Leon Uris (55 page)

It seemed like a year before the assholes stepped their fire farther up the hill.

It was closing in on our witching hour. One more exposed hillside to crawl, our fourth gully. Either this would be the one or we’d have to call it a day.

Lord! It was almost like looking at the Promised Land from across the River Jordan. The gully below took a weird U-shaped turn with the end of it running down to the beach at an off-angle. We gathered up and counted shells landing in the area. Only one in five minutes, that was off the side walls. We could live with that.

“Happy.”

“Yo.”

“It’s too late to set the barbed wire down, but get down to the beach and tell Hubble where we’re at. He’s to be here at the crack of.”

It ran through my mind that we could all go back, but I didn’t like the top of the ravine. It was too wide open. Hell…I don’t know. I didn’t like it that there were none of our troops above us here…the Turks could just maybe slip into the ravine….

“Take off, Happy.”

“Elgin, Spears, Chester. I like that indent about halfway up the ravine wall. Let’s set up the machine gun there.”

How in the hell with all those thousands of men shooting millions of rounds did anyone leave this ravine open? We set up the machine gun so that if anyone came into the middle of the ravine we’d catch them broadside.

I got a craving feeling in my stomach. I was hungry. We hadn’t eaten for over twenty hours. I’d heard bitching about the rations, but on this very day nothing ever tasted so good. That would change over time.

As the firing went from dusk into darkness we moved to get a better look at the sea. There seemed to be more chaos than ever. I didn’t like the looks of the water. It was filled with bobbing bodies.

Elgin and Spears were on the gun. Chester and I had our first minutes to reflect. I found a leaning rock, put my back against it, and directed abuse at myself. I hadn’t made myself very proud this day.

“Forget it,” Chester said, reading my mind.

“I didn’t know myself,” I whispered.

“And I didn’t have Johnny Tarbox’s brains and blood all over me. You were back in control within a minute.”

“That’s not what I mean, Chester. Not that I haven’t been scared in my life. The worst fear I’d known before today was realizing I’d never see Georgia again. But I was totally frozen in terror when Johnny got hit. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. Jesus, I didn’t know anything like this existed.”

And I was going to take care of Chester today, make certain he didn’t become freaky. He went through the day like a Sunday stroll in the botanical gardens.

“You’ve known the kind of fear I felt today, haven’t you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What happened to you?”

“It’s just the way your life turns out, sometimes.”

“What can you do about it, Chester?”

“Recognize that from this day on, the monster is sitting on our shoulder all the time. It can strike a hundred times, never twice the same way. It’s worse when you pretend it’s not there. Recognize it! Know it the instant that flush of terror paralyzes you and, at that same instant, say, ‘Hello friend, it’s you again…you sure scare the shit out of me but you can’t stop me from thinking or moving.’ You’ll get plenty of practice.”

I took Johnny’s wallet. There was a picture of him and his old man. He loved his dad. Thought about him after. The photograph of his mother was so old and faded I couldn’t make much of it. He never got a letter from her.

I’d made a basic mistake about Chester. Never judge courage from the size of a man. Won’t make that mistake again. Bloody giant, that kid was.

We went to Spears and Elgin. “Two up and two down,” I said. “You take the first watch. See if you can stay awake for two hours. If not, wake us up. If you have to talk, talk with your lips on each other’s ear. No fucking noise, lads.”

Chester and I found a bit of softer ground a few yards away. We were nearly asleep when some short rounds of artillery fell close to us. We could feel the heat and waves of the blast and a kick of dirt.

“Mind if I curl up with you?” Chester asked.

“My pleasure.”

“If you feel an erection,” he said, “don’t take it personally. It only means I have to pee.”

“Well, you’ll get no hard-on from me this night,” I retorted.

After a time.

“You know what?”

“What?”

“It’s my birthday,” Chester said.

“What the hell. I had mine a week ago. I turned twenty-one. My old man can’t get me back now. How old are you anyhow, Chester?”

“Truth?”

“Doesn’t make any difference out here.”

“I’m turning seventeen.”

