It was dark when they set off. The stars were blurred as though smeared on thick oiled glass, and they crouched, making their guide impatient, fearing a shattering hammer blow. But as they slithered deeper down they realized that the snipers of a few nights before had ceased operating, and excitedly they tasted freedom by standing upright. On a sharp corner, plunging into a herb bush, Bluey filled his pockets with crushed stalks.
They found Potty at work with an electric torch, his fingers partly enclosing the glass, causing light to fan in pink blades across the faces of the dead. Six corpses lay in a row awaiting Indian bearers who would hoist them on stretchers down to the less steep part of the valley, and from there convey them in mule carts to the cemetery.
“Which is Frank?” The light picked him out.
“The dead are expressionless, aren’t they,” said Potty. “They’ve exhausted the range of feeling.”
Decomposition had not yet set in. Under low canvas in the furtive light the faces were like stone knights in a makeshift tomb.
“They don’t look rested,” said Bluey. “What is it about them faces?”
“Here come the Sikhs,” said Potty. A garbled phrase rose from below, followed by a ripple of dislodged gravel, and then silence. Bluey swung his rifle to the side and then to the front in case of a Turkish patrol. Potty laughed at the thought: “Our men are all round.”
Suddenly a huge figure loomed from the darkness above. Bluey’s rifle, in another charge of nerves, banged Walter’s kneecap.
“Jesus!”
“It’s Doherty,” said Potty. The announcement, though edged with exasperation, was also a greeting. A giant materialized holding one end of a stretcher from which he tipped, cruelly, a badly wounded man.
“We found this here Injun up in the scrub. I think he’s just about to kick the bucket, he’s been shot clean through the guts. You’d better tell him about God.”
The Sikh seemed indifferent to Potty’s close study of his face, and with good reason: “He’s dead already.”
“Let’s push on down,” Doherty said to his mate.
Walter and Bluey stacked the dead man beside the rest. Neither spoke. The corpse was lighter than a wheat bag by far, but clumsily balanced, which made it hard for Walter to think of the task as part of a day’s work, which was the mental trick he had determined to perform to overcome revulsion at touching dead bodies. At school the juniors had once staged a rebellion in the locker room, throwing themselves in a pile and refusing to move. The seniors had been given the job of peeling the inert forms clear and lugging them outside. But these boots in his hands never kicked, and the turbanless head of greasy hair dangling between Bluey’s shins neither twisted nor butted.
They were catching their breath when Doherty’s voice flew up through the darkness. “Hey, Rev! There’s another Injun down here keeps asking for wine. Have you got anything to drink?”
They scrambled down the path and found a bearer doubled over holding his stomach. He had slipped from the track and hauled himself up again. The wound was black, perhaps a day old.
“You damn fool,” said Potty, “he’s trying to tell you to wind a bandage around his wound.” The Sikh burial party arrived as Potty pulled a clean dressing from his pocket. He applied it with steady hands while Walter cupped the torch. Then he sent the Sikhs on up the hill while Walter and Bluey hitched the wounded man between them and dropped into the black pool of the valley, lurching like competitors in a three-legged race.
Down at the carts they found themselves in a place resembling a mining camp. Here were ammunition boxes, planks, rolls of wire, empty water containers, and men, hollow-eyed clumps of wounded, some wedged into the hillside where eroded slits had been chipped wider, others carelessly dumped in the open. A few slept, but most stared with the wide eyes of nocturnal creatures. The healthy laboured. Everything — men, materials, even the dead — seemed destined for service in an underworld where a nameless ore of frantic value was to be found, and the mine was hereabouts, testified the haunted labourers, though no-one knew exactly where.
