If Then (20 page)

Father Huxley mutters prayers over the dead and ministers to a yeoman whose chest has been crushed by shrapnel. Blore attends to the dressing; the heart is exposed and glistens in the dark. Without stretchers to take the men down to the beach, the doctor decided to treat minor injuries there and then. For a bad head case, two bearers lock hands so as to carry the wounded man between them back down the ridge.

On his haunches, Huxley takes a sip of water. He has dark close-cropped hair and a moustache that is losing its definition.

“How is your faith, Father?” asks Hector.

Huxley picks a sprig of wild thyme then rubs it between his finger tips to release its scented oil.

“You are a pacifist, sergeant,” says Huxley. “Another Quaker. Like Collinson.”

“I study all religions.”

Huxley reaches out in the dark and puts his hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

“Your ambition in studying all the religions of the world is laudable. But there is enough in Christianity to satisfy one lifetime. It contains surprising subtleties.”

“Do you have an example?”

“Right now I would rather be handling a machine gun.”

“You can’t be a priest and kill a man.”

“Killing might make me
more
of a priest. Because then I would share the burden of the men in its entirety. You see, subtleties.”

They duck down into the hollow. The Turks have fallen back to a position further along the ridge. They should be able to reach the site without crossing enemy lines.

The clouds shed their gilded edge and spread in dark tatters over the high land. With Collinson leading the way, the five men leave the trench and set off through the gullies. This mad country. The scent of blooms, smoke, sage and opened corpses. Sometimes the breeze carries a memory of the Sussex Downs and it’s as if James is sneaking back through his past, the landscape of his life passing underfoot. The squad slows as Collinson checks his bearings. Hector is wary, on the lookout for the sniper.

“How far now?” asks Blore.

Collinson paces out in a circle, searching the earth for the deeper darkness of a hole, pushing aside thorny branches and testing the solidity of the ground with the heel of his boot. The soft patter of a soot fall. Collinson takes a stick from the ground and works it into the earth between adjacent rock ledges. The earth falls easily away.

“Here,” he says. “It’s like a big rabbit hole.”

Boots first, he pushes his way into the earth, then works his entire body into the hole, until just his glasses glint back at them.

“I’ve found it.”

Blore scrabbles ahead of the stretcher bearers to join Collinson down in the hole.

“What is it? What have they found?” asks Hector. “Is it a Turkish trench?”

James gets down onto his knees, unclips his Orilux torch from his belt and trains the beam down into the hole. It is much deeper than a trench and already the others have disappeared from view.

“You go,” says Hector. “I’ll keep watch.”

The impact of a shell has cleared a top layer of hard grey chalk from the stone slabs of a tomb. A very large tomb. James slips down through the loam, white tubers feeling at his face. The earth is cool and moist. His boots find open space and then in one clumsy movement he slides underground.

The doctor and the priest move through a chamber containing a dozen or more stone sarcophagi.

“This is the land of Troy and Helen, Alexander the Great and Xerxes,” says Huxley. “This is a Greek necropolis of the greatest antiquity.”

Torch lights waver according to each man’s curiosity. The tomb had been constructed with great precision; smaller chambers, sepulchres about two yards long and wide, and about one and a half yards high, lead off from this central necropolis. Huxley and Blore dig out the grouting under a lid. Stone grinds against stone, and then the grave is open, revealing a long skeleton.

Blore’s torch shines through the dark eyeholes of the skull.

“Careful. If you touch it, it will turn to dust,” says Huxley.

“Look at the wounds.” Blore points to a tiny round section, no larger than a child’s fingertip, cut out of the back of the skull.

“Trepanning?”

“Possibly. The bones are thick and long. This man must have been nearly seven foot tall.”

“A warrior.”

“Or a sick man.” Blore blows away the dust and soil that have fallen in through a crack in the lid. “The skull is malformed, almost bulbous at the back. There is a pattern of trepanning here although the holes are much smaller than I’ve seen before, almost needle pricks through the bone.”

The skull is grooved and ridged, the colour of sandstone, with patches of dark earth here and there. Seen close-up, it looks like a map of the surrounding terrain; the top of the jawbone resembles the stag beetle horns of the bay.

“Were these markings part of a funeral ceremony?” asks James.

