On Dangerous Ground Read online

  I shuffle my feet in the shingle. The medical arrangements at Gallipoli had been appalling – Vickers was right about that anyway. Tens of thousands of troops had been thrown at a well-defended coastline. But how many hospital ships had they sent? I try to remember. Three perhaps? Certainly no more. And only one of them within reach of Anzac. Their beds were filled in the first few hours of the campaign.

  I remember the decks of a battleship awash with men and blood, remember them sending the wounded on to transports that carried mules to the peninsula, remember men dying in the shit and the straw, attended to not by nurses or doctors but by veterinary surgeons. I close my eyes and try to make sense of it. I’d entered that war with all a schoolboy’s enthusiasm for Empire – the legends of Agincourt and Crécy, Waterloo and Trafalgar ready for recital. Now, reluctantly, I can see something in what Vickers said. Even the most heroic died like cattle.

  I watch a solitary figure walk where once an army had died. In a matter of seconds Lambert sidles up alongside me, shingle giving way beneath him. I look into his tired eyes. He’s been up most of the night, working – as he often did – to the point of excited exhaustion. Art, for Lambert, knew no sleep. It walked with Godlike omnipresence beside him.

  ‘Thought I’d show Vickers these, Skipper. Might just lighten him up a little.’ I nod, pleased the mood has turned and that Lambert’s better side is showing. Every drunkard has need of apologies.

  ‘You know, I might even make a gift of this. A gift for the young fella. May have been a bit hard on him last night but, you know, it was only the bottle speaking.’

  Lambert was fluent in that language.

  ‘I worry about the boy, Skipper. He should have gone home you know, when he had the chance. There’s no shame in it.’

  I hasten to agree and this time I mean it. Hundreds of shell-shocked officers had been invalided home and many far less damaged than Harry Vickers.

  ‘I’ve heard him, you know. Heard him crying in the night. Talking nothing but gibberish. And that shake, Charley, we’ve all seen it.’

  An image of Harry Vickers springs instantly to mind. Pawing tobacco from that battered tin he carries, hands quivering like a fish pulled from water. When the fits are at their worst, one of us lifts a lighted cigarette to his lips. Neither of us can forget the look in those eyes, grateful, ashamed and angry.

  ‘It’s as if – as if the war is in his head. Quite apart from what it’s done to that poor lad’s body. Why can’t he put it all behind him?’

  ‘I’m not sure he can, George. None of them can.’

  Can you force a man to forget? I know we’ve tried to. Like most shell-shocked men, Vickers had done the rounds of quacks, sadists and charlatans. Showers of icy water, electric shocks to the limbs, medieval tortures that posed as scientific therapy. And now, some fancier of Freud has decided to send him back, back to where Vickers’ war began. ‘Facing the demons’, they call it. I sigh. Vickers’ war is far from over.

  ‘Anyway,’ Lambert knew it was time to change the subject, ‘a gift for you, too, Skipper. You might think of it as a kind of momento.’ He nods towards the sea. ‘Remember me by it as your cruise boat whisks you up the Marmara.’

  And with that the artist unravels the long stretch of canvas. Its corners buckle in the swift morning breeze and a rich palette of colour leaps out to greet us. Wildflowers, crimson red, blazing yellow, and a bright sky blue rather like the Leschenaultia I’d first seen in Albany. Albany, our last sight of Australia, a great blue harbour edged by cliffs of white limestone, crammed with a convoy of transport and war ships, an army bound for battle on far away lands, all waiting to cross the ocean.

  ‘Found the flowers up by the cemetery here, surprising they grow in winter.’

  ‘It’s beautiful, George.’

  I look up to the graveyard on the hill, following the line of the lonely goat track that provides the only access. I know what nourishes that earth. Little wonder Lemnos can produce such beauty.

  We are four hours at sea before we sight the land again. HMS Hunter rounds the toe of the peninsula, skirting the very beaches where French and British troops lumbered ashore in 1915. At the tip of Cape Helles, two ships have been sunk to form a breakwater. Their dead hulls glare at the Hunter reproachfully, as if they somehow resent their sacrifice, as if they long to set to sea again.

