by Peter Watt
Sean could feel the biting cold of the ground beneath him and was aware that he had crawled across a couple of bodies whose decomposition had slowed in the cold. Needless to say, the sticky mess that clung to his arms was something he did not want to think about as a whiff of rotting flesh assailed him. He had taken the lead and his group moved within a short distance of him. Every five minutes he would pause to ensure they were all still together. Getting there was working out to being a bit better than Sean had pessimistically considered. The Germans were off guard.
Sean called a halt when he could actually smell cigar smoke drifting on the air. The snow had stopped falling and the muffled voices of their enemy could easily be heard.
‘You speak German, Jack,’ Sean whispered in the CSM’s ear. ‘What are they on about?’
‘Not much,’ Jack replied, straining to differentiate the voices. ‘I can hear one of them talking about his kids . . . I think he is showing his cobbers photos of them. Mostly stuff our own mates are talking about right now.’
‘A bastard of a night to be doing this,’ Sean muttered angrily and Jack knew what he meant. Would the man talking with love about his family die in the next few hours at their hands? The company commander should be out here with them to see what his orders came down to on this sacred day. Then the German voices broke into a song whose tune Sean recognised – ‘Silent Night’. Their singing was accompanied by a harmonica and each man on the deadly patrol felt a lump in his throat.
Sean signalled to his patrol to close up and gave final orders of what they were to do in the next few minutes. Absolute surprise was on their side and the shock of their assault should carry the day. Each man armed himself with a grenade and when they had carefully cut their way through the barbed wire, ensuring that they did not rattle any of the empty tin cans strung out to warn of an approach, Sean rose up and tossed his primed grenade into the trench before them. It was followed immediately by four others and before the first bombs had hit the floor of the trench they were followed by five more.
Confused and frightened voices greeted the arrival of the egg-shaped explosives, but they were cut short, turning into screams of panic and pain as the bombs exploded in the confined space. The raiding party followed Sean by leaping into the trench that was now a mass of writhing, wounded German soldiers. The acrid smell of smoke caught them as they fell on the men. Sean’s landing was buffered when he landed on a dead soldier who lay face down amid a heap of scattered photos of a young woman surrounded by three children. Sean could feel his heart pounding as if ready to burst out of his chest.
A wounded soldier attempted to sit up and reach for his rifle but Tom Duffy swung his metal-studded, home-made club to smash in his skull, spraying blood and brain tissue into his own face. Sean searched around desperately for a prisoner and saw a German NCO clasping his head, hands over his ears. He was stunned and appeared to have been deafened by the proximity of the grenades exploding.
‘That one!’ Sean screamed at Jack, who understood, grabbing the still stunned soldier and wrapping rope around his wrists.
From around the corner of the trench, Sean could hear the sounds of the Germans rapidly organising to launch a counterassault against them. Already four armed men appeared from below a well dug bunker, firing wildly down the trench. In an instant Sean saw Lieutenant Grant crumple and it was obvious he had been caught in the rifle fire. He lay on his back and in the flickering light of the overturned brazier flames, Sean could see that his face had been smashed by a bullet and another had hit him square in the chest. He was choking on his own blood and desperately attempting to cough to clear his lungs. Sean knew that the young officer was as good as dead and impossible to rescue as the German infantry spilled from their deep bunkers and down the trench towards them.
Both Tom Duffy and Dan Frogan fought well, priming grenades and tossing them at the bend in the trench either side of their flanks, deterring any enemy from rushing them down the length of the trench they now occupied.
Sean plucked to his lips the whistle that he had secured by a lanyard around his neck and gave the long blast of the prearranged signal to get out of the trench and return to their own lines as best as they could with their prisoner.
The raiding party, now reduced to four men, hauled themselves over the top of the sandbags to find the gap they had cut in the wire. They had hardly gone 10 yards when the night sky was suddenly filled with parachute flares, their magnesium white lights dangling, reflecting off the field of snow, but also lighting up the silhouettes of the fleeing Australians. A machine gun opened fire from their flank, churning up wisps of snow around them. Jack was yelling at his reluctant prisoner in German, urging him to do what he was told.
