In deep night we lead our horses to the campsite, dismount at the edge of the tent line and walk towards the light of the fire. Hammond has sited the base camp with an engineer’s precision. The quarters of the Australian War Graves Unit are set low in a gully, sheltered from the wind that whips around the peninsula. Firelight throws our shadows and Lambert shudders as he watches our ghostly forms drift across the landscape.
‘So you’re back then gentlemen. Didn’t think you’d be out quite this long. There’s cause to take some care you know,’ Hammond holds a bullet up for all to see. ‘Unexploded ordinance. It’s everywhere.’
Keen to make his point Hammond then throws the cartridge into the fire and an instant later, it flies back out at him. The angry crack sends the horses rearing. For the last five years, Hammond has lived in constant danger. That particular bullet wasn’t meant for any of us.
‘You’ll be hungry, I expect.’ The mention of food lifts Lambert’s spirits instantly. ‘I’ll get one of the Indians to cook you up a curry.’
Curry was the chosen food of Anzac. It disguised the taste of rancid meat, sweetened sour bread, made even the weevils palatable. Vickers once told me he’d traded a week’s rations for a single meal with the Indians. Swarthy chefs would gather up Gallipoli’s thyme and grind down the saffron spices of the Orient. The chatter of their kitchens comes back to me as I imagine the cloves of onion and garlic that hung from the colonel’s tent poles. I can almost hear the sound of mustard seeds popping and smell the amber oil fusing with fenugreek and cumin.
‘Don’t suppose there’s anything to wash it down with,’ Lambert is ever the optimist. ‘A red goes rather well with curry. An excellent but young wine for preference – to be imbibed, I think, in rather large quantities.’
‘That lot would disagree with you,’ Colonel Hammond gestures towards what he likes to call the Turkish enclosure. The Islamic injunction against alcohol has always been an affront to a digger’s sensibilities. ‘I can’t offer you any burgundy, Lambert. Left my last case on the Somme, don’tchaknow.’
I note Hammond’s parody of a clipped British accent. It is perfect.
‘But there’s the local brew, my boy. I warn you. It’s got a kick to it.’
And so within the hour we are sitting beside the fire, tending the flames and chewing our bully beef as we had done at Anzac. The heat of the fire reddens my face and thaws my frozen hands. I savour the warmth of companionship.
‘So you got down to the beach then?’ Hammond hardly need ask.
‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘and to the cemeteries.’
‘Call them that, do you?’ Again, Hammond’s voice turns. He is short-tempered at the best of times and this topic touches a raw nerve with him. ‘Turks have made a mess of our cemeteries. Even in the old graveyards, Shrapnel Valley and Brown’s Dip, it’s taken me weeks to find where the men are buried. Grim business.’
I imagine it is. Already we’d seen Hammond’s men pushing their steel probes into the earth, seeking the soft ground or the blunt obstruction of a body. Bodies – after four years you could hardly call them that.
‘You know, Hammond...’ Vickers runs his fingers through his hair as he speaks, ‘...we would like to know why the Turks tore down our crosses. Was it just religious zeal – or did they really h-hate us. I find all this so hard to-to believe.’ His voice trails off towards the end, clouded by emotion.
Hammond is appalled. ‘Pull yourself together, man. And don’t be so damned naive. Even though we thought the Turk was a fair fighter, what happened here shows their true colours. Islamic zeal, I call it; they did it because they’re fanatics.’ Hammond chews his meat vigorously and spits gristle into the flames. ‘Bad crowd, the Turks, I tell you.’
Lambert motions towards a party of Turks milling by a separate campfire. Some are bearded, some not, several wearing the remains of ragged uniforms, their heads covered with a kind of makeshift turban. They seem dark and sinister. ‘Fanatics you say, Hammond?’ He reaches with some deliberation towards the bottle, ‘Yes, well, you’ve got to admit, they do look the part, don’t they? Rapine and sudden death in the eyes of every one of ’em! Awfully like a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, eh Vickers?’
I remember the eyes of that Turkish officer in no-man’s-land blinking at the sight of so much carnage and I ponder his final words: ‘At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep.’ He held a tiny copy of the Koran in the palm of his hand, his lips quivered with prayers across an acre of the slain. There was no fanaticism in him, only in the orders that laid waste a generation.
At that very moment another Turkish officer walks into the centre of our circle. ‘Perhaps they burnt the crosses because they were cold, gentlemen,’ he rubs his hands by the fire, ‘far colder than when you English left Anzac. Crosses were the only wood left to burn on Gallipoli.’
He takes a cigarette from a silver case, taps it three times on the lid, then, as if remembering something, returns it to the case. ‘I am Zeki Bey,’ he continues, ‘Major Zeki Bey. I am here as your liaison officer – as agreed in Constantinople.’ He raises a smart hand in salute and the party leaps to its feet. Vickers and Hammond return the compliment, as brisk and as sharp as if they were on a parade ground. ‘And the war is over, gentlemen. Open old wounds and they will only bleed again.’ He opens the case again and offers each of us a cigarette. It is the same dark tobacco I had smoked in 1915 and barely a week ago at Maidos. All but Hammond accept.
For a moment we consider the new arrival. The major has the pleasant complexion of a tanned European, a slight, dark moustache, deep brown eyes and a quick smile. His smart uniform is not unlike the German field grey with red shoulder patches, black gaiters and a Turkish helmet of dark felt material. I suppose he is slightly under average height, about the same height in fact as Vickers. There is the same sensitivity in his face, too – a softness about the eyes and the lips. But unlike Vickers the major seems strong, self-assured, confident. Zeki Bey has the bearing of a man who’s known victory and defeat and who treats those two imposters just the same.
Vickers is the first to respond.
‘Actually this was the Australian section of the line, Major, and we placed those crosses there for the families of the dead, families grieving for graves they’d never see. The English held Helles and Suvla. Mostly, we Australians s-s-served at Anzac.’
‘Of course. But Australians, New Zealanders, Indians – you all fought for England. From the other end of the world you came to fight and die for England’s Empire.’
‘It’s our Empire too,’ Lambert barks back. ‘And Australians to a man are proud of that!’
Vickers says nothing.
‘Of course,’ the major is a man who knows the virtues of diplomacy. ‘Perhaps, though, we were all just soldiers here, we did our duty whatever our nation. We all fought, bled and froze to death here. Your crosses were raised for the living as much as for the dead, Colonel Hammond, and for the living they were taken.’
At a signal none of us had seen, one of the Turkish workmen places another stool by the fireside. Zeki Bey quietly assumes the role of host, a reminder of whose land these men had died on. ‘Please, shall we not be seated?’
He pulls out the stool intended for himself and gestures to Vickers to take it. Harry Vickers smiles meekly, mingling gratitude with embarrassment. There is an elegance in the Turkish officer’s movements that seems almost statesmanly. Trust, warmth and affection are all signalled by this single gesture. Hammond grimaces.
‘And what about the graves that were looted? Did that serve the interests of the living as well?’ The colonel tosses back his drink, as if offering a challenge.
Zeki Bey replies without a second’s hesitation. ‘Now that, my friend, was never the work of Turkish soldiers. Isolated marauders, bandits deep in the mountains. I have seen Turkish graves looted in much the same way.’ He gestures towards Helles. ‘The Ottoman army respected the bodies of the dead. We repaired your cemeteries.’
Hammond has had enough of this. He will not be lectured to by any Turk. He looks with contempt at the major’s neatly tailored uniform, so unlike the rough khaki of men he was proud to command.
‘So you “repaired” our cemeteries, did you? Bloody ruined them more like. I’ve seen what your Ottoman army did,’ Hammond points down towards the gully. ‘Mounds of earth made up to look like graves with no bodies beneath them; little circles of stones anywhere and everywhere. It’s a disgrace, Major. The Australian Government, the Australian people protest in the strongest possible terms.’
‘And where are our cemeteries, Colonel? Why are their no markers for the graves of our martyrs? Who has blotted out their memory?’
