by Sam Angus
I never saw the German right behind me till he fell. I turned when I heard a shot and then saw him slump to the ground. There behind him was Captain on Merriman’s mare, his rifle levelled. I waited while Captain galloped up.
“Captain…,” I said, and with my arm I pointed to the child at the gun.
We both looked at him then, and Captain hesitated. He was a child, ragged and starving and convulsed with fear. Captain caught my gelding’s reins and led him to me. I mounted and we turned away from that child, both of us, at the same time, and went on.
* * *
I was commended for gallantry after Rafa, given a medal that I never felt was mine to take or wear. Captain was proud for me, but there was a wariness, too, if the medal caught his attention. He looked often, searchingly, at me, wondering, I think now, what kind of friend I’d be, whether distinctions and honors would force a wedge between us.
“Father…,” he said once, around about this time. “Father had a medal too.” There was some pride in his voice and also some hurt. I remembered the plummy officer who’d torn his father’s stripes from his arm and ground them into the dirt of the horse lines outside Alexandria. I remembered Captain too, on the beach, sewing them back on to his father’s sleeve by starlight, on the night he buried him.
We’d been all the other had in the way of a companion. Friendships made in war are forged and tested in heat that is white-hot. You are under a microscope when you’re living at such close quarters, the good and the bad of you open for all to see.
That whole episode at Rafa and the medal made me ashamed, and I think it was after that that I began to grow shifty with Captain, shifty as the wind of Arabia, turning to him or turning away as it suited me.
It was about this time, too, because of the medal perhaps, that men like Ballard and Skerret and Hadley took up with me. I was silly, flattered to be taken up by them, but I felt grand, too, and thought I knew what it felt like to be a man when I was with them. They were older even than Francis, and when you’re young you count out carefully the years between yourself and the men you look up to.
GAZA
1917
In Sinai, Firkins took to talking about Samson and the Philistines, and how we were in the wilderness. Of course we could all see that without Firkins saying anything about it, but he kept on about how beyond Gaza there’d be fig trees and vines and flowers and milk and honey. We groaned and rolled our eyes but we had a terrible time of it at Gaza. We had two pitiful and bungled attempts at it. The second time we attacked Gaza was the same as the first—all choking dust and blinding sun. You can’t think, you see, when it’s like that, when the enemy is blanketed in smoke, and sand is spurting up and the men and horses around you are writhing and screaming. I was still on that young gelding at Gaza, and he was caught by shrapnel and that sent him rearing up, poor chap. I fell from him as he spun and fled wildly, reins trailing, for the back lines.
I staggered back, step by sinking step, mirage and madness mixed in me, reeling like a drunk in the soft sand, foaming at the mouth like a wild dog. Thirst is most agonizing at sundown and in the back lines I scrambled for the water on my hands and knees like a beast. My gelding was there with the Veterinary Corps, already bandaged, and Captain and Hey-Ho were there too in the back lines, going amongst the men who were naked and delirious, their tongues black and swollen.
It was a terrible journey from there back to the Wadi Ghuzzee, heads aching from the sun, eyes bloodshot with the blinding glare that came off the sand, stragglers falling and left to die in our wake, the blind linking arms, the whole desert and sky the color of dust, the dust so thick you could lose sight of the horse in front. Only by listening could I tell where the camels were, the mules, the limbers, the artillery wagons, and all the rattling paraphernalia of war.
In the dusk of the second day, the sky turned lurid, the light strange and fitful. A hot wind blew in, the heat of it increasing minute by minute till it had the blast of a furnace. My gelding was a noble thing and he never played up with me for nothing. When an immense cloud came at us, huge and gauzy, he dug his hoofs in and shook and quivered and pawed the sand. Officers were charging down the lines, their tempers ragged, urging us on. That cloud was coming towards us at a licking pace. My gelding put his head down and whimpered, and all around us men were cowering, and suddenly we were in the teeth of a storm, a hurricane-force wind, heavy with sand. I thought of Liza and the paddock with the elderly apple tree, in the lee of the westerly breezes. I was glad Liza couldn’t see then how the horses suffered, their eyes bloodshot and weeping with sand, their blind and stumbling attempts to move. I lashed that gelding and tried to turn him, the sand burning like needles on my face and arms and hands. He bunched together with the other horses, all of them shoulder to shoulder, nose to tail, in a tight knot, some forwards, some backwards. He moaned and dropped his head away from the whip and sting of the sand.
