The officers scanned the sea with their binoculars and as soon as the boats were hauled up, ordered full steam ahead. Inside the wide harbour at Lemnos, crowded with warships and transports, the soldiers learnt that a torpedo had been spotted passing astern of the ships just outside the entrance. Eight of the B Company had drowned. One lifeboat capsized, and their brigade commander, Colonel Linton, died of exposure a couple of hours after being pulled from the water.
The troops stayed aboard the Haverford for two nights at Lemnos, then filed down a gangway to a small steamer, the Partridge, and sat down on its decks. At 4pm on 4 September, it sailed out to Gallipoli. They reached the peninsula at about 9pm and closed in to the shore. It loomed high above them, a dark mountain dotted with myriad dim and flickering lights on its flank. A crackle of rifle fire and the occasional boom of a cannon or bomb came across the water. Fountains of water flared white in the sea as artillery shells landed. Bullets plopped into the water or whacked into the side of the ship.
A small tug pulled a barge alongside. Heaving their kitbags, rifle and rations, the soldiers stepped onto it, sailors grasping and pulling those who lost balance. With the soldiers standing up close together, the barge moved to shore. Bullets whizzed through the dark. Once or twice a man groaned and slumped. Charles found himself chanting the old incantation taught to him by Mr Mishima back in Yokohama: Gyatte gyatte hara gyatte haraso gyatte Bodiso waka. A couple of soldiers turned to look at him. He had been reciting it aloud.
The barge bumped against the wobbly piers of a makeshift jetty, Watson’s Pier, and the men scrambled ashore, running for cover under the cliffs. By 11pm they were all on the beach. Laden with gear and weapons the men filed along the shore through a jumble of stores, bales of fodder and ammunition boxes, trudging up a steep path to the top of what they later learnt to call Rest Gully. Exhausted, as much by fear as the hard climb, they fell asleep where they lay down. The cracking of rifle shots was much louder.
In the morning they looked down the gully to a segment of blue sea, criss-crossed by small warships and supply boats. In the distance, large grey warships emitted puffs of white smoke, followed a few seconds later by a rumbling sound and then explosions inland. What lay above on this landscape, they didn’t dare poke their heads out of the gully to see.
The commanders gave them a day to rest in the gully, calling on soldiers every now and then for fatigue parties to bring up stores. Some went down to swim, taking a chance against the artillery shells lobbed by the enemy. Charles immersed himself in reading Clausewitz, to see if he could find any way of breaking the siege that he could perhaps pass on to the commanders. Looking up, he saw two of his men watching on and nudging each other.
At nine the next morning, Charles’ group left Rest Gully and climbed up to Lone Pine, the forward position seized from the Turks at such great cost a month earlier, gaining 45 metres of a bare plateau at a cost of 2200 of their men and probably double that number of Turks. The stench of rotting bodies was stomach-churning. The soldiers holding the position were haggard and glassy eyed. Most wore just shorts, boots and a hat during the day. Their bodies were covered with sores and grime.
‘So you’ve come at last,’ someone greeted the new troops. After a handover of two days, they and the 24th Battalion and a handful of Light Horsemen were left to hold Lone Pine. They were rostered two days on in the forward trenches, two days off in reserve at Brown’s Dip. Their forward trench was a zig-zag roughly parallel with the Turkish front line, only about 14 metres away at the closest points. In some places, communication trenches connected the two lines, blocked by a wall of sandbags with peepholes through.
Charles stayed down on the trench floor, three to four metres below ground level, apart from the sentries standing on a parapet looking out through periscopes, at which the Turks sniped when they saw a flash of sunlight on glass. Between the lines lay dead men, swollen and black. Sometimes the Turks would shoot up the bodies closest to the Australian trenches with machine guns, to worsen the reek. At night, reconnaissance parties crept out into no-man’s land, most to bring back identity discs and pay books from the Australian dead so their families could at least know for certain, not just be told their boys were ‘missing’.
