Leon Uris (61 page)

“Can you manage?”

“You’re light as…a fucking mule….”

I’d done the right thing by not murdering the bastard, but I sure as hell didn’t want to become his friend. I lost whatever little sleep was due me thinking about him and Georgia. Till now I had attained a measure of control over my longing for Georgia, but with this prick here, my hunger for her was constant.

Despite me staying out of his way, we had a lot of business to do. His Ghurkas doted on him, but otherwise he didn’t have friends. Why the hell, out of all the troops in Anzac, did he want to be my cobber?

Even though I assured him that men save men on the battlefield all the time as a matter of fact, his gratitude was beyond the ordinary. He began leaning on me, knowing I could cut through red tape. I usually delivered. He liked me more and more. Every time I saw him, it felt like I was getting a punch in the mouth.

I did have to admire the way he snapped back. As fate
would have it, I needed a favor from him. Modi got the dysentery bad and it scared the hell out of me. Fearing more for Modi’s life than my own bitterness, I begged Dr. Norman that if there was any way to save Modi, he just had to do it for me.

You know how it is with doctors, they always carry a little something in their kit that generally isn’t on the market. He gave me some kind of elixir for Modi, warning me that it contained diluted opium.

As Modi plugged up, I calculated that Calvin Norman and I were square. We owed each other nothing more.

I was helping unload some new leather about a week after Norman arrived and looked up to see him at the paddock. “Landers, I have to speak to you,” he said seriously. Well, he was always serious, but today seemed a bit more so. “It’s a personal matter, actually.”

Calvin didn’t have a full face like a jolly man. His grim personality had stretched the skin over his cheekbones tightly and whatever was annoying him now had him very taut. The first thing that came to mind was that Georgia had sent him a letter with my name in it.

I checked for Farting Ferdinand. The big bugger was shooting south.

“The beach looks quiet,” I said. “Up for a dip?”

“Sounds excellent.”

For obvious reasons I checked Norman out as he undressed. Well, Georgia got no great bargain with him in that department. We did the Anzac whore’s bath, sitting deep enough to cover our shoulders.

“You warned me when we went out to tour the lines that there was no possibility of setting up a surgery closer to the trenches.”

“Never can tell which post the Turks will hit or which one we will hit. We try to keep each other from sleeping during the night.” I was relieved that this had nothing to do with his wife and me.

“So,” he said, “back to your two original suggestions. I
have to establish a surgery either in Widow’s Gully or under the Red Cross tents. I had hoped to be able to give frontline treatment. Damned mule ride or the litter-bearers’ run to Widow’s can take up to two hours down from the lines. As you said, Gallipoli has certain built-in realities.”

“It’s a crying shame but we lose an awful lot of men bringing them down.”

“Gallipoli,” he said, “seems to be one long cry. A few more surgeons, a few more Ghurka teams will help. I hope they get here soon.”

“I want to ask you a stupid question, Doctor. Most of the men we lose bleed to death. Isn’t there some way we can pump new blood into them?”

“Good question, Landers. We’ve experimented with transferring blood. Sometimes it does work. Too many times it brings on instant death. It appears that there are different classifications of blood.”

“By race?”

“No, not by race. By some set of ingredients which we cannot identify or group. Look, at least we have ether to work with, and morphine, iodine for infection. Wars of the last century didn’t have much of anything—saws, knives, and stitches. Here, let me have a look at your stitches.”

I stood in the water.

“How you escaped infection, I’ll never know. So, the best I can do here is operate before we put them aboard ship for Alexandria…those who have a chance.”

“Losing many wounded aboard ship?” I asked.

“Hundreds. I’ve demanded a pair of proper hospital ships. We’ll see how far my carte blanche goes. Why I really asked you here was to get your opinion of where I should set the major surgery. At Widow’s Gully we have a measure of safety from Turkish artillery, but it’s very tight quarters with little possibility of assuring proper sanitation. However, if I set up in the Red Cross tents, I’d be wide open to Turkish gunfire. What do you suggest, Landers?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’m not Solomon.”

“I’ll make the decision,” Norman said, “but I could use the benefit of your thinking.”

