The Animal Stars Collection

by Jackie French

  You said in your letter that I would find out where you were when the Australians made a start. Well my son, the Australians have done gloriously—they have made England ring with their bravery. Mr Asquith said in the House of Commons that the Australians had fought like heroes and that they had surpassed themselves in the annals of British warfare with their bravery. The Red Cross, he said that they worked like heroes to save and rescue the wounded.

  Jack my son, my heart is fairly bursting with sorrow and with pride to think that you are amongst such a lot of brave men—but mind they have paid dearly for their bravery. I saw the Australian list of casualties this morning and I am sorry to say that it’s very heavy.

  I see that the 3rd Field Ambulance has got some wounded but thank God that your number was not there. I was thankful I can tell you that God had spared you to me as yet.

  My dear son I wrote to you last week—you said that you hadn’t had a letter from me for a month, but Jack my dear lad I didn’t know where to write to you for you wrote and told me that you were leaving Egypt and you were coming either to France or England. I didn’t know where to write to but I wrote you last week on speck and I addressed it to The Dardanelles, so that I hope you have got my letter.

  Now my dear son, write and let me know how you are keeping, for mind my lad, that this is a terrible anxious time to me. I am anxiously following the war in the Dardanelles. I am thirsting for every detail of news that I can get for I still get my papers night and morning. I couldn’t live without them.

  Now my dearest son hoping and trusting that the Lord in His great mercy will guard and protect you in these terrible times and that He will hear my prayers for you.

  From your ever loving and affectionate

  Mother

  CHAPTER 30

  Richard Henderson

  Anzac Cove, 24 May 1915

  War was bad. But this, thought Richard Henderson as he gazed across the gully, was worse.

  It was a day of truce. A day for both sides to put down weapons and bury the dead. The smell of death was so thick you felt you had to wade through it; the flies were breeding in great buzzing clouds, and the rats had grown fat.

  It was the quiet that was the strangest. Only yesterday the air had been thick with noise: explosions, yells—all the sounds of so many men dug into the ground or hidden behind barricades in so small a space.

  He had never known Gallipoli quiet. The sky was grey, weeping now and then with a thin, cold rain. Richard could even hear the soft whoosh of the waves as they lapped in and out of the cove, and the triumphant cawing of crows as they feasted on meat that had once been men.

  Bodies lay everywhere: shattered shapes on the bare earth. A few weeks before, this gully had been a thicket of myrtle scrub. Now the little trees were broken stubs and the bodies of the Turkish soldiers were so thick about them that in places they were piled two or three high. A wounded man must have fallen on a dead comrade, and then another collapsed on both of them. Each man still held his bayonet, as though in death they sought to defend their country yet.

  Even the wounded were quiet today: too weary to moan. Here and there a man lifted an arm as though to call for help, then dropped it. What help would come here?

  Only us, thought Richard.

  It was strange, working so near men who a few hours ago had been trying to kill you. But both sides knew that if they kept trying to fight amongst the rotting flesh they would all die—not in battle, not from bullets, but from fever or the trots. Already more men were dying from dysentery than from wounds, their bowels running with a thick black liquid that smelt of blood.

  Far above them thousands of watchers lined the flat-topped mountains, despite the rain, looking like beetles in the distance. Turkish civilians, someone had said, come to see the burying of the dead.

  He and the other stretcher-bearer teams had been carting bodies from this gully to the big trench graves since just after sun-up, two men to each stretcher. First they had to cut the identification discs from around each dead man’s neck, then make a record of who he had been. Somewhere a family waited for him. At least when this was over their loved one would no longer be listed as ‘missing’ but ‘killed’. What was worse? Richard wondered. To know for sure your son or husband was dead, or to go on for years, hoping, praying, waiting for the voice that never came?

  He didn’t know. He could only do his best. Carry the wounded from the battlefield, and hope that they would live. Carry the dead from the rotting piles…

  He bent over the next body and began to push it onto the stretcher. At least it was still recognisably human, not just shreds of bone and skin inside shredded clothes.

