Redemption. - Redemption. Part 44
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Redemption. Part 44

Brodhead was relieved to be able to crack a smile followed by a laugh. He drummed his fingers on the table. Well, here is what you've been waiting for, lad. Transport, m the event we are stalemated and hung up on the wrong side of the hills."

"I see," Chris said, realizing the enormity of it.

"The French have a relatively easy supply situation requiring no special transport capacity. Now, with the main British force down here at the tip of Cape Helles, there is a fluid front and difficult terrain to negotiate."

Chris nodded.

"There are Jews in Palestine, you know...pioneers reclaiming land, that sort of thing. Life has been made difficult for them by the Ottomans. When the war started the Turks rounded up many of the men and inflicted rather nasty punishment on them, claiming they were British spies and sympathizers. A large number of them, several hundred, escaped to Egypt and petitioned to form a unit of the British Army. It was decided, for political reasons, not to have them officially in the army per se but to allow them to form a unit we will use for transport at Cape Helles. The Zion Mule Corps."

"I say," Chris said.

"When I went over preliminary plans back at the War Office, a mule unit was the only way to go with my Anzacs. Damnedest thing, Chris, we discovered that neither New Zealand nor Australia knows anything about mules. Never had them in either place, can you imagine?"

Chris looked as though he was going to burst into tears.

"Bang on, Chris. If the attack stalls and we have to go to the trenches, we are doomed without mule transport. There is no other way we can get food, ammunition, water, and medical supplies up the mountainside, and there is no way we can remove our wounded. What I told you back at Camp Bushy is the absolute truth. We are doomed without mules, should the battle go wrong. From this moment, the Seventh New Zealand Light Horse is the mule transportation battalion for the Anzacs. You must build it from the ground up. I will give you every priority within my power. Do this, and I repeat my promise, you'll jump directly to colonel at the end of the campaign...you have my word.... Well?"

"Mules," Chris said, "rather degrading, sir."

"So is war," Brodhead answered.

60.

The mail boat made a welcome round of the convoy at Gibraltar and, as they got under way again, the officers and men were given a fill of letters to be read and read again until the words themselves grew war-weary.

Jeremy reached his quarters and saw a packet of letters on the small ship's desk. He thumbed the envelopes, stopped on one that caught his eye, and opened it.

My Dear Jeremy, How often in life it is a truth that we have no time for our friends but all the time in the world for our enemies. I write to you as the enemy, so kindly indulge me.

My name is Gorman Galloway. Most generally I fit the accepted descriptions of a "feckless Irishman." I am also the constant companion and dearest friend of your mother; therefore, your enemy.

I am risking your wrath for I can no longer bear witness to a magnificent rose withering and dying for want of a kind word from her son.

I believe in neither heaven nor hell, except for what we make for ourselves here on earth. You have created your private hell in the manner you handled Molly O'Rafferty. You have done a wretched deed and have then gone and branded yourself with a white-hot iron, flayed your flesh with whips, soaked your bereavement in gin-thank God, decent gin.

Your brother, Christopher, who I think is an ass, has written that you have begun to show a spark of life. That means you are starting to forgive yourself. The ability of a man to atone, here on earth, has always been the most remarkable of human features. No sin, and certainly not even one as grave as yours, cannot be redeemed. It appears to all here, you have punished yourself sufficiently.

Had you read Caroline's letters, you would realize that she has forgiven her father and cares for him deeply and tenderly. She has likewise forgiven her husband to the point of being civil with him.

My dear Jeremy, she has forgiven you and longs for you with a longing that will surely kill her if you continue to punish her and yourself with your silence.

Life hinges on many factors we cannot control. Two of the most important factors, we can control. We can manage our relationships-and what is life but a series of relationships?-and we can correct our mistakes, here on earth within our life span. Bad relationships and mistakes are all a normal part of the game of life. Who are you, who has been forgiven, to continue to inflict pain upon a woman who adores you and grieves for your smile, your touch, your word?

Do you want to lay on Caroline what you have laid on Molly? Will that make things right? If you go into battle and, God forbid, are numbered with the slain, you must take her to a far more bitter death.

Her eyes well with tears when she speaks of your beauty, your sweetness, and of the absence of meanness that probably pushed you into your mistake.

Please, Jeremy, if there be any manliness in you at all, then you must make a gesture that you and she are on the mend.

