Morning mist rolls in from the ocean. Sea birds follow close behind, squawking tales of the sea, their bellies brimming with bass and mackerel. The noisy clatter shakes me from my slumber but still I lie there, clutching the warmth in prickly blankets, digging my head deeper in the pillow. Vickers and Lambert sleep uneasily in the beds beside me. They’ll wake to regret yesterday’s words and yesterday’s drinking.
I dress hurriedly but quietly, creep from the hut and make my way to the kit store. A party of soldiers is already preparing our departure. We will leave Lemnos on the tide, the same tide that carried us here. I watch as our few belongings are packed firmly but carefully into kit bags. My portable typewriter, camera and papers are folded neatly into my suitcase; Lambert’s oils, brushes and canvas, along with a healthy stock of ‘medicinal’ brandy, line a hefty travelling trunk. Vickers’ camera proves the most challenging item of them all. Its fragile frame of glass and cloth collapses into itself and is bound up securely in an old Flanders greatcoat. The soldiers take special care. And I know why. A photograph of a distant grave is what every grieving mother longs for.
The morning passes slowly; as does every morning before a journey. I wonder for a moment where my own journey might end. Was home Australia where I was born, England where I was raised, India, Egypt, any of the Imperial frontiers I’d wandered? Perhaps this was my only home now. The rough companionship of men who’d lived through war, the strange bond of tenderness that held us together. I sigh and look out to sea; even now the dark tide is surging towards us. Every journey ends with the beginning of another.
It seems an age before we’re all gathered on the wharf, waiting for the last of the stores to be assembled and for a navy launch to fetch us. The soldiers have lugged the long, black travelling trunk onto the beach. Some wag has labelled it Lambert’s coffin. I smile uneasily at that dark digger humour. The contents of that ‘coffin’ would kill George one day. The luggage has been assembled in two separate piles. The largest is destined for Constantinople, the other (along with Lambert himself) for Chanak, a little seaside village on the straits of Gallipoli. It’s the first time our party will be separated and I must admit I feel a little anxious. The wowser in me wonders if Lambert can be trusted to re-equip the stores. Or would a week-long binge squander all our funds with a thirsty British garrison?
I walk down to the beach craving a few more moments to myself on what now seems the loneliest of islands. I stand on the shingle, water lapping quietly at my feet. It will be a full twenty minutes before the launch arrives. I recall the paths, bell tents and makeshift wards that had once lined the busy shores of Lemnos. The island had served as a hospital base from the first few weeks of the campaign. Men were sent here direct from battle; their hasty field dressings caked with all the filth of Anzac. Many had died on this very beach, almost exactly where I am standing. I imagine them here again – lying on their stretchers staring up at the boundless blue above them.
I shuffle my feet in the shingle. The medical arrangements at Gallipoli had been appalling – Vickers was right about that anyway. Tens of thousands of troops had been thrown at a well-defended coastline. But how many hospital ships had they sent? I try to remember. Three perhaps? Certainly no more. And only one of them within reach of Anzac. Their beds were filled in the first few hours of the campaign.
I remember the decks of a battleship awash with men and blood, remember them sending the wounded on to transports that carried mules to the peninsula, remember men dying in the shit and the straw, attended to not by nurses or doctors but by veterinary surgeons. I close my eyes and try to make sense of it. I’d entered that war with all a schoolboy’s enthusiasm for Empire – the legends of Agincourt and Crécy, Waterloo and Trafalgar ready for recital. Now, reluctantly, I can see something in what Vickers said. Even the most heroic died like cattle.
I watch a solitary figure walk where once an army had died. In a matter of seconds Lambert sidles up alongside me, shingle giving way beneath him. I look into his tired eyes. He’s been up most of the night, working – as he often did – to the point of excited exhaustion. Art, for Lambert, knew no sleep. It walked with Godlike omnipresence beside him.
‘Thought I’d show Vickers these, Skipper. Might just lighten him up a little.’ I nod, pleased the mood has turned and that Lambert’s better side is showing. Every drunkard has need of apologies.
