If Then

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “We can’t dig into this rock,” complains Brilliant.

  “He means in the necropolis,” says Hector, pulling aside the brambles covering its entrance. “The grave.”

  With Brilliant’s help, he cuts back the twisted thorny branches to expose a narrow passage leading downward at an angle of about forty-five degrees. James hands out shovels and the men set about widening the entrance, digging out the rocks, laying them aside. Harassed by flies and without water, digging is hard work. The blade of the shovel has to be worked around rock debris to get purchase, and the ground is clutched by roots that are old and tough. With the entrance widened, the surgical table is slid down into the grave. Hector calls for lamps and torches. James lowers a haversack down to Private Brilliant’s upturned, squinting face.

  “It’s blessed cold down here,” says Brilliant.

  Blore comes over to check on their progress. He wants mirrors positioned to focus sunlight around the head of the table.

  “Sunlight is a disinfectant,” he explains.

  “Why not operate in the open air?” asks James.

  “Flies. Snipers. Shrapnel. I could go on. Have you been down there yet?”

  “No.”

  “Are you afraid that you may experience your vertigo again?”

  “It would only hamper my ability to perform my duty. Once the attack is over, I will go into the necropolis and give myself up to it.”

  At the sight of Blore and James dallying at the entrance, Huxley bounds over.

  “Are you going in now?”

  “He wants to wait,” says Blore.

  “I must have a peek.” Huxley winks, gets onto his haunches, and works his way into the hole. Up to his chest in the earth, his helmet comes askew. James reaches over to adjust it and, as he does so, runs his fingers around the back of the padre’s head; unlike James and Doctor Blore, Trevenen Huxley does not have scar tissue at the back of his head.

  During the service, Huxley spoke about his sense that they were living in another world, with one reality superimposed upon the other. Time has been folded neatly down the middle so that two corners that were far apart have been brought together. To what purpose, to what end, it is impossible to say. A flaw in God’s creation? Perhaps there was no design and the phenomenon is an accident.

  James sits down and wipes the sweat from his brow.

  Huxley heaves his way out of the hole.

  “See anything?” asks James.

  The priest gets to his feet, flicks the mud from his trousers and puttees, then takes a rag and wipes his fingers clean.

  “I found another open burial jar. I could not decide if the two skeletons in it were entwined in one another’s arms in an aspect of peace or an aspect of suffering. Sacrificial victims, I suppose, buried alive and holding onto one another until the very end.”

  He removes his dog collar and flicks the soil from it.

  “Death is so damned stubborn. Death does not let go. Death does not give up.”

  “You said this morning that it was all part of the plan.”

  “I know. And some days that is the way it seems to me. At other times, I wonder if we shouldn’t just let the world commit suicide and sing a beautiful dirge over its corpse.”

  Under his breath, Huxley tries a wordless lilting melody.

  Captain Tuke returns for the stretcher squads. At midday, he leads the stretcher bearers up the valley side to the flatter high ground. In a narrow track, the human traffic is dense and they make slow progress as they have to step aside to let the soldiers through who are reinforcing the line. The loose rattle of the Turkish machine guns grows louder, interspersed with scattered explosions from hand grenades.

  Sergeant Hector has one end of the stretcher and James has the other. The rocky sides of the track abrade his knuckles. All morning he has focused on the next waypoint and steered his thoughts away from this ultimate destination; it was enough to concentrate on the climb up the ridge, and then to fixate upon the establishment of the dressing station, and then let others through in their rush to war. The necropolis and his conversations with Blore and Huxley fade away: this moment is everything. The long carry from the front line to the aid post and back again. Close to the line, shrapnel bursts then floats away. The concussive blows of the Turk’s six dozen machine guns. No more talk. Smoke – white, black and dirty grey smoke. Blotches of men prone against the scorching rock, too far away for him to witness individual agonies or listen to dying prayers.

  The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire. The devil brings in the chorus and the men sing in dissonant keys and pitches of agony and suffering. Stre–tcher–bear–ers. Str-et-cher-bear-ers. The symphony of the slaughter yard. Hector and James run into the fog and are deafened by its terrible music. The men of the ambulance become mixed with the regimental stretcher bearers; scrawny soldiers in rags, their arms almost wrenched from their sockets, impelled to go back and forth from the battlefield to the dugouts behind the line, carrying men torn and rent by the heavy bullets of the machine gun. Hector leads the way into the firing zone, and James follows, holding onto the back of the stretcher for dear life, aware of how exposed he is.

  From a distance, battles can seem routine, almost inanimate; from the inside, all is turbid. The cries of the wounded come from every direction. Hector crouches over a man and, after ascertaining that he can be helped, he and James hurriedly get him onto the stretcher. James secures the sling around his chest so that if he slips, the stretcher will not clatter to the ground. Then back again across the ridge top they must go. It would be so easy for a bullet to pass through him, quite accidentally, on its way to a more pressing appointment. Courage is just a matter of keeping going. Of not giving in to the reasonable counsel of despair. Of persistence in defiance of the facts. A gout of black smoke flares up, filling his lungs and stinging his eyes. He will not stop. Pain and exhaustion be damned. They reach the shallow trench; gently, gently, he lowers his stretcher handles until he is squatting and then Hector turns to face him, straining to raise his stretcher-handles above his head. Hector could not make himself a larger and easier target than this. His long, muscled torso exposed. Then Hector steps backward, feeling for a foothold, and they jolt down into the trench.

