Kingdoms Fall - The Laxenburg Message (6 page)

           
Hart and Gresham started right off walking into the village. They carried a
couple canteens and each wore an Turkish jacket and helmet. They still needed
to avoid the troops on the road, but it was now very late and very dark and the
number of troops moving on the road had dwindled. There were no sentries on the
east side of the village to challenge them, as the Turks did not expect to be
attacked from the rear. Hart and Gresham quietly and casually passed behind and
around a number of burnt-out buildings until they could see into the village
center, where they found several hundred Turkish troops sitting and lying
about, resting.

           
“Look’ee there,” said Hart, “old Abdul is bedded down for the night.”

           
“There’s the water supply,” whispered Gresham, pointing to a metal cistern to
one side. Just the sight of the water tank had caused his body to cramp up. It
had been sixteen hours since his last drink. Gresham smeared some dust on his
face, picked up his canteens, and walked boldly into the village square.

Hart laughed to himself, “what kind of bloody
plan is this?”

Gresham walked calmly towards the cistern. He
avoided the larger groups of men and stayed close to those who were lying down
or asleep. The street was packed with Turkish soldiers. Gresham reached the
cistern, quickly filled his canteens, and then simply walked off slowly down
the road to the west. Hart followed him by a few minutes, likewise dressed in
Turkish jacket and helmet (although, at nearly six and a half feet, Hart looked
a great deal less like a Turkish infantryman). A Turkish Colonel stood up and
approached Hart as he filled his canteens.

           
“
I-yak-sham-lar
,” Hart growled at the officer, bowing slightly as he
began walking briskly after Gresham. Fortunately, the Turkish officer was too
confused and too tired to react.

           
“What the hell did you say to him?” Gresham asked, after they cleared the last
group of sleeping Turkish troops.

           
“A Sergeant knows how to speak to officers, Sir; doesn’t matter which army he’s
in.”

           
Gresham and Hart were startled at the mass of German Maxim machine guns and
Krupp field artillery that had been drawn up into the village to resist the
British offensive, not to mention rolls of barbed wire and enormous stores of
ammunition. They were glad the guns were quiet for now. In front of the
village, the Turks had begun digging trenches and stringing wire. The village
would be impregnable in a days’ time. Gresham and Hart reached the west end of
the village and located Cooper with the cart. “Here’s some water,” said
Gresham, passing up a canteen. “Now, Sergeant, lie in the cart and pretend to
be dead while the Corporal and I start up the road.”

           
Hart jumped into the back of the cart, disturbing the thousands of flies
feasting on the rancid liquids pooled on the cart’s wooden slat bed. Gresham
and Cooper whipped up the horses, and the cart began its slow trek west.
Shortly after, they paused by a dark, narrow, gully long enough for Gresham to
collect Wilkins and the rest of the company. Slowly and quietly, the men walked
from the gully and climbed into the stack of “dead” men in the cart. After the
last man was loaded, Gresham and Cooper continued westwards through one small
Turkish encampment after another, across the Anafarta plain and back towards
Suvla Bay. Given the smell of the cart, the load of “bodies” in the back and
the dead of night, it was not surprising that no one challenged them or even
came close enough to look at their faces. Soon the camps thinned out, and the
cart simply continued into the empty plain beyond.

Gresham was exhausted. For the past twenty-four
hours, he had focused solely on moving forward and keeping as many men alive to
fight another day as he could, but his head hurt and his muscles ached and his
sense of smell might have been permanently damaged by the odor of the cart. The
road before him was dusty and dry. Too many men had died to take a ridge that
no one seemed to want to keep. The ridge would have to be retaken. The war
would go on and on and on. That was a mixed blessing, as far as Gresham was
concerned. He thought back to his brief final conversation with his father, who
had sent his bastard son away from Manchester with an ultimatum: Be gone for
good; succeed or die, it made no matter.

Gresham’s mother was a poor Irish kitchen
servant who had died young, and Gresham had ended up an orphan in the streets
of Manchester where he had fought to survive each day. He became such an
embarrassment to his father that he had finally been abducted and sent away to
public school. He had done so well there that his father had even arranged to
send him, at great expense, to Oxford. That had not gone well at all. Now
Gresham had been sent away from Manchester for good, and he had finally found
something at which he genuinely excelled: He would be a cold-hearted ruthless
bastard of an infantry officer, if only the British army would let him.

           
The cart approached a line of British infantrymen stationed a half-mile from
the shoreline just as the night sky was beginning to turn light grey. Gresham,
still dressed in a Turkish coat and helmet, pulled the cart off the road and
leapt down to strip them off. “We’ve gone as far as we need to go by cart,” he
whispered. The men piled out and shook themselves, taking deep breaths of fresh
air.

           
“I’ll be damned,” said Wilkins upon seeing the wary British sentries just fifty
yards ahead. He and Hart stripped off their Turkish coats and walked with
Gresham up to the picket line. The men there were also surprised.

           
“Ah, it’s you, Captain Wilkins,” said a fresh-faced Second Lieutenant cheerily.
“Colonel Banks has been asking after you, Sir. He’ll be delighted to see you
well. You had better see him at his field quarters.”

           
“And where the Devil
are
the Colonel’s quarters?”

           
“There, Sir,” pointing to a hill to the southwest, “at Lala Baba.”

