Redemption. - Redemption. Part 63
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Redemption. Part 63

"You are in shit up to here," I said, pointing to his eyes.

I sat in the sand about to burst. He sat beside me and tapped my shoulder timidly.

"May I speak?"

"Yeah...sure..."

"During the landing I prayed for all my gaffer friends. For the entire day I went into profound meditation. A message transported itself over the water to me. I am badly needed here. I received the message that Johnny Tarbox was killed."

"Go charm a snake. Somebody told you."

"Johnny is dead, then?"

I looked at him. Tears ran down his cheeks. The first boat filled with wounded, their blood mingling with mule dung, was being muscled off the sand bar. Hell, who could argue with such a premonition...but how could I explain this to jolly Christopher Hubble? Christ.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Jeremy said on reaching us.

"Goddamned, Jeremy," I said getting to my feet and lending Yurlob a "friendly" hand. "I totally blew it. I told Yurlob to come in with the first load of mules so he would have a clear picture of our layout. I plain forgot to clear it with you and the Major."

Jeremy knew I was lying in my teeth.

"We'd better go see the Major," Jeremy said.

Christopher Hubble was pleased as punch, pacing to and fro before our battalion headquarters dug into the hillside. A work party was building permanent fencing at the paddock and pulling up the barbed wire. At least one outfit on Gallipoli knew what it was doing.

"Never thought I'd be glad to see a mule. Dr. Mordechai says we're getting in over a hundred today-Yurlob! What the devil are you doing here?" Christopher demanded.

"Totally my screwup," I said. "I had told Yurlob back on Lemnos to come ashore with the first batch of animals so he could get a fix on our situation. When we got aboard the Wagga Wagga I had so many things on my mind, I overlooked mentioning it to you. My responsibility, sir." "Is your post covered, Yurlob?"

"Absolutely. By two of the best packers in Punjab."

"Do they speak English?"

"They are British troops, sir. They've trained half the Indian Army."

"Are you two people diddling me?" the Major asked.

"Yes, sir," I answered.

"Landers is covering for me, sir. It was my doing."

"And I suppose you want to stay, Yurlob?"

"Please, sir, you must let me stay."

"We do need him here," I said quickly. "I have to spend the next several days finding trails to the front lines. We really need him in the paddock...really...."

"Really," Jeremy added.

We were utterly struck by the Major's next remark. "At least you came ashore. That's a hell of a lot more than General Darlington has done."

"Then I can remain, sir?"

"You chaps...you think...you're pressing...Oh, welcome to paradise."

How do I explain this thing? We were an Anzac nut inside of a Turkish nutcracker.

The immediate objective was the stringing together of a coherent front line. We had to push the Turks off this hill and out of that ravine, take that ridge, hold this spur. We shoved them far enough back so the Turk didn't have us squarely in his gun sights and could not use us as free shooting gallery.

Colonel Monash, the Aussie, pushed his brigade forward by a series of head-on-head bayonet charges until he created a series of defensible positions.

The New Zealand Brigades were ostensibly led by Major General Godley, but he never showed up during battle. Our main frontline officer became Colonel Malone, a North Islander, teacher, and farmer, who simply took over and crafted new units out of what was left of the original ones.

The Anzac enclave was carved out by clawing at the ground, turning rocks over with bayonets, using trenching tools, then picks and shovels...filling sandbags, shoring the earth from collapsing....

As we burrowed in, the Turks made life hell. They sat above us in defenses six and eight trench lines deep with sweeping fields of fire. Behind them were batteries of mobile howitzers.

All ashore who were going ashore!

All ashore was everyone in the expeditionary force with a weapon. I was at the bottom of the rung as an officer, but I knew that an attacking force should hold a three-to-one superiority in troops over the defending force, under ordinary circumstances.

Gallipoli held no ordinary circumstances. The Anzacs had come in from the sea, a unique invasion in modern history. As we hit land, we had an uphill push into brutal and forbidding landscape against a well-entrenched, well-armed, well-led enemy. Our ratio over the Turks should have been six or seven to one. My uneducated guess was that the Turks had as many men as we had, maybe more. Moreover, they had an unchallenged corridor from Constantinople to receive reinforcements and supplies.

