Some places are like a magnet. They beckon you, hold you – a promise longing to be fulfilled, a secret love, an unfinished dream. For me Anzac is all those things. Despite its terror, despite its tragedy. Or perhaps because of that. Gallipoli has become a memory that feeds upon itself, a part of me I had to return to.
We arrive at Hammond’s camp early in the afternoon. I leave the main party almost immediately with the intention of setting off alone across the ridges. But Vickers and Lambert quickly insist on joining me.
‘Not wise to travel alone in these parts, Charley.’
None of us can leave the landscape waiting.
‘Really, Lambert, whatever are you wearing today?’ Hammond calls after us as we ride from the camp. With pointed beard, Light Horse rig-out, slouch hat, scarf and spurs, Lambert looks like a cross between a cavalier and an Anzac. Only a man as large in life as George Lambert could wear such an outfit. And the old reprobate knew it.
‘Had to dress for the occasion, me boy...’ Lambert pushes his hat to one side and waves a dramatic farewell to Hammond, ‘Have to look the part you know.’
But by far the most wondrous sight lies ahead. The corrugated terrain of Anzac stretches out before us. A winding track rises steadily along the old frontline. Set square in no-man’s-land, it faithfully follows the contours of collapsing trenches. I feel a queer excitement as we skirt Steele’s, Courtney’s and Quinn’s, hottest places of the Anzac line, still bristling with barbed wire and still gazing sternly across at the enemy. Just a few years before, men could not even crawl at night in safety. Now the whole epic beauty of the ridges rolls out all around us. We dismount as the track narrows. A stiff breeze blows in my face and soil clings to my boots. Walking the ground of war is brisk, tense, exhilarating.
Down to our right, Suvla Bay curls like a crescent moon around the coastline. I can just make out the line of the main sap stretching from Walker’s Ridge in the south to outposts on the Anzac perimeter. I remember Maori soldiers digging that great trench through the heat of summer, men who would be warriors reduced to a sweating, toiling army of navvies. A storm cloud rolls in ominously across the water.
‘It’s going to pour, Charley.’ Vickers sounds more alarmed than usual. ‘Don’t you think we ought to get back?’
It’s Lambert who yells back at the wind. ‘No, let’s risk it.’
Risk still comes naturally to Anzac. The three of us plunge down the gully to the beaches. Our horses sway and slip in the mud. Several times Lambert almost loses his hold, regaining the saddle by only the narrowest of margins. Every jolting step brings forth a memory. I can almost see the mules that once plied this track, with writhing, moaning cargo perched upon them; soldiers shot to pieces in the hills above them, the strongest of men crying out for their mothers. I remember laying those bundles to rest in the little graveyard we are passing. Sleeting rain lashes the neat circles of stone. Water pours across our path. It’s as if God himself is weeping.
Not far from the cove we round the low sandy rise of Hell’s Spit. Like every hillock in the Anzac line, its sides are pitted with dugouts. Makeshift shelters of timber and earth, some are covered with remnants of iron roofing, others by sheets of rotting hessian. Now the old sacks that once served as doors flap wildly in the wind. I listen as one hollow slap answers another. A series of tracks crisscross the rise, steps dug into the earth waiting still for men to climb them. Once these hills held an army, a city buried deep in the soil sheltering from the war above them. And from holes in the ground soldiers watched the sea and the sky. I remember the splendour of the sunsets, a blaze of pink and red burning the distant mountain tops of Imbros and Samothrace, the glory of all things undying.
Our party rides on twenty feet more. The Walers slip and stagger across a mudslide barring the path. Again it is Lambert’s burdened mare that almost loses her footing. At the ruins of an old water tank, we turn sharply to the right and step out suddenly onto the beach at Anzac.
In some ways the scene is exactly as I’d left it. The waters of Anzac Cove pound tirelessly on its pebbled shore. Wave after wave sighs in and out, leaving traces of foam and silver stranded in the shingle. The same grey cliffs crumble carelessly into the Aegean. Seaweed is still heaped where tumbling waters have left it. To my left, I can see a bank of wave-worn stone, the same stone I’d stumbled across on the day of the landing. To my right, a tiny rivulet trickles down to the beach as if the land was bleeding.
And yet the shore seems forever altered. Just four years before the same stretch of coast had been a hive of activity: men laboured over stores, swam in the sea, fashioned makeshift bombs from jam tins and bullets, traded, gossiped, yarned, debated. Today nothing stirs except a single gull coming in from the sea, plunging through the angry clouds, riding the wind like a dolphin would the waves.
