Redemption. - Redemption. Part 64
Library

Redemption. Part 64

The Major clenched his teeth together in just that particular way. Bad news was coming.

"Blast the luck," he said.

"Don't tell me."

"Afraid so. You and your imperial guards, myself included, are to report to command at 0500. The General wants you to take him up to Quinn's Post."

"That's a serious place."

"I'm only the messenger."

"Oh, I have that position," I said.

"Colonel Malone also requested us."

I opened my eyes. How do I break this to my lads? "Fuck!" I cried, unbeknownst to myself. "I am not going up to Quinn's Post until I wash my feet."

My care was right close to my squad. I took the surprise box and walked over to them guided by their snores. No matter how deeply they slept, the mere words "Quinn's Post" awakened them.

"On your feet," I commanded. "We're taking a swim...RIGHT NOW!"

There are flashes of golden moments in a lifetime. Suddenly you're in a situation of mind, taken wholly by surprise, and something is happening you never before knew existed. A moment like that was with Georgia on the boat to Auckland. Another night was at Villa Valhalla, just sitting and talking to Jeremy.

Now, in this bloody hole, I'm suddenly smitten by euphoria. The beach was fairly quiet this night with only an occasional shellburst, sort of like the fireworks on the King's birthday. Chester had told me of a place where the bottom was sandy and the water clean.

I gave my lads their surprise. "Take off your boots," I ordered. They gaped as though I were crazy. "Sincerely," I said. I picked up the box and opened it. Four new pair of boots, new socks, and three varieties of foot medication. Happy was the only one who carried a rifle and bayonet. I had told him to bring it to the beach. Fortunately, he had had it sharpened by the Maori lad who had the grindstone and was going to go home rich making the bayonets razor sharp.

You see, this was an enormous moment. We hadn't taken off our boots in over two weeks. Using extreme care, Happy sliced the laces, and from the tongues down to the toes, I pulled the boots apart.

Take the best instance of your entire existence...now triple it. That's what it felt like. We stripped down and waded into the water giggling like my sisters at a slumber party.

We sat in chest-high water with a sense of happiness never to be duplicated. I know we hadn't slept for two days and we had to report to command in a couple of hours, but we talked that night.

Dan Elgin, our gunner-hell, he was a farmer, you could tell that from a mile away. But do you know, his hobby was watching birds. He had drawn over a hundred varieties from the woods by his farm near the Rotorua Volcano. Well, there weren't many birds hanging around here except vultures, and we were thankful for them. They kept things tidy in no-man's-land.

Dan was worried that many species in the NorthIsland were becoming extinct because of the logging. It was the first time I ever thought about the fact that New Zealand could run out of birds, although we'd nearly run out of our national bird, the kiwi, because it didn't have wings to escape its human predators.

Elgin had a wife and daughter, as well, but hardly mentioned them.

Happy Stevens of Palmerston North was a shoolteacher. Here, I thought he was more like Cherster's age and all along he was an elder in his late twenties. The grin-that's what made Happy look young.

Spears didn't say much, never did. One would have the feeling he came from a background of poverty and hid whatever family life there might have been. To his credit, he didn't invent a nonexistent existence for himself, as many of the lonely do.

I was the only South Islander. God, I wanted to be able to talk about Ballyutogue Station. Anyhow, I laid it on thick about the beauty of the South Island.

It was a nice night, not from any secret revelations, but suddenly the four of us were New Zealanders, and somehow that meant terribly much to us.

We were nearly too tired to stand up but we got to wrestling in the water, then staggered back to our caves to catch the two hours and five minutes sleep due to us.

Quinn's Post. A piece of land in hell so nasty the devil exiled it to Gallipoli. It nubbed forward like the prow of a ship hanging out as a standing invitation to the Turks all around to pour in gunfire.

Quinn's Post was at the open end of Monash Valley, the most strategic position on our line. If, indeed, the Turks ever cracked it, they would be able to pour into Monash Valley to the sea and split our forces in half.

Abdul stacked his forces around Quinn's Post in a series of positions with ominous names: Bloody Angle, which gave them a view to the sea; the Chessboard, a brilliantly conceived series of square trench works that blocked us from every direction; Dead Man's-Ridge (there must be one in every battle zone), which had a series of hidden gullies funning off it toward Quinn's.

In a word, Quinn's Post probably faced the most heavily fortified acre of land in the world.

