On Dangerous Ground Page 3

  But Brawley’s Kipling went no further than The Jungle Book. ‘I am all too aware of government policy and we are not here to discuss that. Personally, I think we should just let the dead rest; I don’t see what good can come of exhumations. After all these years, it is not as though these remains mean anything to anyone.’

  ‘That’s not the point...’ Mark suddenly felt the room close in on him. He straightened his glasses hoping to signal some semblance of authority. Vanessa noted that the frame was slightly bent and the lenses fogged and grubby. ‘What needs to be remembered, what we shouldn’t forget, is that the Australian Government, indeed all the dominions, and of course the British, entered into a kind of agreement.’

  ‘Agreement? What agreement was that, Dr Troy?’ the general’s voice was impartial but encouraging.

  ‘Families were not permitted to repatriate the dead, they couldn’t bring their boys home or even build a memorial over their graves. To compensate, the state pledged to care for their graves in perpetuity – that was precisely the phrase they used – in perpetuity.’ Brawley shuffled in his seat. ‘The state agreed to honour every man or indeed every woman with an epitaph. And to record all the names of the missing. I would argue that that agreement is no less binding now than it was in the 1920s.’

  ‘Oh, would you?’ Brawley exploded. The big man’s voice bellowed across the room. ‘Yes, well the government does maintain existing war graves, that’s why the Office of Australian War Graves is here today,’ Brawley nodded to colleagues at the far end of the table. They looked down sheepishly at their files – hoping to evade some conflict of interest. He went on regardless. ‘But what you’re suggesting, all this nonsense about recovering the dead, goes well beyond that. If we don’t see that there’s decent access across the whole Anzac area, and remember we’re just three months out from the centenary of the landing, there’ll be an outcry. Maybe it’s possible some bones might have been uncovered building a small section of the road but who’s to say if they are human?’

  ‘That is confirmed now, Howard.’ Vanessa’s voice, soft but precise, tempered those of the angry men growling and posturing around her.

  ‘Yes, but not necessarily Australian.’ Howard Brawley suddenly realised the drift of his remarks, reddened deeper and offered a swift and politic qualification. ‘I mean they could be the bones of New Zealand soldiers, couldn’t they – or British. And there were Indian troops who fought at Anzac – Sikhs, Muslims, God knows who else – we can’t give them a Christian burial.’

  Brawley sank back into his seat, flustered by a speech that was more like an exhibition. Of course, public servants could not determine policy. That, Brawley was the first to admit, was the prerogative of government. But drafting, implementing and interpreting policy raised any number of possibilities. The policies that suited Brawley best were those that offered the best public image for the minister and the least possible paperwork for the department. Admitting that the new access road to Anzac unearthed human remains was what the minister’s minders called a PR disaster. Damage control alone would tie up most of his staff and all of his resources.

  In the opposite corner of the room, Vanessa counted the yellow flags stuck about her paperwork. Counting was her standard response to stress; the surest way she knew to maintain poise and composure. She sensed the heat of Brawley’s body and his blubber and bluster made her slightly nervous. She could almost smell the testosterone. She wondered how her boss had risen so far. How men like that acquired such power was really quite beyond her.

  ‘Will it be possible, gentlemen, to determine the nationality of any remains?’ the general enquired. ‘I don’t suppose much will be left of the uniforms.’

  Perhaps to make a point, a gentleman was not the first to answer Grimwade.

  ‘Brass buttons remain, General; we can identify remains as Australian to this day in France and Belgium.’ Brawley turned to Vanessa with a look of blunt betrayal. Her next performance appraisal would be far from flattering. Vanessa visualised countless files towering around her. But continued regardless. ‘And in some cases the dog tags.’

  ‘Ah – identity discs won’t be much use to us at Anzac, Miss Pritchard,’ the professor’s words were muffled by a pipe lodged optimistically in his mouth. ‘Made of compressed cardboard in the early years, rotted almost as quickly as the men themselves. Rather short-sighted of the government.’ The suited men moved uneasily in their chairs as if they themselves were responsible.

