On Dangerous Ground Read online

  ‘Not much of this is properly catalogued, you know – and look, you really gave me a challenge with this one – is that a five or an eight?’

  Fabian pressed the call slip accusingly across the table. Scholars were a curious breed. Why did men who spent their whole lives playing with words find the most elementary act of writing so difficult?

  ‘Now that’s a five, Fabian – look, I’ve written it again neatly in the corner.’

  Hardly neatly, Fabian wanted to say, but there were some researchers he liked better than others.

  ‘Well, I had best fetch eight then. Let’s see: 3DRL 762 358,’ Fabian re-wrote the entire call number on the slip, in the boldest, neatest letters he could muster. ‘And I’m afraid you will have to wait for the next retrieval.’ Fabian knew someone had to set the limits of tolerance. ‘So, Dr Mark, I take it you don’t want this then?’

  Mark Troy looked up at the dull brown cardboard box crammed tight with papers. In a black square, he could just make out the term Misc. Miscellaneous always signalled mystery for a researcher. These were the papers that didn’t quite fit, random correspondence, arbitrary jottings, unfinished stories. All their lives archivists worked to order the world into carefully indexed series; Misc was the admission that they never quite succeeded.

  ‘Well, are they part of the Bean collection?’

  ‘Oh yes. And not easy to find either. I haven’t been in that corner of the stacks for years.’ Fabian’s white coat was speckled with dust, evidence of much toil in the archives. Mark’s glasses, coated with grime, shared the grubby patina of history. He tried to restrain his excitement. ‘Then, I’d best work through them.’

  Fabian was pleased. There was nothing he hated more than researchers who picked the eyes out of a collection. In his twenty years of service, trolley men like Fabian had witnessed an alarming decline in academic standards. Few researchers worked their way through the boxes nowadays. They called up a file here, a file there, just enough to get a feel for the sources, to lift a line or two of text and pad out the requisite footnotes. Those who worked the archives were a sensitive barometer of changing academic practice – their time in the shelves a measure of spiralling workloads, increasingly mercenary grant applications and an evermounting pressure to publish. Some ‘clients’ hadn’t read enough to know, Fabian thought, only read enough to suit whatever fashion it was that now swept through the academy. In the stacks of the Australian War Memorial, Fabian Treloar fought single-handed against the précised history of postmodernism. He was a stickler for the old school, a champion of industrious empiricism.

  For Mark Troy there were no such certainties. He lacked Fabian’s faith in the facts. Indeed, from his undergraduate days he’d been trained to view every fact with scepticism, and he knew that in any given box, in a single slender file, there were just too many facts along with opinion, hearsay, wilful invention to deal with. But even then Mark conceded it was what the archives didn’t say that mattered. The absent letter, unspoken truth, the half-remembered conversation.

  Mark sighed as his mind weighed the work piled on the trolley. The past was a messy business. A kind of palimpsest where one text wrote busily over another, cluttered, untidy, rather like the jumble of icons crammed on his computer screen. He moved the cursor to create yet another one before he began the awkward labour of unpacking 3DRL 762 358.

  To the archivist, Bean’s rough diaries must have seemed a peculiar assortment. Entries marked by days rather than dates, scratched, illegible shorthand, a series of what might have been sums or codes, curious pencil sketches of men, places, animals. Mark tapped his pencil on the table. Could be anywhere, anytime – France, Belgium, even from Bean’s homestead back in Tuggeranong where he completed his lifetime’s labour: The Official History of Australia in the War 1914–1918. Mark closed his eyes again and imagined a fragile fellowship with the long dead author – a man who had turned his desk away from the garden, fearing flowers might distract him.

  He unfolded a brittle piece of parchment and flinched as it tore in the corner. At top right the accession number was duly stated. Its title, Miscellaneous Landscape, seemed a contradiction in terms, at odds with the specifics of geography. Then, almost on a whim, Mark rotated the image. Instantly, the landscape of Gallipoli stared back at him. It’s Quinn’s Post, he thought to himself, must be.

