Each man took a turn to feel the fragment and rub it between thumb and forefinger.
“It’s shrapnel,” says James.
“One end is tapered like a bullet,” notes Hector.
“The padre thought it was shrapnel too. Quite curious though. It dropped straight down, it did not veer away under impact.” With the point of his knife, he holds up for their inspection the head of the insect.
“It has been moulded in one piece from a material I do not recognize, hard with some pliability and very thin. It is not organic tissue.”
James bends close to inspect the remains.
“It’s too dark to see.”
“It is ridiculous of me to fuss over such a thing in the middle of war but I find, when the fighting is on, that my mind fixes upon the smallest details and images, and it was in such a moment that I saw it.”
Collinson wraps the handkerchief around the remains and returns them to his pocket.
“What was your position at the time?”
Collinson points to a square on the map near to the southwestern slips of Karakol Dagh, the high ridge that girdles the north side of the beach, into which they ventured far on the first night and encountered the sniper.
“It’s a particularly tricky spot. It’s very easy to lose one’s way,” says James, remembering the starless night.
Collinson says, “The Munsters found something up there while they were digging a trench, an underground chamber of sorts. Quite ancient. A Turk sniper had them pinned down.”
“I came across him. His rifle fire has a particular crack to it,” says Hector.
“There are wounded men up there. Once the padre is ready, we will head up.”
With night thoroughly bedded in, the singing spreads from dugout to camp; valley hymns from the Welsh Field Ambulance and, in response, a mournful full-voiced rendition of Loch Lomond from the Scots. In the dark, the highlands summoned by the song are almost palpable: the purple-hued heath, the gloaming, the striated mountain banks. James blinks. The moon is bright and naked and the pier is lined with silhouettes of stretcher squads. The dry scrub on a distant hill burns. There are unburied dead all along the beach, their uniforms tight and narrow.
Father Huxley arrives with the doctor, Blore, and together the men lead the hike back up the thorny ridges of the Karakol Dagh, the rocky hills running along the north of the battlefield. The doctor grouches all the way up about the conditions in which he is expected to work, the sand on his scalpel, the nurses without enough water to wash, and no shelter for the wounded; some of the men had to lie injured directly under the sun. Word has gone around that the ambulance will soon run out of stretchers, that they are not coming back off the hospital ships. He asks how the battle is progressing. No one really knows. Collinson is convinced that the entire landing is a decoy as there seems to be no clear plan. Why else did they not push on immediately upon landing? Why are they stuck on this interminable beach?
They struggle about a mile over the ridge and then approach the dugouts on the northern slope overlooking Saros Bay. Out to sea, the storm lightning is silent and distant; overhead, the cloud cover is thin and the first stars are out. In the trenches, the soldiers are unshaven and desperate for water. James shares his canteen among the squad, a dozen men, four injured, another eight dead. All day fighting with the Turk and then the sniper fire kept each man face down in the earth. There are four times as many enemy as when they landed, and each day that passes only brings more. Collinson curses the indolence of their general. With sundown, the sniper moved on, and the Turks retreated further into the ridge, scraps of blue uniform glimpsed between thorns.
Father Huxley mutters prayers over the dead and ministers to a yeoman whose chest has been crushed by shrapnel. Blore attends to the dressing; the heart is exposed and glistens in the dark. Without stretchers to take the men down to the beach, the doctor decided to treat minor injuries there and then. For a bad head case, two bearers lock hands so as to carry the wounded man between them back down the ridge.
On his haunches, Huxley takes a sip of water. He has dark close-cropped hair and a moustache that is losing its definition.
“How is your faith, Father?” asks Hector.
Huxley picks a sprig of wild thyme then rubs it between his finger tips to release its scented oil.
“You are a pacifist, sergeant,” says Huxley. “Another Quaker. Like Collinson.”
“I study all religions.”
Huxley reaches out in the dark and puts his hand on the younger man’s shoulder.
