If Then

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “No different than before,” says Jordison, resuming digging.

  “That is unimaginable.”

  “That’s nature.”

  The squadron fall in, grab their monkey boxes and stretchers. The canvas is stained with blood. They fill up their water bottles with brackish chlorinated water. With the arrival of 53rd division, the beach is as busy as Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night. Sikhs drive light carts and lead mule trains carrying ammunition. Engineers work in the dust kicked up by marching men, threading telegraph wires across the sand. The trench contingents fall in, platoon after platoon with full packs, loaded for strength rather than speed. Bayonets unsheathed and dully gleaming in the moonlight, the soldiers set off across the plain, the stretcher bearers following a way behind. James is paired with Jordison. Hector moves between the stretcher squads from the different ambulances, keeping everyone in order. In the dark, it’s easy to lose your way.

  A sea fret rolls in from the bay. With the fog at their back, the silhouettes of the squads will be visible to the snipers. Their stretcher bearer brassards will not. The platoons advance around the north end of the luminescent salt lake. The crack-crack of sniper fire. Ahead, from over the blue grassy dunes, come the agonies of wounded men, cries in every register and horribly particular to each man: plaintive, urgent, monstrous, whimpering. The voices come from rock and hollow: “Ambulance!” “Bearers!” “Stretcher bear-e-r-s!”

  Sniper fire in open country is a disjointed nightmare. Bullets spark off the rocks. The strays, the ricochets, are not as deadly as a direct shot but still capable of giving you a nasty one. A bullet passes under his chin, and then veers vertically upward like an enormous dragonfly. He senses men running close by. He ducks and dives. Another bullet passes half a yard overhead and seems to loop around their position in a whirring arc. Out of the continuous roll of sniper fire, echoing down from the high ground and across the plain, one particular rifle can be discerned; its action is neat with a note of suction, like a boot lifted from mud.

  Five yards or so to the right, an unmoving figure, another pale face in the earth: Hector. James sighs. He should call to the sergeant, but what if he does not answer?

  Again the distinctive sucking vacuum of the rifle. Distance and direction is hard to judge. The acoustics in this place are disorientating, and sometimes sound and vision do not marry.

  Slowly, Hector’s boot turns over and then finds purchase, and, quick as a mountain cat, the stretcher bearer skids over to James’ position.

  “Do you hear that rifle? It’s him again,” he says. “The sniper from the ridge.”

  “Maybe it’s just the same type of rifle.”

  “It’s him again and he’s hunting us.”

  “Do you see him?”

  Within the grey mist of the ridge, muzzle flashes crackle in a haphazard line from left to right; inland the scrub is denser, and here and there, a shot flickers out from the bushes. Bullets thud dully into the earth around them. Hector clutches his metal helmet with both hands.

  “Come on!” he shouts, though he himself does not move.

  The sniper finds his range. A bush on their flank stirs. And then, in response, comes the thorax-shaking lazy thud of a machine gun, shredding the thorn bushes. The sound of gunfire deepens as it judders slower and slower. The smell of thyme becomes so sharp, so quickly, it’s as if his senses have gained mastery over time and space. In between each bullet, he hears the hellish whispers of war: the tear of shirt fabric, the final parting of parched lips, the infinitesimal sound of blood filling up pores in the soil. He hears shouting. He is shouting. And when the machine gun stops, and the flecks of sage and thyme float out from the havoc, James slaps Hector on the back. That’s all it takes. The two men rise up.

  The line advances around the dried-up salt lake. On Saturday, the Inniskillings were massacred here, and a few of their dead are still standing, thigh deep, in the sludge. Eviscerated by shrapnel, one silhouette stands with arms akimbo, head back, legs stoutly fixed. The Turk had sunk landmines under the curling hexagonal tiles of the plain, and when the regimental stretcher bearers went to retrieve their wounded, heavy gouty blowouts of wet mud and crust sent pieces of them and their kit wheeling through the air. Working his way through the marsh, James tries to comprehend the suffering of the wounded men still out there on the salt flats. As a pure sensation, that wealth of pain would exceed the capacity of the organism to experience it, surely. Accordingly, language is imprecise. Could a numeric quantity be ascribed to suffering, per Collinson’s equations of war? Yes, there would have to be a number for this quantity of pain, a sum that, once calculated, would prove that this battle was not chaotic but had in fact been meticulously planned to produce the greatest amount of suffering.

