Harry Vickers had left us almost the moment we stumbled onto the shingle. As Lambert and I walked further down to the sea, he had turned back towards Shrapnel Valley, determined to retrace his steps from that first day of the landing. He was a private then. Another two years would pass before he gained his commission in Flanders. Those were the days before he was wounded; before the shelling on the Menin Road gutted half his company and tore his young body to pieces.
I wonder if Vickers remembers what I no longer can, a time without pain, without fear, without nightmares. Our age of lost innocence. As I pace the cove with Lambert, I know Vickers is in the bush, swept away on the same running tide of remembrance.
It was broad daylight when Harry Vickers waded ashore. Shrapnel shook sparks from the shingle as he ran to take cover. He halted at the base of a small rivulet running down to the sea and looked back in astonishment at the beach behind him. Not so far away a party of seamen and engineers was struggling with a wireless pole, indifferent to the danger bristling around them. A thin line of wounded and dead marked the far end of the beach. All were casualties of the first battle for the ridges. Within a brief parameter, no more perhaps than eight or so yards, Vickers and the men who gathered around him could stand in comparative safety. Beyond that, rifle fire and shrapnel smashed the pebbled shore. Vickers shivered. There was an odd attraction in standing so close to death, a queer desire to plunge into the inferno.
An officer approached them.
‘Who’s in charge here – what company do you belong to?’ The urgency in his voice betrayed his confusion.
‘I am, sir, Corporal Collins, D Company.’
‘D Company? You should have come in a mile south of here.’
The officer turned back to the beach and watched another flotilla of vessels jostling for space on the shore. A line of men jumped too early from boats. Their heavy packs dragged them beneath the water.
‘Damn,’ he mumbled. ‘This is a mess, Corporal.’
He turned to face the men, lifting his voice, suppressing the panic. ‘Now I know you’ve been given a difficult task,’ even Vickers could see it was impossible, ‘but the covering force are up there waiting for you. Whatever you do you must keep up the advance.’
As if on cue, another Turkish shell ploughed into the ridge above them. It showered the beach with soil and debris.
‘Just keep up the advance,’ the captain roared above the clatter, ‘...and good luck to all of you!’ And with that he walked away, away towards the fire blazing on the shoreline and the next line of boats trying to land there.
And so the men of D Company began their feeble assault on the Turkish peninsula. Loose clay gave way beneath their feet. They kicked mud and grime into faces of those behind them. At times the climb was so steep that they literally dragged themselves upward. Bleeding hands clutched the mallee-like scrub that clung to the cliff. Aching bodies were pushed along with the butt of men’s rifles.
A few hundred yards from the shore, a soldier by Vickers’ side let go of the cliff and slipped down towards the gully. His body bounced through low scrub, tumbling and careering down the slope. The bleeding bundle came to a halt abruptly, slamming into another pile of flesh and khaki. Then a sharp push from behind.
‘Get your fuckin’ head down, you fool. It’s a sniper.’
Vickers lay almost vertically on the cliff face. A clump of thyme was torn apart by his chin. He felt the stems scratch against him as the smell of wet earth welled up in his nostrils. It was a minute before he dared to move at all and only then to tilt his head sideways.
‘Can you see anything?’
There was fear in Collins’ voice but also fury. Trust a bully, Vickers thought, to take the place behind him. He blinked against the sun and began to swing his head upwards. Again Collins tugged at his body.
‘Stay down you silly bugger, he’ll have his sights trained on us.’
But he hadn’t. In the second Vickers looked up he had seen the forward party stumbling down on their quarry. Men seemed to come from all directions, suddenly exposed, bitterly determined to flush out the enemy. For a moment it seemed the sniper had laid down his rifle and raised his hands in the air. If so, it made little difference. Collins loosened his hold on Vickers before a single shot rang out. Another body thumped the same wild course towards the shoreline. It landed face upwards on the ridge above them.
The enemy did not look anything like Vickers had expected. The Turk was not much more than a child. His complexion was strangely pale, his writhing body no larger than his own. Vickers had expected a big man with a curved sword, a pirate in a fez, a brute for whom killing was a pleasure. Not a clean-shaven boy crying for his mother.
