On Dangerous Ground Page 6

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I whisper. A match for the greatest cathedrals of Europe, the finest, glittering palaces of Empire, the soaring dreaming towers of ancient, ivy-laden Oxford. ‘Just beautiful.’

  But Vickers doesn’t hear me. His eyes swim from one sacred image to another, and soar up to the heavens beyond. A child tugs at my sleeve. Big eyes look up with hope and hunger. I turn to one side and slip a coin from my pocket. A tear runs down Vickers’ face. I pretend not to notice.

  ‘Welcome to Gallipoli, gentlemen. Welcome back, I should say.’ Colonel Hammond’s manner is brisk, blunt and yet disarmingly familiar. Normally, the very thought of visitors horrifies him. His lonely outpost in the Dardanelles, headquarters of the war graves detachment, hardly had the facilities to deal with them. But he can tell we are not your run-of-the-mill Gallipoli pilgrims. He knew we had fought here, against the Turks, the lice, the punishing lie of the land, the sickly stench of the corpses. Hammond, like Vickers, is a Gallipoli veteran. The golden ‘A’ pinned to his tunic signals membership of the same exclusive club, the same terrible fellowship.

  ‘Now you’re not the first visitors we’ve had, so don’t think yourselves too special.’

  The warmth of Hammond’s handshake seems to suggest otherwise.

  ‘I’ve even turned a few away, tourists from those damned cruise ships bound for Constantinople. God knows what they think they’ll find here.’

  What indeed? I look around the ruined townships of Maidos, once a thriving Greek fishing town, then a busy hospital base for the Turks, and now, after its battering by British naval guns, a pile of rubble. To my left an old man roasts chestnuts on an ancient iron stove. Their shells peel open as he rakes the glowing embers. Down by the seawall, a party of fishermen repair their nets, long needles darting in and out. I take a sip of my strong black coffee and marvel at the ingenuity of the Turks and Greeks milling around us. Normally Greek and Turk were at each other’s throats. They had battled for centuries along these disputed borders. But now all their differences have been put aside to prepare this morning’s modest beverage. Hot and sweet it numbs a thousand years of grievance and brings what is left of the old town square to life again. I risk the final sip of coffee, draining moisture from sediment, sucking the flavour out of the grounds stuck to my teeth.

  ‘But you haven’t had Australians visit here, surely? The war is barely over.’

  Vickers couldn’t contain his incredulity. What kind of cruise would take in a battlefield?

  ‘Only one thus far. An old bloke by the name of Murray got here somehow, all the way from Gippsland. God knows, I’ll not forget that poor blighter in a hurry – his son bought it on Walker’s Ridge – first week in August.’

  Walker’s Ridge.

  The name says it all. Like most men who survived the war, Hammond has ceased to believe in words. Words cannot begin to express what they’ve been through. But place names are different. The Ridge, the Nek, Pozières, Bullecourt, Passchendaele. Strange sounding names from worlds away. Names that hold their own kind of darkness.

  Hammond coughs and begins again. ‘Of course, we did what we could for him. But you can imagine what it’s like out there. Still a bloody mess. We’ve barely begun to bring in the bodies.’ A second’s silence is followed by a shout: ‘Hey, you there!’ Hammond bellows at a Turk unloading our supplies, ‘Bloody idiot! Take a bit more damned care will you?’

  I am startled at the sharpness of the rebuke. I look the stern, old soldier up and down. Not a man to be trifled with.

  ‘That’s what we’ve been sent to find out, Colonel Hammond – what it’s like out there. Rumours have reached Australia. There’s talk of...’ I lower my voice, as if shielding a scandal, ‘rumours of desecration.’ I regret this allegation the moment I utter it. For all the evidence of the cables, Vickers and I remember the Turk as a clean fighter, playing the game as honourably as one could in war, not the sort to pillage graveyards. Hammond, however, thinks otherwise.

  ‘Not just rumours,’ the colonel scowls. ‘Dug up bodies at Anzac and Helles, riffled through the remains like animals. And they burnt every cross there, gentlemen, every cross we’d raised. Savages – just damned savages.’

  He slams down his coffee as if he would choke on it. A group of Turkish workmen move quietly away – Hammond’s body language tells them far more than their slight knowledge of English. The old soldier swings at the air with his cane, slaying an unseen enemy.