“Your ambition in studying all the religions of the world is laudable. But there is enough in Christianity to satisfy one lifetime. It contains surprising subtleties.”
“Do you have an example?”
“Right now I would rather be handling a machine gun.”
“You can’t be a priest and kill a man.”
“Killing might make me more of a priest. Because then I would share the burden of the men in its entirety. You see, subtleties.”
They duck down into the hollow. The Turks have fallen back to a position further along the ridge. They should be able to reach the site without crossing enemy lines.
The clouds shed their gilded edge and spread in dark tatters over the high land. With Collinson leading the way, the five men leave the trench and set off through the gullies. This mad country. The scent of blooms, smoke, sage and opened corpses. Sometimes the breeze carries a memory of the Sussex Downs and it’s as if James is sneaking back through his past, the landscape of his life passing underfoot. The squad slows as Collinson checks his bearings. Hector is wary, on the lookout for the sniper.
“How far now?” asks Blore.
Collinson paces out in a circle, searching the earth for the deeper darkness of a hole, pushing aside thorny branches and testing the solidity of the ground with the heel of his boot. The soft patter of a soot fall. Collinson takes a stick from the ground and works it into the earth between adjacent rock ledges. The earth falls easily away.
“Here,” he says. “It’s like a big rabbit hole.”
Boots first, he pushes his way into the earth, then works his entire body into the hole, until just his glasses glint back at them.
“I’ve found it.”
Blore scrabbles ahead of the stretcher bearers to join Collinson down in the hole.
“What is it? What have they found?” asks Hector. “Is it a Turkish trench?”
James gets down onto his knees, unclips his Orilux torch from his belt and trains the beam down into the hole. It is much deeper than a trench and already the others have disappeared from view.
“You go,” says Hector. “I’ll keep watch.”
The impact of a shell has cleared a top layer of hard grey chalk from the stone slabs of a tomb. A very large tomb. James slips down through the loam, white tubers feeling at his face. The earth is cool and moist. His boots find open space and then in one clumsy movement he slides underground.
The doctor and the priest move through a chamber containing a dozen or more stone sarcophagi.
“This is the land of Troy and Helen, Alexander the Great and Xerxes,” says Huxley. “This is a Greek necropolis of the greatest antiquity.”
Torch lights waver according to each man’s curiosity. The tomb had been constructed with great precision; smaller chambers, sepulchres about two yards long and wide, and about one and a half yards high, lead off from this central necropolis. Huxley and Blore dig out the grouting under a lid. Stone grinds against stone, and then the grave is open, revealing a long skeleton.
Blore’s torch shines through the dark eyeholes of the skull.
“Careful. If you touch it, it will turn to dust,” says Huxley.
“Look at the wounds.” Blore points to a tiny round section, no larger than a child’s fingertip, cut out of the back of the skull.
“Trepanning?”
“Possibly. The bones are thick and long. This man must have been nearly seven foot tall.”
<
br /> “A warrior.”
“Or a sick man.” Blore blows away the dust and soil that have fallen in through a crack in the lid. “The skull is malformed, almost bulbous at the back. There is a pattern of trepanning here although the holes are much smaller than I’ve seen before, almost needle pricks through the bone.”
The skull is grooved and ridged, the colour of sandstone, with patches of dark earth here and there. Seen close-up, it looks like a map of the surrounding terrain; the top of the jawbone resembles the stag beetle horns of the bay.
“Were these markings part of a funeral ceremony?” asks James.
“There is regenerative scarring all along the incisions. Whoever this was, they were alive when the procedure was performed.”
Blore pauses.
“I am familiar with this place, and these procedures.” His hands tremor over the skull. “The cold air, these wounds, I remember them in my fingertips.”
On his hands and knees, Huxley explores an adjacent tomb. His torch light reveals two enormous urns, one cracked open, and inside, two skeletons laid side by side.
“Man and wife?” asks Blore. “Lovers?”
“Each skeleton has only one arm,” notices James.