  I stare at the hulk of a collier stranded high in the shallow water. It bleeds rust into the sea, like a whale disembowelled on the shoreline. I can just make out the peeling name on the bow. The River Clyde. Today its cargo is its story. This was the boat we’d run ashore on the first day of the landings, thousands of British troops packed in her bowels. We called her the Trojan Horse of the Dardanelles. Covered by Maxim guns blazing from her bows the Tommies were to wade ashore and take the Turkish trenches. But I knew it didn’t happen like that.

  I look at the place where she has come to rest and scan the distance to the shore. A hundred feet – two hundred, maybe. I jot the information down in my notebook. But today it’s not blank space my mind is measuring. I picture the men in the sea, dragged down by the weight of their packs, cut to pieces by machine guns. Wave after wave of reddened water; corpses, like a black shoal of fish, drifting. All the poetry of Homer couldn’t have saved them.

  The Hunter’s engines snort and her smokestack shoots with flame. A gruff farewell to beached companions. Then she rounds another cove and the River Clyde, with all her mysteries, slips from sight.

  For twenty minutes we steam close beside the coast, running the length and breadth of the old Allied encampment. My eyes squint at the shore. Line after line of empty trenches stretch out along the beach, still waiting, it seems, for some lost army to fill them. Another roar of engines and propellers churn the fathomless deep; the Hunter strikes out for the Narrows, retracing the course of a doomed Allied fleet four years earlier.

  We sail into the straits. The European shore rises up from the sea like a fortress. I look up at a forest clinging to the cliff face. Scruffy and sparse, like the mottled scrub of Bathurst, reaching to the sky at impossible angles, as if planted there by God. Ranging across these ridges, batteries of mobile Howitzers had pounded the invading fleet, then moved on before the ships’ guns could find them. I wonder, again, where Turkish artillery was sited; remember the bursts of flame and smoke that spat down death and mayhem.

  As the sea-lane narrows, the white rounded walls of Kilitbahir stare back at me – ‘lock of the sea’. I snatch a breath from the breeze. Few fortresses had been named so aptly. I turn back from the railing and gaze across the waters behind me. To the Asian sides of the straits, a second fort seals the entrance to the narrows. Like two sets of teeth bared against the enemy. Stern, cruel, hungry.

  ‘Kale Sultanieh – that’s what they call it, Charley.’

  I’d wondered when Lambert would emerge from his cabin.

  ‘“Sultan’s fortress” it means, at least that’s what the captain reckons.’

  Every writer can weigh the meaning of a word. Impassable, I jot in my notebook.

  The ship labours on against the current and now the cold waters of the Marmara are surging down to the Mediterranean. The channel has narrowed to less than half a mile. As Vickers joins us, something clangs against the hull. A dull metallic thud reproaching itself. I look nervously to him and then to Lambert. I can read their dread: not all the mines had been cleared from the straits and it was mines that sent French and British battleships, their stacks still fuming, to the bottom.

  ‘Just driftwood, I expect,’ my voice sounds thin and unconvincing, ‘or perhaps we’ve clipped a fishing boat.’

  I look down at the deep and wonder if nets ever tangle in the wrecks, or drag the skeletons of seamen to the surface. I imagine bodies rocking in their watery graves and shoals of fish weaving through the bones of sailors.

  ‘You know why we couldn’t get through, gentlemen?’ The captain of the Hunter walks up towards us. He’s a short, stout man, perhaps
fifty years of age, with a thick black beard streaked with salt and silver. He paces the ship’s deck as if it were his kingdom. He glares spitefully shoreward, clears his throat and bellows even louder.

  ‘It’s quite simple, really. The Turks had such damned good advisors. Our men, gentlemen, our men. See over there?’ Captain Tallow motions to what appears to be a pipe jutting into the sea. ‘Royal Navy torpedo tubes – installed just a few years before the war – courtesy of His Majesty’s Government. They were meant to keep German ships out, not ours.’ He sighs loudly at the water, damning the sea as only seamen can. ‘Blasted Turks, treacherous lot. Still, we got our own back.’ He aims his telescope menacingly at the shore. ‘Not much of that left standing, eh, gentlemen?’