The situation down at Cape Helles was no better. British and French forces inched inland and dug a line not much more than a mile up the peninsula and were under a constant rain of gunfire from the Turks on the high ground.

Our casualties were running in excess of fifty percent!

A horrendous blunder shook our trust in the officer corps down to the nubbins. With our advances at both Anzac Cove and Helles stopped cold, the southern height of Achi Baba no longer held strategic meaning.

Why? Why? Why? Why? It seemed that Major General Sir Alexander Godley thought Achi Baba should be captured as a show of resolve.

To even consider such an operation there should have been a Corps reserve of at least several divisions backing us up on Lemnos. There was no Corps reserve. All were ashore who were going ashore.

Godley pulled his New Zealanders off our lines at Anzac and transported them by boat down to Helles with orders to storm the heights of Achi Baba. This, apparently, was conceived by Godley to put himself up for hero status.

Using remnants of the Otagos, Wellingtons, and Aucklanders, they had to charge, in the open, across flat ground called the Poppy Field. It was a slaughter. No New Zealander reached the foothills of Achi Baba.

An enraged General Brodhead, who had been unaware of the debacle, recalled the survivors to Anzac Cove. From that time on, Colonel Malone disobeyed order after order from Godley to launch suicidal assaults. With Lieutenant General Brodhead obviously siding with Malone, Godley was all but stripped of authority.

Firing generals in the middle of a battle can have a debilitating effect on the troops' morale. Godley was kept around for ornamental purposes. He was a man who appeared to be looking at you through two glass eyes.

Here was now and this was what was what. From the minute we hit the beach at Anzac and Helles we had lost our offensive posture. All we could do was dig in and hang on by our rinny-chin-chins.

Anzac Cove was four hundred acres of ruptured and tormented land owned by the devil and under lease to the Turks. Four hundred bloody acres we had. Ballyutogue Station was over ten times larger. Fifty thousand of us were packed in, living in caves on the reverse side of the hills with a Turkish meat grinder in front of us and the sea to our backs.

May 1915-either end of the first week of May or beginning of the second, I'm not sure.

We were lucky Yurlob Singh had had the balls to stow away to Gallipoli. Between himself and Dr. Mordechai Pearlman, the mule operation was honed to a textbook study by future generations of muleteers. The animals were the best-fed, safest, cleanest, and most comfortable British troops on Gallipoli, and did they haul the tonnage uphill!

Unfortunately, we were losing the animals fast. In some areas the Turks had to change positions slightly to be able to hit our trains with gunfire. As luck would have it, a hundred mules from the Zion Battalion landed at Anzac by mistake and we also got some small mules from the Sikh Mountain Howitzers. Yurlob knew how to handle the Sikhs, and thank God, Modi was there to deal with the Palestinian Jews. They had no sense of military discipline. They argued about everything, although they worked like hell. I'm glad I wasn't at their paddock.

Anzac Cove grew even more colorful. We landed a couple battalions of Ghurka infantry of Nepalese origin. They were a lively bunch, the Yellow Aussies we called them, and the Aussies were called the White Ghurkas.

Some more New Zealanders arrived, a Maori battalion and troops that had been guarding the Suez Canal in Egypt. This was all well and good but these were not Corps reserves, just men to plug up the line and replace the steady stream of dead and wounded.

We were trying to play catch-up because we had come ashore without a whole list of things a modern army carried. Because Australia and New Zealand had very little in the way of standing peacetime armies, we had no howitzer artillery, vital to this kind of fighting. We also came in without steel helmets, gas masks, with obsolete Boer War rifles and even makeshift uniforms. The Turks had hand-thrown bombs called grenades, something we'd never heard of.

Anzacs had achieved a standoff for the moment, but sooner or later the Turks were going to try to push us into the sea, and there seemed to be no movement from London to avert this.

Life around Mule Gully and battalion headquarters could have been worse. We were under constant fire, although Mule Gully itself proved to be quite safe. The Turks rarely let a night go by when they didn't probe the head of the gully just to make sure we were still on guard.

The real crappy part of soldiering was that there was never a moment when you could, of good conscience, not be working. Digging...digging to make small safe areas for the wounded awaiting evacuation. Digging in pairs for personal rectangular dugouts straight into the hills, like to slide a coffin in. Troglodyte dwellings, as ancient cave men knew. Repairing the piers that the Turks hit daily with artillery fire.