  East of the lake is a lower curved ridge they call Scimitar Hill, four miles from the shore and the object of the advance. First there is a riddle of trenches upon Chocolate Hill on the foothills of the Tekke Tepe, a nine hundred foot massif, a displaced piece of the earth’s crust, thrust out of the underworld. He thinks again of the skull in the necropolis; if the pattern on the skull and around the trepanned section was a map of the battle, then the surface of the brain is a system of entrenchments: the way the cortex folds in upon itself, forming trenches and gullies, creates the greatest possible surface area. By increasing the size and complexity of the surface area of the brain, the volume of suffering it can apprehend, calculate and cause also increases.

  Soldiers drift back from the firing line. They were ordered to advance but not to engage, or so it seemed. The wording was imprecise. By eight in the morning, the advance upon the ridge is routed. The line falls back to Chocolate Hill. The ambulance dress the walking wounded and send them on their way. Collinson and Brilliant trot back with a bad case on the stretcher, the right side of his face shot away, lashing blood out of his wound as he sings madly of Tipperary. Among their ranks are men whose nerve failed, ragged raw troops with self-inflicted wounds. Jordison wants to stop and pick up a leg case but James says no, not yet.

  “What are you looking for?” asks the yeoman.

  “Greater suffering,” says James.

  How does he decide whom to save? By the severity of the wound, of course. It stands to reason that the further the bearers advance into the battle, the greater the suffering they will encounter. In place of orders, of which there are none, he must reason it out himself. If this, then that. He climbs out of the gully to let the stretcher parties pass along the line of evacuation, one after the other, shuttling through the dark, working the disassembly line. Blore supervises an advanced dressing station at the cut of the salt lake. James and Jordison answer the haunting calls, find the wounded men, treat them, then carry them to the doctor. For some carries, there are no stretchers available. Jordison hoists up a big Irishman with a shattered foot, braces the man’s weight on his hip bones, trying for a hold somewhere between pick-a-back and fireman’s lift. The Irishman’s arms dangle loosely over Jordison’s chest as he staggers across the field. James works rifles through the sleeves of an overcoat to form an improvised sling that they use to carry a young grey-skinned lad, a bad dysentery case, crying and apologizing. I am not wounded, he says, just weak. The soil tips out of his body.

  The stretcher bearers move further into the battle, toward Chocolate Hill, a steep-sided charred molehill and gateway to the Tekke Tepe. They find men who have been wounded for twelve hours or more. With a pair of scissors, James cuts away the flesh of a gangrenous arm wound and the man does not flinch. The nerves are dead. Without any water, the men’s tongues are black, a vile shrivelled black. Hard to believe, in some cases, that this was the body of a fighting man only two days previously. The morning’s advance pushed back the Turkish snipers, freeing the men who had been pinned down without food or water under a remorseless sun, eating grass to fill their bellies. They stumble out from cover, gaunt as the living dead, their uniforms in tatters, their faces long with suffering. Some men cannot speak for
thirst and they shiver and shake with sniper madness. For these hollow men, Jordison allocates a sip from his medical water bottle, and when that runs dry, he shares a draught from his own supply. Hector puts a stop to that. The stretcher bearers will need their strength to sort the living from the dead at Chocolate Hill.

  The hillside is a shambles, a lunatic warren. His boots kick away water bottles, get tangled with khaki and blue Turkish tunics. James and Jordison climb up a path, only to find it stopped halfway up by a shelf of rock. They climb out, and, following the sounds of men, find another trench. Gear and limbs abandoned alike, and in the shallow trenches, corpses imprinted with the boot marks of fleeing soldiers. A squad of soldiers keep their rifles trained on the Turkish positions and will not answer their requests, even when Jordison screams at them.

