Captain Read online

  “For God’s sake, Bayliss, stop this nonsense,” was all the Major’s answer.

  Chips was waiting for me outside.

  “Sir, they’ll shoot him. They’re under orders. Any animal that can’t keep up…”

  I turned and went straight back to the Major. This time he spoke with quiet fury through gritted teeth.

  “There’s so few of us, Billy … Merriman, Tandy, Merrick, Robins … All gone … I need you … you’re one of us.”

  I played the last card I had.

  “I’m underage,” I said. “I wish to leave.”

  “It’s too late, Bayliss. You’re not underage anymore,” the Major answered sharply, and I wondered that he knew.

  He was hard pushed, the Major, on that race to Damascus. He knew the ties that bound me, bound us all, to Hey-Ho, but the course of the war would be determined by this race and he was subject to the Brigadier, and the Brigadier to the Major-General, and so on, and we in the ranks had no choice.

  Somewhere on the road to Kuneitra next day, the Major went on ahead to reconnoiter, leaving Captain Mason to take command of our line. The Captain knew we weren’t going fast enough for the General, and he was going up and down the line, harrying us all on. I could see the quaking in Hey-Ho’s legs, grey-black muzzle almost to the ground, the sorry, fallen ears. He tripped and stumbled, and never, ever, had I seen that sure-footed little animal trip or stumble before. Terrified for him, I kept to the tail of the line, keeping him in my sight.

  Several horses, several of the service animals, were flagging—not only Hey-Ho, but it was Hey-Ho who fell to his knees. The line behind was held up on the narrow road, units converging and muddling up, and officers were cussing and shouting. I dismounted, and Chips and I stood on either side of Hey-Ho and tried to coax him to his feet. There were two large cans on that little donkey’s back, but Chips, God bless him, had left them empty.

  “It’s no good, sir…”

  “I promised,” I said. “I made a promise. At Kuneitra I will find somewhere to keep him safe…”

  Captain Mason was forcing his way back down the line to see what was causing the delay.

  “Christ, Billy!” Chips’s face was streaked with sweat.

  Captain Mason was hard-pressed by his own superiors, I guess, as much the Major was, but Captain Mason was a young and callow man. I saw the harried lines of his face, the pistol in his hand.

  “Lift him, Chips,” I hissed, rank with fear. “Then we’ll hold him up when the officer comes by.”

  Captain Mason halted his mare in front of us.

  Hey-Ho’s forelegs quivered and shook, but we held him between us and looked the other way.

  He loaded his pistol.

  “No, sir,” I said to the Captain. “No.”

  “He’s been with us since Suvla, sir,” said Chips.

  The Captain raised his pistol.

  I took a step forward, blocking the Captain’s line.

  “No, sir, no. No one has the right to do this…”

  Captain Mason’s arm and pistol were raised and level.

  “Step aside, Bayliss, and turn your head away. I’ll deal with you later.”

  I stood my ground and went on, recklessly. I knew I’d be charged for this later, for insubordinate behavior.

  “You weren’t there at Gallipoli,” I said. “You never went down on your knees for water, never scooped it up with your bare hands or drank it from the ground like a dog. We depended on him for our lives…”

  “Turn your head aside, Bayliss,” said Mason. “And move on down the line.”

  Chips grasped my arm.

  “Billy,” he said. “Billy—look—he can’t breathe—he’s choking…”

  My eyes flickered for a second to Hey-Ho, then back to Mason.

  “He never so much as flinched at a Turkish bullet … never shirked … not a day sick or sorry…”

  “Bayliss. I will have no further argument. Move away and I will see you later.”

  Captain Mason’s arm was still levelled, and my eyes were on him, but his own eyes were on Hey-Ho, on the straining legs, the heaving flanks and streaming neck.

  Somewhere farther on there was a command to halt and the line came to a weary, disorderly standstill. Hey-Ho’s matchstick legs were faltering and staggering and disconnected. I stayed where I was. The Captain’s arm hesitated there with the pistol, the resolve in his eyes loosening.

  “Billy,” Chips said, his eyes towards a horse galloping down the line in a cloud of dust. Suddenly Captain Mason’s arm was knocked, and his pistol spun in the dirt of the road.