  At the captain’s invitation, we each peer through the telescope in turn. Chanak looks reminiscent of an Italian seaside resort, with comfortable if rather flimsy villas backing on to the straits, private piers, fretwork boat and summer houses in gimcrack Turkish style, a few cheap shops. But what had once been a town was now a collection of ruins. The captain’s guns had pounded every wall that could be seen. It was not hard to imagine the smoke and fire and panic, or the trail of civilians fleeing their stricken township. I’d seen as much in France. In this war and all to follow, exploding shells made no distinction between combatant and civilian. The British Navy may not have opened the gateway to Turkey, but it had certainly inflicted its fair share of havoc.

  The old sea dog was still baying for blood. ‘If the fleet had got through, I would have done the same to Constantinople. Taught the brutes a lesson! Those Ottoman buildings are ancient timber, gentlemen, tinder-dry; ships’ guns would have set them off nicely. You know,’ he tilts his cap with an air of satisfaction, ‘I think you would have seen the bonfire all the way from Anzac.’ The captain snorts defiantly and fills his lungs loudly with the breeze. ‘Saved a lot of lives, we could have. If only we’d got through. If only.’

  I look up the straits, gaze into sea-sprayed distance and long to see the city the captain had hoped to incinerate.

  Campbell Park Offices, Department of Defence/Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2015

  General Grimwade glanced at his watch and nodded with approval. Precisely 0800 hours. He had arrived at the Campbell Park offices a full hour ahead of any other committee member. There was more than enough time to collect his thoughts, re-read the papers, review each respective position.

  His driver saluted smartly as she opened the door. Today it was a young naval cadet. With military precision, drivers in the Australian defence forces were rotated on the basis of service and gender. Because driving was an official duty she was dressed in immaculate white, not the drab cams worn by cadets day in and day out of their training. Her blond hair was pinned back into a bun and crammed beneath a naval bonnet. Attractive lass, the general thought as he stood up beside the car. Cuts a fine figure even in a naval uniform.

  The general returned the salute. His hand lingered on his hat a second or two longer than protocol required. In his opinion, naval cadets made the best drivers. Courteous, efficient, always keen to please. Less familiar than the infantry, less haughty than the air force. And women, he was prepared to concede, made far better drivers than men. The rules of civilian life, it seemed, were totally reversed in the military. He added a wink to the salute. A mark of familiarity quickly won approval with junior ranks. But General Grimwade was not a man who tried to be popular. He respected women who succeeded in a belligerently male world. And he valued a capable and presentable driver.

  He walked quickly and deliberately towards the entrance of Nodule D Campbell Park which was, he had to admit, the ugliest of all the military establishments he’d served in. Its concrete walls rose up like a bunker from the bush. There were a few gaily coloured posters taped to the windows. A picture of young women abseiling sought to entice new recruits to the social club. He would have all posters removed later that day. The brutality of Campbell Park’s architecture was entirely intentional.

  Within minutes, the general was seated in the committee room. A clerk dressed as a corporal set the table to order around him. Papers to his right, water to his left, a notepad and pen aligned with conspicuous accuracy. The general was a tidy man. And perhaps for that reason he found this whole Inquiry unsettling. The questions were unclear, the debate acrimonious, the solutions far from obvious. As the Inquiry’s chair, General Grimwade was not required to voice an opinion. Indeed, he liked to think of himself as an informed but impartial umpire. Even so, there was much in these fraught discussions that troubled him. Nor was it just the obvious points of disagreement. As he grew older, the general also grew more anxious. He wondered if he still had the air of command, if the bureaucrats who ran Canberra really took his authority seriously or if bright shining buttons were all just for show now.

  A leather-bound copy of the Imperial War Graves Register sat solemnly in the centre of the table. Volume 6. The general wondered how many more volumes it took to name all the dead of the Empire.

