Johnny had ingested his fill of soggy hot air and was in a fuzzed state as Rory crawled in. They traded remarks as to how bloomin' hot it was.
"Well, we've crossed the equator and we're moving north," Rory said. "That tells me that South Africa is out."
"Got an uncoded message today at the center. We're making a rendezvous around Ceylon with some Indian troops," Johnny said.
"So, we're heading for the Mediterranean and maybe on up to England."
"Sounds right to me."
"And just maybe we'll stop at Aden and the empty ships will take on our Arabian horses."
"I'd like to take on a few Arab women...first they come out and do their belly dance and then start twirling their tits...."
They were quiet for a time. Tarbox was faraway, in an arched room filled with belly dancers.
Rory had made a discipline of keeping Georgia Norman out of his mind. The hours were better spent crying inside for his Uncle Conor than longing for her. Conor was dead and in time the hurt would fade. Georgia had told him that his pain would be tucked away.
But Georgia! She came bursting through to him at the oddest places and the oddest times. Mostly he thought of her lying on the bed with her green silk kimono opened to her whiteness. It never failed to create a sensation of sheer wanting, and it flowed all about him. He trained himself to let her in for only a few minutes or he'd get restless and moody.
Both Conor and Georgia strangely dimmed as Liam Larkin made his stand. Why the Squire! Something about the sea, the bloody convoy that was throwing him together with his father.
"Where's Chester?" Johnny asked.
"In the engine room giving dice lessons."
"I'll bet he learned it in Hong Kong in one of those gambling palaces with his old man, don't you think?" Johnny asked.
"Maybe, but he's a natural with numbers. He showed me the odds on every combination on the dice. As for blackjack, all he has to do is hold the deck. I'm only letting him have five quid a day. I don't want the whole ship in debt to him."
"It was brilliant of me," Johnny said, "to see the great merit of this lad and slip him into the Light Horse."
"You son of a bitch."
They were quiet again, now awake, and propped up so they could see out of the lifeboat down to the decks and out to the lightless convoy. Uncle Conor had told Rory that on the smooth seas and heaven-filled nights, the sailors dreaded the watch because they had time to think about everything they had left behind, everything they coveted...to become a rover.
"What's bothering you, Rory?"
"Nothing."
"Shit, I can hear your brains buzzing clear across the boat. Smoke is coming out of your ears."
"Hell, it must be crossing the equator. I can't seem to be keeping my old man off my mind. I feel like we're sharing a strange passage, him going down to New Zealand and us to wherever. Somehow, I wake up, like I was him in the darkness of steerage all alone without two shillings to rub against each other. He must have been scared shitless, Johnny. He always talked about that trip, but I never much listened."
"The Squire is something, all right," Johnny said.
"You liked him, didn't you?" Rory asked.
"I wasn't his son," Johnny said quickly.
"What'd you like about him?" Rory pressed.
"What he made out of nothing but his two hands. That was respect. I liked him as well. All my crew liked him. He cared about us. Our food was from your mother's kitchen and any hurt man was taken care of. He did a lot of quiet favors. He was so proud of Ballyutogue Station. And...he was fun to stand up to the bar and drink with and a joy to fish alongside of up at that trout stream of his. Like said, I wasn't his son so I don't know why you two didn't get on, but it's mostly the same in every family."
That was the case, all right. Everybody wanted to deal with Squire Larkin. Drovers, shearing crews, the church the auctioneers...everybody liked the Squire.
"Did you get along with your old man?" Rory asked.
"We had a rough life together, Rory. My father was never much more than a roustabout, the wandering prospector looking for that one lucky strike. Me and my sister spent our whole childhood living in a caravan, prospecting the South Island with him. We never had our own home."
"How'd you learn to read and write? Mother?"
"No!" Johnny said abruptly. Then he softened. "I picked up my schooling on my own. There was always someone in the mining camps teaching the kids. You know, those guy who get sick of civilization and run off looking for the bonanza. We had some smart people around."
Johnny had gone off like an alarm at mention of his mother. Rory knew the woman was off bounds, from then on.
"My mother," Tarbox said with another voice, "was an actress...like a music hall song-and-dance girl, and New Zealand was too small for her. She was a great theatrical success in the west of America in the gold and silver rush towns."
The quiet fell again. A long time quiet.
"You asleep?" Rory asked.
"Not anymore."
"Why is my father rattling around on this ship, now?"
Tarbox laughed. "What better place to think about your old man than on a troopship?"
"You liked the Squire?" Rory asked.
"Yeah, he is right out of the earth," Johnny said.
"But you didn't like prospecting with your old man."