‘I’ll have ’im,’ Collins cried out and pushed Vickers aside. He lifted his rifle and paused, the cold steel of the bayonet famished for flesh, blue with malice.
‘Imshi yalla, you bastard!’
And with that Collins drove the long straight steel into the heart of the already dying youth. Blood shot up into his face and the lifeless body careered through the bushes.
‘Fuckin’ snipers! Murderous Turkish bastards!’
Vickers looked into the eyes of his comrade, ablaze with a kind of madness. So unlike the soft blinking eyes of the boy Collins had just killed. Quite unexpectedly, Vickers found himself admiring the young man who shot at them from a shallow trench on a cliff face. Lying there alone, knowing that sooner or later the massing enemy would close in on him. And he must have known men like Collins would show no mercy. Vickers had prepared himself that morning for fear, and pain, and hardship but not for this.
The party resumed their stumbling journey up the ridge, but there was a reluctance in Vickers’ step that he had not felt before. This was Turkish soil. They were the invaders.
Ahead of them lay a small plateau, a level stretch of ground bordered by cliffs and gullies. And beyond that, the massive ridges that formed the back of the Sari Bair Range. He longed to stretch and straighten himself as they found their first secure footing. But a soft humming above his head persuaded him otherwise.
It was almost eight in the morning. Time had evaporated in the hurry and confusion. The men stumbled on through the scrub and slumped to a halt in an abandoned Turkish trench line. Around them lay a dozen or more wounded. A single stretcher-bearer moved quickly among them. Vickers knelt down beside them, reached for his canteen and raised it to the mouth of a gasping soldier. The wounded man clutched the flask and the precious fluid splashed over his tunic. Vickers steadied his hand and guided the bottle towards him. The water caught in the wounded man’s throat and he coughed it, choking, into the clay.
The medic tugged the bottle away. ‘Not for this lot, Private, you’d better hang on to it.’ He caught Vickers’ eye – a single glance said it all. No point wasting water on dying men. But Vickers had not yet accepted the callous economy of war. Fighting could turn men into animals or lend them the compassion of an angel. And it could make the hardest of men a coward. Corporal Collins was shivering now. You could smell the fear on him.
‘You’ll need a hand now, won’t you?’ It was Collins who spoke. ‘I mean to get this lot back down to the beach.’ The medic looked back angrily.
Vickers ran his eyes along the line of groaning men. He knew in an instant it was hopeless. ‘Let’s get a move on, Corporal, they’ll be sending help up later.’ It was what the medic wanted to hear and for a moment it seemed to still the cries around him. But as Vickers, Collins and his men moved on, the cries for water seemed to follow them. It was the most piteous thing Vickers had ever heard. Now every step he took filled him with a kind of loathing.
Beyond the plateau, the land plunged steeply into the scrub and gullies that crisscrossed the peninsula. Vickers had no map. In any event it would have been useless. As the bush deepened he lost sight of the second ridge, their immediate objective. At times they followed tracks left by men who, just a few hours before, had scratched through the same landscape, sometimes in pursuit of the Turk, at other times their quarry. But mostly the paths led to nowhere.
More than one track halted with the body of a soldier. Leading the party, Vickers would be first to stumble across them. Some were turned up to the sun, sprawled out as if the bullet had knocked them senseless. Others were twisted wrecks. Dried foam sat on their lips; brown clay caked their fingertips. At first he would pause a moment to close those eyes, or cloak a torn tunic around the body. But as the sun rose higher and the buzz of flies betrayed each waiting corpse, Vickers did his best to avoid them. Death seemed all the uglier for being so hurried.
Less than an hour from the beach, the men staggered onto another ridge enabling Vickers to see his position clearly. A little over half a mile wide, it looked out across the crumpled landscape to a third ridge about a mile distant. To the north, the land rose steadily, towards the summit of a mountain. The rise to their left was Baby 700, larger and more foreboding than the close-knit lines of the sketchy ordinance map. Beyond it was Chunuk Bair, almost the very peak of the peninsula. From windswept heights, a small party of the advance force already looked down on the Narrows. There was a burst of shrapnel overhead and Collins and Vickers flung their faces into the gravel. As the dust slowly settled a pair of polished boots blurred into focus.