  ‘And now the powers that be tell us it’s time to “negotiate”. To parley with the unspeakable. Take my word for it, gentlemen, this war isn’t over, not for any of us.’

  And indeed the Australian War Graves Unit is still armed for battle. I do a quick count of guns. There are at least twenty men, each carrying a standard Lee-Enfield. A small cart to our left is equipped with stores, ammunition and a Lewis gun. There is enough firepower in this ruined fishing village to quell a small rebellion. Why, I wonder, is a War Graves Unit carrying more guns than shovels? Was the armistice with Turkey so very fragile?

  Hammond notices my discomfort.

  ‘Don’t worry old man. All under control for the moment. This show of force is just to keep the brigands at bay. Other day one of our men was wounded out beyond the fishermen’s huts. Wild country, if you get my meaning. And if trouble does break out between the Turks and the Greeks, well,’ Hammond slams his hand on a holstered revolver, ‘we can keep order here. We’re still soldiers you know.’

  A burly six foot four, with the broad shoulders of a bushman, Colonel Hammond is still very much a soldier. His face broadens to a smile. I notice his teeth are chipped and yellow like the ivory keys on an old piano.

  Again, Hammond reads the look with uncanny accuracy.

  ‘Here, try one of these. Turkish cigarettes – probably the most powerful weapon of the war.’

  Hammond strikes a match and circulates the one flame between us. I draw back on the thick, tightly packed cylinder. For a moment we are silent, each of us lost in thought and the parchment cloud of smoke billowing around us. The sharp smell reaches my nostrils. Yes, I have tried these before. In the May of 1915, when both sides put down their guns and buried their dead in no-man’s-land. There was an uncanny silence between the lines that day, men afraid to speak least they swallow the air around them. Slime stuck to our boots and our faces were thick with flies. Such a pitiful sight, acre after acre of dead, bodies strewn like seaweed.

  The tangled mass was piled highest near our trenches. There lay the casualties of one suicidal Turkish attack after another. Wave after wave they had come, determined to drive ‘the English’ into the sea, breaking with a thud, subsiding in a spray of bullets. At first, men paid for a place in that firing line – a chance to settle old scores, avenge the deaths of brothers, mates and comrades. But after an hour’s blazing carnage, their guns glowing hot, most turned away, in awe of the courage, appalled by the slaughter. May was the month men confronted the madness. Each side piled up the bodies of men they killed and handed them back to their countrymen.

  It was early that afternoon that a Turkish captain had handed me my first Turkish cigarette.

  ‘Tenez. Ça aide.’

  And it did help. The smoke concealed the stench of the dead; its bitter taste a sudden sweetness. I barely remember what I said in reply. Words in any language would have failed me.

  The same Turkish officer had gestured first to where bodies were heaped the highest, then to the long common grave about to swallow them.

  ‘Ça, c’est la politique,’ he declared, ‘et ça, mon vieux, c’est la diplomatie!’

  Politics or diplomacy? I ask myself which had brought me back to Anzac. And whether Hammond, a man who clearly knew how to hate, could really tell the difference.

  ‘Well we had best be off gentlemen.’ Hammond grinds his cigarette butt into the gravel. ‘You’ll want to set up camp before nightfall. Abdul!’

  A young Turk appears a second later, an Australian Waler trailing behind hi
m. Vickers strokes its long tangled mane, as if renewing a valued acquaintance.

  ‘I’m glad we didn’t shoot all the horses. Still, you know,’ Hammond turns towards the young man, ‘the Turks treat them terribly. You can ride, can’t you, the track is pretty rough up there.’

  ‘Oh yes, we can ride,’ Vickers replies, swinging with painful determination across the saddle. ‘Only Lambert,’ he wonders how to put this diplomatically, ‘is a bit out of condition.’

  In the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of our returned companion. He heaves his tall slender body to the side and lunges awkwardly forward. Lambert had begun his morning in the Red Lion at Chanak, making his way to Maidos barely an hour earlier.

