If Then

by Matthew de Abaitua

  They had ridden out to make love at the foot of the Long Man of Wilmington, as the old wives had told her it was a fertility symbol. Unlike the Cerne Giant, the Long Man was without phallus and seemed more to him like a spirit gripping the sides of a doorway, and about to step through. After they made love, she gathered blackberries in a basket and, when it was full, sloeberries in the train of her skirts.

  Jordison hauls him up onto the path. They take hold of the stretcher again. Darkness was considered vital to the success of the landing, but it is of no help to a stretcher bearer. Going up and down the nullah has left him more disorientated. He could not even say, with any certainty, in which direction lay the sheer cliff of Saros Bay.

  The war itself is no help, it is strangely silent.

  “We have to find the aid post. We must rejoin the rest of the ambulance,” says Jordison.

  But which way? James searches the sky for clues. The single star has gone out, obscured by thick immovable cloud. They walk on, uncertain, with the crawling sensation that every step will have to be retraced. After two miles, they realize that they have wandered beyond their own lines. They keep going. One mission of the landing is to gain and secure this ridge, and they have done so, accidentally, two stretcher bearers lost on the first night of their war. The terrain twists this way and that, manipulating them to its own ends.

  They climb to gain a vantage point in this mad country. A searchlight beam divides the night in two. The triangular beam, with the apex emanating from a point that could be behind Turkish lines, advances across the topmost ridge. They drop to the ground, and Jordison shuffles backward. The searchlight stops ten yards to the left. Then flicks five yards closer. Jordison freezes; to stifle a cry, he bites down on the earth. The patch of illuminated ground slides closer and reveals a figure, two yards ahead. It is a body, one hand clutching the air in rigor mortis. James buries his head in the ground and turns his face toward his chest, and tucks in his legs, so that his breathing will not reveal him. In this foetal position, he waits in a prolonged quivering moment, hoping that whoever aims the searchlight will mistake their prone bodies for corpses. A last thought of Ruth, he owes her that much; to remember her at the moment of his extinction. A faint muscle memory of their lovemaking outdoors, the exultation of his bare arse between her splayed legs, the anxiety that they will be discovered giving the act a wanton urgency in which he selfishly pursued his own pleasure in a way that she responded to. Tighter, he tucks his knees up in anticipation of being bathed in light. As if he could fold himself flat and slip through the cracks in the earth.

  “It has passed,” whispers Jordison. The searchlight flicks down the ridge. Opposite, the silhouetted hand of a dead body slowly closes into a fist and becomes a living shadow. Sergeant Hector. He slides down between them.

  “We got lost,” says James. “I’m so glad you found us.”

  “I’m lost too,” Hector replies. “I reckon we’re beyond the British outposts and not far from Turkish lines. I can’t see a damn thing. If that searchlight hadn’t swung up here I’d have gone right over the precipice. It’s a fair bet that it’s a Turkish searchlight which puts their lines somewhere down the ridge.”

  All three men, shivering on the high ground, search the horizon for some sign of the bay: a grey streak in the distance seems the most likely.

  “We’ll head that way,” says Hector.

  “But when we get in that mad country again, we’ll lose our bearings,” says Jordison.

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Staying here makes more sense than blundering around in the dark.”

  “It should be sunrise by now,” says James

  He has never experienced combat before. None of them has. He has been afraid before. Of course he has. Not like this though. A entire day of fear with more days of terror to come. Weeks even. How will they stand it?

  “When sun comes up, we’re as safe here as we are on the beach,” says Jordison. Hector is not listening. He puts a subduing hand on Jordison. In the passing glare of the searchlight, in the centre of a clump of bushes, James sees a figure move: its helmet and uniform are interwoven with leaves and branches to form a pelt of vegetation, and in its hands, a rifle. The searchlight moves on. The night rushes in.

  “He’s found me again.” Hector is riveted with disbelief. “He’s looking right at me.”

  “Who is?” asks Jordison.

  “The sniper. He’s after me.”