“Billy … Billy!”
Captain and Hey-Ho were there, in the swirling sand beside us, an arrangement of blanket around the donkey’s eyes and silver muzzle, his nose buried between Captain’s back and arm.
“Billy, wait!”
Captain tied a strip of shirt around my gelding’s muzzle while I fell helplessly over his neck, sand in my eyes and mouth and nose. Hey-Ho tripped on doggedly, neck extended so as to keep his muzzle buried in the pit of Captain’s arm. He went wherever Captain led, through storms of sand, storms of shrapnel, on he went at his master’s side, Captain his alpha and his omega. We followed, the muzzle of my gelding to Hey-Ho’s salt-and-pepper tail, on and on, till we reached a gully and flung ourselves down and staggered blindly, vomiting into a patch of scrub.
We dug at the sand and stone with our bare fingers while the swirling wind struck at our limbs and tore the clothes from our backs and lashed our skin raw with grit and sand and drew trickles of blood from our skin. We crouched together, Captain and I, in the shallow scoop we’d made, blankets over our heads.
The wind grew still more violent, shifting the waves of sand from one place to another, flooding our dugout and forcing us away. In the dead of the night we staggered, clutching each other, to where the animals stood bunched. They had no shelter, their flanks and necks, poor things, streaked with blood drawn through their skin by the lashing sand.
* * *
It was after that sandstorm that we were camping near to the Wadi Ghuzzee, our tail between our legs, licking our wounds after that second attempt on Gaza. We were all in and around the Ghuzzee, the infantry to our left, Camel Corps to our right, the Hun planes overhead. That wadi was a shocking place, flies in our drink, in our food, and we had to sleep amidst all the creeping, crawling things of Arabia, but there were dates and porridge and jam and bread.
It was there, on our last night in the Ghuzzee, that Ballard called out, “Bayliss, young Bayliss, over here!”
I was standing on my own in the canteen, queuing to buy pears and cocoa and half listening to Ballard and Skerret’s banter.
“Bayliss, over here!”
Captain was waiting for me, perhaps grooming Hey-Ho. Captain was at Hey-Ho’s side all the time there in the Wadi Ghuzzee, worried that Hey-Ho was losing condition, a hand on the drooping ear.
“Come on, Bayliss,” said Firkins and Hadley.
They were determined to make a night of it. Tomorrow we’d rise at four and move north again. We’d make another attempt on Gaza, but this time we’d surprise Jacko and hit him first at Beersheba, where he wouldn’t expect us.
Ballard had a parcel from home: chocolate and the Malvern Gazette. I sat with them and we read of all the little things of home, of the inches of rain and the appointment of a new mayor, till all the Englishness of England and all the wet of Worcestershire were swimming in my head; and I never went to Captain with the pears and cocoa.
In the morning we breakfasted on biscuit and bully and sipped from our water bottles.
My new mare was saddled and bridled, her nose in a bag of c
orn, Captain at her side. He lifted her head, took a wet cloth, and held it to her muzzle.
“The smell of water, just the smell of it, will help her thirst,” he said. The terrible memories of the last two attempts on Gaza were in his mind’s eye too that morning. He held out his hand to me.
“This is for you.”
He placed a pebble in my palm. I half laughed, not knowing what it was for and wondering if it was because I’d offended him that he was giving me such a thing, but he laughed too, easily and freely.
“Suck it,” he said. “When your mouth is dry, keep it there and suck it.” He’d learned that from the Arab syces—the native grooms—who looked after the transport camels—like all desert people, they knew to suck stones to keep the mouth wet. I only smiled back at him as I took the pebble. There was guilt in my silence, you see, because I was thinking how I’d never taken him the pears and cocoa, and how I’d shared them instead with Ballard and the others.