Sean glanced around to see Private Frogan following, running in a crouch, stumbling as bullets tore over his head, then scrambling back on his feet to continue running. Machine guns had opened up from their own lines in a futile attempt to provide cover fire but the machine gun firing at them was too well entrenched.
At first Sean could not see Tom Duffy but then spotted him as a flare settled in the snow in front of the German lines. He was running back to the German lines towards the machine gun, a grenade in each hand.
Sean shouted to him to leave the gun and run, but Tom knew what he must do if they were to live. He was on the gun before the crew could traverse the barrel to kill him when he threw his grenades. They exploded on target and the gun fell silent.
‘Bloody marvellous!’ Sean shouted, impressed by the raw courage of the new recruit.
He turned to run when the world exploded. He was not even aware that he had been blown off his feet by a German trench mortar bomb, brought into action to counter the raid on their lines.
Sean lay in the snow beside the small scorch mark where the mortar had exploded. Winter was the worst time for the spread of shrapnel, he thought, as he lay on his back, staring up at a sky filled with tiny swinging lights like those he remembered on Christmas trees at home. When the ground was frozen, the artillery rounds and mortar bombs exploded on impact, scattering the deadly shards of hot metal to shred men’s flesh, whereas mud absorbed the rounds before they exploded and muffled the effects of shrapnel. It was so peaceful, as he could not hear anything. It was as if the war was over, and he was back home in the Redfern hotel that had always been a part of his family heritage. There was the aroma of a lamb roast and the clink of bottles of cold beer to wash down the Christmas lunch.
The face of Jack Kelly loomed over him and he felt Jack’s strong hands under his arms, dragging him into a shell crater. He was shouting something but Sean could not hear him and was annoyed that the CSM was disturbing his Christmas Day. Then the darkness crept over Captain Sean Duffy, MC; he was truly at peace for the first time in the past two years of his life.
PART TWO
1917
11
Captain Sean Duffy lay between clean, starched sheets in the English manor house converted to a hospital for wounded officers. Outside it was cold and Sean was vaguely aware that the men of his battalion were many miles away across the English Channel, shivering and dying in the trenches he had left behind. He had jumbled memories of being dragged through no-man’s-land by Jack Kelly while every inch of the journey caused screaming agony. After that, a maze of recollections of being transported back to the field hospital behind the lines and the operating table tended by a grey-faced army surgeon before being subjected to a gas that took away his pain and any recollection of what occurred next: the train trip with others mangled by the science of modern weapons to the coast, before being shipped to England to be loaded on a lorry and transported to the fine old home with its ivy-covered walls.
When the operation was over, Sean knew what had happened to him, and he tried not to weep for what he had lost. But in the darkness of the long hospital ward, his tears flowed freely among the screams and shouts of his fellow wounded, reliving in their troubled sleep the awful shell fire and machine-gun chatter tha
t had brought them to this place. The ward echoed with shouted commands to long dead platoons and companies of soldiers that had followed these now shattered men who had been their leaders.
For almost a month Sean had not received any visitors; his world had been reduced to extreme pain and the cheerful encouragement from the doctors and nurses who tended to the shattered men under their care. He had befriended the wounded officer occupying the bed beside his own, a Canadian major in his early forties, married and now minus his arms from the elbows down. From the little that the Canadian shared, it appeared his wife had left him when she heard that her husband had been severely wounded. She had in fact written to him apologising for meeting another man, a civilian working in the civil service, and thought that he had the right to know she would ask for his cooperation in seeking a divorce.
