If Then (18 page)

James risks a look back: at the crest of the hillock, the sniper’s silhouette, taller than a man, with fronds and bullrushes fixed to his helmet, and branches jutting every way out of his uniform. James swears he sees the bushes on the flank advance toward him also. The land is not a neutral party in this war. The land has taken sides.

A rifle fires. The sound is different than standard musketry, hollower, and ends with a faint intake and hydraulic hiss. A bullet cracks through the air like a whiplash. James considers going foetal again. Another bullet whistles by and thuds dully, disappointedly, into the soil. Like hares ahead of the plough, the three men run, each in their own fashion; Hector with high knees and bladed palms; Jordison, burdened, flailing through waist-high thistles; and James, dodging, trying to devise as he runs the ideal pattern to follow if one is to avoid being shot, that is, the correct number of steps to take in a particular direction before veering off in another. A bullet sighs in his ear with unreciprocated adoration. In daylight they would be dead men, but the night spares them; Hector’s run banks sharp right, and he leads them into the shelter of the nullah, whooping joyfully as he disappears.

Thank God for the dark, thinks James. Thank God for that single disappeared star.

14

H
is feet sink
into the sand, his hands raw from carrying the stretcher, now abandoned somewhere up the ridge. Exhausted, he cannot even perform the calculation required to thread a shoelace. It is unspeakable that he takes another step. Yet he must. And he does. Stamina is his talent. Marriage, duty, forbearance, suffering: endurance is beautiful.

Dawn rises over the sea as it has risen since ancient times and will continue to rise long after this terrible war has ended.

Beside him, Jordison, head down, stumbles leftward across the grey beach, then rightward, then left again; even Hector, the mountain goat, is feeling the weight of the long night. Of the sniper nothing more has been seen but that is the way with snipers.

Jordison crumples untidily to the sand.

“What is the point of it all?” he cries.

It is the third time that Jordison has asked this question of them. James cannot muster the energy to respond. Hector is reduced to simple imperatives: shut up, come on, keep up, not far now – as if he were a father determined to lead recalcitrant children to a pleasant view.

James returns to help Jordison up. The Lancastrian is heavy with tiredness.

“I wish you had a gun, then you could shoot me in the hand and the two of you could carry me onto the hospital ship.”

“I have a knife. I could stab you in the hand. But it’s likely the wound would get infected. And then you would die. Probably on the hospital ship surrounded by other dying men.”

Jordison shakes his head. He’s gone deep inside himself and is questioning what he finds there.

“Why are we here? What does it mean?”

“There is no point in asking why. You can’t get to the bottom of the world through reason. We must use feeling.”

“I feel spent.”

“We all do. But I can’t leave you here and if you insist upon flopping to the ground like a sack of spuds then you put us all in danger. Get up. Get up and walk with me.”

James hauls the groaning Jordison to his feet. They walk together toward the beach. Silvery threads of first light on the grey and indigo waters of the bay, winding around the peaks of Imbros to the south west, and Samothrace to the north west. The naval guns resume and are answered by shells from the Turkish positions. Underfoot shimmers with distant impacts. The firing line is further inland than the day before. The battle is thinning out. The Turks were surprised and outmatched by the naval guns. Soon the Allies will gain the ridge. It is feasible that he may even get out of this alive.

“The world is so very beautiful.” James puts his arm around the bleary-faced Lancastrian. “Because it endures. Are you loved, Jordison? Do you love anyone?”

“You’ve gone mad, haven’t you?”

“I am determined to think only of love between here and the camp, and that will see us home. My wife is called Ruth. We were childhood sweethearts. I have long felt our union was a matter of destiny and that is why it endures; if it were one of chance, it would not be so beautiful.”

James’ strange sozzled talk amuses Sergeant Hector, eavesdropping from a few paces ahead. “You want to know why we are here. I will tell you. If we can love one person, Jordison, then we can find meaning in the universe. We must cultivate love if we are to address your questions of ‘why are we here?’ and ‘what does it all mean on the cosmic scale?’ That is to say, we must become cosmic lovers.”

“You’d tell me if you two have been on the rum, wouldn’t you?” Jordison asks his sergeant.

Hector, with sandy eyebrows, wafts flies from his lips.

“Private James, doesn’t cosmic love suggests its opposite of cosmic hate?”

James nods, “Our sergeant is a mystic. Theosophist, philosopher or gymnosopher – which are you, sergeant?”

“I believe in studying all the world’s religions.”

