Solomon's Song

by Bryce Courtenay

  To further the idea of Christmas coming, we have had the first snowfall of the year. As there has been no issue of blankets, it is bitterly cold. (Did you buy the blanket factory in Launceston?) Coming after the severe summer heat with very little autumn weather to warn us, the snow, the first most of the lads have ever seen, has been disastrous. We are told nearly eleven thousand troops have been treated with frostbite, bronchial conditions and the like. Several hundred men froze to death on the night of the first fall. Even the snow, it seems, has sided with the Turks. I must end this for the time being as we are to go out on patrol at dawn and I must try to get some sleep. I will take up again tomorrow.

  PALACE HOSPITAL

  1st January 1916

  My dearest Hawk and Victoria,

  You will see from the above address that my luck has changed, or has it? I lie on a bed in the sunshine, looking over the coming and going of warships and transports in the harbour below, knowing that I am not, for the present, going anywhere.

  Your mail sent to Gallipoli has caught up with me at last and I have a pile of eight letters from you, Victoria, and have taken to rationing myself with one each day. Two also from you, Grandfather Hawk, very precious and much cherished. The constant flow of letters from home has kept me sane and I don’t quite know how I would have managed without them. My platoon looked forward to them as much as I did. I was in the habit of reading relevant bits to them and, towards the end, I feel sure they regarded your letters as if they had themselves received them. It is now obvious why they were not received on Gallipoli as they would have arrived over the period we were preparing to evacuate, though, of course, I didn’t know this at the time I started this letter.

  I have taken a bullet to the stomach which occurred on the last day on the peninsula, in fact only six hours before we pulled out. It is not as bad as it might seem, it was not a direct hit, but a ricochet and has lodged sideways near my spine. The doctors have not operated and there is some talk that I may be sent to England where the facilities for removing it are better. Though I have some pain, it is nothing compared to that suffered by most of the men here and I count myself fortunate. They have shaved my head and I am able to wash my body every day, it is quite the most wonderful experience.

  You must both forgive me if I return to the subject of my letter to you from Gallipoli, now three weeks ago. I fear it will be a long one as I have much to get off my chest. You would do well to read it in dribs and drabs to avoid tedium. It is now even more important to me that I write it all down. So, with your permission, I shall finish it, though thankfully in the past tense. This morning, for the first time, I have been able to reflect on being alive and am not yet quite sure how I feel, though I think I am grateful and, perhaps, as the saying goes, time will prove to be the great healer it is supposed to be. And now I shall continue.

  What a change has come over us since we first sailed from Egypt keen as mustard to get to the Turk and to show him what it meant to come up against Australians. At the time, I am ashamed to say, we had little opinion of the fighting ability of our foe, thinking him just another kind of gyppo with a broad yellow streak running down the centre of his back. We referred to him, as we did the Egyptians, as ‘wogs’ and often enough as ‘dirty wogs’ and yearned to be dispatched to France to fight the German soldier whom we regarded as a white man like us and therefore a worthy foe.

  It seems quite astonishing to me that this was only seven months ago and in so short a period I could go from such youthful arrogance to the person I have now become. No matter what you are told at home, the Turk has proved to be a brave soldier who is not afraid to die and loves his motherland as we do ours. He has also given us a thorough trouncing and, although I shall always be proud of the way we fought on Gallipoli Peninsula, the Turk has no less reason to feel proud that he defeated us. You must believe me when I say we were not easy to beat and that we never gave up, not even at the very last disillusioned moment.

  2nd January

  It seems strange lying here in the winter sunshine without the constant crackle of gunfire or artillery shells bursting over my head. The biggest disruption to the peace and quiet is the occasional mournful sound of a ship’s horn in the harbour below or the clatter of the tea trolley down the hospital corridor.