‘You know, I might even make a gift of this. A gift for the young fella. May have been a bit hard on him last night but, you know, it was only the bottle speaking.’
Lambert was fluent in that language.
‘I worry about the boy, Skipper. He should have gone home you know, when he had the chance. There’s no shame in it.’
I hasten to agree and this time I mean it. Hundreds of shell-shocked officers had been invalided home and many far less damaged than Harry Vickers.
‘I’ve heard him, you know. Heard him crying in the night. Talking nothing but gibberish. And that shake, Charley, we’ve all seen it.’
An image of Harry Vickers springs instantly to mind. Pawing tobacco from that battered tin he carries, hands quivering like a fish pulled from water. When the fits are at their worst, one of us lifts a lighted cigarette to his lips. Neither of us can forget the look in those eyes, grateful, ashamed and angry.
‘It’s as if – as if the war is in his head. Quite apart from what it’s done to that poor lad’s body. Why can’t he put it all behind him?’
‘I’m not sure he can, George. None of them can.’
Can you force a man to forget? I know we’ve tried to. Like most shell-shocked men, Vickers had done the rounds of quacks, sadists and charlatans. Showers of icy water, electric shocks to the limbs, medieval tortures that posed as scientific therapy. And now, some fancier of Freud has decided to send him back, back to where Vickers’ war began. ‘Facing the demons’, they call it. I sigh. Vickers’ war is far from over.
‘Anyway,’ Lambert knew it was time to change the subject, ‘a gift for you, too, Skipper. You might think of it as a kind of momento.’ He nods towards the sea. ‘Remember me by it as your cruise boat whisks you up the Marmara.’
And with that the artist unravels the long stretch of canvas. Its corners buckle in the swift morning breeze and a rich palette of colour leaps out to greet us. Wildflowers, crimson red, blazing yellow, and a bright sky blue rather like the Leschenaultia I’d first seen in Albany. Albany, our last sight of Australia, a great blue harbour edged by cliffs of white limestone, crammed with a convoy of transport and war ships, an army bound for battle on far away lands, all waiting to cross the ocean.
‘Found the flowers up by the cemetery here, surprising they grow in winter.’
‘It’s beautiful, George.’
I look up to the graveyard on the hill, following the line of the lonely goat track that provides the only access. I know what nourishes that earth. Little wonder Lemnos can produce such beauty.
We are four hours at sea before we sight the land again. HMS Hunter rounds the toe of the peninsula, skirting the very beaches where French and British troops lumbered ashore in 1915. At the tip of Cape Helles, two ships have been sunk to form a breakwater. Their dead hulls glare at the Hunter reproachfully, as if they somehow resent their sacrifice, as if they long to set to sea again.
I stare at the hulk of a collier stranded high in the shallow water. It bleeds rust into the sea, like a whale disembowelled on the shoreline. I can just make out the peeling name on the bow. The River Clyde. Today its cargo is its story. This was the boat we’d run ashore on the first day of the landings, thousands of British troops packed in her bowels. We called her the Trojan Horse of the Dardanelles. Covered by Maxim guns blazing from her bows the Tommies were to wade ashore and take the Turkish trenches. But I knew it didn’t happen like that.
I look at the place where she has come to rest and scan the distance to the shore. A hundred feet – two hundred, maybe. I jot the information down in my notebook. But today it’s not blank space my mind is measuring. I picture the men in the sea, dragged down by the weight of their packs, cut to pieces by machine guns. Wave after wave of reddened water; corpses, like a black shoal of fish, drifting. All the poetry of Homer couldn’t have saved them.
The Hunter’s engines snort and her smokestack shoots with flame. A gruff farewell to beached companions. Then she rounds another cove and the River Clyde, with all her mysteries, slips from sight.