Major Herbert Lancaster was tough, but at night Sean could hear him sobbing from the pain of betrayal. Sean had joked that between them the doctors should be able to put together a whole man: Sean’s legs amputated below the knees and the major’s arms, on one body. Whenever the weather allowed and both men were not being subjected to their recuperation procedures for the fitting of artificial arms and legs respectively, they would spend time on a bench in the garden, Sean lighting and placing a cigarette in the Canadian’s mouth. Major Lancaster sucked on the smoke and sighed. ‘As soon as I get my new arms,’ he said, ‘I’m going to wipe my own arse, then light my own cigarette and finally punch the bastard who has taken my wife from me. Just a few of life’s little luxuries one takes for granted when one has arms.’
The late winter chill carried the smoke from their cigarettes skyward while Sean gazed at the water dripping from the trees as the country emerged from the winter.
‘At least we don’t have to go back,’ he said softly, hunching against the day and staring down at the grass struggling to break through the last ice of winter. There was no response from the Canadian sitting beside him; both were beyond feeling any guilt about leaving their units on the battle front. Both were numbed by constant pain and the effects war had on their futures. When Sean had learned that his comrade had also been a solicitor with a firm in Ontario, they had warmed to each other, often revealing private thoughts on everything from how the war was being prosecuted to the way they went about their legal work in civvy street.
‘Well, old chap,’ Herbert Lancaster said one day, gazing at the stately building that was their temporary home. ‘It appears that you may finally have a visitor – as he is not wearing the uniform of one of ours.’
Sean looked up to see Patrick Duffy strolling towards him in the uniform of a divisional staff officer. Sean’s instinct was to rise to greet his senior officer but he quickly remembered that was something he was not about to do given his current condition.
Patrick reached the two men.
‘Sorry that I cannot salute you, sir,’ Herbert said with a touch of lazy sarcasm. ‘Captain Duffy does all the saluting for both of us.’
Patrick shook his head, brushing off the apology.
‘May I introduce Major Lancaster, sir,’ Sean said. ‘He’s one of those mad Canadians we have had the misfortune of serving alongside of from time to time.’
‘Can’t shake hands either at the moment,’ Herbert replied, the cigarette dangling from his lips.
‘Herbert, this is my cousin, Colonel Duffy,’ Sean continued with a weak smile.
‘I have heard that there are a lot of you former convicts in Australia,’ Herbert said with a wide grin. ‘But I did not think it was that bad that captains could be related to colonels.’
‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Major Lancaster,’ Patrick said and, beyond military protocol, raised his hand in a lazy salute, a gesture not lost on the Canadian.
‘I suspect that you two have a bit to talk about,’ Herbert said, rising from the bench. ‘So, I shall see if there is a brew on in the ward. A pleasure to meet you, sir,’ he said before ambling away towards the old manor.
Patrick took a seat on the bench beside Sean. ‘I was saddened to hear you copped it,’ he said. ‘I only learned about you being evacuated a couple of weeks ago and, as fortune has it, I was sent back here to complete a staff college course. How are you, old chap?’
‘I’m supposed to be alive,’ Sean replied bitterly. ‘But it does not feel like it.’
Patrick nodded his head, understanding the handsome young man’s meaning. ‘You know that your wounds will have you on a ship back to Sydney soon,’ he said. ‘I presume that you will return to the practice.’
‘I suppose so,’ Sean answered, hardly thinking much about the future.
‘Do you still have the pain?’ Patrick asked.
‘It’s not so bad now,’ Sean answered as a raven took flight from a tree denuded of leaves. ‘They are helping me with a set of artificial legs. I was fortunate that I kept some of my legs below the knees. It helps in my mobility.’
‘I know that what I am about to tell you is no consolation to losing your legs but it has come through divisional orders that you have been gazetted to major. You proved to be a good student on your staff college course and I was able to slot you into a vacancy. You would have had your own company,’ Patrick said. ‘I wanted to be the first to congratulate you, Major Duffy.’
Sean blinked at the news. He had finally received the rank to go with the position he most desired but it was all for nothing now. He would be recuperated back to Sydney and discharged from the army to return to civilian life.
‘Thank you, sir. I appreciate the gesture.’
