The waters of the Bosporus smell like nothing I have ever smelt before. They run deep and dark along the seawall, rising up to lap the heels of fishermen before plunging down to drench the breakwater. I fill my lungs with heady, sun-soaked sea spray. Even in the bitterest winter, the waters of the Bosporus carry the scent of summer. They run tirelessly from one corner of the Ottoman Empire to the other, having decided their course a thousand centuries before Constantinople began.
My eyes scan the city walls. They are in ruins now, battered by one invader after another, pillaged for stone by industrious builders, worn down by centuries of wind and rain. The hungry and the homeless have carved out a space for themselves beneath the broken arches. Lines of washing flap from the battlements, surrendering memory where Greek, Persian and Christian armies once laid siege. Wind rustles through crumbling limestone. An army of the city’s stray cats pisses and plays in the rubble of history.
Constantinople’s skyline is cut into frosty blue. A symphony of soaring minarets, medieval towers and arching domes frames the heavens. I blink once or twice in sheer astonishment. For all its shabby splendour this is the most beautiful city I have ever seen.
And yet this is the place we were charged with destroying. I cringe as I imagine all these rich skies ablaze. Nothing much distinguishes one army from another, that truth the classics has taught me. From one age to another, plunder and pillage have been the wages of war. I kick the earth at my feet, dislodging stone set in place by crusaders, and I recall, with not a little regret, my own frenetic souveniring, the shattered mosaics, holy relics and priceless art looted from antiquity. In the museum we promptly labelled these ‘exhibits’, as if a word could make a difference. But they were really trophies, the prizes any victor claimed.
Vickers walks up and shuffles to a halt. ‘We never got here did we, Charley?’ words sink into the swell beneath us. ‘You know,’ he continues, ‘it’s probably just as well. You remember the Wazza?’
I do. In the Easter before the Anzac landing, Australian and New Zealand troops had torn the red light district of Cairo to pieces; burning, looting, beating shopkeepers and citizens senseless. The men had rioted to avenge mates infected in the brothels. I frown – that was surely an injury they’d brought upon themselves. It took a division of British military police to bring that sex-crazed mob to its senses. Colonial rabble they called us – savage, untrained, undisciplined.
I look at Vickers. He’s nodding his head in agreement, as if thoughts are conversations. It takes savages to fight any war. And maybe for some, it didn’t matter who we were fighting: Turks, ‘wogs’, ‘gyppos’, any colour or culture different to our own.
There’s a bitter taste in my mouth. Here in the markets of a foreign land Australians had haggled over the price of an embrace in the same breath that they bargained for trinkets.
‘Yes, Harry, I remember. And I must admit the Wazza made me ashamed to be Australian.’ I cease to slouch on the seawall and raise up to my full height – alongside Vickers that seems considerable. ‘But that’s behind us now, isn’t it.’ I tap my pipe on the stone and watch the ashen remnants scatter in the breeze. ‘No one remembers the Wazza but they all remember Anzac.’
‘Yes,’ Vickers answers slowly, ‘especially that poor lot.’
He points down to the jetty. A barge lifts up and down in the swell, and a ragged army of Turkish infantry clamours ashore. They look more like scarecrows than soldiers, their uniforms in tatters, their boots – if they have any – bound together with string. It is as if the spirit has gone out of them. Some shuffle towards an open fire smoking near the water, others slump on empty crates and ships’ bollards.
‘Poor beggars,’ Vickers continues. Men who cradle their own pain are often moved to pity, and to insight. ‘That’s what defeat looks like, Charley.’
I nod in agreement. That fate could have been our own. I’d seen men just like that limping down from the firing line in France. Diggers broken by the brunt of battle, confused, dispirited, without the faintest hope of home. God only knows where home was for the hastily demobilised Turkish forces. With the Ottoman Empire crumbling around them, it would now take a miracle to send them there.
A staff car pulls up suddenly alongside us and a sharply dressed, sharply mannered officer leans out of the window.
‘You chaps the Australians? I’ve orders to run you up to the Constant. Climb in, will you?’
He flings the back door open. It creaks in rusty protest.
‘Oh, don’t worry about them, Captain.’
Vickers is watching the last of the Ottoman army step unsteadily from barge to seawall.
‘They shan’t be giving us any trouble!’