A trench line down from Quinn's Post ran for a quarter of a mile through our forward positions at Courtney's, Steele's, on down to Lone Pine. The Turkish trenches and ours in this quarter-mile stretch were pressed so close to one another that no-man's-land was a mere twelve and twenty yards wide. We could damn near use each other's latrines.

When Colonel Malone, a New Zealander of few words, took over the Quinn position, he had the shovels going twenty-four hours a day until our concentration and connection of trenches dulled the Turkish ambitions.

Every few feet at Quinn's Post there was an earthen step to a vertical niche so a rifleman or machine gunner could stand and have a field of fire.

By daylight nothing could move above the trench line without drawing a blizzard of gunfire from the Turks. By night, they had a weapon unknown to us, hand grenades. A couple of nights I had to lay over at Quinn's Post and the grenades never stopped.

I pulled up all the corrugated metal and heavy mesh I could find on the beach and took it to Quinn's and they roofed their trenches with it. The roof was set at an angle so that when a Turkish grenade landed, it rolled back down into no-man's-land, hopefully before it exploded.

At last we found a decent use for some of our rations. Empty jam tins were filled with bits of barbed wire and sharpnel. Powder, detonators, and fuses were added. These were very crude versions of the Turkish grenades, but Abdul was no longer going to get free throws.

Other innovations came about through necessity. We were able to scan the Turks through homemade periscopes. Other periscopes were rigged so they could be used to aim snipers' rifles. When we received new Enfield rifles, our sharpshooters, sighting in through periscopes, became so accurate they could shoot through the Turkish firing loopholes.

If the racket didn't get you at Quinn's, the smell would. When a man went down in the narrow waist of no-man's-land, it was impossible to get him back. The vultures became so fat they could hardly fly and began to leave the corpses to rot under a sun that shot the temperature up over a hundred degrees every day.

Our dead who went down in our trenches were stacked at a far end. We'd wait until the wind blew toward the Turkish lines, then pour on petrol and set the corpses afire.

At 0430 my squad gloried in our new socks and boots. Our party consisted of my lads, Major Chris, Lieutenant General Brodhead, and his right-hand strategist, Colonel Markham.

I took them up the eastern wall of Monash Valley where we passed less than two hundred yards from the German Officer's Trench, a major Turk stronghold.

Yurlob had carved out a mule track from where Monash Valley forked and one of the gullies led into the rear of Quinn's Post. Turks always had this spot under surveillance from Bloody Angle and the Chessboard.

Without mules we were able to crawl the last fifty yards without drawing fire. It amazed me how General Brodhead and Major Chris and Colonel Markham always looked like they had walked out of the tailor's shop, while me and my lads looked ravaged.

I was fascinated by the easy way Brodhead had as he moved through the trenches chatting up the troops, earnestly hearing their input and totally sympathetic about the trials of life at the Post. Brodhead went beyond the automatic stiff upper lip crap the senior Brits seemed compelled to dish out.

Brodhead and Markham went into Colonel Malone's headquarters dugout and after a few minutes I was called in.

"Landers, how far can you get us up the ridge toward Russell's Top?"

It hit me in the stomach. I wanted to say "About six inches" or "Depends on how anxious you are to die."

"How many in our party and what do we want to do?" I asked.

"Colonel Markham, Colonel Malone, and myself. We want to take a look at the Chessboard. Can you do it?"

"We can do an in and out," I said. We'd been running supplies to the outpost at Pope's Hill but came in from another direction.

"What we'd really like to get a look at are the four or five gullies falling off Bloody Angle," Markham said.

I looked at Malone's map table. "There's a ditch up Dead Man's that practically touches the Turkish lines, very close. I'm talking five, ten yards. I think we can see the gullies from there. I should tell you, sir, if the Turks engage us, we can't be rescued."

"Let's have a go at it, what?" Brodhead said.

Well, his uniform was going to get messed up on this one. I had learned from the time I was a kid that you can be standing five feet away from a lost lamb and not see it. If a man plays the brush and little bumps in the land correctly, he can hide his body almost anywhere.

The shallow ditch and deliberate slow movement could put us on a U-turn we wanted. A hundred yards...a hundred minutes...right near the end, I spotted a triangle of land mines and looked for trip wires...shit...I hate snipping trip wires....

Click! Only pliers, but it sounded like a cannon.

Bloody Turks had the mines set so we couldn't get around them without waking up their army. We had to crawl through them...I hummed the Maori farewell song under my breath..."Now is the hour for us to say good-bye"...did they read my signals...three mines, go through them...

Close your mouth, Brodhead...the sun is going to bounce off your smiling teeth...

