On Dangerous Ground Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  ON DANGEROUS GROUND

  One: Beginnings

  Two: Dark Tides

  Three: Rich Skies

  Four: All Things Undying

  Five: Dawn Will Be Theirs

  Six: Rarer Gifts

  Seven: The Deep Night

  Eight: The Colours of the Earth

  Nine: Into Cleanness Leaping

  Ten: A Gathered Radiance

  Eleven: A Richer Dust

  Twelve: Endings

  REFLECTIONS

  ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND A GUIDE TO FURTHER READINGS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  IMAGE CREDITS

  ON DANGEROUS GROUND

  Bruce Scates is a prize-winning teacher, scholar and storyteller. He has written many books about the Great War, offered expert commentary for radio and television and led several historical tours of Gallipoli. He is Professor of History and Australian Studies at Monash University, has served on the National Committee investigating mass graves at Fromelles and is Chair of the History and Heritage Panel of the Anzac Centenary Advisory Board. This is his first novel and his first imagined history.

  George Lambert, Anzac, from Gaba Tepe, 1919.

  To the memory of my Grandfather, Pte Thomas Charles Scates, Quinn’s Post, 1915, and for Ken Inglis, who taught us how to remember Anzac.

  D.H. Wilson, ‘The Eastern Mediterranean traversed by the Expedition showing Alexandretta and Gallipoli’. The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, vol.1.

  Phillip F.E. Schuler, Map of Anzac and Suvla Bay, Pictures of the battlefields of Anzac, Osboldstone, Melbourne, 1916.

  One

  Beginnings

  the bloody grind of battle...

  Ellis Silas, ‘Capture of Turkish Trenches’, Crusading at Anzac anno Domini 1915, British-Australasian, London, 1916.

  Lemnos, en route to Gallipoli, 1919

  I dig my hands deep into my greatcoat pockets, stretch out my frozen fingers and fill the muffled spaces. For a moment I let them linger before sinking them into well-worn corners. Searching. Then, in a quick, clean and much-rehearsed action, I clutch my pipe and lift it to my mouth, biting down on ebony. Instantly the taste is on my tongue. Dry breath and moist tobacco. A match strikes red in the morning light. The first curls of smoke billow up around me. The smell from the ember is warm, comforting, familiar.

  I look out across the water to the smudge of hills on the horizon. Even from my distant hut on the isle of Lemnos, the landscape of Gallipoli is unmistakable. My eyes run down gullies like a finger on a map. I trace sharp ridges plunging to the sea, plot the course of broken ravines, scan the buckled shoreline. I steel my face against the wind and wonder where the trenches had cut across the hills, guess which of the heights gave Turkish gunners the best reach of the beaches. The landing seems a lifetime ago now. And yet it feels as real and as close as if it were yesterday. In the half-light, memories surge across the water. How strange to feel so homesick for Anzac.

  A shadow appears followed by a voice.

  ‘That you, Charley?’

  My companion has appeared from nowhere. Four years of soldiering have refined the art of ambush. Harry Vickers smiles, aware he’s startled me and clearly rather proud of it. He moves in a little closer, draws a cigarette from a crumpled packet and fumbles for his lighter.

  ‘Here,’ I say, more to regain my composure than anything else, ‘save yourself the flint, Harry.’ I cradle my hand around the flame and move it up towards him. For a moment I study the young man’s face, its lines deep and furrowed like those trenches on the ridgelines. Vickers seems so much older than he is. Like that swelling sea, there is a restlessness about him. And a hurt as deep as any ocean.

  The wind strengthens suddenly and we’re pushed against the wall of the hut. It creaks as the weatherboard bends against our backs. Vickers shifts the weight of his body from one foot to the other. I know there’s a pellet of Flanders shrapnel still lodged in his thigh; I can feel the cold morning air twisting its jagged edge. But Vickers says nothing. We both stare hard at the water and know what the other is thinking.

  Perhaps it’s because historians are never really comfortable with silence that I am the first to speak. My words are measured, precise, the same words I’ve chosen to begin a thousand conversations, conducted over a hundred campaigns, a careful record of the most careless kind of carnage.

