Captain

by Sam Angus

  “Fire!”

  They were, all of them, just walking, steady and straight, into an inferno, an inferno of all kinds of explosives and shrapnel.

  One foot in front of the other, Billy, just one foot in front of the other.

  I was walking and it seemed extraordinary how much shrapnel there could be, how I could feel the tear and whisper of it on my skin and still not be hit.

  One foot in front of the other, just one foot in front of the other.

  Bullets screamed into stones. The field guns roared, machine guns rattled, rifles cracked and snapped. Old Colonel Colville stumbled. Our line never wavered. I did as the others did, I never flinched or turned my head. Lying on the ground, the gallant old man waved us on.

  “Forward, boys, forward!” were his last words.

  The line moved on and I went too, one foot after another, just one foot after another. My rifle was levelled then, and there was something about Colville lying there on the stone, the crimson stain on his tunic, perhaps because he waved us on so cheerily, perhaps because he’d have known Father, but after I saw him there, left to die in the blazing sun, I fired that rifle. I fired. Fired and fired and fired till it burned to the touch and I couldn’t see for the tears in my eyes. Apperley fell, and Cooper, and great holes opened up in our ranks … Tandy went down too, and there were men falling all around.

  I reached a place, somehow or other I got there—it must’ve been an old Turk trench—quite deep—and we paused to regroup—a minute or two only—and went on—men in the ranks taking command. One foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, into the range of a thousand rifles, into murderous, intense fire.

  I don’t remember when exactly, but at some point the scrub on the right caught fire and the blaze spread across the dry and crackling ground. The flames crept up on the wounded and the fallen. We moved on, and never turned our heads, leaving them to shrivel in the sun and the flames, but I can still hear now the screams of them, screams that pierced even the shriek of the guns.

  That day was a slaughter.

  Dark fell like dust over the hill and the spurts of red from the enemy died down. The ground was soaked in the blood of the Yeomen. Contorted bodies lay thick as pile everywhere, faces half shot away, some killed even before they fired a shot, mostly Yeomanry farmers in the pink and prime of life. I don’t like to look back into that day, into the din and flames and horror of it … No, there was never anything like it again.

  By night fires had broken out all over—the ridges were blazing too, the flames leaping and spreading into one another, bathing the slopes in bloodred light. The moans and cries of the wounded rose to the stars. Here and there an arm rose, begging for water. Some of those left out there scraped their way back.

  Somehow, the end of the day had come, and I was still there.

  Officers crept along the line, trying to consolidate our position, to get us into some sort of order.

  “Dig in, or they’ll have their shrapnel on you at dawn.”

  The Fusiliers came up to help bring in the wounded and that was terrible work—blind or without their reason or unrecognizable the wounded mostly were. But the stretcher bearers and the Fusiliers went about up there as orderly as if in some green-gold corner of England.

  I stared, struck dumb by the day, into the night. The Colonel. Apperley, Cooper, Tandy … I sat there among the sandbags, the ammunition, the bodies, amongst all the debris of battle, while the cold white searchlights of the destroyer raked back and forth over the burning hills.

  Captain was as good as his word. He came up with the mule train, asked for the Yeomen and was directed to us. He was wearing an approximate sort of uniform, a rifle slung over his shoulder, water cans stacked either side of Hey-Ho, who was grazing in the scrub, his legs hobbled so he couldn’t stray beyond the slight rise that sheltered him from the enemy guns.

  “Billy? Billy?”

  Slowly I raised my head.

  “How are you?”

  I drank down the can of water he handed me.

  “Were you scared?”