The staff car coughs and purrs towards the western district of the city. It crosses the cobbled bridge that spans the Golden Horn, skirts the Galata Tower’s medieval stonework and climbs the winding streets that separate ancient Constantinople from the modern. En route, I count over a hundred wayside stalls, tiny fires cooking chestnuts and corn, men with bread piled high on their heads, shoe-shine boys and salesmen plying their commerce on the streets of the city. To my left I can make out the lanes, shops and markets of the city’s Jewish quarters, nestled in the shadows of alleyways, a world unto themselves. The call to prayer rings out from an ancient minaret, a cable car clatters by plush city bars. Twenty minutes after our journey begins we stop outside what the expatriate British community calls the Constant. The old German Teutonia Club, with its spacious rooms and shaded gardens is yet another trophy of war and renaming it was the timeless prerogative of the conqueror. One of the largest union flags I’ve ever seen dangles from a balcony. The officer steps out on the running board.
‘Expect you’ll want to clean up a bit. I’ll be back after lunch to run you over to the mission. Remember, Captain, dress uniform for dinner. Black tie for you, sir.’
Vickers nods grimly. Even if the world was falling apart at the seams the Empire would dress for dinner.
The officer makes a curt salute, climbs back into the car and motions to the driver. The gears grate loudly as the vehicle rumbles away. The smell of whisky and cigars beckons us towards the building.
The meeting at the British diplomatic mission goes much better than we expect. A man promoted well beyond his ability runs through all our curious requirements. Yes, the Turks will provide an officer to escort us across the battlefields and, yes (with some effort), they can probably arrange a veteran of 1915. Maps, the military attaché assures us, shouldn’t be a problem even if the Turks wouldn’t provide them as a courtesy.
‘Got a map from a German officer.’
‘No idea of how to play poker.’
‘Just like the old days.’
‘Had the Hun on the run.’
His conversation mimicked the machine gun fire from the trenches, the rhythmic arching fire heard every night, bursts of death sweeping across the land. And so our Gallipoli mission is equipped, rationed and sorted from an old Ottoman house on the fringes of Sultanhamet. Every home outlives its owners, I think to myself. That is a building’s greatest sadness. I listen as the ancient timbers arch and creak, alarmed by the new army of occupants. Telephones and typewriters take the places of urns and ornaments; a shambles of desks and office spaces colonise a once exquisite drawing room. Inventories are drawn up, forms signed, items receipted. The great home seems uncomfortable with itself, puzzled by strange, new intrigues whispered in its corridors. Whilst far away in London, clerks from the foreign office gloat like greedy relatives over a will, divvying up the assets of Empire.
By late afternoon, Vickers and I find ourselves beneath the great dome of Hagia Sophia. We had wandered the city for hours, every winding street beckoning us on to another. Exhausted by our journey, our gaze rests on murals set in stone centuries ago. Most are damaged and incomplete. Pillaging crusaders have prised coloured tiles from the walls – art was just another form of booty. But the figures of saints, angels and the Virgin Mary still peek out from the cloudy surface, gazing down as intently as when Santa Sophia’s dome had first vaulted the sky.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I whisper. A match for the greatest cathedrals of Europe, the finest, glittering palaces of Empire, the soaring dreaming towers of ancient, ivy-laden Oxford. ‘Just beautiful.’
But Vickers doesn’t hear me. His eyes swim from one sacred image to another, and soar up to the heavens beyond. A child tugs at my sleeve. Big eyes look up with hope and hunger. I turn to one side and slip a coin from my pocket. A tear runs down Vickers’ face. I pretend not to notice.
‘Welcome to Gallipoli, gentlemen. Welcome back, I should say.’ Colonel Hammond’s manner is brisk, blunt and yet disarmingly familiar. Normally, the very thought of visitors horrifies him. His lonely outpost in the Dardanelles, headquarters of the war graves detachment, hardly had the facilities to deal with them. But he can tell we are not your run-of-the-mill Gallipoli pilgrims. He knew we had fought here, against the Turks, the lice, the punishing lie of the land, the sickly stench of the corpses. Hammond, like Vickers, is a Gallipoli veteran. The golden ‘A’ pinned to his tunic signals membership of the same exclusive club, the same terrible fellowship.
‘Now you’re not the first visitors we’ve had, so don’t think yourselves too special.’
The warmth of Hammond’s handshake seems to suggest otherwise.
‘I’ve even turned a few away, tourists from those damned cruise ships bound for Constantinople. God knows what they think they’ll find here.’
What indeed? I look around the ruined townships of Maidos, once a thriving Greek fishing town, then a busy hospital base for the Turks, and now, after its battering by British naval guns, a pile of rubble. To my left an old man roasts chestnuts on an ancient iron stove. Their shells peel open as he rakes the glowing embers. Down by the seawall, a party of fishermen repair their nets, long needles darting in and out. I take a sip of my strong black coffee and marvel at the ingenuity of the Turks and Greeks milling around us. Normally Greek and Turk were at each other’s throats. They had battled for centuries along these disputed borders. But now all their differences have been put aside to prepare this morning’s modest beverage. Hot and sweet it numbs a thousand years of grievance and brings what is left of the old town square to life again. I risk the final sip of coffee, draining moisture from sediment, sucking the flavour out of the grounds stuck to my teeth.
