Leon Uris (64 page)

Jeremy was out on a perimeter of shell holes with Reconn, the Maori, and the Auckland companies. The Wellington stayed in reserve. Captain Matamata came in with the chilling report that his patrol was unable to reach the Suvla Corps. They were still on the beach.

Colonel Markham, Brodhead’s adjutant from Corps, found his way to Malone, where Chris and myself were working.

“Why aren’t they moving off the beach?” Malone greeted Markham.

“We’d best not get excited,” Markham responded in what was being set up as British-officer-speaking-to-colonial posture. “Communications got a bit slapdash between Suvla Corps and Anzac. We’ll clear them up at a shipboard conference tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight,” Markham snapped back. “We’ll get the Suvla Bay people moving off the beach by morning.”

“Colonel Markham,” Malone said, minding his temper. “The Turks have their reserves below, deciding where to send them. If the Suvla Corps does not take Ridge 269 in the next two hours, they will run into two Turkish divisions who are going to—I guarantee—move in and occupy 269 tonight.

“I want to know what happened at the Nek,” Malone finished.

Markham’s mouth tightened. “The Nek is neither here nor there. I have come up with specific orders for you to release the New Zealand Brigades at the Apex and bring them over here, immediately.”

“I’m not sure I hear you right,” Malone said.

“We mean to hold Chunuk Bair. We’ll sort Suvla out in good time.”

“Colonel Markham, there has already been a massacre at the Nek.”

“Who told you that!”

“Colonel Monash…and now you want me to put the entire New Zealand Corps in a trap up here. I will not—repeat,
not
—bring over my brigades until we hook up with the Suvla Corps.”

“Major General Godley—”

“Fuck Godley.”

Markham took the field phone, got the Apex, and told them to bring on General Brodhead at Corps. He reported he had Malone’s refusal to send any more men over to Chunuk Bair.

“He wishes to speak to you,” Markham said, giving Malone the phone.

“Malone.”

“Brodhead here. Didn’t you understand your order?”

“I did.”

“Are you or are you not going to comply this instant?”

“Not until we have Suvla on our left flank and the Aussies on our right. Too breezy up here all by our lone-somes.”

“Let me speak to Colonel Markham.”

Markham listened and replaced the phone, then turned and looked about.

“Major Hubble,” Markham said.

“Yes?”

“Place Colonel Malone under arrest and have him escorted back to Corps.”

Well now, Christopher Hubble’s life, as they say, flashed before his eyes in the next few seconds.

“Sorry, Colonel Markham, I refuse.”

“Landers, place them both under arrest and remove them.”

“No, sir,” I said.

Colonel Joshua Malone put his big square timber-clearing hands on Colonel Markham’s shoulders and
looked at him squarely. “You and Brodhead and Churchill and Kitchener and Stopford and Godley and Darlington have betrayed the manhood of Australia and New Zealand. You have brought them to this place and you have butchered them with your collective, deplorable incompetence. The farce of Gallipoli was always beyond the capabilities of all the King’s generals. I’m taking my people off Chunuk Bair. You’ve massacred enough men for one day.”

He took the phone up again. “Quigley…Malone here. Turks are out of the Ravine. Plug it up at both ends, I’ll be bringing the Kiwi All-Blacks back in about an hour.”

“Give me that phone!” Markham demanded.

“Get out of here, we have work to do. Major Chris. Go around our perimeter. We want an orderly withdrawal. Your people will be covered by the heavy machine guns. Donaldson, start moving Auckland down the hill. Make straight across the Ravine and up to the Apex. Apex is covering you.”

“Indeed I shall, Colonel Malone.”

“Willumsen.”

“Sir.”

“Better catch up with Major Chris. He’s itching for a fight and I don’t want him making any charges down the other side.”

Ignoring the stunned Markham, Malone set up our tragic withdrawal. When Markham finally did get to the field phone, it wasn’t working. I had disconnected it.

The Maori Company filtered back, waiting until the Aucklands were on the way down, then went over the side themselves.

At that bloody instant came the final betrayal!

God knows who! God knows why! Naval gunfire opened up again. I reconnected the phone as the explosions tore into the plateau and called to the Apex to get the firing stopped.