"I hated it, Rory. I hated him for what he gave me. I hated watching my sister grow into a mining camp girl. So, I quit when I was able and did my hitch in the Royal Marines. You know what? For four years I grew hungry for my old man. I realized that he was doing what he was doing because it would have killed him to sit in one place and be without a dream, and I realized he had put a lot of good things into me. Every soldier on this ship is pissed off at his parents for screwing up their lives, and every soldier who lives through the war is going to spend the second half of his life getting over the first half. That's the way it goes down. We all blame our parents, all of us...then we never seem to see ourselves doing the same things to our own kids."
Johnny was annoying him. He didn't know what the hell Squire Larkin had done to him!
"So, I came back from the Marines," Johnny said, "and I saw my old man for what he was. A sweet man who did the best he could. But, you see, he always accepted me as a kid and I was pretty rotten. I never accepted him for what he was. After the Marines, we saw each other for what we were and not what we wanted the other to be. So, he started riding with me as one of my drovers and those four years were the happiest of my life."
It sounded like his Uncle Conor and the grandda he never knew, Tomas Larkin. Conor and Tomas gave each other bad, bad turns in the beginning, but in the end, there was love.
Oh Jaysus, Rory thought, there are too many mountains to cross with the Squire and the valleys are too deep. He never knew how to quit picking on me. He never stopped making me feel unwanted.
Could I have done something about it? Rory asked himself for the first time.... I knew he was proud of the way I rode but I rode reckless instead to piss him off and show him how much better I was than poor Tommy. I hated fishing with him because I didn't like him forcing me to come and I hated his joy in hooking the big one.
Every time I did something that could have made the Squire proud, I threw it at his feet like a pile of shit. I liked pissing him off. I loved his rage at me and knowing he had to have me.
Damnit! HE did it to ME, him and my Virgin Mary mother made me ashamed I was born.
Maybe...maybe...I could have made the right gestures. Maybe, here and there. No, the mountains are too high with that man, and the valleys too deep.
Shunk-rooomshunk...shunk-rooomshunk...
Rory remembered seeing Johnny Tarbox and his old man after they drove into Uncle Wally's pens in Christchurch. Old Johnny was so caring, took care of cooling down his da's horse, and then they headed into the bar, arms about the other's shoulder.
Steerage in a rusted freighter with an empty pocket and fear ahead. Christ! Get him off my back already!
...Maybe...I should have made a gesture...
Shunk-rooomshunk...
59.
As the Anzac convoy sweltered northward toward the Red Sea, a second convoy from England sweltered southward through the Straits of Gibraltar for a rendezvous in Egypt.
The British home armada carried forward echelons of a pair of veteran army divisions and a host of attached elements to establish a large permanent base camp and training facility.
Berthed on several of the southbound warships was a cadre of two hundred regular British officers to take over the Anzac units, bringing them up to strength and assuring British control.
Major General Sir Llewelyn Brodhead and his staff sailed aboard the cruiser, HMS Foxhampton. He set up a secure command center where he spent most of the day and half of the night.
Brodhead had expressed his concerns on a military venture he was not completely in tune with. Once the War Council made the decision, he got aboard in a positive manner, as one might expect of a fine field commander. When they passed Gibraltar he began briefing his senior officers on a need to know basis and made his presentation with very much of a can-do attitude.
Yet, can there be a man lonelier than one of high rank about to embark on a venture he held grave doubts about and who had to hold these doubts within himself?
Before the battle there was so damned much to be done. Brodhead would be assuming command of tens of thousands of untamed raw colonials. He and his officers had to get them into combat shape in three to four months. Beastly short time, that. Training would be a merciless grind, worsened by the heat.
The trick here was to gain confidence. These Anzacs were apt to grow to hate their British overseers. Building a spirit of the corps was as important as their fighting skills.
If Sir Llewelyn had a soft spot, a sentimental button, it was Ulster. He intensely disliked what he was about to lay on young Major Hubble, but Hubble was his hand-picked gamble. Although Chris had a modest rank, the General felt close and at ease with his junior confidant, and he would most likely open up and tell more to impress Hubble with the importance of his mission.
"Sir! Major Hubble!" the General's botsman ripped off.
"Yes, show him in. No interruptions of any sort unless it's from Fleet Command."
"Sir!"
"Major Hubble, at your service!" Chris said, flashing a smart salute. The two were locked in with a clang. Chris's heart was a-thump. No one with the lowly rank of major had been privy to the command room. The whir of a powerful overhead fan and the sucking out of dead air was heard as Brodhead looked up with the eyes of a sorrowful bloodhound.
"Sit easy, Chris. Stop me for questions as you wish and prepare yourself for a real boot in the ass."