Hector’s dark eyes are alive to the prospect of mockery and he watches James carefully before continuing: “I don’t cleave to any one religion. They all stem from the same point. The same pattern. And are proceeding toward the same end.”

“Spoken like a true mystic. Tell me, sergeant, was your enlistment part of your search for knowledge? Did you secretly come here to improve yourself?”

“I enlisted to serve.”

“But not to serve your country.”

“You are tired, private.”

The conversation renders Jordison indignant.

“There is no knowledge to be gained in war. Nothing to be learned. Nothing good, anyway.” Tired and sullen, his broad face is smeared with red earth. “And if there was, whatever schooling we receive will soon be spread over the earth along with our arms and legs.”

To the wounded men on the beach, sunrise comes as a relief after a long cold night under the tarp. A hundred or so men have been laid down at the clearing station to join the hundred already lying there. Not all of them wake at dawn. The orderlies go along the lines and pull blankets over the faces of the dead. Emerging from a sandbagged dugout, the doctor puts his mug of tea up on a corrugated iron roof while he lights his morning pipe. The smell of strong tobacco covers the odour of corruption.

The three stretcher bearers sink dog-tired into dugouts. James falls asleep so quickly that his self-awareness is not entirely extinguished, and rises through the monstrous proportions of the dream landscape like a kite-tail. He dreams of love and the long carry, with him at one end and Ruth at the other, and between them an empty stretcher.

It is too hot to sleep for long. He wakes with the conviction that it’s a Sunday. And it is. Strange that it should feel like a Sunday here and now, with Jordison making tea on the primus stove and the naval guns clanging repeatedly; their racket combines with the heat of the sun to become an enormous oven door being repeatedly slammed shut. Yet it is undeniably a Sunday.

Hector moves among the men as he passes out the rum ration. He informs them that Father Huxley will lead mass in the gully while Canon McKenzie, for men of Protestant persuasion, will take a congregation through hymns and homilies from the shelter of a cove.

“Which will you attend, sergeant?”

“I am told the padre is a freethinker,” says Hector, slopping grog into James’ tin cup.

“Doesn’t the army require the opposite of freethinking?”

The young sergeant squints. He knows the older man is mocking – but what? Him?

“You are a Quaker, of course,” says James.

“By birth and education.”

“You’re a crank like the rest of us. You must have noticed the prevalence of cranks in the ambulance. We’ve been filed here.”

“We must serve. We must do our duty by our fellow man. And keep our true thoughts about King and Country to ourselves. Drink your rum, private.”

The rum softens the stiffness in his arms. He lies before the Aegean Sea and gazes out, beyond the rocking destroyers, with their puffer clouds of gunsmoke, to the mauve and jagged outline of Imbros. If the men do not take the higher ground, there will be nowhere for them to go but back into the sea. Pushing on should be a matter of some urgency; yet, along the beach, the army is inert. It mills. The men dig trenches, and squads march left then right, kicking up dust in their drudgery. The landing mixed up the regiments and they are continually resorting and unsorting themselves in an attempt to find order. The clanging oven door of the artillery makes it hard for the commanding officers to think straight. An excess of orders creates chaos and in response the landing is – if not becalmed – then directionless, almost indolent.

The religious service adds to the perverse normality of the Sunday morning. In shirtsleeves and pith helmets, the congregation squints against the sun and waft flies from their faces. The stretcher bearers sit at the back, the fighting men to the fore. Huxley, the priest, is a tall ascetic type in golden chasuble. He sets up a portable altar and sacred kit. His long, young face concentrates upon the ritual with a deliberate gentleness. His voice is not always audible above the ordinance. A high explosive shell lifts the lid momentarily upon the world, and then lets it fall noisily back into place. The padre swallows drily, his pronounced Adam’s apple dips, and then he continues his sermon, his tone stronger, his volume greater.

James gazes back along the curve of the bay in the direction of the explosion. Lighter craft continue to land, with soldiers sloshing through low tide. The silver sand is blotted with the black misshapes of the dead, human and animal. The clank of a cold beef bone in a tin cup. He retches.

The flies will grow fat on a diet of men. James cringes and baulks at the feel of them on his skin. Corruption clings to the hairs of their black and red legs like dew to grass. The flies will multiply. The flies will swarm out of a blazing hellhole to cool their feet upon the faces of the dead.