  ‘You were there from the first weren’t you, Harry?’

  A seasoned collector of words, a trader in memory, I know the first question matters most. It decides the fate of an interview, especially with men fresh from fighting. By now, I thought I’d found the perfect formula. A phrase that signalled trust, invited dialogue. But Gallipoli could still surprise me.

  ‘So were you, Charley.’

  Vickers looks straight ahead, staring spellbound at the water. There is no need to say anything more. A gull wrestling with the wind careers above us before plunging like a dead weight into foaming madness, flight and form extinguished in an instant.

  A sheet of rain runs fast across the sea. It lashes the water and races towards us. Spray stings my eyes. Salt rubs into them.

  ‘It’s cutting up rough – best go back in, eh?’

  I nod and, as we turn to go inside, steal one last hurried glance at what we always knew as Anzac.

  The door of the hut creaks loudly to a close. It rouses George Lambert from what had once passed as a sofa. He stretches and blinks at the light now streaming in through the window. The surge of wind has pulled a curtain to one side revealing the room and its only occupant in all their shabby intimacy. My eyes scan the clutter that attends every artist: a costume thrown carelessly over a chair, a vase of dried flowers, pots of drying paint, a teetering pile of books on the floor, any number of empty wine bottles. Lambert is dressed in his usual bohemian excess: a bright mauve scarf, loose collared shirt and a wide-cuffed gown fashioned from brocade and velvet. The colours collide with the dull khaki of our greatcoats. Enamoured as he is of men in uniform, George is a creature of outrageous individuality.

  ‘Wondered when you blokes would have had enough. Getting a bit fresh out there is it? Here...’ Lambert thrusts a small flask towards us. Its silver sheen flashes in the winter sunlight. ‘This might just warm you up a bit.’

  ‘Really, George, it’s a bit early isn’t it?’

  Lambert pulls the flask away as quickly as he’d offered it. ‘Please yourself, Vickers.’ He clears his throat. His cough sounds like clag shaking in a bottle. ‘What about you, Charley? Last of the cognac, you know, last of the good stuff.’

  I knew it well enough. The honey-sweet smell of liquor was all too familiar in this particular company. I watch the artist’s hand moving to and fro with the flask, like a brush sweeping across a canvas. Lambert seemed to have the shakes this morning. Of course it could be the cold, but it was more likely the aftermath of last night’s fierce revelry, launching into poetry and song, spraying spittle into candlelight, through to the wee hours.

  ‘Hair of the dog, Charley?’

  I knew Lambert thought I was something of a wowser. There is no word more hateful in a digger’s vocabulary. Perhaps for that reason I wanted to prove him wrong. Perhaps because drinking didn’t seem such a sin any more or perhaps it was just Lambert’s wink – wicked and irresistible.

  ‘All right, George,’ I enjoy my little rebellion, ‘just a snifter.’

  I pull a chair to Lambert’s side and sink down beside him. The room seems suddenly smaller than it was – warm and close as if the walls themselves remembered conversations. We’d been together several weeks now. The adventures of our journey and a common distan
ce from home had made us somehow inseparable. I’d come to think of Lambert and Vickers as an old married couple. The two men feuded and forgave with relentless regularity.

  As always it was Lambert who struck up a conversation. Enamoured of his own lyrical, sing-song words – hungry for companionship.

  ‘Good to share a dram, eh Charley? We artists must stick together and drink together I say.’ He leans across the sofa and we manage a clumsy clink of glasses. Then, as is so often the case, Lambert’s tone changes. ‘But I’ve been wondering about you Charley Bean – are you really an artist at all? I mean, is your history art – that long and weary road trodden by all who would attain true greatness? Or is it...’ Lambert strokes his ginger beard as he searches for the right word, ‘...is it some sort of science?’

  The last word reaches me as the first sip of cognac singes my throat. ‘Science,’ he snarles again, spittle settling on his goatee, ‘that drab thing much beloved of engineers and...’ Lambert pauses and considers all the vocations inimical to artists, ‘...accountants! Yes, that is a deep question for you, Skipper. Here! Take a second sip to consider it.’ The artist leans again across the sofa, tilting the flask at a perilous angle.