For twenty minutes we steam close beside the coast, running the length and breadth of the old Allied encampment. My eyes squint at the shore. Line after line of empty trenches stretch out along the beach, still waiting, it seems, for some lost army to fill them. Another roar of engines and propellers churn the fathomless deep; the Hunter strikes out for the Narrows, retracing the course of a doomed Allied fleet four years earlier.
We sail into the straits. The European shore rises up from the sea like a fortress. I look up at a forest clinging to the cliff face. Scruffy and sparse, like the mottled scrub of Bathurst, reaching to the sky at impossible angles, as if planted there by God. Ranging across these ridges, batteries of mobile Howitzers had pounded the invading fleet, then moved on before the ships’ guns could find them. I wonder, again, where Turkish artillery was sited; remember the bursts of flame and smoke that spat down death and mayhem.
As the sea-lane narrows, the white rounded walls of Kilitbahir stare back at me – ‘lock of the sea’. I snatch a breath from the breeze. Few fortresses had been named so aptly. I turn back from the railing and gaze across the waters behind me. To the Asian sides of the straits, a second fort seals the entrance to the narrows. Like two sets of teeth bared against the enemy. Stern, cruel, hungry.
‘Kale Sultanieh – that’s what they call it, Charley.’
I’d wondered when Lambert would emerge from his cabin.
‘“Sultan’s fortress” it means, at least that’s what the captain reckons.’
Every writer can weigh the meaning of a word. Impassable, I jot in my notebook.
The ship labours on against the current and now the cold waters of the Marmara are surging down to the Mediterranean. The channel has narrowed to less than half a mile. As Vickers joins us, something clangs against the hull. A dull metallic thud reproaching itself. I look nervously to him and then to Lambert. I can read their dread: not all the mines had been cleared from the straits and it was mines that sent French and British battleships, their stacks still fuming, to the bottom.
‘Just driftwood, I expect,’ my voice sounds thin and unconvincing, ‘or perhaps we’ve clipped a fishing boat.’
I look down at the deep and wonder if nets ever tangle in the wrecks, or drag the skeletons of seamen to the surface. I imagine bodies rocking in their watery graves and shoals of fish weaving through the bones of sailors.
‘You know why we couldn’t get through, gentlemen?’ The captain of the Hunter walks up towards us. He’s a short, stout man, perhaps fifty years of age, with a thick black beard streaked with salt and silver. He paces the ship’s deck as if it were his kingdom. He glares spitefully shoreward, clears his throat and bellows even louder.
‘It’s quite simple, really. The Turks had such damned good advisors. Our men, gentlemen, our men. See over there?’ Captain Tallow motions to what appears to be a pipe jutting into the sea. ‘Royal Navy torpedo tubes – installed just a few years before the war – courtesy of His Majesty’s Government. They were meant to keep German ships out, not ours.’ He sighs loudly at the water, damning the sea as only seamen can. ‘Blasted Turks, treacherous lot. Still, we got our own back.’ He aims his telescope menacingly at the shore. ‘Not much of that left standing, eh, gentlemen?’
At the captain’s invitation, we each peer through the telescope in turn. Chanak looks reminiscent of an Italian seaside resort, with comfortable if rather flimsy villas backing on to the straits, private piers, fretwork boat and summer houses in gimcrack Turkish style, a few cheap shops. But what had once been a town was now a collection of ruins. The captain’s guns had pounded every wall that could be seen. It was not hard to imagine the smoke and fire and panic, or the trail of civilians fleeing their stricken township. I’d seen as much in France. In this war and all to follow, exploding shells made no distinction between combatant and civilian. The British Navy may not have opened the gateway to Turkey, but it had certainly inflicted its fair share of havoc.
The old sea dog was still baying for blood. ‘If the fleet had got through, I would have done the same to Constantinople. Taught the brutes a lesson! Those Ottoman buildings are ancient timber, gentlemen, tinder-dry; ships’ guns would have set them off nicely. You know,’ he tilts his cap with an air of satisfaction, ‘I think you would have seen the bonfire all the way from Anzac.’ The captain snorts defiantly and fills his lungs loudly with the breeze. ‘Saved a lot of lives, we could have. If only we’d got through. If only.’
