Bill the Bastard

by Roland Perry

  Shanahan pulled a face. ‘Bit of a problem there,’ he said. ‘I can have him on one condition.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That I arrange a dinner between you and Banjo.’

  Phelan laughed. ‘You bloody men have a cheek! Trading me, not like horseflesh, but for horseflesh!’

  ‘Will you do it for me?’

  ‘What does he expect?’ she asked pointedly.

  ‘Nothing! Just to have dinner with you, that’s all.’

  She considered him. After a few seconds she said: ‘I’ll do it with my own condition.’

  ‘Anything!’

  ‘That you’ll sleep with me.’

  Shanahan blinked and then stared.

  ‘Ah, got some real emotion out of you,’ she said.

  ‘Will you dine with Banjo, please?’ he asked.

  Phelan sipped her drink. ‘Why not?’ she said phlegmatically. ‘I don’t fancy him. Just as long as he takes me to dinner somewhere really nice.’

  ‘I appreciate this. We’ll put Bill on the train for Romani in a couple of days. Still plenty of work to do. Not that much time. There is a rumour that the Turks are preparing to attack us in the Sinai. I look forward to a good relationship with him in the field.’

  Phelan drained her glass and motioned for a waiter to refill it.

  ‘You like your champagne,’ Shanahan observed.

  ‘I had a couple in the lounge before you arrived too.’ She took another sip. ‘In the blood, really. My dad was an alcoholic.’ She stared at him. ‘Don’t know how you avoid it.’

  ‘Never had the desire.’

  She took a cigar from her handbag and fitted it in the gold holder. She handed him an embossed silver lighter and motioned for him to light it for her. He obliged.

  ‘I suppose you don’t smoke either?’ she said, offering him one. He shook his head.

  ‘Your dad Tom used to drink at the Roma Hotel with my dad. They were both drunks.’ She waited for a reaction. Shanahan was looking at the menu.

  ‘What are you having?’ she asked.

  ‘The lamb chops.’

  ‘Me too. There’s an English cook. They’ll be good.’

  She smoked for a while and sipped her champagne before asking: ‘Old Tom was tough on you, wasn’t he?’

  ‘We all copped a fair bit of abuse, physical and mental. But there were a lot of us, remember—a lot of brats to keep in line. I was the first-born male. I guess Dad made all his mistakes as a parent on me.’

  ‘I remember being at your place and someone broke a window. There were about twenty kids playing cricket. No one owned up to it, so he lined us all up and belted us round the legs with a garden hose!’

  The remark teased a hint of a smile from Shanahan. ‘Very democratic of him,’ he said.

  ‘But my sisters and I had nothing to do with it! He still dished it out and we weren’t even his kids!’ The shock seemed to revisit her.

  ‘Scarred for life, are we?’ Shanahan asked.

  ‘No, of course not. I just remember it. I also saw him strapping one of your brothers to a kitchen chair and belting him with a scrubbing brush.’

  ‘If it was Joe,’ Shanahan said with a wry look, ‘he probably deserved it.’

  ‘You’re defending your father, aren’t you?’

  Shanahan didn’t respond.

  ‘I remember you were the father figure for your younger siblings,’ she went on, ‘you protected them from old Tom.’

  ‘“Protected” is too strong. My older sister Polly and I used to look after them. Best to keep them away from Dad if he was drunk, which was every night. But he worked bloody hard, you know.’

  ‘Never any excuse. Your father was a moody, heavy-handed bully like mine.’

  ‘He could be melancholic.’

  ‘Don’t give me the “poor maudlin Irish” excuse, please.’

  ‘I think you’re overstating things.’

  ‘Bullshit!’

  Her loud swearing caused the room to fall silent. She drank more. A waiter took their orders. ‘And more champagne,’ Phelan said as the waiter collected the menus.

  She finished her cigar. ‘It’s the reason I’m thirty-four, not married and haven’t had children.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘All that drinking by Dad, night after night. He would come home and verbally abuse my mother. She would argue back. He’d hit her, not every night, but sometimes. That was bad enough. We used to cop abuse too. I swore I’d never marry. I haven’t. But I’m engaged.’ She held up her ring finger. ‘Yet it’s only for show. Saves Bob a bit of embarrassment over “living in sin”. He can always say we are getting married next year or when the war’s over. But he knows how I feel.’

