Captain Read online

  I paused for breath at the elbow of the gully and watched a picketboat approach the jetty, a string of pinnaces behind her. The officers were still on the beach, still herding men into line. I saw, too, before the foot of the gully, by the ruined building and the stacks of provisions, a donkey grazing in the shrub—Hey-Ho. Captain, too, would be there, if he’d made it. As I was about to turn and race down, I was pulled roughly to one side. A Major was shouting, ordering more men aside.

  “You—you—you—and you lot there, into line! Into line!”

  Merrick and Tandy and I were rounded up into a makeshift unit.

  “You—get reinforcements at the double. You lot—take the goat track branching left off the main gully. Get to the top, get to the hollow, then get to the higher ridge and cover the gully. There’re Yeomen up there—unsupported—vulnerable from the far side of the gully. Keep low. Try to make contact with the troops on both sides. Hold the contact—hold the position and dig in.”

  I wiped my face on my sleeve, then set off back up a narrow track. It steepened, then disintegrated, and we clawed and gripped the rock to haul ourselves up. At a small plateau, we crawled forward in a squirming line. Lieutenant Straker was up there ahead, and when we reached him, I paused to rest. He gestured to a small ridge ahead.

  “Our men are up there.”

  I wiped my streaming face on the shredded cloth of my sleeve. We were motioned onwards by some officer or other up ahead.

  “Keep low, boyo,” whispered the Lieutenant. I didn’t like that he was so familiar with me when he wasn’t with the others, him being a Second Lieutenant and me being just a private.

  We wriggled like snakes. Fear clawed at my nerves, barbed things tore at my skin, the sun blazed on my back.

  Lieutenant Straker froze. After a second or two he inched back.

  “Don’t move a muscle. We’ve been seen.”

  I glimpsed one—two—three—three Turks—snipers—so close—no, fifteen or more, and not more than fifty feet away—unearthly and strange as sprites—green-faced and crowned with thorns and twigs. The Australian was right: Jacko was everywhere, in every nook and cranny of the place, and there was nothing but thistles between us and him. I was trembling violently, fingers clawing at the ground. Stealthy and silent, the Lieutenant fixed bayonet. I did the same, fumbling and shaking at it, but when I looked up, the Turks were melting away, disappearing like wild cats into the undergrowth.

  “Dig in, for God’s sake, get down and dig in.”

  Dig in, to bare rock?

  There was a sudden savage shriek somewhere to the right, then the sound of fighting, hand to hand, one man against the other, going at it like wild animals with stones and teeth.

  A bullet raced past immediately to my left—I felt the long purring breath of it almost on my skin, long and low—then thudded into a rock at my heels. I was still jittery and shaking as the Lieutenant fired, fired and fired again, and the whole unit was firing, only I’d dropped my rifle, was fumbling with the ammunition and I heard the faint amusement in the Lieutenant’s voice. “Thank you, Bayliss,” as he picked up my fallen round to load his own rifle. You see, I’d not yet fired a shot.

  A bullet smacked into the spine of a rock inches to my left and ricocheted off. Suddenly there was yelling all around.

  “Turk advancing!”

  Immediately ahead, a line of Turks was rising shoulder to shoulder, steel flashing, too many of them to say, and we were only ten men.

  Disembodied voices yelled from the rocks and ridges, regular soldiers taking the command.

  “Back! Get back!”

  The Lieutenant hesitated, looked quickly to the rear, then hissed, “Straight to the gully when I say—not the path, but to the right … Quick now, run!”

  Bent low, we raced, scrambling back, slipping and stumbling. Merrick and Tandy were somewhere to my left, I think, when I hurled myself over the brim of that gully. I glimpsed for a split second, too late, a vertical drop—and fell, dropping my rifle, flailing, tumbling, falling, grasping at a sapling, losing it, clasping at another, falling faster, then caught up and tangled and held briefly in some wretched thorny thing, the stones rolling and crashing beneath, dirt in my eyes, grit in my teeth and ears and nose. And if Jacko ever saw me there quivering in midair and all tangled in that pitiful tree with no rifle and never even having fired a shot, he must’ve been laughing even harder than Merrick and all the others would have.