“There is regenerative scarring all along the incisions. Whoever this was, they were alive when the procedure was performed.”

Blore pauses.

“I am familiar with this place, and these procedures.” His hands tremor over the skull. “The cold air, these wounds, I remember them in my fingertips.”

On his hands and knees, Huxley explores an adjacent tomb. His torch light reveals two enormous urns, one cracked open, and inside, two skeletons laid side by side.

“Man and wife?” asks Blore. “Lovers?”

“Each skeleton has only one arm,” notices James.

He shines his torch upon the curved clay surface of the closed urn, hoping for a crack or gap; he imagines the skeletons of man and wife entwined, and then, over time, bones falling from one body into another, a rib shared, a thigh bone tumbling into the lover, dust passing from lip to lip. It is stupid to dwell on death, he knows that, but the entwined skeletons have blindsided him with love. Ruth. Love is an element like air or water, you inhabit it, become accustomed to it, but notice sharply when it is gone. How much has he been hiding from himself in order to survive this war? How much has he forgotten? He remembers Ruth sewing by lantern light, the
rat-a-tat-tat
of the needle as she worked the crank. He sorted through photographs in search of one to take with him; and then, walking out through the town and over the Downs, toward Newhaven and the transport that would take him to war.

The sound of distant cannon fire from Mount Caburn. He had walked with Hector through Firle. The blacksmith spoke of the transformation of Newhaven. Industrial slag heaps, he said, filled up the dock and there were massive explosions day and night; quarrying, the whole coastline blown up and reshaped. On the road into Newhaven, the houses were all empty, the population evicted or fled. The streets along which he had driven the people out. In another life. The armour. The implant. The skulls belong to the dead inmates of the Institute, the victims of recreational brain surgery.

James sways. The doctor steadies him.

“What is it?”

“I just had the most violent impression.”

The doctor grips him close.

“Me also. The others do not seem to be affected. Gather yourself. A moment’s vertigo, and all will be lost.”

“We must transport these relics to safety,” says Huxley.

“And how are we to do that?” whispers Collinson.

“We will return with a fatigue party, some mules and a wagon, and carry the urns across the ridge.”

Even to men of intellect, Huxley’s plan appears idealistic.

“We should just cover up the tomb and return to the beach,” says Collinson.

“This is a vital archaeological site,” says Huxley.

“We can’t excavate it under fire. Would you have the stretcher bearers carrying bones and dust to the CCS when there are wounded men out there?”

“When the line advances we will return,” says Collinson.

Huxley will not be persuaded.

“The necropolis will quickly decay if exposed to air. Every hour is vital if these relics are to be preserved.”

“You are forgetting that we are at war,” says Collinson.

“The war is temporary. These bodies, this site, are a forgotten aspect of eternity. We are all here to serve a higher cause. What greater cause could there be than the connection between us and this deep antiquity?”

James feels faint and weak. The vertigo. The terrifying distance between himself and the world as it is. He cannot bring himself to look at the skulls again, or even at the other men. He cannot even lift his head. It is as if a great invisible claw has closed over him, holding him tight.

“It’s just another grave,” he says. “Ancient past.”

“The past is knowledge,” insists Huxley.

“It’s knowledge of death, of which we have plenty.”

Blore shivers in the dark tomb.

“I have the overwhelming feeling that I just lost another patient,” says the doctor.

Huxley returns to the tall skeleton with the malformed skull. He bends over the grave, reaches into the red soil, and brings out a clay urn of the same design as the large urns in the antechamber. This smaller urn is about a foot long. He swaddles the urn in a blanket.

“We are near to the ancient city of Eleonte. These skeletons could be the remains of sacrificial victims. The daughters of Demophon and Mastusius.”

Gently, Huxley puts the urn into his backpack.

“Sacrifice of the innocents. Fertilizing the earth with the blood of our most precious possession: the young. It is an ancient rite we are compelled to perform.”

The men record what they can of the necropolis, and then claw their way up into the dawn. Scrabbling back out of the bowels of the earth, James thinks again of the violent impression the chamber had given him; of trenches cut into the Sussex Downs, armoured giants stalking the narrow streets of Lewes, and the malformed men and women who inhabited the Institute in the country. A madness, all of it, brought on by his faint. The doctor was right. A moment of vertigo and all would be lost.