I put my hand over Chester’s mouth and watched his eyes open. What a kid! He wasn’t even alarmed. I put my mouth around his ear. “Turks,” I said. “They came over the ridge and are down in middle of the gully. Elgin’s at the trigger. I’m putting up a flare in about thirty seconds.”

I rolled away from him and put a flare into the Very pistol. There was almost no noise below. The Turks must be wearing rags over their shoes. There! A little snap of brush…I want them in just a little deeper…just a little…

I aimed for the opposite wall of the gully so we could light them up without being seen ourselves. The sound of the cartridge arcing out brought quick, loud whispers from the Turks.
THERE!
Night to day! They were caught and frozen in the white brilliance…trapped. The dummies were bunched up.

“Go!”

Elgin was lovely…a real machine-gunner…short bursts…picking up first on those who might make a charge at us…a scramble…they poured back toward the ridge and escaped. Elgin’s tracers kept finding them. I don’t know if any of their patrol got back over the ridge alive.

The light over the gully went from fierce white to dull bloody red and popped out…

“We’d better move to the opposite wall of the gully,” I said, “in case they come back. Good go, lads.”

“I didn’t even use a half a belt of ammo,” Elgin said, taking the carrying handle of the gun and draping it over his shoulder.

“I’ve got the ammo case,” Spears said.

Chester Goodwood was frozen, then shivering and dried up. I slapped him and he grunted a not. “Want me to carry you or can you hold on to the back of my shirt?”

“I can move,” he assured me, wobbling to his feet.

I had studied the lines of the gully during the daylight hours and hoped that in near blackness I could find my way down the center and up the other side. Holding hands or shirts, we skidded and huffed into the gully bed. Something soft under my feet. Shit, a Turk!

He moaned and cried, begging for his life. I dared turn my torch on him for an instant. Poor bastard’s stomach was out. His eyes screamed to me for mercy!

“I’d better finish him,” I said, “or else he may call to another patrol.”

“I’m sorry, Abdul,” I said, and shot him.

Elgin and Spears were restless but dropped off to sleep, flinging themselves about and muttering. Chester said nothing. He was going through the same shit I had in the landing boat when I froze.

So, what did the day bring? I had lost much of the awe I had for men wearing admiral’s stripes and the red collar
of a general. They had done some fucking stupid things today.

As for Chester Goodwood, I suppose wars had been crafted for guys like us. He had become a very big man in my eyes.

All right, Rory, you’ve now known ultimate fear. You felt it again when the Turkish patrol entered the gully, but by God, the second time you had your head on.

Elgin…what a gunner…Happy Stevens from Palmerston North…where the hell was he? That’s right, I sent him back to the beach. I hope he made it…

The Turk moaned…he refused to die. I couldn’t get rid of that wild look he wore. Who would be crying tomorrow in Constantinople? A couple of little kids?

I never thought there would come the day I would wake up with sheer elation at the sight of Major Hubble. Happy had done his job. He had reached the beach. Just before dawn, the platoon and battalion company moved into the beach end of the gully with reels of barbed wire.

I saw them in the middle of the gully! Eight dead Turks! The wounded fellow had crawled halfway up to us when he gave out.

Jeremy handed me his canteen. Nothing ever felt as good going down…nothing.

“It was a good thing you were here,” Christopher said. “This gully was wide open right down to the beach. The Turks could have come back with a battalion and attacked if you hadn’t gotten their patrol.”

“Shithouse luck,” I mumbled.

Why did I put a Very pistol into my pack? Why did I call for a machine-gun squad even though I knew it would slow me down? Why did I select this ravine? Luck? Luck? Luck? How many lucks do you get before you are Johnny Tarbox? Why Johnny? Why not me? Chester told
me that every soldier who ever experienced it probably wondered why he lived and the guy next to him died.

“I understand we lost Tarbox on the landing?” the Major asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Bad luck. Good fellow,” Chris said. He scanned our area. “I see you’ve staked out the paddock. Good go. Jeremy, can you get it enclosed with wire?”

“Yes.”