  But not in 1915. That much was obvious. The angles were all wrong. The trenches had been filled in, those sharp slopes flattened and terraced. But when else would Bean have sketched the site? Mark’s mind was racing. Of course – 1919 – the Gallipoli Mission. The archivist hadn’t recognised Quinn’s Post because this was a landscape in transition – they were levelling the ground to lay out the cemetery. ‘These men held Quinn’s. They hold it still.’ Where had he read that?

  In a matter of minutes, all the miscellaneous files assumed a meaning and a purpose. Mark flicked through the diary – Q – Quinn’s, 60 – Hill 60. EP. He paused for a moment. Embarkation Pier. The figures were map references, lines of longitude and latitude. He glided his finger across symbol and text. The scratching of Bean’s pencil marked specific sites – the place where the troops first came ashore, where the trenches almost met, the last desperate stand of Lalor and his men, fighting to the death on the farthest ridges. Bean had found them there in 1919, still sited in a close defensive crescent, nothing left but their skeletons. There was a tiny cross stencilled in the corner. It stood as stark on the page as any stone memorial. ‘Here’ was written beside it. What was here, Mark wondered?

  Then it caught his eye again. One box larger and weightier than all the others. Fabian had grunted as he hauled it off the trolley. ‘Must be full of the old man’s paper weights,’ he’d exclaimed, half in warning, half in wonder.

  Mark slid the contents onto the table. It was as if an old drawer sealed for generations had suddenly been opened. Rusting filing clips, blunted pen nibs, a sheet of carbon torn from a long frozen typewriter all spilt out before him. And something else, something dark and heavy. Mark peeled the tissue paper away. It took just an instant to recognise it – a firing loop, pockmarked where snipers’ bullets had sped into metal. Even now the cold iron seemed to vibrate, battered by the trauma of the trenches. ‘Relic,’ Mark muttered, ‘not paperweight.’

  Amidst all the debris of war he then noticed something curious. A pile of letters, still half sealed in their envelopes, still bound by a ribbon knotted an age ago. He tugged expectantly on the crimson chord. There was the musty memory of a scent, a hint of thyme, dust and perfume.

  Crater at the Centre of Turkish Trenches, Lone Pine, 1915

  Lt George Roy Irwin’s attack on Lone Pine was but one of a series of battles marking the August offensive. Everywhere, from Helles in the south to the northernmost point of Anzac, Allied troops stepped out of the sordid shelter of their trenches and charged across no-man’s-land.

  The main breakthrough was to be launched from Anzac. For all the time Irwin and his men had fought and suffered there, the cove and its hill-bound surrounds were no more than a narrow beachhead. It was hoped a new force of Australian and New Zealand troops could weave their way through the tangle of gullies to the north of the Anzac position and strike out for Chunuk Bair and Hill 971 – the windswept lonely summit of Gallipoli. Hoped that whoever took those heights might also take the peninsula.

  Standing by the walls of the crater Roy Irwin was just tall enough to make out the Australian advance. One wave after another struggled to the Turkish parapet and simply disappeared. He traced the scene of slaughter before him. The long line of bodies that died as they fell, their life breath snatched away, murdered in an instant. A boy’s bare knees jutted out from the pile of butchered khaki.

  ‘What’s happening, sir? Have our blokes got through?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Saunders – it’s hard to tell at the moment.’

  Irwin knew that uncertainty bred panic in men. Even so, he couldn’t lie to them. This looked nothing like t
he model attack outlined in the general’s briefing. A charge at enemy trenches had the best chance of success if there was a concentrated assault on the weakest point of defence. Irwin could see others charging well beyond the frontline, leaping into what must have been a reserve trench, or perhaps one of a hundred saps stretching out into no-man’s-land. It was chaos, he thought. Why enter the trenches in so many places? It made no sense to him.

  As Irwin looked out, a Turkish bullet whizzed by him. He felt its flattened nose cut a swathe through the air; a whine rang out in his eardrums. His heart jumped a beat: every soldier knew a near miss. But the fortunes of war favoured some at the cost of others. The same bullet plunged into Corporal Saunders’ mouth. He fell back in the trench and blood welled up in his throat to drown him.

  ‘We can’t stay here, sir.’ There was panic in the private’s voice but also a terrible resolution. ‘They’ll pick us off one by one, just give us a chance, just let us at ’em.’