I look up the straits, gaze into sea-sprayed distance and long to see the city the captain had hoped to incinerate.
General Grimwade glanced at his watch and nodded with approval. Precisely 0800 hours. He had arrived at the Campbell Park offices a full hour ahead of any other committee member. There was more than enough time to collect his thoughts, re-read the papers, review each respective position.
His driver saluted smartly as she opened the door. Today it was a young naval cadet. With military precision, drivers in the Australian defence forces were rotated on the basis of service and gender. Because driving was an official duty she was dressed in immaculate white, not the drab cams worn by cadets day in and day out of their training. Her blond hair was pinned back into a bun and crammed beneath a naval bonnet. Attractive lass, the general thought as he stood up beside the car. Cuts a fine figure even in a naval uniform.
The general returned the salute. His hand lingered on his hat a second or two longer than protocol required. In his opinion, naval cadets made the best drivers. Courteous, efficient, always keen to please. Less familiar than the infantry, less haughty than the air force. And women, he was prepared to concede, made far better drivers than men. The rules of civilian life, it seemed, were totally reversed in the military. He added a wink to the salute. A mark of familiarity quickly won approval with junior ranks. But General Grimwade was not a man who tried to be popular. He respected women who succeeded in a belligerently male world. And he valued a capable and presentable driver.
He walked quickly and deliberately towards the entrance of Nodule D Campbell Park which was, he had to admit, the ugliest of all the military establishments he’d served in. Its concrete walls rose up like a bunker from the bush. There were a few gaily coloured posters taped to the windows. A picture of young women abseiling sought to entice new recruits to the social club. He would have all posters removed later that day. The brutality of Campbell Park’s architecture was entirely intentional.
Within minutes, the general was seated in the committee room. A clerk dressed as a corporal set the table to order around him. Papers to his right, water to his left, a notepad and pen aligned with conspicuous accuracy. The general was a tidy man. And perhaps for that reason he found this whole Inquiry unsettling. The questions were unclear, the debate acrimonious, the solutions far from obvious. As the Inquiry’s chair, General Grimwade was not required to voice an opinion. Indeed, he liked to think of himself as an informed but impartial umpire. Even so, there was much in these fraught discussions that troubled him. Nor was it just the obvious points of disagreement. As he grew older, the general also grew more anxious. He wondered if he still had the air of command, if the bureaucrats who ran Canberra really took his authority seriously or if bright shining buttons were all just for show now.
A leather-bound copy of the Imperial War Graves Register sat solemnly in the centre of the table. Volume 6. The general wondered how many more volumes it took to name all the dead of the Empire.
‘Pass me that book as you leave would you, Corporal? And, thank you, you’ve done a good job here.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
The general was left alone with 5000 names of the fallen. He turned the book on its side and inspected the spine. Major Barton: Australia House, London was printed neatly on a label. The old book had been repatriated when the records of the Australian High Commission were forwarded to the archives and Barton, Grimwade realised, must have been the military attaché in London. He smiled quietly to himself – a gesture that made his moustache bristle. Forty years ago he too had been posted to Australia House and no doubt sat in the very same office as Major Barton. But there, the general realised, all the similarities ended. For General Grimwade, London had been one long round of social engagements – cocktail parties, embassy events, hobnobbing with royalty. Major Barton, he knew, wasn’t so lucky. From the end of one world war to the beginning of another, grieving families called on the major in the hope of finding a loved one’s grave and many had come from as far away as Australia. Grimwade sighed. Did it really help, he wondered, to travel so far and find so little?