I’ll make the decision, he said. Phew! Both decisions could be wrong, but he didn’t shirk. He’d make the decision fifty times a day about who had the chance to survive long enough to get to Alexandria…and who died here…. I could not help but feel deeply for this man. Without his mask of indifference, without his ability to accept the responsibility for many, many deaths…lives could not be saved. No wonder the bloke seemed to be made of cast-iron.

“Well, let me see. The Red Cross tents are preferable for you?”

“Yes.”

“Up till now we’ve honored each other’s Red Cross. Our tents are wide open. So far, so good, but the Turks are nobody’s sweethearts. I wouldn’t want to be their prisoner. Modi—Dr. Pearlman, the chap you gave me the dysentery medicine for—is from Palestine. The Turks beat him across the soles of his feet with a thick branch. Crippled a lot of his friends that way. The Turks also have a big thing about raping male prisoners. But even if they didn’t fire on the Red Cross tents deliberately, mayhem and loss of fire control happens here all the time. A few shells can fall short or otherwise go awry. There’s another major risk. Our own naval gunfire has killed hundreds of our men. Wouldn’t there be added tension on the surgeons operating during a bombardment?”

“When in doubt, take cover,” he said.

“I may be wrong but I think those tents are going to get hit.”

“Well, thanks, Landers, you’ve helped awfully. You’d think the Turks would be running low on ammunition after a while.”

“They’ve opened an ammunition factory south of Constantinople. It’s about the only correct intelligence we’ve gotten.”

*  *  *

The sappers and engineers created a mammoth cave in the east wall of Widow’s Gully, roofed it with steel and piled up to twenty feet of sandbags and earth…too tough even for Farting Ferdinand.

As June wore on, the heat kicked up to 130 degrees at times. Down at Cape Helles the Brits made another futile attempt at Achi Baba. At terrible cost they advanced about a mile up the peninsula and never got another inch of this wretched ground. This offensive was utterly puzzling. As I was privy to official field reports I sorrowfully came to learn that not only could staff be monumentally incompetent, but they could also be monumental liars about the whys and wherefores. Disasters were being encased in the poetry of fantasy.

Of the original gaffers and Major Hubble, one man stood out as potentially the finest officer of us all, and that man was Chester Goodwood. Seemed like the entire Anzac depended on the way he ran the beach.

Chester had two assets. The first was an ability to sense requirements and future shortages and get the material in before the shortage occurred.

His second asset was a sensitivity that made him rail at incompetence, no matter what rank it carried on its shoulders. Chester tore into officers to get their asses moving and, at Lemnos, colonels froze in fear of his wrath.

In due course he demanded that Major General Godley fire his top-ranking quartermaster, a light colonel, and in the showdown, Godley meekly complied. I must say I could not have been more proud than when he became First Lieutenant Goodwood. Can you imagine? He still was not big enough to support his own beard.

Finally, Christopher Hubble got his long-held dream, a battalion to command under Colonel Malone. It was a mixed bag of troops, under the esoteric designation of First Kiwi.

Jeremy had done the beach long enough. He caught
the fever and was transferred up to First Kiwi where he was given the scout platoon known as Reconn A.

To be factually honest, Modi could run the paddock in a yawn. Over time we had developed a couple dozen packers and trail masters who could handle the operation, including the Palestinian Jews and the Sikhs.

I therefore put in my own request to join the First Kiwi and used my weight with Brodhead to get the request directly to him. I was stunned when it was denied. I went to Colonel Markham, about as pommy as Christopher Hubble, and “requested” to know why.

At first Markham diddled with me, saying that as a man who was potentially going to be decorated, it would be better if I did not get shot up. Well, that’s no reason, and I let him know it. He gave up and showed me my request for transfer. There was an attached sheet and notation.
Subaltern Landers would have utmost value to my unit in assisting with the wounded
. It was signed Lieutenant Colonel Calvin Norman.

What were the gods trying to tell me? Truth be known, as the paddock ran on automatic, I had become inexorably drawn to Widow’s Gully, getting his surgery constructed, and doing a number of things requiring the common sense generally lacking among the staff officers.

Somehow I decided not to protest, knowing deep down I could make off to the front lines if I really cared to.