  “Private Jordison, these men are dead!” shouts James.

  The stretcher bearers retrace their steps downhill in search of a path up. In a communication trench, an officer carrying an empty dixie raves at him.

  “We’ve taken the hill, but we’re dying of thirst!”

  “Where’s your aid post?” asks Jordison.

  The officer shakes his head and pushes past them.

  “We find a man here and head back,” says Jordison. They reach another trench. Both men sicken with the smell of it.

  “This is a grave,” says James. “We can’t help anyone here.”

  Daylight breaks, lifting the soft blue and grey bands of mist that lie over the ridge. From the trench, he gathers more medical supplies, bandages and morphine. Jordison makes another overcoat stretcher from the debris. They can see what they are doing. It’s not a blessing.

  With daylight comes heavier and more accurate fire from the Turk. From somewhere deep in the ridge, a great clang and then the first shell of the day whistles overhead, exploding in a white and black plume on the salt lake. Soldiers run back and forth, the divisions are intermingled, orders are confused, maps lost, briefings missed. On Lali Baba, the command peer through eyeglasses at the battlefield, looking for patterns so that they can figure out where to deploy the battalions. Without clear directive, the army ceases to be a rolling force of intent and becomes more like the waves caught in the bay, advancing and retreating across the rocks; some waves build, and break further up the shore than others. The mass of men undulates across different points of space and time according to local agents of causation. Hector’s voice cuts through the confusion. Where other men shamble and stumble, his directions remain sharp, his bearing straight. With pith helmet, braces and shirt sleeves rolled up, he really is the most fearsome pacifist.

  “We must push on to the firing line,” says James.

  “What are our orders?” Jordison has been brave thus far. To push on of their own free will seems foolish.

  “We don’t need orders,” says James. “We know what we have to do. The battle is ahead.”

  Hector wipes the perspiration and soil from his face with a rag. “Have you heard any more from the sniper?”

  This morbid obsession with the sniper disturbs James. God knows it is hard to hold onto reason when the sun is up and the salt lake shimmers in time to his heartbeat.

  He takes out his Zweiss glass and gazes east across the Sulajik plain. The key to the entire operation is the high peak of Tekke Tepe. If the Allies could secure the high ground and hold the ridge then the landing would be a success. Whatever assault had been undertaken that morning upon the peak had failed. The gateway to the ridge is guarded by, on one side, the curved peak of Scimitar Hill and on the other, the W hills, so named for the pattern of the vegetation upon them. These two modest high points watched over either side of a long spur that is the route up Tekke Tepe.

  “We’ve no water,” says Jordison. The creases in his face are grimy with sweat.

  “Neither have the wounded,” says James.

  “Do you remember, that first night, I asked you to shoot me?” Jordison says. His thin khaki uniform is hot with exertion. “You should have done it. Shot me and sent me home. What difference would it have made?”

  “None whatsoever,” says James.

  “I’ve seen fingers shot off on purpose.”

  “Do you want to join the cowards?”

  “I have a family.”

  “We go to alleviate suffering.”

  Jordison closes his eyes and slowly puts his hands over his ears. Mutely, he shakes his head. He is spent.

  “We are nothing,” he mumbles.

  James kneels down next to Jordison; he speaks carefully and with a threatening emphasis.

  “To a wounded man, lying in the scrub, you are everything.”

  “You want to get yourself killed. I’ve got children.”

  “If you don’t get up now, I will shoot you,” says James. “And not in the hand.”

  James hooks his arms under Jordison’s armpits and hefts the big man up, and when he tries to stumble back down onto his knees, he hefts him up again. Sergeant Hector takes out three woodbines. James lights one. The dry tobacco scorches the back of his throat and tars his senses. Jordison refuses a coffin nail with a slow shake of his head.

  “I had a vision,” says James.

  Hector opens his mouth and the smoke finds its own way out.

  “I want to tell you about it before we go. In case we don’t make it back. It came to me when we were underground. You were in it.”

  “In the dream?”