He opened up the inside cover and released a thick, dusty smell not unlike that office in London; its walls the dirty colour of a fog on the Thames, soiled with sixty years of cigarette smoke. He turned the pages to a list of names inscribed on the Lone Pine Memorial. These were the men they had never found, the men buried somewhere on Gallipoli, in hurried unmarked graves the new roadworks would probably open. The names piled up with alphabetical precision. A catalogue of carnage. Even the general was appalled by the tidiness of it all. The pages, he noted, were soiled and thumb-marked. Hundreds of wives, parents and children must have flicked through the columns. He could almost see their fingers scrolling down, desperate to touch one name among so many. The spine creaked open at surnames beginning with ‘I’. IRWIN, GEORGE ROY – was neatly underlined. Twice in fact. Now why was that, he wondered?
‘This is an Inquiry completely independent of the government,’ Brawley declared. ‘And there is no question of us trying to influence your findings. But I must impress upon you the delicacy of the situation. Certainly the minister would not be at all pleased if reports of our deliberations appeared in the media – or if anything, anything, was done to pre-empt the committee’s proper recommendations.’ Brawley’s fat lips pronounced ‘proper’ rather too emphatically.
What kind of recommendation was ‘improper’? Mark wondered.
General Grimwade quietly reminded Brawley who was running the Inquiry. ‘Of course, we all appreciate the minister’s concerns and the discretion of this committee is above question. I thank you all for your submissions and I suggest we adjourn until next week. It will certainly take time to study all these papers. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.’
Vanessa smiled. It made a change to be acknowledged.
‘Just a moment, General – please.’ Mark sensed impatience and disapproval. ‘Can we just, just clarify a point of procedure?’
‘Yes, of course,’ the general’s demeanour changed suddenly. He was a man who respected protocol.
‘We’re not limited, are we, to the papers furnished today? What if other archival evidence came to light?’
Brawley fumed. Widening the terms of reference was always dangerous. ‘I can assure you, Dr Troy, our investigation has been exhaustive. No time or expense has been spared. Really,’ Brawley lowered his voice and turned towards the general, ‘we must ask ourselves, is this really in the public interest?’
There was a second’s hesitation while General Grimwade considered his options. Extending the Inquiry would mean more time, more expense and doubtless more controversy. Canberra, as always, was in a hurry for a result – a tidy recommendation like the all-too-tidy catalogue before him.
‘A thorough investigation is always in the public interest, Mr Brawley, providing of course it doesn’t delay things unnecessarily. Dr Troy, Professor Evatt, you have until next week.’ The general glanced again at his watch. ‘At 1540 hours, I declare the meeting closed.’
In the shuffle of papers that followed, the next words were lost to all but Mark. ‘Good luck,’ the general mumbled through his moustache. Almost a century earlier Major Barton had said much the same.
Dr Mark Troy took his seat in the archives. Table eleven was his place of preference. Bathed in the soft light of the reading room’s cathedral-like window, it offered a clear view of the lined shelves and the comings and goings of researchers. All around him was a quiet intensity: Wednesday was one of the busy days at the Australian War Memorial.
A trolley of documents rumbled towards him.
‘Good to see you again, Dr Mark. It’s the Bean papers again, isn’t it?’ Fabian lifted the files tenderly from the frame and placed them down with exaggerated care on the table. Title and first name was a liberty he took with younger academics. Just to remind them of their place. He had been training Mark for some time now and he feared he’d made little progress.
‘Not much of this is properly catalogued, you know – and look, you really gave me a challenge with this one – is that a five or an eight?’
Fabian pressed the call slip accusingly across the table. Scholars were a curious breed. Why did men who spent their whole lives playing with words find the most elementary act of writing so difficult?
‘Now that’s a five, Fabian – look, I’ve written it again neatly in the corner.’
Hardly neatly, Fabian wanted to say, but there were some researchers he liked better than others.
‘Well, I had best fetch eight then. Let’s see: 3DRL 762 358,’ Fabian re-wrote the entire call number on the slip, in the boldest, neatest letters he could muster. ‘And I’m afraid you will have to wait for the next retrieval.’ Fabian knew someone had to set the limits of tolerance. ‘So, Dr Mark, I take it you don’t want this then?’