Potty took a breather after finding a doctor for the Sikh, and sprawled with Walter in the dust exchanging impressions of home. Mr Fox had not liked Parkes, it was too open after his South Australian hill country. An argument developed with Bluey umpiring. All that Walter loved the minister hated: frozen puddles in winter, low clouds of guncotton blue bowling up from the south, and the summer furnace that glaringly struck distant vistas out of existence. He would mention no names, but also the people, the congregation, had not been kind to him. “Your parents are fine folk,” he said politely. But Walter knew that they too had given the minister only the average regard.
Coming down the hill Walter had changed his mind about Mr Fox. His desperate care to manoeuvre the Sikh without needless hurt, the way he poured kindly phrases into the dark man’s ear and drawled “Of course you are” when the fellow, stung by pain, had cried “Bill cool tucker-ah, Sahib” (or something) which Potty said meant “Quite fit” — add to this the memory of Frank clawing at his precipice of life while Potty worked to hold him there — indeed everything Potty had done this day (when Walter put it in a new light) seemed bravely set against the values of these few square miles of butchery. Even his position as a brace to hold men ready for military death, while very real, was an accidental side effect of his gift of love. And his directness and simplicity, like everything else about him, showed he was no longer the subtle madman.
So Walter blurted a complaint to the new man about the old:
“I always had trouble with your sermons.”
“As I did myself.”
“No — my fault — they were above my head.”
“And often above mine. It was a confused time. If only I could go back now, back to a pulpit. I don’t think I was a Christian then.”
“Are you now?” asked Bluey.
“The Christian truth is bedrock. Such a simple lesson to come from pain.” Tiredly accepting a suck from Walter’s pipe he repositioned himself on a stack of empty sandbags and confessed: “Mind you, I was no stranger to pain before. It’s just that I failed when I tried to apply faith to the intellect, rather than to the world … You’ve changed!” he suddenly switched his attention and poked Walter in the ribs.
“Have I?”
“I couldn’t see the thinker. Haven’t you rid yourself of more than a touch of self-satisfaction?”
“He’s always brooding about something,” pronounced Bluey.
“The outer man must be cultivated. Can I have some more of that pipe? Poetry is a deceit.”
“How come you didn’t recognize me before?”
The minister launched into a sermon. But here the dusty words were lapped around by objects that gave them force. “Change has altered us all. Don’t you care more about others now? The army demonstrates that all of us are linked, even enemies. But so does Christ.”
“I can’t tell,” muttered Walter. But something heartening had been said. Potty had gone as it were ahead of him, taunting with analysis an as yet undeveloped cast of character, and by such a means … creating it. The cloud of self was desperate for highlights.
Bluey was bored. “When do we get started?” He struck matches, lighting up the minister’s face between them.
“Soon. I need a rest. They don’t train men of the cloth for the outdoors.” Mr Fox outlined his usual night’s routine: a round of the hospital tents near the beach, then back to the gully for funerals. He called them “funerals” as if everyone turned up, when in truth for the past few nights he had been the only one in attendance, an unseen, unheard figure rolling bodies into a trench, intoning a few ancient words, looping identity discs on the necks of crosses, then back to his dugout on the heights at two or three in the morning.
Bluey strolled to a donkey and felt over it from teeth to tail for quality. Walter found the inactivity wonderfully refreshing. His agonized self-questioning did not seem so wasteful after all. The past few days of fear and panic had been half in alarm at the imminent destruction of an incomplete self. Now here was Potty Fox telling him that the self was never incomplete: never quite. It even seemed possible that he would escape into the future, for here was a man of faith blithely assuming that a future existed.
“What will you do after the war?”
“I don’t know.”
“The farm?”
“No.”
“Won’t your father expect you back?”
“I wanted to be a geologist. Now I don’t know.” Walter scanned his prospects and saw something unseen before. “I might have a go at becoming a journalist. I’ve got a friend, Ollie Melrose, who sends things off to the papers. They never publish them.” He then ventured an innocently vain opinion that later was to cause trouble: “I think I could do better.”
“You should keep a diary.”
“Here? I’ve done nothing important.”
“Have you considered the church?”
“Cut it out!”