‘But you haven’t had Australians visit here, surely? The war is barely over.’
Vickers couldn’t contain his incredulity. What kind of cruise would take in a battlefield?
‘Only one thus far. An old bloke by the name of Murray got here somehow, all the way from Gippsland. God knows, I’ll not forget that poor blighter in a hurry – his son bought it on Walker’s Ridge – first week in August.’
Walker’s Ridge.
The name says it all. Like most men who survived the war, Hammond has ceased to believe in words. Words cannot begin to express what they’ve been through. But place names are different. The Ridge, the Nek, Pozières, Bullecourt, Passchendaele. Strange sounding names from worlds away. Names that hold their own kind of darkness.
Hammond coughs and begins again. ‘Of course, we did what we could for him. But you can imagine what it’s like out there. Still a bloody mess. We’ve barely begun to bring in the bodies.’ A second’s silence is followed by a shout: ‘Hey, you there!’ Hammond bellows at a Turk unloading our supplies, ‘Bloody idiot! Take a bit more damned care will you?’
I am startled at the sharpness of the rebuke. I look the stern, old soldier up and down. Not a man to be trifled with.
‘That’s what we’ve been sent to find out, Colonel Hammond – what it’s like out there. Rumours have reached Australia. There’s talk of...’ I lower my voice, as if shielding a scandal, ‘rumours of desecration.’ I regret this allegation the moment I utter it. For all the evidence of the cables, Vickers and I remember the Turk as a clean fighter, playing the game as honourably as one could in war, not the sort to pillage graveyards. Hammond, however, thinks otherwise.
‘Not just rumours,’ the colonel scowls. ‘Dug up bodies at Anzac and Helles, riffled through the remains like animals. And they burnt every cross there, gentlemen, every cross we’d raised. Savages – just damned savages.’
He slams down his coffee as if he would choke on it. A group of Turkish workmen move quietly away – Hammond’s body language tells them far more than their slight knowledge of English. The old soldier swings at the air with his cane, slaying an unseen enemy.
‘And now the powers that be tell us it’s time to “negotiate”. To parley with the unspeakable. Take my word for it, gentlemen, this war isn’t over, not for any of us.’
And indeed the Australian War Graves Unit is still armed for battle. I do a quick count of guns. There are at least twenty men, each carrying a standard Lee-Enfield. A small cart to our left is equipped with stores, ammunition and a Lewis gun. There is enough firepower in this ruined fishing village to quell a small rebellion. Why, I wonder, is a War Graves Unit carrying more guns than shovels? Was the armistice with Turkey so very fragile?
Hammond notices my discomfort.
‘Don’t worry old man. All under control for the moment. This show of force is just to keep the brigands at bay. Other day one of our men was wounded out beyond the fishermen’s huts. Wild country, if you get my meaning. And if trouble does break out between the Turks and the Greeks, well,’ Hammond slams his hand on a holstered revolver, ‘we can keep order here. We’re still soldiers you know.’
A burly six foot four, with the broad shoulders of a bushman, Colonel Hammond is still very much a soldier. His face broadens to a smile. I notice his teeth are chipped and yellow like the ivory keys on an old piano.
Again, Hammond reads the look with uncanny accuracy.
‘Here, try one of these. Turkish cigarettes – probably the most powerful weapon of the war.’
Hammond strikes a match and circulates the one flame between us. I draw back on the thick, tightly packed cylinder. For a moment we are silent, each of us lost in thought and the parchment cloud of smoke billowing around us. The sharp smell reaches my nostrils. Yes, I have tried these before. In the May of 1915, when both sides put down their guns and buried their dead in no-man’s-land. There was an uncanny silence between the lines that day, men afraid to speak least they swallow the air around them. Slime stuck to our boots and our faces were thick with flies. Such a pitiful sight, acre after acre of dead, bodies strewn like seaweed.
The tangled mass was piled highest near our trenches. There lay the casualties of one suicidal Turkish attack after another. Wave after wave they had come, determined to drive ‘the English’ into the sea, breaking with a thud, subsiding in a spray of bullets. At first, men paid for a place in that firing line – a chance to settle old scores, avenge the deaths of brothers, mates and comrades. But after an hour’s blazing carnage, their guns glowing hot, most turned away, in awe of the courage, appalled by the slaughter. May was the month men confronted the madness. Each side piled up the bodies of men they killed and handed them back to their countrymen.
It was early that afternoon that a Turkish captain had handed me my first Turkish cigarette.
‘Tenez. Ça aide.’
And it did help. The smoke concealed the stench of the dead; its bitter taste a sudden sweetness. I barely remember what I said in reply. Words in any language would have failed me.