He shines his torch upon the curved clay surface of the closed urn, hoping for a crack or gap; he imagines the skeletons of man and wife entwined, and then, over time, bones falling from one body into another, a rib shared, a thigh bone tumbling into the lover, dust passing from lip to lip. It is stupid to dwell on death, he knows that, but the entwined skeletons have blindsided him with love. Ruth. Love is an element like air or water, you inhabit it, become accustomed to it, but notice sharply when it is gone. How much has he been hiding from himself in order to survive this war? How much has he forgotten? He remembers Ruth sewing by lantern light, the rat-a-tat-tat of the needle as she worked the crank. He sorted through photographs in search of one to take with him; and then, walking out through the town and over the Downs, toward Newhaven and the transport that would take him to war.
The sound of distant cannon fire from Mount Caburn. He had walked with Hector through Firle. The blacksmith spoke of the transformation of Newhaven. Industrial slag heaps, he said, filled up the dock and there were massive explosions day and night; quarrying, the whole coastline blown up and reshaped. On the road into Newhaven, the houses were all empty, the population evicted or fled. The streets along which he had driven the people out. In another life. The armour. The implant. The skulls belong to the dead inmates of the Institute, the victims of recreational brain surgery.
James sways. The doctor steadies him.
“What is it?”
“I just had the most violent impression.”
The doctor grips him close.
“Me also. The others do not seem to be affected. Gather yourself. A moment’s vertigo, and all will be lost.”
“We must transport these relics to safety,” says Huxley.
“And how are we to do that?” whispers Collinson.
“We will return with a fatigue party, some mules and a wagon, and carry the urns across the ridge.”
Even to men of intellect, Huxley’s plan appears idealistic.
“We should just cover up the tomb and return to the beach,” says Collinson.
“This is a vital archaeological site,” says Huxley.
“We can’t excavate it under fire. Would you have the stretcher bearers carrying bones and dust to the CCS when there are wounded men out there?”
“When the line advances we will return,” says Collinson.
Huxley will not be persuaded.
“The necropolis will quickly decay if exposed to air. Every hour is vital if these relics are to be preserved.”
“You are forgetting that we are at war,” says Collinson.
“The war is temporary. These bodies, this site, are a forgotten aspect of eternity. We are all here to serve a higher cause. What greater cause could there be than the connection between us and this deep antiquity?”
James feels faint and weak. The vertigo. The terrifying distance between himself and the world as it is. He cannot bring himself to look at the skulls again, or even at the other men. He cannot even lift his head. It is as if a great invisible claw has closed over him, holding him tight.
“It’s just another grave,” he says. “Ancient past.”
“The past is knowledge,” insists Huxley.
“It’s knowledge of death, of which we have plenty.”
Blore shivers in the dark tomb.
“I have the overwhelming feeling that I just lost another patient,” says the doctor.
Huxley returns to the tall skeleton with the malformed skull. He bends over the grave, reaches into the red soil, and brings out a clay urn of the same design as the large urns in the antechamber. This smaller urn is about a foot long. He swaddles the urn in a blanket.
“We are near to the ancient city of Eleonte. These skeletons could be the remains of sacrificial victims. The daughters of Demophon and Mastusius.”
Gently, Huxley puts the urn into his backpack.
“Sacrifice of the innocents. Fertilizing the earth with the blood of our most precious possession: the young. It is an ancient rite we are compelled to perform.”
The men record what they can of the necropolis, and then claw their way up into the dawn. Scrabbling back out of the bowels of the earth, James thinks again of the violent impression the chamber had given him; of trenches cut into the Sussex Downs, armoured giants stalking the narrow streets of Lewes, and the malformed men and women who inhabited the Institute in the country. A madness, all of it, brought on by his faint. The doctor was right. A moment of vertigo and all would be lost.
16
Another landing. A star shell drifts over the dark waters of the bay. Soldiers wade through the shallow waves, kicking up foam and moonlit phosphorescence. Army boots make no sound on sand. The men advance across the beach without footfall.