  ‘Perhaps there’s another way.’ Again Mark felt the eyes of the panel shift towards him. ‘Parts of the peninsula are relatively stable, not so badly affected by erosion. It really depends where the remains are found. We know which units served in each sector.’

  ‘Yes, but at what time Dr Troy? All the units circulated. Everyone knows how confused the fighting was in the early days in particular. We need to keep this matter in perspective. And we need to remember our timeline.’ ‘Timeline’ meant such different things for these two men. ‘January now. We have precisely ninety-seven days before 25 April. Even if work resumes on the road tomorrow, this will be a punishing schedule.’

  Brawley, as always, saved the most persuasive argument till last. ‘Really gentlemen, this debate is all quite academic.’ He chose the word advisedly. ‘Look at where the roadwork is proposed.’ He waved a map triumphantly in the air. ‘The new road runs behind Lone Pine parallel to the third ridge and well out of the way of the Allied sector. If there are remains there, they are bound to be Turkish – or Arab for all we know – and until the dozers move in we won’t know if there are any...’ Brawley again chose his words carefully, ‘...substantial deposits. A bone or two doesn’t make a skeleton – let alone a graveyard.’

  Laughter broke out from the far corner of the room. Brawley quietly congratulated himself. The homeliest analogies were always the most disarming. Now for the coup de grâce.

  ‘Ultimately of course, none of this is really our concern. The Turks build and maintain all the roads on the peninsula. This is their problem and theirs alone. You’re not suggesting we challenge Turkish sovereignty, are you, Dr Troy?’ He paused just a moment for effect. ‘I’m sure historians know what happened the last time we tried that.’

  Mark looked longingly towards the window, knowing a reply now would serve no purpose. He noticed a flock of rainbow parakeets had stormed the rooftops of Nodule C, splashing riotous colour across the battleship grey of the building. He wondered if someone would be sent to remove them.

  Professor Evatt looked down and folded his papers. He sighed wearily, as only an old man could, and returned his pipe carefully to his pocket.

  ‘Shall we adjourn for coffee, gentleman?’ Like Brawley, the general knew battles were won and lost by their timing. ‘Miss Pritchard,’ the old soldier caught the young woman’s eye, ‘do please join us.’

  Australian Trenches facing Turkish Position at Lone Pine, August 1915

  Although it was a hot afternoon, the men in the trenches shivered. They drew furtively on cigarettes, fumbled for the best grip on their rifles, gazed up at the parapet and tried not to meet the eyes of those around them. In the moment before battle each man found himself alone, wrestling a fear that welled up in his belly, measuring every shallow breath, quietly reckoning his own chances of survival. Some counted the days since they’d left home, some mumbled prayers, some struggled to remember the sound of a voice, the face of a friend, the touch of a woman. The moment before a battle lasted an eternity and it could tear men apart in an instant.

  A long whine sliced the summer air. Like everyone around him, Lt Irwin knew the shell would fall nearby. Men pushed back into the trench wall, braced themselves for impact. Each shell had a name: Black Maria, cricket ball, black cat, seventy-seven. The names given to tame the terror – as if sharp metal could somehow respect intimacy.

  Loud, steady, rumbling – a six-inch shell, Irwin thought. Fired by a ship’s gun, intended for Turkish trenches but a shifting sea and the sway
of a broadside had sent it spinning towards them. For a second he considered the absurdity of it all, to be killed by one’s own guns just minutes before facing the enemy. But Irwin knew there was no such thing as a fair death in battle. Soldiers survived or soldiers died: for all the science of modern warfare, luck alone decided the outcome. Still, the officer inside him longed to take command.

  ‘Steady,’ he roared. ‘Steady men, steady.’

  Tommy Lyall probably never heard the lieutenant’s words, even though he stood just a few feet away. Lyall’s nerves had simply given way, long before the bombardment began. Once, Tommy Lyall had been a sportsman – fastest across the field, first to mark and last to weary. He was the pride of a tiny country town nestled in the high country, his father’s son, his mother’s darling, one of an army of suntanned giants Australia had offered up to Empire. Now the gunner shook like a half-drowned kitten. His body swarmed with lice, his bowels ran raw with dysentery. This was the twentieth bombardment that week and the young soldier knew the horrors closing in on him. A second before impact, he gulped down his last breath of air, and pissed the last drop of moisture from his body. A stray six-inch shell blew young Tommy’s body to pieces.