The padre does not speak of Hell. He studiously ignores it. Nor does he make much of Heaven. This congregation has not come to hear confirmation of a particular orthodoxy. Rather it is the wellspring of all religious feeling that they want. And what is the enlightenment that the men thirst for? He cannot say. Meaning? An answer to Jordison’s question about why they are there and why they must die? No. Such questions belong to the naivety of yesterday. Being together, in the gully, surrounded by the scented beach herbs, to know that one still belongs to life, that is it. Yes. To feel that one will not be forgotten.

He never believed in God, not even as a boy in the school hall when, eyes closed and hands pressed together in prayer, he longed to be transported up to another realm. When he peeked, the chilly school hall remained. The boys bleated the hymns then sat in tousled ranks, cross-legged and numb-arsed in short trousers, as the headmaster deployed scripture to explain what the boys could and could not do in the yard. His earliest memory is disbelief. He has simply never been able to believe a word of power’s cant. There is a possibility of God or some guiding agency in the universe (though not – in all likelihood – here, on this beach) but he has never felt it. All is expedient, utilitarian, accidental, sorted and unsorted according to love and hate. He could mount a defence of love as a sorting principle. Love could make a benign order out of this hell.

The padre dips his fingers in holy water. The congregation fidgets with thirst.

The service complete, the men fall out, shaking the sand from the seat of their trousers. Sergeant Hector goes over to the padre as he gathers up the altar, and shares his spiritual concerns. James, godless, takes out his pen and paper and writes a letter to Ruth concerning his theory of the cosmic lovers.

He writes: “You and I are the alpha and omega at opposite ends of the universe and we come together in the generative force of consummation. I will have a pair of rings made for us, the Greek symbols for Alpha and Omega in gold and silver.”

His whimsy is auntish. Unserious. Should he, then, write about the bodies that he lay down under the tarps? With their covering of skin and flesh overturned in the same way that a shell overturns the earth?

The wounded men do not get the help they expect, and in their eyes, a blankness that will, in the coming weeks, spread from face to face; their expectations must be recalibrated to harmonize what lies within with what lies without. The result is madness, of course. The madness that proceeds from the logic of war. No, he will not write about what it feels like to put your foot through a dead man’s rib cage and to hear the trapped air expire:
wffffffftt
.

In the letter, he suggests that they must go blackberry picking upon his return, and, if he is back after first frost, to gather the sloes from the chalk pit in Wilmington. He hopes Ruth will catch the allusion to the afternoon they made love at the foot of the Long Man on Windover Hill. They had been reading about fertility rites, ‘Spirits of the Corn and The Wild’ from
The Golden Bough
. The blasphemy of his bare white arse in the sunlight. The way she did not immediately gather herself once the act was done but lay there, splayed and smiling, for a wanton minute. The straw flattened and shaped by Ruth. At night all my troubles come to me but I have learnt to drive them away with thoughts of you, dear Ruth. Remember me. Preserve me in your thoughts.

Flies cluster at the nib of his pen, interrupting the thought. Arguing with it. He swats them away, dabs the blot they have caused, and tries to pick up the thread of cosmic love.

He is interrupted by Collinson, the professor, with his round eyeglasses and boyish enthusiasm for theories and ideas. Another Quaker. The youngest of seven children. All the firstborns go to the firing line, and all the lastborns hang back. Collinson is not much older than James but he has a tendency to be didactic and would be something of a bore if his ideas weren’t so cranky.

“This battle is not right. We should not be stuck here like this.” Collinson sits next to James.

“Don’t you think this landing is very odd? I’ve been observing the men. And our orders. We are not behaving as men ought to behave in the condition of battle.”

“How ought we to behave?”

Collinson’s blond hair is thin around the crown in contrast to his thick dark eyebrows. He squints at James through his round wireframe spectacles.

“You must have noticed the peculiarities.”

“It’s all peculiar, Collinson. It’s war.”

“If it’s war, then why are we lying on a beach? The battle should have more impetus than this. More forward momentum. It should not be inert.”

“What would you suggest?”

“We are here to secure the high ground. That was the entire purpose of the landing. And yet we have dug in positions on the beach. It goes against the logic of our orders.”

Hector, lost in spiritual matters, wanders by. Collinson stops him.

“Don’t you think, sergeant, that there is something odd about our situation? We sail halfway around the world, to land upon a foreign land at great cost, only to
lounge
.”

Collinson gestures at the men who are undressing at the water’s edge.

“There! The perfect proof of my argument. Here we are at war and those men are bathing as if they are at Brighton beach. If this were a normal conflict, then our general would be here among us, driving us forward, filling the men with the will to fight, not hiding on the
HMS Jonquil
with a dodgy knee. Here, I have made the calculation.”