  “The waiting was the worst,” I answered, not telling all the truth, not telling I’d not gone forward with the others, that the Lieutenant had yelled at me, that I’d gone like a child, one foot in front of the other, and that as I went one single feeling had filled my head: that if I kept going, if I went on and on, I’d suddenly reach green fields, see a church spire, a half-timbered house …

  I didn’t tell him any of that. Instead I looked at him and said, “When they’re right up close, and the air is thick with them, the bullets sort of purr and whistle in your ears.” Captain looked at me quizzically. I rushed on, gaining steam. “But I don’t mind that. And the shrapnel, it’s like a whoosh, like a crashing gust of wind…”

  “I know, Billy. I know shrapnel, I know bullets,” said Captain. “I have heard them. Only, in Egypt we were safe. When we got to Egypt, it was safe…”

  I bowed my head. It was a fair and gentle rebuke. When all I’d known in life was cricket and croquet and tea in the nursery at Bredicot, Captain had been driven out of his home, had crossed mountains on foot.

  He had something in his hands, I noticed then—something rifle-shaped and wrapped in a blanket. He handed it to me, holding out his own hand for my rifle in exchange.

  “For tomorrow,” he said, and I saw from the shine in his eyes that he was proud. I unwrapped it. The gun had bits of wood and glass and wire rigged in a box over it—a periscope—a periscope made to fit a rifle. I put my eye to it. With it I could see everything without exposing my head. I turned to him in amazement, but Captain’s face was serious.

  “I am scared for you,” he said simply. “I’ll come up with the relief. When it comes up, I will be here again.”

  He went to Hey-Ho. The little donkey picked his way on those butterfly legs of his, back over the rock and thistle, between the bodies and all the wreckage of war, the shards of wood and metal. Hands beckoned at every step, men crying out for water. Captain and Hey-Ho stopped, gave water, and moved on. When they had no more to give, I saw Captain stoop and help a wounded man onto that little donkey’s back, then turn and head for the gully.

  There weren’t enough mules at Gallipoli, you see, to carry the water; there were never enough mules and never enough water. I don’t think the Generals had measured those hills before they sent us over there; they’d not thought about how we’d get things up and down, and those stout and plucky pack animals went up and down, up and down the gullies, and we, up there in the blazing sun, depended on them for our lives.

  It was bitterly cold, too cold to sleep. Men twitched and started in their sleep. Others moaned and whimpered like dogs. Firkins was close to losing his reason that night. It might have been because he lost his pipe that he dug a deeper hole for himself than anyone, and was scratching and clawing at the ground like a terrier.

  They came up once more that night with water, Captain and Hey-Ho, and went back and forth amongst the wounded. As they went to and fro under the stars, I watched them and I saw how very unlike a donkey was to a horse. I began to think that even Trumpet could be improved by little bits of Hey-Ho: his patience, perhaps, and the delicacy of his hoofs. Hey-Ho had the mournful ancient eyes of all his species, but he was in some ways more donkey than any other. His cans clanked more merrily than those of any other, his bray was louder than any other, his ears somehow sweeter and sadder than any other. He was the quintessence of donkey, all the donkeys of all the centuries distilled in that one little Hey-Ho.

  * * *

  Dawn fingered her way over the ridge and met a scene of cruel desolation.

  I took position in a ragged line only one man deep; not a line really, just a series of holes of all shapes and sizes. It was the men in the ranks who took command that day. No relief came up. The sun crept higher and still we waited, cowering, still we prayed for reinforcements, for water, for ammunition.

  As the sun reached her height, the enemy guns
erupted in a great blaze of fire and the guns of our warships answered and swept back and forth with deafening thunder. We waited in the sweltering heat, still praying for reinforcements, for water and ammunition. There was no information, no orders, nothing. The enemy fire died down, the enemy line seeming to melt and fade towards the knoll.

  In the middle of the day, a unit of Dorsets—fifty or so of them, seventy yards ahead and to the right of us—rose. Immediately they came under fire and we watched in horror as they began to fall. They were pulling back—the line breaking—Jacko was on the move and suddenly his fire was on us and it was coming from right and left and ahead—and we were firing back. I had my periscope, and that was a great help—and there was no hesitation in my using the rifle that day.

  Bullets cracked like whips against stone. Jacko’s gunners had our range, their fire deadly and determined. The air fluttered and moaned in the wake of the shells, and echoed with confusion and screams, but we stayed and held our ground—that day at least. We’d no chance—the ground between us just then was the size of a croquet pitch and Jacko had more men, more guns, more ammunition.