After an hour and a half of dreamless, blanketless sleep, James wakes. He uses a half-gill of water for a shave, and waits for the tea-dixie to come up. Next to him in the dugout, raindrops quiver upon Jordison’s broad face. The Lancastrian is of yeoman stock, with a wide jawbone, sandy-straight hair and a broad trunk; when he withdraws his head into the collar of his greatcoat, the flesh under his chin concertinas neatly. Above the shaving line, his upper cheek is fringed with down; below the shaving line, the patchy beginnings of a tawny beard. His young face shows the contours of the old man to come.
The aura of the star shell reveals dark mounds in the silver sand, some sleeping, some dead.
Using the shovel as a bier, Jordison and James drag bodies into a pile. It’s more of a clearance than a burial, the work of the Divisional Sanitary Officer and not fit for the stretcher bearers of the 32nd Field Ambulance. But there is no sign of a sanitary officer. In the landing, military planning has become as improvised and fragile as the spider’s webs hanging in the scrub, newly-woven and quivering with dew.
Jordison whispers prayers. Behind every pull and heft of the shovel, sand spills back into place.
James doesn’t remember any prayers, so he asks Jordison if he has any family.
The Lancastrian shivers and withdraws his wide face deeper into his coat. Some of the men show a reluctance to speak. Part of it is exhaustion. Part of it is lack of water. But there is something else behind their silence. Shock. Superstition.
“I have Ruth,” says James. “No one else. Do you have a wife?”
“My wife works in my place in the mill,” says Jordison. His voice is hoarse, his thoughts slow to stir. “And three children too. We had ’em soon as we married, and a bit before. One after the other, Irish triplets. When I enlisted, she said she’d be glad to see the back of me.”
“I didn’t talk to Ruth about enlisting. We both knew I had to go. It was the thing I least wanted to do, you see.”
Along the beach, Hector rouses the rest of the men from their hoggish snori
ng. It is the middle of the night. It will always be the middle of the night. With his spade, Jordison turns over the severed head of a Gurkha, the face pushed clean off. The yeoman lets out an involuntary groan of pity and lament.
“This poor sod. This poor, bloody sod.”
It is not quite four in the morning. They do not dwell on the details of their work. The stretcher bearers shovel thistle-clutched topsoil onto the burial mound. Crickets abrade their hind legs and share data.
“You don’t have any children?” asks Jordison.
“No,” says James.
“I worry the war’ll still be going on when my lads are of age. Why would it stop? If this is what the bosses wanted, then they’ll only want more of it.”
“There will come a point when the sacrifice becomes too great.”
That was the phrase Edith Von Pallandt had used when her son enlisted: “In the spirit of splendid sacrifice.” At the garden party in Lewes, the consensus had been that civilization was stuck, and progress had failed. Bad blood in the body politic. The death instinct was abroad within civilization, the careless desire to sweep away the world that frustrates us.
His memories from before the war are hazy. There is only the long now. From the hills comes the sound of renewed fighting. He puts his heel onto the shovel edge and forces it downward.
A boot with a shin bone jutting out of it. Jordison leans over, hoists the bone up with the shovel, plants it deep in the earth, and pats the soil true. The gardener turning the earth over. In the necropolis, there was a skull stained with the resemblance of the battlefield: a notch on the jawbone that reminded him of the curved horns of the bay, and then following the curve of the bone, the shadows of hills leading to a rucked scarring in the surface of the bone, the high ridge. In the necropolis, he had a mystical experience, a violent impression of another realm beyond this one. Through the veil and all. The bodies mark the land and the land marks the bodies. The Von Pallandts would appreciate that. He cannot dwell upon it. A moment’s vertigo and all is lost.
“I wonder what will grow here afterward,” says James.
The yeoman pauses, foot on shovel, like a machine turned off, and does not look up at him.
If Then Page 19