If Then Read online

  Stretcher bearers will move in open formation. Their searching zone will be the Kiretch Tepe in support of the Manchesters. He takes one end of a folded stretcher. This he understands. This he can do.

  Bullets send up spurts of sand. He goes with his squad over tufty hillocks of grass and thyme and then the ascent up dried water courses raking the lower ridge. Up! Up! On! On! To the right, deep gullies down which a man could tumble and be hidden in the shadows under thorny bushes. Silence abides. Nobody talks. Nobody can talk. No man knows his own mind. Fear prises the body and soul apart as neatly as a scallop knife – pop! He is no longer in control of himself. Someone or something else commands him: the war itself. He runs in expectation of death – any second, any second now – and then his soul will hang around like so much chaff until a stiff breeze disperses it and he will return to the source.

  Up the ridge they go, through thorny waist-high scrub, their boots sliding over the loose sediment and a thirsty rock-studded earth. Perspiration streams off him, positively pouring. Five weeks on the boat has left him far from shipshape. James slips and puts his hands on this foreign ground to steady himself, accidentally letting go of his end of the folded wooden stretcher. He must not let go of the stretcher.

  They have gained a hundred feet, sufficient height to look back across the beach and the landing, with its legions of men and horse, its half-pitched tents and dumped stores.

  “Don’t be distracted by the view,” says the lieutenant colonel. He directs the stretcher squads to crawl up and down the dried watercourses of the ridge, listening for the cries of the wounded. When they find an injured man, he is to be carried back to the beach. The horse and cart ambulance are useless in this terrain. The slopes are so steep that the stretchers will have to be slid down like toboggans.

  The squad drops, belly-down, into a shallow trench, no more than two feet in depth, joining four Munsters lying on their backs.

  “Any wounded?” Hector asks.

  “Any water?” comes the reply.

  There is no time to talk. Hector risks a glance out of the trench and then he is up and running, and so is James, bent double, feet pushing against the downward slide of a sand-floored gully, lungs burning in the effort to keep up with his mountain goat of a sergeant. He dare not let go of the stretcher because without it he will look like a soldier and then he will be of significance to the snipers.

  Hector has heard the call for bearers; he holds his index finger up, listening, locating. There! Still doubled-over, they scuttle through holly bush then slide into another shallow trench dug out of the yellow-orange earth, and discover an entire squad in repose. Only one soldier deigns to speak to them, a ratty private, with blood crusted at his ears and nose; he has the loud voice of a deaf man and his left calf has been stripped from the shin bone. As Hector dresses the wound, James asks after the wellbeing of the other soldiers only to discover that they are immaculately dead, with not a mark on them.

  On the long carry back down the ridge, Hector speculates as to what killed the rest of the squad. A concussive blow from a shell, he decides, which blasted the life from them. Literally snuffed it right out. The private must have survived because, well, Hector didn’t know how, and since the private on the stretcher is adrift in morphine, suspended in it, protected and imprisoned like a foetus in a jar, it’s no use asking him. Down the slope they slide, loose scree underfoot, the stretcher pitching and yawing with the unsteady footing. James finds himself looking at the private’s wound more than he would like: cloth, skin and flesh are fused into one piece like an ornate chair leg. The bone is out. Out of place. The blood running down from his ears has dried in perfect round seeds. The private weighs not much more than a bag of dead leaves, unlike the stretcher itself, which is thirty pounds of wood and cloth, a weight which he feels in his back with every jolting step.

  They return to the beach. The carts are useless on the ridge and they only sink into this soft sand. The squads head southward, two men to each stretcher, thirty of them, a human conveyor belt. The casualty clearing station contains bell tents and a marquee with a red cross visible to the Turk spotters, and these are pitched at the river’s cut.

  Gently, James lowers his end of the stretcher, the sling around his chest slackening. The injured man breathes quickly through bared teeth.