  Many of the dead had lain here for five days, since the last big Turkish ‘push’ to drive the Allies off the peninsula. Other bodies had been here since the start of the campaign. Scavengers had been at them. Some had been further shattered by shrapnel or bomb blast; others had burst when post-mortem stomach gases had swelled them up and another wounded man had fallen on them, or someone had accidentally punctured them with boots or bayonet.

  Most of the stretcher-bearers had strapped on masks of wool drenched in eucalyptus oil to drown the stink. He supposed the gum-leaf smell reminded the Aussies of home. But the oil stung his hands—he’d torn them trying to unwrap some poor beggar from a mess of barbed wire—so when his mask had fallen off he’d let it lie.

  Then suddenly he saw him. A Turk, one body among so many. But this one was alive. Young: fourteen perhaps. Brown eyes gazing up at him. He might even have been one of the students Richard had taught back in New Zealand, staring out of the window dreaming of football or fishing, instead of concentrating on his maths.

  How many of his students were soldiers now? he wondered. How much of what he’d tried to teach would die here in this war?

  He looked around for a Turkish soldier, to call him to help the boy. But the Turks were working at the other end of the gully.

  He hesitated. It was illegal to help one of the enemy, even today—unless he was dead. But here was this boy, his lips cracked and dry.

  The wounded soldier whispered something. Impossible to catch the words, but impossible not to know the meaning. Water…

  Richard unstrapped his water bottle, uncapped it and knelt down. The boy grasped it, gulped, then fell back, still clutching the bottle.

  Impossible, too, to take a water bottle back from a bleeding child.

  He stood up and waved, trying to attract the Turks’ attention. One of them waved back, and began to come over.

  Richard smiled at the boy, then walked back to his stretcher. His fellow bearer glanced at him. He shook his head. Disapproval? Or a promise not to say what he’d seen?

  Richard didn’t know. You didn’t speak in this world of death, not if you could help it. It wasn’t just that any breath made you gag. It was the silence. This day belonged to the dead, not to the voices of the living.

  One load. Another. Sometimes they could fit two bodies on a stretcher. Other times, when the bodies were scraps of skin and clothes and bone, you might fit four or five. Each load had to be taken to the graves and tipped in, while the padres said their words and others shovelled dirt onto the dead faces.

  Richard gazed up at the sky. The clouds still hung over Gallipoli, but he could see that the sun was closer to the horizon. The day of truce was nearly over. Even as he thought it a British officer beckoned to them to come away. He felt a shudder of relief. Even war was better than this.

  He started at a touch on his shoulder. For a moment he almost thought he had felt the hands of the dead. But when he turned he saw it was a Turkish officer. The man held out Richard’s water bottle. Richard took it automatically.

  ‘Oghur ola gule gule gedejekseniz, gule gule gelejekseniz.’

  Richard shook his head to show he didn’t understand.

  ‘He says, “Smiling may you go, and smiling come again”.’

  It was the British officer.

  ‘You speak
their lingo, sir?’

  ‘One of them told me what it means. Off you go, soldier. How long have you been at it?’

  ‘All day, sir.’

  The officer stared. ‘What are you made of? Most men can only stand a trip or two. Get some dinner then, and a bit of kip. See if the medics can give you some whisky.’ He smiled without humour. ‘To soothe your throat.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He walked back down to the beach with the others. He needed to wash before he ate, before he slept.

  Somewhere, he thought, the world still smells of green and living things. Roast lamb and children’s laughter. The dahlias in Mum’s garden. All these were also real. It was important to remember that they were just as real as this.

  He was passing the mules now, and the Indians who cared for them. Big strong beasts, despite the hard work carting water. All except for one. He looked again. No, it was a donkey, not a mule.