A ray of light breaks out unexpectedly from the heavens. It bathes the relics of war in a soft golden sheen: the buckled remnants of the jetty, a few stranded barges, two white steel landing craft beached on the shoreline. Lambert pulls his scarf tighter round his neck, as if to tie down whatever warmth is left in it. Vickers and I stand stiff and straight against the wind. The sky seems to lean on us. Neither of us says a word but both of us remember that day, the day of the landing.
‘I’m not altogether sure I should help you,’ Vanessa tapped her teaspoon in a slow deliberative gesture on the coffee cup. ‘And I’m even less certain of what you’re trying to do. I mean, Howard Brawley has a point, doesn’t he...’ she moistened her lips, all too aware that the young man seated next to her was entranced by them, ‘...it all happened such a long, long time ago.’
The two were seated in the outside area of the Outpost Café. The afternoon sun still had a bite to it but Vanessa’s craving for nicotine was stronger than all the elements. At the edges of the sun-beaten lawn, a statue of Weary Dunlop looked down in sullen remembrance. A red poppy gleamed from the lapel. Mark had always thought the café’s previous name, ‘Poppies’, more appropriate than ‘The Outpost’. It seems even memorials forgot themselves.
‘Time is always relative,’ Mark feared he sounded pompous, ‘perhaps most of all to historians.’ And then, to his surprise as much as hers, he felt the need for confession.
‘Sometimes, you know, going through family papers, it’s as if these men were killed only yesterday. It gets under your skin, rattles you, leaves you, you know ... sort of empty.’ Mark remembered the Red Cross files he had worked through. He felt the pain howling from the print as he fumbled through the pages. Archives captured a moment in time and held it forever. Grief preserved between sheets of acid-free paper.
‘But those people are all dead now – long dead.’
‘Well, perhaps not all of them. Old Professor Evatt told me a story once – about the unknown soldier they buried here in the memorial.’ Mark leaned back and looked out towards the dome arching across the building. Beneath it lay the black marble tomb of a man killed on the Somme over ninety years ago. He would take care with what he said, mindful of the need to seem measured and dispassionate, to strike that ‘right tone’ of scholarly inquiry. Even so, Mark wondered if this woman seated so close beside him was really the only audience. In the cloistered spaces of the memorial, lined with the nameless names of the nation’s dead, it was as if the walls themselves were listening.
‘Well, go on. Don’t keep me in suspense. What did the old guy say? He is old isn’t he? You know, I wonder if he’s even up to this.’
Mark looked down at the foam swimming in his coffee cup. It wasn’t going to be easy. ‘Of course, it was quite a business, bringing a man back from France. Two of the plots they first dug up at Adelaide Cemetery were communal graves and the remains were all mixed up together. “Co-mingled” they call it. Like the bodies at Fromelles, I guess.’
‘Please. Too much information.’
But the image sprang to mind immediately. White bones caked with chalk and soil. The threads of rotting uniform. Even the tarnished brass buttons which, as Vanessa had said, proclaimed this man ‘Known Unto God’ an Australian. Mark gulped a mouthful of coffee, barely noticing the scorch of it. Now the bustling coffee shop seemed as quiet as the cloisters.
‘After they had buried him here, after the officials and dignitaries had laid their fine wreathes and made their fine speeches, Professor Evatt saw an old woman come out from the crowd. She collapsed there at the tomb, and just went to pieces. “He is my brother,” she cried, “He is my brother.” She believed they’d brought her brother home. It was kind of like – well, like closure I guess,’ Mark wondered if that very modern term really belonged there. He tried again. ‘It was as if they had laid a ghost to rest, a ghost that had haunted a whole generation. Maybe, that man’s not unknown at all, Vanessa. He’s someone’s brother, someone’s son, someone’s sweetheart.’
Vanessa was taken aback. ‘Well, that’s just over-the-top, Mark. Truly weird.’ She clunked her coffee cup down on its saucer. Its contents splashed across the table. ‘Surely you don’t believe that stuff, believe in ghosts I mean. That was just an old woman’s...’ Vanessa struck at the cup with her teaspoon as if to punish it, ‘an old woman’s delusions. Maybe you and your precious professor are letting your emotions get the better of you.’
‘It’s her emotions that are the issue,’ Mark replied, ‘and whether or not we should try to understand them.’
Vanessa looked back blankly. ‘That’s just what they said about Fromelles,’ she snapped, ‘and where did that get us, exactly?’