The same Turkish officer had gestured first to where bodies were heaped the highest, then to the long common grave about to swallow them.
‘Ça, c’est la politique,’ he declared, ‘et ça, mon vieux, c’est la diplomatie!’
Politics or diplomacy? I ask myself which had brought me back to Anzac. And whether Hammond, a man who clearly knew how to hate, could really tell the difference.
‘Well we had best be off gentlemen.’ Hammond grinds his cigarette butt into the gravel. ‘You’ll want to set up camp before nightfall. Abdul!’
A young Turk appears a second later, an Australian Waler trailing behind him. Vickers strokes its long tangled mane, as if renewing a valued acquaintance.
‘I’m glad we didn’t shoot all the horses. Still, you know,’ Hammond turns towards the young man, ‘the Turks treat them terribly. You can ride, can’t you, the track is pretty rough up there.’
‘Oh yes, we can ride,’ Vickers replies, swinging with painful determination across the saddle. ‘Only Lambert,’ he wonders how to put this diplomatically, ‘is a bit out of condition.’
In the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of our returned companion. He heaves his tall slender body to the side and lunges awkwardly forward. Lambert had begun his morning in the Red Lion at Chanak, making his way to Maidos barely an hour earlier.
‘I’m all right, old man, be with you in a moment.’ He is breathing heavily. The strain of the journey is beginning to show. Though Lambert has said nothing, I know the artist also nurses war wounds of his own. Most of the Light Horse who served in Palestine had ‘a touch’ of malaria. So had Lambert.
I watch his tall angular frame lurch from stirrup to saddle. I know he has conquered much harder mounts than this one. The grey mare neighs loudly as Lambert pulls her into line. He jolts in the saddle as man and beast unite. A breeze whips up the rain as our party turns towards Anzac. I remember it rained just like this on the day of the landing.
The letters of Elsie Forrest spread over the desk like a tablecloth. For a time, Mark had pushed them back together, assembling a flimsy tower of fraying paper, dust and ribbon. But gravity got the better of linear narrative and the papers tumbled down, each letter seizing a space separate to the others.
Mark paused a moment before reading. He adjusted his glasses and swept his hair from his forehead. Archives like these merited a kind of reverence. However young and gauche he was, he knew that. All around him researchers were retracing the steps of men few had known, soldiers lost in the deserts of Tobruk, the flat fields of France, the mountains of Korea and the jungles of Vietnam. To his left, an old couple shifted through reports of missing POWs. They were seeking out a stranger, a man whose touch they’d never felt, whose words they’d never known. Only six Australians had survived the death march from Sandakan; all the rest had perished, taken, kind souls said, by the mists of the mountains, scattered to the winds. But Mark knew otherwise. Table sixteen was a mess of files and photographs, maps of airfields long forgotten and overgrown, images of young men who flew off into crimson skies and never came to earth again. Outside in the cloistered galleries the names of 100,000 war dead were etched in bronze, gleaming testimony to the loss of a nation. But here in the reading room, the families of the fallen recovered their stories. Here, history stumbled into life again.
Mark knew the familiar sequence of correspondence with the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Bureau. Soldiers weren’t killed in battle, rather, they went ‘missing’. No one really knew what happened to them, and so began a desperate series of inquiries.
‘Did my boy leave any kind of message?’
‘Did he suffer very much?’
‘Was there a priest to comfort him?’
‘Surely there is a nurse I can write to?’
Letter after letter cried out with anger, disbelief or anguish. Twelve thousand miles from the battlefield, denying death seemed a natural reaction. ‘Perhaps my son hasn’t been killed at all, you say no one brought in the body?’ ‘Perhaps he was only wounded, perhaps taken prisoner?’
Red Cross workers considered the grim gamut of possibilities: ‘shot in the head by a sniper’, ‘blown to pieces in the first hour of the attack’, ‘cut down by a machine gun hopping over’, ‘buried completely in the trenches’.
Where information was given, the accounts were subtly amended, sparing mothers the worst of war, sheltering in euphemism. ‘Shot in the privates’ became ‘wounded in the abdomen’; men whose heads were severed by a shell were now simply ‘killed in an instant’. Bodies slung into shell holes became ‘burials in the field’, men were ‘knocked over at the parapet’, or ‘fell’ at the height of the battle. Usually of course ‘the ground had been lost’.
In Mark’s careful estimate, most assaults on enemy lines gained almost nothing. He took a deep breath. Sifting through Red Cross files was rather like attending a post-mortem. He wondered what comfort reports like these offered grieving families, remembered the makeshift shrines to memory entombed to this day in the archives – fragments of fading diaries and letters, shreds of tattered uniform, the grim collection of personal effects (one pipe, one belt, one damaged wristwatch), the final letters folded carefully in a family bible.
