On Dangerous Ground Page 10

  A dry northerly wind seared its way through the streets of the city. It carried dust from the Mallee and grit from the cities west, the skeletons of autumn leaves, tons of tumbling refuse plucked up from bins and gutters. Mark and the other researchers shuffled into the shade. All longed for the cool, quiet marble of the reading room.

  Mark had ridden his bike in that morning. From his tiny deco flat on the edge of South Yarra, fifteen minutes’ pedalling took him right to the heart of the metropolis. Melbourne’s streets were as flat and as straight as any he had ridden in the Wimmera. It was a town that God and Robert Hoddle had made for cyclists.

  His route that morning, as most mornings, followed the Yarra. Its tree-lined banks softened the bright rays of morning sun and muffled the traffic of commuters. Normally, Mark liked to race the rowers. He could easily overtake their long slim craft as they slid across the river’s mud-grey waters. But not this morning. The heat of the January day had sapped his will and his energy. A mob of lycra larrikins had thundered past him. They’d clicked through bicycle gears the way country hoons rev V8 engines. Mark had imagined fox tails trailing from their mudguards.

  By the time he’d reached the crazy building blocks of Federation Square, Mark was utterly exhausted. He’d stopped for a moment and considered the building at war with Melbourne’s grid-lined symmetry. He wondered if the mottled camouflage was an admission of embarrassment, or if architects bound by slide rules harboured dreams of anarchic rebellion. He turned at Flinders Street Station and pedalled furiously on towards Young and Jackson. It had been an effort to do battle with pigeons and trams as they fought for possession of Swanston Street. Now he stood on the library steps, hot, bothered and sticky. The battery in his iPod had given out. There was nothing to relieve the tedium of waiting. A bead of perspiration slid down across the lens of his glasses.

  Five to ten. The crowd was getting restless. A sprinkling of the city’s homeless had arrived and inched closer to the wooden panelled doors, beckoning them to open. Through glass screens Mark watched the last frantic preparations of librarians, security men and locker attendants. No one liked the 10 o’clock shift; sometimes the rush for the terminals was more competitive than the behaviour at the Myer bargain basement.

  With four minutes to spare, Mark began to wonder if there was any point to his visit. Professor Evatt, too old now to spend hours at a desk, had sent him on his way, with his usual encouraging injunction to check all the sources. Mark knew the original transcripts of the conference at Lausanne were held in the League of Nations Archives in Geneva and he suspected it was there that Vanessa had discovered them. Fact-finding missions were one of the perks of the senior public service and invariably ‘facts’ were to be found in the most exotic locations. But the professor thought a copy of the files might still be found in Melbourne. During the post-war period, London routinely despatched treaties to all its dominions. Staffed by lawyers and accountants, the British civil service knew contracts like these bound the Empire together. And during the post-war period, Parliament had sat here in Melbourne. It was not until the late 1920s that filing cases, public servants and politicians were packed off unceremoniously to sheep paddocks around Canberra.

  Perhaps the file had been left behind in the move? The nation’s records have always been divvied up between one jealous archive and another. With luck, Mark just might find it. He remembered the professor’s parting words from a study even more cluttered than his own. ‘Remember, Mark, the good historian is like the giant of the fairytale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.’ In the acrid heat of a Melbourne January, the professor’s fairytale seemed a world away.

  The doors finally swung open and a crowd of eager feet scurried to all four corners of the library. Mark walked with weary determination up the circled marble steps leading to the Cowan Gallery. There, giant canvases hung history from the walls, scenes from Victoria’s illustrious past pleading admiration from visitors. Ahead of him, Robert O’Hara Burke was being buried in the bush, his sun-bleached bones slumped in a Union Jack. Men dressed in black bowed their heads, a clumsy epitaph scratched in the trunk of a gum tree. Mark wondered for a moment if doomed explorers were the true precursors of Anzac, their tragedy the stuff of legends, somehow snatching nobility from failure. He wondered if any other nations cradled their defeats, or if any country, half the age of ours, denied it had a history. A host of colonial artists had sketched Melbourne in the soft greens of England and imagined windmills and a few of Evatt’s fairies in the landscape. As Mark turned towards the Australian collection, the Marco Polo carried settlers across the sea, sailing southward on fast, cold winds that whipped around the globe. The young scholar increased his pace and arrived in record time at the reading room.