16

A
nother landing
. A star shell drifts over the dark waters of the bay. Soldiers wade through the shallow waves, kicking up foam and moonlit phosphorescence. Army boots make no sound on sand. The men advance across the beach without footfall.

After an hour and a half of dreamless, blanketless sleep, James wakes. He uses a half-gill of water for a shave, and waits for the tea-dixie to come up. Next to him in the dugout, raindrops quiver upon Jordison’s broad face. The Lancastrian is of yeoman stock, with a wide jawbone, sandy-straight hair and a broad trunk; when he withdraws his head into the collar of his greatcoat, the flesh under his chin concertinas neatly. Above the shaving line, his upper cheek is fringed with down; below the shaving line, the patchy beginnings of a tawny beard. His young face shows the contours of the old man to come.

The aura of the star shell reveals dark mounds in the silver sand, some sleeping, some dead.

Using the shovel as a bier, Jordison and James drag bodies into a pile. It’s more of a clearance than a burial, the work of the Divisional Sanitary Officer and not fit for the stretcher bearers of the 32nd Field Ambulance. But there is no sign of a sanitary officer. In the landing, military planning has become as improvised and fragile as the spider’s webs hanging in the scrub, newly-woven and quivering with dew.

Jordison whispers prayers. Behind every pull and heft of the shovel, sand spills back into place.

James doesn’t remember any prayers, so he asks Jordison if he has any family.

The Lancastrian shivers and withdraws his wide face deeper into his coat. Some of the men show a reluctance to speak. Part of it is exhaustion. Part of it is lack of water. But there is something else behind their silence. Shock. Superstition.

“I have Ruth,” says James. “No one else. Do you have a wife?”

“My wife works in my place in the mill,” says Jordison. His voice is hoarse, his thoughts slow to stir. “And three children too. We had ’em soon as we married, and a bit before. One after the other, Irish triplets. When I enlisted, she said she’d be glad to see the back of me.”

“I didn’t talk to Ruth about enlisting. We both knew I had to go. It was the thing I least wanted to do, you see.”

Along the beach, Hector rouses the rest of the men from their hoggish snoring. It is the middle of the night. It will always be the middle of the night. With his spade, Jordison turns over the severed head of a Gurkha, the face pushed clean off. The yeoman lets out an involuntary groan of pity and lament.

“This poor sod. This poor, bloody sod.”

It is not quite four in the morning. They do not dwell on the details of their work. The stretcher bearers shovel thistle-clutched topsoil onto the burial mound. Crickets abrade their hind legs and share data.

“You don’t have any children?” asks Jordison.

“No,” says James.

“I worry the war’ll still be going on when my lads are of age. Why would it stop? If this is what the bosses wanted, then they’ll only want more of it.”

“There will come a point when the sacrifice becomes too great.”

That was the phrase Edith Von Pallandt had used when her son enlisted: “In the spirit of splendid sacrifice.” At the garden party in Lewes, the consensus had been that civilization was stuck, and progress had failed. Bad blood in the body politic. The death instinct was abroad within civilization, the careless desire to sweep away the world that frustrates us.

His memories from before the war are hazy. There is only the long now. From the hills comes the sound of renewed fighting. He puts his heel onto the shovel edge and forces it downward.

A boot with a shin bone jutting out of it. Jordison leans over, hoists the bone up with the shovel, plants it deep in the earth, and pats the soil true. The gardener turning the earth over. In the necropolis, there was a skull stained with the resemblance of the battlefield: a notch on the jawbone that reminded him of the curved horns of the bay, and then following the curve of the bone, the shadows of hills leading to a rucked scarring in the surface of the bone, the high ridge. In the necropolis, he had a mystical experience, a violent impression of another realm beyond this one. Through the veil and all. The bodies mark the land and the land marks the bodies. The Von Pallandts would appreciate that. He cannot dwell upon it. A moment’s vertigo and all is lost.

“I wonder what will grow here afterward,” says James.

The yeoman pauses, foot on shovel, like a machine turned off, and does not look up at him.

“No different than before,” says Jordison, resuming digging.

“That is unimaginable.”