Mark sighed into his coffee. He had been through these debates before, at academic conferences and in departmental tearooms. He’d watched the arguments play out, sometimes learned, collegial, respectful – more often than not factionalised and vindictive. One thing he knew for certain, it had been apparent since his first appointment, the bigger the issue in academia, the more petty-minded the squabble.
Mark wasn’t quite sure how to explain any of this to Vanessa. Nor was he sure he wanted to. His discipline straddled two quite opposing worlds, a rational and objective understanding of the past ever at war with the subjective and emotional claims of memory. Empathy versus analysis, political engagement or scholarly detachment, messy lives or tidy archives. Throughout his brief career, Mark had tried to position himself in that great, irresolvable tension. He had never quite succeeded. And the truth was, the more the young man studied history, the less he understood it.
‘History with feelings? That’s not the kind of history I was taught at school,’ Vanessa, too, leaned back. Her face was dappled with late afternoon sunlight. ‘We just did “dates and facts”, we didn’t do emotion. It was all pretty boring, really.’
‘I guess dates and facts are the only things likely to count in this Inquiry.’
‘Whatever.’
Mark wondered how a single word had come to convey so many meanings. Again, Vanessa fell suddenly quiet. A question seemed to settle on her face. Mark could smell her perfume in the Canberra heat. Something was about to happen.
‘Well, Dr Troy,’ she spun out the words as if they were a riddle, ‘just to give you a sporting chance – and to put some of my less agreeable colleagues in their place – there are one or two facts you should have at your disposal.’
Vanessa stretched down to a briefcase by her legs. Mark thought he saw the edge of a tattoo peeping from her plunging neckline. She lifted the briefcase up to the table, paused for an instant and then – with a slightly wicked smile – slowly pulled back the zipper. ‘Here,’ she said indulgently, ‘these are for you.’ She pushed a few sheets of paper between cups, saucers, teaspoons and coffee stains. Crisp and clean, the photocopied pages had none of the dust, tears and creases of the archives. Mark recognised the bold imperious print of the colonial office. Managing the Empire was best done in capitals.
LAUSANNE CONFERENCE ON NEAR EASTERN AFFAIRS 1922–3
‘You’re taking a risk aren’t you?’
‘Don’t be fooled by the glasses, it’s not exactly espionage.’ She tilted her sunglasses. ‘And anyway, I’m thinking of moving on. With Howard Brawley and the boys there’s not much room to go anywhere. Besides, they will never know.’ Vanessa lowered her voice to a mischievous hush, ‘It can be our secret.’
‘Gallipoli’s secret,’ Mark corrected her. ‘Where’s the rest of the file? I’ve seen the Treaty of course, but this looks like a transcript of the proceedings. I didn’t know it existed.’ The young scholar’s voice quickened with excitement. ‘Wherever did you get this?’
‘Ah,’ murmured Vanessa, dropping her Marlborough Lights into her handbag. ‘You’ll have to work that one out for yourself. I’ve told you quite enough already.’
‘But you haven’t really said anything.’
‘Haven’t I?’ she rose and swung her handbag across her shoulder, ‘Maybe you haven’t been listening.’
And with that she walked away, swaying her hips ever so gently. Amidst all the ambiguities left in the wake, one thing was for certain, Vanessa Pritchard was not really 2IC to anyone. She turned back when Mark least expected it. ‘Well, are you coming?’
The two of them walked down the side of the Memorial. The building, long and white, stretched out like a cat basking in the sun. Vanessa slipped off her shoes and stepped gingerly on to the surrounding grass. She sank her toes into the soil, digging down for moisture and coolness. Mark smiled. It was as if they were breaking the rules, flippant in this sombre place, furtive as young lovers. Vanessa skipped from one patch of shade to another. There was playfulness in her he’d not seen before.
‘Come on, I’ll race you.’
‘You’re not serious?’
‘Try me.’
She sprinted towards the furthest stretch of shade. Mark lumbered awkwardly after her, guilty as a truant schoolboy, hiding all the while from history. They scrambled across the yielding green and stopped head-to-head at the base of the Light Horse memorial.
‘We’ll, that’s creepy.’
Vanessa looked up at the bust of a horse, mounted, like the remains of an ancient treasure, on the base of a tapered column. Its head was wrenched apart, as if the speed and madness of its gallop had torn it asunder. A tongue stretched down to lick a body that wasn’t there. One wounded eye looked out on nothing.
‘Abstract?’
‘No...’ Mark replied, ‘damaged. This is all that’s left of Web Gilbert’s masterpiece – his memorial to the Light Horse. Arab nationalists blew the sculpture to pieces.’
