Greene argues that the Unknown Digger was still alive and writing in Christmas 1916 and into 1917, but died in May 1917. His estimate is the latest date in a long line of hypothetical dates. And yet, we know only too well that Alan Lewis died on the fields of Har Megiddo in September 1918. Either Freedland, Greene, Whitlock et al., who have analysed the poems within an inch of their lives, are incorrect in their assumptions, or my theory is wrong. So here I find I must part ways with contemporary theoretical assumptions, and plunge headfirst into the lonely world of conjecture.
Freedland and Greene both came to their conclusions for the death of the Unknown Digger by inferring that the final poem in the collection ‘must have been written around the time of his death.’123 Freedland argues that ‘nothing but death would stop a wordsmith of the Unknown Digger’s ability and prodigious output from continuing to write’.124 In fact, all historiographical theories about the Unknown Digger’s death come about because ‘the literary world has always assumed the order in which Hayden found the poems is the order in which they were written’.125 But if we disregard the presumed timeline of written poems – if neither ‘Bully Beef’ nor ‘Percute Velociter’ were the last poem the Unknown Digger wrote – then all options remain on the table, and Alan Lewis remains as logical a candidate as any other.
If we examine Lewis and the 10th Light Horse’s movements through 1917 and 1918, we notice parallels with the poetic themes and imagery of many of the Unknown Digger poems. On 9th December 1917, the Turkish army surrendered Jerusalem to the Allies. It was the 10th Light Horse who were the first troops to pass through the city and accept their surrender. Leading the column was Lieutenant Alan Lewis. In a letter home from the period, Lewis wrote:
Leading the men through those ancient streets, I felt like both victor and vanquished. Gallant crusader and unholy infidel. It is a strange feeling to know you are walking through the most significant moment of your life.126
Here Lewis makes a reference to the seasoned campaigners, riding alongside him in the saddle for many years. In ‘Shearing Season’, the shearers celebrate with an ice-cold beer after ‘a long/bloody crusade’.127 In ‘Caught and Disembowled’, the captain of the cricket team recalls leading his team out for the latest season as ‘boys/But now look at ’em’, and after a particularly long slog in the field late on the fifth day of a Test, even calls them ‘veterans of the game’.128 The similarities are too frequent to dispel: surely even Jennifer can see that?
Assuming the Unknown Digger kept writing up until his death in September 1918, it is a simple matter of rethinking the order of the poems. Forget Hayden’s assumed chronology, and look where the evidence points: ‘Assault on a Machine Gun Nest’ is not one of the earliest poems, but rather a cryptic reference to the Battle of Es Salt, written as late as May 1918. ‘Mate & His Pack’ wasn’t written on the evening of the regiment’s disembarkation for Gallipoli, readying for the battle to come, but rather is a reflection of the nomadic lifestyle of the 10th Light Horse and their long journey across the desert toward Damascus. With a little rearranging, the poems of the Unknown Digger fit perfectly into the timeline of Alan Lewis’s military record, up to and including his final, fated days in the fields of Har Megiddo. The final, conclusive evidence for Alan Lewis’s authorship can be found in one of the Unknown Digger’s most famous poems, ‘Ken Oath’, a poem that I am convinced is the final Unknown Digger poem, written only days, even hours, before his tragic death in Har Megiddo. ‘Ken Oath’ is often the first poem young Australians learn in primary school. This humorous, tragic, bittersweet ode to mates everywhere contains many immortal lines, which are regularly shouted out at sports games and graduation ceremonies, and used as dedications and epitaphs. The crucial point that proves to me that this poem was written by Alan Lewis in Har Megiddo is the final stanza, when the tired boys arrive at the bar after a long day in the bush, and are greeted by the publican, sorrowfully proclaiming that the pub has run out of beer. I ask, what better approximation of Armageddon could any Australian possibly hope to produce?129
How heavy, exactly, is a rifle, with the bayonet attached? I’ve researched it, of course, but the numbers, when you read them on the page, don’t mean a lot. I tried to approximate the weight, using an old broom handle, and some of my downstairs neighbours’ dumbbell weights, but they kept sliding down the pole, and I had to keep rearranging them, and the gravitas of the situation was ruined. So I went down to the Imperial War Museum and asked to hold a replica, for research purposes, and stood out on the grass, with the polite man in charge of First World War weaponry watching me, and held it to my shoulder and walked ten metres up the gravel driveway and ten metres back, and aimed it at the tip of the dome, but then the polite man asked for it back, and I immediately forgot how heavy it had been in my arms.