  ‘I’m all right, old man, be with you in a moment.’ He is breathing heavily. The strain of the journey is beginning to show. Though Lambert has said nothing, I know the artist also nurses war wounds of his own. Most of the Light Horse who served in Palestine had ‘a touch’ of malaria. So had Lambert.

  I watch his tall angular frame lurch from stirrup to saddle. I know he has conquered much harder mounts than this one. The grey mare neighs loudly as Lambert pulls her into line. He jolts in the saddle as man and beast unite. A breeze whips up the rain as our party turns towards Anzac. I remember it rained just like this on the day of the landing.

  Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2015

  The letters of Elsie Forrest spread over the desk like a tablecloth. For a time, Mark had pushed them back together, assembling a flimsy tower of fraying paper, dust and ribbon. But gravity got the better of linear narrative and the papers tumbled down, each letter seizing a space separate to the others.

  Mark paused a moment before reading. He adjusted his glasses and swept his hair from his forehead. Archives like these merited a kind of reverence. However young and gauche he was, he knew that. All around him researchers were retracing the steps of men few had known, soldiers lost in the deserts of Tobruk, the flat fields of France, the mountains of Korea and the jungles of Vietnam. To his left, an old couple shifted through reports of missing POWs. They were seeking out a stranger, a man whose touch they’d never felt, whose words they’d never known. Only six Australians had survived the death march from Sandakan; all the rest had perished, taken, kind souls said, by the mists of the mountains, scattered to the winds. But Mark knew otherwise. Table sixteen was a mess of files and photographs, maps of airfields long forgotten and overgrown, images of young men who flew off into crimson skies and never came to earth again. Outside in the cloistered galleries the names of 100,000 war dead were etched in bronze, gleaming testimony to the loss of a nation. But here in the reading room, the families of the fallen recovered their stories. Here, history stumbled into life again.

  Mark knew the familiar sequence of correspondence with the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Bureau. Soldiers weren’t killed in battle, rather, they went ‘missing’. No one really knew what happened to them, and so began a desperate series of inquiries.

  ‘Did my boy leave any kind of message?’

  ‘Did he suffer very much?’

  ‘Was there a priest to comfort him?’

  ‘Surely there is a nurse I can write to?’

  Letter after letter cried out with anger, disbelief or anguish. Twelve thousand miles from the battlefield, denying death seemed a natural reaction. ‘Perhaps my son hasn’t been killed at all, you say no one brought in the body?’ ‘Perhaps he was only wounded, perhaps taken prisoner?’

  Red Cross workers considered the grim gamut of possibilities: ‘shot in the head by a sniper’, ‘blown to pieces in the first hour of the attack’, ‘cut down by a machine gun hopping over’, ‘buried completely in the trenches’.

  Where information was given, the accounts were subtly amended, sparing mothers the worst of war, sheltering in euphemism. ‘Shot in the privates’ became ‘wounded in the abdomen’; men whose heads were severed by a shell were now simply ‘killed in an instant’. Bodies slung into shell holes became ‘burials in the field’, men were ‘knocked over at the parapet’, or ‘fell’ at the height of the battle. Usually of course ‘the ground had been lost’.

  In Mark’s careful estimate, most assaults on enemy lines gained almost nothing. He took a deep breath. Sifting through Red Cross files was rather like attending a post-mortem. He wondered what comfort reports like these offered grieving families, remembered the makeshift shrines to memory entombed to this day in the archives – fragments of fading diaries and letters, shreds of tattered uniform, the grim collection of personal effects (one pipe, one belt, one damaged wristwatch), the final letters folded carefully in a family bible.

  He raised the first of Elsie’s letters up to the light and noticed something quite extraordinary.

  ‘Thought I might find you here, mind if I join you?’

  Vanessa’s voice startled Mark, and prompted accusing glares from the tables around him. She smiled back apologetically, as if pleading special dispensation.

  ‘We really should talk.’ Her voice conveyed a sense of urgency. ‘Can you break for a coffee?’ The young woman leaned closer, perhaps out of consideration for the other researchers but something in the softness of her tone suggested otherwise. The scent of her perfume was rich and alluring.

  ‘Sweet. Just give me a minute.’ With slightly exaggerated care, Mark shuffled Elsie’s letters into a pile and noticed again the duller, dustier scent still sealed deep inside them.