  Irwin glanced down at his corporal thrashing for air. The dying man’s throat was slashed to the bone, his face was white with terror. Irwin pushed him on his side, allowing the blood to flow freely. It was the only aid Irwin had time to offer.

  ‘All right men, stay with me.’

  As they stumbled over the crater’s ridge, not one of them looked back at Corporal Saunders. Going over the top, men could only think of themselves. That and the unseen enemy before them. Irwin gripped the map in his right hand. In the heat of the moment, he had not even drawn his revolver.

  Three

  Rich Skies

  a symphony of soaring minarets, medieval towers and arching domes frames the heavens...

  The Harbour and Golden Horn at Constantinople, c. 1919.

  Constantinople/Maidos, 1919

  The waters of the Bosporus smell like nothing I have ever smelt before. They run deep and dark along the seawall, rising up to lap the heels of fishermen before plunging down to drench the breakwater. I fill my lungs with heady, sun-soaked sea spray. Even in the bitterest winter, the waters of the Bosporus carry the scent of summer. They run tirelessly from one corner of the Ottoman Empire to the other, having decided their course a thousand centuries before Constantinople began.

  My eyes scan the city walls. They are in ruins now, battered by one invader after another, pillaged for stone by industrious builders, worn down by centuries of wind and rain. The hungry and the homeless have carved out a space for themselves beneath the broken arches. Lines of washing flap from the battlements, surrendering memory where Greek, Persian and Christian armies once laid siege. Wind rustles through crumbling limestone. An army of the city’s stray cats pisses and plays in the rubble of history.

  Constantinople’s skyline is cut into frosty blue. A symphony of soaring minarets, medieval towers and arching domes frames the heavens. I blink once or twice in sheer astonishment. For all its shabby splendour this is the most beautiful city I have ever seen.

  And yet this is the place we were charged with destroying. I cringe as I imagine all these rich skies ablaze. Nothing much distinguishes one army from another, that truth the classics has taught me. From one age to another, plunder and pillage have been the wages of war. I kick the earth at my feet, dislodging stone set in place by crusaders, and I recall, with not a little regret, my own frenetic souveniring, the shattered mosaics, holy relics and priceless art looted from antiquity. In the museum we promptly labelled these ‘exhibits’, as if a word could make a difference. But they were really trophies, the prizes any victor claimed.

  Vickers walks up and shuffles to a halt. ‘We never got here did we, Charley?’ words sink into the swell beneath us. ‘You know,’ he continues, ‘it’s probably just as well. You remember the Wazza?’

  I do. In the Easter before the Anzac landing, Australian and New Zealand troops had torn the red light district of Cairo to pieces; burning, looting, beating shopkeepers and citizens senseless. The men had rioted to avenge mates infected in the brothels. I frown – that was surely an injury they’d brought upon themselves. It took a division of British military police to bring that sex-crazed mob to its senses. Colonial rabble they called us – savage, untrained, undisciplined.

  I look at Vickers. He’s nodding his head in agreement, as if thoughts are conversations. It takes savages to fight any war. And maybe for some, it didn’t matter who we were fighting: Turks, ‘wogs’, ‘gyppos’, any colour or culture different to our own.

  There’s a bitter taste in my mouth. Here in the markets of a foreign land Australians had haggled over the price of an embrace in the same breath that they bargained for trinkets.

  ‘Yes, Harry, I remember. And I must admit the Wazza made me ashamed to be Australian.’ I cease to slouch on the seawall and raise up to my full height – alongside Vickers that seems considerable. ‘But that’s behind us now, isn’t it.’ I tap my pipe on the stone and watch the ashen remnants scatter in the breeze. ‘No one remembers the Wazza but they all remember Anzac.’

  ‘Yes,’ Vickers answers slowly, ‘especially that poor lot.’

  He points down to the jetty. A barge lifts up and down in the swell, and a ragged army of Turkish infantry clamours ashore. They look more like scarecrows than soldiers, their uniforms in tatters, their boots – if they have any – bound together with string. It is as if the spirit has gone out of them. Some shuffle towards an open fire smoking near the water, others slump on empty crates and ships’ bollards.

