On Dangerous Ground Page 7

  Vanessa hesitated a moment as though counting the cost of something. Then she spoke again. Softer, slower, almost reluctantly.

  ‘But I believe in process, Mark. If there isn’t due process there’s nothing to control us.’

  Who was ‘us’, Mark wondered.

  ‘You know, there’s some information you should be aware of.’ She drew long and hard on a second cigarette. ‘Treaty of Lausanne, heard of it?’

  ‘Of course, negotiated between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied Powers at the end of the war; February 1923 wasn’t it?’

  ‘You’re the historian.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s your point exactly?’

  ‘Now that would be telling,’ Vanessa slipped on her sunglasses in a pointedly furtive gesture. A secrecy stole into her voice, all in keeping with the costume. For a moment she touched his hand. Mark enjoyed this unexpected intimacy. A party of school children streamed towards the steps of the memorial. Two teachers bounded ahead, determined to stem the noisy clatter breaking out all around them. In an instant, Mark and Vanessa were surrounded by a sea of bags and uniforms.

  ‘Not here,’ Vanessa cried out. ‘How about that coffee?’

  ‘Sure,’ Mark shouted back. A bellowing teacher demanded silence; the cockatoos screeched on regardless.

  Australian General Hospital, Lemnos/Alexandria, Egypt, 1914–15

  In the second week of August 1915, Sister Elsie Forrest sat in the far corner of the isolation ward at Lemnos. At last the moans of the wounded had given way and the hospital was silent. She watched as a padre administered last rites.

  Bed 19: GSW., Post Op., No fluids. Normally, she would know a dying soldier’s name; in the fitful hours between the dressing and morphine she would gather enough details to write consolingly and convincingly home to Australia. But Bed 19 had only just arrived. The dying man was unaware of all the formalities breaking out above him. He saw nothing of the padre’s hands sketching the sign of the cross, felt no finger on his forehead, heard no silken clatter of the rosary. Elsie wondered if, in his last glimmer of life, the poor boy really understood anything. She was not sure she understood anything herself now. Bed 19 could not have been as many years, and in a few hours’ time they would take that young body and cover it with the sandy soil of Lemnos. Waste was an understatement. The shabby walls of the isolation hut witnessed the passing of a generation.

  The orderlies walked briskly by her, a stretcher slung by their side. With no fuss and less ceremony, they laid out the body for the mortuary. It was their ninetieth trip for the day. Of the last boatload that came in they had lost almost everyone. It wasn’t just the wounds that killed them – from the ridges at Lone Pine to the beach at Mudros it was at least an eighty-hour journey. Men were left to bake in the sun, the last drop of moisture leaching from their bodies. In a way, Bed 19 was one of the lucky ones: unable to feel the pain or heat or thirst, incapable of reckoning his own slight chance of survival. It was the men who struggled who found it the hardest, Elsie thought. Those who swam against the tide. Their own will to live made the act of dying so much more difficult.

  Elsie ruled a neat line through the case notes. Life extinct: 4.05am, cardiac arrest. Again, she wondered why they bothered. What good could such details possibly do anyone? She drew a sheet of paper from the drawer of the desk and began the inevitable letter home to Australia: ‘It is with deep regret that I write...’ She glanced up to the corner of the case notes; Bed 19 had a name after all.

  ‘You get some rest, Elsie. Maggie and I can manage on our own. Try to get some sleep before the next boat comes in.’

  The matron’s tone was firm but comforting. Like a mother soothing a child, her voice conveyed strength, patience and kindness. Elsie wondered if Matron had meant to call the two duty nurses by their Christian names – she’d always been such a stickler for formality. But days as taxing as these fostered a rare kind of intimacy. And Matron knew Elsie was fretting for her soldier.

  As always, Maggie’s tone was bright and hopeful. ‘He may be on the next boat, you know.’

  On the battlefield war bred fatalists, in nursing wards – where against all odds lives were sometimes saved – dwelt a tiny colony of optimists. Maggie was one of these and her tone to her friend contrived to imagine what was fast becoming unimaginable. Romance, she thought, might coax her friend to rest. Not so long ago romance had promised to take Elsie Forrest anywhere. Secretive strolls down shaded garden paths, whirlwind dances in the palace ballroom, sips of sparkling champagne on its terrace.

