Captain Read online

  “We will go to England one day, Father says, so we called him Hey-Ho.”

  I was still laughing but he was still puzzled, so I put on a straight face and asked, “What is your name?”

  His limbs seemed to coil, as if he were readying himself to spring away. I caught him by the arm, wanting him to stay, this boy, with whom I didn’t have to pretend I was not scared, from whom I did not have to hide tears.

  “What’s your name?” I asked again.

  He studied me again, as if deciding whether to answer. When he spoke it was in his strange, faltering English.

  “Before … before … my name was Benjamin … Here, they call me Captain. The English Major, he used to call me Captain.”

  As if regretting he’d said so much, he tugged his arm back and sped away, barefoot and silent on the sand.

  ALEXANDRIA

  AUGUST 14, 1915

  We Yeomen left the next morning while it was still dark, in silence but for the tramping of so many feet. By the time the sun was high, we were in the seething stench and filth of Alexandria.

  We halted to let a column of horses by, the men in files of threes, each man leading two mounts. I thought of Trumpet again as I watched them go by and felt glad he was not here in apple-less Egypt.

  A troop of old soldiers pushed past us, laughing at the shine and polish of our kit, at the weight of it. We marched on through the quaint white streets and their pushing press of humanity and the jangle of foreign tongues. Arab hawkers swarmed round us, crying out their chants.

  The dock was immense, forty quays or more, an armada of vessels of all kinds in it—destroyers, troopships, cruisers, liners, hospital ships. Provisions stood in stacks on every quay: ammunition, water cans, crates, and tins. Everywhere were horse trains, gun limbers, field kitchens; officers calling out, still recruiting men; lines of sick and wounded soldiers in blue hospital uniforms.

  “Gallipoli,” Sparrow said, pointing to a row of wounded. “They’re from Gallipoli.”

  I felt a tightening of the heart, the cold fingers of fear. Did no man leave Gallipoli standing? Was it only the dead or the near dead that got out? There were only men with whiskers here, men who didn’t mind the yellow wounds and the burned flesh melded to khaki cloth. I was alone, very alone, amongst such men. What would Abel Rudge feel, I wondered; if he’d seen those men from Gallipoli, would he be scared too? Yes, I was too young; if I told Lieutenant Straker my age, I could go home to Bredicot. That boy from last night, had he seen what men looked like when they came back from Gallipoli? How would he feel in my place? How would he feel if he were going to Gallipoli?

  If only he were with us, there’d at least be someone else to talk to.

  We halted beside two large ships: the Anglo-Egyptian and the Ascania. Behind us stood a great dock shed, the side of it open to the harbor. I smelled the mules before I saw them—a mule makes an unholy stink compared to a horse, especially in the heat of Egypt. I looked into the dock shed and glimpsed, behind the stores and equipment, three lines of pack animals. Hey-Ho—was he in there?

  “Bayliss—into line!”

  I stepped back and waited in file as steep gangways were placed to the lowest deck of the Anglo-Egyptian. Still, we waited, and while we waited, I wondered about the mules and wondered if the boy—Captain he’d said he was known as—if Captain were with them. Farther down the quay, a bit of a palaver was going on, an officer trying to get sixty-odd stubborn transport horses up the gangway onto a battleship called the Pasha. A chestnut mare was walking peacefully up, neat as ninepence, her nose calmly in her nose bag, but halfway up, she stopped dead. She raised her head and pulled at the rope, every line of her firm in the determination to go no farther. I smiled, thinking how Trumpet would do just the same if I were to bring him to a filthy Egyptian dock and force him up a narrow gangplank. Behind the mare, horses were whinnying and pulling back. Two subalterns, red-faced and ruffled, were whipping the mare’s rump. We were all laughing then at the subalterns, but at the same time I knew I’d not want to be behind her on that plank if she kicked or reared.

  We waited in the hot sun. I was standing near John Merriman, Ernest Sparrow, Archie Spade, and Harry Beasley, half listening to their talk about the Turks and their fear of a bayonet, half thinking of the night before, of Captain’s secrecy and stealth, wondering what lay behind it, wondering about his attachment to Hey-Ho. What were the terrible things the donkey’s eyes had seen? I smiled to myself at the notion of all the English donkeys that said hey-ho, hey-ho.