By now the two men are on the edge of their seats. I am worried. This is getting out of hand. The Turks can make things hellishly difficult for us and the last thing we want is to lose so valuable an informant. All through my life I’ve played the role of peacemaker – dutiful son, diligent prefect, disinterested scholar, fair-minded sportsman. Tonight is no exception.
‘I say, Hammond, we’re all rather tired.’ It is the best I can think of. ‘Why don’t we take this up in the morning? Major, are you...’ He understands my signal.
‘I have my quarters prepared already, thank you.’ As Zeki Bey rises from the stool, the Australians leap to their feet.
‘Please gentlemen, don’t trouble yourselves. We will speak in the morning, insha’Allah. Goodnight Colonel, Captain, Monsieur Bean, Monsieur Lambert.’
We wait for the major to walk well away before any of us speak again.
‘Cheeky bugger knows who we are,’ muses Lambert.
‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘and what brings us here.’
I emerge from my tent not long after sunrise, stooping low to clear the canvas cover that serves as a doorway. Height has always posed a problem at Anzac: the taller the man the deeper the trench or the dugout. I look through the mist of grubby glasses and survey the early morning campsite. Vickers is already up, seated on a camp stool and stroking the embers of last night’s fires. To my left I can hear the commotion of the ‘native camp’ where a party of bickering Greeks and Turks are dividing their rations for breakfast. To my right, the Walers are being groomed and fed. They snort steam into their muzzle bags and stamp at the frozen earth. It is as if they miss the lush valley pastures of Australia.
‘Did they wake you, Charley?’
‘No, couldn’t sleep much last night anyway.’
‘Me neither – the storm I expect.’
‘Yes, must have been.’
Both of us knew that was far from the truth.
Vickers removes his jacket, turns one sleeve inside out and continues a task that has occupied much of his time. With quiet deliberation, he runs a burning cigarette slowly up the seam. It hisses with delight every so often.
‘Bloody lice, eh Charley,’ Vickers turns out the second sleeve. ‘I just can’t seem to get rid of them.’
On the ridges above us, the winter sun shines its lemon light. I wonder if it has warmed the waters of the cove, wonder how many times Hammond, Vickers and I had swum there summers ago, washing the insects and the grime from our bodies. The waters of the Aegean were really the only defence against the parasites of Anzac. Singeing them with cigarettes brought but temporary relief. Within the hour, the old enemy would rally, regroup, and resume their shabby war of harassment.
‘You’ll find the fleas an even greater challenge, Captain.’ Hammond appears brandishing a jug of rum. ‘In fact, I’d wager a whole colony of them have been camped here since Anzac.’ He moves towards a camp stool and stretches his feet towards the embers. ‘Nothing to be done about it, of course, can hardly drown the buggers in the Aegean this time of year. God, it’s cold this morning. Sakar! Fetch some firewood.’
And with that he takes a swig of rum, and offers it first to me and then, more reluctantly, to Vickers. Real men could take a drink at dawn but Vickers seems too soft – he could kill lice but could he kill the Germans?
‘Ah, hair of the dog, is it?’ Lambert’s instinct for alcohol has again proved infallible. He slumps down on a camp stool. ‘Army issue rum – how I’ve missed it. Pass it here, my good fellow.’
He takes a long deep swig from the jug, and I can sense the warmth flowing through his body.
‘Ah, that’s brought me back to life. Best have another dram before that Turkish fellow joins us. Now, Hammond,’ he turns to the old soldier without returning the rum, ‘what about breakfast?’
Breakfast this morning is much the same as it was four years ago. To the closing hours of the war, the military bureaucracy in London worked on the assumption that the fighting might never end and dutifully produced enough Peek Frean Biscuits to feed an army for a century. In the hands of Hammond’s Indian cook, the wood-hard wafers have been ground to powder and stewed to a kind of porridge. Dollops of jam are all that make it edible. The bully beef tastes much the same as I remember it. It is as stringy and as salty as the rancid bacon. Again, curry brings a better flavour to the meal, blunted, in Lambert and Hammond’s case, by the sharp tang of alcohol.
Zeki Bey joins us not long after breakfast. This morning he has taken dried dates and apricot, yogurt and honey, vine leaves stuffed with rice and a glass of apple tea sweetened with sugar. The Ottoman Empire may have lost the war, but in the culinary stakes the Turks conquered Britain long ago. He comes down to the camp on horseback. A kind of authority travels with him, what the Maori troops would have called mana.
As the party prepares to leave I fling the last dregs of my tea into the fire. It spits and steams in protest. Zeki Bey’s handsome stallion prances as we mount our stout and grudging Walers.
‘And where should we go this morning, gentleman? To Ari Burnu down Korku Deresi?’
‘Anzac Cove, more like,’ Hammond knows that war is always a matter of geography, ‘straight down Monash Gully.’ He kicks the Waler sharply in its side and we begin the jolting descent to the beaches.
The cove is peaceful. Last night’s storm has blown to a standstill in the gullies. Frost sits on the earth like an icy carpet. Rocks and twigs shine white in the sun, as if a child has sprinkled the world with icing sugar. From the slight rise of Ari Burnu, I can see the debris of war scattered on the seabed. There is the wreck of a landing craft, weapons and crates, even the rotting hull of a monitor that had strayed too close to the shoreline. Water seeps through shingle, a rushing sound mingling with a breeze. I remember plunging into the same Aegean what now seems an age ago. I wonder how so fearful a place can also be so beautiful.
‘Can I ask you something, Major, man to man, soldier to soldier, now that the war is over?’
Vickers pats his Waler as he speaks, as if the question might alarm the horses.
‘Of course, Captain, and I am bound to answer honestly.’
‘We came ashore at the wrong beach you know, too far north, right at the foot of these wretched ridges. Now, if we had come in at Brighton Beach, on that wide open bay, we could have made it across, couldn’t we?’ Vickers speaks quickly now, rushing to reassure himself. ‘We co-co-could have marched east, right across the plains, straight to the other side of the peninsula.’
Zeki Bey smiles and looks patiently into Vickers’ eyes.
‘But, Captain, that is where one would expect an army to land,’ he nods towards the south, ‘and we had fortified that coastline.’
A silence follows. Zeki Bey dismounts and lifts what would serve as a walking stick from the ground. A kind of unease spreads through our group. Some truths are too terrible to be confronted.
‘How extensive were the defences, Major?’ I reach for my notebook and pencil.
Zeki Bey smiles. ‘All the barbed wire we could find, Monsieur Bean, trenches of course, machine guns sited to enfilade the beaches. We had orders to open fire the moment the boats came within range.’ The major scratches a map in sand. His stick rubs furiously as if scrubbing out a battalion. ‘But most important was our artillery...’ now his stick pounds the earth ‘...mountain guns, Howitzers and the heavy battery at Gaba Tepe.’
‘Beachy Bill?’
‘Yes,’ Zeki Bey sighs disapprovingly, ‘that is what the English called her. Our gunners had the range of Brighton Beach,’ he takes a resolute breath and scans the horizon. ‘Shrapnel sprayed from those guns could sweep aside an army.’
‘So, what you’re saying then,’ Vickers pats his mount more sternly, ‘is that the landing wouldn’t have worked, not even if we came ashore in the ri-right place?’
Zeki Bey turns to his left and points out across the line of the cove. ‘What do you see, Captain?’
I am unsure of his tone. It is gentle, coaxing, much like a father teaching a son, and something else, something more familiar.
‘Well, nothing really, you can’t see much at all from here, the view of Bri-Brighton Beach,’ Vickers turns his head towards the cliff face as words begin to fail him. ‘It’s bloc ... blocked by the headland.’
‘Exactly, my friend. We might have shelled this beach but we could not see it, not from Gaba Tepe or any position beyond. And the ridges you found so hard to climb blocked the fire from our guns.’
Vickers’ eyes run up the stubborn slopes. I can see he views them differently.
