big smoke ter give ’em a hand ’til she got better again, then the ruckin’ war come and I joined up with you miserable lot.’

  ‘Yes, Private Horne, the fighting axe can be a lethal weapon in the right hands,’ Ben smiles, ‘but I don’t suppose there’ll be too many of them on either side in this war.’

  ‘Reckon I’d ’ave one o’ them ’stead of a bayonet any time,’ Horne drawls. ‘Not much you can do with a bayonet, it don’t even chop timber good.’

  Ben ignores this last remark as it will necessitate a lecture on the uses and abuses of the infantry bayonet. He runs his eyes across the sitting infantrymen. ‘Anything else we may have learned?’

  ‘Practice, Sergeant? Everything takes practice.’ The answer comes from a serious-looking lad named Spencer, with the stocky build, dark hair and obsidian eyes of his Welsh ancestors. He has a naturally scholarly look about him, enhanced by the fact that he is constantly found wearing a pair of reading spectacles and with his nose in a book. He passed the required army eyesight test simply by memorising the complete eye chart and is known in the platoon as ‘Library’, as he always seems to know the answer to every question they are collectively asked.

  ‘Right, Private Spencer.’ Ben would have preferred someone else to have come back with the answer. He is concerned that rather than think for themselves, too many have come to rely on young Spencer to answer for them. He picks up the axe and absently strokes the slightly curved blade with the ball of his thumb. It is severely blunted from its recent mishandling by the platoon and he thinks how it will take him most of the evening to hone it back to its former razor-sharp cutting edge. ‘This is a fighting axe,’ Ben pronounces, holding it above his head. ‘It was used in the Maori wars around 1860 against the British by my grandfather’s platoon, the Tommo Te Mokiri.’

  ‘Your grandfather was a Maori, Sergeant?’ Numbers Cooligan exclaims in a surprised voice.

  ‘No, my grandmother was. My grandfather was a first-generation Tasmanian, a timbergetter like Private Horne here, but from the Southwest Wilderness. He perfected the use of the fighting axe for the Maori and made it a very effective weapon.’

  ‘He fought against the British, Sergeant?’ Spencer asks quietly.

  ‘Yes, Spencer, the British aren’t always on the side of God. But that’s enough o’ that,’ Ben says, impatient to continue. ‘The point I’m trying to make is that Private Rigby here is a great shot because he’s practised most of his life. I guess I can do what I did to Private Cooligan for the same reason. I too have practised throwing a fighting axe for most of my life. Throwing it sixty, perhaps more, times a day since I was seven years old.’

  ‘How old are you, Sergeant?’ Cooligan now asks.

  ‘Twenty-six, Cooligan, and prematurely aged by having you in my platoon asking unnecessary questions.’

  Cooligan hardly hesitates. ‘Sixty times a day, shit that’s four hundred and sixteen thousand and one hundred times you’ve thrown that axe, Sergeant.’

  ‘Thank you, Cooligan, I thought by now you would have learned not to be a smart arse!’ Ben pauses and looks about him. ‘So that’s my point.’ He indicates the gum tree with a jerk of his head, ‘I apologise for showing off back there, but it’s my job to try to keep you alive against the odds. If you can use a rifle better than the enemy it may just one day save your life.’ Ben pauses again and spreads his hands. ‘So don’t despair, you ain’t gunna be a marksman right off. Private Rigby here is just as much an amateur with the fighting axe as you are with the Lee-Enfield.’ Ben shrugs. ‘So there you go, practise, practise, practise. There’s few that’s born to do anything instinctively except to suck on our mamas’ tits.’

  This brings a few titters from the seated platoon, but Ben isn’t through talking yet. ‘Remember, you don’t have to be able to hit the badge on a German soldier’s cap at a hundred yards to kill him. A metal jacket will make a fair bit of mess wherever you hit him. Remember, you’ve got a target as big as yourself and the enemy has the same, so always conceal as much of your body as possible. If you’ve practised holding a rifle, firing it, spending time with your S.M.L.E., then, when you’re firing at the enemy, the accuracy will come to you soon enough. Statistics gathered in the Crimean War and again in the Boer War show that only one in one hundred rounds fired will cause any sort of damage, that is, find its mark. You can improve on that statistic. The platoon that uses its concerted and practised firepower effectively and aims accurately is the one most likely to stay alive. The enemy is least likely to directly attack a section of the trenches where the firepower is accurate and sustained. Now, do you understand me, you blokes? Get to know your rifle and you may just come out of this war alive.’