Both sides had given up the idea of a frontal attack. The Turks would lob round grenades, like black cricket balls with hissing fuses, causing the Australians to dodge into redoubts or behind the baffles in the trench. They in turn made their own bombs, jam-tins stuffed with cordite and match-heads. Their engineers dug tunnels under the enemy lines and blew up mines.
With the handover at Lone Pine, the men inherited a respect for the Turks, whom they referred to by the collective name ‘Abdul’. When officers came up and handed around gas masks, they refused to wear them. ‘Abdul always fights clean,’ one said. The exchange of bombs lessened. Instead, the Australians threw over notes, and got some back in rough English or French. One said: ‘You are too weak to advance and too strong to surrender, and we are the same, so what the ---- are we going to do about it?’ Another: ‘If you don’t surrender in 24 hours, we will.’
Once a Turkish boy waved a white cloth on his bayonet tip and dashed over with a parcel of fine, dark tobacco. Inside was a note asking for paper to roll cigarettes. The Australians heaved a bag of old wrappings and newspapers over, keeping enough to roll their own versions of the Sobranie.
More worrying was a new gun, an artillery piece called the Seventy-Five which lobbed shells from a vantage point the Australians called Scrubby Knoll, not far but remote enough for impersonal killing. Occasionally the shots landed among them, steadily increasing the list of dead and injured. But even without that, the filth in the trenches, the plague of lice and fleas, were sending dozens of men back to the hospital ships with acute dysentery from which eventually most came to suffer.
Charles had an unexpected call on his Japanese knowledge one day. Some new mortars had been delivered with a set of range tables written in Japanese. He was asked to translate them.
Let us imagine this incident led to an encounter that presaged Charles’ role working for Intelligence as a translator in a second great war. Imagine that, a few days later, some staff officers came up to the front line trenches in the wake of General Birdwood while D Company was on watch, and one asked to see ‘the sergeant who spoke Japanese’.
This would have been a well-built young man with bristly dark hair coming quite low on his forehead, spectacles as thick as the bottom of a beer-glass, and a thick moustache between a strong nose and chin. He wore the crown and pip of a lieutenant-colonel. Charles would have saluted as smartly as he could.
‘Aubrey Herbert,’ the lieutenant-colonel would have introduced himself. ‘Intelligence officer on Birdwood’s staff. I was in the embassy in Tokyo a long time back, before the Russian war they had. Couldn’t get all that drawn in to the Japanese. Moved on to Constantinople.’
Herbert would have peered at Charles obliquely. It wouldn’t have taken Charles long to realise Herbert was extremely short-sighted, almost blind. The soldiers would have heard about him in Egypt, the Englishman and Orientalist who’d attached himself to the Australians and New Zealanders and who’d organised the truce in May for both sides to bury their putrefying dead.
‘You’ll know about Harry Freame, won’t you?’ Herbert would have quizzed Charles. ‘Pity we don’t still have him.’
Indeed, Freame was already a legend, the half-Japanese son of an English teacher who’d had a life even more adventurous than Charles’, as merchant seaman and soldier in Mexico and German South-West Africa. Then he’d become a scout with a New South Wales battalion in the first wave at Gallipoli. He’d wriggled out into no-man’s land and into the Turkish trenches with ease. The Turks had hit him at Lone Pine in mid-August and he’d been invalided back to Australia. Fraeme had grown up in Osaka but their paths had never crossed.
Herbert might have then turned back to his
task. An orderly in his party would have handed him a megaphone, and he would have climbed on the parapet and shouted to the enemy in Turkish for several minutes. There would be whistles and jeers from the opposing lines.
‘What did you say, sir?’ Charles would have asked when Herbert jumped down, taking off his cap and wiping his forehead.
‘Oh the usual thing,’ Herbert would have said. ‘We don’t have any real quarrel with you Turks. We’ve always got along pretty well. Fought on the same side at Crimea. Only quarrel is with the Germans, who are fighting to the last Turk. Just surrender. We don’t kill prisoners, we give you good food and medicine, treat you well.’