  ‘He wouldn’t want to see you looking like that, would he?’ Maggie ran her hand across Elsie’s bedraggled blonde hair, ‘...and you’ll need proper rest if you’re to care for him.’ She smiled bravely. Elsie’s pretty face was lined from too little sleep and too much worry.

  Still the young woman hesitated.

  ‘C’mon, get some rest now,’ Matron paused a moment, ‘...Sister.’ A request became an order.

  From the isolation ward, Elsie walked towards the line of bell tents that formed the nurses’ quarters. The island was a sea of tents now, row after row, beach after beach of canvas on clay. The main path would have been the quickest, the same path the Australian nursing contingent had been piped in on twelve weeks earlier. Then so keen, so confident, so full of purpose. Elsie couldn’t bear to walk that way just now. She stumbled down towards the beach and in the shallow light of morning her feet slipped deep into shingle.

  She looked out across the water. Even now an inky smudge on the horizon sketched the distant landscape of Gallipoli. Near the entrance of the harbour a fleet of gaily painted fishing boats were setting out to sea, plying the waters of the Mediterranean as they had for generations. Departing at dawn, they would return at the end of day, their nets bulging with the bounty of the deep. Strange, Elsie thought, that so much could go on as before when the whole world had changed so utterly. And then beyond the last of the fishing boats she saw it – one of the Black Ships, an old steamer rusting at the hull, pressed into service to ferry the wounded to Lemnos. It lurched this way and that, writhing in the sea, like the broken men stacked between its decks. Elsie turned abruptly and retraced her steps towards the ward. Perhaps in that next cargo lay her soldier, her Roy.

  ***

  Elsie had first met Roy Irwin in November 1914, as the first ships of the first contingent steamed into Alexandria. The tiny harbour thronged with vessels. It seemed every boat, of every size, of every country was there to greet them. Modern motor craft weaved their way around the elegant and ancient Levant. Long and graceful, their bleached lateen-sails stroked the water. Clippers and schooners anchored at the harbour’s edge. Masts and oars vied for space near wharves just as crowded and busy. Every boat was covered in flags. Vivid reds, deep purples and shining white flashed in the breeze from ship’s mast to water’s edge. Their crews were drawn from every quarter of the East: Arab, Egyptian, Nubian and Syrian, costume and headdress as different as every ship’s build and rigging. Elsie stood astounded on the Kyarra’ s deck as swarthy men in long flowing robes shouted out in a dozen dialects. The Western world was at war: ordered, regulated, clad in a grey drab sameness. But here at this gateway to the ancient East, life bustled in colour and commotion.

  The limestone cliffs that rimmed the harbour had already stood there for millennia. Worn and pitted by the warm Mediterranean, it struck Elsie that they had already seen the navies of Nelson, Napoleon, Caesar and Alexander sail past them. On the eastern edge of the harbour, she saw Fort Qaitbay soar up like a citadel, its battlements and towers a curious blend of Islamic and Crusader architecture. Elsie had scanned its ancient walls and wondered if the smooth white stone had been carried from the ruins of the city’s lighthouse. In this time-soaked land, one edifice of antiquity rose up literally on another.

  But the soldiers who’d looked up on the same scene saw only the machinery of terror. Standing not far away from Elsie, Lt Roy Irwin imagined archers leaning from its tilting towers and
firing at men massing beneath them. Today the weaponry had changed, but not the intention. In the noonday light, Lt Irwin could just make out the shape of maxim guns mounted between the battlements. Their angry nozzles pointed out to the sea, menacing the ghosts from far away lands.

  ‘Beautiful isn’t it?’ Elsie had only just noticed the young officer standing for some time beside her. Then she hastened to correct herself. ‘I’m Sister Forrest, 2nd Australian General Hospital.’ She smiled, unselfconsciously; Elsie was a bush girl unused to social pretension. ‘We’ve not met before, have we?’

  ‘Irwin, Lt Roy Irwin, pleased to meet you,’ the tall young man hastily extended a hand and just as quickly withdrew it. A tar-like substance stained his fingers. ‘Molasses,’ he explained, ‘for the horses. I’m here to bring them ashore.’

  ‘Oh, that explains it – why I haven’t seen you before. After two months at sea, I thought I’d seen quite enough of everyone.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a bit like that isn’t it?’