 
; Over the subsequent weeks Ben’s platoon is constantly jeered at, the other platoons in the battalion and the company chiacking them mercilessly. They become known as ‘Trigger Clickers’ because of the manner in which they constantly practise with an unloaded rifle. There is even a chant some wag has dreamed up.

  Tiddly-winks young man

  Get a woman if you can

  If you can’t get a woman

  Get a Trigger Clickin’ man!

  However, on the final occasion Ben’s platoon appears on the firing range, they achieve the highest aggregate ever scored at Broadmeadows. Moreover, Numbers Cooligan has taken the opportunity to run a book at the camp, betting that the Trigger Clickers, now abbreviated among themselves to ‘The Click’, who have come to take pride in their nickname, will beat any other platoon in the camp at final range practice. He offers the attractive odds of three to one and he isn’t short of punters willing to have a bet as some platoons consist of mainly country lads who know their way around a rifle. After the big win he shares his takings with the others, making every man in the platoon two pounds richer, eight days’ pay after deductions.

  ‘So what if you’d lost, Private Cooligan?’ Ben enquires while graciously accepting the two pounds Cooligan proffers after the shoot-out.

  ‘No way, Sergeant, I give the scorer at the shooting range two quid to gimme the total score of every platoon in the battalion for all six times we’ve been to the range. By the time we got to the last practice we was an average of thirty points ahead o’ the second best, that’s a fair margin to play with.’ He pauses and taps one forefinger against the other, explaining, ‘Now, with Crow Rigby shooting a possible one hundred or near as dammit every time we go out,’ he taps his forefinger a second time, ‘and taking into consideration that one or two of us is gunna go off the boil, so deduct say, twenty points, we’d still ’ave won hands down. It’s averages, Sergeant, numbers don’t lie.’ He pauses. ‘A champion ’orse don’t win every race he runs, but if you know the form of all the ’orses in the race and put him in accordingly, lemme tell ya, he ain’t gunna get beat too bloody often.’

  ‘What did you do in civilian life, Cooligan? I seem to recall you were a strapper, that right?’

  ‘Nah, I only said that because I ’oped to get into the Light Horse, Sarge, fancied them emu feathers in me hat.’ He continues, ‘But they found out soon enough I couldn’t ride, never been on an ’orse in me life. Bookmaker’s clerk, Sergeant, me uncle’s an on-course bookmaker at Flemmo. I pencil for him. Cooligan’s the name, numbers is the game!’

  Ben waves the two pound notes Numbers Cooligan has given him. ‘Well, thanks for including me in, Private Cooligan.’

  Cooligan’s hair, like all the others’, has been cut short back ’n sides but he’s managed to persuade the camp barber to keep the front a bit longer so that it looks like he is wearing the hairy part of a snow-white shaving brush above his brow. He constantly smooths it with his palm as he talks, ‘Well, matter a fact, Sergeant, The Click was, well we was ’oping, you know, that you could sort a spend it with us? Two quid each in our pocket will go a long way to drown a man’s sorrows durin’ a night on the town before we embark on the slippery dip. Lads reckon that’d be real good, you know, a final beer or twenty before we all leave ’ome?’

  ‘You’re on. Name the time and the place, I’ll be there.’

  ‘Hornbill, er . . . Private Horne, says his uncle will lay on the pies at cost price and throw in the sauce bottle, so we thought we’d meet at Young & Jackson’s, the pub with the bollocky sheila painting above the bar. Know it, Sergeant?’

  ‘She’s called Chloe, yeah, I know it, what time?’

  ‘Tuesday, seven o’clock, er . . . nineteen ’undred hours, Sergeant,’ Numbers Cooligan says, clearly chuffed that Ben has accepted their invitation.

  It is October 16th, just five days before the battalion will depart on the Orvieto, part of the fleet assembled to transport the troops across the Great Australian Bight to Albany and then eventually across the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal to Britain.

  Ben spends as much time as he can with Victoria and Hawk, both of whom are becoming increasingly aware that the war in Europe is not going to be over by Christmas, as all the newspapers confidently predicted when war was declared.