  At the dressing station, the stretcher bearers lower their burdens, one at a time, into the necropolis. James loiters at the edge of the hole, listening to the doctor work quickly below. Blore treats ten men in ten minutes.

  “We’ll have to grip the bone,” says Blore. “Pass me the lion-forceps.”

  The doctor runs out of catgut sutures.

  “Do you have cotton? Any string even?”

  The orderly finds catgut in the haversack.

  “I want you to find someone like us on the battlefield,” Blore shouts up the hole.

  James does not know what he means.

  “A headshot.” The doctor appears at the bottom of the hole and points to the scar at the back of his skull. The mirror beside him glints. It is full of sun.

  James feels woozy and spent. He should eat, but he has no appetite. The professor offers him a drink from his canteen. The water is pure and clear. Indecently pure. The finest drink that ever passed his lips. He looks with astonishment at Collinson.

  “I found a tiny stream,” explains the professor, “a crystal rill of water trickling through the rocks.”

  The water is so perfect that for a few seconds James feels hysterical ecstasy at being alive. He swallows, sips again.

  “It’s a miracle, isn’t it? It was just trickling through the rocks, bold as brass. We filled two dixies.”

  One dixie of water is lowered down into the necropolis, then decanted and hauled back empty.

  “Come on. We’ll get some more,” says Collinson.

  Sergeant Hector wants to
know where the hell they think they are going. Collinson explains about the tiny stream.

  Hector is sceptical.

  “The Turks have poisoned the wells. They left their dead in the waters to rot.”

  “This is not a well. It’s a spring. Crystal clear and straight from the rock.”

  “We have to get back to the front.”

  “And we will. But we might as well take some water with us.”

  The soldiers are in agonies from thirst, and with the amount of wounded they are bringing back, the ambulance will quickly run short of water. The plan had been to send bearers back down to the beach to gather water brought in from Lemnos but the men’s habit of dipping their filthy mess tins into the canvas troughs had – no doubt – helped the spread of dysentery. A supply of fresh water could be worth a great deal in the battle for the Kiretch Tepe.

  Confident of the route, Collinson leads the way out of the valley; Hector and James follow, carrying a dixie apiece. The goat track runs alongside the steep sea cliff and their nailed boots slip against the loose shale. The sea below is hypnotic: the sound of the surf breaking against the rocks, the surface spirals of cornflower blue spin over slower, deeper indigo currents. The guns of the destroyer break the spell. Shells arc overhead and all three men in single file flinch and duck. A familiar holly oak tree, grown aslant under the pressure of rising thermals, provides a marker.

  Collinson leads them down a steep dried watercourse, the sea at their backs. They slide down the shallow nullah for about fifteen feet to a platform. Collinson edges across toward a jutting rock only to decide, upon arriving at it, that it is the wrong one.

  “This is not right at all,” says Collinson.

  James gazes back up the ridge and there stands the sniper with the sun at his back, seven foot tall with a stark headdress of gnarled holly oak branches. He wears a fencer’s mesh mask. He hoists his smooth cylinder rifle into position and takes aim. The barrel hoots like a loud blowpipe. Hector gasps with palpable surprise, puts his hand to the back of his head, then falls onto his knees. Both men watch blood arc from the wound onto the dry soil.

  The sniper’s rifle is moulded from one piece of smooth grey material. He takes out another pointed bullet and slides it into the chamber.

  To survive, he should clutch Hector to him as a shield, or throw himself down the gully and into the vegetation. James does neither of these things. Gently, he lowers Hector’s head onto his lap.

  His bloodied lips stutter an objection: “B- B- B- But…”

  The wound is a circular hole in the back of the skull, and the scalp bleeds quickly. James dresses the wound under the gunsight of the sniper. Hector’s head lolls back, his eyelids fluttering, his lips forming then failing to form a word. Below them, Collinson clings to the rock face, unmoving, hoping that the overhanging vegetation conceals him from the enemy.

  With the dressing applied, Hector must be moved. James heaves his friend up onto his back. Kindness is worth dying for.

  “Hold on,” he says. Hector’s arms tighten around his chest and then James begins to climb back up the nullah, his knuckles white with each handhold. The extra weight makes his hands shake and he has to breathe deeply between each straining grasp. The sniper watches him climb.

  “Don’t shoot me,” James gasps. “Let me… Let me save him.”

  Why does the sniper not shoot him? Is he merely curious to see if James can struggle to the top of the nullah with his friend on his back, each torturous step bringing him closer to the barrel of a gun? The urgent panic in James’ chest – it feels like he’s stayed underwater for too long. He will not look at the gun, he keeps his head down as if to evade its awful scrutiny. From the seaward side of the ridge, he hears – for the first time since they landed – birdsong, intense strings of notes like a kite-tail against a vast blue sky. He has no more strength to climb but he has something more fundamental than strength, the matter of his heart and his bones and his muscles, and these he will exhaust to take the next few strides. Beneath the mesh of the mask, the shadowy outline of the sniper’s face regards his struggle, tapping the muzzle of the rifle thoughtfully against his steel toe capped boot.

