Alas, he has not got the right complexion to blush as you read this to him, but there is no longer need to hide my feelings. You say in your last letter that he grows frail, his huge shoulders stooped, his hands crooked with arthritis, his eyes, his great dark eyes, grown rheumy, but his mind still clear and clean to the intellect. I shall not see him out, I shall not be there to stand by his grave and weep for him. But you will do it for me. Never was there a man I loved as much. Never was there a man who was better at being a member of the human race. In those moments when I have been overcome with despair, and there have been many such as the one I face at this very moment, I ask myself, ‘What would Grandfather Hawk do?’ and always it becomes clear, he would do the right thing by his mates, by his fellow human beings. I must do the same. My dear Grandfather, if I should die, as I think I shall, I can say only this, you have given me the strength to die with dignity. No better man than you ever lived.
And you, my dearest, I love and cherish you to the last moment of my life. Be brave and good and strong. I thank you and love you with every breath in my body for what you have been to me.
And then there is Sarah, my beloved Sarah. Will you give her half of my inheritance and take care of her when she returns? Treat her as if she was my wife, for I have loved her with my body and my mind is filled with her presence every day. No man could want more than she has given me. Love her, Victoria, as you love me.
And now it is goodbye to the three of you.
I love you all, with all of my heart. Death cannot change that.
Ben.
Ben has barely completed the letter when Partridge comes up to him. ‘The C.O.’s gorn walkabout, mate.’
Ben doesn’t understand at first. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘He’s ripped off his gear and gorn, tin hat and revolver, screaming like a banshee, told you the bastard wasn’t worth bringing.’
‘You didn’t stop him?’ Ben asks.
‘Stop him, three of us tried, he’s gorn mad, he just knocked us aside, next thing he was out the entrance.’ Folding the letter, Ben finds an envelope and addresses it. He places the letter in the envelope and seals it. Then he puts it in his kit. ‘Partridge, you’re a useless bastard, but promise me one thing.’ Ben points to his kit. ‘Inside are two letters, one is addressed to my sister in Tasmania, the other to my fiancée, if you get out of here you see they get them. Tell my sister I said to give you a hundred quid.’ Ben grabs up his pad and writes.
Victoria,
Pay this bastard Partridge a hundred pounds when he delivers my letter.
Ben Teekleman.
‘There you go.’ He hands the note to Partridge.
‘Hey, wait a moment, Sergeant-Major, you’re not going after him, he’s gorn mad, he’s a flamin’ looney!’
‘It’s a long story,’ Ben says and, taking up his Maori fighting axe, he starts for the entrance. There is a brief lull in the bombardment and he turns to the men. ‘There’s just a chance the Germans will stop in the early hours of the morning and we’ll try to beat a retreat. If it does, get out of here and make for our lines, it’s your only hope, lads, take it, don’t stay here.’
Ben walks into the open, it is now around ten o’clock at night with the German bombardment lighting up the battlefield in huge flashes as the heavy shells land, sending up towering pillars of dust that catch the light. It is like a scene from hell and he looks to where his trench was before they made it across to the blockhouse. There is nothing to be seen except craters, the lads who stayed are almost certainly dead.
Ben is not concerned about machine guns, there is too much dust. He hopes only to find Joshua cowering somewhere. He doesn’t know why he’s gone after him, something simply tells him he must. That if he doesn’t he will be dishonouring himself, Victoria, Hawk. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But by now nothing does any more. Somehow, something is coming to an end, something dark and ugly and too long in his blood.
A shell explodes about fifty yards ahead of him, lighting up the whole area, cutting through the dust, and then he sees Joshua. He is naked, walking towards the village of Pozières. He has crossed a section of trenches where the German front line stood, now pounded into nothing. Where men a few hours before crouched and hoped, there are only craters and death and the rats scurrying everywhere.
Ben starts to run towards Joshua. Stumbling, he falls and feels his face scrape against the dirt, losing his tin hat. He doesn’t try to find it but rises and continues running.
Joshua has disappeared into the darkness. But another shell lands and lights him up again. His nude body wearing only the tin hat seems enlarged, bigger than the landscape itself. His nudity is somehow visionlike, as though he is an angel who has come among them, or is man, naked, pleading, asking for the carnage to end, for a new beginning, a new start. Adam looking on the battlefield for Eve.
Ben keeps running, his breath beginning to hurt in his chest. He realises that he is very tired but he moves forward. Another shell bursts and he sees Joshua. This time he is standing in a shell crater and is up to his waist in dirty water. At last Ben comes upon him. Joshua has his revolver and he is firing repeatedly at the body of a dead German strung up on a roll of barbed wire. The German is long dead, his body rotting. An arm falls off and rolls down the side of the crater into the water, and still Joshua fires.
Ben runs into the crater and, taking Joshua’s hand, he pulls him out of the hole. Joshua screams as though in pain. On the bank Joshua clutches at his ankle, crying like a small child and Ben, using his torch, sees that his ankle is broken. He lifts him across his shoulder, not quite sure where he finds the strength. Then he begins to carry him across no-man’s-land.
Ben carries Joshua for fifty yards and then rests and picks him up again and carries him a little further. Twice a machine gun opens up and he can hear the bullets as they strike the ground near him. Still he continues, resting and carrying. It takes him nearly an hour to cover the six hundred yards. A pistol is fired from the direction of the village, from the Allied lines. He can see men starting to run towards him, his own people. The light seems to hang in the sky forever, bright silver light, sharp, clean, and beautiful. He thinks of Sarah, her body touching his, making love, the soft whimpering sounds she makes and then a sudden lull in the bombardment and into it a single cracking sound, like a twig breaking, as the sniper’s bullet hits him. Ben feels himself sinking, melting with the weight of Joshua’s body. And he hears Sarah sighing, he is caressing her cheek with the back of his fingers and she looks at him and sighs, ‘I love you, Ben, more than my life,’ then the darkness comes. Joshua Solomon is mad. Ben Teekleman is dead. The story is ended.