  ‘Poor beggars,’ Vickers continues. Men who cradle their own pain are often moved to pity, and to insight. ‘That’s what defeat looks like, Charley.’

  I nod in agreement. That fate could have been our own. I’d seen men just like that limping down from the firing line in France. Diggers broken by the brunt of battle, confused, dispirited, without the faintest hope of home. God only knows where home was for the hastily demobilised Turkish forces. With the Ottoman Empire crumbling around them, it would now take a miracle to send them there.

  A staff car pulls up suddenly alongside us and a sharply dressed, sharply mannered officer leans out of the window.

  ‘You chaps the Australians? I’ve orders to run you up to the Constant. Climb in, will you?’

  He flings the back door open. It creaks in rusty protest.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about them, Captain.’

  Vickers is watching the last of the Ottoman army step unsteadily from barge to seawall.

  ‘They shan’t be giving us any trouble!’

  The staff car coughs and purrs towards the western district of the city. It crosses the cobbled bridge that spans the Golden Horn, skirts the Galata Tower’s medieval stonework and climbs the winding streets that separate ancient Constantinople from the modern. En route, I count over a hundred wayside stalls, tiny fires cooking chestnuts and corn, men with bread piled high on their heads, shoe-shine boys and salesmen plying their commerce on the streets of the city. To my left I can make out the lanes, shops and markets of the city’s Jewish quarters, nestled in the shadows of alleyways, a world unto themselves. The call to prayer rings out from an ancient minaret, a cable car clatters by plush city bars. Twenty minutes after our journey begins we stop outside what the expatriate British community calls the Constant. The old German Teutonia Club, with its spacious rooms and shaded gardens is yet another trophy of war and renaming it was the timeless prerogative of the conqueror. One of the largest union flags I’ve ever seen dangles from a balcony. The officer steps out on the running board.

  ‘Expect you’ll want to clean up a bit. I’ll be back after lunch to run you over to the mission. Remember, Captain, dress uniform for dinner. Black tie for you, sir.’

  Vickers nods grimly. Even if the world was falling apart at the seams the Empire would dress for dinner.

  The officer makes a curt salute, climbs back into the car and motions to the driver. The gears grate loudly as the vehicle rumbles away. The smell of whisky and cigars beckons us towards the building.

  The meeting at the British diplom
atic mission goes much better than we expect. A man promoted well beyond his ability runs through all our curious requirements. Yes, the Turks will provide an officer to escort us across the battlefields and, yes (with some effort), they can probably arrange a veteran of 1915. Maps, the military attaché assures us, shouldn’t be a problem even if the Turks wouldn’t provide them as a courtesy.

  ‘Got a map from a German officer.’

  ‘No idea of how to play poker.’

  ‘Just like the old days.’

  ‘Had the Hun on the run.’

  His conversation mimicked the machine gun fire from the trenches, the rhythmic arching fire heard every night, bursts of death sweeping across the land. And so our Gallipoli mission is equipped, rationed and sorted from an old Ottoman house on the fringes of Sultanhamet. Every home outlives its owners, I think to myself. That is a building’s greatest sadness. I listen as the ancient timbers arch and creak, alarmed by the new army of occupants. Telephones and typewriters take the places of urns and ornaments; a shambles of desks and office spaces colonise a once exquisite drawing room. Inventories are drawn up, forms signed, items receipted. The great home seems uncomfortable with itself, puzzled by strange, new intrigues whispered in its corridors. Whilst far away in London, clerks from the foreign office gloat like greedy relatives over a will, divvying up the assets of Empire.

  By late afternoon, Vickers and I find ourselves beneath the great dome of Hagia Sophia. We had wandered the city for hours, every winding street beckoning us on to another. Exhausted by our journey, our gaze rests on murals set in stone centuries ago. Most are damaged and incomplete. Pillaging crusaders have prised coloured tiles from the walls – art was just another form of booty. But the figures of saints, angels and the Virgin Mary still peek out from the cloudy surface, gazing down as intently as when Santa Sophia’s dome had first vaulted the sky.