It’s not until you lose it that you start to question its weight.
And it’s not until you’ve held the wood and metal, cradled it in your arms, or lugged it through mud and blood and soil for days on end, that you understand the heavy–baby weight of it, the load of it, the way it becomes an extension of your own body, an extra limb that follows, turns where you turn, jumps when you jump, or pushes back into you, against your shoulder, with the force of the bullet discharged from the barrel, the ease with which the long elegant weight of the bayonet slides through the air and into the body lying before you with the lightest of caresses, rolling forward and slicing through skin the way you would reach out and touch someone’s face in darkness, your fingers light as sundust, glittery through the air onto their eyelids, their nose, their full lips, the gentle curve of their cheek. The butterfly flutter of their eyelashes.
But instead of feeling the unmistakable features that make up the face you know, you find a different nose, foreign lips, and you find you are holding a stranger in your hands, and with the ease of a stolen kiss and the simple roll of the wrists that slices open a belly, you rock your weight forward, into your palms, into your thumbs, and pushing back, you crush your nails into the wet sheaths of the stranger’s eye sockets, until all you feel is damp slop against the darkness in front of you, and the rifle in your hands, your bloody thumbs, come away so easily, so lightly, from the body before you that was once a living person that you wonder, for a breath, if you did anything at all, or if all it took was your presence, your being here in this moment, holding this weight in your hands, this constant pull toward the warm welcoming earth beneath your feet, this solidity of wood and metal, this ache in your muscles, this extension of your arms, this living part of you that leaves you wondering if all it took was you being here in this specific place at this specific time for what happened to have happened as it happened.130
SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. JANUARY 1918.
First clue is a drop in pressure, the sudden headache, the horses throwing their heads back. Over the horizon they see the sandstorm approaching, like a wave of dark water rolling in from out the back, breaking across the plain. No time to avoid it. Barely time to pull scarves across mouths, to button shirts, to lean down and calm the horses. The sunlight withers. They are thrown into sudden night. Against exposed skin, the sand tears, flicks, pierces – tiny pinpricks of pain – goosebumps, pins and needles. The air is thick and sharp, peppering their uniforms, spraying dust.
He ducks his head, squints, but he can’t see more than a foot in front of Kelly’s ears. The horses scream, closing their eyes. Blinded, they walk through the storm. He pulls his hat lower and breathes in dust. He tastes the bitter, alkaline powder on his tongue, coating his throat. It’s in his ears, up his nose, in the pores of his skin.
Kelly grunts, turning her head back toward him, but he pushes her on, into the maelstrom, through the gritty air. He reaches a hand forward to rub her mane, and a vivid blue spark jumps from her matted hair into his palm. He pulls back in pain, flexing his fingers.
As fast as it arrives, it is gone again, blowing across the plains and through the scrub, back the way they came. The
air left behind is empty and thin. He pulls the scarf down from his mouth and takes a sip from his canteen. His saliva is thick and white. He pours a little water onto his face and neck, and looks around. The men have separated in the storm, gone walkabout in all directions. They turn and ride back towards him, their faces flawlessly divided above the bridge of the nose into dark and light; burnt and raw.
He wipes the grime from his eyes and tastes chalky bitterness. Kelly snorts, and wiggles her ears.
‘All right, girl. Almost there,’ he lies.
My love.
The dust devils have been through camp and upended everything, tearing out tents and riling up the horses. The willy-willies pick up all sorts and fling them, whirling, into the sky. Each afternoon I pray for the Freo Doctor, and each night I lie awake with the bugs, and hate this place. Only exhaustion brings me sleep.
One of the new boys has a ritual he performs each night, a particular kiss, on a particular photograph, a muttered goodnight to the stars. We make fun of him, of course, call him sentimental and soft. Then we lie awake and worry while he sleeps soundly. I wish I had a photograph of you to keep me company. Would that be possible; do you think?
