Solomon's Song (68 page)

Ben tries to sleep himself but cannot and he takes out a writing pad and pencil and starts to write to Victoria.

My dearest sister Victoria,

I am writing to you from a German blockhouse we have captured near a village called Pozieres. You will no doubt read about it in the weeks to come as it is the first major offensive the 1st Division has undertaken in France. The whys and wherefores are not important. What is, is that I feel sure that I won’t be coming home to you. That this is the end. The Germans have us pinned down and there is no getting out.

Curiously, it is also the end of a long story because Joshua Solomon is with me, the two of us in the same battle. But, as I write this, he cowers in a corner whimpering to himself. The poor fool cannot, I believe, help himself. What is happening to us all is well beyond cowardice. You do not call a man a coward for being afraid to go over the top when the whistle blows, be he a company commander or a private. He has seen all his mates killed and then all his new pals killed, and, then, because the idea of friendship becomes impossible, mateship now too awful to contemplate, the replacements are received as blank-eyed strangers, who come at night to huddle beside you in the trenches. These are no longer seen as men, only as numbers in a well-thinned roll call after each skirmish into enemy lines. New recruits are no longer seen as whole, but become assorted parts, eyes, skulls, arms, legs, torsos, scraps of unidentified meat. They simply become flesh new-opened, gaping, bloody stumps where once strong arms held their sweethearts close or firm-muscled legs kicked a football and ran shouting urgent instructions across a flat green paddock under a blue sky.

The men who sit huddled in the dust and carnage beside you in the trench become torsos cut off at the waist, like open-mouthed fairground clowns. Heads lolling with fatigue on your shoulder are in your mind already disembodied, tomorrow’s ‘dirty melons’ you are sent out to gather from the mud after each attack. Only the rats are real, they waddle like fat butchers at a meat market and choose the choicest human parts, the intestines, the haggis of hate.

My dearest sister, I do not expect to return from here. The German artillery has us trapped and it has continued now all day and I daresay will do so all night. It is not too hard to understand why our cousin Joshua cowers in a dark corner sucking at an empty bottle of whisky, which he won’t relinquish.

It is to drown the noise, the booming, cutting, whining, whooshing, whistling, exploding, blunt and bloody, never-ending noise that goes into the senseless slaughter of good and honest men.

And so the male line of our two families will die, here in a charnel field in France. All the hate, all the fierce endeavour, all the malicious greed, come to an end.

Now I want you to do something for me. Kiss Hawk, tell him I love him, and always have. Of all the men I have met in my short life he has always shown me that to be fair and just and honest is the way of a true man. I often think how men fight to put themselves first but he always put himself in the second place. Great-Grandma Mary once told me as a small child how he loved our grandfather Tommo above all sensibility and would have gladly laid down his life for him.

Alas, he has not got the right complexion to blush as you read this to him, but there is no longer need to hide my feelings. You say in your last letter that he grows frail, his huge shoulders stooped, his hands crooked with arthritis, his eyes, his great dark eyes, grown rheumy, but his mind still clear and clean to the intellect. I shall not see him out, I shall not be there to stand by his grave and weep for him. But you will do it for me. Never was there a man I loved as much. Never was there a man who was better at being a member of the human race. In those moments when I have been overcome with despair, and there have been many such as the one I face at this very moment, I ask myself, ‘What would Grandfather Hawk do?’ and always it becomes clear, he would do the right thing by his mates, by his fellow human beings. I must do the same. My dear Grandfather, if I should die, as I think I shall, I can say only this, you have given me the strength to die with dignity. No better man than you ever lived.

And you, my dearest, I love and cherish you to the last moment of my life. Be brave and good and strong. I thank you and love you with every breath in my body for what you have been to me.

And then there is Sarah, my beloved Sarah. Will you give her half of my inheritance and take care of her when she returns? Treat her as if she was my wife, for I have loved her with my body and my mind is filled with her presence every day. No man could want more than she has given me. Love her, Victoria, as you love me.

And now it is goodbye to the three of you.

I love you all, with all of my heart. Death cannot change that.

Ben.

Ben has barely completed the letter when Partridge comes up to him. ‘The C.O.’s gorn walkabout, mate.’

Ben doesn’t understand at first. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘He’s ripped off his gear and gorn, tin hat and revolver, screaming like a banshee, told you the bastard wasn’t worth bringing.’

‘You didn’t stop him?’ Ben asks.