‘But this place was stoutly defended,’ I protest. ‘We had over 2000 casualties on the first day alone.’ I remember the faces of the men who’d rushed the beaches and the gullies, holding on when everything around them had gone wrong, fearing death, but even more fearing failure.
Zeki Bey had seen the same men on the other side at Anzac.
‘Casualties yes, but not so many in the early morning. Then, Charles Bean, you know the English had the advantage. Ari Burnu was lightly defended, not 200 men and at first no artillery.’
Zeki Bey pauses a moment, well aware of the scale of the myth he is challenging. ‘You say Anzac was the wrong beach; I think, Captain, for you it was the right one.’
I feel a shiver run down my spine. From the day of our defeat, a generation of British generals had acquitted themselves of the landing. Some argued that currents had drawn the landing craft north. Others that cunning Turks had moved the navy’s markers. But in truth there was no need to move them. If the Anzac forces had landed further anywhere else, it would have been a bloodbath. At one and the same instant, soldier and historian drew exactly the same conclusion. The wrong beach wasn’t the reason the landing had failed. From start to finish an attack anywhere on that coast was doomed to failure.
‘It was all just m-m-madness, then,’ Vickers gulps his words, ‘f-f-futile madness.’
I wonder how I can say that in the official history.
Vanessa’s office was one of the oldest in the building. But she didn’t mind. There was a worrying trend in the public service to encase all offices in glass, subjecting their occupants to the prying gaze of supervisors, receptionists and a steady stream of students on work experience. Senior colleagues down the corridor worked through their days in a kind of fish bowl – sheltering behind flimsy barricades, tightening their ties and tidying desks fanatically, fearful that tilting the blinds a fraction more might cause tongues to wag. Why management had insisted on glass offices was anyone’s guess. It was modern, Vanessa supposed, a kind of make-over for the aging bureaucracy of Canberra. Perhaps someone had read some memo about transparent process far too literally. Or maybe the public service had morphed to a kind of prison. A twenty-first-century panopticon for white-collar criminals. Whatever the reason, Vanessa neither knew nor cared. Her office was different.
Office W809 had one great advantage. Most of the offices on the eighth floor of Foreign Affairs were vacuum sealed, but through some happy oversight her window could be still prised open, just a little and just enough to feel the hot sun or a cooling breeze and hear the real world rumbling on outside. Vanessa loved the dry dusty wind warming her neck as the erratic thermostat plunged the rest of Foreign Affairs below freezing. She smiled to herself. However high she climbed the corporate ladder she’d never find an office quite as good as this one. Outside, a flock of rosellas flashed red in the sunlight, their wings belting on nothingness. They passed from view as quickly as they appeared, leaving an empty blue sky behind them.
Vanessa sat there in splendid isolation. She wondered why she had bothered helping Dr Troy. Academics weren’t her sort normally. Truth was, she was far more comfortable with the powerful bureaucrats who’d colonised Canberra. At least she knew where she stood with them. Even so there was something in his enthusiasm she admired ... or was it perhaps his naivety? Vanessa had always had a weakness for young country boys. She imagined the scruffy lad chasing a football across Jeparit’s oval, straining to catch it. She sighed. The bookish young man had probably never played footy. Vanessa studied her nails. She would have to fix that chip on the varnish. Image mattered to Vanessa. For a woman in her position, it had to. Perhaps that explained why she was helping Mark and Evatt. If the department were faced with a real challenge, she’d be the one to solve it. And how good would that look?
Her mobile phone buzzed aggressively on the desk. It lurched this way and that, turning around itself in a kind of minor earthquake. She picked it up, flicked it onto silent and dropped it in her handbag. She then straightened her skirt and walked out into the corridor. Vanessa had a feeling today could decide everything.
Mark and the professor were late for the committee meeting, forgivable – often mandatory – in academia but hardly acceptable to the military. General Grimwade glanced again at his watch. Already 1410 hours. It was annoying enough that the committee had relocated to the Foreign Affairs offices, but a delay like this was simply intolerable. He had made too many allowances for age and youth already. He picked up his pen, scanned again the agenda and began to rule a neat line through the names of Dr Troy and Professor Evatt the exact same moment that both men lumbered into the committee room.
They carried a pile of papers almost the size of them. The professor staggered underneath his load – transcripts of the proceedings at Lausanne, Sèvres, even Montreux, flagged and highlighted for the benefit of the committee. Mark struggled with an assortment of maps, their pink borders drawn in more confident and expansive moments of Empire.
‘Oh dear,’ Howard Brawley grumbled, his voice lowered slightly but still clearly audible, ‘whatever are we in for?’
Vanessa noted Mark hadn’t shaved that morning – nor for some time she suspected. The two of them looked as if they had slept in their suits, perhaps not slept at all.
‘Good of you to join us, gentlemen,’ the officers’ mess had taught the general to deliver a welcome with a reprimand. ‘Now, I think we really must proceed to business.’
‘Yes, yes, by all means,’ the professor could barely contain his excitement. ‘Took longer than we thought, but yes we got there. These Turkish documents, painstakingly translated from the Ottoman script by my colleague Professor Çeli.’
General Grimwade’s annoyance bubbled to the surface. ‘If you don’t mind, Professor, you are quite out of turn. Mr Brawley,’ the general turned on his chair, ‘I believe you have the floor.’
‘Thank you, General.’
Brawley walked to the front of the room and fumbled with the cords of his computer. Nothing happened. There was the same awkward silence that attends every PowerPoint disaster.
‘I’m just having a bit of trouble here.’ Brawley seemed to be pressing the keyboard at random. ‘I won’t keep you long.’
A moment later, Vanessa moved with practised elegance to the front of the room. Her high heels clicked the parquetry floor. She was neither hurried nor slow but knew every eye was watching her. She leaned across Brawley, smiled politely and, without saying a word, assumed control of the computer. The room plunged into darkness and the first of Brawley’s slides was summoned from nowhere.
‘Thank you, Vanessa.’ Brawley said this as if incompetence was intended.
The first image showed the rusting ribs of a landing craft framing North Beach and Ari Burnu beyond it. The deep blue of the Aegean mirrored the oxygen sky above it. ‘Gentlemen,’ Brawley began, ‘the Gallipoli Peninsula is a place of great natural beauty and immense historical significance.’ A new picture jolted into focus: crowds of Australians and New Zealanders, many clad in their national flags, massed around the commemorative site on North Beach. Some held a bottle of Efes beer in their hands. It was the only suggestion that the huge makeshift campsite was actually in Turkey. Rubbish was strewn from one end of the beach to the other. The blunted face of the Sphinx looked down in disapproval. ‘It is also a major destination for Australian tourists, particularly on Anzac Day,’ Brawley raised his voice portentously, ‘and the Australian Government has a responsibility to facilitate this...’ he paused a moment, clearly wondering if the next word would be quite appropriate, ‘...this pilgrimage.’
What seemed like hours of statistics followed. Australian visitors now exceeded 30,000 a year, most in what the Turks called ‘the Anzac Season’. Turkish figures were little short of astounding; inspired by everything from national fervour to Islamic fundamentalism, they now reached a staggering 2.5 million. All these numbers were duly allocated and analysed: tables measured the demand for buses, hotel rooms, first-aid facilities, even the number of portaloos required every Anzac Day. The conclusion was obvious, so obvious that Mark wondered why yet another ‘fact-finding mission’ was necessary to reach it.
‘The road on the Gallipoli Peninsula can no longer carry these numbers. We require the completion of our new access route, up from North Beach, past Anzac Cove to the Australian commemorative site at Lone Pine and the New Zealand memorial at Chunuk Bair.’
The professor grimaced at Brawley’s pronunciation as a dotted arrow severed the screen.
‘And of course the Turks’, shall we say, ornamental cemetery not far up from Quinn’s. Gentlemen, I am delighted to say that the Turkish Government, mindful of its obligations under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, is prepared to complete just such a road. As you can see, the new road – already half completed – will be a vast improvement on the current one.’