  ‘There are no diplomatic records here, not as such. Have you tried the National Archives?’

  The librarian didn’t mean to be dismissive, particularly not when his client was an academic researcher. But there were protocols to be observed and really the young man should know, and perhaps dress, better.

  ‘Yes, both here and in Canberra. But I was wondering if I mightn’t find something about Lausanne in private papers, perhaps the private papers of one of our diplomats, y’know, someone like that. Do you think that’s likely?’

  ‘Governor’s private secretary, perhaps,’ the librarian mused, ‘but more than likely papers like those made their way back to London. Of course, archives can’t collect everything.’

  Indeed not. Every year, several thousand tons of records were dutifully shredded by government officers. Sample files were kept and once every so often highly trained and highly paid consultants predicted what the future might consider history. In an age of information, heritage is invariably a casualty. This would not be the first time one generation’s records had been culled to make space for another’s. Mark turned to leave.

  ‘You might look at the Fisher Papers, I suppose,’ the librarian’s tone was tentative, almost quizzical. He had worked in archives long enough to know their mysteries. ‘Andrew Fisher served as agent-general in the twenties, bit of a bowerbird, I believe, no telling what you’ll find there.’

  ‘Brilliant! But there wasn’t a thing in the catalogue.’

  ‘Not the computer catalogue, there wouldn’t be, but have you tried the old index cards? There might just be some kind of inventory. Would you like me to help you?’

  The last phrase is one every researcher longs to hear. Time is a precious commodity in the modern library and clients are issued only as much as an institution can afford. Arriving early had always been Mark’s strategy, before the desk was overwhelmed by hoards of earnest family historians. And clearly this librarian still enjoyed the chase; mindful of what the series index left out, he was prepared to think laterally. ‘This way, Dr Troy.’ The professor was right. There was to be good hunting today after all.

  The state library’s index cards were held in the far corner of the reading room, all but obscured by shining new computer terminals. They rested in alphabetical order in purpose-made wooden filing cabinets. Huge and cumbersome, the great oak cabinets would take a forklift to move them. They were a monument to another age, information dinosaurs rendered obsolete by the internet.

  The librarian pulled the drawer marked FISH to FORT carefully from the cabinet. Each card was marked with the same steady hand; copperplate writing, scratched in Indian ink in the first decades of the last century. The right corners of the cards were soiled and frayed, worn down by the fast, flicking fingers of generations of readers.

  ‘Ah, here we are: Fisher, Andrew, diplomat and politician, 1862–1928.’ It was the same joyous cry Mark had often sung to his computer.

  It took several hours for Mark to work his way through the Fisher papers. The librarian was right; the coalminer cum Labor politician was something of a bowerbird. The files for 1920–1925 seemed larger than all the others. Towards the end of his life and career, the Right Honourabl
e Andrew Fisher seemed intent on leaving taxi receipts, menus and postcards to the keeping of a grateful nation. And every year, the jottings in the diaries seemed more and more idiosyncratic. The passing of royalty and statesmen vied for prominence with accounts of family outings and London’s ever-changing weather. A copy of the transcripts of the conference at Lausanne were found in a folio helpfully marked ‘The Alps’; they were slipped (with not a thought of contradiction) between views of Lake Geneva and a timetable for the Channel Ferry. From the moment Mark opened the file, he knew it was sensational.

  Lone Pine, 1915

  In the minute before he died, Ahmed thought not of God or country but only of family and loved ones. The aging private was several hundred miles from home. He’d received no letters, no papers – and, in any event, he could not read them. It was almost a year since he had seen his wife and his children.