  Vickers raises his eyebrows. ‘Charley had better keep a clear head for that one.’

  Lambert frowns. It troubles him that one so young can speak so responsibly.

  ‘Oh Vickers, really – do keep out of it. Artists, historians and drinkers only.’

  ‘Really?’ Vickers snaps in reply. ‘Not even officers?’

  We both knew why he’d said that. Neither Lambert nor I were soldiers, let alone officers. We had served in what the army called an ‘ancillary’ role. I’d been a correspondent for the papers back home, Lambert a war artist in Palestine. Modern-day camp travellers spared the sharp end of battle. Weapons in a propaganda war fought far from the grubby world of the trenches. Even so, we’d both seen our share of fighting. Through sun-drenched summers Lambert had followed the Light Horse across the Holy Land: watched cavalry charge against the guns of Beersheba, seen men and their mounts collapse down to the dust, walked like crusaders of old through the streets of Damascus and Jerusalem. My war began in the deserts of Egypt and ended in the bogs of Flanders. From Anzac to Amiens, the thud of my typewriter as relentless as gunfire. So Lambert and I knew what war did to men, knew its dark ways and terrible secrets. It was easy enough to choose a ‘subject’ after a battle. Survivors who sat for hours, dull, sullen and speechless. As artists, we’d tried to capture that haunted look in their eyes, to scratch that queer chill into print or palette. Perhaps it was just as well we never quite succeeded.

  ‘You can’t pull rank with me, Captain. Don’t think that for a moment. Well, Charley, what’s it to be – art or science? Can you truly recover the past? Or is history only something you imagine?’ He slides forward, his tone suddenly contemplative, as if unravelling a riddle. ‘Is there in fact, a wrong way of remembering. Please...’ the artist’s eyes sparkle, ‘enlighten us!’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I ask.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘And you’ll remember what I tell you?’

  ‘Really, old boy, I’m not that far gone. I’m like Vickers here – a man who values a clear head for the great deeds of the morrow. The morrow, Vickers. On the morrow we walk the Elysian fields of Anzac.’ Lambert raises his hand in a mock salute.

  Vickers shrugs and moves away towards a window. ‘You’re laying it on a bit thick aren’t you, George?’ He stares through the frosty pane and watches figures wrestling in the storm outside, a group of men dragging a tarpaulin over our supplies, the wind tearing canvas from their fingers.

  I consider him a moment as he stands there by the window – a silhouette framed by curtain and sunshine. For him, I know, returning to the peninsula isn’t a matter of art or history. As a veteran of the campaign it honours a promise. A vow shouted at the sea as the last boats pulled away from Anzac; to those circles of stone dug deep into the clay, biscuit boxes shaped into makeshift crosses, old kerosene tins scratched with a name and a message, those loved and lonely graves lining the Aegean. Like most survivors, Vickers and his men have never forgiven themselves. For them, going back was as much a penance as a pilgrimage. And for me also.

  ‘“A bit thick” indeed!’ for Lambert, art was as sacred as any cemetery. ‘We sleep and sup with philistines. Tell us Charley, is there greatness in the canvas of history...’ he sips now directly from the flask ‘...and how might a fellow like Vickers here divine it?’

  Vickers and I exchange a glance. Both of us had tired of this conversation even before it began. The more Lambert drank, the more weighty and worthless the allusions. I’d known the type from my college days at Oxford. Wordy youths who read poetry, talked politics, recited verses from the classics and drank themselves into oblivion. I’d never had much time for them. But Lambert, I had to admit, was different. A great heart was hidden behind that theatricality and bluster. And truth was, we’d come to tolerate, even enjoy, his excesses.

  ‘First and foremost it’s my job to get things right, George. Not to exaggerate, not to romanticise, simply to record. It’s our responsibility to future generations.’