  “God forgive you,” said Major Straker to the Captain. “Any animal but this one…”

  “Billy,” Chips whispered. “Billy…”

  I heard the rasping breath, and turned, and saw the slender legs quiver and fold, as though there were no bone in them.

  Hey-Ho lifted his head and half reared, and gave a bark that was a cry of pain and grief. He staggered back, nostrils wide, limbs confused and dazed and all disconnected, as though they none of them belonged to each other or to him. They seemed to turn to water and give way.

  “Hey-Ho!” I cried, circling his neck with my arms and looking into his eyes, eyes that were still and deep as ever, full as ever, but brimming now, brimming with the sorrow of all the centuries. He fell, and the echoes of his cry shimmered like a wraith in the dusty air above him.

  Perhaps thirty miles from Kuneitra, Hey-Ho lay dead on a dirt track, his whiskery muzzle in the dust, his silver canisters all around him, his ears askew and sort of broken. I knelt and traced with a finger the dark wavering tip of one ear, the uncertain line that I’d once imagined Captain inking in during some lonely moment of his childhood.

  I closed the lids of those eyes that Captain said had seen so many terrible things.

  Those few of us who’d been at Gallipoli buried Hey-Ho there on the road to Kuneitra, the pear blossom and crown badge of the Queen’s Own Worcestershire Hussars beside him, our colors over him, and a pair of shining water cans at his head. The bugle played the Last Post and we raised bayonets in a reaching, glittering arch, tip to tip, over the makeshift grave, and bent our heads to Major Straker’s words.

  “His stout and stalwart heart will go with him, for he was on the side of angels.”

  We fired a ten-gun salute and a weary troop of infantry passing along that road to Kuneitra raised their guns and saluted, and the next troop and the next until the skies over all Arabia were ringing with the news of a certain donkey’s death.

  “Heart failure,” Major Straker said later.

  But it wasn’t. Hey-Ho died of a broken heart.

  We turned and spurred our horses on to catch up with our unit. My eyes dry and hard, my blood cold as steel, I jabbed and kicked Caesar on, chasing away the unmarked mound that will forever lie beside the road to Kuneitra.

  FROM GALILEE TO DAMASCUS

  OCTOBER 1918

  On we went along the long corridor that joins Africa to Asia, Arabia to Europe. To the east rode the gallant Australians, to the west Lawrence and the camels, we Yeomen in the center. I no longer recognized the face I saw in my tin mirror, all traces of boyhood blown away, didn’t know as mine the coolness of my pulse.

  Thousands upon thousands of horsemen stepped out beneath the swaying stars, bridles jingling, gun wheels growling. Even to my own weary, raking mind, we were an otherworldly sight, we Cavalry who had to stop our fierce and honest enemy from entering Damascus.

  Sometime, somewhere, in one velvet night, a band of Turks leaped at us like wildcats. We were still fighting them when dawn fingered her way over the hills. I was wounded there, the shrapnel burying itself deep in the flesh of my arm, the pain of it welcome and blinding, red-hot and scorching to the bone. They got away, but we galloped them down and caught them, weary and limping, their rifles flung away.

  We halted to let the Nottingham Horse go on ahead. They had to secure the ridge before we advanced farther.

 
“Bayliss, stop here and get that treated,” Lieutenant Sparrow said.

  “It can wait, sir,” I answered, and turned away. His eyes followed me. The Nottingham Horse closed in on the ridge, one company from the right, one from the left, with precise and efficient timing. The enemy streamed away north over the hills. Lieutenant Sparrow looked at the red stain of the bandage on my arm and called for a medic.

  “Sir, I’ll see a medic in Damascus,” I said, and spurred Caesar on.

  The Turk cavalry and infantry, several thousands of them, were perhaps six miles ahead and racing for the city. We halted for breakfast, the brass hats giving final orders to Divisional and Brigade leaders, splitting us off into groups of four to ride down on bands of Turks more than ten times our number. I thrashed on, chasing Captain from my mind. I’d promised to look after Hey-Ho and I hadn’t. I rode as though the devil were at my heels, my heart dry and cracked and blank as the ground beneath.

  We drove out all before us, riding the whole of that day, spreading out across the dusty plains in a line so thin the enemy planes could find no target, their bombs falling blankly and careless plumes rising. The going was tough, the hills steep, the wadis slippery, the plains hard-baked as stone. We rode thirty-five miles, no water for the horses, our lips cracked and black. We moved so fast the telegraph could not keep up with us, news of our progress travelling ahead of us only by plane.