He might have turned to a Turkish prisoner. ‘Let’s see if we can reinforce that last message,’ he would have said, issuing an order in Turkish. The prisoner would jump to the parapet and let off a plaintive jabber through the speaking horn.
The jeers from the other side would increase. Herbert would have translated for the Australians: ‘He’s saying that there are still Turks there and sons of Turks, and asking, “Who is this man speaking. If you are a prisoner, go away and don’t talk.’’
‘At least there were no bombs this time,’ Herbert might have sighed, to no one in particular. ‘My sermons don’t make me popular with our men. We get a few surrenders, but until they think we’re winning …’
It was clear to the Australians they were not winning, and were unlikely to pull any irons out of the fire at Gallipoli. The first squalls of winter were hitting the peninsula. The men were now wrapping themselves in whatever they could find to augment their thin summer kit. They felt betrayed. Rumours about spies constantly swept the lines. The Greek and other interpreters or the Jewish transporters were constantly being arrested as they went about their work. Pigeons were shot at, in case they were carrying intelligence.
Back in the trenches, Charles tried to explain to his officers and fellow soldiers how they had continually lost the advantage of surprise through this campaign. The Turks and their German advisors had been waiting for them. Then the landing at Suvla, for which the sacrifices at Lone Pine and The Nek were supposed to be the diversion, had not been pushed through. It seemed clear that the Allied generals were lacking in strategy.
A couple of days later, Charles was called down to his battalion commander’s dug-out. ‘You’ve been spreading disaffection among the soldiers, Bavier,’ Colonel Knox upbraided him. ‘They’re calling you a Prussian officer in disguise. I don’t know who you are, or whether your Swiss-Japanese story is true, but you don’t fit in.’
Knox dismissed him. Charles’ earlier references to Clausewitz had evidently been much distorted. Then, at the end of September, after three weeks in the front lines, Charles was peering through a periscope at the Turkish trenches when a sniper’s bullet hit the device square on, punching a jagged edge back into his face just above the right eye. He was dazed and half-blinded with blood. When he returned from the medical post, a note came from Colonel Knox ordering him back to Egypt as unfit for further service. On 21 October he boarded the transport Karoo and landed back in Alexandria four days later.
The military found him a place in a barracks. He had a bitter 40 days to spend before his ship left for Melbourne. Being sent home was the ultimate disgrace and punishment for the soldiers then, although Knox had given him a ‘good character’ reference. Charles’ quest for military glory and fulfilment of the destiny that formed in his mind on those cadet parades in Yokohama were dashed. His angry, self-debasing debauch in Shanghai had a repetition. One night he went down to an equivalent of the Wozzer and spent a few hours with a plump, amiable Egyptian girl.
This time he was not so lucky. A few days after the transport ship Borda set sail, he discovered the coppery coloured sore that his Japanese co-lodger in Hong Kong had once shown him, and reported to the medical officer. He kept Charles isolated, and on landing in Melbourne had him sent off to the medical camp at Langwarrin.
By then, the initial repugnance at the epidemic of venereal diseases among the troops had moderated. The men were no longer treated as untouchables and kept under guard behind barbed wire. Indeed, by the time Charles was returning, cases were no longer being sent home but treated in field hospitals. The problem was only going to get worse as the Australians moved on to Europe. The commandant at Langwarrin, Captain Conder, had talked the army into building proper wards and bathhouses, and got the guards removed. The injections of the arsenic compound popularly known as ‘606’ were repeated over six weeks, and in Charles’ case achieved a complete cure. In August 1916 Charles was discharged from the camp and from the army.
The security police had been round checking up on him. The suspicion about him being either a Japanese or German spy had not been entirely dismissed. He got a passport however, and sailed for Japan on 14 September 1916.