  Like most of the Ottoman army, Ahmed was a conscript. Before the war, he had farmed wheat in Syria, the southernmost frontier of the Sultan’s Empire. The Ottomans had colonised his country at the end of the sixteenth century but as the Empire decayed and dwindled, the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ lost one rich province after another. In a hotbed of ethnic and nationalist intrigue, Ahmed did not really consider himself Turkish, nor did he feel any great allegiance to the Sultan. As an Arab, his loyalty was not so much to the Ottoman state as to the sparse, dry land his family had farmed for countless generations. Ahmed understood little of the language his officers spoke and even less of the politics that had dragged the Empire into war against Britain. All Ahmed knew was that the soldiers came to take him and his eldest son to war, just as ancient kings had once demanded tribute, or the taxman at the end of every season stole far too much of his harvest. It was not the first time his village had been plundered of its manhood. Conscripted farmers had put down rebellions in North Africa and waged the Ottoman Empire’s long and bloody feuds in Greece and Serbia. Not all wars were fought by patriots. Since time immemorial armies have fought for causes that had little to do with them.

  Until a few weeks back, Ahmed had no cause to hate the English, no more perhaps than did the Kurds, the Greeks, the Bosnian refugees and displaced Armenians who fought alongside him. Gallipoli was not his home, so why should he risk his life to defend it? He longed only to return to his farm and his family, the embrace of his wife, the laughter of his children. Ahmed avoided danger as best he could and crept low and quiet through the shamble of Turkish trenches. Once, he’d been whipped by an officer for lingering behind the lines. A visiting Imam had scolded him and demanded the farmer from the coast of Syria die a martyr for Allah.

  As far as Ahmed was concerned, the war was long and bloody and senseless. Trenches were repaired one day, only to be demolished the next. Artillery duels ranged to and fro across the ridges and for all the slaughter neither side seemed any closer to victory. The heat was staggering, the food inedible, the stench of the trenches intolerable. All the while the farmer read this strange and threatening place through the world he’d left behind him. Fired from the trenches, machine guns sounded like angry ducks. Mounted on planes that soared through the air, they rattled like nesting storks shaking their beaks at the heavens. Turkish guns, Ahmed thought, sounded something like a creaking oxcart. As bullets burrowed into sandbags he imagined grasshoppers leaping and clicking.

  But really the sky was the only thing Ahmed could observe with any safety. From the birdcage of the trenches, through sheets of wire netting, he watched the humming flight of 24 cm shells overhead. Fired from Turkish guns at Palamutluk, they shone like suns made of mercury, descended almost perpendicularly and threw up mountains of soil as they exploded. The battlefield was like a parched, fallow field, a place, he thought, that could never bear life again.

  Ahmed watched the world at war in awe and wonder. He could never really hate the men his superiors called the enemy. As he saw it, soldiers on both sides shared a cruel companionship. Their equally intolerable suffering somehow united them. Every evening, Ahmed sang his prayers and a line from a half-remembered lover’s tune, songs to lay the dead to rest and spark joy and hope in the living.

  In July 1915, the Australian battery at Johnston’s Jolly finally found the Turkish machine gun that had long played havoc on the Anzac’s forward trenches. The Anzacs aim was deadly and accurate. Their Howitzer hurled a 4.5 inch explosive shell high from one valley to another into the very midst of the gun crew. The last thing the Turkish soldiers heard was the dreadful rustle of the shell, ploughing in towards them. It burst on impact and the carnage it caused was dreadful. Six men of the 57th Regiment were scattered around their gun, their bodies torn asunder. Chests and arms looked like wax. Shins and legs, sheared by the explosion, were purple. Bones had been stripped of their flesh. Men’s features were unrecognisable.

  But Ahmed recognised the clear blue eyes of his son gazing back through torn sandbags. He found the hand he had once held, even severed lips that a few days ago had kissed him. ‘Blood spilt on the ground shall not remain there.’ A single shell did what a thousand years of history had failed to do: forged a flimsy confederation of tribes, states and religions into a nation. Made a farmer into a soldier.