The locals have tired of us. They used to clamour for our good favour, offering the ‘Billjims’ the best products, dusting off the gold plates, the silver, for our arrival. We have lost our novelty. I miss Red. If he was marching with us, the children would gather in small groups and point. I would pay them in chocolate to point and snigger, teach them to say Ginger or Sunburn and then laugh at his shock. My tent is eerie quiet – strange what you can grow accustomed to.
It feels about time to leave – we are fidgety and nervous, even Kelly has been temperamental lately, she almost threw me off yesterday. Other than that, the days have passed in their usual monotony – sand and meal and sleep and ride and meal and sand, repeat, ad nauseam. Add sunstroke. Add poisoned wells and invisible assailants.
Add missing you to that list.
Apologies for the scribble, apologies for the dark. Light me up with stories of your own. I need your touch.
Yours, longingly.
He dreams of Gallipoli. They all do. Sometimes he’ll scream himself awake, drenched, the harsh canvas of his bedroll sticking to his back. He’ll peel himself off the mattress and crawl outside with a saddle blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and sleep out under the stars. He won’t be alone. Two or three of them will sit in a circle, sharing cigarettes and tall tales, waiting for reveille.
He hates the dreams. He hates dreaming them. He hates the control they have over him, so he prefers to lie awake. He refuses to sleep, preferring the endless tiredness to their hold. He thinks himself weak, and like the thousand men sleeping around him, pretends nothing is wrong, refuses to discuss it, picks himself up and spits out the dust and carries on carrying on. The night echoes with their cries.
He hates the way the trench is different in the dream. He hates the paper cut-out way it dissolves to thin lines in his peripheral. He hates the way the pocket watch in his hand weighs down his arm, the way the clock hands flicker, like fireflies, backwards and forward. Hours passing by like heartbeats. Minutes stretching into eternity.
He rolls over and looks at the lump across the tent, listening to the steady in and out. His watch says ten minutes to three – ten more minutes of precious sleep until the bugle sounds reveille. He sighs, sits up and tugs his boots on in the dark. Out into the coolness of the night air, the brightness of the moon shocking his half-closed eyes. The sound of boots in sand has become his life, the quiet murmur of the horses, the gentle familiar sounds of the night.
Kelly has her usual spot at the far end of camp, down past the saddles laid out before each mount in preparation for the new day. He trails his hand along the picket line the horses are tethered to; each morning the men brush them down, feed them, talk to them. They say what they can’t say to each other. What he can’t say to anyone else. Not to Rose, not to Red or Nugget. Not to Nancy. The horses nod, and shake their heads, and laugh their whinnied laughs at all their insecurities. The horses listen.
Kelly waits for him, pawing at the ground, gouging deep ruts in the dirt. Her eyes lamplight-huge in the moonlight, knowing which nights he’ll sleep, which nights he’ll toss and turn and kick in the dark. He takes her head in his hands, pulls her close and whispers in her ear. He pops the bridle over her head and she gives him one of her slow winks, the playful glint in her eye more sheepdog than horse. Her tongue is sandpapery in his palm as she nibbles on the sugar cube he’s saved for her.
He throws the saddle onto her back, and fastens the buckles, pulled close to her, the smell of home and the farm in the hard muscle of her shoulder. The coarse hair of her coat is firm against his temple, down her neck, the thick black mane like matted, wet beach hair. In the dark, only the white line across her eyes is visible, peering at him like her namesake, ready for mischief and adventure, swivelling to meet him then turning towards the open desert; pleading, hopeful. He walks her toward the camp gates as the bugle begins to call. From the surrounding tents, he hears the murmuring and grunts of his men. Heads poke from under tarpaulins. Somewhere across camp someone calls out for the bugler to ‘shut the fuck up’.