  “They say the Turk dislikes our bayonets.” Merriman was grinning. “They say he’s scared of a hand-to-hand fight.” Then Firkins started going on about how we were off to a great and tragic battlefield, a land of romance and myth, the land of Dionysius and Ariadne and Jason and all the others. Beasley and Spade groaned and rolled their eyes.

  Old Colonel Colville ordered us into the dock shed. The Colonel was from somewhere around Bredicot. He’d been a contemporary of Father’s, I think, maybe a friend too, the name being familiar to me. Both Lieutenant Straker and the Colonel made me uncomfortable, and there were times I wished I hadn’t joined a Worcestershire Regiment, it all being so sort of close to home if you were underage. Dixies of sugary tea and greasy bacon from the Tommy cookhouse on the dock were handed round.

  “Lead out the mules!” someone ordered.

  I stood a little apart from the others, watching as each mule was led out, but they were all short-eared, run-of-the-mill-looking things.

  “They go below,” Lieutenant Straker said, joining me. “In the stalls below the officers’ horses.”

  The mules were tied in slings alongside the Ascania.

  “Lieutenant, sir, do you know…,” I began hesitantly. “Are the mules coming with us?”

  All the usual shenanigans and kerfuffle were going on, the biting and the kicking and the whole palaver that you get when you tie an innocent, unsuspecting quadruped up in a sling and whisk it twenty feet off the ground into an ocean-bound ship.

  The Lieutenant answered, grinning, “Looks as though they have their own view on the matter.”

  I’d wanted to ask if he knew of Captain, but how could you ask after someone if you didn’t even know his surname and he wasn’t in the Army?

  “First Yeomanry, prepare to board!” growled old Colonel Colville.

  I smiled at Merrick’s reluctant, mocking salute, his teasing imitation of the accent of the commanding classes. I wouldn’t want to be the Turk that faced his bayonet, or Spade’s, or Beasley’s, or the Lieutenant’s, such a tight, strong-looking bunch they were, proud and fierce and caring only for their own. Lieutenant Straker seemed old to me then. He wasn’t older than the other men, but there was an angry kind of courage in him and a natural authority.

  We emerged into the white light of the midday sun.

  “First Yeomanry, board the Ascania.”

  She was the ship the mules had boarded, but I’d not seen Hey-Ho, so Captain would most likely not be on the Ascania either. I sighed, feeling tired of living up to men like Merriman and Beasley and Spade, tired of trying to be jolly about bayonets, tired of having no one around with whom I could be myself.

  That first day aboard the Ascania we started training in the use of a bayonet. A bayonet is a different thing altogether to a rifle. I thought I could fire at a man with a rifle, but I didn’t know then if I could ever kill a man with a bayonet.

  “Go in with the point,” Colonel Colville told us.

  As I stood there on the hot deck, the bayonet in hand, I looked at Merrick’s face, and Beasley’s, and Sparrow’s, but they, none of them, seemed to quail at the idea of going in with the point.

  I’m fifteen, I thought as I fixed the bayonet. Only fifteen, and I will have to kill men. I have to go in with the point and I have to kill. I will kill or I will be killed.

  The Colonel must’ve seen something on my face because he marched up to me and barked, “Get this into your head! This is war, and the onl
y thing that’ll count out there is that you win and that you stay alive. Make sure it’s the enemy that dies and not you.”

  The days were hot and slow. A bugle woke us at six for breakfast, and we drilled on deck from nine to eleven. Then in the height of the day, struck senseless with the force of the sun, the boards of the Ascania blistering, the color stolen from the sea, we were allowed to rest. Everyone else had a mucker, someone to play cards with or chat to. I would always be on my own then. No one said so, but they knew I was younger. Lieutenant Straker almost certainly had some idea, but I don’t think, now, looking back, that he ever breathed a word to anyone.

  One such afternoon, I lay on my own on the shadowy side of the deck and thought about the bayonets. Merrick had taken me aside after the training that day and told me the easy part was the pushing it in, that a bayonet sticks in a stomach and is hard to pull out, that you have to twist it and tug. Then the others had laughed when they’d seen my face—they’d all been laughing at me. I’d never thought of any of this in the Bredicot schoolroom—of bayonet wounds, nor of the twist of steel in a stomach—and wondered if Abel Rudge or Francis could kill a man in hand-to-hand combat. I wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was easier to kill a man if you were older. My thoughts drifted then to Captain. I’d begun to wonder, you see, by then, if he’d been only the melting figment of my lonely mind, for there’d been no sign of him nor Hey-Ho since that night in the horse lines in Egypt.