Major Charles Brand was a professional soldier. Tradition and training taught him that the most important duty of an officer was to set an example to his men. All that morning he had stood proud and erect, barely bowing his head as bullets whizzed around him. Nor had Major Brand removed his Sam Browne belt. The most conspicuous part of an officer’s uniform, it marked him in the sights of every Turkish sniper. His manner to the men was calm and self-assured, but Brand lacked confidence in his own slim chance of survival.
‘What unit are you men from?’
‘D Company, sir.’ Collin’s voice was softer than the first time.
The major turned away. ‘And you lot?’
‘A Company, sir.’
Major Brand drew a deep breath and surveyed the line of panting men before him. Then he turned and looked out to the ridge some way distant. The full sun shimmered in the olive scrub, flashes of red sparked on the horizon. For over an hour Brand had sent each party on, keeping a rough note of their unit and number. As his eyes squinted against the glare he could see none of them. Each lot in turn had been swallowed up by ridge and gullies. Only the echo of gunfire and the occasional puff of shrapnel suggested anyone was out there.
Major Brand already knew that the landing was a failure. Instead of driving inland several miles, the Anzac forces were barely half a mile from the beach. The third ridge lay a further mile away, a murderous mile of cliffs and gullies. Another bullet slapped the bare clay.
Vickers’ voice shook Brand from his thoughts, ‘We’ll push on, sir?’
It was a brave offer from one so young. Brave, the major knew, but also pointless.
‘No, Private. Corporal – you and your men dig in. Sergeant,’ Brand swung about to the man beside him, ‘take your platoon and tell the advanced parties to withdraw. We may need you to cover us as we...’ he paused, reluctant even then to concede retreat was a possibility, ‘consolidate.’
‘The platoon is down to seven, sir.’
‘Then take a dozen of these stragglers!’
The sergeant barked out a series of commands.
Brand wished there was someone else to bear the burden of his decision. Another burst of shrapnel showered snow-white death on the ridges.
Lambert and I follow the track from Shrapnel Valley and find Vickers near the graves of men he’d helped to bury. On the summit of Plugge’s Plateau, twelve soldiers lie side by side, much as when he had left them.
‘We couldn’t get them down to the beach, you know. There wasn’t time. So they died up here. Cr-crying for water.’
‘I’m sure you did all you could, Harry.’
Lambert places his arms around Vickers’ shoulders.
‘They were heroes, Harry, each and every one of them.’
But as the rain falls softly around us I think of other lives snapped short here. No hero’s grave for them, just one corpse after another left to rot in the bushes. I look out across the ridges, shadowed by the coming storm. And from the corner of my eye, I watch Harry Vickers weeping. His face looks as white as limestone – brittle, worn, crumbling. I know there is something ancient in his pain, a grieving that somehow spans the ages.
‘We’d best get moving, Harry, there’s a good fellow.’ Lambert’s voice is gentle and consoling. ‘C’mon my son, must get back to camp before nightfall. Give me a hand will you, Bean?’
And so we clamber down the track, one damaged man supporting another, much like the trails of the wounded that had once weaved their way through these gullies. Less than halfway down, we pass a shattered stone embankment – I make a note of its position – all that remains of the old Australian Battery. Just nearby, in a clump of motley scrub, something white and sharp has worked its way to the surface.
Lord Curzon sipped his tea cautiously and returned the cup to its saucer. He frowned. Not even a Peer of the Realm could demand decent tea of foreigners. The Swiss had never quite mastered the art of tea-making. Tomorrow he would take coffee in the late afternoon. Calculated concession, as he so often told his subordinates, was at the core of successful diplomacy.