  ‘Pass me that book as you leave would you, Corporal? And, thank you, you’ve done a good job here.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  The general was left alone with 5000 names of the fallen. He turned the book on its side and inspected the spine. Major Barton: Australia House, London was printed neatly on a label. The old book had been repatriated when the records of the Australian High Commission were forwarded to the archives and Barton, Grimwade realised, must have been the military attaché in London. He smiled quietly to himself – a gesture that made his moustache bristle. Forty years ago he too had been posted to Australia House and no doubt sat in the very same office as Major Barton. But there, the general realised, all the similarities ended. For General Grimwade, London had been one long round of social engagements – cocktail parties, embassy events, hobnobbing with royalty. Major Barton, he knew, wasn’t so lucky. From the end of one world war to the beginning of another, grieving families called on the major in the hope of finding a loved one’s grave and many had come from as far away as Australia. Grimwade sighed. Did it really help, he wondered, to travel so far and find so little?

  He opened up the inside cover and released a thick, dusty smell not unlike that office in London; its walls the dirty colour of a fog on the Thames, soiled with sixty years of cigarette smoke. He turned the pages to a list of names inscribed on the Lone Pine Memorial. These were the men they had never found, the men buried somewhere on Gallipoli, in hurried unmarked graves the new roadworks would probably open. The names piled up with alphabetical precision. A catalogue of carnage. Even the general was appalled by the tidiness of it all. The pages, he noted, were soiled and thumb-marked. Hundreds of wives, parents and children must have flicked through the columns. He could almost see their fingers scrolling down, desperate to touch one name among so many. The spine creaked open at surnames beginning with ‘I’. IRWIN, GEORGE ROY – was neatly underlined. Twice in fact. Now why was that, he wondered?

  ‘This is an Inquiry completely independent of the government,’ Brawley declared. ‘And there is no question of us trying to influence your findings. But I must impress upon you the delicacy of the situation. Certainly the minister would not be at all pleased if reports of our deliberations appeared in the media – or if anything, anything, was done to pre-empt the committee’s proper recommendations.’ Brawley’s fat lips pronounced ‘proper’ rather too emphatically.

  What kind of recommendation was ‘improper’? Mark wondered.

  General Grimwade quietly reminded Brawley who was running the Inquiry. ‘Of course, we all appreciate the minister’s concerns and the discretion of this committee is above question. I thank you all for your submissions and I suggest we adjourn until next week. It will certainly take time to study all these papers. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.’

  Vanessa smiled. It made a change to be acknowledged.

  ‘Just a moment, General – please.’ Mark sensed impatience and disapproval. �
��Can we just, just clarify a point of procedure?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ the general’s demeanour changed suddenly. He was a man who respected protocol.

  ‘We’re not limited, are we, to the papers furnished today? What if other archival evidence came to light?’

  Brawley fumed. Widening the terms of reference was always dangerous. ‘I can assure you, Dr Troy, our investigation has been exhaustive. No time or expense has been spared. Really,’ Brawley lowered his voice and turned towards the general, ‘we must ask ourselves, is this really in the public interest?’

  There was a second’s hesitation while General Grimwade considered his options. Extending the Inquiry would mean more time, more expense and doubtless more controversy. Canberra, as always, was in a hurry for a result – a tidy recommendation like the all-too-tidy catalogue before him.

  ‘A thorough investigation is always in the public interest, Mr Brawley, providing of course it doesn’t delay things unnecessarily. Dr Troy, Professor Evatt, you have until next week.’ The general glanced again at his watch. ‘At 1540 hours, I declare the meeting closed.’

  In the shuffle of papers that followed, the next words were lost to all but Mark. ‘Good luck,’ the general mumbled through his moustache. Almost a century earlier Major Barton had said much the same.

  Dr Mark Troy took his seat in the archives. Table eleven was his place of preference. Bathed in the soft light of the reading room’s cathedral-like window, it offered a clear view of the lined shelves and the comings and goings of researchers. All around him was a quiet intensity: Wednesday was one of the busy days at the Australian War Memorial.

  A trolley of documents rumbled towards him.

  ‘Good to see you again, Dr Mark. It’s the Bean papers again, isn’t it?’ Fabian lifted the files tenderly from the frame and placed them down with exaggerated care on the table. Title and first name was a liberty he took with younger academics. Just to remind them of their place. He had been training Mark for some time now and he feared he’d made little progress.