  Now that it is all over and I lie once again between clean sheets, I want to put down a few bits ’n’ pieces. I do so not because they are important, but because there are ghosts in my life which must be laid to rest. So many of my mates are dead and I must speak for them and the battles they fought in. I feel at last able to write about the previous months. I, who always stared out of the window when old Mrs Wickworth-Spode tried to get me to put my thoughts to paper, now wish to set the record straight as far as I was concerned in the Gallipoli campaign.

  Some day, they’ll write the history of what happened in the Dardanelles but my mates won’t be in it. They will not be included in any report, which will tell instead of plans and attacks and the doings of colonels and generals seeking vindication for actions taken that were foolish and unwarranted and which resulted in thousands of good men dying needlessly.

  But Gallipoli was never about charts and logistics or the vainglorious careers of our military leaders. It was about young lads doing the best they could, giving the best they had, showing courage and humour and a love for their mates that was always decent and honest and true. Somebody has to tell of them. I will write about my own men, but you could substitute their names for many others, the young blokes who came to Gallipoli who fought and believed until the last. They were the best we had and I doubt we shall ever fully recover from their loss. Wordy Smith once told me that lads like these, strong and brave, most nearly a foot taller than their English equivalents, are the genetic seed from which a people is made. When you see a thousand young lads strewn across a battlefield, their bodies filled with maggots as they rot in the sun, it is difficult not to feel bitterness and despair at the terrible waste. I am not yet thirty years old though I feel twice this age and when I see an eighteen-year-old lad lying dead or calling out for his mother while he holds his intestines in his cupped hands, I cannot think of any cause that can justify such destruction. I’m afraid the old easygoing Ben has been changed, forever, though I doubt for the better.

  And so I am writing down what happened to my mates while it is still fresh in my mind. I will write their proper names at the end of this letter and I want you to find their families and read this letter to them so they know what happened to their sons and can be proud that they raised such men.

  But, first, now that it is over in this part of the world, though we still fight the Turk in Egypt, I must tell you of our life on Gallipoli. I have written to you of the landing and the first few days and so I intend to take up from there. Oh, by the way, I was mentioned in dispatches over the incident with the Turkish machine gun late on the first day. I have lost touch with Captain Daly who put me up for it, though I hope they have seen fit to give him the Military Cross as he deserved a medal far more than I deserved the ‘mention’. I must say I was a bit embarrassed by it all but the platoon took it in the right spirit and said although there is no ribbon for it, if there was they’d each take turns pinning the ribbon above their tunic pocket. Quite right too, if I got a mention all of us should have.

  After the first fierce fighting, when we were eventually driven back and we dug in on a front line that never really changed much for the duration of our stay, things sort of settled down a bit. The fighting went on in pockets, sometimes fierce and sometimes simply an attack on a patrol, or we’d come across a dozen or so Turks up to no good and give them hell. The artillery from both sides (though mostly from the Turk who was better equipped than us in this regard) went on for most of the daylight hours and so did the snipers. On one such day Crow Rigby and a Turkish sniper exchanged shots for four hours until our man seemed to have got the last shot in because we heard no more from the beggar higher up on the ridge. Such contests w
ere common enough and we took a win from one of our own snipers to mean we were superior, like a football match where your side wins against a hated team.

  Oh, how we despised their snipers who made walking out in the open in daylight always a dangerous occupation and who forced us to do most of our chores at night when we were exhausted. The biggest danger was going down to the beach to fetch water for the platoon and I lost three men doing this. Ducking or falling to the ground became a habit almost as common as brushing flies from the corners of your eyes. I found myself on one occasion clawing the ground when someone near me snapped a plank of wood free from a bullybeef crate. Without thinking, our ears were tuned unconsciously to the Turkish artillery fire. The snipers’ bullets never really stopped and silence was unknown to us, the crackle of rifle fire, the whoosh of a shell passing overhead or the sharp crack, bang and whirr of shrapnel pellets raining down was the only constant.