But so too were principles. The Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs had now entered its third month. As autumn gave way to winter, the Turkish delegation had grown more and more intractable and, to Lord Curzon, that Ismet Pasha fellow seemed the worst of them. Wooing the sympathies of Russia and the United States, sniping mercilessly at the Greeks, even playing off the interests of France and Great Britain. Frankly, the man was impertinent. Or perhaps Curzon had grown too used to privilege – as Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, elite of Britain’s landed elite, eldest son of Lord Scarsdale and youngest ever Viceroy of India, few had ever challenged his authority.
Now had it been India things would have been different. There, a timely show of force had put the north-west tribes in their place – British interests sharply secured by British bayonets. But negotiating international treaties had proved a much more difficult task for Curzon than governing all of India. And as far as he could make out, the Turks’ recent success in ousting the Greeks, that damned Chanak Crisis, had made Ismet Pasha even more cocky. To Curzon, the situation in the near East verged on the intolerable. A Turkish army had stared down the British garrison at Chanak and a new war contesting control of the Dardanelles had been only narrowly averted. Lausanne was called to put an end to all this nonsense, draw the borders firmly in the map, placate the Greeks and buy off that troublesome Ismet Pasha. The British Empire had taken four years to defeat the Ottoman army in war. Four years on they had yet to secure a lasting peace with Turkey.
Curzon pushed his muddy tea to one side and studied the papers before him. Yet another cable from the dominions. Australia and New Zealand were not present at the peace table, so it was Britain’s task to represent them. Even so, such incessant lobbying seemed in very poor taste, an unseemly and, Curzon suspected, far too democratic breach of protocol. Australia and New Zealand were dominions after all. Their interests quite subordinate to the greater good of Empire. And why make such an issue over the graves of their war dead? Britain had lost 20,000 in the Dardanelles, France 10,000 and India a figure he had never really bothered to remember. Still, he would put the case as forcefully as he could, if only to put Ismet Pasha in his place. And the truth of it was, Lord Curzon had a soft spot for commemoration. Britain’s Empire was built on blood, and honouring the dead simply went with the territory.
With that in mind, Curzon took his fountain pen and reached for a sheet of parchment. He had already outlined Britain’s principle demands: a demilitarised zone around the straits of the Dardanelles, free and unmolested passage for British shipping, the removal of that all-too-troublesome Turkish garrison. To these demands he would add one other:
Curzon felt no need to name the dominions, let alone outline the extent of the Anzac area they were claiming. Best to leave it at that and the Turks might just let it slip through. After all, Curzon thought to himself, even the French had surrendered their soil for British cemeteries, granting ownership ‘inviolate and perpetual’ to the Empire. Curzon slid the parchment across the polished wooden surface of the table. How clever, he thought, to appeal to ‘sentiment and national feeling’. Ismet Pasha could hardly argue with that, could he?
Ninety years after the proceedings at Lausanne, Dr Mark Troy sat in Victoria’s state library and opened a file marked Secret: Conference Transcript. It was one of the original copies, marked up for the printer with its pages much annotated by clerk, diplomat, and proofreader. Mark imagined the typeface striking the paper, each letter following the other a little louder, a little angrier.
Ismet Pasha roundly rejected the demand for British ownership of Anzac. The Allies could tend their graves, but Curzon had sought ‘a large expanse of land well outside the cemeteries’ – Turkish land which bore the bones of Turkish dead, a full three square miles of Gallipoli’s hills and gullies. The Turks, Ismet Pasha declared, venerated the abodes of the dead, but they would surrender that ground to no one. And such a demand was surely unprecedented.
In the quiet spaces of the heritage reading room, Mark imagined Curzon rising from his seat and thumping the table. Challenged by Ismet Pasha he proved all too ready to enlist the support of the dominions. At stake, after all, was the very stuff of Empire.
And then, in breach of the practiced precepts of diplomacy, Curzon gambled everything on a single outburst.
Mark put the pages back in their place, lending a semblance of order to his busy desk. He then unfolded a large coloured map appended to the volume, attempting to bend the creases in the right configuration. The librarian grimaced as a corner tore; young impetuous researchers took far too little care with the records. In a matter of seconds, the hills and gullies of the peninsula stretched out across the table. An area was shaded in red. From Ari Burnu, it stretched all the way from Chailak Dere in the north, beyond the ridge at Lone Pine, and halfway along Brighton Beach in the south – where the landing was originally intended. Mark’s eyes ran down to article 144 of the Treaty. The land to be granted by the Turkish Government will include in particular the area in the region of Anzac shown on the map.