  Lean and hardened by the mad race from Galilee, by the hard-fought days and fleeting, sleepless nights, unshaven, dusty, our eyes bloodshot, we picked our way up rocky ground to a plain that opened out, empty and level. I had no fear now of the twist of a bayonet in my flesh. Steely and ruthless I was, riding like a devil, fighting like a devil, my throat thick with dust, eyes blurred with sweat, and I was at Johnny Turk’s door by the time the sun was low.

  “Jacko didn’t think we could move so fast!” The Major laughed, seeing the panicky stream of Turks trying to get away up the railway valley in any tin-pot thing. I saw those people being chased from their homes and whatever the right and wrong of it all was, I thought of Captain at the gates of Jaffa, and could not laugh with the Major.

  “Do they know, sir?” I asked. “Have you heard where Captain is—if he is—?”

  The Major shook his head.

  “No … They moved him to another hospital. That’s all we know.” Then he looked at me and said, “What was his name, his real name? It’s almost impossible to trace a man here, especially if we don’t even have his name.”

  “Benjamin,” I said. “Where he came from, they used to call him Benjamin.”

  “Nothing else? Just Benjamin?”

  “That’s all he ever told me,” I answered.

  * * *

  Damascus lies in a semicircle of tawny hills. Its gardens are as green and lovely a place as Jerusalem or Bethlehem, and if I’d had any softness left in me, the sight of it would have been as sweet as the green fields of Bredicot. After the blistering sand and white rock of Sinai, the silvery runnels, pearly minarets, the green gardens should have given ease to my streaming, blood-raked eyes, to my twisted mind, but I saw Damascus with cold, hard eyes.

  There she lay before us, the oldest living city in the world. The race to take her would end tomorrow. The prize for her would be victory and peace. I would ride hard, fight hard to take her, but there would be no peace for me. For me there would always be the knowledge of what I’d done, there’d always be the memory of Captain and his Hey-Ho.

  The stuttering of the machine guns and the rattle of rifles faded. We slipped from our saddles, and fell beside our horses, the gunners beside their burning guns.

  A blistering lightning flash was followed by a violent percussion—an ammunition dump exploding in a terrific column of smoke, then another. Explosion followed explosion, flashes stabbing the sky, one fireburst after another, smoke shells breaking into rainbow stars, explosives of all kinds bursting in showers of golden rain. The latticed wireless mast swayed and crashed, the power station exploded in flying shards. A drum of petrol went up, flinging up a burst of flame. The flames leaped from drum to drum. Fodder and tents went up, and all the provisions of all the Turkish forces of Syria, Palestine, and all Arabia were there burning before our eyes in a monstrous pyre.

  The city glowed bloodred. A roll of thunder roared from hill to hill, to and fro, and across the Arabian desert with echoes that would reverberate across the world. Lieutenant Firkins was silent, dumbfounded by the sight of so much history happening right before his eyes.

  I watched till the fires stuttered and grew fitful. The eastern night put on her velvet black. The sweat was caked on Caesar in white streaks, his flesh raw beneath the girth and saddle, head dropping. Huddled in my blanket beside him on the bare hilltop, I listened to the cries of the jackals and the sighing of the horses, and stared up into the cruel, cold stars that could see into the heart of me.

  That race north took a great toll on us all, but physical exhaustion can still the twisting of the heart and, that night at least, I slept like the child I no longer was.

  * * *

  Dawn came and blurred the gardens in soft river mist. All the armies lay in view: on the hills the New Zealanders and their guns, the Fourth Cavalry along the road to the north, more cavalry still on the ridge beyond, other mounted divisions on the Beirut–Damascus road. There were guns and snipers in the green and pearly city, but there’d be no heart in their fight now.

  We were hard-fighting, hard-riding, well armed, and well mounted, and at last we had the upper hand. A great and gallant army was rushing away before us.

