Redemption. - Redemption. Part 51
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Redemption. Part 51

Chapter One: Getting to Know Your Animal.

Chapter Two: The Pack Equipment.

Chap...

"Oh my God!" Major Christopher Hubble shrieked. "Oh my God!" he repeated, beating his fists on the desk top, wild-eyed. "Oh my God!" He pulled at his hair.

A clerk from the next office tumbled in. "Are you all right, sir?"

"Get my fucking brother...get Lieutenant Hubble in here. Immediately!"

By the time Jeremy arrived, Chris had calmed to a light simmer, gurgling under his breath. "You sent this ludicrous travesty to Corps?" he rumbled low.

"I wasn't going to leave it sitting here and lose six days while you were at staff school."

"Charming, charming, bloody fucking charming."

"Something wrong?" Jeremy asked.

"It reads," he gnashed out, "as though it were written by some low comic in a sleazy song and dance hall in Soho." Chris tore it in half. "You're bloody mad trying to pass this shit off as a British military manual."

"I turned pages in to you every night. You were too damned busy to read it because of your mania that everyone ate, slept, marched, saluted, and shit by the numbers."

"My clear intention was to read it in one sitting when it was completed and go over it with the gaffers. I did not instruct you to send it to Corps!"

"You told me that this book was entirely my responsibility."

"I did NOT, NOT, NOT tell you to send it to Corps!"

The Major's phone interrupted. Chris lifted the receiver and jumped to attention, swooning as he listened. "That was General Brodhead's office. He wants me, now."

"I'll go along with you and explain him what happened."

"You've done enough. You stay right here. Don't you move. Your gaffer squad is under barrack arrest." He paused. "Executive Officer! Captain North!"

"Coming, sir."

"Captain North, write up an order for the battalion to prepare and stand by for a route march tonight to the Wadi Muzzam and get it over to Corps for approval, at once."

"Fifty miles in the sand!" Jeremy cried.

Chris slammed the door and was on his way.

"Be seated, Chris," General Brodhead said.

Oh Lord, the manual was on the General's desk.

Brodhead held up the instruction book. "Who wrote this?" he asked.

"The gaffer squad, sir. I can explain."

"Explain? Yes, go ahead and explain."

"The ultimate responsibility is squarely mine. I should like to say that there was a real bollix in communications. You see, sir, I have been drilling my battalion as a first priority to whip them into fighting shape before their mules arrived and left the manual up to the gaffers with full intention of reviewing it personally. It was finished and sent to Corps without my approval when I was at staff school."

The farther from the green fields of Ulster and the closer to battle, the saltier Llewelyn Brodhead became. He banged his fist on the table several times and Chris blinked in unison.

"Give these gaffers some time away."

"You mean put them in the stockade before court-martial?"

Brodhead roared with laughter. "Well, you do have a sense of humor after all, Chris."

"I'm not quite certain..."

"Give them four-day leave. Best damned manual I've read in thirty-two years! Cuts through all the shit. Just the kind of thing you need to get to the point out in the field. Clear, explicit, humorous-that's what these fucking manuals need, humor. Too bad some twat in the War Office will assign some prig to rewrite it with a corkscrew. Captain Ellsworth has ordered seven hundred copies for the Zion Mule Corps."

"Well," Chris said, breathing more freely as he removed the noose from his neck, "I do admit I was just a tad nervous."

"God, these boys must have really burned the midnight oil. Old Jeremy has come through for us, big!"

In a cheerful mood and with his favorite young officer before him, Brodhead wanted to lift his own loneliness and apprehensions. Say a few things aloud. Things that had brought on insomnia. Things that...oh, better stuff it in, he thought.

"How soon will your battalion be ready?"

"Two or three weeks of intense schooling. A month to two months when we get our mules."

"Good," Brodhead said, not containing what he had just tried to contain. "The opening naval salvo on Gallipoli is a matter of a few weeks away. The Queen Mary, our top new super-dreadnought, has completed its shakedown cruise and will be en route shortly to join our fleet. The French are forming up at Toulon."

"Does give one a bit of a start, doesn't it, sir?"

"Our troops are not ready, Chris. My Anzacs in particular could use a solid three or four more months of training. Fortunately, Darlington-"

"I understand your feelings about Darlington."

"Fortunately, General Darlington insists he will not invade until the 29th Division arrives from England. It's a veteran division, one of our best. Is Darlington playing it safe or is Darlington timid?" he wondered aloud. "Truth is, we haven't faced a modern white army since Napoleon. Darlington may be too old school for this kind of operation, too many new wrinkles in this landing from the sea. You've been in on many of the planning sessions."

"Yes, sir."

"You see how he hedges. We haven't much beach, particularly if we have to land from the Adriatic side. A lot of our thinking is based on the fact that the Turks are exhausted from the Balkan War and that their main army is tied up on the Russian front. But bear in mind-the Balkan union broke its skull trying to capture Gallipoli and lost a number of warships to the Turkish coastal guns."

"Shouldn't our naval bombardment pretty well reduce the Turkish guns, sir?"

"Too fucking much is being made of naval gunfire. The Germans have put one of their top men, General von Limon, in command of the Dardanelles defense. The Turks have opened an ammunition factory south of Constantinople. There are red hot radicals full of fight in the Turkish officers corps. From what little intelligence we can glean out of that Gallipoli wilderness, von Limon is going to stuff five or six divisions in there.

"As for the coastal guns," he continued to unload, "von Limon will replace them with mobile howitzer batteries. The coastal guns are meant to play pitty-pat with warships. Howitzers can loop fire down on troops and keep changing locations."