  The tree bent and screeched, the roots of it torn from the rock, and I fell again.

  Some time passed before I came to. I felt water on my lips and tilted my head to drink. I was lifted and wrapped as if in the velvety black of the sky and carried away.

  Sometime later, when I woke again, not knowing if it were the same night, there was pitchy blackness directly over me, but if I lifted my head, I could see the water of the bay glimmering there, the flickering lights and shadows moving across the white shingle, mules and men, collecting and delivering, loading and unloading, sorting and arranging. Above them all the stars swayed and swung and were both brighter and lower than any I’d ever seen. I was a little concussed still, perhaps, but I saw now that the blackness above me was only the shadow of the cliff.

  A medic was moving there, along the base of the cliff, from man to man. I called out for water, but he did not come. Amidst the shrubby things that stood in silvery outline against the black of the cliff sat a figure, and it was he who turned his head in answer when I called.

  He smiled, then bent over his work once more, his arm moving in and out and up and down, in and out and up and down: Captain—his head bowed, raising his arm to pull, lowering it to push.

  My head throbbed and my lids were leaden and dropping, but I heard a donkey bray and, when my lids closed, the movement of Captain’s arm still played behind them: pulling up and pushing down. I saw a rose-colored quilt, Mother’s day room, her tapestry chair, her right hand, with the slim gold band, pushing a needle in, pulling it out.

  Sewing. Captain was sewing, sewing and crying as he stitched a corporal’s stripes back onto a sleeve. His father’s sleeve. Captain had kept the stripes and now he was sewing them onto his father’s uniform. I opened my eyes and saw him pat and smooth his work, and though I am a plain country boy, it seemed to me then that the stars were there that night only to light his work and to silver the tears on his cheeks.

  He bent over his father’s head and kissed it.

  Later, when I woke again, there was the light of a match moving at my side. Captain had what looked like a strip of packing crate in his hands and he was holding the flame of the match closely to the wood. Captain saw me turn to watch, held a hand to my forehead, asked how I felt.

  “OK.” I said—a little tersely—because I was worried he might’ve seen me looking foolish in the branches of that thorn tree.

  “Good,” he said, with his slow smile. “Good.”

  He bent his head again to the work he was at, then picked up another longer strip of packing crate and bound it with string at right angles two-thirds up the other. A packing crate cross with a name burned on it.

  “I am sorry,” I said.

  He touched his forehead to the tip of the cross and sat for a good while like that. When he looked up, I asked, “Why did you come here?”

  He answered with the same openness with which he’d spoken in Alexandria, the same seriousness, but his tone was matter-of-fact and there was no self-pity in it.

  “I did not like to see Father work so hard.” He put a hand to his own chest. “Bad heart. After—after we lost our home—over the mountains, so far, with Hey-Ho, all our things on top”—he gestured to Hey-Ho’s back—“then Mother, when she got ill, we left the things—Hey-Ho carried Mother … maybe two hundred miles…” He looked away.

  After a while—and now his eyes were glimmering with guilt and anger—he said, “I took extra grain for Hey-Ho—in Alexandria—because he is tired. Every day, only a little…” His eyes blazed. “The Maj
or—”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  He bent his forehead to the cross again.

  “I saw,” I said. “I saw—you and Hey-Ho, you saved him in the water.”

  “It was his heart,” he said. “We saved him from the water, but we could not save his heart.” He gestured to the ruined building at the northern end of the bay. “I covered him with stones. There is no earth here … only stones.”

  A long time passed then, I think, before he said, “Hey-Ho carried you too … you fell maybe twenty feet.” Then he lifted his head and told me I’d fallen, that it had been a while till he’d found me, that Hey-Ho had carried me down the gully.

  I held out a hand to Hey-Ho, calling him.

  Hey-Ho brayed in answer but did not move.

