White Feathers (9 page)

Joseph shrugged off the compliment. ‘So what do you think of it all?’

James’s reply was delayed while they shuffled out of the way of an Australian stretcher party coming back from Quinn’s Post. When the bearers had squeezed past he said simply, ‘It’s a cock-up, Joseph. A complete fucking cock-up.’

Joseph was surprised at the barely suppressed anger in his brother’s voice. James, the career soldier, had always held the military in the highest regard.

‘We’re sitting here like a pack of idiots,’ James continued vehemently, ‘not going forwards, can’t go backwards, half of us are shitting ourselves to death and the other half don’t give a stuff any more, and what’re Godley and bloody Hamilton doing? Playing silly bloody games with attack timetables that are doomed to failure before the whistle even blows! The only one with any brains is Malone, and they won’t give him the time of day!’ He rubbed a grimy hand across his eyes and sighed. ‘Oh, look, I’m sorry, mate. I’m just knackered. Take no notice.’

‘She’s right,’ said Joseph easily. ‘My lot have just about had enough as well. Have you heard from Mam lately?’

‘Yep. Got a letter a few weeks ago, plus some photographs of Duncan, my son. He was born in February and he looks a real little trooper,’ he said proudly. ‘Oh, but you probably know all that
already. They all seem to be all right at home. What about you?’

‘I’ve had a couple. Mam said your boy’s a real little champion. Congratulations. And Keely and Erin are in Egypt now?’

‘So Mam says. They’ve got guts, those two.’

Joseph nodded. ‘Is your mate Ron Tarrant here? This would be right up his alley, wouldn’t it? Glorious charges over the top and all that?’

‘No, he’s not, actually. He got an offer just before we left Egypt to do some sort of extra training with the Australians, so I expect he’ll turn up soon. I think he was a bit miffed about not coming with the division but it was an order, apparently.’

Joseph asked, ‘Is what they’re saying about a push for Chunuk Bair true, do you know?’

‘Well, you know, I’m only a lowly lieutenant,’ James replied sarcastically, ‘but yes, something’s in the wind. We’ve heard Hamilton’s got this idea about taking Chunuk Bair, Hill Q and Hill 971 in one massive push at the beginning of next month — that’s why we’ve got these reinforcements coming in — and I suspect it’ll start from up your end, too, although I hear there’s to be diversionary attacks at the same time from Helles and Lone Pine.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Joseph asked curiously. ‘We don’t hear anything.’

James pointed to his bandaged ear. ‘It pays to keep these things open. Mind you, a piece of shrapnel nearly chopped the bloody thing off the day before yesterday,’ he added with such indignation that Joseph had to laugh.

‘Could have been worse,’ he said. ‘Could have been your entire head.’

James grinned.

‘Well,’ said Joseph, getting to his feet, ‘now that I know more or less where you are I’ll try to keep in touch. You know where the Maori Pa is?’ James nodded. ‘We’re bivvied along there,’ continued
Joseph, ‘when we’re not digging holes somewhere else, that is. Drop by if you get the chance.’

‘I’ll do that. Good to see you, Joseph. Keep your head down, won’t you?’

‘You too, eh?’

Under cover of darkness the Maori Contingent was kept busy digging communication trenches, new roads and dugouts for the reinforcements who continued to land, as unobtrusively as possible, at Anzac Cove. On August the 5th orders were issued for the major offensive scheduled to begin at nine o’clock the following evening: A Company was divided among the four New Zealand Mounted Rifles regiments to fill the gaps left by those who had succumbed to illness and wounds, and B Company was told it would wait in reserve. This piece of news was not received at all well by B Company, who had been looking forward to the opportunity to prove themselves as warriors. The battle orders also said that bayonets only, not bullets, would be used in the opening minutes of the surprise attack, and that no man was to stop for wounded.

As the evening of the 6th drew in, both companies gathered for a religious service conducted by Reverend Wainohu. Quietly and gravely he exhorted them to remember that they held the
mana
, the honour and the good name of the Maori people in their keeping, to go forward fearlessly and do their duty to the last, and to never turn their backs on their enemy. The troops responded with a hymn in Maori, the poignancy of which was slightly spoiled by the applause of a large group of British soldiers who had gathered to listen.