  Of course! Simpson’s donkey! Simpson had caught it—five days ago, wasn’t it? And his donkey was grieving still, by the look of him: his head was down and he wasn’t even bothering to eat the hay.

  Suddenly his swim was forgotten. ‘What’s wrong, Neddy?’

  The donkey glanced up at him, then back down at his unwanted hay. The poor beast was thin enough, thought Richard, without starving in his grief. He picked up a bit of the hay and held it out.

  The donkey looked up at him again.

  ‘Come on, Neddy. You need to eat.’

  The donkey hesitated. Then as the hay brushed his furry top lip he opened his mouth obediently and took a mouthful. He began to chew.

  Richard scratched the soft fur behind the donkey’s ears. Simpson had done good work…

  And it came to him. If Simpson could do it, so could he. A donkey could carry men on steep tracks up the gullies and onto the plateau, places where two stretcher-bearers would stumble.

  And maybe in time he could forget his stretcher had carried the dead, and not the living.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Neddy,’ he told the donkey softly. ‘You and I have work to do.’

  CHAPTER 31

  The Donkey

  Gallipoli, 24 May 1915

  How long had it been since the Man with Kind Hands had died? The donkey didn’t know. Nights and days were confused here. The nights were lit with strange colours; the days were clouded by dust and smoke. But the donkey knew that time had passed.

  He couldn’t eat. He drank. Mostly he just stared, and remembered. There was a lot to remember when you were a donkey. There had never been anyone like the Man he had lost. It was important, the donkey knew, to remember him.

  Vaguely he was aware of hands patting him, stroking his sides, hands that held up hay to tempt him to eat. At first they were the brown hands of the men they called the Indians of the Artillery. But at last the donkey realised the hands that patted him were a different colour, pale like those of the Man he’d lost, and softer, without the calluses of all the men he’d known before. There was something else about this man that was familiar, too.

  The donkey looked up in sudden hope. No, it wasn’t the Man with Kind Hands. This man’s face was longer. His voice was different too, and his clothes. But none of that mattered. For this man also spoke with a voice of love: he sounded gentle, just like the Man he’d lost.

  The man held hay underneath the donkey’s nose. And this time he ate.

  The new man was back the next morning.

  ‘There, Neddy. Good boy, now. Try to eat a bit, will you? If you don’t eat you can’t climb. And we need to climb, Neddy. We need to climb together to bring the men back.’

  The man held water to the donkey’s nose, and he drank. He gave him a biscuit, crumbled on the flat of his hand. The donkey ate it, and then some hay as well. The man stroked him, and the donkey accepted it. He stood quietly while the man repaired his halter, which was lopsided now, and drooping. And when the man tugged on the lead rope he followed him.

  For that’s what you did, when you were a donkey who had learnt to obey both through the stick and from love. You did what you were told.

  But this was not the Man he’d lost.

  Up the gully again, into the world of noise and bodies. Many of the bodies had been buried since he’d been here last. But there were new bodies, already blackening. One popped when he trod on it. Wet stuff sprayed and stank and the donkey cried out for the first time since his master died.

  Hee haw! Hee haw!

  ‘Simmo! It’s Simmo and his donkey! I thought you were a goner, mate.’

  ‘My name’s Henderson.’

  ‘What? Oh, sorry, mate, I didn’t know.’

  Their first passenger was missing most of his hand. His arm was roughly wrapped in bandages and strapped against his chest to try to slow down the bleeding. He muttered, sliding in and out of consciousness, his good arm slung around the man’s shoulders while his body trembled above the donkey’s.

  ‘Good old Simmo. Simmo and his donkey. Knew you wouldn’t let us down.’

  ‘I’m Henderson, old man. New Zealander.’

  But the man didn’t hear. Couldn’t hear, or hadn’t wanted to hear. ‘They say you always get through when Simmo takes you.’

  ‘We’ll get you through.’

  ‘Knew you would. Can count on Simmo…’ This time the man called Henderson didn’t bother to correct him.