  “Very loud donkey,” said Captain, a faint smile broaching his grave face. “Come, Hey-Ho, come quietly.”

  Hey-Ho stepped gingerly towards us.

  Captain rose, the packing crate cross in one hand, the other on Hey-Ho’s droopy ear.

  “Father … said … ‘Look after Hey-Ho.’ Last thing he said … ‘Look after Hey-Ho’…”

  Sometime later that night he returned without the cross. We talked for a long time then. There were tears and there were long silences, and he was simple and unreserved when he did talk, but he never spoke of his father again that night. It was too soon, just then.

  SUVLA BAY

  AUGUST 19, 1915

  I woke again as glimmers of dawn lit the water. In the last minutes before sunrise, mules and carts hurried across the beach, men dragged up field guns and ammunition, other men built jetties.

  At sunrise the water was lashed with a hail of enemy bullets. The men on the beach paused, then continued their unloading. From the safe lee of the cliff, I picked out Captain and Hey-Ho there at the jetty, Hey-Ho still and patient as Captain fixed water cans to him and they went about their work, to and fro, while shells crashed and plowed into the shingle, stirring the water to a white froth. I listened to the buzzing of the flies and the delirious babbling of the wounded that lay in a row to my left. They brought me food, but I couldn’t eat the bread or the biscuit and saved them for Hey-Ho. His digestive system must be stronger than mine if he could eat the biscuit they gave us there.

  * * *

  When the sun was at its height, the beach was still thick with men. The day wore on. The water glittered in the dropping sun, the boats all dipping sweetly in it.

  * * *

  Night came again. My head had cleared. Tentatively I moved my bruised limbs. The green lights of the hospital ship were strung like a necklace along her side, a great red cross in her center. There’d be white sheets and blankets there, but I wasn’t a case for a hospital ship, hadn’t been hit, hadn’t even fired a shot. That hospital ship might’ve taken me home to Mother, to Francis, Geordie, and Liza but I’d have had to tell them how I’d been scared even before we sailed, that my sleep was haunted by bodies stacked any old way, one on top of the other, the dead alongside the living, on an Egyptian dock, that I hadn’t wanted to drink in the Egyptian bars, or sing as I stepped off the boat at Gallipoli, that I still hadn’t fired a single shot.

  Lieutenant Straker found me there under the cliff and had a word with the doctor. I was still wary of the Lieutenant, but I saw now he had a kindness in him, enough not to notice my fear, enough to ask the doctor to give me another night, to say for the minute I wasn’t needed.

  CHOCOLATE HILL

  AUGUST 21, 1915

  “Bayliss. We attack this afternoon. Rejoin the unit. Collect entrenching tools. Abandon pack and greatcoat. At the crook of the gully, take the left fork and keep going.” The line of the Lieutenant’s jaw was tense and hard and I thought better of telling him that my head was still aching. Captain and Hey-Ho and I were standing side by side. I turned to Captain and whispered, “What will you do?”

  “Bayliss,” the Lieutenant snapped. “Go on up straightaway.”

  “You—and the donkey! You—boy!” Chips shouted. “Over here!”

  That was the first time I saw Chips. At the mouth of the gully that ran up from the center of the bay, a mountain of provisions beside him, a largish man sat hunched beside the water cans, the hump of his back intended to signal his disgust at the height of the hill someone had in mind for him to climb and the disconcerting absence of buses or hansom cabs.

  Chips was with the Catering Corps, but assigned to our unit. He was a man not given to motion of any kind. He was appalled, you see, coming as he did from flat country around the Thames Estuary, at the crags and gullies of Gallipoli. He’d seen Hey-Ho and his eyes had brightened at the sight of a donkey, unladen and without any obvious occupation.

  “Who is he, Bayliss?” the Lieutenant asked me, pointing to Captain.

  “Sir, Captain, sir.”

  Captain saluted, answering the Lieutenant’s question to me with surprising confidence and dignity. The harsh lines of the Lieutenant’s face relaxed into a smile.