“You should give it some thought. Especially now you’ve been as deep as a man can go.”
Potty had not understood him after all. Suddenly it all seemed bullshit again. But Walter found something to add, a blatant unfurling of ambition:
“Art.” The word flew straight from Egypt, from the mosque. So somehow his dreams were mixed up in religion, and perhaps that was what Potty saw … Potty who now glanced peculiarly at him:
“Paints?”
But he could not explain, suddenly wouldn’t, because with shock he realized that it was not Egypt after all that lay at the root of his budding ideas, but Frances. She had talked on and on about art and he had only half listened. The words since then had been percolating insidiously upwards until, needing to build a new soul to oust her, he had spilled her ideas out in a stream coloured as his own. He was nothing but a drab skull of echoes. And worse, he was still bonded insanely to her.
“Doesn’t it sicken you? How can you go on?” And then with vehemence, taking it out on the Reverend Potty Fox, slapping him with bitterness and a prescience of his own widening failure to grasp anything: “Reg Hurst’s dead!”
He watched the minister’s face while the announcement clanged around this furtively lamplit compound. His face (Walter now realized) was younger than Bluey’s who was twenty-seven. It was too unweathered to bear its burden of personal history. “I’m sorry,” Walter muttered, “sorry for doing my block.”
Plainly the news was no surprise, though he said (and Walter believed him), “I hadn’t heard.” He made no attempt to ask how Walter knew about Hurst, alive or dead, but calmly accepted that both should know him.
This was unsettling. It seemed cold.
“The most difficult virtue to acquire is fortitude. Reg had it in abundance.”
Bluey drifted back and said: “There are some jokers brewing up that I know from Dubbo. Have I got time to join them?”
“We’re off in ten minutes.”
Walter tried to mend he knew not what. “For Reg’s part he was full of praise for the job you did burying his brother.”
“That took fortitude, all my store of it. I’m inclined to think that the Christian virtues are a gift, but fortitude must be hard won. Their father will be a broken man. He loved Reg best, you know.”
“Hurst told me otherwise.”
“No, he loved him. But loved him badly, which was something Reg could never understand. Reg had numerous blind spots. I wish I could get them all together, I’d make them understand, by Christ! Such a gifted family.”
Walter shrank from the blaspheming parson but was compelled by the emotion in his voice to seek his eyes. They were in shadow. He was bent over his lap making an adjustment to the torch that would enable the bulb, shielded by its conical reflector, to be attached to his belt while a wire ran to the batteries in his shirt pocket. Hour by hour he had become younger. Now, crouched over the smothered bulb, he was a strained equal, tough as a pale thong, all his theology scraped away to leave a vital servant of the kind and the sane. “When all this is finished,” he looked up, “I’ll refresh myself with the things I cast away. Plain speech for one! I think I’ll work with the poor.” The light flickered on and off. “Reg was remarkable.
“He broke into the school and wrote slogans on the blackboards. His father called the police. It was an awfully childish thing for a man in his twenties to do. But there you are. That was Reg. A father’s love can face both ways. It can be all-accepting and cruel at the same time. Doctor Hurst was saddled with the cruel kind in his relations with Reg, whereas anything went as far as Roy was concerned.”
“He said he’d found himself here.”
Potty asked for Walter’s impressions and despite his criticisms of Reg’s limitations seemed pleased to hear them. But something puzzled Walter about a minister of religion’s praise for a miscreant’s character: “His philosophy seemed unchristian. Not unkind, but atheistic. He said he believed everything stopped with the body.”
Potty pointed out that the last place one should expect to find spiritual illumination was in the “gross corruption” of battle. He objected to ministers at home talking about war as a character-building device. He had done so himself, and was sorry though not entirely wrong: it was just that the conventional and the expected did not happen, e.g. Reg. But afterwards, ah, when time for reflection would be found, then a man would be able to discover the window in his soul that looked on to eternity, and then it would be the chaplain’s duty to “catch his scattered senses”.