  She lit a second cigar herself. They sat in silence. Shanahan seemed relaxed despite her probing, which she thought might have upset him.

  ‘You used to be an equestrian,’ he said, suddenly recalling her. ‘You were about thirteen.’ He brightened. ‘You were really good!’

  ‘That wasn’t a question, was it?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Just wondered. Don’t think you’ve asked me one thing since we met.’

  A fresh bottle of champagne was popped and poured.

  ‘To answer your non-question,’ she said, ‘yes, I did have a go as an equestrian. But when we had to move to Brisbane it became too costly to have me indulged. Horses are an expensive business and I had five siblings who needed their own less costly indulgences. Like tennis and cricket. But I have always loved horses.’ She held his gaze. ‘You do understand why we love them so much?’ she said.

  Shanahan waited. He knew she would tell him.

  ‘You can relate to them. You find it much easier than humans. And they are loyal. They don’t let you down, abuse you or leave you. You learn that if you treat them well and with respect.’

  Shanahan nodded almost imperceptibly.

  ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t realised that,’ she persisted. ‘That’s the reason, or let’s say a big reason, you can handle Bill the Bloody Bastard when nobody else can.’

  Their meals were served.

  ‘Are you married, Michael?’ she asked as she added some Worcestershire sauce to her chops and mashed potatoes.

  He sampled a chop.

  ‘You do ask a lot of questions,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Tell me about your fiancé.’

  She reached across the table and placed her hand on his.

  ‘Are you going to sleep with me?’ she asked.

  13

  SHADOWS IN

  THE DESERT

  Shanahan’s regiment was warned by a Light Horse outpost: German planes were in the area and coming towards his HQ encampment in the Sinai twenty kilometres from the coast. He raised the alarm, causing a hundred troopers to scurry to their horses and gallop straight into the desert. Shanahan was nervous. This was the first real test for Bill. He had come through several practice runs of this kind, but how would he perform facing a real threat? If he reverted to his former capricious nature he could be trouble. What if he bolted and became a target?

  Shanahan galloped off just as the other troopers spread out in all directions for several hundred metres. He could just hear the steady drone of a German biplane buzzing in the cloudless sky. Shanahan pulled Bill up close to some scrub, patted him and said: ‘Okay, we stop here for a few minutes, cobber.’

  After the hectic scatter of minutes earlier, there was hardly a movement. Shanahan could see horses and riders frozen in positions near scrub and palm trees in every direction. From ground level it seemed impossible that they would not be sighted from the plane, but experience had taught the troopers that pilots and their observers could not differentiate between the Light Horse and the vegetation.

  The German plane appeared, at first just a dot on the horizon. The drone grew louder. Shanahan looked up. He felt nervous and a little helpless. There was nothing to fight back with if the plane dropped its bomb. He cared not for himself but for his men, whom
he had drilled well. He assured them they would not be struck if they stayed motionless, but this was a crucial moment. Would the theory be proved correct? The plane circled, which indicated the Germans had intelligence that there were troopers in the area. Then the plane wobbled low.

  ‘Jesus,’ Shanahan whispered. He could make out the hooded heads of the pilot and observer as they looked this way and that, trying to spot any prospective target. The plane swooped so low that it seemed it might land, which could have been a fatal move. The soft sand would make take-off difficult. But the Germans were not going to come down. They were skimming the dunes to find their hidden quarry. After about twenty minutes of circling and lowering with the incessant fearsome drone splitting the silent desert air, the Germans flew off north and back to a base just over the border in Palestine, a mission unfulfilled.

  Shanahan trotted back to his tent at a small oasis. He was satisfied that he could trust his horse on an important manoeuvre. He was also relieved that none of his men had been hit.