  ‘But don’t I know you? You seem somehow...’ Elsie’s eyes searched the features of that handsome face, the skin bronzed by an Australian sun, ‘somehow familiar.’

  The sudden intimacy took Irwin aback. The soft voice of a woman was so unlike the rough world of soldiering. Elsie’s voice pounced on a sudden recognition: ‘You wouldn’t be one of Sarah’s boys, would you? There’s an Irwin family in Merimbula.’

  ‘Yes, but how...?’

  ‘I was the district nurse at Tilba. Got to know all the families someway or other. And quite a few times we went to the coast – you know – mostly ’round Christmas.’

  They chatted a while, exchanging stories of sea and sunshine. Irwin told Elsie about exercising his favourite stallion in the surf of Bar Beach. She smiled as she imagined this lean young man rearing and riding in the breakers. A host of common memories mingled playfully together; iced tea on hot verandas, the blue mist of mountains, skies the colour of rusting iron, curling golden beaches that stretched on forever. They remembered the call of magpies warbling in the dawn and the cry of kookaburras serenading sundrenched land. They shared again those last dying days of summer. Then, for longer than either of them imagined possible, they enjoyed a strangely comfortable silence.

  On the deck beneath them, a crowd of soldiers threw pennies into the sea and an even larger crowd of children dived down to retrieve them. Elsie watched the young naked bodies weave through the water. Glancing to her left, she noticed the young lieutenant looked uncomfortable. He blushed at her bright blue eyes, as beguiling as the ocean. For a moment Elsie’s whole world soared heavenward.

  ‘Must get on, miss, have to supervise the unloading.’

  ‘Yes of course, but we will see you again, won’t we? We’re neighbours, after all.’ From the country they came from, a distance of a hundred miles was nothing.

  Elsie was alarmed she could sound quite so brazen. Normally she was shy, reserved, a little ill-at-ease in male company. But there was something in Irwin that invited her trust, a frankness born of the land, a sense of common origin.

  ‘Yes, miss, I’m sure we will – Sister, I mean.’

  ‘Please, call me Elsie.’

  ‘Roy.’

  Both knew they had breached military protocol. ‘Sister’ was a term intended to distance nurses from the men they cared for. But in that bright afternoon at Alexandria, with gulls clicking the water in dance, the two forgot everything but each other.

  The fleet disgorged its cargo of men, horses, stores and machinery on to the wharves. It was a cumbersome business. Winches dropped the heaviest loads over the ship’s side, onto the wharf or they fell into the water. Roy Irwin and his sergeant helped the horses go over, calming the frightened beasts with liquid-soft voices and hard dry lumps of sugar. They fastened slings across their girths and stepped to one side as they raised them kicking and bellowing into the air. Several horses had to be destroyed, their sleek, sweating bodies stressed to breaking point. Elsie shuddered as she heard the gunshots ring out. It seemed such a wasteful end to so long a journey. Two weeks from their landfall, Lt Roy Irwin and his company were finally assembled on a railway siding outside Alexandria. They clamoured with pack and rifles into aging compartments that stank of goats and petrol. The doors were left ajar as the train rattled its way towards the teeming flats of the Nile. The journey to Cairo that followed was slow, hot and tiring.

  Roy looked through the narrow slit of light of the doorway. He saw acre after acre of fields, a brilliant emerald green bearing all the harvest of Egypt. Never before had he seen so much land under crop, not even on the best lands of Australia. Back home, cockies scratched a living from the arid soil, knowing drought or flood could bring ruin to their labours. Here the very landscape proclaimed its bounty, the rich black earth replenished every year with the flooding of Nile delta.

  The train that carried the first division towards Cairo embodied the paradox of Egypt. The engine was British, its steaming black boilers forged in a busy Manchester workshop, but the carriages that lurched and swayed on it were French, German and Belgian in origin. Indeed this train was unlike any that traversed the tracks of Europe: its quaint crowded carriages were painted in the same royal blues and ochre reds that dressed the tombs of ancient Egypt; many of the windows (the glass long since broken) had been replaced with the ornate wooden grilles seen in splendid mosques and Cairo cafés; alongside the sharp engineered lines of twentieth-century technology lay the sacred craft of artist and wood-turners. The train, like Egypt itself, was unsure of its identity, modern and ancient, European in construction but Eastern in appearance, a mixture of styles, purposes and intentions. It was a train that carried travellers from the continent to Egyptian ruins financed, for the most part, by borrowed English money. And its timetable was almost as variable.