Again the minister used the word “bedrock”. If Reg took the materialist line then it was not all that different from the line taken by Potty himself. The universe of the spirit dwelt a hand’s breadth away from the universe of chaos. The merest rent in the fabric between he world and —
But the chaplain remembered himself, just when most lively and interesting. He donned his specs and they showed again the secretive opaque lenses remembered from home, only now the effect was dim and smoky. He stood and swirled into darkness, hailing the Sikhs who had at last materialized with the dead from Waterfall Gully. He fetched Bluey, returned for Walter, and they set off in a file towards the cemetery.
As they shuffled along Bluey told Walter that while poking around during the wait he had found a neat stack of rifles and bandoliers beside apparently unused though properly packed haversacks. On asking an officer who they were for he was told “it would be tragical to enquire”. He stopped Walter at one point and said, “That sky pilot friend of yours gives me the creeps.”
“He’s all right. He’s better here than he was there.”
Bluey had few dislikes. But when he fixed on one, that was it. His cheerfulness never faded, it just became blithe hostility. When the line halted at a wider part of the gully he clamped Walter by the shoulder: “Haven’t you noticed? He don’t give a fuck about exposing us. Listen!” Along the length of track just traversed they heard the clatter of a spent bullet denting and sliding through boxes and tins abandoned on either side. “I don’t trust him. He’s like bloody Reg Hurst. Hang around him too long and we’ll be smeared all over the place like a mad woman’s shit.”
They came to a shelf of land behind the beach near the exit of Shrapnel Gully, a spot the chaplains had started calling “God’s Acre”. After the Sikhs had set the bodies down in rows and departed, Potty gave the night’s work a preliminary scan. Other dead were here from earlier. They stretched off into the dark, a tangled skein increasingly decomposed. Among them Bluey found someone he knew: he pointed, uttered a drowning syllable, and vomited. Bluey had reached his breaking point. Walter feebly placed a hand on his back:
“What’s up?”
“Piss off.”
He strode to a gravelly depression, a hole the size of a bathtub, squatted and refused to move. “This is not human work,” he complained when the chaplain remonstrated. Then he said: “Aw, shit. Give me a minute. I knew Wiley Banks and I’ve got to think.” It was not just that he knew the man and grieved. Banks’s face had been half torn away and was infected with maggots. “Wiley often used to sing for us. You should have heard his voice.”
“I have,” said Potty. “I knew all these men. Don’t tell me about Wiley Banks. His favourite song was The Trumpeter. I can hear him singing now.” He took Bluey’s elbow and helped him to his feet, the thin torchlight at his waist contracting for a second to a faint moon that wandered back and forth across Bluey’s stomach.
“‘Tread light o’er the dead of the valley’. Isn’t that the one?”
After wiping his mouth Bluey set to work in the stinking graveyard.
Then it was Walter’s turn to vomit. For this was not like the stink of a dead animal in the bush with its furry, coppery stench easily breasted. Nor even like the smell of the dead on the heights, which fell back now and then before a breeze. Here one was compelled to walk to the mucked heart of matter, reach out a hand, plunge it into the black pulp and grasp for a slimy bone which itself was only the outer casing of something deeper, darker, more horrible and endless. And all the while to go on, deep breath after breath, breathing as in a nightmare a medium fit only for another species.
Yet thankfully not only the body emptied itself of pure scruple here, but also the mind. After taking a mouth-clearing swill from his water bottle Walter set fiercely to work. Bluey grabbed the leg of a recent somebody and Walter an arm. Could the grazing of lately immobilized backsides possibly matter? At first with respect they manoeuvred the bodies from their lines, and then roughly. Bluey remembered the broken stalks of herb — it was thyme — a pungent green stain that showed on their handkerchiefs in the dark and restrained the clinging odour until, like poison, the stench rebuffed sweetness and entered the blood.