  He and his squadron still had to wait for action. There were daily grumbles but just one trooper deserted. Shanahan took this down-time to work his horses up to peak condition, using Jackie Mullagh as the top trainer. In return, Mullagh asked for special training sessions with Bill. He claimed to have been tipped off 30 times, but he would not give up. He was resilient and determined. Shanahan obliged. He walked Bill and Mullagh out to a scrubby area near their oasis HQ.

  ‘Horses have an instinct for rhythm and movement,’ he told Mullagh as he walked Bill around in much the same manner as he had after Paterson’s exhibition. ‘You got to work them up to it by repetitive movements. Think of him as a natural dancer.’

  Shanahan asked Mullagh to mount Bill.

  Mullagh got on gingerly, expecting to be bucked off at any second. But Shanahan kept walking him up and back, around and backwards. Bill eased into the rhythm, almost as if he was unaware of his rider.

  Shanahan counted: ‘One, two, three. One, two, three . . .’

  Bill was prancing to the numbers. After ten minutes of this routine, Shanahan pulled Bill up. He patted him, and told him how good he was.

  ‘Now dismount,’ Shanahan said.

  Mullagh slid off and stood back, again expecting to see the horse’s powerful hind legs kick. But they did not. Shanahan positioned Mullagh next to him and held the reins with him. He built into a slightly different rhythm. Under his breath he said: ‘Now you hold the reins. I’m pretending to hold them.’ Shanahan inched away, leaving Mullagh in charge. When a further ten minutes elapsed, Shanahan called a halt.

  ‘You don’t want me to mount him again?’ Mullagh asked, surprised.

  ‘No. You haven’t got his respect yet. That will take time.’

  They strolled Bill back to squadron HQ.

  ‘You have to wheedle him,’ Shanahan said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Cajole him, charm him. You have to bend him to your will without the bend, if you get my drift.’

  ‘Bribe him?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘But I seen you give him them licorice sweets.’

  ‘If you watch closely, I never give them as a reward. I stroke and pat him, even give him a hug sometimes. That’s his reward.’

  ‘I think I get it.’

  ‘You gotta be strict but fair.’

  Each day they went through a similar routine for half an hour. After ten days Shanahan surprised Mullagh by asking him to take Bill for a ride. All seemed to go well. Shanahan got on another horse and trotted after them. When he was near, Bill suddenly stopped and hurled Mullagh to the ground.

  ‘Why the hell did he do that?’ Mullagh asked, brushing sand from his body. He was shaken. ‘It was goin’ so smooth!’

  ‘Maybe he got bored. Who knows with Bill? But you both did okay. You were up there for more than two minutes.’

  The days dragged by. The sun was strong. Some Anzacs had sunstroke during blistering days. Many of the troopers had come from hot, semi-arid regions of the north and west, but they had never encountered regular temperatures of 45 to 50 degrees Centigrade. Rifle bolts scalded hands and boots shrank. The heat had a constant companion of swirling winds which sometimes created sandstorms that bit and burned exposed skin. The sand itself became an enemy cursed more than the Turks. The winds carried uncomfortable whiffs of the desert, where the stench of decaying bodies—humans, horses and camels—lingered in the scattered and sporadic desert war. Birds of prey circled and caught the attention of troopers but not nearly as much as the flies, which irritated them as they had at Gallipoli.

  The impatient troopers were finding plenty to complain about as they waited for action. The sustained diet of bully beef and rock-hard biscuits was not helping although there were promises from the High Command that it would be improved. Water was restricted to one bottle of a few litres every twenty-four hours. It was not enough, and troopers were often caught using water from the horse troughs to refill their containers. Their ration was often brackish and not made more palatable by chlorine tablets, which the army doctors made compulsory. The dissolved chlorine was supposed to kill bacteria. The troopers used it for cleaning the rust off stirrup irons.

  There was the odd skirmish or distant encounter with Turkish patrols drifting down from Palestine to test the Light Horse and cavalry strength and resolve, but apart from these adrenalin rushes, there had been nearly four months of relative inaction in 1916. More troopers considered deserting and catching a boat to Europe to join the Allied forces fighting the Germans.