He raised the first of Elsie’s letters up to the light and noticed something quite extraordinary.
‘Thought I might find you here, mind if I join you?’
Vanessa’s voice startled Mark, and prompted accusing glares from the tables around him. She smiled back apologetically, as if pleading special dispensation.
‘We really should talk.’ Her voice conveyed a sense of urgency. ‘Can you break for a coffee?’ The young woman leaned closer, perhaps out of consideration for the other researchers but something in the softness of her tone suggested otherwise. The scent of her perfume was rich and alluring.
‘Sweet. Just give me a minute.’ With slightly exaggerated care, Mark shuffled Elsie’s letters into a pile and noticed again the duller, dustier scent still sealed deep inside them.
Mark and Vanessa walked without a word to the exit. They passed the white landing craft wrested from the beach at Anzac and turned right at two stone lions, once the guardians of Menin Gate now tethered at the entrance of the Memorial. They stepped into the bright light of the forecourt. Ahead of them, draped with flags, stretched the long red aisles of Anzac Parade, each of its sides flanked with monuments. Mark wondered how many more would be built before the world came to its senses. Beyond, lay the bright sky blue of Lake Burley Griffin, followed by the sapphire haze of the Brindabella Ranges. Canberra was set in a vast natural amphitheatre.
Mark was one of the few Australians he knew who actually liked Canberra, as much, if not more than, the seedy streetscapes of Sydney or the faded glories of Melbourne’s boulevards. Perhaps it was the theatre of the place, or perhaps it was just that Mark was still a country boy at heart. He had grown up in the Wimmera and there, like Canberra, the dry summer air was still and blue and silent. He watched an arc of cockatoos reeling towards them, carrying sunshine on their backs.
‘God, don’t you hate Canberra? It’s all so empty isn’t it? Cigarette?’
‘No ... thanks ... I don’t.’
‘Well, I will if you don’t mind – six hours in committee is enough to break all my resolutions. I’m so,’ she struck a match and sucked hard on a Marlborough Light, ‘...well, I’m over it. It is all just tiresome.’
‘Do you think so?’ Mark wondered why his conversation seemed just a string of single syllables; he could do better than this surely. ‘Your research with Intelligence, and Foreign Affairs, that would be interesting, wouldn’t it’?
Vanessa seemed genuinely surprised. She blew out a stream of smoke and smiled back indulgently. Her teeth, unlike his own, were white, polished, faultless.
‘Seriously? Oh my God, you must be joking. Research and government are totally incompatible. You know what I think? We spend most of our time avoiding information, not finding it.’ Mark smiled. In the parched summer air, he found her presence cool and comforting. ‘And if we did find anything, do you really think they would listen?’
Vanessa made it abundantly clear who ‘they’ were. Her head nodded dismissingly towards the furthest shore of the lake and the capital’s Parliamentary precinct. Four kilometres to the west, a steel tripod lifted an Australian flag to the sky. From far away it looked something like a giant stick insect. Beneath the tripod, under a soft green expanse of lawn, was the grinding machinery of government.
‘After all, we don’t want another Fromelles on our hands, do we Mark – you don’t mind if I call you Mark, do you?’ She looked away from Capital Hill and smiled in his direction.
‘Of course not,’ Mark answered. ‘Vanessa? Isn’t it?’ The question was unconvincing.
Vanessa smiled again and continued. ‘You see, Mark, Fromelles posed what my colleague Mr Brawley calls “an awkward but binding precedent” – mass grave, costly exhumation of the dead, we even built a new cemetery. The problem is, if we do find any bodies at Gallipoli that whole business would have to start up again, forensic archaeology, DNA testing, families lobbying government for a proper burial. Have you any idea how much that would cost?’ She threw her cigarette to the lawn, and trod it into the earth. ‘It’s simply staggering. Quite a burden on the taxpayer. Best, as far as the department’s concerned, if we don’t find any bodies. God knows we avoided finding bodies at Fromelles long enough.’
Vanessa brushed her fringe away from her face and Mark’s eyes fell on the nape of her neck – alabaster blushing red with summer sunshine. She nodded again towards Capital Hill. ‘You know I always thought it appropriate they put Parliament under that hill. Talk about burying your head in the sand, eh?’
They both giggled.
Mark thought it time to take the initiative. ‘But I thought the government favoured the exhumations at Fromelles. Your department was involved wasn’t it? And the minister...’
‘Oh yes, the minister, Brawley, the highest levels of government. They got to meet Prince Charles. But that whole thing only happened because there was proof the bodies were there and we had to go about reburying them. That’s what this Inquiry is about, Mark. The burden of proof. The department will deny the graves are there – but if you, or old Professor Evatt, find some, well then, watch them all change their tune. That’s politics.’