After each two or three bodies had been lain in the ditch they raided a bag of chloride of lime and frantically powdered the corpses until the air became sharp with a smell like laundry bleach, and the dusted shapes of men revealed themselves as in a photographic negative. Then they sprayed earth from alternating shovels, paused, and were lulled by Potty’s words: “I am the resurrection and the life … Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower.” Once he threw in a text for his helpers: “Be not weary in well-doing, for in due season ye shall reap, if ye faint not.” This was when Frank, his stomach wound smelling like bad meat, was covered as quickly as any other. The thrill of holiness in these pauses overcame revulsion, or else it was the thrill of ghostliness … “What if one of these poor saps is still alive?” asked Bluey. Walter swore that a cold hand had moved in his: but Potty checked and found that the man had been shot through the heart.
At the end of the last row ten Turks were lumped together for interment after the forty-two Australians. Bluey told a joke about a cave in no-man’s-land at Cape Helles that had been abandoned by the English on arrival of a goat. But when a Turk looked in the goat had departed in disgust. “These here smell better than our chaps,” said Walter, “because they’re smellier alive than dead.” Bluey said: “Return to sender — hey, mother! Chop-chop!” But Potty shut them up.
Then they set the crosses upright, hammered them in, and were told by Potty of a place at the beach where they could find a cup of tea and sleep for the night. By then it was one thirty, and they were beginning to see strange shapes — a bush became General Hamilton and strode forward with a hand extended for shaking before its whitish tips settled; a group of wounded lying on a vast and lumpy tarpaulin awaiting their shift to a hospital tent was transformed: real men, right enough, but the way their blood-soaked lint glistened under the sweep of Potty’s torch made it seem, for an alarmed second, that a chest of jewels had been tipped over them, and they had no knowledge of it, except that the colours weighed them down in rubiate slabs, and they knew they would never again rise with the power that had been so easily and recently theirs. As the three filed closer to the sea they heard a frog croaking in the intervals between bullets. Its voice came from another world again, where nature, not man with his hatred and cruelty, ruled the earth.
The scene at the chaplain’s dugout also had its hallucinatory aspect. They were greeted by a colleague of Potty’s, a tall wakeful man wearing a clerical collar and a brown neck-protector suspended from his cap. He produced fresh tea as promised and served it from a china teapot. “Uncracked,” he proudly pointed. Then he showed the sleeping place to Walter and Bluey, a roomy, clean-swept hutch, iron-roofed, with sandbagged walls half-set into the hillside. Along the rear wall of earth ran a bowed wooden shelf where wildflowers, purple and white, luminous as felt in the candlelight, were bunched in empty jam tins. Between each lot of flowers were stacked Bibles, hymn sheets, communion cups and wine. It would be like sleeping in the vestry of a church. Outside, a giant kettle dangled above red coals, and there were sweet biscuits as well as the usual dry. “This sea,” said the other chaplain, a Reverend Ray, indicating darkness from which could be heard, faintly, the slap of wavelets, “is where St Paul passed by ship from Troas to Neapolis. Plainly in sight of this spot.”
Bluey and Walter kept swaying forward from exhaustion, but Potty eagerly spouted the text: “Therefore loosing from Troas, we came with a straight course to Samothracia, and the next day to Neapolis.”
“Can’t you readily picture the little boat?” asked the tall minister of Potty.
“Oh, yes,” said the wide-awake other, as if this was what made everything cheap at the price, these glimpses of Christian contiguity. You could tell they had been though this ridiculous but not stupid conversation many times, these men, who of all those stranded on the peninsula were doomed to moral agony whatever the physical comforts they snatched for themselves or thrust, brave palliatives, on others — cocoa, magazines, writing paper, or a night’s rest in safety. Even Bluey, on the point of wading in, could see that.
“I’m for dreamland,” he said, and the ministers, wanting to talk a while longer, smiled a motherly goodnight. As Walter tipped his tealeaves to the ground he heard Chaplain Ray mutter, not without bitterness, “There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, come over into Macedonia, and help us.”