“Up at the top of the gully, don’t spare the wire. Lay it down heavy. Major, I got a suspicion that there’s a zigzag route into here. We’d better get a company of infantry up there with a couple of Vicker guns.”

“I totally agree,” Chris said. “You help Jeremy here. I’ll take Goodwood back with me so he can explain this draw to General Brodhead.”

“How goes the battle?” I asked.

“We’re putting a lot of men ashore today,” Christopher said. “We’ll get everything tidied up.”

When Christopher was gone, Jeremy sat alongside me. “Monumental fuckup,” Jeremy said. “Naval gunfire, zero. Our landing, one mile north. The Anzacs are digging in for dear life a thousand to fifteen hundred yards uphill. Well, this looks like a fairly good spot.”

It was. Not only did we have our paddock but also our battalion headquarters. Later Anzac Corps headquarters dug in in our general area.

With the paddock perimeter laid out and Major Hubble having more hands than needed to dig out battalion headquarters, I went back to the beach to help evacuate the wounded.

The day was all about men pouring onto the beach from the sea, rushing up to shore up our lines while we were getting our wounded into boats…getting gear…trying to anchor down the pontoon piers, which were being blown almost as fast as we could set them up.

I glimpsed a blur of faces…Happy from somewhere…
Chester…Dan Elgin, my machine-gunner last night, limped in with a leg wound…whistling artillery, explosions, and the constant cries and moans of the wounded.

I stripped to the waist as the midday heat became insufferable and found myself in charge of one of the working piers, pulling in boat after boat unloading, then loading them with wounded. I filled them up until bodies totally covered the bottom of the craft. Most of them lay ankle deep in blood. As boats pulled off to the troop transport area, I could see the dead being dumped overboard.

By early evening I learned that there were no proper hospital facilities aboard the troopships. It seems that all the Red Cross transports were in service in the English Channel taking men back from the Western Front. We were using cattle boats here with virtually no medical personnel or equipment aboard. Some ships were making for Lemnos, others for Alexandria.

I don’t know how many men I loaded that day…maybe fifty…maybe a hundred boatloads. I was so soggy with their blood, their bodies continually oozing and slipping through my hands.

Chester found me. A perimeter had been established at the head of what was now Mule Gully with two infantry companies digging in to protect it.

We found Jeremy on the beach, somehow managing to keep a line of order in the chaos.

“Let’s take a bath,” I said.

We couldn’t take our boots off, the sea was too filled with sharp-edged bits of lava, and it was equally difficult to find a clean pool of water away from the blood and slime. We came out of the sea sticky. Then, my second delicious tin of bully beef and hard biscuits.

The Major had set up a fairly decent little cave for battalion headquarters in the hillside. “We’ve ten to twelve thousand more men ashore in this sector,” he announced. “They’re forming a line up there as best they can. Seems to be lots of open spots. How’s the beach, Jeremy?”

“Reasonable. We have our boxes sorted out, more or less, and know about where to send the new units up.”

“Rough paddock is ready,” Chester said.

“The mules will be coming in another day,” I said. “Right now we haven’t got the slightest idea of where to dispatch them. I’d like to go out with a squad tomorrow and find our front lines and figure out the best route to each major post.”

“Good.”

Just like that, Major General Alexander Godley was standing over us in a semicircle of officers. We limped to our feet.

“What have we here?” Godley asked, not even knowing Major Hubble!

“Christopher Hubble, sir, Mule Transportation Battalion. We’re making headquarters in this hill and we’ve set out a barbed wire fence for the paddock, right over there.”

“You’re the one who put those men stationed at the head of the gully?”

“Yes, sir…”

“Next time, get permission from me.”

With no more, no less, he stomped off.

Captain Paul, the battalion executive officer, a ruddy farmer from Mataura, grunted his way in looking a bit shaky. “News from Cape Helles,” Paul said. “The first wave landed and took up the left flank, meeting no resistance. Instead of pushing inland till they engaged the Turks, they sat on the beach and had tea.”

“What!”

“The Twenty-ninth Division landed on the right flank. The Turks are cutting them to pieces.”