  3rd January

  Yet, after the first month, we became so accustomed to these conditions that the men pronounced themselves bored. The only one of us who seemed remarkably adjusted was Peregrine Ormington-Smith who somehow found flowers still growing on ground that was cratered by artillery shells and churned to dust. He would sit quietly in his dugout with some specimen the size of my little fingernail under his microscope and paint it, making copious notes beside it as though this tiny blossom was of the greatest importance to mankind. The man was quite impossible.

  The rest of us soon forgot those first few days after the landing when we were too stunned to think and wished only to get off the peninsula and never fire another shot in anger again. In the long period of tedium after the first onrush the thing we hated the most was not being able to see the enemy while they, perched higher up, on the ridge and cliff faces, could look directly down on us. We constantly told ourselves that if only we could fix bayonets and have a go then we’d soon enough have the better of them.

  I know you must find this difficult to understand, but day-today living conditions were so tedious and difficult that the men thought of fighting, even dying, as a kind of relief from the tension. Most had become quite indifferent to losing their lives. Wordy Smith said it was a type of insanity brought about by battle fatigue and the extreme tension of being shot at all the time without being able to effectively shoot back. He may well have been right. We are different now, none of us the same nice lads who left home ten months ago. Death was such a common occurrence that it seemed almost as normal to us as staying alive. We came to see the business of staying alive not as good management but purely a matter of luck.

  But always there was a hunger for victory, to do what you could when you could, so that those who followed you had a better chance. Every day wounded men returned to the trenches, not because it was critical that they did so, but because they had begged the hospital or first-aid post to be allowed to fight with their mates. They had quite lost the ability to see themselves as individuals, but only as a part of a unit that was not complete without them nor they without it. This changed after Lone Pine, Quinn’s Post and the Daisy Patch, where there was so much slaughter and where we lost so many of our mates that those of us who were still alive felt completely isolated and unable to go back to the slaughter. It was as if a part of us had been removed, disabling us as fighting men. I shall tell you later of these three battles which took place in August.

  4th January

  Victoria, you must excuse my not pandering to your feminine sensibilities, but I want you and Grandfather Hawk to get a clear picture of how things were here in the summer (June, July, August) and still were right to the end, except that we suffered less from flies and disease in the cooler weather.

  I tell you these things not because I want you to take pity on the lads but so that you can understand the life of an ordinary soldier here on Gallipoli. We left Australia not caring what the war was about, it was a chance to fight for King and Country to show what we were made of. Now, with so many dead and so little resolved, I must question why men go to war against each other. If you are to marry and have sons of your own I pray that you will teach them war is a hell to be avoided.

  If my life is to be spared there are some things I can never talk about. This is not because I caution myself not to do so, but because men who must kill each other are not given the words for how they feel afterwards.

  Not that I regret having come, and if I must die I am prepared to do so, but now I want to know why my country needs to take my life from me, I must know what the higher cause is for which they offer me as the sacrifice. Why all this killing is necessary? On the battlefield, to stay alive was never more than a passing thought, because there was nothing we could do beyond occasional commonsense to increase the probability of survival. We all believe now that it is only a throw of the dice if we come out of this fighting inferno alive or dead. War is a game of chance. A matter of luck.

  When a man is shot and killed where you yourself stood moments before, you put it down to luck. God does not get the credit, He loved the man who died as much as you, but it is Lady Luck who is thanked. I confess that each morning as my eyes open to another day it has become my habit to reach for the Tiki about my neck and to hold it to my lips a moment. I do this every bit as earnestly as a Roman Catholic might kiss a crucifix. I do the same before going on patrol or into battle and I do it again last thing at night. Just as our mother said, I have come to believe in it as much as our great-grandmother believed in her Waterloo medal. This little green man that hangs about my neck has become my great good luck and I should be vexed if I lost him.