  Hector slides down a steep stratum of the ridge, so steep that if they did not have a sniper at their backs, Jordison and James would never have followed him. The three men grunt and leap down through the broken stones. The descent ends in tall grass and thistles, through which they run crouching and cringing in anticipation of a bullet.

  James risks a look back: at the crest of the hillock, the sniper’s silhouette, taller than a man, with fronds and bullrushes fixed to his helmet, and branches jutting every way out of his uniform. James swears he sees the bushes on the flank advance toward him also. The land is not a neutral party in this war. The land has taken sides.

  A rifle fires. The sound is different than standard musketry, hollower, and ends with a faint intake and hydraulic hiss. A bullet cracks through the air like a whiplash. James considers going foetal again. Another bullet whistles by and thuds dully, disappointedly, into the soil. Like hares ahead of the plough, the three men run, each in their own fashion; Hector with high knees and bladed palms; Jordison, burdened, flailing through waist-high thistles; and James, dodging, trying to devise as he runs the ideal pattern to follow if one is to avoid being shot, that is, the correct number of steps to take in a particular direction before veering off in another. A bullet sighs in his ear with unreciprocated adoration. In daylight they would be dead men, but the night spares them; Hector’s run banks sharp right, and he leads them into the shelter of the nullah, whooping joyfully as he disappears.

  Thank God for the dark, thinks James. Thank God for that single disappeared star.

  14

  His feet sink into the sand, his hands raw from carrying the stretcher, now abandoned somewhere up the ridge. Exhausted, he cannot even perform the calculation required to thread a shoelace. It is unspeakable that he takes another step. Yet he must. And he does. Stamina is his talent. Marriage, duty, forbearance, suffering: endurance is beautiful.

  Dawn rises over the sea as it has risen since ancient times and will continue to rise long after this terrible war has ended.

  Beside him, Jordison, head down, stumbles leftward across the grey beach, then rightward, then left again; even Hector, the mountain goat, is feeling the weight of the long night. Of the sniper nothing more has been seen but that is the way with snipers.

  Jordison crumples untidily to the sand.

  “What is the point of it all?” he cries.

  It is the third time that Jordison has asked this question of them. James cannot muster the energy to respond. Hector is reduced to simple imperatives: shut up, come on, keep up, not far now – as if he were a father determined to lead recalcitrant children to a pleasant view.

  James returns to help Jordison up. The Lancastrian is heavy with tiredness.

  “I wish you had a gun, then you could shoot me in the hand and the two of you could carry me onto the hospital ship.”

  “I have a knife. I could stab you in the hand. But it’s likely the wound would get infected. And then you would die. Probably on the hospital ship surrounded by other dying men.”

  Jordison shakes his head. He’s gone deep inside himself and is questioning what he finds there.

  “Why are we here? What does it mean?”

  “There is no point in asking why. You can’t get to the bottom of the world through reason. We must use feeling.”

  “I feel spent.”

  “We all do. But I can’t leave you here and if you insist upon flopping to the ground like a sack of spuds then you put us all in danger. Get up. Get up and walk with me.”

&nb
sp; James hauls the groaning Jordison to his feet. They walk together toward the beach. Silvery threads of first light on the grey and indigo waters of the bay, winding around the peaks of Imbros to the south west, and Samothrace to the north west. The naval guns resume and are answered by shells from the Turkish positions. Underfoot shimmers with distant impacts. The firing line is further inland than the day before. The battle is thinning out. The Turks were surprised and outmatched by the naval guns. Soon the Allies will gain the ridge. It is feasible that he may even get out of this alive.

  “The world is so very beautiful.” James puts his arm around the bleary-faced Lancastrian. “Because it endures. Are you loved, Jordison? Do you love anyone?”

  “You’ve gone mad, haven’t you?”

  “I am determined to think only of love between here and the camp, and that will see us home. My wife is called Ruth. We were childhood sweethearts. I have long felt our union was a matter of destiny and that is why it endures; if it were one of chance, it would not be so beautiful.”