Armies dig. Armies never stop digging.

We shored up the entrances to our troglodyte cave homes with sandbags and whatever timber we could locate. We covered the dirt floor with brush so it would not turn to mud on our bedrolls. It turned to mud anyhow. We wrapped the roofs and sides in is in glass and rubber sheets and canvas to cut down on leaking.

What the hell, it was home. It got a little bigger and fancier each day. Photographs we had purchased in Cairo went up on the walls, a few trinkets taken off the Turks, a little tea fire, piss pots, all made it homey.

Yurlob and Modi never left the paddock. Chester and Jeremy bunked in with me.

Jeremy Hubble and Chester Goodwood ran a good part of the beach operation. Jeremy proved himself to be an officer of quality. I'm not saying it because he's my cobber. What he gave, what every good officer gave, was a feeling that he knew what he was doing. He moved thousands of tons of war supplies to the men who needed them with very few screwups.

The wounded coming down from the lines were set into Widow's Gully for the night in a safe area Jeremy had carved out, and he had them evacuated, two, three, four hundred a day, gently and quickly.

Jeremy was responsible for keeping the piers operating. Repairs were done constantly under Turkish fire. He went through the heartbreaking exercise of getting big cannons ashore and into emplacements, only to have the Turks destroy them in three days.

Naval gunfire, you ask? Well, sometimes it was "go" and would pin the Turks down and cover an advance. Sometimes it didn't work. Too many of our men were taken down by our own guns.

If Jeremy was smart, Chester had to be credited for half the brains. Chester Goodwood knew where every box of gear was warehoused, which company was on the lines, what each post required on a daily basis, whether the mules had hay, and whether we had our foul stinking rations; he screamed for more water tankers, demanded clean boats to evacuate the wounded, sensed a shortage coming up, and headed it off. Can you imagine, a seventeen-year-old officer and a former drunken lord, beach-mastering such an operation!

I'd manage to see one or the other for a few minutes a day, and if we were lucky enough to go off duty together for a few hours, we'd hunker down in our bunker, review the world situation for a minute and a half, and fall dead asleep.

Yurlob's arrival freed me from the yard. I took on the most urgent detail. We had landed with maps so obsolete they must have been surplus from the Homeric period of Ancient Troy. Corps had a good team of cartographers correcting the maps and detailing every hill and gully, but what I had to do was NOW.

I needed to mark all our forward positions, number them, and draw a route map from Mule Gully to each post citing landscape peculiarities and Turkish hot spots.

Map #1-Gully to Chatham's Post-1 miles. Beach path as marked. Best time to dispatch is late afternoon (1530-1600) as sun is directly in Turks' eyes. Safe route to return after dark. Danger points: Turks on eastern ridge of Valley of Despair. There is a fifty-yard gap between Ryder's Post and Chatham's. Have covering fire laid down, enter post through Perry Draw for maximum cover. Chatham's is our southern anchor and a daily target for Turkish artillery fire. Expect to return with twelve to fifteen wounded on normal run.

Map #3-Gully to Lone Pine-2 miles. Beach south and into Victoria's Gully. This post is shit city...

Map #4-Gully to Courtney'sPost-2 miles...

Map #5-Rhododendron Spur Map #8-The Apex Map #15-Plugge Plateau Map #19-Taylor's Hallow Map #25-Beauchop Hill Map #31-Guillotine Ridge For a tad of relief I put casual comments like, "This is your lucky day" or "Congratulations, you made it again" or "Spectacular view of sunset, a must" or "Make pee-pee before crossing open ground."

Major Chris admonished me to quit the editorials until Lieutenant General Brodhead found them amusing. You might get an idea now of how the battlefield ran. Starting at Mule Gully there were some thirty-five fingers or routes, each of different length and over different terrain, leading to our perimeter. We did not have a solid front line. Some forward positions were heavily dug-in trenches, some were observation posts, some were along ridges, trenches, and others were nests to cover gaps in the line. The perimeter was zigzag, a disconnected labyrinth. My route maps became invaluable in pointing out hot spots, detours, cliffsides, dead ends.