  I stretched my arms out, inspecting my tanned skin. We’d marched ten times around the first-class deck that morning, two and a half miles in all, to the beat of the band, the brassy thump of the sun on our backs and the ships from all the oceans of the world going about on either side.

  At Bredicot, when I felt most alone, I’d always go to Trumpet and the other horses. That afternoon, too, I left the deck and crept below to the officers’ horses. They were all jammed together in restless lines—no air, no room to exercise or groom them. Somewhere one was thrashing, rearing and striking at the wood with his forelegs. Men were shouting, the horse smashing against his stall, a vet trying to calm him, then taking a needle to him. I crept away, nauseous with the heat, and the swell of the sea, and the stink. I longed for the companionship of Trumpet, as there’s no finer friend than a horse when you’re lonely, but was glad really that I hadn’t brought him with me to the burning bowels of the Ascania, to be driven mad with the heat.

  I left and went down the steep gangways: two decks down was where the mules were kept. I searched the lines stall by stall, just in case I’d missed Hey-Ho before, but they were all ordinary-looking things—no long black-tipped ears.

  The sunset was a melancholy thing, all purples and greens and chromes, and I felt lonelier for its loveliness. Hour after hour, I watched the wash of the water along the bow, gazed at all the tiny passing islands of the Greek Aegean, all strung out, till I was almost hypnotized by the hiss of the bow wave. It grew dark and I set to tramping up and down the deck with my tinful of thick, sugary tea. The boards were wet with dew beneath my bare feet, the touch of the breeze sweet and soft on my bare skin, those strange, eastern stars above. I heard Merrick and the others laughing like drains at something or other, and I wished Liza were with me, or Francis, or almost anyone.

  A hospital ship passed, her green starboard light burning in the dark. Our own portholes were darkened, and we crossed her like a shadow, dark and silent, the captaincy wary, watching to the left and to the right for what might lie below.

  * * *

  The Ascania steered around two tiny islets, turned, and navigated a passage deep between two great hills into the harbor of Moudros. A grey destroyer drew up alongside, her sailors all waving their caps at us, her band playing us in. At anchor there were cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers, minelayers, hospital ships, launches, submarines—a terrific spirit-stirring display of sea power. Francis would have liked to see this, I thought. He had a collection of lead ships in his room at Bredicot. On the hills above the bay, white tents seemed to have bloomed like desert roses, each one fluttering with an ensign or hospital cross or French tricolor.

  There at Moudros, pinnaces and packet boats dashed around in all directions day and night. The right food or equipment was always on the wrong boat; there were no water carts on the shore, no kettles, cookers, or signalling equipment to be had anywhere. We Yeomanry were to sleep aboard the Ascania, Colonel Colville told us, our departure for Gallipoli being so imminent, but we were kept there in the harbor for three days practicing going up and down the rope ladders that were dropped over the sides of the ship. On the third day the Lieutenant sent me ashore on some errand, so I got a break from all the climbing up and climbing down.

  After the errand I had time to spare and reckoned I wouldn’t be missed for a while, so, for the joy of being on solid land again, I walked over the sun-scorched grass between the hospital tents and on upwards. The heat was as fierce as the blast from a furnace, but there was a village up there ahead, gleaming white in the hollow of a hill and it might’ve been that, or the fear of what might happen in the days to come, that made me want to climb that hill. At the top, I told myself, there’d be a view, perhaps, and I might see Gallipoli. I climbed past the village and on, then sat there at the top and caught my breath and wiped my streaming face and fought away the flies. The sheep bells echoed across the still water of the bay and all the great ships down there looked like tiny painted toys. Across the sea somewhere lay Gallipoli. I scanned the horizon. Far away, through a quivering violet haze, I saw what looked like a whale-backed hump in the silvery surface of the sea. The tail end of Europe. Gallipoli. I raised Father’s field glasses to my eyes. I was rather proud of them and took them everywhere, because in the Army only the officers are given glasses.