  “Water,” gasps the injured man, his lips chapped and sore from the long carry under the sun. The flies find him. He flinches and spits them out. The flies are remorseless. The flies return with additional divisions.

  James walks along the line. All of the injured men want water. Some want their mothers. In preparation for serving with the ambulance, he had volunteered at the hospital in Brighton. On his first night he saw a cut nose, a deep gash across the bridge, and it upset him greatly. It did not prepare him for this, for the missing pieces, for the scraps. The unmanned moans of pain. Quite inhuman. Or too human. The wounds are an obscene revelation of what being human entails.

  Rain clouds approach across the sea. Hector shows the men how to weight a peg so that it holds in the sand. Then he directs the erecting of a tarp. He’s a real boy scout. Big fat raindrops form tiny craters in the sand. A rivulet runs down the tarp, James crouches openmouthed under it, refills his canteen, then his mouth, then washes off the sand and clay in his scalp. The khaki drill of his uniform is soaked until it steams.

  A doctor, a thin man with high widow’s peaks in his close-cropped hair, joins him at the rivulet and nods at James’ canteen. His manner is brisk and his hands are bloody. James holds the canteen to the doctor’s lips for a swig of rain water. He drinks it all. Orderlies arrive with baskets of bandages and sterilized sacks. They mill in expectation of orders; crouching, the doctor and James wait for the thin stream of rainwater to refill the canteen.

  “We landed at the wrong beach and had to trek across the sands with all this.” The doctor waves a thin bloody hand at the station. “How we’re doing out there?”

  “The Manchesters have broken through on the northern ridge. We’re bringing their injured down.”

  “That’s a long carry.”

  “The mules can’t handle the sand and neither can the motor.”

  “What about the other beaches?”

  “I don’t know. From the ridge, it all looks like war to me. We came across a squad. They were dead but their bodies were intact, with no sign of injury. They were lying around as if enjoying an afternoon doze. My sergeant thinks they were killed by a compressive blast. Have you ever seen anything like that?”

  “It could be gas. But you’d smell it. Nurses can turn yellow from merely removing the uniforms of men who have been gassed. Who is your sergeant?”

  “Hector, sir.”

  “And you are?”

  “James, sir.”

  “Private James.”

  “I prefer just James, sir.”

  The doctor looked askance at this breach of military code.

  “You must meet the padre. He’ll like you. You’re one of his types. A freethinker.”

  Before James can disagree, the doctor stands and returns to the shade of the tent, organizing the orderlies and attending to the wounded. The rain has stopped and the tarp dripped dry. Out to sea, battleships at anchor shell the ridge and their firing is a constant rolling noise. The shells the Turks toss back come in various forms: the whining whirring ones, the crashing iron kitchen sink ones, the high explosive ones that stop time for a silent moment in which the rocks, rifles and limbs float weightlessly and then noise and time devastatingly resume. Honour, in the face of such blunt mechanical force, is impossible. Honour is absurd. A man does not have to be a freethinker to understand that.

  The squads fall in. The lieutenant colonel orders the men to pool their canteens, every man adding his water ration to a big empty petrol can. It’s the only way to be sure that no one is hoarding water. They trek back up the ridge in Indian file, with the lieutenant colonel leading, followed by Sergeant Hector, then the squads with fo
lded stretchers and finally the corporal bringing up the rear in case any man should fall out. Salt lines streak his shirt and his pith helmet reeks of sweat. The cry for water goes up along the shore, where the Aegean breaks against the gentle rise of the sands. Nothing else is worth saying.

  13

  James sips juice from a cold tin of peaches, the sharp edge dithering under his lip. He has to concentrate. It’s hard to concentrate. Did he sleep? Has he slept? In the ravine, Jordison cooks up salty beef and biscuits but he can’t stomach it, not in the middle of the night and not without water. Digesting that lot will take more effort than the food puts in. The ground is painfully cold even through the sheeting and his greatcoat, and his shoulder feels like it has been packed in ice. The sea mist rolls over him and it tastes of salt and cordite.

  Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.

  Overhead, a single star is visible through the layered vapours. He had expected the sky to be full of stars and is disappointed that the atmosphere is so thick. When will he be able to drift above the clouds? When will he see what the Earth looks like from space? Or gaze into the Beyond without the gauzy intervention of the veil? By concentrating his will into an astral entity, it ought to be possible to escape the boredom of gravity, turn back and see the sun reflect off the Aegean, the atmosphere tinged with sunrise, a land of gauzy greens and bluish browns bounded by mountain ranges and dark coastal waters, and nothing of man visible. Space would be cold and airless, and overstocked with stars. Positively stuffed with stars. The sun would not be yellow, but a round heart of livid whiteness fringed with a searing red corona. Space would be lethal, and of a blackness unknown to the Earth. His spirit would traverse the void powered by will. The fundamental unit of reality is will. The stars are burning engines of will. The stars desire his ascent, and he responds in kind; why does this not happen? How preposterous that the talent to bend space to his own will is denied to him! What ridiculous futility! He wants to see the universe. He must. Visions are near, just over the curvature of the Earth, curved like a dining table. Thoughts branch of their own volition, form decision trees with variable outcomes.

  He sighs.

  He is asleep again. If only he could concentrate.

  His hand droops but does not let go of the can of peaches.

  “Why must I always wake you, James?” asks Sergeant Hector through narrow lips. The sergeant is younger than him, an NCO promoted for excellence on the parade ground before they had even got to the Dardanelles. A natural leader, yes, but also a loner. Northern chap. Not particularly clubbable. Three inches short of proper officer class.

  “I’m awake,” he mumbles. Emerging from their bivouacs in the ravine, the stretcher squad forms a shivering Indian line behind the sergeant. James falls in and the line jogs out into the night, past Alligator Point. His heart beats quickly, from the shock of being awake and nicotine starvation, and his legs are yet to find their strength. The stretcher bearers run along the wet ridged sand, alongside the florescent fizz of breaking waves and the slide of the sea back into fathoms of heavy shadow.

  The hike is too bloody much. A cigarette would help, a pinch from the plug of filthy twist in his pocket. He is not permitted to strike a light until dawn; the big guns may be silent but snipers haunt the ridges. The Munsters pilfered dark clumps of baccy from the Turk when the sentries bolted from their piquets at the first sign of the landing and declared it superior to the twist issued in their rations. They found the coffee pot still boiling away too. Talk about a spot of luck.

  Jordison has the other end of the stretcher. The 10th Division was formed as an Irish regiment, with the numbers in the ambulance division made up from the all sorts and odd sorts you didn’t want in the line: the weak-chested cranks, piratical Boer veterans and pacifist intellectuals and – in one case – a professor of mathematics who could not abide the shame of the white feather. Even the sergeant was a Quaker, albeit a Quaker with the holler of a warmonger.

  And then there were the nonconformists from the northwest, like Jordison, a gardener from Morecambe or thereabouts; he described the visibility balloons tethered to the ships as being like great yellow marrows. On the pier at Lemnos, they had coaxed Jordison into smoking his first cigarette but he absolutely refused the rum. A man of principle. Salt of the earth.

  “And what is your creed?” Jordison asked James, coughing behind his coffin nail. “If I carry a stretcher with a man, I’m owed an account of his beliefs. There must be something wrong about you to end up in the ambulance. What do you believe in? What do you strive for?”

  I would like to drift above the earth and embrace the naked stars.

  Jordison has more wind in him for the climb up the ridge than James can muster and keeps glancing impatiently back at his fellow stretcher bearer. The moon is a thorn sunk deep in the cloud and the meagre light of a single star is not much to work by, never mind navigate. The maps are of the wrong scale for this kind of work and do not accurately represent the torturous routes they have to take.

  The air cools as they climb. At a hundred feet, the vegetation is jungly. They mustn’t get lost again: he reminds Jordison not to lose track of the others.