  The war of movement had started with the retreat from Mons, where in the first weeks the German successes caused consternation throughout Britain and the Empire. The Germans swept everything before them to come within fifty miles of Paris before they were finally halted by the French and British Expeditionary Forces at the battle of the Marne. But it was achieved at a terrible cost to the Allies, two hundred thousand killed, wounded or missing in September alone, eight thousand dead at the battle of Le Cateau, by no means the biggest battle fought, yet more had died here than Wellington had lost at Waterloo. The battle of Ypres, still going on, promises ten times as many. Slowly it is beginning to sink into the consciousness of thinking Australians that this is no grand excursion in Europe to which the flower of our young blood is being invited but a bloody slaughter such as the world has never witnessed before. They wonder how Britain has managed to involve herself in such an ungodly mess.

  With the Turks closing the Dardanelles and thus denying Russia access to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea, it now looks increasingly likely that they will declare themselves on the German side. Most Australians give little thought to what might be. The glory of a young nation proving itself in battle is still the ideal most hold dear to their hearts. As far as the hoi polloi are concerned, all the Allied casualties prove is that we’d better get the 1st Division over there in a hurry so that our lads can have a go and show the Germans what good colonial stock can do in this made-to-order stoush.

  The morning of October 21st brings a cloudless dawn which will later be followed by bright sunshine. Victoria rises early and, putting on her dressing gown and slippers, pads through the silent house towards the kitchen to make herself a pot of tea. Passing Hawk’s study on the way, she sees his light is still on. She taps on the door which is slightly ajar and pushing it open a little further sees Hawk at his desk writing.

  ‘Grandfather, you’re up early?’

  ‘Hmmph, what is the time, my dear?’ Hawk asks absently, not looking up or pausing from his writing.

  ‘It is just after five, not yet completely light.’ Victoria then realises that the curtains are drawn and Hawk is still dressed as he was the previous evening. She knows her grandfather to be a meticulous man who bathes and changes into a fresh suit and linen every morning. He’d once explained to her that most folk think of black people as being naturally dirty, ‘It comes with the chocolate colour, my dear.’ From some deep sense of inferiority which he has long since overcome in other things, he has accustomed himself to change his suit and linen every day and, sometimes, if the day has been hot, twice a day. ‘You haven’t been to bed, have you, Grandfather?’ she chides.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Hawk says brusquely, putting his pen away and turning stiffly to smile at her, rubbing the back of his neck with a huge hand. She sees his weary face and realises that he is now an old man, it is only his enormous size that still gives him the impression of strength. She has also noticed that the joints of his fingers have become swollen and nobbled with arthritis and that he has taken to holding his pen awkwardly, though, typically, he has not said anything about the pain he must be experiencing.

  ‘Oh, what’s going to happen? Will Ben be all right?’ she asks in a tremulous voice.

  ‘I hope so, my dear, though it’s looking less and less like the grand picnic in Europe the recruitment posters so ardently promised our lads, the great adventure.’

  ‘Grandfather, can’t we do what Abraham’s done for Joshua Solomon and find a nice safe position for Ben so he doesn’t have to fight? Surely you have the influence, if Sir Abraham can, then you can too!’ Victoria cries in sudden despair.

  Hawk raises his eyebrows in surprise. ‘My dear, we
don’t know for sure that’s the case with Joshua, all we know is that he’s one of the few selected to go to England for further training, a singular honour I believe.’

  ‘Yes, to be on the staff of one of the fat old generals! What is it? Liaison officer? It’s not fair. Why should he get away with it?’

  ‘Well, someone has to do it. Joshua has been to Oxford, he knows the English and their ways extremely well. Why, he’s almost become one of them and he’s a clever young man to boot. I’d say he was an admirable choice as a liaison officer, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Grandfather, you know what I mean, it was fixed!’ Victoria reproaches him. ‘It’s not like that at all!’

  ‘Well, we can’t prove that and nor should we try to. As for Ben, how do you think your brother would feel if we even attempted to remove him from the coming fray?’

  Victoria sniffs defensively. ‘He needn’t know,’ she shrugs, tearfully.

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Ben would most certainly know. He’s not a lad to be easily fooled. Besides, you of all people with your egalitarian Labor views, how could you suggest such a thing? Even if we could, it would be grossly unfair to use our influence in such a manipulative manner.’

  Victoria begins to sob. ‘I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, but I can’t help it, I don’t want Ben to die!’ she howls, and rushes towards the seated Hawk, curling up on her grandfather’s lap and, like the little girl he used to comfort when she was upset, she weeps against his chest.