Spears, Happy, Elgin, the machine gun and I were off at daylight and we became the team. Only trouble was, it never really stopped or started. As soon as we got back to battalion headquarters at night we'd have to work out two or three new route maps with the cartographers through part of the night. There was never a night that an extra hand wasn't needed at the paddock or with the wounded or something got crapped up with the boats in the cover or the Turks hit a dump of supplies.

I was getting down to the last of the trail maps when a new duty was added. I suppose my squad was doing its job too damned well, because General Brodhead took a liking to us, or possibly he thought we were charmed because we'd gotten through so far without a casualty. The General made daily sweeps of the front lines. Many of the places were simple to reach, so simple even his staff officers could find the way.

However, when it came to the "fun" places like Quinn's Post, we'd escort him. Quinn's was nightmare land. When Colonel Malone had taken it over, it was the most miserable shithole on the face of the earth.

He forced the troops to make the place livable, for as long as one remained alive. The no-man's-land in front of Quinn's Post ran from twelve to twenty yards from the Turkish lines. I do not lie-twelve to twenty yards. We and the Turks could hear each other complaining about rations.

My lads were feeling mighty haughty about the "honor" of taking Brodhead to worse places on the line. I felt it no great honor and I must have worn it on my face once too often.

"If you don't like the detail, Landers," he said to me, "we can assign you to General Godley."

That was the second time I realized Llewelyn Brodhead was more or less a human being, after all.

A little over two weeks into the campaign we'd had one of those really sorry days. We were drawing up our last map and what should have been an easy route map from Camel's Hump. The fucking Turks liked to dress themselves with brush, so they'd look like mulberry bushes. They sniped at us all day. We crawled on our bellies for at least seven hours.

As we entered our command area, our nightly salute from Farting Ferdinand, a big mobile Turkish gun, hit too close to make it funny.

The route to Camel's Hump was full of nuances, like that weird angle from which the Turks sniped at us today. I suppose all cartographers are humorless or they'd be something else. We finally finished our work and remembered we hadn't eaten all day.

Happy to draw rations we retreated to the squad's cave.

"What the hell's this?"

"New ration tonight. The regular bully beef ration had rotted in the sun. Half of headquarters has dysentery."

"I'll be. Chicken in aspic. Well, well."

"What's aspic?"

"Aspic is like a high-class jelly you float fancy dishes in, I think," I explained.

The label didn't quite explain that by chicken, they meant chicken feet. By feet, we got it with feather points, foot padding, tiny knuckle bones, and claws. It was Elgin's lucky day. He got crushed chicken neck.

Strangely, it occurred to me at this moment that I was one-fourth of a thing...a squad. We moved about in the hills with the deftness of ballet dancers, great lovers, movements of beauty through stony, ripping soil. A look into Spears' eyes told that he knew there was a sniper on our left. A quick hand signal and Elgin...the best gunner on Gallipoli...had his piece firing inside seven seconds. We'd go hours without passing a word, yet if one man was missing for a time...it was like the other three limped. We were a whole only when we were together.

Yet we didn't know a damned thing about each other. I knew their towns, professions. I knew they all hankered to get laid. But I didn't know anything about them. Only that we were four New Zealanders drawing maps together in a very stranger place.

Well, I'd arranged a surprise for them. A real surprise! No, not a woman, but the absolutely next best thing. It had taken some doing to put it together, but today was the final route map and it was time to celebrate.

Well, maybe we'd celebrate tomorrow, instead. I suppose we hadn't slept for...maybe...let me figure...maybe like forty hours, and today was a real pisser.

"I'll run this map over to the Major," I said.

They were all asleep. Elgin was asleep sitting up, two chicken claws dangling from his mouth like upper fangs and oozing aspic.

"Map number 42-A," Major Chris said. "Good go, Landers. So, Abdul's set up a sniper's alley there. I'll get the information to the General. Think we can get them with one platoon?"

I propped my head in my hand and closed my eyes but continued the conversation. "No. They're shooting from over five hundred yards. They're not trying to hit anything just make us miserable...anyhow, I'm letting my lads sleep in tomorrow and then taking them to the beach to get cleaned up...and I got a surprise for them."