A series of images flashed across the screen including a picture of Brawley posing beside a bulldozer. ‘It is a full two lanes in width, there are a number of parking bays for buses and the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism is considering several scenic viewing areas for visitors. Work commenced early last year, and without further ... delays,’ the last word was mumbled reluctantly, ‘the new road can still be finished by early April. In a gesture of international cooperation, the Australian Government has contributed to the cost of construction and in return the Turks have suggested we might name the road itself.’ In his own gesture of cooperation, Brawley turned to Mark and Evatt, ‘We hope members of our committee might well suggest suitable possibilities. Well, that’s all gentlemen.’
Another crisp march of high heels and the neon lights flickered into life again. Suited men applauded diligently.
The general rapped his knuckles firmly on the table. ‘By “further delays”, Mr Brawley, can we expect the unearthing of still more human remains?’
‘Not at all, General ... well, at least that seems very unlikely. Not Australian remains anyway.’ One qualification piled on another. Brawley was already flustered. ‘There were of course extensive Turkish trenches in this region but we are confident that any human remains have long since eroded down the slopes. Really they could be anywhere. It’s all...’ his voice lapsed into lamentation, ‘...all something of a mystery.’
The professor very nearly lost his temper. His face, normally the white of ancient parchment, flushed red with anger. ‘Not to the Turks it isn’t, Mr Brawley. Look here...’ He pushed a document across the table. ‘See here – Lt Fasih’s diary, carefully translated from the old Arabic script, confirms an olive grove somewhere in that vicinity. It’s clearly marked as you can see. And it served as a burial ground for Turkish officers.’
Brawley looked at the map and replied dismissively, even rudely.
‘Really, Professor, how many olive groves were there on Gallipoli in 1915? And who is to say the road runs anywhere near the one in question?’ He swept his finger over the map, summoning a highway from nowhere. ‘In any event, a cemetery reserved for officers was hardly likely to be very large. For the most part, I believe, the Turks disposed of their dead far less ceremoniously. Ordinary soldiers were buried willy-nilly. In short, the new road is hardly likely to interfere with a cemetery, say, of Lone Pine’s dimensions.’ He tapped decisively on a symbol signifying a Commonwealth War Graves Commission site, secretly relieved he’d found it.
‘The point is,’ Mark followed up on his old professor’s lead, ‘whether we should interfere with that landscape at all. We should consider the impact roadworks and traffic could have on that fragile landscape. There is yet to be a proper archaeological survey of the area and that...’
‘Yes, we are still waiting for such a survey and I expect we will wait many years longer.’ A challenge always brought out the fighter in Brawley. He flexed and strutted like a boxer amidst the ring binders. ‘The fact of the matter is, gentlemen, that this land is the responsibility of the Turks. They are obliged under the Treaty of Lausanne to provide access to the cemeteries. In fact, for their convenience as much as ours, they are keen to do so. There is really nothing fragile about a road, Dr Troy, not even a road the Turks build.’
A chuckle broke out in the corner of the room. Brawley knew how much his audience had tired of political correctness.
‘In any event, if we don’t do something to manage the problem, well, the Commonwealth can’t accept any liability for any breach of public health and safety.’
Those four words, Mark thought, harboured a multitude of sins in every sphere of government.
Again the general’s knuckles rapped against the table. ‘That’s enough, gentlemen. Please, order. Order!’ The clatter and chatter eventually subsided. The general drew a deep breath before speaking. ‘Professor Evatt, is there any new evidence you and Dr Troy wish to present to the committee?’
‘Well yes, Mr Chairman,’ the professor raised his pipe ever so slowly to his lips, ‘as a matter of fact there is...’
The ring of a mobile phone cut short the professor’s oration. The general looked down at the number. It was the Prime Minister’s office. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, gentlemen. I’ll need to take this.’
Mark Troy was not quite sure how he had found himself in a soft-top Lamborghini V10 speeding down the Federal Highway to Sydney. At the time, Vanessa’s offer seemed innocent enough. The committee had adjourned to consider all the new documents he and Professor Evatt had tabled, there was no need to spend the weekend in Canberra and on Monday both he and Vanessa were scheduled for briefings in Sydney. ‘Why don’t we go together?’ she’d suggested. She ‘had the use of a car’, it would ‘save the Department an airfare’, ‘and no one in their right mind would want to spend Saturday night in Canberra’. There was no denying that argument.
Mark ventured asking who the sports car belonged to. He’d noted the number plates as he sank down in the plush upholstery. REX4 suggested the vehicle wasn’t Vanessa’s. ‘Oh, just a friend,’ she’d replied before quickly changing the subject. ‘Don’t you love this road, Mark?’
Mark had to admit he did. Beside them the Lake George Range curled around the shores of its namesake, an ancient escarpment eroding out the ages. Occasionally, rocks gleaming golden with a million years of sunshine would tumble down to the roadside barrier, crumbling to pieces as they did so. To his right, Lake George stretched out flat and dry. Mark’s eyes ran across the line of bush that clutched to the hillside. He could barely remember when it last carried water. Even at 4.00pm the plain glowed with heat. As they sped across the landscape, Mark was in awe of its beauty and its grandeur. Once Lake George had rested on the floor of an ancient ocean. Aeons later it retained an oceanic splendour.
Vanessa loved the Federal Highway for quite a different reason. She set the cruise control fifteen kilometres over the speed limit, lifted her foot from the accelerator and leaned back to enjoy the ride. Mark noted her high-heeled shoes resting on the carousel, as black and chic and dangerous as the Lamborghini.
For several minutes they did little but watch the road. With some skill and more recklessness Vanessa weaved the car in and out of a broken stream of traffic. Soon they had left Canberra and its Friday exodus far behind them.
‘Is there any music? Have a look in the glove box will you, darling.’
Mark was taken aback by the endearment. Vanessa was a woman of constant surprises. He flicked through a pile of CDs calling out artists’ names in feigned indifference.
‘Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez.’
‘I can’t believe this. Seriously. The whole morbid crew!’ Vanessa overtook a red Ferrari, the only car on the road that could possibly match her speed or glamour. ‘Rex is a merchant banker, for fuck’s sake! The glove box must be where he keeps his social conscience. Isn’t there anything else?’
Mark drew a deep breath. Confessing personal musical taste is risky in any relationship.
‘I’ve got a mix of Red Hot Chilli Peppers ... you know, just for when you’re short of something.’
At first there was no response.
‘Well, that will have to do I suppose. Least you’re not into rap. I hate that.’ Mark made a mental note.
He rummaged in his bag. The Red Dwarf symbol on its flap caught Vanessa’s attention.
‘You don’t really watch that stuff, do you?’
‘It’s serious social satire, Vanessa.’
‘Sure.’
She slipped the disc into the player and flicked the volume dial louder than Rex could have imagined, and for a good fifteen minutes the Red Hot Chili Peppers blasted away to the heat of a dying day.
‘So, Mark, tell me about yourself.’ Vanessa turned down the volume. Her voice was quiet but compelling, as if inviting confidence.
‘Well, at the moment I’m working on...’
‘Oh not that, please, no work stuff. The drive can be boring enough, you know. Something personal would be interesting. Apart from this red fetish thing.’
‘My eyes are blue.’
She laughed, perhaps a little too self-consciously. ‘Yes, I’d noticed. And your hair is getting long enough for an Emo! Are you married? Children? Mortgage?’
‘No.’
‘Rich, single, gay guy then?’
‘Hell, no. Why did you think that?’
It was the standard indignant response of heterosexual men whenever they believed their manhood slighted.
‘Think what? That you might have a mortgage?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Mark wondered whether teasing men was a mandatory subject at whatever private school his driver had been sent to. The scholarship boy from Jeparit was well out of his depth. Again, Vanessa stretched and sighed in the seat beside him. Despite the air-conditioning he felt hot and uncomfortable.