  One day the commanding officer would write a letter home. Some gallant lie to ease a lifetime of grieving. But not today. Today no one really noticed Tommy Lyall’s death; why note one particular death when so many others were to follow?

  Irwin wiped the dust from his eyes and cried out again from the debris. ‘Ready men ... we’re going over.’

  As had happened so many times before, the shell that fell short was the last. Before the smoke had cleared, whistles sang out along the Allied trenches. Irwin and his men clamoured over the crumbling parapet and charged in a ragged line towards Lone Pine. The long shadows of late afternoon stretched out before them.

  ***

  In July 1915, the commander of the Royal Naval Air Service completed his reconnaissance flight over the Anzac sector. It was a fine day, perfect for observation. Soaring summer thermals lifted his flimsy craft high into the heavens. The sound of flexing wood and flapping canvas could barely be heard above the splutter of his engine.

  It was a route he’d rehearsed several times before. A bumpy take-off from the makeshift airstrip on Tenedos, a sharp turn north over battleships moored near the island, a gradual climb to 500 feet and a twenty-mile flight across the sparkling blue of the Aegean. Long before he reached Helles, the pilot could smell the trenches. Climbing to a thousand feet he pushed on to Anzac. There he had barely an hour to complete his mission. His aircraft traced the route up Monash Valley while dust clouds rose from an army of trudging feet below. Heaving supplies to the firing line, the soliders looked up in envy and in wonder, allowed a cautious sip from their water bottles and resumed the long, hot haul to the trenches. Some blokes had it easy.

  It was the trenches the commander was most interested in, theirs and ours, straddling the heights of the peninsula. Often he found it impossible to tell them apart. To discourage bombardment from the Allied fleet, the Turks had dug in no more than twenty yards from their enemy. The frontlines followed one another with jagged precision and between them ran a maze of saps, holes and ditches. Some were communication lines, some jumping off points, others collapsed earthworks where men on either side had tunnelled towards each other. At some places, the Turks’ tunnels and ours tumbled into one another. Shovels bludgeoned men to death and flimsy barricades separated one murderous band from the other. But of course, the pilot saw none of this. Only lines carved from the clay. The yellow earth glistened in the sun, a golden stream cut through the olive green of Anzac.

  Weaving through the cloudless sky, the pilot traced the gullies and the ridges. Behind him an observer sketched and scribbled and photographed.

  The MF11 Shorthorn soon jolted back across the airfield at Tenedos and a bevy of intelligence officers ran out to greet it. That same afternoon the cartographers began their work, plotting a zig zag of red and blue across Gallipoli’s buckled landscape. A British Army in the field needed modern maps, made by modern methods, not ruffled sheets of parchment, embroidered with curious text, scavenged from the bodies of Turkish officers. These new maps would give the Allies the advantage. Mastering the terrain was their first step to winning ground at Gallipoli. But it was what the airman hadn’t seen that mattered. From 500 feet, no one could make out the hollows where guns hid or the twisted ravines that could swallow up an army. The map of the Turkish position at Lone Pine was probably the least reliable of them all.

  ***

  ‘This way, men, this way, for God’s sake get over here.’ Irwin was slumped on the side of a bomb crater; his right arm, waving furiously, was all that could be seen by men coming up behind him. The ground around him was warm and smoking. In the last hour before the attack, mines had been exploded beneath no-man’s-land. Pock-marked with craters, the battlefield looked nothing like the smooth contours traced by cartographer and airman. The cries of the wounded rang out above the clatter of musketry. Irwin knew there was nothing he could do to help them.

  ‘Just rest a minute and I’ll get my bearings – anyone hurt?’