  A regiment of the Australian Light Horse formed the advance. The Yeomen moved on at a brisk trot behind, a line two miles long, laughing and shouting, arms glittering, bridles jingling. We poured in from the north, from all sides, on horse, on camel, and on foot, flooding the plain, more units joining us, minute by minute, more mounted men from all sides, and all the hoopla, all the pride and honor and razzmatazz, all ranks moving as one and before us the pearly city quivering in the green. Nerves thrilling to the joy of an open plain, Caesar danced and jigged and there was splendor in it all.

  The sun broke across the city and amplified the glory of the day, but despite it all I shivered, feeling the dark space at my side where Captain and Hey-Ho should’ve been.

  And when we came in sight of the Deraa road a halt was called. A pitiful rabble was fleeing along that road, a confused, chaotic stream of bullocks, carts, motor cars, lorries, wagons, limbers, camels, horses, and field kitchens. I thought again of Captain at Jaffa and of journeys across snowy mountains, and then suddenly I was thinking of Bredicot and of armies chasing Liza and Mother and Francis and Geordie out, and then I no longer knew anymore what was wrong and what was right.

  I was at the Major’s side just then, and he turned to me and said, “It was all for this, Bayliss, all for this.”

  I turned away.

  You could rely on Firkins for a historical perspective and he’d clearly prepared some words and put his pipe aside for the moment: “A proud, fighting nation brought to her knees. An empire that has held the armies of Europe at bay for centuries, now breathes her last.”

  The advance was sounded. A roar rolled like a great wave along the line. I was long, long tired and there was nothing in me that thrilled to the mass of trembling horseflesh, to the pounding of hoof and the drumming of blood and muscle, and the flashing swords, and I neither laughed nor shouted with the others as we chased and harried the terrified Turks away.

  We galloped through the green-and-silver gardens and clattered into a winding street and into a day of carnival. All the ways were thick with people, who clung to the necks of our horses, kissed our stirrups—my stirrups and the stirrups of all the men, even Firkins’s. Rolling waves of song and cheer followed us, the walls lined shoulder to shoulder, everyone singing and laughing and weeping, the women hanging out their carpets, throwing flowers and sweetmeats from latticed windows and crying out a thousand welcomes.
Cries were taken up and carried from street to street, in a swinging chant. They sprinkled us with rose water and all sorts, and it was like a dream, the confetti and the crying and the clapping and the laughter tumbling from the latticed windows, but there was no Captain, and the little donkey who’d travelled so far, from the place he’d once called home, through Europe to Egypt and Gallipoli, through all of Sinai and Palestine, with the boy he loved—he was not there.

  A high chieftain converged with us in a small square, behind him a band of Arabs mounted on wiry, fast-stepping ponies, all silver harnesses and jingling bells. Men whispered and pointed. He was not an Arab but a blue-eyed Englishman in all that glorious oriental getup.

  “Lawrence, the soldier-scholar … that’s Lawrence,” whispered Lieutenant Firkins, a little breathless at the sight of the great man.

  Lawrence’s men saw our khaki and saluted us with thundering salvos, fired at the heavens, again and again, as though to empty their magazines at the joy of an ancient city once again in Arab hands. Behind Lawrence’s ponies came camels, heads high on their swaying necks, eyes hooded, unsurprised by the hysteria and the confetti in their forelocks.

  Dolly?

  Our camels had gone to Lawrence—where was she?

  I yanked poor Caesar round, and turned him down the ranks of camels, forcing a way through the heads that bent to my stirrups, the hands that offered sweetmeats, and peaches, and grapes, the fingers that slipped flowers into Caesar’s bridle. Dolly. I fumbled in my pockets for a date, kicked Caesar on. He snorted and danced, light on his feet in protest at the presence of so many camels at such close quarters. I pressed him on past camel after camel, all brown and run-of-the-mill sorts of things.

  Dolly! A young Arab boy, sitting higher than his companions, a bunch of grapes in one hand, a rifle, skyward, in the other, was turning into the street. I forced Caesar down against the flow of brown camels. Dolly! Tall and creamy, confetti tangled in her forelock and lashes. Ancient eyes in an ancient head, she gazed upward and over the minarets and mosques as though she’d seen such sights each day since she’d been born. For a passing second, with a lurch of feverish hope, I thought I saw too a small grey donkey with sorry ears at Dolly’s side. A hand held out grapes, a head cried into Caesar’s neck, clinging to his mane. I lunged for the grapes, snatched them up and shook off the man who clung to us.