What I did was run the overall movement of the place…seeing that supplies got in for the surgery…carving out places where the wounded would be most safe and comfortable…using Turks around the clock to clean the area…keeping the floor of the surgery free of blood…moving amputated arms and legs to the garbage barge on a path that those waiting for surgery could not see them…working with Chester for extremely swift and smooth evacuations…sitting with the odd chap who particularly needed my hand as he was bleeding to death…keeping fresh uniforms supplied for Norman and his surgeons and teams….

I can’t even start to tell you, but there was a lot to do and I must say I found a real reason for being.

Every day Dr. Norman would select out fifty to a hundred most in need for surgery and divide them up among his surgeons. Down in the gully he would look them over, lying there like sides of beef in a slaughterhouse, and he’d tag them…some for death…some for evacuation without surgery…some for surgery.

He and the other doctors operated under beastly conditions, the floor under them always gone slippery from blood as the Turks mopped up bucketfuls under their feet as they operated.

The big room resembled a coal mine cave: badly lit, smelly, poorly ventilated, the fly netting constantly in need of repair…bloody guns always banging nearby….

It might sound diabolical but I learned more about humanity here than I knew existed. You see, here was the stuff of my people, the New Zealanders, and the Aussies as well. We tried to instill a single hard rule telling the wounded that we would all fare better if they could bear their pain in silence.

Screaming and yelling and thrashing about would only upset the other men and make it ten times more difficult for the surgeons. Maggots were put on rotting flesh to eat away the infection, rubber bits were clamped on the men’s teeth. There was a steady moan of those suffering unmerciful agony…but seldom a scream, and never mass screaming…waiting on their litter or the floor for their turn on the operating table.

Calvin Norman sawed and stitched his way through most nights with scarcely time to clean himself and his tools between operations.

“Where are you from, lad? Auckland. Ah, I love those hills about Auckland.”

“It’s gone! My arm is gone!”

“Not to scream, lad, it will go hard on your mates.”

About dawn Dr. Shurhum and Dr. Norman and the
other chaps could scarcely stand up, but they continued on until their eyes blurred and their hands could no longer be controlled, making the instruments unsafe. Speech slurred. Dr. Norman could no longer give orders properly.

About that time I’d take him out to the beach and put him in the water. Chester always had a clean uniform laid out for him. As the light came up from behind Chunuk Bair I’d tuck Norman in away from the artillery and help empty Widow’s Gully either for the evacuation boat or the…you know…burial at sea.

Bad news comes fast…good news takes its time drifting to Gallipoli. With a new hospital ship going into service, hundreds of men could be saved.

My nightmares had their own nightmares…a lot of blood and limbs…Dr. Norman’s surgery all mixed up with me at Quinn’s Post…and terribly strange dreams of Georgia. Chester hovered over me as if I was a cripple, as if he didn’t have enough to do. See, I became afraid to sleep…but in this place, a man can learn to sleep standing up in twenty-second snatches.

Can you beat it! A day finally arrived, and none too soon, when Norman had no surgery to perform. We repaired to my troglodyte cave and feasted off some tins of staff officers’ cream of potato soup, and, can you believe, salmon, vino, and custard! Well now, either Calvin Norman couldn’t drink much or he was usually too damned tired out to handle alcohol. I decided to get him pissed. He drank again and again and fell back against the wall and closed his eyes.

I knew I would have to listen to his worries and they were not long in coming.

“One of the problems here are the so-called healthy men,” he said. “I’d estimate that in Anzac as a whole, man for man, each soldier is only operating at fifty percent of his strength. They are skin and bones and open to anything these bloody flies and lice are carrying in. How strong are you now, Landers?”

“Fifty percent.”

“Well, I suppose the Turks are pretty weak as well, although they have access to wheat and meat.”

“How do you feel when you operate on a Turk?” I asked.

“I feel I have to work twice as hard to save him.”

“Aye…. Here, good fucking wine. French.”

“I’m making some bad decisions every night,” he babbled. “Sometimes, just before I put them under and their eyes plead to me, I already know he’s gone and it comes to me that someone is going to get a cable the next day in Sydney or Wellington….”