Mark was affronted by her frankness. The same flock of cockatoos wheeled madly above them and screeched a stream of obscenities towards Mount Ainslie.
Vanessa hesitated a moment as though counting the cost of something. Then she spoke again. Softer, slower, almost reluctantly.
‘But I believe in process, Mark. If there isn’t due process there’s nothing to control us.’
Who was ‘us’, Mark wondered.
‘You know, there’s some information you should be aware of.’ She drew long and hard on a second cigarette. ‘Treaty of Lausanne, heard of it?’
‘Of course, negotiated between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied Powers at the end of the war; February 1923 wasn’t it?’
‘You’re the historian.’
‘Yes, but what’s your point exactly?’
‘Now that would be telling,’ Vanessa slipped on her sunglasses in a pointedly furtive gesture. A secrecy stole into her voice, all in keeping with the costume. For a moment she touched his hand. Mark enjoyed this unexpected intimacy. A party of school children streamed towards the steps of the memorial. Two teachers bounded ahead, determined to stem the noisy clatter breaking out all around them. In an instant, Mark and Vanessa were surrounded by a sea of bags and uniforms.
‘Not here,’ Vanessa cried out. ‘How about that coffee?’
‘Sure,’ Mark shouted back. A bellowing teacher demanded silence; the cockatoos screeched on regardless.
In the second week of August 1915, Sister Elsie Forrest sat in the far corner of the isolation ward at Lemnos. At last the moans of the wounded had given way and the hospital was silent. She watched as a padre administered last rites.
Bed 19: GSW., Post Op., No fluids. Normally, she would know a dying soldier’s name; in the fitful hours between the dressing and morphine she would gather enough details to write consolingly and convincingly home to Australia. But Bed 19 had only just arrived. The dying man was unaware of all the formalities breaking out above him. He saw nothing of the padre’s hands sketching the sign of the cross, felt no finger on his forehead, heard no silken clatter of the rosary. Elsie wondered if, in his last glimmer of life, the poor boy really understood anything. She was not sure she understood anything herself now. Bed 19 could not have been as many years, and in a few hours’ time they would take that young body and cover it with the sandy soil of Lemnos. Waste was an understatement. The shabby walls of the isolation hut witnessed the passing of a generation.
The orderlies walked briskly by her, a stretcher slung by their side. With no fuss and less ceremony, they laid out the body for the mortuary. It was their ninetieth trip for the day. Of the last boatload that came in they had lost almost everyone. It wasn’t just the wounds that killed them – from the ridges at Lone Pine to the beach at Mudros it was at least an eighty-hour journey. Men were left to bake in the sun, the last drop of moisture leaching from their bodies. In a way, Bed 19 was one of the lucky ones: unable to feel the pain or heat or thirst, incapable of reckoning his own slight chance of survival. It was the men who struggled who found it the hardest, Elsie thought. Those who swam against the tide. Their own will to live made the act of dying so much more difficult.
Elsie ruled a neat line through the case notes. Life extinct: 4.05am, cardiac arrest. Again, she wondered why they bothered. What good could such details possibly do anyone? She drew a sheet of paper from the drawer of the desk and began the inevitable letter home to Australia: ‘It is with deep regret that I write...’ She glanced up to the corner of the case notes; Bed 19 had a name after all.
‘You get some rest, Elsie. Maggie and I can manage on our own. Try to get some sleep before the next boat comes in.’
The matron’s tone was firm but comforting. Like a mother soothing a child, her voice conveyed strength, patience and kindness. Elsie wondered if Matron had meant to call the two duty nurses by their Christian names – she’d always been such a stickler for formality. But days as taxing as these fostered a rare kind of intimacy. And Matron knew Elsie was fretting for her soldier.
As always, Maggie’s tone was bright and hopeful. ‘He may be on the next boat, you know.’
On the battlefield war bred fatalists, in nursing wards – where against all odds lives were sometimes saved – dwelt a tiny colony of optimists. Maggie was one of these and her tone to her friend contrived to imagine what was fast becoming unimaginable. Romance, she thought, might coax her friend to rest. Not so long ago romance had promised to take Elsie Forrest anywhere. Secretive strolls down shaded garden paths, whirlwind dances in the palace ballroom, sips of sparkling champagne on its terrace.
‘He wouldn’t want to see you looking like that, would he?’ Maggie ran her hand across Elsie’s bedraggled blonde hair, ‘...and you’ll need proper rest if you’re to care for him.’ She smiled bravely. Elsie’s pretty face was lined from too little sleep and too much worry.
Still the young woman hesitated.
‘C’mon, get some rest now,’ Matron paused a moment, ‘...Sister.’ A request became an order.