‘Stop him, three of us tried, he’s gorn mad, he just knocked us aside, next thing he was out the entrance.’

Folding the letter, Ben finds an envelope and addresses it. He places the letter in the envelope and seals it. Then he puts it in his kit. ‘Partridge, you’re a useless bastard, but promise me one thing.’ Ben points to his kit. ‘Inside are two letters, one is addressed to my sister in Tasmania, the other to my fiancee, if you get out of here you see they get them. Tell my sister I said to give you a hundred quid.’ Ben grabs up his pad and writes.

Victoria,

Pay this bastard Partridge a hundred pounds when he delivers my letter.

Ben Teekleman.

‘There you go.’ He hands the note to Partridge.

‘Hey, wait a moment, Sergeant-Major, you’re not going after him, he’s gorn mad, he’s a flamin’ looney!’

‘It’s a long story,’ Ben says and, taking up his Maori fighting axe, he starts for the entrance. There is a brief lull in the bombardment and he turns to the men. ‘There’s just a chance the Germans will stop in the early hours of the morning and we’ll try to beat a retreat. If it does, get out of here and make for our lines, it’s your only hope, lads, take it, don’t stay here.’

Ben walks into the open, it is now around ten o’clock at night with the German bombardment lighting up the battlefield in huge flashes as the heavy shells land, sending up towering pillars of dust that catch the light. It is like a scene from hell and he looks to where his trench was before they made it across to the blockhouse. There is nothing to be seen except craters, the lads who stayed are almost certainly dead.

Ben is not concerned about machine guns, there is too much dust. He hopes only to find Joshua cowering somewhere. He doesn’t know why he’s gone after him, something simply tells him he must. That if he doesn’t he will be dishonouring himself, Victoria, Hawk. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But by now nothing does any more. Somehow, something is coming to an end, something dark and ugly and too long in his blood.

A shell explodes about fifty yards ahead of him, lighting up the whole area, cutting through the dust, and then he sees Joshua. He is naked, walking towards the village of Pozieres. He has crossed a section of trenches where the German front line stood, now pounded into nothing. Where men a few hours before crouched and hoped, there are only craters and death and the rats scurrying everywhere.

Ben starts to run towards Joshua. Stumbling, he falls and feels his face scrape against the dirt, losing his tin hat. He doesn’t try to find it but rises and continues running. Joshua has disappeared into the darkness. But another shell lands and lights him up again. His nude body wearing only the tin hat seems enlarged, bigger than the landscape itself. His nudity is somehow vision like, as though he is an angel who has come among them, or is man, naked, pleading, asking for the carnage to end, for a new beginning, a new start. Adam looking on the battlefield for Eve.

Ben keeps running, his breath beginning to hurt in his chest. He realises that he is very tired but he moves forward. Another shell bursts and he sees Joshua. This time he is standing in a shell crater and is up to his waist in dirty water. At last Ben comes upon him. Joshua has his revolver and he is firing repeatedly at the body of a dead German strung up on a roll of barbed wire. The German is long dead, his body rotting. An arm falls off and rolls down the side of the crater into the water, and still Joshua fires.

Ben runs into the crater and, taking Joshua’s hand, he pulls him out of the hole. Joshua screams as though in pain. On the bank Joshua clutches at his ankle, crying like a small child and Ben, using his torch, sees that his ankle is broken. He lifts him across his shoulder, not quite sure where he finds the strength. Then he begins to carry him across no-man’s-land.

Ben carries Joshua for fifty yards and then rests and picks him up again and carries him a little further. Twice a machine gun opens up and he can hear the bullets as they strike the ground near him. Still he continues, resting and carrying. It takes him nearly an hour to cover the six hundred yards. A pistol is fired from the direction of the village, from the Allied lines. He can see men starting to run towards him, his own people. The light seems to hang in the sky forever, bright silver light, sharp, clean, and beautiful. He thinks of Sarah, her body touching his, making love, the soft whimpering sounds she makes and then a sudden lull in the bombardment and into it a single cracking sound, like a twig breaking, as the sniper’s bullet hits him. Ben feels himself sinking, melting with the weight of Joshua’s body. And he hears Sarah sighing, he is caressing her cheek with the back of his fingers and she looks at him and sighs, ‘I love you, Ben, more than my life,’ then the darkness comes. Joshua Solomon is mad. Ben Teekleman is dead. The story is ended.