I kept all of Elsie’s correspondence. Like the letters of a first love, I bound them carefully with ribbon and locked them safely away. Even as I turned the key on the old oak cabinet, I knew that someone, one day would find them. History cannot keep a secret for long.
Among the last of her letters was a cutting from a Sydney weekly. It showed Roy Irwin’s parents bent by the memorial to missing at Lone Pine. The date on the cutting was 1926, eleven years after their boy had vanished. I wondered if Hammond had helped them find that place on the panel, wondered what he said as they gazed on letters chiselled softly into the stone. I realised the Irwins were among the first Gallipoli pilgrims. Unable to lay the body of their son to rest, they took a rubbing of all that was left of him – a name.
I cannot say with any certainty what they were thinking that day, their thoughts sealed forever in the photograph. But I believe they whispered a prayer, finishing the prayers of dying men, in every corner of the killing fields.
The Irwins returned with a relic from Gallipoli. They could have taken a pebble, lifted wet and shining from the shores of Anzac Cove, or one of the poppies which blaze blood red beside the trenches. But their choice was a handful of soil, scraped from the land where their son was buried. A proud Turkish major had pressed the clay into their hands and told them to take their earth and his own home to Australia.
In time, Roy’s spirit was laid to rest beneath an avenue of trees planted in his honour. The women who loved him, the men who searched for him, returned him to the soil. Bar an old general who died out at sea, no more of our dead came back from Gallipoli. And no more ever will.
You can imagine the picture now, as you will never find such a thing in the archives. Elsie and Maggie stand beside me. We carry offerings of flowers – a tiny spray of violets, a sheaf of golden wattle, poppies entwined with rosemary. Lambert and Vickers are absent from this photograph. George had died some years back: the artist’s heart never as strong as his brandy. And Harry Vickers? Harry had taken his own life. He’d limped into the mud of a dam out west and drowned in its still, stale waters. They say he threw his medals in first. I imagine him watching them sink to the bottom like those sacks of men we dumped in the Aegean. All that pain, all that sacrifice and now none of us can see the point of it. It is autumn 1933 and Hitler has just come to power in Germany. Soon our sons and daughters will march to war again. Soon a new list of names will glisten on the memorial.
I watch as Elsie buries her ring in that same soil – a treasure Roy chose for her from all the treasures of Egypt. She slips the golden band from her finger and pushes it gently into the earth. She will never marry.
April leaves tumble quietly to the ground. Mid-fall, wind swung, weightless, they are captured by the camera. Brown and brittle, they whisper of decay. And they signal the coming of winter.
The new road to Lone Pine was built just as Howard Brawley had always said it would be. Dr Troy and the professor had brokered a series of compromises with the government. They protected the site as best they could and avoided many of the mass graves Mark had warned of. Even so, bones snapped to powder on the blunt blades of dozers. The dead of a dozen nations worked their way to the surface and were covered over again by bitumen and road fill. It was Vanessa who had first suggested an ossuary for any scattered remains unearthed – those the dozers could not re-bury fast enough or that were inconveniently documented by the mobile phones of visitors. Vanessa, Mark knew, was always a lateral thinker. Her solution saved embarrassment for the government and secured the first of many overseas postings.
Ten years after the Centenary the two met again at Gallipoli. Vanessa arrived, as all the officials did, in a sleek black limousine driven far too quickly through the crowd. As it pulled into the memorial site on North Beach, Mark wondered again who these new roads were really built for. She recognised him as she climbed from the car.
‘Of course, it’s Professor Troy now, isn’t it?’ Vanessa had always relished the trappings of authority. ‘And I believe the minister’s asked you to address us this afternoon?’ She leaned closer than any of her diplomatic minders thought prudent. ‘Quite right I say. If you and Professor Evatt hadn’t come to your senses this road wouldn’t be here. Pity, the old guy didn’t live to see it.’
Mark wished he could have that time all over again. Vanessa wondered if that same black suit he had worn ten years ago could ever swing back into fashion.
The Australian ceremony at Lone Pine began well after the scheduled time of 11.00am. The official party had returned to their hotel immediately after the dawn service. Thousands of weary travellers awaited their return; but for all their talk of mateship and endurance Australian politicians have always valued their comfort. They took a leisurely breakfast and then rested to fortify themselves for the afternoon of photographs and speeches.
As the crowd reassembled at Lone Pine, Mark assessed the damage. Ridges had been cut away, hills and gullies levelled, isolated posts – once legends in themselves – bridged by a bulwark of bitumen. In Bean’s day, Anzac had been set aside to commemorate the missing. Now the landscape, like the men who died there, had vanished forever.
Mark looked out across the sea of backpackers. Their bodies were draped with Australian and New Zealand flags, their faces fraught with too little sleep, far too much drinking and wet trails down their cheeks. Several, he noted, wore the medals of long dead men. He recognised them instantly. They were the same medals his grandfather had worn. Symbols of a war the old man wouldn’t speak of, fought in the fevered jungles of New Guinea and in the misty skies above its mountains. A long, hard, desperate struggle against fascism. A ‘good war’ Mark supposed, if any war warranted that title. But what war had these young people come to commemorate?
Mark knew that for the young people gathered, one world war merged seamlessly with another. The words of the minister in the grey light of dawn confirmed that. At Gallipoli, men died ‘for democracy’, ‘for freedom’, ‘for the good lives we enjoy in Australia’. He could see why these proud, homesick people wanted to believe it. Why there was a need to salvage something noble and good from the shabby, sordid tragedy.
Mark thought of Roy Irwin and an epitaph he had read that very morning in Shrapnel Valley cemetery.
Words written for a boy from St Kilda back home. But they could be the words of any wife, any mother, of any nation. He wondered what words Elsie Forrest would have chosen for Roy. Australia had just built a road over his remains. Remembering, it seemed, had become an act of forgetting.
Vanessa nestled her cheek against his and whispered, ‘Well, Mark, it’s your turn now.’ Mark smelt the rich alluring perfume. She placed her hand encouragingly on his arm. ‘I know the minister is so looking forward to this.’
Mark rose from his seat, adjusted his tie, and turned back to collect his papers. Vanessa already had them, and offered the folder to him with a smile and a wink.
‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, will you?’
The PA system echoed oddly. ‘Here history was made and now it’s time to hear from a historian. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Mark Troy.’
Mark walked unsteadily by the memorial to the missing, past lines of names etched in stone and a field of plastic poppies sprouting between them.
The applause subsided as the small, somewhat bedraggled scholar adjusted the height of the microphone at the podium. Sweat broke out across his brow, his hands shook, a fear that so became Lone Pine sat at the pit of his stomach. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the ground on which you stand today...’