‘What about you then?’ Mark bounded to the offensive. ‘Husband, children, mortgage?’
‘Oh God, no. Well, none but the latter. To tell you the truth...’
Vanessa paused long enough to resume the advantage. ‘I’ve gone right off men for the moment.’
‘I see.’
Vanessa didn’t bother answering. Her lips widened to a smile as she glanced at herself in the rear-vision mirror.
Four kilometres had swept by before Vanessa took up the conversation again. ‘The problem with you men, you know, is that you always want something from a girl. Wife, mother, cook,’ she sniggered, obviously recalling someone in particular, ‘personal trainer! Me, I’m all for independence. Speaking historically.’ Vanessa was prepared to remove that last bolthole from her quarry. ‘You must admit it’s an irony, Mark. Men are supposed to be the strong ones, breadwinners, providers, head of the family, all that sort of thing – but really you are all so very needy.’
Mark was alarmed by his companion’s bitter tone. She couldn’t be any older than he was. Late twenties at most, too young to speak with such jaded experience.
‘You see, Mark, we’re all alone in the end, however much it’s convenient to pretend otherwise.’
He nodded, acknowledging the companionship of singles the world over. Of course, Mark had had relationships, moments of tenderness, love and intimacy. But despite popular illusions to the contrary, the academic world was no place for romantics. His last relationship had ended when his lover moved interstate in the quest for tenure. There had been little job security in Australian universities for decades. Keeping a post, let alone securing promotion, required what HR liked to call a flexible outlook. It was management-speak for endless re-skilling, re-invention, re-location. It wasn’t that either of them wanted to part – by any human measure theirs was a happy relationship. But scholars’ lives are bound by other rules, a quasi-monastic calling jealous of any rival. Probably every book Mark had read was written on the rubble of a relationship.
The figure of a kestrel flashed into view. Its wings shone silver as it danced in the boundless space and light above them. For a few seconds, Mark watched it curl about the thermals, visible one instant, lost to long, blue oblivion the next. Then, as Vanessa flexed her grip on the steering wheel, the bird plummeted earthward. It slipped beyond sight as yet another insect collided with the windscreen.
‘Well, this isn’t much fun – broken hearts club. I know what I need,’ again she paused, just a little playfully, ‘...a cigarette!’ They both laughed, the purring of the engine now no longer audible.
‘Rex won’t let me smoke in the car, you know.’ There was possessiveness in that denial that rendered Mark just a little jealous, ‘But that, my dear, is the beauty of a convertible.’
She slowed the car far less than she needed and with a high pitched burr the canopy began to fold back. It closed in around itself like the wings of some strange insect. The car buffeted a moment, lurching with the sail unfurled. At the same time, hot, noisy air rushed all around them. It was as if they had burst from a cocoon. Vanessa’s sun frock lifted a moment, revealing more than even she had expected. Mark looked diligently away and studied the passing vegetation. He felt Vanessa’s hair fly against his face; his heart, like the car, was racing. Exposed to the elements, Mark became suddenly aware of the speed and the danger. Vanessa took it all a step further.
‘Hold the wheel, will you?’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
Vanessa had already released her grip and reached for her handbag. As she rummaged for a cigarette, Mark held the wheel steady. He was pushed even closer to her than before as the car roared ahead. Mark watched the road intently, but most of all he wanted to look down, his eyes guiding that long shapely leg towards the brake pedal.
When Vanessa finished her cigarette, she resumed control of the car and summoned the canopy back over them. She swept hair from her eyes, moistened her lips, and took a sip from a bottle of water. The landscape seemed quieter and more distant than before: a blue barrelled sky and clumps of thinning trees reminded Mark of a Nolan or a Lambert.
‘I suppose you think that was a little irresponsible.’
‘Well, you could say that.’
‘And what would you say if I said you were the irresponsible one?’
‘Come again?’
‘It’s what you do, Mark. I didn’t put our lives at risk then, not really, not for an instant. But people like you change lives forever. You change the way lives are remembered...’
Mark realised the drift of the conversation. They had come back to history as surely as the road behind them curled back to Canberra.
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean, Vanessa.’
‘Oh, I think you do. The problem with historians,’ Mark recognised the tone again, ‘is that you’re so keen to have the last word, so keen to pass judgement. We’re just protecting the public good, you know. Trying to do the best for the electora...’ She thought better, ‘for the people of Australia. I mean, we all know the bodies are there somewhere but why actually go out and look for them? No one wants that Fromelles business again, it’s all so costly and unnecessary. Children are dying every day, aren’t they? Dying for lack of drinking water. Why waste money like that on the dead?’ Vanessa flexed in the driver’s seat. ‘But no, you historians have to judge. Think you can tell us what’s right and wrong.’
It was the first time Mark had heard that War Graves and Foreign Aid shared the same funding line. He would take this personally.
‘Well, that’s not really fair on me, is it? I didn’t ask to give evidence to your Inquiry. But we have to tell the truth, don’t we? We can’t just lie for the convenience of the government.’
‘Oh, you lie all the time. I think historians are habitual liars. Finding one file, not finding another. You’re so...’ Vanessa looked beyond the bitumen for just the right word, ‘...so selective.’
She changed lanes for no apparent reason. Mark felt the car shifting like a yacht on its keel. Now its driver had a momentum all of her own.
‘Take dates for instance. How many books have historians written on the landing, that one day in April 1915? But what about the stories you don’t tell us? What did 1915 mean to the Armenians, for instance? Wasn’t that the first great ethnic cleansing of the twentieth century? Isn’t that more important?’ She tightened her lips as if she had bitten into a lemon. ‘Don’t pretend you’re above politics, Mark, you’re not! The only difference is that your politics pretends – pretends it’s rational and disinterested. But it’s not, is it?’ She looked at Mark and ignored the road again. ‘Is it?’
Mark noticed that one of the long legs had found the accelerator.
‘That’s a bit outside my field.’ Even to Mark that sounded like a cop-out. He searched for safer ground. ‘But where’s this coming from, Vanessa? I didn’t think you liked the government’s line?’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it!’
Mark glanced again at the young woman’s face. There was a sheen in her skin as if wind and sun had scorched her make-up. Her eyes were red and moist. It looked like she’d been crying.
‘I just think this whole thing is getting out of hand.’ Mark wondered if the ambiguity was intended. ‘And I think I need another cigarette.’
Vanessa reached again for her handbag. This time she creased down the folds of her frock.
A speechless hour later, the Lamborghini jerked back one gear, then another as it pulled in towards Berrima.
Mark felt the world closing in around him.
‘Sorry, I woke you. I need a break.’
‘No, that’s OK.’ He tried to hide his surprise at her concern. ‘I wasn’t asleep.’
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. She knew from experience when men were lying. She strained her eyes against the glare. Beyond the parched land a line of green elms slipped down into the valley.
‘It seems cooler now. Don’t you love the way they plant shady trees at the entrance here? So green and pretty.’
Mark sat up and nodded as he watched rusting plaques march by, each tilting at the base of a tree, each signalling a loss too terrible to imagine. But yes, it had a kind of beauty. Rest at the end of a long hot day, as quiet as the evening folding around them.
‘I’ll pull up over by that pillar.’
‘Memorial.’
‘Spooky. Well, it’s shady anyway.’ There was a glow in Vanessa’s face. Just the heat perhaps. Mark liked to think otherwise. The car slowed to a halt. Both waited an instant before clicking free their seatbelts.
Vanessa found a spot at the base of the memorial. She sat cross-legged, shoeless, the white of legs cooled by the whiter stone. She looked up at the pillar and mumbled something. Mark realised she was counting.
‘Eighty-four names. But maybe that’s wrong. Eight, maybe nine, names are repeated.’
‘No, brothers count, too.’
‘Of course.’ Vanessa feigned control but this time she seemed unsettled. ‘Eighty-four then. And how big do you think this town would have been? Back then, I mean.’
‘It’s the whole district really. Not that it would be have been much bigger. Less than a thousand anyway.’