Lest We Forget
A NOTE ON SOURCES
I and my research team have made extensive use of the wonderful resources of the State Libraries of Victoria and New South Wales and also those of the Australian War Memorial. Numerous texts and reference books have been consulted to confirm dates, names, facts and the overall historical accuracy of Solomon’s Song. My debt to C. E. W. Bean’s Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (1921–1942) is obvious. Bean not only edited the twelve volumes of this monumental history but wrote the text of six volumes himself and also produced a most readable one-volume abridgment published in 1946 as Anzac to Amiens (Australian War Memorial, Canberra).
Other books used include:
Patsy Adam-Smith, The Anzacs, Nelson, West Melbourne, 1978.
—— Prisoners of War: From Gallipoli to Korea, Ken Fin Books, Collingwood, 1998.
Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1851–1939, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1966.
The Australian Handbook and Directory for 1874.
A.G. Butler (ed.), The Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services in the War of 1914–1918, vol. 1, Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea, Australian War Memorial, Melbourne, 1930.
Ruth Campbell, A History of the Melbourne Law School, 1857–1973, Faculty of Law, Uni
versity of Melbourne, Parkville, 1973.
Michael Cannon, Land Boom and Bust, Heritage Publications, Melbourne, 1972.
—— The Long Last Summer: Australia’s upper class before the Great War, Nelson, Melbourne, 1985.
Graeme Davison et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998.
Peter Dennis et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995.
Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian soldiers in the Great War, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1974.
Gregory Haines, The Grains and Threepennorths of Pharmacy: Pharmacy in New South Wales, 1788–1976, Lowden Publishing, Kilmore, 1976.
R. F. Holder, Bank of New South Wales: A history, 1817–1970, in two volumes, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1970.
H. Aubrey Husband, The Student’s Handbook of Forensic Medicine and Public Health, 6th ed., E. & S. Livingstone, Edinburgh, 1895.
John Keegan, The First World War, Hutchinson, London, 1998.
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1994.
The Longman Handbook of Modern British History, 1714–1950, Longman, London, 1983.
Philip E. Muskett, The Illustrated Australian Medical Guide, in two volumes, William Brooks, Sydney, 1903.
L. M. Newton, The Story of the Twelfth: A record of the 12th Battalion, A.I.F. during the Great War of 1914–1918, 12th Battalion Association, Hobart, 1925.
Margaret Orbell, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Maori Myth and Legend, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 1995.
Stephen Pope and Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, The Macmillan Dictionary of the First World War, Macmillan, London, 1995.
Hilary L. Rubinstein, The Jews in Australia: A thematic history, William Heinemann, Port Melbourne, 1991.
Anne Salmond, Between Worlds: Early exchanges between Maori and Europeans, 1773–1815, Viking, Auckland, 1997.
Sands & McDougall’s Directory of Victoria, Sands & McDougall, Melbourne, 1890–1930.
Elizabeth Scandrett, Breeches & Bustles: An illustrated history of clothes worn in Australia, 1788–1914, Pioneer Books, Lilydale, 1978.
G. H. Scholefield, A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 1, 1769–1869, and vol. 2, 1870–1900, Dept. of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1940.
Michael Symons, One Continuous Picnic: A history of eating in Australia, Duck Press, Adelaide, 1982.
Tasmanian Post Office Directory, 1885–1890.
Fred Waite, The New Zealanders at Gallipoli, 2nd ed., Whitcombe and Tombs, Auckland, 1921.
Walch’s Tasmanian Almanac for 1885, J. Walch & Sons, Hobart, 1885.
THE POTATO FACTORY
Always leave a little salt on the bread . . .
Ikey Solomon’s favourite saying is also his way of doing business. And in the business of thieving in thriving nineteenth-century London, he’s very successful indeed. Ikey’s partner in crime is his mistress, the forthright Mary Abacus, until misfortune befalls them. They are parted and each must make the harsh journey separately to the convict settlement in Van Diemen’s Land.
In the backstreets and dives of Hobart Town, Mary learns the art of brewing and builds The Potato Factory, where she plans a new future. But her ambitions are threatened by Ikey’s wife, Hannah, her old enemy. The two women raise their separate families, one legitimate and the other bastard. As each woman sets out to destroy the other, the families are brought to the brink of disaster.
A thrilling tale of Australia’s beginnings, told by master storyteller Bryce Courtenay
TOMMO & HAWK
Brutally kidnapped and separated in childhood, Tommo and Hawk are reunited at the age of fifteen in Hobart Town. Together, they escape their troubled pasts and set off on a journey into manhood. From whale hunting in the Pacific to the Maori wars of New Zealand, from the Rocks in Sydney to the miners’ riots at the goldfields, Tommo and Hawk must learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses in order to survive.
Along the way, Hawk meets the outrageous Maggie Pye, who brings love and laughter into his life. But the demons of Tommo’s past return to haunt the brothers. With Tommo at his side, Hawk takes on a fight against all odds to save what they cherish most. In the final confrontation between good and evil, three magpie feathers become the symbol of Tommo and Hawk’s rites of passage.
An epic tale of adventure and romance from Australia’s bestselling author, Bryce Courtenay
Solomon's Song Page 62