Your devoted enemy, Gorman Galloway Jeremy opened the lid of his chest and took out the bundle of letters that lay on the top, tied with a ribbon and softly scented of his mother's perfume. He had agonized for the courage to take the moment to answer her. The time had come.

Mother dearest, Please tell Gorman Galloway he is not the enemy. But you already know how fortunate you are to have one such beloved friend. I once had one and have recently gone to his grave to find guidance.

Gorman Galloway repeated to me what Conor Larkin tried to teach me: Mistakes are part of life and they need not be fatal to the moral man. Mistakes are crutches for cowards and I have used mine to further inflict pain on the people dear to me.

Mother dearest, I've swilled the bottle dry and I've wallowed at the bottom of a greasy pit of shame and guilt and self-pity and self-hatred for enough years.

It is time for Jeremy to quit his whimpering. As we gained distance from Ireland, the air itself took on a different scent and taste. It no longer suffocated me when I breathed.

I am going to get well, Mother. Perhaps, I'll be well for the first time in my infamous life as a rotten and useless peer. I am going to spend the balance of my days as a good and decent man.

The sorrow of Molly O'Rafferty will never leave me, nor do I want it to, nor will I let it pull me under, any longer. I shall follow every trail that might find her and our child.

If I fail to find her, if she has made a new and good life, if she is no longer alive, I will never go back to what I once was.

The rage of my father will also never leave me. I am disgusted with my cowardice in yielding to him and am in disgust of him for what he will do to keep his cursed kingdom.

What was once so important in my life, what I so dreaded losing, is now strangely unimportant. I intend to renounce my title when the war is over, but I want to do it standing in front of him.

When I think about my early days, I recall my terror of him. Fond memories of Father are few. There was a time for many summers I adored going off with him to our summer home at Daars in Kinsale.

Father and I would go shark fishing. He picked mean weather and the seas lashed us cruelly, but what a master sailor he was! And when we pulled in those ugly gray monsters, the bigger the shark, the more daggerlike his teeth, the more we'd celebrate in unabashed joy.

I came to learn that my excitement was from destroying something evil and his came because I think he was trying to exorcise his own evil.

Then, we'd land and the instant his foot touched the pier, he was angry with me.

Come what may ahead, Mother, I shall not go under again. Come what may, I shall carry on to the end as a kind and decent man.

I have saved your letters for the precious day I would open them. The time has come and I pray that more are on the way from you and your dear friend, Gorman.

Your loving son, Jeremy

61.

Camp Anzac, Menu, Egypt, February 1915 The sudden eruption of the Anzacs from their entombment on the troopships was a wonderment for men and for boys becoming men taking their first steps beyond home.

Miracles, photographs from their geography textbooks, took life in the form of the Sphinx and pyramids all around them. Camels! Cloth-headed tops on the men...true and actual Arabs! Veiled women! It was the amusement park outside Sydney, wot!

To the Egyptians, this most recent onslaught, albeit peaceful, of another foreign army was absorbed with a shrug and the all encompassing allusion that it was "Allah's will." Unwelcome visitors had been the gist of their ancient and recent history, and soon the latest visitors would be absorbed in the bazaar that was Cairo.

These Anzacs were soldiers of great wealth receiving Pay of ten, fifteen, twenty English pounds a month, which would serve as a balm for the hell-raising they intended to impose.

Within hours of the Anzac arrival, a full brigade of vendors had established stalls at the camp gates, backed by a battalion of hawkers. Hundreds of young boys, whom the Anzacs called Terriers, hustled a variety of services. The lads from down under soon realized they were princes in a land of poverty.

Mena was a haphazard site that housed an old Ottoman barracks. When the British relieved the Turks of Egypt there were additions for a permanent base. While some of the camp was in ready condition, a feverish building program was under way by swarms of laborers from the city.

Camp Anzac became a flash flood of men and equipment with temporary two-man tent areas, jerry-built structures for supplies, hospitals, and hospital and command centers.

The day laborers-vendors and Terriers, the native Egyptians-were at the bottom of the social rung, picturesque and not entirely to be trusted. These men and boys represented the sole piece of imperialism, the living proof that some people are not fit to do anything in their own country other than serve the colonizer.

Until an orderly camp and training regimen were established, Cairo was out of bounds, and the only recreation was to hire a Terrier for a night climb up one of the pyramids. Even though there were quite a few broken bones and some deaths, pyramid climbing continued until the British officers took firm control.