Bluey called back: “Should we snuff the candle?”
Then, when they were settled, he said to Walter, “We could have done better by Frank. How can we tell the boys we just — dumped him.”
“His funeral was as good as the rest’s.”
“Still —” He reached out and pinched the candleflame.
Men tramped up and down outside, and from the beach came muffled shouts, the whinny of donkeys, the bang of iron on wood, the flop of tin. Earlier, a brief glimpse of the beach in the faint grey mist of distant searchlights propped between battleships and shore had revealed a kind of confused bayside goods yard, long and narrow, with soldiers instead of stevedores milling around purposelessly. But by now their tasks must have been sorted out because either side of the dugout resounded as thoroughfares must have … where? … in ancient Cairo … before the invention of the wheel. Nothing was older than Cairo. Nothing … and Walter pursued the thought, age melting into age down echoing archways of weathered stone on which the generations registered as shadows, if at all, and the individual was naught but the sound of a footstep fading before the space of life was done.
Bluey was still awake. “I couldn’t wash properly,” he complained.
“Nor me.”
“They ought to let us off after all we’ve done … Wally?” Bluey was crying. To cover himself he gulped, “Christ, what a joke.”
Walter tried to find a word to encompass the day just finished, something to throw to Bluey in expiation of its terrors. But if the right word existed it was wandering white-faced in shocked circles far from memory. Before Walter finally fell asleep he piled up extra blankets and burrowed in, also wanting to cry but unable to do so. If ever there was a night when nightmares would rack his mind, this was it — but he slept dreamlessly and woke refreshed.
In the morning Bluey was gone, and Potty’s palliasse in the corner lay neat as an unused hospital bed. Why were things so quiet? The hour was late (he sat up in alarm: past stand-to), already sunlight pressed into the gully and with its beachside intensity brightened the cave where he lay. From far away came the lazy pop of rifle fire, and was it just his mood that made him decide that the shooting lacked heart? For seconds at a time nothing at all could be heard. Then it started again … the rattle of a switch of peppercorn absentmindedly flicking leather. Settling back on his blankets, making a pile under his head for a pillow, he filled a pipe and resolved not to move until ordered. After a minute he heard footsteps and then the voices of Bluey and Mr Fox at the fire.
“Oh, I know what you’re driving at, padre. At home I used to go to church and all that, but this bloody war has knocked it all out of me. How can you believe in a God of love? He don’t love no-one. Look what happened to Wiley Banks. And what about young Wally? One bloke dropping dead after another, practically in his arms. He’s had the shit knocked out of him.”
Then the voice of Chaplain Ray cut in, raised in objection to the swearing, and was pounced upon by Bluey’s reply: “Shit to bad language.”
Potty’s response was unclear, but his tone scolding, and Bluey’s words then fearfully angry: “Go and complain to your God about the buggered bodies,” (he was yelling now, moving farther off). “Don’t mamby-pamby me about my lip.” Through a gap in the blankets that served as a door Walter saw Bluey seat himself on a knoll and face the sea.
This defence of his feelings by Bluey surprised him. He looked again — Bluey the guard. True friends sprang up when least expected, and from the foulest muddles.
Mr Fox brought Walter a cup of tea and Walter shrugged, smiling feebly. “Bluey’s not himself.”
“Another hard day ahead.” Yet the minister spoke almost gleefully: “Listen.”
“They don’t seem too keen on it. What’s up?”
“The armistice is agreed to. At seven thirty everything stops.”
Walter sat upright and splashed tea: “Go on!”
“There’ll be lots to do, I’ll need you and Blue again.” The way he said “Blue” was wrong, in the manner of someone overfamiliar to mask dislike.
“I don’t think so,” said Walter. “I mean, hadn’t we better get back to our mob?”
“It’s all fixed. I had an inkling of this yesterday.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t get up. There’s ages before we start.”