Wellington drifted back and down into the Ravine. Jesus! No Chris or Jeremy!

“The Plateau looks clear,” Malone said. “Retire the machine guns!”

The gunners broke down, tied their weapons to the lines, and lowered them. Colonel Markham continued to stand near Malone, confused as to what to do.

I went away from them with a growing feeling of fright as the last of the stragglers holding the rear guard went over the cliffside.

The Navy was really giving it to us. I went down, sensing a close hit. It splattered all about me. I looked up to see Markham being hurled off the cliff by concussion. Where the hell was…oh no…Malone was down. I took a couple of steps toward him, then saw it. The top of his head had been ripped off.

I can’t be the last one up here! I can’t be! Someone’s late pulling back! No! Come on! Wait…Willumsen on the dead run.

“Let’s go, Landers,” he said. “Our lines are cleared.”

“Where’s the Major and Jeremy?”

“They won’t be coming out,” he said, grabbing me hard. “I found them in a shellhole. They’re both dead.”

I don’t remember the march back. Nothing of it. Nor do I remember much of what happened for the next several days.

The first I recalled was hearing Chester’s voice through a mist, and I do remember reaching out to find him. I felt his hand on my shoulder and his fingers stroking my head. I knew I had to push through the dense field that shrouded my mind. As memory started to filter in I realized that in a moment I would be faced with something terrible.

I remembered and wanted to crawl back into the fog but the sharpness of pain was too powerful. I could hide it no more.

“You remember now?” Chester asked.

I grunted.

“You’ve a decision to make, Rory. You cannot delay it,” he said softly. “Rory, you have to tell me. Do you want to go on living?”

Oh Jeremy, Jeremy, my brother Jeremy!

Another voice, the sonorous sound of Modi. “If you will not accept that Jeremy is dead, then we must leave you alone with it,” he said.

“Don’t leave me alone,” I rasped.

“Look at me and tell me that Jeremy is dead,” Chester said.

“I can’t do it.”

“If you let it linger, it can put you into a serious black hole,” Modi said.

I felt a rage well up in me. This is no time to hound me! I thought they were my friends. I wanted to destroy something, anything. Modi smelled my rage and blocked the entrance.

“If you go out and kill a thousand Turks, Jeremy will still be dead,” Modi said.

“Get out of my way!”

“Sure,” Modi said, stepping aside.

I stood but could not balance myself in my weakness, and I slumped down again.

Chester started in on me again. “Do you choose to go on living or not?”

“What the hell do you know? And you, Modi, what made you desert the Russian Army! Don’t fucking preach to me! What do you know?”

Modi grabbed my hair and lifted my face so his beard was almost on me. “I’ll tell you what I know. My village was burned before my eyes by Cossacks. My wife was raped by twenty of them and murdered. My baby daughter was decapitated. It’s called a pogrom, Landers. Want me to sit and whimper with you! Yes? I live!”

Lord, I felt so low. I wrapped my arms about his knees and whispered that I was never more sorry in my life. “Tell me what to do,” I begged.

“In a place like this,” Modi said, “despair is a greater enemy than the Turks. You’ll rot as fast as a corpse in no-man’s-land unless you take what happened face-on. Do you want to live as a cripple or as a man?”

“I hear you.”

“Now tell us. Who died on Chunuk Bair?”

“Colonel Malone,” I said with voice dry and croaky.

“And Major Chris?”

“Yes, Chris is dead.”

“Who else?”

“Jeremy is dead.”

Having opted for life and admitting to Jeremy’s death was a very necessary first step. Either Chester or Modi was with me all the time, encouraging me to speak about Chunuk Bair and Jeremy.

Modi was right. Unless I took it on and fought it, I would be setting up a wreckage for a life. I needed power and wisdom from every source I could draw upon….

I had to convince myself I was not trying to assign the battlefield as a distant memory. A man must carry such as this for all his days. The question was, how much of the battle do I let dictate how I will live from now on?

If the pain of it, the worthlessness of it, and aye, the godlessness of it consumes me for the rest of my days, as it will many men, then I have not honored the death of my beloved comrades.