‘I know that you are going through the bitterness of losing a part of your life but you will be of great value to myself and the family when you return to Sydney,’ Patrick said awkwardly, his face twisted in a grimace. ‘I need you to act on my behalf for the family interests when you return. You are, after all, linked by blood to me.’
Sean glanced at Patrick and could see a pained expression in his face. ‘What I can do to help, I will,’ he said. ‘I suppose as a solicitor I might be able to do something.’
‘You know that I have two sons,’ Patrick continued, staring into the shrubs and rockeries. ‘My youngest, Alexander, is currently posted to a training battalion as a company commander. And my eldest is running the family business. Alexander is a soldier through and through. Perhaps that is my fault for allowing him to follow me in as many ways as he could. Sadly, Alex does not have a head for business, whereas George does.’
‘Then your family matters appear to be well and truly under control,’ Sean responded.
‘I know this will sound shocking coming from a father who is not supposed to differentiate between his children, but I do not trust George any further than I could kick him,’ Patrick said, tapping his swagger stick unconsciously against the side of his boot. ‘So I have drawn up papers giving you full authority to make any decisions that you might think I would make, if I were back home. With that authority is, I hope, a generous salary to oversee my interests. You see, we have shared much in the last two years and I trust you as if you were my third son. I think you will have Alex’s support in your endeavours. He has his military career, but as my proxy you have the requisite legal background to keep an eye on the company affairs.’
Sean was stunned by what his cousin was telling him. It was a huge responsibility and a show of great trust in him. For a moment he was speechless.
‘I beg you to take up my offer,’ Patrick continued. ‘I would trust you with my life.’
‘Sir, you know that I will,’ Sean answered.
Patrick extended his gloved hand, taking Sean’s mitten-covered hand in his own.
‘Then, it is done.’ Patrick rose from the bench. ‘You do not know how much it means to me to have you home looking after the family interests in the competent way that I know you are capable of even when the chips are down.’
‘Sir, you must know I disobeyed orders when I got my wound,’ Sean said in an attempt to test his cousin’s resolve to
grant him with the power of attorney.
‘I know all about the trench raid,’ Patrick said, standing over Sean. ‘There was a formal charge submitted by that blithering idiot of a company commander of yours to have you and Kelly court-martialled. But your CO overrode his report and even recommended you both for a decoration. I am afraid the army brass would not come at that, but they did quash the request for a court martial.’
‘Is Hartford still the commander?’
‘I am afraid so. But learning what I have about Kelly, I suspect he will do a good job protecting the men of the company. In fact, Jack Kelly has been recommended for officer training.’
‘That is good to hear,’ Sean answered, nodding his head. ‘Jack is a highly intelligent and brave man with outstanding leadership qualities.’
‘That’s what I deduced,’ Patrick said. ‘I had the pleasure of interviewing him at Div HQ last week. He said that if the army recognised him for anything good, it was because he had the honour of serving under you – as brief as it was.’
Sean felt his face flush. After all that happened, Jack Kelly still had a good opinion of him. Although Sean knew his military career had come to an end his heart was still with his old battalion with which he served from the first weeks at Gallipoli up until his wounds in weeks past. ‘I know that Jack will make the grade,’ he said. ‘His men will be ably led.’
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ Patrick asked.
‘No, I will be okay,’ Sean replied. ‘Just a matter of getting the hang of my new legs and then getting settled back into the practice at home.’
‘Well, time I made it back to London, old chap,’ Patrick said, placing his gloved hand on Sean’s shoulder. ‘Chin up and we will meet home in Sydney as soon as this damned show is over.’
‘Yes, sir. See you when I see you.’
Patrick walked away, leaving Sean alone in the sprawling garden. He gazed at the back of his distant cousin and sighed. He would be going home but some part of him besides his legs would always remain in the filth and mud of the front. His soul would linger over the battlefield forever. He was glad that there was no woman waiting for his return. After all, he was no longer a full man in either body or soul.