Mark Troy looked up at the dull brown cardboard box crammed tight with papers. In a black square, he could just make out the term Misc. Miscellaneous always signalled mystery for a researcher. These were the papers that didn’t quite fit, random correspondence, arbitrary jottings, unfinished stories. All their lives archivists worked to order the world into carefully indexed series; Misc was the admission that they never quite succeeded.
‘Well, are they part of the Bean collection?’
‘Oh yes. And not easy to find either. I haven’t been in that corner of the stacks for years.’ Fabian’s white coat was speckled with dust, evidence of much toil in the archives. Mark’s glasses, coated with grime, shared the grubby patina of history. He tried to restrain his excitement. ‘Then, I’d best work through them.’
Fabian was pleased. There was nothing he hated more than researchers who picked the eyes out of a collection. In his twenty years of service, trolley men like Fabian had witnessed an alarming decline in academic standards. Few researchers worked their way through the boxes nowadays. They called up a file here, a file there, just enough to get a feel for the sources, to lift a line or two of text and pad out the requisite footnotes. Those who worked the archives were a sensitive barometer of changing academic practice – their time in the shelves a measure of spiralling workloads, increasingly mercenary grant applications and an evermounting pressure to publish. Some ‘clients’ hadn’t read enough to know, Fabian thought, only read enough to suit whatever fashion it was that now swept through the academy. In the stacks of the Australian War Memorial, Fabian Treloar fought single-handed against the précised history of postmodernism. He was a stickler for the old school, a champion of industrious empiricism.
For Mark Troy there were no such certainties. He lacked Fabian’s faith in the facts. Indeed, from his undergraduate days he’d been trained to view every fact with scepticism, and he knew that in any given box, in a single slender file, there were just too many facts along with opinion, hearsay, wilful invention to deal with. But even then Mark conceded it was what the archives didn’t say that mattered. The absent letter, unspoken truth, the half-remembered conversation.
Mark sighed as his mind weighed the work piled on the trolley. The past was a messy business. A kind of palimpsest where one text wrote busily over another, cluttered, untidy, rather like the jumble of icons crammed on his computer screen. He moved the cursor to create yet another one before he began the awkward labour of unpacking 3DRL 762 358.
To the archivist, Bean’s rough diaries must have seemed a peculiar assortment. Entries marked by days rather than dates, scratched, illegible shorthand, a series of what might have been sums or codes, curious pencil sketches of men, places, animals. Mark tapped his pencil on the table. Could be anywhere, anytime – France, Belgium, even from Bean’s homestead back in Tuggeranong where he completed his lifetime’s labour: The Official History of Australia in the War 1914–1918. Mark closed his eyes again and imagined a fragile fellowship with the long dead author – a man who had turned his desk away from the garden, fearing flowers might distract him.
He unfolded a brittle piece of parchment and flinched as it tore in the corner. At top right the accession number was duly stated. Its title, Miscellaneous Landscape, seemed a contradiction in terms, at odds with the specifics of geography. Then, almost on a whim, Mark rotated the image. Instantly, the landscape of Gallipoli stared back at him. It’s Quinn’s Post, he thought to himself, must be.
But not in 1915. That much was obvious. The angles were all wrong. The trenches had been filled in, those sharp slopes flattened and terraced. But when else would Bean have sketched the site? Mark’s mind was racing. Of course – 1919 – the Gallipoli Mission. The archivist hadn’t recognised Quinn’s Post because this was a landscape in transition – they were levelling the ground to lay out the cemetery. ‘These men held Quinn’s. They hold it still.’ Where had he read that?
In a matter of minutes, all the miscellaneous files assumed a meaning and a purpose. Mark flicked through the diary – Q – Quinn’s, 60 – Hill 60. EP. He paused for a moment. Embarkation Pier. The figures were map references, lines of longitude and latitude. He glided his finger across symbol and text. The scratching of Bean’s pencil marked specific sites – the place where the troops first came ashore, where the trenches almost met, the last desperate stand of Lalor and his men, fighting to the death on the farthest ridges. Bean had found them there in 1919, still sited in a close defensive crescent, nothing left but their skeletons. There was a tiny cross stencilled in the corner. It stood as stark on the page as any stone memorial. ‘Here’ was written beside it. What was here, Mark wondered?