  “Captain, is it? Well, Chips here has his eye on that animal of yours. We’ll see if you and that donkey can live up to your name, shall we?”

  And so it was that I was sent back up the hill, that Captain was absorbed into the Yeomanry, and little Hey-Ho was loaded with clanking cans filled with water from Alexandria.

  We parted, Captain and I, with a smile.

  “See you,” he said.

  “So long,” I said. “Don’t forget me. It’s thirsty work up there.”

  He smiled again, and I knew he could see even then that I was scared.

  It was mighty long and steep, that gully, and there were sections of it that had signs like:

  DUCK AND RUN!

  That was mostly in the crooks and doglegs of the gully that were open to enemy fire, and you went past them at a run with your heart flapping like a loose sail against your ribs.

  The trenches wound up and down and all along the hillside. There were hundreds of corners and kinks and elbows and long, straight traverse sections. In one of those traverses, I found Tandy and Robins and Firkins and the others. Tandy asked to borrow my field glasses.

  “Look, Billy.” He handed them back to me. “Chocolate Hill, the lowish one, brown-colored,” he whispered. “Then look due east from the Salt Lake and you can see it. That’s the one we’re going to take. We’ve got men up there, Billy, in dugouts under cover of the hill.” I clenched the muscles of my legs to stop them shaking, wondering if Tandy had seen, but he was still watching the ridge.

  “How will it feel?” I asked. “Killing a man?”

  “It’s him or you, Billy, him or you.” He smiled gently. “You have no choice.” He smiled again. “See, they’re below, just below the knoll.”

  The ridge ran from one high point at one end of the bay to the other. The lower slopes blazed yellow with gorse, the tops straggled with Scots pines. I picked out scattered infantry, all as dusty-colored as the trees and scrub.

  “Just beyond Chocolate Hill is Scimitar Hill and beyond that to the north is W Hill. They’re held by the Turks. There are guns on the tops of them.” I picked out the Turkish infantry too in the low scrub in the front of the hill, beyond it the bulges and buttresses of Sari Bair.

  We waited in line. I fingered my Lee-Enfield. Would I fire this time? If it was him or me, would I kill? The Lieutenant crawled up, behind him a handful or so of men.

  “Go over, boys.”

  Go over? When the slightest flicker of a thistle would draw fire? If I moved so much as a finger, I’d be riddled with bullets, killed thousands of times over. The enemy was behind every bristle, every stone and rock of this place. My fingers tightened around the gun. This time I would not drop it, this time I would fire. I must have the quicker finger, Beasley had said. It’s him or me. Him or me.

  We moved off, hands and noses in the dusty scree, crawling up beneath rocky ribs and knolls and strange outcrops, protected only by a minute rise in the land.

  “All right, stop her
e, boys. Dig in and hold on till the artillery come.”

  Isolated fragments of us, all different battalions and units, settled into every cranny and depression alongside and to the rear. Again there was a long wait.

  In the early afternoon, our battleships came in close to the bay and began to bombard the enemy positions on the two hills. The first shell fell with a sobbing shriek and hurtled deep into the earth, hurling stones and dust up, engulfing the enemy line in clouds of white smoke. The earth beneath me trembled with the impact. The cannons roared and shells screamed over our heads, the air whimpered and moaned, and the roaring breath of the shells was on my face. Every battleship and cruiser and field gun and howitzer was firing, and the din of them seemed to force its way into the gap between my brain and the bone of my skull.

  * * *

  After an hour the bombardment stopped, there was a second’s silence, then the instruction, “Forward!”

  The line rose and walked forward as if on a parade ground. I was still standing, undone with fear, made senseless by the din of it all, my brain turned liquid, my legs watery. The Lieutenant turned and yelled, “One foot in front of the other, Bayliss, just one foot in front of the other.”

  Everything inside me turned pulpy and quivering. I couldn’t think, couldn’t move, you see, in all the din of machine guns, artillery, bombs, rifles, and all the battleships in the bay firing broadsides.