  I caught, or thought I caught, a distant pulsing in the air. I started and tensed and wiped the glasses and looked again. My fingers trembled on the field glasses. That throbbing, that pulsing was the sound of guns: the guns of Gallipoli.

  The heat fell away. The buzzing of the flies quieted and still I stared towards that blue-grey ridge, was still staring as the sun sank in a blaze, bloodred and pink. I thought wistfully how that sun would soon set too on the hills of Worcestershire. In two hours it would be sundown at home, and the throbbing of those guns, the fear of what lay ahead, made me long to hang on to the reins of the sun and be galloped westward on her rays, to Bredicot.

  The end of the day was bugled, and the call taken up from camp to camp. Then the French trumpets began their wailing and the mournful cries echoed up to the tops of the hill and soon it seemed that the whole island was crying out the sad news of the sun’s setting once again. I watched the dusty mules nibble at scorched thistles, listened to the wailing of the trumpets and the ringing of the sheep bells, and felt lonelier then than I’d ever felt, and smaller. When the first campfire was lit, I started on down, slipping on the loose stones that glowed rose-pink in the last of the sun’s rays.

  Merrick and Firkins were there on the dock.

  “Young Bayliss, you’ll get it in the neck,” hissed Merrick. “Where’ve you been? There’ll be the devil to pay—the Lieutenant’s been looking for you.”

  “We’re under orders to proceed to the peninsula. Tonight,” said Firkins, very solemn and portentous. “History is in the making, young Bayliss.” He removed his pipe to illustrate the importance of the moment. “The dawn of a new chapter.” His cap was adrift, his tunic all wrongly buttoned and he didn’t look at all like the dawn of a new chapter, but I felt a tremor of fear. By morning I would be at Gallipoli. By morning I would see action for the first time.

  We worked to breaking point on the dock, Firkins and Merrick and Beasley and I, loading stack after stack of provisions. The bay was all feverish commotion: forage, equipment, ammunition, mules, all being moved from jetties to barges, trawlers towing strings of rowboats to the ships. Hour after hour, boatload after boatload of troops were ferried to the ships, till there was moonshine on the water and
the ships were all twinkling with their strings of red and green lights and the bands all playing on the warships and the tom-toms beating from the Indian camps.

  “Embark at once. Board the Queen Victoria.”

  The order was passed mouth to mouth along the jetty. I lifted the last crate of many hundreds labelled “Medical Supplies” onto a barge, and looked up to watch a liner steam out of the bay, her band playing a rousing air and every vessel at anchor waving as she disappeared into the dark of the open sea.

  Firkins and I squeezed ourselves onto a barge and found a place to sit between the crates of medical supplies. We crossed the flickering water in eerie silence, dark forms gliding to and fro in the balmy night.

  As we rounded the stern of the Victoria, I saw a pair of mules being hustled into a sling. They were making their usual song and dance about the whole thing, protesting and kicking and yanking and biting and the whole shebang. They were suddenly whistled off their hoofs and hoisted, still and silent with shock, their hoofs dangling, then swung and plunged onto the deck.

  Merrick looked up at the moon and frowned. Then Beasley and Sparrow did, and one by one, each man looked up at her. She was bright and full and her light would be no friend to us that night. A tot was passed hand to hand, from bow to stern.

  “Young Billy,” said Merrick, passing it to me, and there was amusement and challenge in his eyes, so I, in a spurt of defiance, lifted it to my lips and swallowed, and the shock of the stuff in my throat was burning and violent.

  As the tug that had held the mules prepared to pull away, a dark figure sprang from the stern of the last boat, leaped to the rope ladder, and pulled swiftly up. I leaped to my feet—the boy—Captain! A stowaway? I forced my way along the deck between the crates, through the Lovat Scouts, the Yeomanry, the Essex, and all the different sorts that were in the barge, to the front. When we were finally alongside, I was the first off the barge, the first to scale the ladder up the Victoria, climbing hastily and clumsily, my pack lurching and swinging. I searched the top deck, the deck below, the deck below that, then deeper still to the mule lines. I was quiet and went on tiptoe, keeping to the places where there was straw on the ground because Captain didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to be found.