‘When?’
‘In 1956, height of the Suez Crisis, I think.’ Mark glanced down apprehensively at an explanatory plaque. Being caught out with a date wrong is the fear of every historian.
‘Why?’
‘Politics, I guess.’
Mark looked up at the jagged head, its classic lines ripped apart by the force of the explosion. The mane was twisted like a buckled plate. A burst of shrapnel had cut it to pieces. He shivered, suddenly aware of this conflation of art and history. During the Great War proud mounts like this one had been slaughtered in their thousands, muscle and flesh cut down by steel, the age of chivalry butchered on the killing fields of Flanders.
‘Vandalism, I’d call it.’ Vanessa walked around the sculpture, inspecting the ruin with unexpected reverence. She stroked the nose as if to calm the statue’s ghost. ‘What’s the point in blowing up a statue?’
Mark looked at nostrils flared with pain, panting out their agony. Picasso’s Guernica planted at the foot of the Australian War Memorial.
‘It isn’t just art, Vanessa. It’s a symbol. The Arabs saw this as a symbol of British colonialism.’
‘That hardly excuses this – poor thing.’ She stroked the face once more, as if she could make it whole again. ‘Anyway, art should be above politics. They had no right to do this. This was just ... just terrorism.’
Was that the right word, he wondered? But Mark wasn’t about to argue. He looked back anxiously at the Memorial building and remembered his laptop left untethered at his desk. Four-fifteen. It was almost closing time.
Ten minutes later Dr Mark Troy returned alone to the research centre. Fabian seemed slightly censorious as he pushed the trolley to the corner of desk eleven. A leisurely coffee break posed almost as serious a threat to the profession as hasty, half-hearted research. In fact, in his experience, the two scholarly vices went hand-in-hand. Dr Troy, he noted, had rolled up his shirt sleeves and loosened his tie and collar. He looked even more windswept than usual. Fabian wondered if his managers had considered some sort of prize for the worst-dressed researcher.
‘Finished with that file have we?’ Fabian suspected Mark had barely started.
‘No, I’ll stay with this one a little longer.’
‘Suit yourself, Dr Mark. Oh, and by the way,’ Mark looked up in trepidation, ‘that’s the last collection for the day – and remember with the gallery development there’s no service on the weekend.’
It wasn’t a statement that invited a response, let alone a challenge.
‘Thanks, Fabian,’ Mark sighed deeply, accepting the humbling hierarchy of the archives.
He looked down at the jumble of papers marooned on his desk. It took a moment for his eyes to focus. The ink was as faint and as dry as ninety years could make it; the dull blue flower pressed to the page was bleached of vibrant colour. It was a neat hand, a woman’s hand, curling across the paper. It was so very kind of you to write ... your words will be of great comfort to the family ... should you visit Tilba or the district, please do make a point of calling on me. The usual Edwardian niceties, formal but still somehow intimate, professions of despair schooled in a kind of stoic acceptance. Then came the lines that caught the scholar’s eye, every jolting word cut deep in the paper. And yet for all you have done, and all you have found, my faith is unshaken. I know he is alive and I will go on praying and hoping.
Mark scanned the page, hungry for conclusion: No one has the right to say he is dead ... He is as near to me now as the day he said goodbye ... We shall never be parted.
The last words were underlined and the ink blurred almost beyond recognition. ‘She was crying,’ Mark whispered to himself. And what could it mean, he wondered? What had Bean done? What had he found? What made this death any less certain than all the others?
Mark’s eyes followed the stream of ink and tears to the bottom of the paper, ‘Your friend always, Elsie’. Again, he caught the musty scent. In the corner of the letter, Bean’s fountain pen had scratched its path across the page. Lt G R Irwin: Missing.
Night had fallen by the time Lt Irwin and his men charged again at the Turkish trenches. The battlefield was like a black sea moving beneath them. Flashes of gunfire illuminated craters, sandbags and the writhing bodies of the wounded, and then just as suddenly plunged them back into darkness. Irwin strained to watch the men dart from one side to another, flashing like fireflies around him. They were clumsy, disoriented, confused. In the darkness they stumbled across the broken terrain, tripping over the dead and each other. Several of Irwin’s men arched and fell, their lives snatched from them in an instant. Others crumbled into balls of pain, and howled at the world rushing by them. By the time Irwin made the Turkish parapet, he calculated over a third of the force were dead or wounded. He knew the generals judged this an acceptable level of wastage.