“Good luck,” Captain said, and then I knew he didn’t mind about petty things because he smiled and said, “Here are some more, for your friends.”
* * *
When the sun rose we were in position and in full order. The big guns were brought forward at a gallop. We Yeomen waited in line while our shells began to roar and flash and screech across the sky. Then Jacko’s guns roared too, and shells were screeching in all directions, rolls of sound splitting the air, the red earth erupting, the hills roaring and crashing with them. The field artillery began to snap and bark, and the noise was beyond bearing, beyond all imagining. The infantry moved forward and everywhere men were moving, columns of red dust rising, officers yelling, but we were still to wait and watch in the shelter of a dry watercourse.
Bullets whizz-whizz-whizzed and zip-zipped into the sand around the infantry, shrapnel bursting in clouds that opened and grew loose and soft as dandelions.
All day we waited and watched, and I rolled that pebble around in my mouth and held the cloth to my mare’s muzzle. As the day wore on, and the heat and thirst grew, each of us still there, each holding a weary, thirsty horse, we began to turn our eyes to Beersheba, where the wells were.
I eyed the sprawling houses of the town, and the pepper trees and the eucalyptus, and thought of the cool deep water in her wells. I uncorked and sipped the last from my bottle. My mare whinnied at the scent of water and the thrust of her head threw me almost to the ground. The afternoon was slipping away, but there could be no retreat. The water was either thirty miles behind or three miles in front. And eleven thousand horses must drink or die.
All of a sudden there was a distant drumming and shouting, and Lieutenant Straker said, “Good God! The Australians—they’ve no swords—at bayonet—they’re…”
A brigade of mounted men wearing the emu feathers of the Australian Light Horse crested a ridge and moved across the plain at a hard gallop amidst splashes of sand and flame, and leaping clouds of dust. The infantry had been going a bit slow for their liking and they hadn’t waited around for forms to be signed or instructions to be given. They’d just fixed their bayonets and tucked their rifles under their right armpits and taken their chances and set off. We felt the pounding of their hoofs beneath our own feet on the hard dry bed of the wadi, and our own horses trembled and quivered as we watched with envy the advance of those Light Horsemen. They spread across the plain like running water, roaring like Vikings, and there wasn’t a man or a horse amongst us Yeomen that didn’t then feel cheated not to be up there with them.
My mare snorted and trembled. She raised and lowered her head, snorting and whimpering, every muscle quivering and twitching. Streaks of sweat marked the lines of her sinews and congealed down her forelegs.
“Unheard of,” the Lieutenant was saying. “Cavalry against machine guns and artillery…”
We were all openmouthed; we all were—those Australians went so fast, Jacko couldn’t adjust his guns in time, and the Australians were galloping right in under the range of them and roaring and singing as they went.
They took Beersheba, the Australians, using the rifle and bayonet as a lance, and we Yeomen had played no part in it at all.
In the purple dusk there was a great rumbling of wheels and hoofs as brigades and batteries raced to the town. The horses smelled the sweet scent of water across the dusty air and whinnied. An officer on horseback went out behind the men of the Light Horse, and there was the sound of pistol shots to the wounded horses that lay out there. When we crossed the Turk trenches, Ballard and Hadley and everyone stopped to sit down and eat jam and biscuit, but I pushed on, trying to find Captain and Hey-Ho.
I passed transport wagons, crumpled motor lorries, oxen, camels, and mules, some dead, some moaning from their wounds, past all the jumbled wreckage of an army, the bits of wheel and wagon, bits of bullock, mules still yoked, one dead and fallen, the other on his knees, the sight enough to make you never want to see a war again. I thought of Mother and what she’d said about the way the Arabs looked after their animals.
The streets of Beersheba clattered as brigade after brigade filed in, ungirthed and unbridled, to let the horses drink from the wells. It was a miserable place, Beersheba, all brown earth hovels and choking heat, and a confusion of armored cars, stinking camels, military police and transport dashing about with mounds of fodder, airplanes flying low, and cavalry details going from one place to another, and I was rounded up before I found Captain and made to push on.