The offensive began with a naval bombardment followed thirty minutes later by the order to advance, and it wasn’t long before Joseph and the rest of B Company, waiting anxiously in trenches
well back from the fighting, could hear the wildly jubilant
peruperu
of A Company as they bayoneted their way through the Turkish lines.

No one said anything, but no one needed to.

Then, stealthily, like stoats slinking away from a raided henhouse, a handful of shadows slipped out of the trench and began to make their way up the gullies towards the battle on the higher slopes. By dawn only two platoons remained.

Joseph led his men quickly up to the heights where they slid into enemy positions now occupied by Anzac and British troops. Panting heavily from the dash up the scree-covered slopes, they crouched at the bottom of a trench and waited for orders from Lieutenant McPherson. Joseph’s throat was painfully dry and the blood in his head pounded, but he felt elated and more alive than he could remember. To his left squatted Ihaka and on his right hunched the rest of his section, eyes round with fear and excitement but all of them grinning madly. At the sight of their faces, black in the darkness but with the whites of their eyes and their teeth shining, he fought a brief urge to giggle as adrenaline roared through him.

When McPherson gave the order to go over the top, Joseph sensed Ihaka gathering himself to vault out of the trench and prepared to follow him; in theory he should be going first but he doubted that Ihaka would be wasting too much time on matters of military protocol. He dug the toe of his right boot into the crumbling clay of the trench wall, noting with detachment that whoever excavated this one hadn’t done a very good job of shoring it up, rested his rifle briefly on the ground in front of him, and heaved himself up and over. Rifle and shellfire cracked, whistled and boomed overhead, but through it he could still hear the mighty sound of a hundred Maori war chants echoing along the ridges. Ahead of him he saw the dark shape of a low mound, and signalled
to his men to spread out and follow him towards the minimal shelter it afforded.

As he moved forward he suddenly realised, with a dreadful sinking sensation in his gut, that there was an occupied enemy entrenchment between his section and the mound. McPherson clearly had not seen it before he gave the order to advance. But they were too close now to do anything but keep running forward. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a flicker of downward movement as Joe Witana stumbled and fell to the ground, his rifle tumbling away from him, but did not check his own stride. Instead, he glanced around to ensure his men were with him, increased his speed and launched himself into the trench ahead, landing with a bone-jarring thump directly on top of a terrified face peering up at him from the shadowy depths.

He used his momentum to drive his bayonet through the throat of the wretched Turk, grunting with the effort of yanking the blade out again and grimacing as he felt it grate against bone. To his left Ihaka was despatching another Turk rather more messily, and Joseph could feel rather than hear his friend’s yells of victory.

In less than a minute the handful of enemy had been disposed of, and Joseph squatted on his haunches, gasping and trying to slow his galloping heart. Most of his men had made it to the trench with him, although they had had to leave Joe Witana where he had fallen. He noticed Billy Parawai nursing what appeared to be a badly wounded shoulder, and wondered fleetingly how they would get him back down to the beach. The other thing he noticed was Ihaka, bending over his dead Turk and preparing to decapitate the corpse with his bayonet.

‘
Kao
!’ Joseph bellowed, kicking out with his boot and knocking Ihaka’s rifle out of his hand. ‘
Whakamutu
!’

Joseph saw with a jolt of dismay that Ihaka’s eyes were bulging with naked fury and his teeth bared. He raised his clenched fist
at Joseph for a brief moment, then, shouting words that didn’t make any sense at all, he leapt out of the trench, turned his back on the line of Turks dug into the ridge above them, bent over and deliberately bared his buttocks in the traditional and ultimate Maori gesture of disrespect. Without thought, Joseph lunged out of the trench and made a grab for his friend’s ankle, hoping to pull him off balance and out of the direct line of fire, but he was too late. He had a moment to register the look of affronted astonishment on Ihaka’s face as the single bullet tore through his back and into his heart, then opened his arms in a clumsy attempt to catch the big man’s body as it tumbled back into the trench.

Wi crawled over, his mouth hanging open in shock, and gazed uncomprehendingly at the body of his boyhood friend. ‘What did he do that for?’ he yelled over the rifle fire.