  Lt Irwin and his company had been crowded into the second last carriage. It was probably the worst to travel in. It jolted with every distant tug of the engine. Soot and dust made the air taste of charcoal.

  The nurses, by contrast, travelled with senior army officers. Just as nothing could match the squalor and poverty of the East, so too few places could rival its opulence. Elsie sank back in the deep red leather of her seat. The clink of glasses echoed around her as orderlies, dressed in gleaming white, served lemonade and gin and pastries. The movement of the train, the heat of the day, the rarefied atmosphere of luxury and privilege, all lulled her to sleep. By the time she began to stir they were nearing the outskirts of Cairo. Elsie awoke with a secretive smile on her lips, remembering Roy’s impulsive pledge to ‘treat them both to tea’ at Groppi’s.

  ***

  Sister Elsie Forrest came to her senses as the first stretcher case hurried through the surgery door. There were a hundred more waiting behind it. The ward was noisy with cries and commotion.

  ‘For God’s sake, Sister,’ the matron ordered as she hurried past, ‘I told you to get some rest. Now you’re here, help prepare this man for surgery.’

  Elsie looked down and knew at once they would probably lose him.

  Four

  All Things Undying

  a blaze of pink and red burning the distant mountain tops...

  Leslie Fraser Standish Hore, ‘The Bacchant tolls the knell of parting day’, World War I Sketches, November 1915.

  Anzac Cove, 1919

  Some places are like a magnet. They beckon you, hold you – a promise longing to be fulfilled, a secret love, an unfinished dream. For me Anzac is all those things. Despite its terror, despite its tragedy. Or perhaps because of that. Gallipoli has become a memory that feeds upon itself, a part of me I had to return to.

  We arrive at Hammond’s camp early in the afternoon. I leave the main party almost immediately with the intention of setting off alone across the ridges. But Vickers and Lambert quickly insist on joining me.

  ‘Not wise to travel alone in these parts, Charley.’

  None of us can leave the landscape waiting.

  ‘Real
ly, Lambert, whatever are you wearing today?’ Hammond calls after us as we ride from the camp. With pointed beard, Light Horse rig-out, slouch hat, scarf and spurs, Lambert looks like a cross between a cavalier and an Anzac. Only a man as large in life as George Lambert could wear such an outfit. And the old reprobate knew it.

  ‘Had to dress for the occasion, me boy...’ Lambert pushes his hat to one side and waves a dramatic farewell to Hammond, ‘Have to look the part you know.’

  But by far the most wondrous sight lies ahead. The corrugated terrain of Anzac stretches out before us. A winding track rises steadily along the old frontline. Set square in no-man’s-land, it faithfully follows the contours of collapsing trenches. I feel a queer excitement as we skirt Steele’s, Courtney’s and Quinn’s, hottest places of the Anzac line, still bristling with barbed wire and still gazing sternly across at the enemy. Just a few years before, men could not even crawl at night in safety. Now the whole epic beauty of the ridges rolls out all around us. We dismount as the track narrows. A stiff breeze blows in my face and soil clings to my boots. Walking the ground of war is brisk, tense, exhilarating.

  Down to our right, Suvla Bay curls like a crescent moon around the coastline. I can just make out the line of the main sap stretching from Walker’s Ridge in the south to outposts on the Anzac perimeter. I remember Maori soldiers digging that great trench through the heat of summer, men who would be warriors reduced to a sweating, toiling army of navvies. A storm cloud rolls in ominously across the water.

  ‘It’s going to pour, Charley.’ Vickers sounds more alarmed than usual. ‘Don’t you think we ought to get back?’

  It’s Lambert who yells back at the wind. ‘No, let’s risk it.’

  Risk still comes naturally to Anzac. The three of us plunge down the gully to the beaches. Our horses sway and slip in the mud. Several times Lambert almost loses his hold, regaining the saddle by only the narrowest of margins. Every jolting step brings forth a memory. I can almost see the mules that once plied this track, with writhing, moaning cargo perched upon them; soldiers shot to pieces in the hills above them, the strongest of men crying out for their mothers. I remember laying those bundles to rest in the little graveyard we are passing. Sleeting rain lashes the neat circles of stone. Water pours across our path. It’s as if God himself is weeping.