Potty’s hand strayed along the shelf and plucked a fat little Bible. He riffled the pages and became absorbed. The morning had clouded over and a drizzle began.
Well, why should Bluey be left undefended?
“I heard some of what Bluey said.”
The minister left a finger marking his place and looked up slowly, uttering an “Mmmm?” of irritation.
“There doesn’t seem much to be said for the other side. Your side. Not after what we saw last night.”
“I thought we’d talked this through yesterday,” said Potty, abandoning his text. “But never mind.” The snug Bible went phut as he slapped it down.
“If He’s all around, how can He let this go on? He could have easily stopped it before things got bad.”
“God limited His own power when He made man free. There’s no freedom to do right without a freedom to do wrong. See what I mean?”
Walter took a loud sip of his tea. God sounded like a foolish headmaster. And cruel.
“He works by appealing to free men. His whole life, Christ’s, was an appeal for the absolutely free loyalty and love of people like you and me. He showed us what it might cost — there was no making things attractive and easy. Where good and evil meet, inside or outside, there must and should be war. This eternal fight, inside and out, isn’t that the moral equivalent of war?”
“Are ‘they’ all bad and are ‘we’ all good?”
For a minute the minister had no answer. He threw back the blanket at the door to show the drizzle lifting its dull curtain. Bluey now sat in a shaft of sunlight, pricked with glistening mist. He tossed the dregs of his tea away, but stayed seated, tossed pebbles at a tin, smoked.
“En masse,” said Potty at last, “I’ve heard it claimed that this is almost the first time Christian principles have been applied to international relations.”
It seemed they were all to be Christs at Gallipoli, devoting their lives to the enactment of a moral drama. But it didn’t fit. Mankind was more a writhing garbage heap, dead or alive — feasting, competing, stealing one from the other. The rank discharges of the dead showed it last night, as did the living on the heights as they sought out the living of another race, and increased their self-esteem by killing them.
Yet there was one person who fitted the picture: Potty himself. But not now — last night when he played the healer on the hill, and later as the pilgrim breathing sane consolation on the track to the charnel pit.
Now? Bugger him.
Anything, any point to be proven, Walter believed, had to be done with few words and lots of action, otherwise it was conjecture. So now Potty was just a preacher again, dragging others up his own mental Calvary, potty all over again, all clarity obscured, a man who had lost the self-proclaimed honour of plain speech.
“There, does that clear things up?” And he left Walter feeling suddenly exhausted, desperate for a code of his own to put up against those who ran the world.
The track was busy again with tramping soldiers, one of whom asked Walter, now sunning himself at the entrance, if he had seen Doherty.
“You mean a big vulgar bloke?”
“Vulgar? He’d kill you for less.”
“Then it must have been him I saw last night, tipping darkies off stretchers.”
“What are you? Some kind of clown?” The speaker (Walter stood, extended a hand) was Ozzie Deep, last seen punching tickets at the Forbes Mail. After mutual recognition set in Ozzie grew confidential, and grinning said, “Always, you never missed,” when Walter flashed out a hand and tipped Ozzie’s hat over his eyes. It appeared that Private Doherty was one who never rested from money-getting. In the midst of battle he was rumoured to have knelt on the chest of a debtor and squeezed him for ten shillings. Ozzie knew for a fact that the chaplains had sacked Doherty from a burial detail because he was caught knocking gold fillings from the mouth of a Turkish officer. “I’m on his list,” said Ozzie, “Christ knows why. He’s a savage. Well, if I keep moving …”
Bluey had been joined by another figure, a medical orderly with prominent red armbands. Walter was reluctant to close the gap and make it a threesome — he would have to thank Bluey for his words, and that would be awkward, for though it was a relief suddenly to find himself unsentimentally pitied and thus befriended, Walter was more at home with the edginess that prevails between those who are not quite mates. On friendship’s other shore the true individualist sees a mire of disillusion. Bluey and the stranger were clapping each other on the back and shaking hands. The chap reminded Walter of Billy Mackenzie — his cap off-square in jaunty truculence, the stocky stance which even when relaxed and conversational carried an air of resistance. A slightly frontwards-leaning man he was, with the habit of chopping a toe in the dirt to make a hole, and then wedging a toecap in it while the other foot employed itself on a similar project, as if to state, This man will not be budged one inch. Try me.