‘Christ!’ Mark exclaimed. ‘Ismet Pasha gave way. Australia owns Anzac’. No richer gift could he imagine.
The duty librarian glared again in his direction. And as she did so, the young scholar reached for his mobile.
‘Your lieutenant got further ahead than any of us, miss. He was real brave. Nothing seemed to stop him. But we couldn’t bring him back ... trench just fell in on us. All that dirt, miss, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe...’
‘It’s all right, Private,’ Elsie Forrest sank a flannel in the bowl of water beside her. The liquid was grey and lukewarm. Still it cooled the blazing forehead of her patient. She watched a drip of moisture curl down his cheeks, tracing a path across his face, mingling with beads of perspiration. Slowly, she stroked him, pressing down with each movement of her hand, soothing the soldier as one would a crying baby, ‘Hush, hush now.’
Elsie knew she wouldn’t get much sense out of him. This was her fourth attempt to speak to the injured man, one of the hundreds they had brought in from Lone Pine, and every time she mentioned the collapse of the enemy trench the soldier relived that entombment.
‘You’re safe now, safe,’ she said. It was the word every soldier longed to hear, and the word not a single one believed in.
Suddenly, the wounded man began thrashing at the air. He then burrowed into the sheets as if the whole world was closing in on him.
‘Orderly, Orderly!’
It seemed an age before any help came. The critical ward at Alexandria General Hospital was overflowing with patients; beds filled every room, every stairway landing, every corridor. She threw her weight down on the flapping sheets and waited. Her body buffeted to and fro with the writhing of her patient.
‘Got him, miss, you rest now.’
The tremor seemed to subside as the orderly pinioned the body into place. Bound by leather straps to the bed, all the man could do was toss his head from one side to the other. He buried deep into the pillow as the orderly checked his tongue. The orderly had seen fits like this many times before, men thrashing with fear, pain or fever. The best that could be done was to immobilise the body and check that nothing blocked the airways. For the orderly, this had become routine. ‘Tying down the shakers’ he called it. A patient, Elsie thought, deserved better.
‘Easy soldier, easy,’ she stayed by his bed and continued to stroke his forehead with the tepid flannel. ‘You’re safe now, better now.’
‘He can’t hear you, miss.’ Dilation of the pupils confirmed he had already slipped from consciousness.
‘We don’t know that for certain, do we?’ It was not so much a reprimand as a statement of faith, at odds with all that her medical training had taught her. ‘It’s just that...’
For a moment the orderly tallied the ward’s priorities. The cot cases were quiet, bed 14 was no longer haemorrhaging, 3, 10 and 25 had been moved on to the mortuary ward, he could manage the others. He looked over to the exhausted nurse beside him. Sister Forrest had worked three shifts in a row, refusing to leave her charges. Perhaps it was best she lingered here now.
And with that, the orderly resumed his routine, pacing the rows of sweating, sick and wounded, rendering what little comfort he could, knowing men would probably die regardless. This was his third month in the critical ward; the second since the beds swelled with the bodies of men brought in from the August offensive. Unlike the young nurse, he had learned to dissociate himself from those who whimpered around him – a man would go mad otherwise. And so too, he thought, would Elsie.
It was almost two hours before the patient stirred again. Elsie slumbered beside him. The late afternoon sun streamed through the balcony’s wooden shutters. Heat drained what little nourishment sleep could offer. With a cough the soldier shuddered into consciousness. Elsie guided a glass of water to his lips.
‘Not too fast now,’ the wounded man was gulping. ‘Easy, easy.’
His head fell back on the pillow. ‘Thank you, miss.’
Elsie was taken aback by his sudden calmness but knew enough of nursing not to show it. She wondered if she should ask any more, but feared returning her patient to the dark dreams of the trenches. In truth, he had never left them.