  Mark and Vanessa walked without a word to the exit. They passed the white landing craft wrested from the beach at Anzac and turned right at two stone lions, once the guardians of Menin Gate now tethered at the entrance of the Memorial. They stepped into the bright light of the forecourt. Ahead of them, draped with flags, stretched the long red aisles of Anzac Parade, each of its sides flanked with monuments. Mark wondered how many more would be built before the world came to its senses. Beyond, lay the bright sky blue of Lake Burley Griffin, followed by the sapphire haze of the Brindabella Ranges. Canberra was set in a vast natural amphitheatre.

  Mark was one of the few Australians he knew who actually liked Canberra, as much, if not more than, the seedy streetscapes of Sydney or the faded glories of Melbourne’s boulevards. Perhaps it was the theatre of the place, or perhaps it was just that Mark was still a country boy at heart. He had grown up in the Wimmera and there, like Canberra, the dry summer air was still and blue and silent. He watched an arc of cockatoos reeling towards them, carrying sunshine on their backs.

  ‘God, don’t you hate Canberra? It’s all so empty isn’t it? Cigarette?’

  ‘No ... thanks ... I don’t.’

  ‘Well, I will if you don’t mind – six hours in committee is enough to break all my resolutions. I’m so,’ she struck a match and sucked hard on a Marlborough Light, ‘...well, I’m over it. It is all just tiresome.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Mark wondered why his conversation seemed just a string of single syllables; he could do better than this surely. ‘Your research with Intelligence, and Foreign Affairs, that would be interesting, wouldn’t it’?

  Vanessa seemed genuinely surprised. She blew out a stream of smoke and smiled back indulgently. Her teeth, unlike his own, were white, polished, faultless.

  ‘Seriously? Oh my God, you must be joking. Research and government are totally incompatible. You know what I think? We spend most of our time avoiding information, not finding it.’ Mark smiled. In the parched summer air, he found her presence cool and comforting. ‘And if we did find anything, do you really think they would listen?’

  Vanessa made it abundantly clear who ‘they’ were. Her head nodded dismissingly towards the furthest shore of the lake and the capital’s Parliamentary precinct. Four kilometres to the west, a steel tripod lifted an Australian flag to the sky. From far away it looked something like a giant stick insect. Beneath the tripod, under a soft green expanse of lawn, was the grinding machinery of government.

  ‘After all, we don’t want another Fromelles on our hands, do w
e Mark – you don’t mind if I call you Mark, do you?’ She looked away from Capital Hill and smiled in his direction.

  ‘Of course not,’ Mark answered. ‘Vanessa? Isn’t it?’ The question was unconvincing.

  Vanessa smiled again and continued. ‘You see, Mark, Fromelles posed what my colleague Mr Brawley calls “an awkward but binding precedent” – mass grave, costly exhumation of the dead, we even built a new cemetery. The problem is, if we do find any bodies at Gallipoli that whole business would have to start up again, forensic archaeology, DNA testing, families lobbying government for a proper burial. Have you any idea how much that would cost?’ She threw her cigarette to the lawn, and trod it into the earth. ‘It’s simply staggering. Quite a burden on the taxpayer. Best, as far as the department’s concerned, if we don’t find any bodies. God knows we avoided finding bodies at Fromelles long enough.’

  Vanessa brushed her fringe away from her face and Mark’s eyes fell on the nape of her neck – alabaster blushing red with summer sunshine. She nodded again towards Capital Hill. ‘You know I always thought it appropriate they put Parliament under that hill. Talk about burying your head in the sand, eh?’

  They both giggled.

  Mark thought it time to take the initiative. ‘But I thought the government favoured the exhumations at Fromelles. Your department was involved wasn’t it? And the minister...’

  ‘Oh yes, the minister, Brawley, the highest levels of government. They got to meet Prince Charles. But that whole thing only happened because there was proof the bodies were there and we had to go about reburying them. That’s what this Inquiry is about, Mark. The burden of proof. The department will deny the graves are there – but if you, or old Professor Evatt, find some, well then, watch them all change their tune. That’s politics.’

  Mark was affronted by her frankness. The same flock of cockatoos wheeled madly above them and screeched a stream of obscenities towards Mount Ainslie.