He hooks his boot into the stirrup, pushing off the ground with his right leg and throwing himself up and onto Kelly’s back. He’s spent more time in the saddle than his own bed recently, riding from camp to camp – new orders sending them first one way, then the other. The horses are exhausted, and the men are grumpy, and all he can offer is the promise of a nearby bed, the dream of sleep, hot food and fresh water. He trots up and down the lanes of tents, calling for the members of first patrol to be in their saddles in five minutes. The horses grow restless. They’ve lost weight, ribs jutting from sagging skin. The endless heat, the dry arid air, the constant film of dust. He’s watched horses eat their own shit, rolling their fodder around in the dirt and eating sand in their hunger. They must wait until the regiment returns to camp for the evening before getting their allotted two buckets of water, which sometimes takes hours to find. Once the horses have been fed and watered the men can worry about themselves, and fall asleep exhausted under the stars.
Kelly never complains. She never bucks and fights like some of the other horses, never drops her head and refuses to meet his eye. He knows where she’ll be each morning, and she trusts him to find food, to bring her water, to brush her down at the end of a march. She walks him back toward the camp gate to wait.
Slowly, like wildflowers blooming, men ride up from the darkness. First come the new recruits, the ones still eager to impress him, trying to curry his favour. Next are the post-Gallipoli recruits, the ones who made up the numbers while he recovered in Lemnos. He doesn’t know them. He doesn’t care. Last of all, laughing among themselves, grizzled and leathery, come the Gallipoli veterans. They make him wait. If any of the others tried to do the same, he would play the officer card, spit flecking from his lips, but he allows the Gallipoli vets this one concession. They know he won’t say anything. He has become his father. He accepts that. There are worse fates.
He’s aware of the way the men talk about him. Silent. Shell-shocked. The stranger leading them. He tries not to think about it. It’s easier if he doesn’t remember names, or stories, or faces. Bookworm, they say. Loner. It’s easier if he doesn’t make friends.
Kelly shuffles her feet in nervous expectation, dancing her own little Kelly foxtrot, and he holds an open palm on her neck to calm her, while the men form up around him.
When they’re assembled, they ride.
He loses himself in the rhythm of the hooves, the repeated takatuk, takatuk of metal horseshoes thudding into the hard earth. Nancy. Her mock disapproval, the faces she made when she didn’t think he was watching. He pulls himself lower, closer to Kelly’s neck as her strides lengthen, the music of the ride changing. Remembers the way Nancy’s eyebrows relaxed, her natural frown, giving her a look of righteous indignation eve
n as she let loose with a tirade of filth worthy of some of the oldest hands in the regiment.
The men fan out behind him as they race across the plain.
To make her sigh, to hear the little tutting noise she’d make when his jokes fell flat, the trim edges of her smile. The ground races beneath Kelly’s feet. And the child. His child, he has to keep reminding himself. She sent him a blurred photograph on her first birthday. Two black eyes peering into the lens, peering out at him. Judging. He kicks his heels in harder, pushes Kelly to speed up. Faster, away from it all. The men behind race to keep up. He sends her half his pay packet each month, all he can afford, but she writes every few weeks. Sometimes he pretends he can read love in her words. Sometimes he can’t bring himself to open the letter. He can’t get a feel for the baby. For his baby.
Kelly is foaming at the mouth, sweat on her haunches, each ragged breath a burst of frost. He can hear one of the troopers behind him yelling, begging him to stop. He pushes them harder.
They are flying.
The sand streams by beneath, like he could be ten thousand miles up and the tiny pebbles huge boulders, the brown brush vast forests. High up above him a black spot circles in the ever-brightening sky. He slows Kelly to a trot, then a walk, then halts entirely, her nostrils flared large, her flanks steaming in the dawn. The men pull in on either side, and he points a gloved finger up at the dot. Kelly stamps her feet like a petulant child. The drone is in his ears, a summer evening croak of mosquitoes and crickets, of flies in his room buzzing by his eyes. Slowly, the plane climbs. They watch for a minute, as it cuts through the wisps of pinking morning cloud, spinning, turning, banking, climbing higher and higher until it wings away, off in the direction of the Allied lines. He sits for a moment, perched in the saddle, listening for a return, but the hum of the engine fades, and all he can hear is Kelly’s sniffle of impatience, his own breath, the thump of his heartbeat in his ears.
Where the Line Breaks Page 18