Then it caught his eye again. One box larger and weightier than all the others. Fabian had grunted as he hauled it off the trolley. ‘Must be full of the old man’s paper weights,’ he’d exclaimed, half in warning, half in wonder.
Mark slid the contents onto the table. It was as if an old drawer sealed for generations had suddenly been opened. Rusting filing clips, blunted pen nibs, a sheet of carbon torn from a long frozen typewriter all spilt out before him. And something else, something dark and heavy. Mark peeled the tissue paper away. It took just an instant to recognise it – a firing loop, pockmarked where snipers’ bullets had sped into metal. Even now the cold iron seemed to vibrate, battered by the trauma of the trenches. ‘Relic,’ Mark muttered, ‘not paperweight.’
Amidst all the debris of war he then noticed something curious. A pile of letters, still half sealed in their envelopes, still bound by a ribbon knotted an age ago. He tugged expectantly on the crimson chord. There was the musty memory of a scent, a hint of thyme, dust and perfume.
Lt George Roy Irwin’s attack on Lone Pine was but one of a series of battles marking the August offensive. Everywhere, from Helles in the south to the northernmost point of Anzac, Allied troops stepped out of the sordid shelter of their trenches and charged across no-man’s-land.
The main breakthrough was to be launched from Anzac. For all the time Irwin and his men had fought and suffered there, the cove and its hill-bound surrounds were no more than a narrow beachhead. It was hoped a new force of Australian and New Zealand troops could weave their way through the tangle of gullies to the north of the Anzac position and strike out for Chunuk Bair and Hill 971 – the windswept lonely summit of Gallipoli. Hoped that whoever took those heights might also take the peninsula.
Standing by the walls of the crater Roy Irwin was just tall enough to make out the Australian advance. One wave after another struggled to the Turkish parapet and simply disappeared. He traced the scene of slaughter before him. The long line of bodies that died as they fell, their life breath snatched away, murdered in an instant. A boy’s bare knees jutted out from the pile of butchered khaki.
‘What’s happening, sir? Have our blokes got through?’
‘I don’t think so, Saunders – it’s hard to tell at the moment.’
Irwin knew that uncertainty bred panic in men. Even so, he couldn’t lie to them. This looked nothing like the model attack outlined in the general’s briefing. A charge at enemy trenches had the best chance of success if there was a concentrated assault on the weakest point of defence. Irwin could see others charging well beyond the frontline, leaping into what must have been a reserve trench, or perhaps one of a hundred saps stretching out into no-man’s-land. It was chaos, he thought. Why enter the trenches in so many places? It made no sense to him.
As Irwin looked out, a Turkish bullet whizzed by him. He felt its flattened nose cut a swathe through the air; a whine rang out in his eardrums. His heart jumped a beat: every soldier knew a near miss. But the fortunes of war favoured some at the cost of others. The same bullet plunged into Corporal Saunders’ mouth. He fell back in the trench and blood welled up in his throat to drown him.
‘We can’t stay here, sir.’ There was panic in the private’s voice but also a terrible resolution. ‘They’ll pick us off one by one, just give us a chance, just let us at ’em.’
Irwin glanced down at his corporal thrashing for air. The dying man’s throat was slashed to the bone, his face was white with terror. Irwin pushed him on his side, allowing the blood to flow freely. It was the only aid Irwin had time to offer.
‘All right men, stay with me.’
As they stumbled over the crater’s ridge, not one of them looked back at Corporal Saunders. Going over the top, men could only think of themselves. That and the unseen enemy before them. Irwin gripped the map in his right hand. In the heat of the moment, he had not even drawn his revolver.