‘You know as well as I do, Wi,’ Joseph yelled angrily back in Maori. ‘Because he was who he was, and because nothing else would have been as good as this, as far as he was concerned. This is what he wanted, and now he has it.’

Wi said nothing but reached out and gently touched Ihaka’s face, relaxed now in death and looking somehow triumphant. ‘
Ae
, you are right,’ he agreed eventually. Then, to himself, he said flatly, ‘The ancestors will be pleased.’

At ten o’clock the following morning the Maori Contingent received orders to reassemble and move on to Table Top, a position slightly to the north of Rhododendron Ridge and below Chunuk Bair. They did, under a constant hail of rifle fire, then were told, confusingly, to get off the hill again and wait at the bottom. They gathered there in comparative shelter, comparing notes on the previous night’s work while Major Te Rangi Hiroa worked steadily to sort out who had been wounded and to what extent, and whose
bones would have to be left behind on the peninsula.

The remainder of that day was spent resting, crouching among the low bushes and snatching sleep whenever possible. Joseph, as weary as everyone else, was not at all surprised to find himself nodding off from time to time, and not particularly perturbed when others succumbed to sleep even as he spoke to them. Billy Parawai’s shoulder wound was declared serious enough to warrant his evacuation from Gallipoli, and a gory but not life-threatening gouge across Belter Paki’s broad back required stitching, a painful process he endured stoically. The section, now reduced to six, had been blooded and were proud of their achievements, but utterly exhausted. Much later in the night they roused themselves, ate, smoked, emptied nervous bladders and bowels in the bushes and prepared for the morning’s pre-dawn attack on Chunuk Bair.

Concealed in shadows not yet banished by the faint light of the impending dawn, the Maori soldiers crept in a column led by Brigadier-General Johnston up the ridges of Chunuk Bair and moved quickly onto the summit. But as the sun ascended, the Turks were afforded better visibility and began to pick off the reinforcements moving up to join Johnston on the heights, and after that the situation began to deteriorate. The New Zealanders hung on until they were relieved under cover of darkness the following night, but on the 10th the British forces who had taken their place on Chunuk Bair were swept off by a massive Turkish counter-attack. The newly gained Hill Q was also lost.

The offensive had failed. Lieutenant-Colonel Malone, one of the few New Zealand officers who had inspired respect and admiration in his men, was mortally wounded and although his death was keenly felt, particularly among the Pakeha units, the loss of one man paled in significance compared with the overall Allied casualties: the Maori Contingent alone had lost seventeen men, eighty-nine were wounded and two were missing in action.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

J
oseph was only ever able to remember brief slices of what happened to him after the shell landed near his bivvy on the morning of the 10th of September.

He could recall the moments immediately before the blast — stirring his stringy stew half-heartedly and thinking how sick and tired he was of bloody bully beef — then lying flat on his back with flies crawling all over his face and not being able to make his arms move to swat them away and Wi’s face hovering over him saying, ‘Hang on,
e hoa
, I get them off for you.’ After that there had been a few mumbled words from a serious-looking face that might have belonged to Major Hiroa, then a feeling of great tiredness and an odd sensation of weightlessness.

His next memory was of the sharp smell of disinfectant in a room with thick pipes criss-crossing the ceiling and of being lifted off a stretcher by a pair of medical orderlies who chattered to him nonstop. After that he was unpleasantly lucid for a considerable period of time. He was carefully transferred to a narrow table, then told that the doctor would be with him in a few minutes. Both of his legs ached monstrously and he wanted desperately to sit up and have a look at the damage, but a searing pain in his back wouldn’t let him. When one of the chatty orderlies asked him if he wanted
more morphine, he nodded and closed his eyes gratefully as the drug flowed through his system. He must have only dozed off for seconds, though, because when he came to again the same orderly was still there, helping a rather plain-faced and tired-looking nurse cut his stinking shorts off him with a large pair of shears.

‘Am I on the hospital ship?’ Joseph asked, his voice rasping dryly.

‘That you are, Sergeant Deane,’ replied the nurse cheerfully, snipping through the waistband of his pants, apparently immune to the sight of male genitals. ‘You’re on the
Maheno
. You’ll be fine now, just wait and see. Doctor Forster will be along in a moment.’