  James hauls himself further up the rock face, his boots slipping in the loose dry earth. He is ten feet or so from the top, close enough to hear the toe of the sniper’s boot abrade against the loose rock, considering it, testing it.

  James asks, “What do you want with us?”

  The sniper cocks his head quizzically. Beneath his dark plain uniform, his limbs are thin and elongated, and there is not much of him around the trunk. James bends forward and hefts Hector higher up his back, bracing the weight of the sergeant against his hip bones. The barrel of the rifle points in his direction.

  When the sniper speaks, it is as if two voices are intertwined: Englishman and Turk, with one following after the other, echoing it.

  “Do you understand me?” is part of what the sniper says. The rest is foreign to James.

  “I think so.”

  “He can end the war,” says the sniper.

  His eyes sting with sweat. Flies find his face. He spits and blows them away.

  “Why did you shoot him then?”

  “Save him,” says the sniper. “Save him or I’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t understand,” says James.

  “It wasn’t quite like this last time,” says the sniper. “It’s different because of you. I wonder if I will be changed, too.”

  The sniper turns on his heel and limps away. Collinson scrambles over to James and helps support Hector from the rear, lessening the burden. Still, it is hard work covering the last few feet. His lungs are still tight from the smoke he inhaled during the trench fire, and he cannot get oxygen into them quickly enough. Collinson takes a turn carrying Hector on his back. The wounded man’s face is very pale.

  The stretcher bearers stumble back along the goat track, carrying one of their own.

  “The sniper shot Hector, but he didn’t shoot us,” says Collinson.

  “True.”

  “And you spoke to him.”

  “He spoke English.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me that Hector can end the war.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He singled him out and spared us. What would a Turk want with a stretcher bearer of the 32nd Field Ambulance? We are the least important people in the war.”

  They stumble across the loose scree, waving flies from their faces. The sun is unremitting. Hector’s cheek rests against Collinson’s bony back, his head wrapped in a bandage that is already showing a livid spot of blood. They rest for a moment. James puts his hand under Hector’s chin and raises the man’s lips to take the remaining water in his canteen. An act of kindness; he remembers what Huxley said about his mother, before she died, worrying that she had not achieved anything to match her illustrious family. Kindness is not entered onto the great ledger of civilization; the men who commanded this battle will be remembered, if only for their incompetence, but the men who cared for its casualties, who cradled them as they died, who listened to their last words, who shared the last of their canteen, will be forgotten.

  They resume their long carry of Hector.

  James says, “Doctor Blore told me that, when he operated on the head cases, the patients spoke some kind of code.”

  “God. Yes.”

  “What did it mean?”

  “Nothing, I presume. The brain has a quite terrifying capacity to remember, you see, and under magnetic stimulation, it seems that the parts of the brain schooled in mathematics were activated.”

  “So it was just a triggered memory?”

  “The mathematical expressions were unfamiliar to me; in form, they were recognizable as a series of algorithms, but the expressions were gobbledygook.”

  “Could you speculate?”

  Collinson stumbles under the weight of Hector. James catches his arm and
steadies him.

  “I am not inclined to speculate,” gasps the professor. “I experiment. I gather evidence. I test proofs. Huxley wanted to discuss it, but I flatly refused.”

  “When the sniper spoke, it was as if part of his speech was being translated. Poorly. Something is interfering with our senses.”

  “Do you mean to say that we are not in our right minds?”

  “Yes.”

  “On that point, we agree. We are sick and thirsty. We barely eat, we hardly sleep and we are surrounded at all times by the most gruesome of sights. Our CO is a madman. Look…” Collinson points at a rock. “I just saw that rock bend. Am I to speculate as to the suspiciously malleable quality of solids or do I conclude that my senses are deranged? And if our senses are deranged, then further speculation is pointless. We are subject to hallucinations and fancies. We must ignore them and cling to what we know. Otherwise we will not last much longer.”

  * * *

  They arrive at the dressing station and stumble through the camp to the entrance of the necropolis. A line of wounded men, some sitting, some lying down, wait under a tarp. James shouts down the hole to Blore that Sergeant Hector has been shot in the back of the head and needs immediate treatment. He finds and unfolds a stretcher and slowly Collinson crouches so that the wounded man can be taken from his back and laid upon the bloody canvas.

  “Send him down!” says Blore.

  After strapping Hector in, Collinson takes the stretcher handles at the foot end and looks expectantly back to James. The rest of the ambulance is working the line. The battle continues to rage upon the ridge. He cannot avoid descending into the necropolis any longer. The vertigo. It is time. James picks up the head end of the stretcher and braces his body to bear the full weight; Collinson backs into the hole, sliding down a worn groove in the mud. The stretcher is lowered into the grave at an obtuse angle, and as his face passes out of the sunlight, Hector sighs with acceptance.