After a consideration, Brodhead dropped the bombshell. "We have to hit the beach running. The British must take the Achi Baba hilltop five miles inland and we must take Chunuk Bair, also five miles inland, in the first week. If Darlington dawdles we are in for one long hot summer. Chris, when the history of this war is writ, I absolutely guarantee you that more men will be killed and wounded by the machine gun than by all other weapons combined. The Gallipoli Peninsula has more places to hide machine guns than any piece of ground the British Empire has ever tried to capture."

"We'll take those hills, sir."

Proper stuff coming from a proper officer, Brodhead thought. We'll take those hills, sir. Shit! He did not share his final thought with the young major that if he were defending Gallipoli with his Anzacs, he could hold out forever.

The general's aide knocked and entered, then laid an order on the desk for his signature.

"I thought that as long as Major Hubble was here you might as well approve this for him."

"Let's see here," Brodhead said adjusting his glasses. "Forced night march exercise, battalion strength, to...Jesus Christ...Wadi Muzzam...hummm." He dismissed his aide with a wave of the hand.

"Bit drastic, what?" Brodhead said. "Shouldn't your lads be concentrating on their mule training?"

"We don't have any mules, sir. Until we do there is only so much schooling we can give them. Otherwise, I intend to have the Seventh the most battle-ready battalion in the Corps."

"This wouldn't be entailing some kind of collective punishment, would it, Chris?"

Chris held tight so as not to fumble his thoughts. He had laid them out as his lullaby night after night for just this moment.

"This is a cavalry battalion, sir, and not a very refined one. They are roughnecks. They were furious to be turned into muleteers. There has not been a single morning that I haven't had to go to the stockade and collect dozens of them from their punch-ups in Cairo."

"Maybe you're caught in a vicious cycle. After a night march to Wadi Muzzam, aren't they going to try to dismantle Cairo? Chris, before you answer, I was going to speak to you on this matter. You have invoked twice as many punishments as any other battalion commander in the Corps."

"I daresay, sir, my battalion is twice as good as any in the Anzacs."

"Chris, one of the reasons we held the staff seminar was to clarify our traditional role with the colonials. God knows there isn't a more imperial man than myself, but we have to realize that each Commonwealth has its own system of social order. Indeed, we cannot go strictly by the book as we do with our British soldiers. Isn't that your understanding?"

"I'd rather not say, sir."

"I'd rather you do."

Llewelyn Brodhead watched Chris turn into Roger Hubble right before his eyes. The words were the same, the look was even the same.

"My grandfather, Sir Frederick, was a Victorian entrepreneur...always proud of his humble beginnings...playing the game with the Orange lodges, marching alongside the lads on the Twelfth of August...made an art of knowing his workers by first name, pretended to share their sorrows. Well, he's ended up with a public company and unions in his yards."

"I think probably a new era has overtaken him, Chris. No one in his right mind would consider Sir Frederick Weed a soft man."

"Perhaps," Chris agreed reluctantly.

"Do go on."

"I rather liken the Army to my father's earldom. The people tilling his fields and operating his factories are his soldiers, in a manner of speaking. They are there to fulfill the mission of the earldom, to continue our way of life. We cannot get involved with sentimentality over the hard luck of this worker or that farmer and his family. If we were to cave in to sentimentality, we would have lost the earldom during the great famine. If we here now in the Anzac Corps cave in to sentimentality, we will lose the empire."

Brodhead had always thought he had a hard man in Christopher Hubble. Now he knew exactly how hard. He was one of those few officers who seem to thrive on the hatred of his men and in return builds an awesome battalion. Yet, almost all these officers go one step too far.

"I agree we must have their utmost respect," Brodhead said, "but we must also respect them. I'm setting aside this night march. We don't want these boys to get a feeling they are out there fighting for nothing. I am instructing you to get on with your mule transport."

"It would be simpler if we had mules to work with. The Zion Mule Corps has already received a hundred animals."

"You'll learn that we colonials get the leftovers."

"I daresay, the Jews are not exactly British."

"But they are serving British divisions. Speaking of Jews, one of my brigade commanders is a Jew. Quite competent."

"Really, sir? A Jewish brigade commander? Which one?"

"Colonel Monash, the Aussie."

"Well, that's empire."

Brodhead gave the nod for Chris to leave.

"Oh Chris, who did the actual writing of your instruction manual? I mean, the chap who put the words down. Very clever."

"Private Chester Goodwood. He's a member of the gaffer squad."

"Put a couple of chevrons on him. Corporal, for now."

"Yes, sir. He is equally good with numbers. He's the son of Sir Stanford Goodwood, a banker in Hong Kong."

"Sir Stanford Goodwood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Lord, I knew him years ago. I thought he was rather nelly queer, you know. At that time it was rumored he had a penchant for young boys. So he has a son? Well, probably has something to do with continuity and all that."

67.

Cairo, February 1915 Despite the flood of warriors into Cairo, Sonya Kulkarian's preferred, classical, elite, and lavish entertainments were not much in demand. No longer were the great sheikhs and princes of the Arabian peninsula able to gain easy access to Cairo because of the war, and when they did manage to come, it was long on business and short on bombastic orgies. Everything was business. The wealthy of Cairo, a staple for her enterprise, no longer established their little oases of relaxation in their headlong rush for war money.

British officials and generals had mostly been too tightfisted to avail themselves. Now and again, an off-horse Englishman liked and could afford her entertainers, but British pickings were lean.

But what did it matter? At the age of forty-one Sonya Kulkarian had packed in her fortune and was independently independent.

Did it matter that the royal palace had only called once since hostilities began? No! Truth be known, service to royalty was only good as a credential. Otherwise, they were impossible to serve. Their credit was hardly a thing of beauty. You cannot demand payment in advance from royalty.