           
“Very well. I must freshen up first. Gresham, please accompany me.”

           
“Yes, Sir” said Gresham. “Sergeant Hart, get the men squared away, and see if
you can locate the rest of the company and Lieutenant Keeling.”

           
“Aye, Sir.”

As they passed the Second Lieutenant, Gresham
stopped. “Say, Lieutenant, there’s a Turkish Battalion two miles along this
road. Do you have any idea why no one is shooting at them?”

           
“Orders, I s’pose, Sir?”

           
“Of course, that must be the reason.” That response came as no surprise to
Gresham, who continued his march with Wilkins back towards the bay where they
had begun only twenty-four hours before.

C
aptain Wilkins and Lieutenant
Gresham walked to shore and stopped long enough to rinse their faces and hands,
smoke a cigarette, and drink a modest amount of rum. They still stank from the
cart and were splattered with dried blood and the vast cloud of flies which it
attracted as they hiked down to Colonel Banks’ quarters. Banks was the
Battalion commander, and he reported directly to General Mahon in command of
the Division. Wilkins liked Banks; he was a difficult old man but was generally
good at following orders, whilst Mahon was widely regarded as one of the finest
Generals in the British army. The morning had started hot, and before Gresham
and Wilkins reached Lala Baba, the sun had begun to bake the shoreline. It was
still relatively quiet and the Turkish shells directed at the British position
came only once every few minutes.

           
“I recommend you let me talk to the Colonel, Lieutenant,” Wilkins said, as they
walked through the amassed troops. “He can be quite difficult.”

           
“As you wish, Sir. I find I rarely know the right thing to say to such men;
they rather annoy me.”

           
“That is all the more reason for you to remain silent. Officers like Banks want
to know they are in charge, and it does no good to intimidate them. This old
fellow’s sure to rap your knuckles if you do.”

           
“Yes, Sir,” said Gresham. To the Captain, the world was just an extension of
Eton, he thought, as he tried to sweep his filthy, disheveled black hair out of
his eyes.

           
The shoreline was crowded with thousands of boxes, men and draft animals, and
it was quite difficult to find a path through. It seemed an entire army had
been forced into the fifty yards between the water and the top of the hill that
surrounded the shore. At last they made it down to the hill called Lala Baba
between the bay and the dry salt lake. Colonel Banks had the largest tent among
those raised at the base of the hill.  Wilkins wondered where General
Mahon and General Stopford were located. Had they even come ashore yet? A guard
went in to announce Wilkins as he and Gresham waited outside in the bright hot
sunlight.

           
“Good God, you’re a mess, Wilkins, but I am glad to see you alive,” said the
thin, grey-haired Colonel Banks as he stepped out of his tent and stood in its
shade.

           
“Thank you, Sir,” replied Wilkins.

           
“You reached the top of Kiretch Tepe, I hear. Is that right?”

           
“Yes, Sir, the Lieutenant and I reached the top of the ridge, but we had to
leave men behind with Keeling to secure the trenches as we advanced. I thought
those men would be reinforced by additional companies coming up behind us, but
as those companies did not, and as my lines had become stretched, we and
several dozen men in my company were cut off when the Turks began their
counter-offensive in the afternoon.”

           
“Of course, yes, I see. So you were stuck behind the lines.”

           
“Yes, Sir.”

           
“Well it was still a fine bit of work. The Manchesters advanced farther than
any other British Regiment yesterday. Even if we couldn’t hold the ridge, it
was quite an achievement. How did you get back across the lines?”

“Thank you, Sir. We marched down to Anafarta
Sagir to meet up with the Ninth per my orders, but we found the town overrun
with Turkish infantry instead. We were able to sneak back across the lines
during the night in a corpse wagon.”

“Ha, Ha! A corpse wagon? How ingenious!”

“I must also report to you, Sir, that there are
at least a thousand Turks in the village across the plain now, and many more
appear to be coming up behind them. The Lieutenant reports that the Turks are
digging in and are well supplied with artillery and machine guns.”

           
“I see, yes . . . . Well, that’s all General Stopford’s doing. Mid-day
yesterday he ordered us to keep to the shoreline until we could get both
Divisions completely landed. There are still men and a vast amount of supplies
ferrying across from the transports, and it seems to be taking much longer than
the General anticipated. The Fifth Inniskillings moved up the ridge yesterday
to join your men and, rather than advancing onwards, they simply dug in and
relieved Keeling and sent him back down. General Mahon is furious.”

“That’s very disappointing, yes, Sir.”

“Well, I don’t want to hold you boys up chatting.
You need to clean yourselves up a bit, and I expect you’d like a meal. We’ll be
meeting in the officer’s mess at 16.00. Hopefully I will have our orders from
General Mahon by then.”

           
“Tea time. Yes, Sir.”

           
“And you are Lieutenant Gresham, is that right?” the Colonel asked, turning to
Wilkins’ Lieutenant.

           
“Yes, I am, Sir.”

           
The colonel eyed him stonily a moment. “I have been given orders for you to
report to I-Branch at General Headquarters on Imbros as soon as possible.”

           
“Imbros? You mean the island, Sir?”

           
“Yes of course the island. I don’t know how you will get there, but I was
instructed to send you and you are now sent. Wilkins, see you at tea, my boy,”
and with that the Colonel retreated into his tent.