The mathematics seem to startle her.
‘But I guess most of them returned. This is all the men who went away, surely.’
‘Count the crosses, Vanessa.’
She was surprised by the authority in the young man’s voice. Vanessa’s finger ran to the left of the line of names, sweeping the dust from the gold etched into the panel, feeling for the touch of each softly chiselled letter. Despite the warmth of the evening air, she shivered.
‘So many names, for so small a place. But only names, you’d think they’d want to say something.’
‘Names said everything.’ Mark’s fingers stopped at the last of four brothers. ‘Everything that needed to be said, anyway.’
‘And how many memorials like this are there?’
‘In the Highlands you mean, or in NSW generally or right across the country? Thousands and thousands.’ Mark grimaced. The labour of loss piled up around them.
‘I can’t really see it helped,’ she said. ‘Building all these monuments. They didn’t have a grave did they?’
‘That’s the point, Vanessa. Names are all they had.’ Mark nodded towards the west, ‘They reminded them of those real graves – on the other side of the ocean.’
Vanessa stretched her legs out on the stone. Her eyes ran up and down the column. She seemed more pensive than Mark had seen her before.
‘All these memorials, all those names. It must have been thousands of pounds, lifetimes of savings. What about all these men without crosses? Those who came back? That’s what I’d like to know. Crippled, blind, faceless. Who looked after them?’ Vanessa’s voice re-found its confidence. ‘Every penny they spent on stone like this was money needed by their families.’
‘It’s not for us to judge them.’
‘Judge them? Who’s talking about judging? It’s a simple matter of priorities. Who do you value more – the living or the dead?’
Mark didn’t answer. The sun was setting red against the hills. It hung radiant above the ridges, bathing the valley in the last of its glow, poised in crimson glory. For a moment he wondered how many of those men had watched the same sunset from here. Looking out on eternity before it charged forth to meet them. A series of sprinklers from the park nearby sprang into action, spitting warm water into the air, slashing the fields like machine guns. Mark could smell the moisture in the air. Vanessa rose to her feet, wishing she’d never begun the conversation.
‘Time to go then?’
Alexandria’s Royal Gardens was usually a thirty-minute walk from the seawall. Maggie took the shortest route and weaved her friend through the bustle of the city’s Arab quarter. It was market day, so their progress was slower than usual. Donkeys, boys and women swayed under impossible loads: baskets of fruit, bundles of cloth, colourful urns and drab wooden boxes resting on head, hip or shoulder. The men, Maggie noted, kept well out of the way playing cards, smoking water pipes, and drinking coffee in any of a hundred side street cafés. They made more noise than anyone – laughing, arguing, reading passages from tattered papers to loudly appreciative audiences. But it was the women that Maggie watched with a curious mixture of suspicion, fascination and envy. The labour of the markets, even the business of buying and selling, largely seemed to be their province, their whole world bound by a narrow path that led from home to market and back again. And yet, strangely, it felt no lesser a thing for that: gliding through the busy streets, their eyes alone speaking, every step shrouded by the sacred.
Both Maggie and Elsie had forsaken claims of home and family. That was the price they paid for a career in the early twentieth century. They met and trained together for several years at the Coast Hospital in Sydney, where they rose through the hurdles of hardships and exams that marked their profession. Qualifying as nurses several years before the war, they enjoyed a degree of independence that previous generations, East and West, would have found unimaginable. Of course the male doctors still bullied their nursing staff and male officers insisted on addressing them as subordinates. But women like Maggie and Elsie sometimes chose to ignore them. They lived their own lives as they thought they should and quietly subverted many a man’s authority.
How they had come to be here now Maggie found hard to understand. She supposed they went to war for much the same reasons as their menfolk: patriotism, a sense of duty, a vague hope of social advancement and a restless quest for adventure. It was something of a thrill just weaving their way through the markets – besieged by sights, sounds and carpet-sellers, treated with curiosity, condescension or contempt by the owners of the land Britain had decided to occupy.
Maggie took Elsie by the arm, shaking off of a street urchin selling oranges and scattering a flock of pigeons. She led her down a narrow alleyway. The street’s cobbled surface was slippery beneath them, polished by the feet of a thousand travellers. Every window they passed was shielded by ornate wooden lattice. Maggie caught a glimpse of eyes peering out from behind the screens: women in brightly coloured scarves and long beaded shawls watched the world pass as they had done for generations. She struggled to hear a fragment of what was being said; not that she would have understood a word of it anyway. They were intruders on the street, barging through the marketplace in much the same way that armies bullied their way across borders. As they entered the side gate of the gardens, the call to prayer rang out above the city. Solemn and triumphant, it had a beauty and a melody all of its own. Never had Maggie heard anything quite so humble and exalted.
The two women walked beside a wall of ancient limestone. They wove their way through rows of palms and fragrant frangipani, flowers all the colours of the rainbow surrounded them. Every smell had a flavour. Elsie imagined she tasted strawberry and liquorish, chocolate and coffee, even the thick syrupy treacle she and Roy gave to favoured horses. Strange, Elsie thought, how smell could trigger memory. Her thoughts turned again to the young man lost in war, neither dead nor alive, almost certainly wounded, inexplicably missing.
‘It’s lovely here, isn’t it?’ Maggie breathed in the perfume and exhaled the fumes of the city. ‘You know when the Sultan established these gardens he stocked it with every flower, from every corner of the Ottoman Empire.’ Maggie chose her words judiciously, determined to lead her friend from worry as carefully as she’d led her through the market. And who could resist the history of so beautiful a garden? Not a girl from the bush at any rate. She pushed a frangipani behind Elsie’s ear, playfully, teasingly, like the first act of a long and elaborate seduction.
‘So, you’re saying this was part of Turkey once?’ Maggie was taken aback by the curtness of her tone.
‘Yes Else, I think much of this part of the world was once.’
‘Then I wonder...’ Elsie paused with an uncharacteristic bluntness, ‘I wonder why we couldn’t just leave it to them.’
For the first time in their friendship, Maggie sensed a kind of rejection. But she was not easily discouraged and hugged her friend. ‘Come on my girl, we’ll have that cup of tea.’ They turned at the last of the flowerbeds and walked towards the tearooms.
The two women were received by a quiet Egyptian youth. He led them to the centre of an arching colonnade and sat them down beside a fountain. Worn stone lips tumbled out their offering, water as clear as crystal, smelling of rose petal and jasmine. A moment later the waiter returned with their order – Indian tea for Elsie, poured from a china pot; a glass of apple tea for Maggie, sweet, golden and refreshing. For several minutes neither woman spoke. They sipped their tea and listened to the playful gurgle of the fountain.
‘What do you think’s become of him, Maggie, tell me, honestly?’
‘I really don’t know, darling. I don’t know any more than you do.’ She looked away and summoned up her courage. ‘What exactly did the soldiers say?’
Elsie fumbled in her handbag. In a hospital notebook she had recorded every conversation, with every soldier over the last few weeks, noting anything that had a bearing on Roy Irwin’s disappearance. Elsie had taken down the words as they were spoken, careful to note any hint of hesitation, any puzzled silence. Most, she thought, spoke honestly, relating the horror of the battle as best they could. Only a few wounded men had refused to look her in the eye. They stared out into space as if it could hide them.
‘Here, it’s all here in my notes. Not one of them saw him killed, not one of them.’
‘But what did they see?’
‘Oh, too much,’ Elsie sighed, ‘and too little.’
She flicked feverishly through the pages of the notebook.
‘The last man to see him was a private who followed him into the trenches. There was an explosion, he said, and Roy was wounded in the head. But Roy wasn’t killed. Not that anyone saw. And they all say there’s a good chance he was taken prisoner.’ Elsie’s voice faltered with those closing words. Prisoners posed a risk in any battle even more so when the odds were in the balance. Both women knew what the fighting at Lone Pine was like. Both had seen the wounds it inflicted.