  When Australian troops stormed into the Turkish trenches at Lone Pine, Ahmed was the first to meet them. He brandished an obsolete Martini rifle. He had three rounds of ammunition. He was weak from too little sleep and too little nourishment. But the old farmer went to war, to drive the English into the sea and avenge the death of the son they had butchered. He was a delikanli now. All the stars in the heavens had turned to dust and his heart heaved with hatred.

  Ahmed’s war ended as a 303 bullet cut a path through his body. ‘La ilaha illallah,’ slipped from his lips. His body slid from consciousness.

  ***

  ‘Push the poor beggar out of the way, that must be the way down there.’ Lt Irwin’s men rolled Ahmed’s body to the side of the trench. No one bothered to bayonet the old man. They needed every ounce of their strength and a dying soldier was hardly a threat to them. Irwin’s eyes were trained on the deep corners of the trench. A flare went up and a shining whiteness spread. One of ours, Irwin thought, but that hardly mattered. Through the broken wooden canopy the trench was momentarily illuminated for close to twenty feet. Smoke shone like tarnished silver in the moonlight.

  ‘This way,’ Irwin shouted. ‘Remember to cover me.’

  They descended deep into a gallery of trenches, each man a bobbing shadow in the darkness. The air was heavy with the smell of blood and cordite. No one looked back to see the old man close his eyes.

  Six

  Rarer Gifts

  the hills and gullies of the peninsula stretched out across the table...

  Territory ceded to the Empire, detail from ‘Records of Proceedings of the Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs, 1922–23’.

  Anzac Cove: Remembering the Landing,1915/1919

  Harry Vickers had left us almost the moment we stumbled onto the shingle. As Lambert and I walked further down to the sea, he had turned back towards Shrapnel Valley, determined to retrace his steps from that first day of the landing. He was a private then. Another two years would pass before he gained his commission in Flanders. Those were the days before he was wounded; before the shelling on the Menin Road gutted half his company and tore his young body to pieces.

  I wonder if Vickers remembers what I no longer can, a time without pain, without fear, without nightmares. Our age of lost innocence. As I pace the cove with Lambert, I know Vickers is in the bush, swept away on the same running tide of remembrance.

  ***

  It was broad daylight when Harry Vickers waded ashore. Shrapnel shook sparks from the shingle as he ran to take cover. He halted at the base of a small rivulet running down to the sea and looked back in astonishment at the beach behind him. Not so far away a party of seamen and engineers was struggling with a wireless pole, indifferent to the danger bristling around them. A thin line of wounded and dead
marked the far end of the beach. All were casualties of the first battle for the ridges. Within a brief parameter, no more perhaps than eight or so yards, Vickers and the men who gathered around him could stand in comparative safety. Beyond that, rifle fire and shrapnel smashed the pebbled shore. Vickers shivered. There was an odd attraction in standing so close to death, a queer desire to plunge into the inferno.

  An officer approached them.

  ‘Who’s in charge here – what company do you belong to?’ The urgency in his voice betrayed his confusion.

  ‘I am, sir, Corporal Collins, D Company.’

  ‘D Company? You should have come in a mile south of here.’

  The officer turned back to the beach and watched another flotilla of vessels jostling for space on the shore. A line of men jumped too early from boats. Their heavy packs dragged them beneath the water.

  ‘Damn,’ he mumbled. ‘This is a mess, Corporal.’

  He turned to face the men, lifting his voice, suppressing the panic. ‘Now I know you’ve been given a difficult task,’ even Vickers could see it was impossible, ‘but the covering force are up there waiting for you. Whatever you do you must keep up the advance.’

  As if on cue, another Turkish shell ploughed into the ridge above them. It showered the beach with soil and debris.

  ‘Just keep up the advance,’ the captain roared above the clatter, ‘...and good luck to all of you!’ And with that he walked away, away towards the fire blazing on the shoreline and the next line of boats trying to land there.

  And so the men of D Company began their feeble assault on the Turkish peninsula. Loose clay gave way beneath their feet. They kicked mud and grime into faces of those behind them. At times the climb was so steep that they literally dragged themselves upward. Bleeding hands clutched the mallee-like scrub that clung to the cliff. Aching bodies were pushed along with the butt of men’s rifles.