  Let me give you a bizarre example of how our minds were affected in this matter of luck. We all took turns to go down to the bore near the beach for our daily ration of water, that, by the way, was the most precious of substances on the ridge. We were given a third of a gallon each day, which in the heat was only just sufficient to keep us from dehydrating. I tried to save a mugful for my ablutions etc. With this I had to shave, wash and, if I was careful not to make the water soapy, to get a boil up for half a mug of dirty-water tea. Anyway, I digress. As I was saying, the business of going down to fetch water (each man had to carry four gallons up the ridge on his own) was a slow dangerous journey with a number of rest stops where enemy snipers, ever alert, waited to pick us off. Half a hundred troops died this way every week.

  On the way down from our position to the bore near the beach, along a steep rocky path lay a dead Turkish soldier whom the maggots had cleaned out, and a bit of a bushfire, started by shrapnel, had smoked the carcass to a black, leathery affair of taut skin stretched over bone. He lay right beside the path on his back with one blackened arm and hand straight up in the air as if he was appealing for mercy.

  Well, one evening Numbers Cooligan and Woggy Mustafa were sent down on water detail and, passing the dead Turk, Numbers pointed to the blackened carcass and told Woggy that his Irish grandmother had once said that shaking the hand of a dead man brought incredible good luck and the promise of a long life.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Woggy. ‘God’s truth?’

  ‘Would I tell you a lie?’ said Cooligan.

  ‘Course you would,’ replied Woggy.

  ‘Well, I ain’t,’ Cooligan said, ‘I swear it on me granma’s grave.’

  Woggy was taken in by the apparent seriousness of the oath and solemnly shook the dead Turk’s hand. Of course, when they got back to the line Numbers couldn’t tell us quickly enough about Woggy’s nocturnal greeting of the dead Turk. It was a big laugh shared all round and Woggy got a hard time from the rest of the lads except Brokenose Brodie, who asked Cooligan if what his grandmother told him was fair dinkum ’cause he swore it on her grave.

  ‘She ain’t dead,’ Cooligan said, thinking this hilarious. ‘No grave to swear on, mate!’

  Well, the next time Woggy was on water detail he went with Andy Anderson, a big lad from St Kilda. Woggy passed the dead Turk and stopped and solemnly shook his hand. On the way back Andy was killed by a s
niper. A week later Woggy was on water detail again, this time with Moggy Katz, same thing again, Mustafa shook the dead Turk’s hand and a little further down the path Private Katz took a sniper’s bullet through the left shoulder. Then another detail on water duty got shot and we had one dead and three wounded in our platoon.

  From that time on every member of the platoon going down the path shook the dead Turk’s hand. News of the hand soon spread and it wasn’t too long before everyone in the company passing by was shaking the hand. Until one day it dropped off, whereupon some wag pushed the hand into the crevice of a rock to the side of the path so that the fingers protruded outwards. To the very day before we fought at Lone Pine in August, every soldier passing by on that particular path touched the blackened fingertips for the luck he thought it would bring him. The black hand, as it became known, assumed a deep significance to those of us on the ridge and I confess to touching it myself.

  5th January

  Of the many vexations that beset us this past summer the flies were the worst. The greatest relief that came our way was not when the enemy ceased to attack, but when the colder weather killed off the flies.

  I first saw the flies on wounded men in April, and thought I had never witnessed such a gross thing, but they were a mere buzzing aggravation compared to what was to come in June, July and into the hot weather of August. We did not always observe the strictest standards of hygiene in the trenches, which fell far short of the standards we were taught before we left. But then it was always supposed there would be water available, whereas we had too little to spare for cleanliness.

  The men went for weeks without a wash and the fleas and lice were a constant plague so that every two days we wore our uniforms inside out in the hope that the sun would fry the lice. Every week or so a dozen men from the platoon would go down to the beach where we bathed in the salt water. If you didn’t mind a shrapnel pellet plopping beside you every once in a while it was well worth the effort. There were no waves to speak of and it was a bit like bathing in a salty pond, and the cool water of the Aegean after the blazing heat up on the ridges was glorious. We would go in in our uniform and this killed the immediate fleas and the lice, though not the eggs which hatched in the seams and seemed impervious even to being smoked over a fire.