He faced a fortress of sandbags and pine. Heavy logs had been dragged across the trenches, shielding the Turks from the worst of the Allied bombardment. They had entombed an army of men deep inside its galleries. Lt Irwin and his men could hear the muffled brutality of battle below.
‘It’s no good, sir, we can’t budge it.’ Tons of earth thrown up by Allied shells had made the fortress even more impenetrable.
‘There must be a break in the line further on,’ Irwin threw his map to the ground in disgust. ‘This way, damn it, follow me.’ And so Irwin and his men staggered along the line of the fallen forest. With every step, like blind men groping through darkness, they felt their way for some point of entrance. They were several hundred yards from the Allied line when the buckled pine rendered up the earth. Irwin smelt the still, putrid stench of the trenches and stared deep into a tunnel-like cavity.
‘Can you make out anything?’ a soldier asked. ‘What’s down there, sir, what’s down there?’
‘What can you see, Roy, because I can’t see anything.’ Roy reached for the matches in his pocket and struck a flash of phosphorus in the darkness. ‘Well, it’s deep, Elsie, I can tell you that much.’
‘Of course, it’s deep. The guidebook says the burial chamber of Cheops is the deepest and best concealed of all the pyramids.’
‘What d’ya reckon he’s hiding from then?’
Elsie playfully pushed Roy a little deeper into the darkness.
‘We won’t get much further than this. Here, I’ll get one of the guides to fetch a lantern.’ Outside, a crowd of Egyptians in flowing white gowns fumbled to produce an assortment of lamps, wicks and candles from nowhere.
‘No,’ Elsie whispered, ‘let’s just wait a minute; let’s just rest here.’
Elsie sat on a block of stone and drew Roy down towards her. An age ago the stone blocked the entrance of the tomb, now it sat still in the dust, fanned by the cool air rising from deep below. Elsie took a deep breath. The air smelt of the Katoomba caves she’d visited as a child; silent, quiet, secretive places.
‘Thank God it’s cooler here. That sun is punishing.’
Roy noticed the thin film of perspiration that drew the young nurse’s uniform closer to her body. She was a small woman, what his mother might have called petite but her figure curled with a beauty young men craved, small firm breasts exquisite to imagine. Elsie carefully removed her hat pin, then her hat and finally with a sharp tug of a ribbon, let her hair tumble out around her shoulders. She knew he was watching her. Sometimes a gaze can be as tender as an embrace – and as earnest.
For a moment, the two sat there, enjoying the silence as they had so often done before, thankful for an end to the bruising journey on camels across the sands. Elsie allowed her hand to fall softly to her side. The young officer shuffled a little close on the stone. Now their bodies were touching.
‘We could go back to the Mena. They do a splendid tea you know.’ Indeed they did. The Mena Hotel catered for tourists fleeing the squalor of Cairo for the wonders of antiquity. It squatted there in the sands, shadowed by the pyramids, vast, ornate and almost as impressive. The Mena was barely a mile from the tomb of Cheops where the couple now sat and only twenty minutes’ hurried ride from Irwin’s AIF encampment. For almost a century it had dispensed ice tea to hot English tourists, mixed cocktails in palm-lined gardens, hosted balls in the moonlight, and now all its splendours were at the disposal of His Majesty’s Government.
‘Wouldn’t it be a bit crowded?’ Irwin didn’t want to share Elsie’s company with anyone.
‘I expect so, British officers have taken to calling there – ever since it became a base for Australian nurses.’
‘Oh, have they?’ There was a hint of jealousy in his voice. It wasn’t hard to imagine the English elite with their immaculate uniforms and their smooth purring voices descending on Mena, charming women like Elsie.
‘No you don’t need to worry, really, Roy. They just seem pompous to me, pompous and narrow-minded. Most of the girls look out for Australian company. Besides...’ Elsie smiled, looking like a pixie full of mischief, ‘...Australian troops are so much better paid.’
She nudged him again and found herself nestling in his arms. With the caution of every young love, Roy bent down and buried a soft uncertain kiss in her hair. Elsie lifted her head and their lips and desire came together. They could hear their hearts pounding in that cool quiet place. Every breath tingled with ecstasy.
They remained there for an hour. Their eyes dimmed by yearning gradually adjusted to the shadows. A shape seemed to move towards them.
As Lt Irwin neared the Turkish trench, the crack of a rifle followed by a cry came up from the darkness. The young soldier lunged forward, ‘You bloody fool, Clement, put your weapon away – it might be one of our blokes.’
The bloodied face of an Ottoman soldier watched as Irwin and his men crept towards him.