Elsie rummaged again through her notebook and resumed the jolting narrative: ‘Yes, perhaps Roy was taken prisoner. Perhaps, he’s in some hospital somewhere – somewhere in Turkey...’ One hope fed on another, gambling with fate, the stakes spiralling higher. ‘That head wound – he must have lost his memory. And he’s waiting, Maggie, waiting for someone to find him.’ She slammed the book down on the table. Avoiding Maggie’s eyes, she spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘I can’t believe he’s dead. If he’d been killed I’d know somehow.’
Again Maggie looked away. So many mothers, wives and sweethearts had said the same.
‘Yes, but Elsie you must be brave, you must prepare yourself for – for the worst. You and I both pray it doesn’t come to that.’
These words were not new to her. In the ageless plight of the bereaved, the young nurse stood at the crossroads: unable to lay the man she loved to rest, frightened to hope, unwilling to mourn, lost, like Roy himself, in a kind of limbo. And then all the pain came rushing out of her like a dam wall breaking.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she blurted out. Maggie held her tighter and tighter, stroking her stiff matted hair.
In an instant a crowd of waiters flapped uselessly around them. ‘Does madam need a doctor?’ ‘Some water, madam?’ ‘Some brandy?’ A smartly dressed officer pushed them to one side. He tapped the table with his swagger stick as if to wake children from a daydream.
‘Is there a problem here? Ladies!’ The last word was barked like a command. Then the officer lowered his voice. ‘For God’s sake, what’s this scene about? Pull yourself together, Nurse, the natives are watching.’
‘And you think that matters?’ Maggie snapped back. She turned again to Elsie. She was holding her tight enough now to draw the pain inside her.
‘It matters a great deal, madam. And have you forgotten how to address a superior officer?’
He loomed over both of them. The pips on his epaulettes signalled a colonel’s rank. A red band threaded through his collar confirmed he was on the general staff. A monocle in one eye twitched as he spoke. Alexandria or Imbros, a luxury liner off the Dardanelles or a plush office in Cairo was as close as Colonel Bell would ever come to fighting.
Elsie gasped for air. Her sobbing grew louder, more desperate, more pleading.
‘I ... I loved him, I ... love him.’
‘Oh heavens above! – Curtis. Curtis!’ The colonel’s batman scurried in from outside.
‘Fetch the car and take these two nurses back to their quarters.’
‘Y’sirr.’
‘And hurry up about it man.’ The colonel lowered his voice, as if it was painful to be there. ‘This sort of behaviour reflects badly on us all.’
Maggie rose to her feet, still cradling her friend. She looked at the colonel’s face. There was a terrible emptiness there, as if God had forgotten something.
As the two women walked unsteadily away the colonel turned back to his party. Best, he thought, to put such unpleasantness behind them.
‘Colonials, of course, not much one can do, I’m afraid.’
‘Comes of bad stock, Reggie.’ His colleague swallowed the last of his wine. ‘Still, with the Empire in peril one can’t always choose one’s soldiers.’
‘No...’ the Colonel too drained his glass ‘...nor one’s nurses it seems.’ The sound of their laughter overtook Elsie’s sobbing. As they closed the door behind her Maggie heard the colonel and his brother officers calling for their brandy.
The colonel’s driver did as he was ordered and returned Maggie and Elsie to their quarters. But not immediately. No sooner had the car jolted through the garden gates than Maggie began the gentle art of feminine conspiracy.
‘Now, Sergeant, you can’t just take us back to the barracks. It’s really not what the girl needs,’ Maggie leaned forward. Elsie was drifting into sleep on the seat behind her. ‘She’s had a bit of a shock. Lost someone on Gallipoli.’
The soldier seemed unimpressed. ‘We’ve all lost someone there, miss – and it’s Corporal, not Sergeant.’
Maggie feared this was going to be harder than she first thought. The corporal was a small exacting man, a good deal older than herself, polite and reserved. Not the kind to take risks, Maggie reckoned. The car lurched on. The stench of nearby tenements soured the memory of garden rosebuds. Maggie persisted.
‘Oh, I’m sure it will be Sergeant in time, Corporal. It’s just that I doubt the colonel needs the car immediately and all those other officers had cars as well, didn’t they? I just wonder if there wasn’t somewhere quiet we could go for a time, somewhere to take her mind off things. You wouldn’t know anywhere would you?’
Indeed, the corporal did know somewhere. Much of his war had been spent ferrying general staff from one of Egypt’s distractions to another – though not all of them were suitable for ladies. In truth, he wanted to help. The sleeping nurse was probably half his age. No sweet young girl should suffer such sorrow. And Curtis’ compassion was also edged by guilt. Men back at the barracks envied him his job: its comfort, its perks and its safety. He felt only a sense of shame. Half his battalion had been slaughtered at Suvla Bay. Even now, their bones were bleaching white in the sun, corroding in salt-dried earth, unhonoured, unknown.
‘Problem is, miss, I am the colonel’s desegregated driver and I’m not sure his order can be, as it were, countermanded.’ Maggie knew this was an invitation.
‘I am an officer too you know and my rank in the Australian Nursing Corps matches that of a colonel.’
‘Is that so, miss?’ Corporal Curtis suspected it wasn’t. ‘Well, if that’s a direct order...’
‘It is, Corporal.’
‘Very well, miss. Then I would venture to suggest the Roman ruins in the old quarter. Very fine it is, miss, spoken highly of by all the officers.’
‘The Roman ruins it is then, Corporal!’ her voice sang out in a very public triumph. ‘And I will treat you to afternoon tea on the strength of it.’ The corporal blinked in surprise, and the car plunged into a pothole. Corporal Curtis had never before had such an offer, not from an officer and certainly not from a lady. But he considered himself a man of the world and assumed that in Australia things were done differently.
‘Well if you insist, miss...’
The Vauxhall Tourer changed course abruptly, tumbling the nurses and unsettling nearby carts and bystanders. Its left forward wheel bounced over the kerb and it seemed for a moment that car, driver and passengers would career into a street stall.
‘Sorry, miss,’ Curtis shouted above protesting stallholders, ‘but we’ll have to turn here if we’re to miss the market. Much enamoured of their markets, are the Egyptians.’ His voice slowed and lapsed into the jargon of a guidebook. ‘For the Egyptian, you see, the market “fulfils a sochial as well as an ecynomic function”.’
‘Is that so, Corporal?’ Maggie repressed a giggle and tried to nudge her friend from her stupor.
‘Is there much you know about Egypt, Corporal?’
‘Oh yes, miss.’ The Corporal was delighted to be noticed in this way. ‘What I’ve read, miss. And of course what I’ve heard the officers say. Educated gentlemen they are, miss, read the classics they have. Really, you wouldn’t believe some of the stories.’
And so, as the Vauxhall jolted slowly down the city’s ever-crowded streets, Corporal Curtis retold the tales of antiquity; kings with tall white crowns, queens of unimaginable beauty, hawk-headed Horus and the vulture goddess Nekhbet, great tombs, glistening riches and the dark terrors of the underworld. Like most self-read men, Curtis’ knowledge ranged the ages with gay abandon, confusing kingdoms, muddling dynasties, contracting the sprawling, Nile-bound geography of ancient Egypt. But in other ways his taxonomy of the ancient world was encyclopaedic in precision. Many an hour he had spent in Cairo’s museum as he waited on the mandatory tours of officers, dignitaries and statesmen. Bent on self-improvement, the former grocer from London memorised one explanatory label after another. Corporal Curtis catalogued deities in the same ordered way he’d once stacked tins, jars and bottles.
Not that the past was a fetish to him. Curtis considered himself a thoroughly modern man and hoped the young ladies could see that. The mysteries of the internal combustion engine were only the beginning. Corporal Curtis took an interest in all the achievements of twentieth-century science and its many more exotic offshoots: phrenology, spiritualism, flight through the air and journeys beneath the sea, the many miraculous powers of electricity. Even so, the ancient world exerted an attraction all of its own. Arrayed in the soft light of the museum, the wonders of antiquity outshone the most brilliant new invention.