  James’ strange sozzled talk amuses Sergeant Hector, eavesdropping from a few paces ahead. “You want to know why we are here. I will tell you. If we can love one person, Jordison, then we can find meaning in the universe. We must cultivate love if we are to address your questions of ‘why are we here?’ and ‘what does it all mean on the cosmic scale?’ That is to say, we must become cosmic lovers.”

  “You’d tell me if you two have been on the rum, wouldn’t you?” Jordison asks his sergeant.

  Hector, with sandy eyebrows, wafts flies from his lips.

  “Private James, doesn’t cosmic love suggests its opposite of cosmic hate?”

  James nods, “Our sergeant is a mystic. Theosophist, philosopher or gymnosopher – which are you, sergeant?”

  “I believe in studying all the world’s religions.”

  Hector’s dark eyes are alive to the prospect of mockery and he watches James carefully before continuing: “I don’t cleave to any one religion. They all stem from the same point. The same pattern. And are proceeding toward the same end.”

  “Spoken like a true mystic. Tell me, sergeant, was your enlistment part of your search for knowledge? Did you secretly come here to improve yourself?”

  “I enlisted to serve.”

  “But not to serve your country.”

  “You are tired, private.”

  The conversation renders Jordison indignant.

  “There is no knowledge to be gained in war. Nothing to be learned. Nothing good, anyway.” Tired and sullen, his broad face is smeared with red earth. “And if there was, whatever schooling we receive will soon be spread over the earth along with our arms and legs.”

  To the wounded men on the beach, sunrise comes as a relief after a long cold night under the tarp. A hundred or so men have been laid down at the clearing station to join the hundred already lying there. Not all of them wake at dawn. The orderlies go along the lines and pull blankets over the faces of the dead. Emerging from a sandbagged dugout, the doctor puts his mug of tea up on a corrugated iron roof while he lights his morning pipe. The smell of strong tobacco covers the odour of corruption.

  The three stretcher bearers sink dog-tired into dugouts. James falls asleep so quickly that his self-awareness is not entirely extinguished, and rises through the monstrous proportions of the dream landscape like a kite-tail. He dreams of love and the long carry, with him at one end and Ruth at the other, and between them an empty stretcher.

  It is too hot to sleep for long. He wakes with the conviction that it’s a Sunday. And it is. Strange that it should feel like a Sunday here and now, with Jordison making tea on the primus stove and the naval guns clanging repeatedly; their racket combines with the heat of the sun to become an enormous oven door being repeatedly slammed shut. Yet it is undeniably a Sunday.

  Hector moves among the men as he passes out the rum ration. He informs them that Father Huxley will lead mass in the gully while Canon McKenzie, for men of Protestant persuasion, will take a congregation through hymns and homilies from the shelter of a cove.

  “Which will you attend, sergeant?”

  “I am told the padre is a freethinker,” says Hector, slopping grog into James’ tin cup.

  “Doesn’t the army require the opposite of freethinking?”

  The young sergeant squints. He knows the older man is mocking – but what? Him?

  “You are a Quaker, of course,” says James.

  “By birth and education.”

  “You’re a crank like the rest of us. You must have noticed the prevalence of cranks in the ambulance. We’ve been filed here.”

  “We must serve. We must do our duty by our fellow man. And keep our true thoughts about King and Country to ourselves. Drink your rum, private.”

  The rum softens the stiffness in his arms. He lies before the Aegean Sea and gazes out, beyond the rocking destroyers, with their puffer clouds of gunsmoke, to the mauve and jagged outline of Imbros. If the men do not take the higher ground, there will be nowhere for them to go but back into the sea. Pushing on should be a matter of some urgency; yet, along the beach, the army is inert. It mills. The men dig trenches, and squads march left then right, kicking up dust in their drudgery. The landing mixed up the regiments and they are continually resorting and unsorting themselves in an attempt to find order. The clanging oven door of the artillery makes it hard for the commanding officers to think straight. An excess of orders creates chaos and in response the landing is – if not becalmed – then directionless, almost indolent.