  “No, it was more like a memory. Of a different time. We walked together across the Downs near my home in Lewes. The towns and villages were empty. The people had been evicted.”

  “Before the war?”

  “We were on our way to war together. The memory felt as if it had been placed within me by God.”

  “The Christian God?”

  “The Absolute. I sensed another force within me. It draws me in. Yet it remains hidden.”

  Hector takes almost indecent relish in his woodbine. The simple act of inhalation and exhalation is enough for him, in that moment.

  “We are exhausted. Men are dying all around us.”

  “Do you remember walking on the Downs with me?”

  Hector thinks, then quietly shakes his head.

  “I glimpsed something,” says James. “A world beyond this. Or next to it. There is a great convergence.”

  From the direction of Scimitar Hill, shaggy men shuffle away from the heaving black smoke. He feels faint again. James drops his cigarette. His fingers are weak. He has no strength to hold. To hold things together. He feels a force pressing down upon his thoughts, a great inner weight that is suddenly lifted and then he feels too light.

  “Steady,” says Hector. The sergeant catches James. He almost faints. He does not faint. It is not permitted for the men of the 32nd Ambulance to fall. That has been decided. Even Collinson, loose trousers tainted by dysentery, carries a stretcher.

  Jordison points with alarm.

  “The scrub is on fire!”

  Nausea breaks over James. The back of his hands ripple. Hector puts the cigarette back between James’ lips and the dog-end is large and painfully dry.

  “We need to move the wounded away from the advancing fire,” says Hector. He attempts to rally soldiers and stretcher squads for the advance to Scimitar Hill. The men who have just returned from the battle push the sergeant aside, and stagger on toward the beach.

  Jordison takes up the empty, folded stretcher. Now it is his turn to haul James to his feet.

  “We can’t let those poor sods burn alive,” says Jordison.

  Scimitar Hill lies three quarters of a mile to the east, in the foothills of the Anafarta ridges. The East Yorkshire regiment had taken Scimitar Hill the day before, but with unclear orders, had abandoned it. Here the battle breaks up into absolute chaos, a nauseous confusion, the boundaries blurred between the living and the dead.

  Jordison and James advance through a mob shuffling away from the front. The limbs of the stumbling men are burnt black from the su
n, their uniforms ragged and torn, their faces covered in dirt and streaked with sulphurous yellow from the acrid exhalation of shells: it is as if the bodies they buried that morning have returned from hell.

  The Turkish soldiers move up the hill in twos and threes and fire upon the retreat. Bullets veer around James like bats. Another twenty yards to the trench and he can see the men clawing their way out of the grave. He shoves Jordison ahead of him and, at a running crouch, the stretcher bearers weave through the field to the trench. The wounded and the sick are scattered all along the lines; Jordison tries to stop the fleeing soldiers, shouting at them to each take a wounded man. He cuffs a corporal around the ear. The corporal fights back with desperate lunging punches. Jordison gathers half a dozen men from the retreat to serve as bearers. James drops down into the trench and walks along the sandbagged bloody rut searching for the most desperate case: he finds a dozen. At the aid post, the MO is dead and the injured men lie in stranded ranks. James inspects the cases, identifies the ones who are to be moved first, and the bearers begin hauling out the wounded back along the trench.

  The strong north wind carries thick smoke with it. A fire has been set south of the battalion lines and it spreads hungrily across the parched scrub. James scrambles up the side of the trench. The fire burns as tall as a house and advances towards them at a serpent’s watchful pace. The smoke pulses upward in muscular waves. Tattered scraps of uniform are carried up on the rising heat. He tries to calculate how many of the wounded they can carry before the fire reaches them.

  James takes the head end of the first stretcher in line. Jordison takes the foot end; as they run, the trench side rakes the skin off his knuckles, then some flesh. Once they are on open ground, they set down the stretcher and return for the others. An olive tree burns. The brambles char and spark like fuse wire. He can feel the heat of the approaching fire on his face as he stumbles back down the trench. At the aid post, the wounded men feel the hot approach of the fire too, and they cry and try to get off their stretchers.