‘Hard to say which of the Egyptian deities was the most important, miss, they didn’t have just one god like us Christians. Truth is,’ and Curtis could clearly concede the logic in this, ‘there was a god for almost everything and most creatures, well, they sort of became gods too.’ Curtis mentally retraced his steps through the museum galleries, choosing the deities he thought young ladies would find the most colourful. And he imposed his own order on a universe lost millennia ago.
‘At the top, like, there’s Amun – supreme creator, god of the air and the sun and he’s everywhere.’ A breeze swirled around the cabin as if confirming Amun’s continued presence. ‘Took all forms he did too, miss, could be a ram or a lion even a goose. Often he appears as a long, upright snake symbolising fertility...’
Curtis had recited the museum card without quite fathoming its meaning. Maggie nudged Elsie again and much to her relief found she was smirking. Realising his indiscretion, Curtis plunged to the very bottom of his supernatural hierarchy. ‘Then there’s the gods of the underworld, cruel and dangerous, miss, like Am-Heh who had the face of a dog and was so mean only Amun could control him.’
‘And, Corporal, was there a god for you, for soldiers I mean?’ Elsie at last had spoken. Drawn from her grief by a man enamoured of the ancients.
‘Oh yes, miss, Wepwawet – jackal-headed war champion of the pharaoh. Strong and brave and clever he was too, miss,’ Curtis again imagined marble statues sleeping in the dim light of the museum. ‘Led you safely through the underworld to paradise.’
To paradise. The phrase jolted in Elsie’s mind. In a world full of death it was difficult to imagine any hereafter. Perhaps the afterlife of ancient Egypt, peopled with all the strange beings Curtis described, was no less credible than her own battered faith. Perhaps the more gods one had, the greater the hope of something beyond. Her parents had told her that all she loved would be reunited in heaven. She closed her eyes tightly. No, that heaven was not for her. Her love for Roy was a passion. Like nothing that had touched her before or ever could again. That kind of love belonged to the living.
Troubled by her friend’s sudden silence, Maggie took up the conversation. ‘So you mean anyone could reach paradise then, not just the rich, not just the pharaohs?’
‘Oh yes, miss, if they had led a good life. In a way, they believed much the same as we Christians. You’d enter the next life if you’d been good in this one.’
Curtis slowed the car as he approached the entrance to the Roman ruins. He turned to face them both as he pulled on the handbrake, cranking the car to a standstill. ‘When you die there is a time of judgement. Your heart is placed in one pan on the scales of justice and a single feather is placed in the other. That feather is truth, you see, and if you’ve led a good life the scales will be balanced.’
‘And if not?’ Maggie was quite sure she had not always been good.
‘Oh, the gods of the underworld don’t muck around, miss.’ He slapped the wheel of his car as if it were a plaything. ‘They would throw the bad heart to Ammut – eater of the dead – part crocodile, part hippo, part lion. Must have had an appetite, I think, miss. Truly fearsome.’
‘Indeed!’ declared Maggie. ‘And I reckon you must be parched, Corporal. I think you’ve earned that cup of tea.’
‘Well thank you, miss, that’s very kind of you. But I’ll take my tea by the car. Kiosk is really just for officers.’
‘You’re with us, Corporal. Let’s just say you’re our escort – our – what was his name?’
‘Wepwawet,’ Elsie whispered without even thinking.
‘But, miss...’
‘That’s an order, Corporal.’
In time, the three took tea in the corner of the kiosk. They hid themselves in a forest of broken columns shielded from the gaze of nosy sightseers and off-duty officers. Nurses had always occupied an ambiguous place in the military bureaucracy – nominally subalterns, but paid not much more than a corporal. Told not to fraternise with other ranks but hardly likely to be accepted as brother officers. That Maggie and Elsie were Australians made their status all the more problematic. It was what the Imperial authorities liked to call ‘a grey area’. Funny, Curtis thought, grey was the colour of their uniform. But by now he was feeling more at ease. He enjoyed Maggie’s friendly banter and a kindness seldom seen in wartime. Australia, he thought to himself, might just be a country worth visiting. Pity it was so damned far away from everything.
As the afternoon drew to a close, they rambled across the ruins of forum and temple. They stood side by side with the statues of gods and maidens. Flesh and stone shared a stange companionship as if the passing of the ages had made them equals. By 4.00pm the three of them had reached the amphitheatre. Its circled seats of stone still awaited a performance. Maggie was quick to oblige.
‘Coo-eee!’ It was a cry loud enough and clear enough to reach all the way to Australia. ‘Coo-eee!’
Maggie looked hopefully to her friend. At least now she was smiling. But Curtis shuffled uneasily. Bending the rules was one thing, trumpeting it to the world another.
‘Miss, I really think...’
‘You’re right, Curtis. Quite right. Behaviour unbecoming and all that sort of thing. Here. I’ll stand aside. Come on down and perform for us.’
‘But, miss!’
‘That’s an order, Corporal. Come on, you’ll enjoy yourself.’
Curtis stood beneath a small cross chiselled in the stone a thousand years earlier. It marked the acoustic centre of the amphitheatre. From that point even a whisper was audible from every corner of the auditorium. He coughed and became instantly aware of an audience. A party of English tourists, wintering in Egypt for the duration of the war, had taken their seats in the circle above him.
‘I – I don’t recall any speeches, miss. Not like the officers.’ Curtis remembered standing where Maggie stood now, and how Kipling, Shakespeare, Latin verse and old school song had been bellowed out by his betters.
‘But you could tell us another story,’ Elsie suggested. ‘Another tale from ancient Egypt.’ Curtis saw how much the young woman longed for distraction. He retraced his path through the galleries of antiquity and ended at the apex of all the sun god manifestations. Then he stumbled into a story.
‘Ra – symbol of the Sun – he took the form of a falcon mounted by a scarab or a cobra.’
‘But what did he do, man?’ One of the party of tourists demanded entertainment. Curtis’ thoughts sped along the corridor of Cairo’s museum.
‘Ra created mankind from his tears, sir,’ Curtis was a man born to serve and he would take this task seriously. ‘It’s a symbol you see, because the gods weep for all the bad things men do, so much so that Ra decided one day...’ he paused to gather his thoughts, ‘... one day Ra decided to be rid of us.’
Curtis moved forward and raised his voice up to the auditorium. The words flowed more freely than they ever had in the museum. The sun glared on the stone, as if Ra himself was watching. Then the tale slid into darkness.
‘Ra ordered the god Hathor to destroy us. Hathor took the shape of a lion, he did, a terrible lion,’ he howled out the words as if they were a warning, ‘a beast that tore men’s bodies to pieces. The slaughter went on and on until the whole wide world was a wasteland. Nowhere was safe.’
Curtis’ voice was racing now, echoing across the ruins, ‘There was nowhere to run to. The earth became as cold and as cruel as the underworld.’
The audience fell suddenly silent, alarmed by the soldier’s raving intensity.
‘It’s as if they are drunk, you see, drunk with men’s blood, drunk with the pleasure of killing.’ And then Curtis stopped, alert to the slippage that had carried his story from one millennium to another. The crowd shifted uneasily in their seats. There was a rustle of conversation. A few voices rang out, buffeting an echo across the stage.
‘What man, how does the story end?’
‘Yes, how?’
‘Tell us!’
‘I, I...’ And in truth Curtis couldn’t tell them. Like armies all across Europe, his story had bogged down in a senseless round of killing. There and then, Curtis had reached a terrible conclusion. The war would go on forever. It could end only when there were no men left to feed the monster.
Laughter rang across the high seats of the auditorium. Curtis looked down. Elsie had folded in Maggie’s arms and once again was weeping. A sacred ibis ambled around their crumpled figures. Slow, cautious, sinister – as if peering in from one world to another. Curtis shivered. Surely, he thought, that was a symbol for something.