The pommy officers all arrived tapping the same brand of riding crop against their riding britches above their riding boots. There were several cavalry units at Mena, but even the pommy infantry and artillery officers carried the riding crop as some sort of scepter of office.

The Aussies and New Zealanders whose lives had been relatively free of caste were nonplussed by the unfriendliness, formality, and vain arrogance of their new commanders. It came from the very tone of their ever so British voices and the look of their ever so British eyes. For the first time they were given a definite feeling of not being seen as good as the other fellow. An unseen line had been drawn, unseen but quite deep, indeed.

Yet, two volcanic questions burned brightly as the camp shaped up; namely, when do we get liberty into Cairo and when do we get our horses?

Serjeant Major John Tarbox stomped his boots and snapped off a beautiful salute, as befitted his new C.O.

"Sir, Serjeant Major Tarbox, at your service!"

"At ease, Tarbox," Christopher Hubble said. Chris neither rose nor extended a hand and seemed to be looking through and past the serjeant. Another officer, First Lieutenant Jeremy Hubble, sat nearby quite relaxed and smiled a friendly smile.

"I'm Major Hubble, battalion commander. The gentleman here is Lieutenant Hubble, coincidentally my brother."

Jeremy came to his feet, extended his hand and shook Johnny's warmly, to Christopher's annoyance.

"Let us get to the point," Chris interrupted. He leaned forward in much the same menacing manner his tutor General Brodhead did when he was dead serious. "There will be no cavalry in this expeditionary force. You understand what I'm saying?"

"I suppose so, Major."

"All horse battalions are to be reconstituted into infantry, heavy weapons, sappers, howitzer artillery, etcetera, etcetera."

"Yes, sir."

"Except," Christopher continued on, "for our Seventh New Zealand Light Horse, here. I have informed my officers as of this morning. The reason will become apparent."

Johnny found a weak smile and managed to get it on his face.

"The Seventh Light Horse is now a transportation battalion, a mule transportation battalion."

"Beg pardon, Major Hubble, but I don't know a fuck-mg thing about mules."

Jeremy laughed aloud.

"Nor, may I add, does anyone else around here," Christopher snarled. "I strongly advise you to take this news in stride and demonstrate that I have your full and unstinting cooperation."

"Unstinting, sir."

"Unstinting," Chris repeated through clenched teeth It had gone down hard as hell with the officers earlier, it would be a shock right straight down the line. Chris lifted the Tarbox records and plopped them in the center of the desk and went through them with agonizing deliberateness.

"Now then, Tarbox, you are one of the battalion elders, what?"

"I suppose so, sir, I'm uh...thirty-four."

"Thirty-six," Rubble corrected.

"If you count various contingencies."

"What contingencies?"

"I lied about my age when I ran off to do a hitch in the Royal Marines."

"And you rose to the rank of lance corporal in five years."

"I was a full corporal, sir, and except for a misunderstanding when I failed to catch the last liberty boat-"

"Because you were locked up in the Singapore jail for, shall we say, a barroom brawl, after which you received punishment in the form of thirty days of bread and water, and reduction in rank to lance corporal."

It was not my fault, Johnny thought, the goddamn prostitute's pimps jumped me. He was about to make his case but thought better of it.

"So, you're not really a proper serjeant major, are you?"

Oh Jaysus, Johnny thought, here it comes! "I certainly am, sir, in a manner of speaking."

"Oh, really? Kindly explain yourself."

"We don't have many standing units in New Zealand and because of my superior horsemanship and devotion, I commanded the Royal Color and Honor Guard, itself."

"That would be a half-dozen horses for ceremonial occasions, right?"

"Well, sir..."

"So, you really weren't a proper serjeant major?"

"If I may say so, sir, everybody in North Island and South Island knew Johnny Tarbox. Dads used to say to their kids, 'May you only grow up to ride like Johnny Tarbox. He does the King's colors proud.' The instant the war broke out, knowing my fame, I was asked to travel from one end of the country to the other and, pretty much single-handed, I signed up enough lads for four entire Light Horse battalions."

"And you consider yourself quite the horseman?"

"There may be a few men better, but you'll have to look damned hard to find them. I've done everything with a horse except fuck them and eat horseshit."

Jeremy broke up as Christopher went sallow, then stared, glazed blue eyes continuing to look through his man almost with hatred.

"I appreciate the differences between our cultures, but in the future, I shall consider obscene language before an officer as a punishable offense."