  “Here’s one,” says Jordison. They set the stretcher down and get a closer look. In the dark, you can’t see where they’ve been hit. How beyond help they might be. This one has flies in the wrong places and a queer scent, a mix of putrefaction and the perfume of wild thyme, sage and mint gathering in the hollows.

  “God help him,” whispers Jordison. They leave the body behind.

  They climb on, but the gully does not open up into a clear view of the surrounding country. Rather, it leads them deeper into the spiky overgrowth. The path is narrow and steep. To keep up with the squad, Jordison drags them through a palisade of bullrushes. They break through waist-high scrub and nearly go headfirst over the edge of a cliff. Jordison rears back no more than two feet from the cliff edge. The two men breathe in the sheer grey drop down to black waves.

  “What kind of mad country is this?” asks the Lancastrian. “This is not the way we were heading.”

  “You got lost.” James turns around. It’s his turn to lead. They have lost the squad. Their training in signalling was better suited to advancing across flat terrain than this broken country. Back down the narrow path he goes, then quickly up a hillock to get a broad view of the work at hand. A nullah to the other flank, a steep narrow dried watercourse, down which it would be easy for a man to lose his footing and fall. A likely spot for a carry. He holds his hand up. Wait. Listen. Yes, from somewhere down the bottom of the nullah. Voices. He beckons Jordison close and points down.

  Jordison listens too, then shakes his heavy head.

  “You don’t hear them?”

  “How do we know they are our men?”

  They listen again. Oak branches stirring. The voices may be English, or they might not. They could be accents from another part of the Empire: Welsh or Irish, Australian or Indian. Jordison is not convinced. He is a doughty man but cautious. Surely, over the next rise, there will be easier carries than this one? The men discuss it in agitated whispers. James points firmly to his chest. I’ll go. I’ll go alone. Jordison agrees, and settles down on his belly, hands to the fore, to lower James and his tentative boots into the sliding slipping earth of the nullah. He does not want to go pounding down there only to discover a squad of Turks, nor does he want to be mistaken by his own soldiers for the enemy. The Turk respects the red cross but cannot see it in the dark.

  James takes out his regulation twist, rolls himself a cigarette, and lights it in the bowl of his helmet. With the lit end still covered, he drags softly upon it, feels the smoke settle the inner dispute of his nicotine craving, and then exhales blue and grey smoke down the course of the nullah. He descends, and every yard or so, exhales another mouthful of the noxious twist. Any man on his side would recognize it. He slides another four, five yards. He puts his hands up and steps through the scrub expecting
to see men huddled ahead. But there is no one. Just two dark patches on the ground and the ferrous tang of bloodsoaked earth. The spot is so peaceful and reflective it reminds him of home. He strains to listen. The injured men may have retreated at his approach, a sure sign that they are the enemy and could, right now, be crouched in the scrub. Watching him. Aiming at him.

  The oak branches stir; between these branches, quivering silver webs, six in a row and glistening with dew, each with a big spider at the heart of them. The mind is inclined to spot faces in nature; when afraid, every man is a pantheist, alive to the spirits within rock and tree. He looks again at the blood on the ground; his squad must have attended to the injured men, and the voices he heard were their reassurances as they carried the wounded away. There are only phantoms in the bush.

  He takes the long way back up the nullah, a zigzag path, clearer and not as steep as the way down. He gets a handhold of earth and a centipede runs over his wrist. It is the lull before dawn and the land seethes with anticipation. This soil didn’t seem to him to be fit for much but the maps showed a cultivated patch beyond the salt lake, perhaps olives, or even corn. Anything he could eat straight off the bough would be alright to him. Grapes. Something with a bit of juice in it. He comes across a hawthorn bush full of blackberries just like the ones at home. August is too early for ripe berries, and these are sharp and not as plump as the ones he picked with Ruth on the paths leading down to Alfriston.