From the isolation ward, Elsie walked towards the line of bell tents that formed the nurses’ quarters. The island was a sea of tents now, row after row, beach after beach of canvas on clay. The main path would have been the quickest, the same path the Australian nursing contingent had been piped in on twelve weeks earlier. Then so keen, so confident, so full of purpose. Elsie couldn’t bear to walk that way just now. She stumbled down towards the beach and in the shallow light of morning her feet slipped deep into shingle.
She looked out across the water. Even now an inky smudge on the horizon sketched the distant landscape of Gallipoli. Near the entrance of the harbour a fleet of gaily painted fishing boats were setting out to sea, plying the waters of the Mediterranean as they had for generations. Departing at dawn, they would return at the end of day, their nets bulging with the bounty of the deep. Strange, Elsie thought, that so much could go on as before when the whole world had changed so utterly. And then beyond the last of the fishing boats she saw it – one of the Black Ships, an old steamer rusting at the hull, pressed into service to ferry the wounded to Lemnos. It lurched this way and that, writhing in the sea, like the broken men stacked between its decks. Elsie turned abruptly and retraced her steps towards the ward. Perhaps in that next cargo lay her soldier, her Roy.
Elsie had first met Roy Irwin in November 1914, as the first ships of the first contingent steamed into Alexandria. The tiny harbour thronged with vessels. It seemed every boat, of every size, of every country was there to greet them. Modern motor craft weaved their way around the elegant and ancient Levant. Long and graceful, their bleached lateen-sails stroked the water. Clippers and schooners anchored at the harbour’s edge. Masts and oars vied for space near wharves just as crowded and busy. Every boat was covered in flags. Vivid reds, deep purples and shining white flashed in the breeze from ship’s mast to water’s edge. Their crews were drawn from every quarter of the East: Arab, Egyptian, Nubian and Syrian, costume and headdress as different as every ship’s build and rigging. Elsie stood astounded on the Kyarra’ s deck as swarthy men in long flowing robes shouted out in a dozen dialects. The Western world was at war: ordered, regulated, clad in a grey drab sameness. But here at this gateway to the ancient East, life bustled in colour and commotion.
The limestone cliffs that rimmed the harbour had already stood there for millennia. Worn and pitted by the warm Mediterranean, it struck Elsie that they had already seen the navies of Nelson, Napoleon, Caesar and Alexander sail past them. On the eastern edge of the harbour, she saw Fort Qaitbay soar up like a citadel, its battlements and towers a curious blend of Islamic and Crusader architecture. Elsie had scanned its ancient walls and wondered if the smooth white stone had been carried from the ruins of the city’s lighthouse. In this time-soaked land, one edifice of antiquity rose up literally on another.
But the soldiers who’d looked up on the same scene saw only the machinery of terror. Standing not far away from Elsie, Lt Roy Irwin imagined archers leaning from its tilting towers and firing at men massing beneath them. Today the weaponry had changed, but not the intention. In the noonday light, Lt Irwin could just make out the shape of maxim guns mounted between the battlements. Their angry nozzles pointed out to the sea, menacing the ghosts from far away lands.
‘Beautiful isn’t it?’ Elsie had only just noticed the young officer standing for some time beside her. Then she hastened to correct herself. ‘I’m Sister Forrest, 2nd Australian General Hospital.’ She smiled, unselfconsciously; Elsie was a bush girl unused to social pretension. ‘We’ve not met before, have we?’
‘Irwin, Lt Roy Irwin, pleased to meet you,’ the tall young man hastily extended a hand and just as quickly withdrew it. A tar-like substance stained his fingers. ‘Molasses,’ he explained, ‘for the horses. I’m here to bring them ashore.’
‘Oh, that explains it – why I haven’t seen you before. After two months at sea, I thought I’d seen quite enough of everyone.’
‘Yes, it’s a bit like that isn’t it?’
‘But don’t I know you? You seem somehow...’ Elsie’s eyes searched the features of that handsome face, the skin bronzed by an Australian sun, ‘somehow familiar.’
The sudden intimacy took Irwin aback. The soft voice of a woman was so unlike the rough world of soldiering. Elsie’s voice pounced on a sudden recognition: ‘You wouldn’t be one of Sarah’s boys, would you? There’s an Irwin family in Merimbula.’
‘Yes, but how...?’
‘I was the district nurse at Tilba. Got to know all the families someway or other. And quite a few times we went to the coast – you know – mostly ’round Christmas.’