“That’s nature.”

The squadron fall in, grab their monkey boxes and stretchers. The canvas is stained with blood. They fill up their water bottles with brackish chlorinated water. With the arrival of 53rd division, the beach is as busy as Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday night. Sikhs drive light carts and lead mule trains carrying ammunition. Engineers work in the dust kicked up by marching men, threading telegraph wires across the sand. The trench contingents fall in, platoon after platoon with full packs, loaded for strength rather than speed. Bayonets unsheathed and dully gleaming in the moonlight, the soldiers set off across the plain, the stretcher bearers following a way behind. James is paired with Jordison. Hector moves between the stretcher squads from the different ambulances, keeping everyone in order. In the dark, it’s easy to lose your way.

A sea fret rolls in from the bay. With the fog at their back, the silhouettes of the squads will be visible to the snipers. Their stretcher bearer brassards will not. The platoons advance around the north end of the luminescent salt lake. The crack-crack of sniper fire. Ahead, from over the blue grassy dunes, come the agonies of wounded men, cries in every register and horribly particular to each man: plaintive, urgent, monstrous, whimpering. The voices come from rock and hollow: “Ambulance!” “Bearers!” “Stretcher bear-e-r-s!”

Sniper fire in open country is a disjointed nightmare. Bullets spark off the rocks. The strays, the ricochets, are not as deadly as a direct shot but still capable of giving you a nasty one. A bullet passes under his chin, and then veers vertically upward like an enormous dragonfly. He senses men running close by. He ducks and dives. Another bullet passes half a yard overhead and seems to loop around their position in a whirring arc. Out of the continuous roll of sniper fire, echoing down from the high ground and across the plain, one particular rifle can be discerned; its action is neat with a note of suction, like a boot lifted from mud.

Five yards or so to the right, an unmoving figure, another pale face in the earth: Hector. James sighs. He should call to the sergeant, but what if he does not answer?

Again the distinctive sucking vacuum of the rifle. Distance and direction is hard to judge. The acoustics in this place are disorientating, and sometimes sound and vision do not marry.

Slowly, Hector’s boot turns over and then finds purchase, and, quick as a mountain cat, the stretcher bearer skids over to James’ position.

“Do you hear that rifle? It’s him again,” he says. “The sniper from the ridge.”

“Maybe it’s just the same type of rifle.”

“It’s him again and he’s hunting us.”

“Do you see him?”

Within the grey mist of the ridge, muzzle flashes crackle in a haphazard line from left to right; inland the scrub is denser, and here and there, a shot flickers out from the bushes. Bullets thud dully into the earth around them. Hector clutches his metal helmet with both hands.

“Come on!” he shouts, though he himself does not move.

The sniper finds his range. A bush on their flank stirs. And then, in response, comes the thorax-shaking lazy thud of a machine gun, shredding the thorn bushes. The sound of gunfire deepens as it judders slower and slower. The smell of thyme becomes so sharp, so quickly, it’s as if his senses have gained mastery over time and space. In between each bullet, he hears the hellish whispers of war: the tear of shirt fabric, the final parting of parched lips, the infinitesimal sound of blood filling up pores in the soil. He hears shouting. He is shouting. And when the machine gun stops, and the flecks of sage and thyme float out from the havoc, James slaps Hector on the back. That’s all it takes. The two men rise up.

The line advances around the dried-up salt lake. On Saturday, the Inniskillings were massacred here, and a few of their dead are still standing, thigh deep, in the sludge. Eviscerated by shrapnel, one silhouette stands with arms akimbo, head back, legs stoutly fixed. The Turk had sunk landmines under the curling hexagonal tiles of the plain, and when the regimental stretcher bearers went to retrieve their wounded, heavy gouty blowouts of wet mud and crust sent pieces of them and their kit wheeling through the air. Working his way through the marsh, James tries to comprehend the suffering of the wounded men still out there on the salt flats. As a pure sensation, that wealth of pain would exceed the capacity of the organism to experience it, surely. Accordingly, language is imprecise. Could a numeric quantity be ascribed to suffering, per Collinson’s equations of war? Yes, there would have to be a number for this quantity of pain, a sum that, once calculated, would prove that this battle was not chaotic but had in fact been meticulously planned to produce the greatest amount of suffering.