After Beersheba, we Yeomen swept on, right up Palestine. In a front that ran from the coast to the hills, we chased the Turk all the way to Jaffa. The kitchens and Service Corps didn’t keep up with us, and where Captain and Hey-Ho were, for a long time, I didn’t know.
JUDAEA
NOVEMBER 1917
We moved fast, were pushed then to the extremes of our strength, eating and sleeping as we could. I was apart for a long while from Captain. By November, we were in the Judaean foothills and we were in a terrible state, men and horses—no rations or water had reached us and we were suffering, all of us, from fatigue and burning thirst.
We’d got to some miserable place—Khuweilfe, it may have been—and were held up there for a while. The pack animals were on their way up and Captain would be with them, but before they arrived a troop of us cavalry were sent out along some valley or other. We were stuck there in that valley, waiting for an order to attack. Midday came with its scorching heat, every stone throwing the sun back at us. I tore the buttons from my tunic to suck on—I’d lost the pebble Captain had given me. We were in an agony of thirst, all of us. At sundown, we were still waiting and men were going delirious. For the thousandth time that day, I looked to the head of the valley for the pack animals, for the water and the kitchens. Night came and there was still no relief.
By dawn, we were wild and desperate, and when Johnny Turk came, we had our guns on him. He came at us like a dervish, darting and dashing from the rocks, but we broke him and hurled him back.
Every fight was a fight for water. Either we drove the enemy away from it, or we had to go back to where we started, only to have to do it all again another day.
In respect of the water, at least, Huj was the same thing all over again. You see, Huj was the Worcestershire Yeomen’s battle, and for once it wasn’t the Australians who took the thunder: It was us. I think it was because of Huj and the glory of that day that things shifted again between Captain and me.
We looked like hooligans: hollow-eyed with hunger, unshaven—I was a bit proud of my chin just then, and could show it off, there being no shaving allowed, to save water.
We’d reached the place where Jacko had bivouacked the night before—he’d left kit and blankets and limber and fodder and all sorts lying around. It was Merriman who found the water barrels, but Jacko had left some rotting camel in them just for us and none of us drank from them.
Jacko had set himself up on a ridge. Southward he had a clear field of fire, but to his left, where the ridge curled to the right, there wa
s a slight spur that ran down towards a wadi. We Yeomen were to creep along that wadi, one and a half squadrons of us, and snake along its hidden folds. We moved fast, overtaking the Gloucester Yeomanry, the Sixtieth, the Light Horse, and all the other sorts that were there. We got ourselves ahead of the guns too, somehow, so when we reached a place where we were hidden from the enemy batteries, we dismounted to give our horses a breather.
There were Londoners to our left and they were having a hard time.
“Jacko’s having it all his own way today,” said Ballard.
An officer came galloping up and spoke to the Major.
“Prepare to mount,” the Major barked. “Form column of half squadrons, draw swords.”
Now, looking back, I think that every man is scared before a battle, that you never lose your fear, however many times you go in; but in a mounted charge it’s the courage of the whole and the excitement of your horse that sweeps you up in a drumroll of hoof and blood and muscle that pushes out your fear.
We moved off at a smart trot, rising and falling as one, knee to knee, as if on a drill ground, swords balanced across our thighs, tails flying. Jacko knew we were coming from the storm of dust we raised.
The horses sensed our excitement and fear. They tossed and snorted and fidgeted, and my mare jostled Ballard’s, every muscle in her taut, her neck streaked with sweat.
Jacko was ready for us, and opened fire the second we broached the ridge.
The order to charge was sounded.
It was like riding into hell. Jacko had shortened his fuses, his shrapnel bursting in our midst, but we never checked our speed and went yelling and roaring and riding straight at him with swords at the engage, the breath of his shells on our skin. I’ve never ridden harder or faster than at Huj. It was the open slope and the thrill of the pack—the thundering hoofs, the steaming flanks, the flying froth, the flaming nostrils, the straining muscle, and the pounding of air and wind and sky—there was surely never anything like that charge at Huj in all history.