They chatted a while, exchanging stories of sea and sunshine. Irwin told Elsie about exercising his favourite stallion in the surf of Bar Beach. She smiled as she imagined this lean young man rearing and riding in the breakers. A host of common memories mingled playfully together; iced tea on hot verandas, the blue mist of mountains, skies the colour of rusting iron, curling golden beaches that stretched on forever. They remembered the call of magpies warbling in the dawn and the cry of kookaburras serenading sundrenched land. They shared again those last dying days of summer. Then, for longer than either of them imagined possible, they enjoyed a strangely comfortable silence.
On the deck beneath them, a crowd of soldiers threw pennies into the sea and an even larger crowd of children dived down to retrieve them. Elsie watched the young naked bodies weave through the water. Glancing to her left, she noticed the young lieutenant looked uncomfortable. He blushed at her bright blue eyes, as beguiling as the ocean. For a moment Elsie’s whole world soared heavenward.
‘Must get on, miss, have to supervise the unloading.’
‘Yes of course, but we will see you again, won’t we? We’re neighbours, after all.’ From the country they came from, a distance of a hundred miles was nothing.
Elsie was alarmed she could sound quite so brazen. Normally she was shy, reserved, a little ill-at-ease in male company. But there was something in Irwin that invited her trust, a frankness born of the land, a sense of common origin.
‘Yes, miss, I’m sure we will – Sister, I mean.’
‘Please, call me Elsie.’
‘Roy.’
Both knew they had breached military protocol. ‘Sister’ was a term intended to distance nurses from the men they cared for. But in that bright afternoon at Alexandria, with gulls clicking the water in dance, the two forgot everything but each other.
The fleet disgorged its cargo of men, horses, stores and machinery on to the wharves. It was a cumbersome business. Winches dropped the heaviest loads over the ship’s side, onto the wharf or they fell into the water. Roy Irwin and his sergeant helped the horses go over, calming the frightened beasts with liquid-soft voices and hard dry lumps of sugar. They fastened slings across their girths and stepped to one side as they raised them kicking and bellowing into the air. Several horses had to be destroyed, their sleek, sweating bodies stressed to breaking point. Elsie shuddered as she heard the gunshots ring out. It seemed such a wasteful end to so long a journey. Two weeks from their landfall, Lt Roy Irwin and his company were finally assembled on a railway siding outside Alexandria. They clamoured with pack and rifles into aging compartments that stank of goats and petrol. The doors were left ajar as the train rattled its way towards the teeming flats of the Nile. The journey to Cairo that followed was slow, hot and tiring.
Roy looked through the narrow slit of light of the doorway. He saw acre after acre of fields, a brilliant emerald green bearing all the harvest of Egypt. Never before had he seen so much land under crop, not even on the best lands of Australia. Back home, cockies scratched a living from the arid soil, knowing drought or flood could bring ruin to their labours. Here the very landscape proclaimed its bounty, the rich black earth replenished every year with the flooding of Nile delta.
The train that carried the first division towards Cairo embodied the paradox of Egypt. The engine was British, its steaming black boilers forged in a busy Manchester workshop, but the carriages that lurched and swayed on it were French, German and Belgian in origin. Indeed this train was unlike any that traversed the tracks of Europe: its quaint crowded carriages were painted in the same royal blues and ochre reds that dressed the tombs of ancient Egypt; many of the windows (the glass long since broken) had been replaced with the ornate wooden grilles seen in splendid mosques and Cairo cafés; alongside the sharp engineered lines of twentieth-century technology lay the sacred craft of artist and wood-turners. The train, like Egypt itself, was unsure of its identity, modern and ancient, European in construction but Eastern in appearance, a mixture of styles, purposes and intentions. It was a train that carried travellers from the continent to Egyptian ruins financed, for the most part, by borrowed English money. And its timetable was almost as variable.
Lt Irwin and his company had been crowded into the second last carriage. It was probably the worst to travel in. It jolted with every distant tug of the engine. Soot and dust made the air taste of charcoal.
The nurses, by contrast, travelled with senior army officers. Just as nothing could match the squalor and poverty of the East, so too few places could rival its opulence. Elsie sank back in the deep red leather of her seat. The clink of glasses echoed around her as orderlies, dressed in gleaming white, served lemonade and gin and pastries. The movement of the train, the heat of the day, the rarefied atmosphere of luxury and privilege, all lulled her to sleep. By the time she began to stir they were nearing the outskirts of Cairo. Elsie awoke with a secretive smile on her lips, remembering Roy’s impulsive pledge to ‘treat them both to tea’ at Groppi’s.
Sister Elsie Forrest came to her senses as the first stretcher case hurried through the surgery door. There were a hundred more waiting behind it. The ward was noisy with cries and commotion.
‘For God’s sake, Sister,’ the matron ordered as she hurried past, ‘I told you to get some rest. Now you’re here, help prepare this man for surgery.’
Elsie looked down and knew at once they would probably lose him.