Chris laid his crop and hat aside and followed the General's lead in loosening his Sam Browne belt and field scarf.
"We're in top secret country now," the General began.
"Yes, sir."
Brodhead stood and rolled down a map like a large window shade, showing the eastern Mediterranean and bordering environs.
"It's a bang-on proposition, Chris. The Turks have closed the Dardanelles Straits and we have to open them. It is a brilliant concept designed to knock the Turks out of the war with a single blow and move up the Danube Valley to split the Germans in half. However, and I'm going to fill you up with howevers, it is more of a political decision than a military decision. Winston Churchill is its most forceful advocate."
Brodhead picked one of his pipes off the desk to use as a pointer. "This is it. This cock of land dangling into the Mediterranean. The Gallipoli Peninsula, forty miles long and varying in width up to four to ten miles. The Dardanelles Straits run along the eastern side into the Sea of Marmara, Constantinople, and the Black Sea. On the western side of the peninsula is the Aegean Sea."
Chris nearly shivered with excitement. Rumors and being a small man in a large staff are one thing. But to sit before a general and become a part of it was an ethereal experience.
"The Gallipoli Peninsula is a wild place, sparsely inhabited, with primitive trails, sheer cliffs, mountains, deep valleys. It is filled with caves and ravines and ridge tops and gorges that can house hundreds of machine-gun nests, mines, and barbed wire. But these fellows up here," he said, tapping a series of hilltop positions, "are the key. Turks have forts with coastal guns capable of shooting down onto both sides."
"Yes, sir," Chris said in a whisper.
"It is also a political and not a military decision for us not to ally yourselves with the armies of the Balkan union. The thinking is that the Serbs, Bosnians, and Bulgarians re too unstable politically and too volatile to be dependable I personally would like to see the Greeks drive across Thrace, but our Russian ally objects to that.
"What this means is," Brodhead went on, "it will be a British show with some French support. Churchill argues that we have an abundance of naval power to subject Gallipoli to the most devastating bombardment in history. Frankly, I expect that Churchill thinks he is going to sink the peninsula.... Questions up to now?"
"Yes, sir. This naval assault. I take it, it must knock out the Turkish hilltop forts and otherwise disrupt and disorient the other Turkish positions so they will be soft objectives later on."
"That's the thinking."
"You have reservations, sir?"
How much to confide, Brodhead pondered. "Yes," he said. "Naval guns fire in a flat trajectory. They are meant to hit other warships riding above the water. Will they be that effective against dug-in land positions? Damned fact is, nobody knows! Never been done! There are other parts of this operation that have never been done, namely, the landing and supplying from the sea of an army of this size. Never been done!
"Now," he went on, "come some other intangibles. What if we don't force the Dardanelles open? That means we will not be able to land on the eastern side of the peninsula. We will have to land from the Aegean side with very little beach, and immediately fight uphill."
The room, so splendid in its mythology a few moments earlier, now began to appear as a deadly vault to Chris.
"The plan is one, two, three," General Brodhead went on. "The French land on the opposite side of the straits in Anatolia-ancient Troy, as a matter of fact. They secure a perimeter, and hold. The Turks haven't much to send against them, nor do the French have to drive inland...just hold their side of the Dardanelles.
"The main British force will land on the tip of Gallipoli here at Cape Helles and drive up the peninsula. Their first major objective will be the hilltop of Achi Baba, about six miles upland.
"We," Brodhead said deliberately, "have very little room for deception. The navy will be pounding them for weeks so they'll know we're coming. The Anzacs will land farther up the peninsula, take Chunuk Bair hilltop, and cut off the entire place from Turkish reinforcements and eventually be joined by the British driving up to meet us."
"Would it be fair to say," Chris interrupted, "that the Turks have shown very little against the Balkan union and the Italians in Africa?"
"The grand scheme is that our navy clears the Dardanelles Straits, steams up to Constantinople, and opens a naval bombardment while we drive up and lay siege."
Suddenly Brodhead's eyes watered and he leaned over the desk and planted his fists in a manner that Chris had come to understand as the man's dead serious mode.
"IF the navy does not clean out the straits...IF the Turks are properly commanded by a German staff and their high ground is intact...IF we are forced to land on the Aegean side and start straight uphill...IF the Turks can force us into a stagnant situation, we may be fucked four ways from Sunday. God help you if what I said ever leaves this room."
Chris pleaded with himself not to turn pale and faint before the General, yet he knew that his legs would not hold him at that moment. Brodhead broke into a sweat of his own and felt like a naughty boy for betraying his doubts to a junior officer.
"What do you need me to do, sir?" Christ asked stoutly. Then, as an afterthought, he said, "One would suppose there will be no cavalry involved?"