‘I didn’t see the lieutenant killed, miss, none of us did. There was an explosion and he was wounded, that’s all I know for certain.’
Elsie was amazed by the precision with which he spoke, the care and the clarity.
‘Thought I saw him walking on, miss, holding his head, unsteady like, walking up to where the Turks were.’ It was as if the image was unfolding before him. And then the soldier drew the conclusion the young nurse had yearned for. ‘Mr Irwin could well have been captured, miss,’ the soldier coughed again, the last sentence jolted forward, ‘where he was ... he had ... had a better chance than the rest of us. Yes, that’s it ... captured. Must have been...’
The wounded man closed his eyes, struggling not to succumb to the memory again, longing for merciful oblivion. But Elsie imagined it for him, men buried alive as the trench collapsed, some struggling to the surface amidst the blaze of Turkish guns, most choking to death. Private Taylor was the only man recovered alive from that trench. The rest of his comrades were still posted as missing.
‘Thank you, Private, you rest now,’ Elsie rose as Private Taylor slipped back into sleep. Then she walked unsteadily from the crowded balcony the army called a hospital.
For well over an hour, Elsie drifted through the streets. Trams rattled by her, pigeons flapped around her heels, horsedrawn cabs cried out for her custom. By late afternoon, she was like a boat cut loose from its moorings, directionless, adrift on an ocean of grieving.
In something of a trance, she crossed the Corniche, dimly aware of the traffic weaving around her. She found herself on the seafront. The warm waters of the Mediterranean drifted in to the shore, stroking Alexandria’s pitted seawall as they had done for generations. A veil of spray floated around her. It carried the scent of distant lands, sheltered bays and half-forgotten islands. For Elsie, the sea was like memory unleashed. It purred with a thousand unimaginable meanings. She remembered the touch of him, the smell of him. She longed to run her fingers through his hair, ached to hold him again. She suddenly sensed someone else standing beside her.
‘Thought I might find you here. That orderly finally let you go then, he’s a bit of slave-driver isn’t he?’ Maggie spoke quickly. Intruders on grief have need for such haste. Then the sudden honesty. ‘Oh, look at you, love, you’re barely standing.’ Elsie was propped up against the wall, swaying as visibly as the shifting sea beneath them. She had not slept for as long as she could remember. This was her third day without eating. Maggie, almost twice Elsie’s size, slipped an arm around her friend, partly for support, mostly for comfort. She wanted to lift Elsie up and pull all the pain away from her. She brushed the hair away from her eyes. It was damp and sticky with sea spray.
Maggie remembered a happier time. Not so long ago, they had stood on the heaving deck of their hospital ship, rounding the Bight en route to Albany, where all the ships of the Anzac convoy would anchor. The two seemed so much younger then, full of the excitement of the voyage, convinced their war would yield romance and adventure. She remembered a frosty sheet of water lashing up and washing them in its fury. The two of them had giggled with surprise, thankful for the brimming sea and a wind that sang with wonder. Nothing, she thought, had made them feel more alive: standing out there, with all the world’s elements whirling around them.
And now look at them. Maggie held her friend a little closer. The great sea that carried them there had crashed to a standstill on the cobbled pavements of Alexandria.
‘Come on, let’s find somewhere for you to rest, somewhere you can find space for yourself.’
Maggie’s first instinct was to take her back to their quarters. She soon decided against it. Far from home and desperate for distraction, the small colony of Australian nurses was a frenzy of activity. The long hot days and nights of caring for their charges were forgotten in a whirl of outings, parties and adventures. There was never a problem in finding handsome officers to escort them. Elsie too had found her young man – different to the rest perhaps. Found him and now lost him. For a moment, Maggie was thankful she’d found none of these young men appealing. Elsie’s company, however glum, was at least a constant, and now she wouldn’t be wrested away. It was a selfish thought and Maggie knew it. But why not be a little selfish when every day was giving, giving, giving?
‘I know where we’ll go,’ Maggie decided, ‘those tearooms in the gardens, I know you like it there,’ and for just an instant there was a spring in the young woman’s step. She pulled Elsie away from that melancholy sea and turned to the throbbing heart of the city.