  On the night of 23 April 1916, two days short of a year after the first Anzac landing at Gallipoli, Shanahan received an urgent call from Harry Chauvel to ride with a squadron of 128 troopers to Oghratina, a village forty kilometres from the Suez Canal in the Sinai. The British 5th Mounted (Cavalry) Brigade was in trouble. They had been attacked by the Turks.

  Shanahan had to wake Bill, which was no easy task for he loved his beauty sleep. This time the lieutenant exercised his right to ‘bribe’ his animal with a handful of sweets and a big drink. The sugar helped wake him. It was going to be a long ride through the night over terrain they had never travelled before. Twenty minutes after the call the squadron was lined up in seventy rows of two, including the eight packhorses and mules and two camels at the rear. Shanahan was out front with Bill prancing a little to start with and still smarting from his rude awakening, but after several weeks he had not attempted to buck his new master/ friend once, not even in a frisky, unthreatening moment. He was the horse to have at the head of the column. He was the biggest animal in this outfit by a hand (4 inches or 10–16 centimetres), and easily the heaviest and most powerful. Shanahan, at 180 centimetres, seemed to grow much taller in the saddle, and everyone in his regiment recognised him as the best horseman among them. Most had accepted this even before he’d ‘tamed’ Bill the Bastard, but after he’d taken on and made that exceptional mount an addition to the Anzac force, everyone acknowledged Shanahan’s superiority as a horseman.

  The two camels laden with stores and weaponry each carried a little more than the horses. Shanahan had tossed up whether or not to bring them. He expected them to be slower than the horses, but it remained to be seen if they could keep within reasonable distance of the column. He planned a nine-hour ride, with ten-minute breaks for both man and animal every hour. A full moon augmented the light from untold numbers of brilliant stars as they began the steady negotiation of the waves of sand. Talking was forbidden. Voices travelled far in the desert night. The only noise was the light, jangling sound of water bottles hitting metal buckles or belts. One cigarette an hour was allowed but only in the first two hours. A pretty sprinkling of a hundred lights moving at ground level could give away the unit’s size and direction. Smoking would be allowed in the breaks but only under cover of coats or blankets.

  After forty minutes, Shanahan called a halt. The cameleers were told to return with their animals to base. The camels had lagged behind, groaning whe
n whipped to make them move more quickly. Their stores were spread over eight packhorses and mules. It settled in Shanahan’s mind that the Walers were superior in all forms of desert warfare, whether moving to a potential encounter or in the actual battle itself. Troopers had reported that the camel’s capacity to go long distances without water was more myth than reality. They may well have had the ‘tanks’ to hold more water and last longer without a drink, but Walers were consistently going further without complaint—they were much quicker. The troopers would use them in any proposed charge, whereas they would never use camels this way. The men also found them far more accommodating animals. Cameleers were known to build a rapport with their animals, but none ever reported the strong relationships that most troopers had with their horses.

  ‘They [the horses] also smelt a hell of a lot better,’ Shanahan wrote to a relative, ‘their breaths had a certain familiar fragrance. But the camels were best avoided, at either end.’

  The endless hillocks, interspersed with the odd mountain, were heavy, slow going. There was no actual track, except for paths through scrubby sections and the occasional oasis inhabited by Bedouins, where the ground was flatter and firmer underfoot. At other less urgent times they might have rounded up these Arabs to stop them warning the Turks of their advance, but there was no time to spare.

  Along with the light, this ride seemed blessed with no wind, but as they moved deeper into the desert, they ran into mist. The troopers all wore their coats to fend off the freezing night air which at dawn would give way quickly to burning sun. Shanahan lifted the pace a fraction in the second hour. Bill was pounding steadily up a minor gradient when he stopped dead about eight paces from the top of a rise. He was agitated, whinnying and pawing the ground. Shanahan nudged Bill with his heels but the horse refused to budge. He reared up. He was not going on. Shanahan called a halt to the column as it bunched untidily behind him. At first he wondered if Bill was playing a stubborn game. He dismounted with Mulherin and walked to the top of the rise. Both men peered over the edge and received a shock.