Back in Yokohama, Charles quickly slipped back into local ways, obtaining work as an English teacher at a middle school and as translator for a newspaper editor. His spirits revived, and with it his ambitions to pursue his army career. In October 1917, thanks to his Gallipoli experience and his old China connections, he obtained a position at the new military academy at Swatow for the Cantonese army, and taught tactics for a year. His Chinese pupils turned out no less inclined than their warlord counterparts to oppress the local people. A deal to acquire machine guns and other arms from Japan for the Chinese army fell through. His sympathetic Chinese commandant gave him a girl for a night to compensate.
Increasingly desperate for a military career, Charles returned to Japan in the hope of joining the British and American expedition to fight the Bolsheviks in Siberia, but had no success. Finally, in 1919 he tried his luck again in Melbourne, and did the rounds of the St Kilda Barracks and the university, offering his services as a Japanese specialist. Few pupils came forward for private classes, and at the end of the year it was clear that his record was marred with question marks and adverse comments. Charles returned to Japan where, it seemed, he belonged.
Chapter 9
A MAN OF ENGLISH
The rise in prices and the importation of anarchism fan each other and will give rise to a major social revolution. The primary school teachers, the police, and petty bureaucrats are budding socialists … You cannot imagine how much the thinking and the ideals of the young today are confused. I am convinced of this … Please destroy this letter.
— The journalist Tokutomi Soho writing to Yamagata Aritomo, 9 February 1920
Tokyo 1920–23
Once back on Japanese soil Charles felt his spirits rise, in spite of all the failures and dead ends of the past decade. He was still only 32 years of age. The taints of his recent past felt lifted. He no longer cared about any patrimony in Europe. Japan enfolded him like a mother’s embrace.
Masataro, his fellow student from the Waseda days, had taken over the family business and put Charles up for a while. He had assumed a gravitas of manner for his business dealings and as head of the household, but when alone with Charles he became the same tentative fellow as ever, listening to Charles’ stories with gasps of surprise and admiration.
Charles went up to the Fudosan temple and lit incense for his mother Chika, bowing to the gilt Buddha deep in the smoky interior behind the vermilion lacquered pillars. He let a few coins clatter into the slatted offering box. Later he paid a call on Bavier & Co. at the new No. 209 office. It looked smaller and more antiquated than he remembered. Herr Gielen had long since retired to Germany; John Jewett, the American manager, had taken charge of both the business and the consular duties of his absent father. The firm’s Japanese manager, his Uncle Bunshiro, had passed away in 1915, as he’d learnt during his previous spell back in Tokyo. With his foster-cousins Rintaro and Naka having preceded their father, and O-Kame also dead, Charles had no family at all left in Japan.
But the managers at his father’s company still regarded themselves as his guardians to some degree.
Sophus Warming gave him a stern talk about settling down, now that he’d ‘had his adventures’ and was of an age when he should be establishing a household. They knew of a widow with a little means of her own, a former teacher, who happened to have the same name as his beloved cousin Naka. She was living at Yokosuka, the naval base down the Miura peninsula, with two boys of her own, a middle one having been adopted out to childless relatives. Charles wrote a quick letter, and on her reply took the train down one morning.
It was the beginning of spring. The rain squalls and gale of the previous day had passed, leaving a perfectly still and sunny day. The train clattered through the tunnels and cuttings, flashing glimpses of trees covered with a green haze of leaf-shoots and cottages with quilts hanging out of the windows to air. The sea on the right, as the train swung past Zushi, was flat calm and pale blue.
Charles was wearing a new dark blue kimono, and a hat, so he must have mingled into the crowd getting out of the compartments and pressing past the ticket collector.
‘Sakai-san! Sakai-san!’ Charles crossed the concourse towards the bright sunlight. A woman holding a small boy by the hand was waving. She picked up the child and walked towards him. Naka Yashiro was a woman with matronly curves above and below the bright sash around her kimono. Her jaw was strong, her gaze level and wise. Then her eyes filled with tears, as she fought to smile. For some reason, his own began to water too. They both bowed, to cover their awkwardness, then stood up. She laughed, and tried to pass over the little boy for him to hold. The child shrank back, looking with terror at Charles’ bearded, Western face.
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