  The religious service adds to the perverse normality of the Sunday morning. In shirtsleeves and pith helmets, the congregation squints against the sun and waft flies from their faces. The stretcher bearers sit at the back, the fighting men to the fore. Huxley, the priest, is a tall ascetic type in golden chasuble. He sets up a portable altar and sacred kit. His long, young face concentrates upon the ritual with a deliberate gentleness. His voice is not always audible above the ordinance. A high explosive shell lifts the lid momentarily upon the world, and then lets it fall noisily back into place. The padre swallows drily, his pronounced Adam’s apple dips, and then he continues his sermon, his tone stronger, his volume greater.

  James gazes back along the curve of the bay in the direction of the explosion. Lighter craft continue to land, with soldiers sloshing through low tide. The silver sand is blotted with the black misshapes of the dead, human and animal. The clank of a cold beef bone in a tin cup. He retches.

  The flies will grow fat on a diet of men. James cringes and baulks at the feel of them on his skin. Corruption clings to the hairs of their black and red legs like dew to grass. The flies will multiply. The flies will swarm out of a blazing hellhole to cool their feet upon the faces of the dead.

  The padre does not speak of Hell. He studiously ignores it. Nor does he make much of Heaven. This congregation has not come to hear confirmation of a particular orthodoxy. Rather it is the wellspring of all religious feeling that they want. And what is the enlightenment that the men thirst for? He cannot say. Meaning? An answer to Jordison’s question about why they are there and why they must die? No. Such questions belong to the naivety of yesterday. Being together, in the gully, surrounded by the scented beach herbs, to know that one still belongs to life, that is it. Yes. To feel that one will not be forgotten.

  He never believed in God, not even as a boy in the school hall when, eyes closed and hands pressed together in prayer, he longed to be transported up to another realm. When he peeked, the chilly school hall remained. The boys bleated the hymns then sat in tousled ranks, cross-legged and numb-arsed in short trousers, as the headmaster deployed scripture to explain what the boys could and could not do in the yard. His earliest memory is disbelief. He has simply never been able to believe a word of power’s cant. There is a possibility of God or some guiding agency in the universe (though not – in all likelihood – here, on this beach) but he has never felt it. All is expedient, utilitarian, accidental, sor
ted and unsorted according to love and hate. He could mount a defence of love as a sorting principle. Love could make a benign order out of this hell.

  The padre dips his fingers in holy water. The congregation fidgets with thirst.

  The service complete, the men fall out, shaking the sand from the seat of their trousers. Sergeant Hector goes over to the padre as he gathers up the altar, and shares his spiritual concerns. James, godless, takes out his pen and paper and writes a letter to Ruth concerning his theory of the cosmic lovers.

  He writes: “You and I are the alpha and omega at opposite ends of the universe and we come together in the generative force of consummation. I will have a pair of rings made for us, the Greek symbols for Alpha and Omega in gold and silver.”

  His whimsy is auntish. Unserious. Should he, then, write about the bodies that he lay down under the tarps? With their covering of skin and flesh overturned in the same way that a shell overturns the earth?

  The wounded men do not get the help they expect, and in their eyes, a blankness that will, in the coming weeks, spread from face to face; their expectations must be recalibrated to harmonize what lies within with what lies without. The result is madness, of course. The madness that proceeds from the logic of war. No, he will not write about what it feels like to put your foot through a dead man’s rib cage and to hear the trapped air expire: wffffffftt.

  In the letter, he suggests that they must go blackberry picking upon his return, and, if he is back after first frost, to gather the sloes from the chalk pit in Wilmington. He hopes Ruth will catch the allusion to the afternoon they made love at the foot of the Long Man on Windover Hill. They had been reading about fertility rites, ‘Spirits of the Corn and The Wild’ from The Golden Bough. The blasphemy of his bare white arse in the sunlight. The way she did not immediately gather herself once the act was done but lay there, splayed and smiling, for a wanton minute. The straw flattened and shaped by Ruth. At night all my troubles come to me but I have learnt to drive them away with thoughts of you, dear Ruth. Remember me. Preserve me in your thoughts.