  After a while his shells came at briefer and briefer intervals.

  * * *

  Again, the day was over and I was still there. There’s always that surprise after a battle to find yourself still alive.

  That day I’d seen a man fall as I fired, actually seen him fall at a bullet I’d fired. Before then, I’d never been able to tell, there’d always been so much smoke and confusion. It is a big moment in a man’s life—in a boy’s life—when you first see a man you’ve hit buckle and bend.

  We answered to our names in the dark. For every gap that had opened in our ranks there was silence in answer. Archie Spade was gone, Harry Beasley wounded … so many.

  “Those that can walk. Those that can stand, into line.”

  The command was repeated, with whispered disbelief, mouth to mouth. There’d been no reinforcements: Did they not know we were so few? It scarcely seemed credible they would keep us up there, much less send us into a nighttime attack. Men half dead were hauling themselves up and crawling to the top of that gully.

  “Advance.”

  We scrambled out of the gully and into the white glare of the moon.

  “Halt. Open fire.”

  My hands trembled as I fired. It was exhaustion then, not fear, that made them tremble. The snapping of our bullets swelled to a din. The hill echoed with the screams of the Turkish shells and the rattle of our guns.

  Men fell back, dead or wounded, into the gully. I stood, senseless with the horror of seeing them bend and break, bodies torn apart.

  “Billy, get down!”

  It was Captain. He pushed me and I fell, senseless and quivering back into the shallow gully. I heard screams.

  “They’re coming!”

  The Lieutenant was shouting for ammunition, for relief, yelling that Jacko was almost on us. I saw the line of Turks running at us. Captain handed the Lieutenant ammunition. Captain unhooked his own rifle, loaded it, and fired, round after round, steely and deadly and accurate.

  “Good God,” said Lieutenant Straker, turning to Captain for a brief second. They held off the Turks that were coming at us for a while, Captain and the Lieutenant, but when another wave of them came up, the Lieutenant yelled.

  “Get back! Get back!”

  Later, that night, farther back, in some other line, as Captain turned to leave, the Lieutenant took him by the hand and said, smiling, “Strictly speaking, the Mule Corps and suchlike are not allowed to fight.”

  In the morning those of us that remained were prodded with the butt of a rifle. We stood to arms in the dim dawn. When it was fully light, we stood down to make tea, a filthy, unshaven, hungry-looking man every three yards, huddled over a dirty tin and a meager fire. Captain came up at six. The well, you see, was at the bottom of the hill. The mules would fetch the water from there, cross the Salt Lake with it and come up at six in the morning and six in the evening. It was a long and dangerous journey and up at the top our water was measured out in thimbles. By that morning—our third up there—a line of dead mules marked the path across the Lake, from start to finish. Jacko kept his eyes on that lake, day and night, not liking to see those animals bringing us up ammunition or water, but I never saw Hey-Ho flinch under any kind of fire. Nor did I see him ever shirk a duty or balk at any burden.

  You had a pal to make tea with or cook bacon with, and up at Chocolate Hill I had to muck in with Firkins and his new pipe. That morning he didn’t talk about the fall of Troy or anything else. I looked at that pipe but didn’t like to ask where it came from.

  We set to improving our dugouts—we were so close to the enemy, and so close too to the top of the hill we wanted to take. It was within our reach if they’d only given us more men.

  “For God’s sake, when will they bring up ammunition?” I heard the Lieutenant ask, more of himself than anyone else.

  At around seven a.m. there was a sudden burst of heavy fire from the enemy.

  By eight the enemy had a new gun in position and the remains of us there were blasted with shrapnel.

  “Get back, get back!” Straker yelled.

  “The order is to retire!”

  Within minutes our trench was taken.

  “Retire, all men!”

  “Dear God, there are no men…,” Straker whispered.

  We crawled away on our bellies like worms. At the cliff edge, our tattered company converged with other men, a mass of leaderless men, all drifting down the gully. We stumbled on between the fallen bodies of the wounded and the dead. At a twist in the gully, we ran into a Casualty Clearing Station, the wounded, in their hundreds, on the ground, hit again, as they lay there, by enemy guns.