  Down the gully, along the beach, back up the gully, as the sun blazed down on them; and carrying water again for the thirsty men up on the tableland, along a narrow path sprayed with bullets, a new path dug by men while shrapnel stung the ground.

  Their passenger this time smelt of muck, not blood. He was so tall his feet dragged on the ground as he sat on the donkey’s back. But his face was thin, and his clothes were loose, as though he’d shrunk.

  Halfway down the gully the donkey felt his back grow wet, and then a smell, the horrid smell of human dung. He’d have liked to twist and buck, to get rid of the man and his smell. But he was too used to obeying to do it.

  ‘Sorry, mate, I’m sorry, didn’t mean…’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. The trots come to us all.’ The man’s voice was matter-of-fact. ‘Had a kid in my class once messed his pants every time I yelled at him.’

  For a moment the exhaustion in the passenger’s voice vanished. ‘You a teacher? Serve you right for yelling at the poor little blighter.’

  ‘Poor little blighter my foot. He put a dead mouse in my sandwich.’

  ‘Yeah? How you know it was him?’

  ‘When you see a boy staring at your mouth just as you’re going to take a bite you suspect something is up. Otherwise I’d have had a mouthful of dead mouse.’

  The passenger laughed. ‘A dead mouse’d taste better than bully beef. Didn’t know you’d been a teacher, Simmo.’

  ‘I’m Henderson…’

  The man called Henderson washed the muck from the donkey when they got back to the beach. At first he tried to lead him into the waves, but the donkey refused. He would face most things, but not the sea again. Hee haw! Hee haw! He lashed out with his hind legs, kicking a passing man, who yelled.

  The donkey stopped kicking. He cowered, waiting for a beating. But no beating came. Instead the man called Henderson filled a tin with water and wiped him with a wet cloth, over and over.

  The donkey endured it. At least the water took away the smell, or most of it.

  Later he heard the man being sick a little way across the sand.

  There were potatoes to eat at night now as well as hay. The donkey had never eaten potatoes before coming here. But he was hungry and the potatoes were warm and filled his belly.

  It was lonely at night now. The man called Henderson didn’t sleep with the Indians and the mules, as the Man with Kind Hands had done. The mules no longer kicked or snorted at him. But they were bigger than him, and stronger. The donkey was different from them, and both he and they knew it.

  So it was good every morning when the man called Henderson came back.
He brought a present every morning, too, a piece of bread or biscuit, so even though he had been left all night the donkey felt that he was loved and valued.

  It still felt strange to be so loved. But it felt good, too.

  CHAPTER 32

  Richard Henderson

  Gallipoli, June 1915

  Day after day they walked together now, Richard and the donkey. Richard had stopped correcting the soldiers when they called him Simmo. This mad world had grown used to a man and a donkey, a miracle among the death and fear.

  One man, two men, three men or more. Henderson or Simpson; Neddy or Murphy. One donkey, two or six or eight. It didn’t matter. Just that they were there. They did what they could. They did their best.

  The worst was when they called to you, desperate men pleading for a chance at life. So many men. And you could only take one, or two at most, even with a donkey.

  More days, more bodies, rats scurrying in decayed flesh. More trenches dug, more paths, the land around him changed to this world that was called a war.

  But through it all the stretcher-bearers carried on. When there were enough stretchers two men did the work of six, carrying between them the awkward stretcher with its burden to be saved from death and anguish—no weapons, no protection, diving in even as the smoke from a shell rose into the air. No matter what the danger, they were there.

  ‘You’re a blinking hero, cobber,’ said one man, as he laid him in the line of wounded on the beach. ‘You and your donkey!’

  But Richard shook his head. ‘It’s the others who are the heroes. The donkey does the work, not me.’

  When there weren’t any stretchers, they worked without, carrying men on their backs or on bits of wood with sacks sewn in between. When the splints and iodine ran out they kept on working. Even bandages were rinsed in the sea and used again, still stained with another man’s blood.