Wa...Wa...Wa...Wa! Lookee here! Whole fucking Chessboard, big curve at the top of Bloody Angle and one, two, three of the gullies...my, my, my.

Malone was beside me. He had that Quinn's Post perfume aura about him. Look at these sons of bitches...they still haven't gotten their uniforms dirty.

I focused my binoculars as did the others. Shit! The Chessboard had grown by over a dozen squares...an entire new trench area had been added on. The gullies off Bloody Angle were filled with troops...lots and lots of them.

The four of us were packed tightly together. Our window to the Turks was only a few feet wide, the only possible place to have our look without exposing ourselves. I wanted to get back, even to Quinn's, but Brodhead seemed to be enamored with what he saw. It seemed like a year before he signaled me to take us back.

None too soon. I didn't see them, but after a time you sense a Turkish patrol and we'd been hanging out there for quite a time.

Okay, Rory, go back at exactly the same pace...don't rush it...breathe deep...Maori farewell song...now we go...now we go...through those fucking land mines.

I looked behind me. Got to say, the Brits were beautiful in the way they followed my line...each pebble of recognition gave me an urge to stand up and run for it...a hundred minutes out...a hundred minutes back.

Oh God, it felt good when the hands in the trenches grabbed me and hauled me in.

"Come on, guys. You know, I always send extra rum up to this post. How about some now?"

"Here you go, chief," Dan Elgin said. "We owe them two bottles up here."

"In tomorrow morning's mail," I promised.

Damn the protocol. Malone, Markham, and the General saw the bottle and partook without ceremony or invitation.

"Nice work, Landers," Brodhead said. "Find Major Hubble and come with him to Colonel Malone's headquarters."

"Yes, sir."

I went through the tarp into the Colonel's quarters. All of them were on the bad side of grim.

"Malone?" Brodhead asked.

"Well, it's what my patrols suspected but never got to see. The Chessboard has increased in size by twenty percent."

"It feels like a full brigade in the gullies off Bloody Angle," Markham said.

"I'd say more," Malone suggested.

Brodhead posed with his teeth lurking through his lips. "Two brigades and we can identify them," Brodhead said. "One brigade is going to slide along the line between Quinn's on down to Lone Pine. Their attack will be to pin the line down. Their main assault will be directly on Quinn's Post with another brigade. They'll come over the gullies in waves right into your face, Malone. There's really no room to maneuver around with flanking tactics. They'll try to overrun us right down Monash Valley."

"Who's resting in Heavently Spa Valley?" Malone asked of the place with the queer name where troops were rotated off the lines.

"Canterbury's," Colonel Markham said.

"Better get them up here," Brodhead ordered. "Colonel Chapman's dead. They'll need a new commander."

"Who's the exec?"

"Lieutenant Colonel Hinshaw."

Malone held his tongue but showed visible uneasiness.

"I think not," Brodhead said.

I'll take the Canterbury's," Colonel Markham said.

"Let me think about it," Brodhead said. "Well, we do have some decent news. Chris told me just as we pushed off this morning. A hundred Maxim guns were unloaded yesterday. How soon can you have them up here, Chris?"

"Depends how they're packed. Right away if they're not in grease."

"Just in light oil," I said. "I checked."

"Good. Landers, Chris...fifty of the Maxims go right here to Quinn's. I want another twenty-five down the line to Lone Pine. Twenty-five in reserve. We're going to need an ammunition dump up here."

"I don't like ammo on top of the trenches," Malone said strongly. "We almost had a catastrophe with that."

"It has to be within a few minutes' reach," Markham said. "Landers?" Chris asked.

"I can set up a series of small dumps right behind the post, sir. If I stay up here with my squad, we'll create the space."

"AM right with you, Hubble?" the General asked.

"Subaltern Yurlob has the transport completely under control. I think Landers up here is an excellent idea."

I knew Christopher Hubble had changed, but I could not help but be touched by the total trust he had placed in me since we landed. He knew I went crazy when Johnny Tarbox died but he saw past it.

Colonel John Monash, the Aussie Commander of the line down to Lone Pine, entered.

"We've just drawn lottery dates at my headquarters," Monash said. "My date is...let's see...the. Turks attack on May 18."

"Well, I hope they give us that much time," Brodhead retorted He told Monash what we had seen today and his notion of the Turkish assault.

"I've lost over thirty men on patrols trying to get a look," Monash said. "So the Chessboard's pregnant. You're going to have to take the big hit," he said to Malone.