East of the lake is a lower curved ridge they call Scimitar Hill, four miles from the shore and the object of the advance. First there is a riddle of trenches upon Chocolate Hill on the foothills of the Tekke Tepe, a nine hundred foot massif, a displaced piece of the earth’s crust, thrust out of the underworld. He thinks again of the skull in the necropolis; if the pattern on the skull and around the trepanned section was a map of the battle, then the surface of the brain is a system of entrenchments: the way the cortex folds in upon itself, forming trenches and gullies, creates the greatest possible surface area. By increasing the size and complexity of the surface area of the brain, the volume of suffering it can apprehend, calculate and cause also increases.

Soldiers drift back from the firing line. They were ordered to advance but not to engage, or so it seemed. The wording was imprecise. By eight in the morning, the advance upon the ridge is routed. The line falls back to Chocolate Hill. The ambulance dress the walking wounded and send them on their way. Collinson and Brilliant trot back with a bad case on the stretcher, the right side of his face shot away, lashing blood out of his wound as he sings madly of Tipperary. Among their ranks are men whose nerve failed, ragged raw troops with self-inflicted wounds. Jordison wants to stop and pick up a leg case but James says no, not yet.

“What are you looking for?” asks the yeoman.

“Greater suffering,” says James.

How does he decide whom to save? By the severity of the wound, of course. It stands to reason that the further the bearers advance into the battle, the greater the suffering they will encounter. In place of orders, of which there are none, he must reason it out himself. If this, then that. He climbs out of the gully to let the stretcher parties pass along the line of evacuation, one after the other, shuttling through the dark, working the disassembly line. Blore supervises an advanced dressing station at the cut of the salt lake. James and Jordison answer the haunting calls, find the wounded men, treat them, then carry them to the doctor. For some carries, there are no stretchers available. Jordison hoists up a big Irishman with a shattered foot, braces the man’s weight on his hip bones, trying for a hold somewhere between pick-a-back and fireman’s lift. The Irishman’s arms dangle loosely over Jordison’s chest as he staggers across the field. James works rifles through the sleeves of an overcoat to form an improvised sling that they use to carry a young grey-skinned lad, a bad dysentery case, crying and apologizing. I am not wounded, he says, just weak. The soil tips out of his body.

The stretcher bearers move further into the battle, toward Chocolate Hill, a steep-sided charred molehill and gateway to the Tekke Tepe. They find men who have been wounded for twelve hours or more. With a pair of scissors, James cuts away the flesh of a gangrenous arm wound and the man does not flinch. The nerves are dead. Without any water, the men’s tongues are black, a vile shrivelled black. Hard to believe, in some cases, that this was the body of a fighting man only two days previously. The morning’s advance pushed back the Turkish snipers, freeing the men who had been pinned down without food or water under a remorseless sun, eating grass to fill their bellies. They stumble out from cover, gaunt as the living dead, their uniforms in tatters, their faces long with suffering. Some men cannot speak for thirst and they shiver and shake with sniper madness. For these hollow men, Jordison allocates a sip from his medical water bottle, and when that runs dry, he shares a draught from his own supply. Hector puts a stop to that. The stretcher bearers will need their strength to sort the living from the dead at Chocolate Hill.

The hillside is a shambles, a lunatic warren. His boots kick away water bottles, get tangled with khaki and blue Turkish tunics. James and Jordison climb up a path, only to find it stopped halfway up by a shelf of rock. They climb out, and, following the sounds of men, find another trench. Gear and limbs abandoned alike, and in the shallow trenches, corpses imprinted with the boot marks of fleeing soldiers. A squad of soldiers keep their rifles trained on the Turkish positions and will not answer their requests, even when Jordison screams at them.

“Private Jordison, these men are dead!” shouts James.

The stretcher bearers retrace their steps downhill in search of a path up. In a communication trench, an officer carrying an empty dixie raves at him.

“We’ve taken the hill, but we’re dying of thirst!”

“Where’s your aid post?” asks Jordison.

The officer shakes his head and pushes past them.

“We find a man here and head back,” says Jordison. They reach another trench. Both men sicken with the smell of it.

“This is a grave,” says James. “We can’t help anyone here.”