  ‘“Get it right”?’ Vickers swings away from the window and plunges suddenly towards us. His hand is raised slightly in the air, as if he is clutching his question. ‘Did we ever “get it right” at Gallipoli, Charley? Nothing went right there, did it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Harry. But it’s the job of a historian to explain why we failed – that’s our most important duty. And...’ I lower my voice and mumble a line from Herodotus into my brandy, ‘...“to preserve from decay the remembrance of what men have done”, give them “their due meed of glory”.’

  Lambert nods darkly in agreement. Duty was a word we both knew the meaning of. But I regret the words as I speak them. From the hour of the landing to the last day of the campaign, classical allusion had ransacked the memory of Gallipoli. Modern-day battles had been fought in the shadow of Troy and on the shores of the Aegean, the most archaic language used to describe the most industrialised killing. I take another mouthful of my brandy. This time it almost chokes me.

  ‘Failed?’ Vickers spits out the words as if they hurt him. ‘My men never failed me. It’s the generals who failed us, Charley – Australian generals, British, French – the whole bloody lot of them.’

  Lambert rolls his eyes. ‘For God’s sake, man, don’t start that again.’ It was as if naming the butchery was some sort of social indiscretion. ‘Listening to you, you’d think England was our enemy.’

  ‘Over eight thousand we lost at Anzac, over eight thousand. And how many thousands more in France, Palestine, Belgium? Sixty thousand dead. How much blood is that? How much blood, eh, Lambert?’ He stops a moment by the window. ‘The French had a name for it, you know, la boucherie, the butcher’s shop. We didn’t fight a war, we were le, le-le-...’

  When he became emotional Vickers was inclined to stutter.

  ‘...led like lambs to the slaughter,’ Lambert interjects. ‘Yes, yes, we’ve heard all that before, Harry. But don’t you do those men an injustice? They volunteered after all, every man jack of them, volunteered to fight for the Empire.’

  Harry, too, had heard it all before. The lies old men told to send young men to war. For him the mother country was just another harlot now. She had crucified her children.

  ‘Do you know what it was like to die for England, Lambert? To k-kill for England? You’d have to have been there to know what it was like. I tell you, there was nothing high and noble, no “meed of glory”. It was all just so bloody s-sordid.’

  Lambert and I both look away. The words are spoken as if they could wound us.

  ‘Men sh-shat themselves you know,’ Vickers lowers his head like a child admitting guilt, ‘before we went over, they – they shat themselves like babies.’

  For a moment no one speaks. A silence falls on the room, an emptiness that follows any
battle.

  ‘It was hard, Harry, I know, very hard,’ Lambert looks deep into his glass and searches there for honest words, ‘but it was a just cause, after all, you kept the world free – free from Prussian tyranny.’

  I watch the pain welling in Vickers’ eyes. His face begins to quiver like jelly.

  ‘For God’s sake, Lambert, we weren’t even fighting Germans here, jus-just poor bloody Turks, half-starved peasants and f-f-fisherman.’

  And there the conversation halts. The wind pounds on the glass and rattles the window frames, prowling around outside, howling for a resumption of hostilities. Lambert stares with disappointment into his glass. He seems alarmed it has drunk itself empty.

  I take the chance to slip away. I walk without a word to a far corner of the hut, as the old antagonists settle down to their thoughts. There is a small desk sheltered by a barricade of stores and cases. I sit myself carefully down, fearing sudden movement would wake dragons from their slumber.

  The light shines through a window above me. It dapples gold and shadow across the dirty white of parchment. I close my eyes for a moment, brace myself like a diver preparing for the plunge, then pull gently but firmly on the thick pink ribbon that binds the files together. The papers spring open and fold out like a concertina, arranging themselves (as some far away office clerk had hoped) neatly on the table. The red seal of the Australian Commonwealth immediately catches my eye. Beneath it lies a stern injunction typed slowly and emphatically: most secret.

  I know what the papers will say even before I read them. These are our instructions. The reason we have come here. Three months after the war had ended, four years after the landing, soldier, historian and artist have been sent back to Anzac. Our task is to walk the shore where our men had leapt into battle, sketch and study the site, bring home any relics of historical importance. Back home in Australia, they call us the ‘Gallipoli mission’, a phrase at once religious and profane, sacred and military.