So when Walter snoozed in the sunlight wih his chin on his hands it was natural that his childhood friend should appear in the garb of the medical orderly. Walter tried to tell him about the burial detail, but memory insisted that his most recent experience was when his dog Ajax had hurt his nearside rear paw while following him to school. A blissful moment; though when he turned to look Billy was no longer part of it. Cream Puff, his school pony, a horse with a passion for Scotch thistles which usually she picked with her lips drawn delicately back to avoid the prickles, now munched them hungrily, spikes and all, while Ajax whimpered unseen. All this took place in a room, he now saw, whose walls (blink) suddenly fell back to reveal the real world and its confounded enclosures: a corridor of gully, a bar of shingle, a thin catwalk of horizon — and something else, a shoulder and a red cross, then a face bobbing across to confront his own.
“I’ll be blowed.”
“I’ll be blowed.”
“I just had a dream about you and me and Cream Puff. Only — I’ll be damned — you weren’t in it.”
“You had a dream about me and I wasn’t in it ? Typical,” Billy turned to Bluey Clarke, “typical Walter Gilchrist material.”
The transformed Billy drew up a crate, planted himself on it, and beamed. “What do you think of my outfit?”
Walter scratched his head.
“I’m an ambulance-wallah. Not a bad sort of life.”
“What made you change?”
“Wipe that look from your face. It’s the real me. Say, when will the reverend be back? Him and me don’t see eye to eye.”
“Stay for a cup of tea,” said Bluey, and busied himself out of earshot.
“If Foxy sees me I’m done,” whispered Billy. “Keep it under your hat, but this ambulance stunt is just for today. The bloody chaplains won’t have a bar of it.”
“Too late. Here he is.”
Mr Fox strode around the corner of the gully. But he found a stone in his boot and stooped to release it.
“I’ve always got the old place on my mind, haven’t you? Cook-a-poi,” he pronounced nostalgically, and edged off a couple of paces, gauging the minister’s next move. “Let’s have a yarn sometime later.”
“Where can I find you?”
Billy smartly surveyed a line of escape through the slum of sandbagged dugouts on the hillside. “Ask for Lieutenant — I’m one of his — haven’t you heard?” He took a deep breath and braced himself for a standing start, waving cheekily to the lumbering Potty. After a second he lowered the arm and aimed it like a rifle. “I’m one of Lieutenant ‘Skipper’ Fagan’s snipers, I was in your vicinity the other day — where were you?” He triggered a “click” with his tongue, said “Cheerio”, then sprinted across the pitted hillside and disappeared.
Potty pursued him for fifty yards, stumbled twice, and returned examining grazed palms. “I don’t know why I bother. He’s the devil for taunting a man. They want him at headquarters, a Captain Benedetto there has been seeking him for days. I’ve a suspicion its news to his advantage, but the young fool won’t stop for me.” On a silk handkerchief bearing an embroidered D the minister dabbed his hands, blew his nose, then stuffed a pocket until it bulged like an outsized carbuncle, which he stroked.
“Have you seen much of him?”
“Not till today.”
“The few times we’ve had words I must say he never mentioned you, though you must have heard of his doings, surely.”
“Nothing.”
“But he’s the one who killed the Turkish sniper in the pine tree the day after General Bridges was shot. It made him instantly famous. He’s killed many since.”
“That can’t be right. It’s not Billy they’re talking about …”
“Billy and ‘The Murderer’ are one and the same,” announced the minister.