  The men pressed in on the walls of the crater. Watching the noisy sky above. Waiting. Then a Turkish bomb tumbled in among them. Crowded into each other, there was nowhere to run. The fuse hissed and sparked, feet froze to the ground. Too frightened even to pray, men stared dumbly at eternity.

  ‘Baaa-stards!’ A burly sergeant, twice the age and size of his men, lowered his head and charged like a bull at the missile. He snatched it from the dust, snorted and stumbled, and flung the bomb back towards the Turkish trenches.

  There was a deafening crash. Dirt and debris showered into the crater. A man’s hand landed at their feet, like a ghost sent back to haunt them. It took a second for Irwin to realise what it was. A young private laughed in disbelief. Others turned away. One man screamed and shook and sobbed uncontrollably.

  The sergeant lunged again, scooped up a second missile and flung it back towards the trenches. As the clamour died down, a new cry of wounded rose up from the battlefield. Dying men, Irwin noted, sounded much the same in any uniform.

  ‘Which way, sir? We can’t stay here. Which way?’

  Irwin crept up the side of the crater and stared long and hard across no-man’s-land. All around him he could hear the bloody grind of battle. He reached for the map folded snug in his tunic.

  Two

  Dark Tides

  a rich palette of colour leaps out to greet us...

  George Lambert, Gallipoli wild flowers, oil on canvas, 28 February and 1 March 1919.

  Lemnos/Gallipoli, 1919

  Morning mist rolls in from the ocean. Sea birds follow close behind, squawking tales of the sea, their bellies brimming with bass and mackerel. The noisy clatter shakes me from my slumber but still I lie there, clutching the warmth in prickly blankets, digging my head deeper in the pillow. Vickers and Lambert sleep uneasily in the beds beside me. They’ll wake to regret yesterday’s words and yesterday’s drinking.

  I dress hurriedly but quietly, creep from the hut and make my way to the kit store. A party of soldiers is already preparing our departure. We will leave Lemnos on the tide, the same tide that carried us here. I watch as our few belongings are packed firmly but carefully into kit bags. My portable typewriter, camera and papers are folded neatly into my suitcase; Lambert’s oils, brushes and canvas, along with a healthy stock of ‘medicinal’ brandy, line a hefty travelling trunk. Vickers’ camera proves the most challenging item of them all. Its fragile frame of glass and cloth collapses into itself and is bound up securely in an old Flanders greatcoat. The soldiers take special care. And I know why. A photograph of a distant grave is what every grieving mother longs for.

  The morning passes slowly; as does every morning before a journey. I wonder for a moment where my own journey might end. Was home Australia where I was born, England where I was raised, India, Egypt, any of the Imperia
l frontiers I’d wandered? Perhaps this was my only home now. The rough companionship of men who’d lived through war, the strange bond of tenderness that held us together. I sigh and look out to sea; even now the dark tide is surging towards us. Every journey ends with the beginning of another.

  It seems an age before we’re all gathered on the wharf, waiting for the last of the stores to be assembled and for a navy launch to fetch us. The soldiers have lugged the long, black travelling trunk onto the beach. Some wag has labelled it Lambert’s coffin. I smile uneasily at that dark digger humour. The contents of that ‘coffin’ would kill George one day. The luggage has been assembled in two separate piles. The largest is destined for Constantinople, the other (along with Lambert himself) for Chanak, a little seaside village on the straits of Gallipoli. It’s the first time our party will be separated and I must admit I feel a little anxious. The wowser in me wonders if Lambert can be trusted to re-equip the stores. Or would a week-long binge squander all our funds with a thirsty British garrison?

  I walk down to the beach craving a few more moments to myself on what now seems the loneliest of islands. I stand on the shingle, water lapping quietly at my feet. It will be a full twenty minutes before the launch arrives. I recall the paths, bell tents and makeshift wards that had once lined the busy shores of Lemnos. The island had served as a hospital base from the first few weeks of the campaign. Men were sent here direct from battle; their hasty field dressings caked with all the filth of Anzac. Many had died on this very beach, almost exactly where I am standing. I imagine them here again – lying on their stretchers staring up at the boundless blue above them.