I learned that some officers submerged while other officers and enlisted men took charge. I knew clearly what my job and territory was and acted as though I had the authority. What I needed, I took. More and more folks thought me hard and I didn’t bother to correct them.

I discovered that Happy Stevens of Palmerston North was a fabulous artist and confiscated him as well as Spears and Dan Elgin and the Vickers gun. I needed to lay out route maps from the beach to frontline posts in the next week or two and these men would make a sweet team.

Where were the goddamned mules? One day late and counting. I had told Modi to round up as many boats as he could with lowering ramps in the front to get the animals ashore more easily. Big sigh of relief as I saw a line of drop ramps heading into Anzac Cove.

Elgin, Happy, and Spears were standing by. As each boat unloaded they were to take the handlers and mules to Mule Gully and into the enclosure. Chester was at my side to go to the gully with Modi and show him where we were going to stash the gear and generally how the paddock was going to operate.

Shyte! We were at low tide and the first boat hit a sandbar twenty feet from the beach. The mules didn’t want to go into the surf. As their packers wrestled with them I spotted Mordechai Pearlman. Beautiful sight!

“Modi! Over here, baby!”

“Rory! Chester! Comrades!”

A bear hug. A slobbery kiss. Chester got his as well.

“Noisy place,” Modi said.

“Just wait.”

“There’s a real mess back on Lemnos. Not half enough beds for the wounded. We’ve been hearing bad stories.”

“You’ve heard right. It’s bad.”

“How are the gaffers?”

“Johnny’s dead,” Chester said.

“Johnny! Johnny Tarbox is dead!”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

As the mules were coerced ashore, some fifty wounded men who had been in a holding gully limped to the beach. As the last mule hit land, the wounded began loading onto the boat.

“The boats are filthy,” Modi protested. “They’re full of shit.”

“I told you it was bad. How many more boatloads do you have coming today?”

“A dozen. Four of them are barges. I thought we would be able to unload them on a pier.”

“All the permanent piers are down. The pontoons bounce like kangaroos.” I tried to sort it out. “We may have to beach the barges and smash them open, drive the animals out.”

Elgin reported that the first load of mules and handlers was ready. I told him to take them to Mule Gully. “Modi, you go to the paddock with Chester and take a look, then better come back here and help me get the rest unloaded. Turn the paddock over to a warrant officer.”

“Before I depart,” Modi said, pulling me aside, “I have maybe a small surprise.” He waved to a soldier standing almost hidden in waist-deep water at the rear of a landing craft. It was Yurlob Singh!

“Chester,” I said, “where’s Jeremy?”

“Second pier down.”

“Get him. Get out of here, Modi.”

Yurlob Singh waded in holding a ramrod posture as though he was determined to be soldierly to the bitter end, as if he were walking up the steps of the hangman’s scaffold.

“Let me explain,” Modi said.

“Wait over there for Chester!” I commanded, then turned to Mr. Singh. “Any fucking thing you want to say before we pay a visit to the brass?”

“Strictly according to regulations I am to use my judgment in being allowed to examine a forward position,” he recited.

“Bullshit. Try again.”

He stood at attention, as though to say, “No blindfold.”

“It is not within the realm of my human capacity to remain on Lemnos. I am prepared for anything from the whipping post to the firing squad. Send me back to Lemnos and I will leave again.”

“Oh, you big hero, you. You fucking raghead! You abandoned your post. How do we get replacement men and mules over here? Are the fucking mules going to walk on the fucking water!”

“If you will forgo your anger for a moment, I will explain.”

“Explain! You better fucking pray to your fucking fat Buddha!”

“I do not think that remark was appropriate.”

“Yurlob, you have no idea how many mules we are going to lose in a week.”

“But there is no problem. My home battalion, the Sikh Mountain Howitzers, was training next to us on Lemnos, as you know. We always carry many extra packers. I have ordered two warrant officers, men of extremely high caliber, to be transferred into the Seventh Light Horse and run the operation in my absence.”

“Yeah, I know, cousins from your home village.”

“How did you know that? Actually, only one is a cousin. The other is a brother-in-law.”

“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.