Modi explained so clearly that he went to Palestine to honor the death of his wife and child by realizing their dreams for them.

And so I must honor my comrades’ deaths by living a full life…live it with and for them…name children after them…see the green of New Zealand for them.

Modi and Chester told me to open my dreams up to finding Georgia. She was alive and real. She must be the hope.

Even with these two souls of compassion, the fight for my own survival was frightening and I asked Conor Larkin to help me.

I did not know Shelley MacLeod. I had learned of his love for her from his letters to me. The letters stopped after Sixmilecross. The news of Shelley’s death came from Father Dary. Conor was in prison and had just taken a cat-o’-nine-tails lashing when he learned of her murder.

Knowing Conor, he must have blamed himself for her death or, at the very least, the two of them were certainly partners in a death vow.

And Conor’s guilt? Now there’s a man who must have suffered no less than the savior on the cross.

I asked him for some of his strength. Conor had survived the most foul and brutal of all human experiences. He came through it, God knows how, and he made a decent and important life, useful and worthy to his last breath.

More important than all else was that he found it within himself to be able to love again. This Atty Fitzpatrick must have been a wonderment to get through to him.

I clung to Conor…and Modi…and Chester…and I demanded of myself not to let Gallipoli take me down.

Lieutenant General Brodhead kept me around Corps. His own shield had been pierced. He was in a sort of funk either over his mistakes or the heavy losses or both.

Why me? Brodhead had had a very special relationship with Christopher Hubble, older brother, father-son, what have you. Chris had done a lot of black work for the General from Ireland to Gallipoli. I think the General had come to depend on Chris enormously. Generalship is a lonely place. Confidants are golden nuggets. Had all gone well, Christopher Hubble was due to come out of the war as one of the youngest brigadiers in British history and, in a sense, Brodhead’s legacy.

I certainly did not have that closeness of Ulster, the military tradition, the station that those two had, but he liked my ways and some of my fairly good results. I found him chatting me up about the promise of a bright future and felt that he was going to ask me to become his aide.

I did not harbor hatred for him. His terrible tactical and battlefield decisions were those of a general whose wars had been fought in the last century. He did not understand how to send men against machine guns. They marched in grenadier lines to be mowed down like wheat.

He was a personally courageous man, rather well liked by the troops, whose hardships he shared. He did the best he could for Anzac after being put into an impossible position, against his better judgment.

With myself at Corps, carrying top clearance and admission to the secured message center, I was able to pick up on the furor in the aftermath of the Suvla Bay landing.

Admiral Jack Fisher, the top naval officer of the Imperial Navy, had flipped and flopped several times over Gallipoli and finally resigned in protest.

Fisher’s resignation forced Churchill to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty.

General Darlington, commander of the Mediterranean theatre, was relieved of his command.

General Stopford of Suvla Bay Corps was fired, as were his division commanders and staff.

The Asquith government fell and a coalition cabinet was formed to conduct the balance of the war.

Brodhead’s probable fate was that he might well not be considered for another field command, a devastating blow to him.

As the shock and scandal of Gallipoli raged and the inquiries began, Keith Murdock, the Australian journalist, rocked the empire with his exposure of what had been done to the soldiers of Australia and New Zealand.

*  *  *

Despite an obvious defeat, the British continued to cling to their wretched acres on Gallipoli. They were confused as to what to do and desperate not to lose face.

August, September, and October came and passed. Gallipoli showed the other side of her ugly face as summer’s inferno shifted into a cold and brittle autumn. We were less prepared for the great chill than we had been for the heat.

In mid-November a blizzard of near biblical proportions tormented the trenches. An Antarctic bluster of gale force winds and blinding snows found us with little shield against it.

The day after the blizzard passed, hundreds of men were found frozen to death or blackened with frostbite, requiring amputations of fingers and toes.

Through a night in late November, Chester, Modi, and I worked at the beach and paddock unloading and packing blankets, gloves, winter coats, scarves, and getting them to the front.

A most desperate situation existed at Chatham’s Post and Ryder’s Ridge. Because of their proximity to the sea, the sting was greater.