  We joined the remnants of the unit and we stood, those of us that could, for the Major to take the roll call.

  “Allgood … Apperley … Arrowsmith…”

  The Major looked up, questioning, paused.

  “Bayliss,” he continued.

  “Sir.”

  “Barnet … Beasley…”

  “Sir.” He had an ugly wound, Beasley, but it was only a flesh wound to the arm.

  “Bird … Bristow … Caradine…”

  “Sir.”

  “Cooper … Creswell … Deakin … Dipple, John … Dipple, James…”

  Our heads bowed. Two days ago the Yeomen had gone into battle a thousand strong, gone over cheering and shouting, the blood hot in their veins. Now scarcely a man remained. Only three hundred answered to their names.

  We knew already that we’d had our chance at Gallipoli and missed it. We’d never had the numbers we needed, never had the support we needed. The men who’d died had given all, for nothing, the bit of hill we’d taken lost as the Turks spread out and moved like running water down the slope, killing any man that hadn’t run. Now the dead and wounded lay, in their thousands, in lines that stretched from the jetty to the foot of the hills.

  There were too many to bury and no earth to bury them in. Barges came to the hospital ship, one after another, night after night. Night after night, the Chaplain stood on the deck, in surplice and cassock, and read the burial service by a single flickering candle, hundreds of us massed on the shoreline, watching in silence. Still figures, wrapped in weighted sailcloth, were placed on the gangplank three at a time, the board lifted, a muted splash, as they slipped feetfirst into the silent sea.

  There was a general issue of wool, soaked in scent, to muffle the stench of the rotting dead. Those of us that survived were racked with illness, gaunt and sunken-eyed.

  Firkins was subdued for a long time. It was a good while before he began to talk again about the heroes of days gone by. His new pipe was a great consolation to him, even though it was a dead man’s.

  Captain, hoping to lift my black mood, brought me a tin of condensed milk and a notice cut from the Times.

  “Billy, listen,” he said.

  The advance of the English Yeo
men “was a sight calculated to send a thrill of pride through anyone with a drop of English blood running in their veins.” It said too that we were the “most stalwart soldiers England has ever sent from her shores,” that we’d moved up that hill “like men marching on parade.” The worst of it all, for the loss and the death, was at Chocolate Hill, and I don’t think in all the history of the Worcestershire Yeomen there was ever a day like it.

  Those three days up there marked the end of my boyhood because you can’t see those things and not be changed. You can’t kill a man and not be changed.

  GREEN HILL

  EARLY SEPTEMBER 1915

  Those of us who could still stand, many with greater wounds than mine, were returned to the ranks to fight. We fought well and proudly and even Johnny Turk wished he’d been on our side and not with Jerry. He was a good and fair fighter and so were we. The Generals on both sides spent our lives like water, but there were never enough of us on our side to hold the bit of ground we’d won.

  I was up there on the hill one day, I remember, six o’clock had come and gone and Captain hadn’t come up. I watched the beach and thought of the gully and the crook in it, where it was steep and slithery and tricky to hurry a heavily laden donkey, but the Turkish guns were on you there and you had to hurry. Every centimeter of that crook was under constant fire and your life was in your hands at every minute.

  I lifted my field glasses. On the beach men were working half naked, covering carts with bushes to camouflage them. Despite the fire, you see, everything went on—the men stacking ammunition carts, the mules going to and fro. There! That was Captain on his way to the jetty, threading between the carts and the mules and the men who sat there trying to patch or wash their clothes. He nodded in answer to their greetings. Captain and Hey-Ho were now loved by us all. Hey-Ho stood patient, head low, accepting his load. They turned to cross the Salt Lake and pick their way up the gully.

  Sometimes the Lieutenant sent me off to guard the train of donkey supplies up the hill and then Captain and I would climb together, tripping and sweating and falling, but that day, as I remember, I’d been kept back on a wiring fatigue.