Leon Uris (65 page)
Authors: Redemption
Tags: #Europe, #Ireland, #Literary Collections, #Historical Fiction, #Fiction, #Romance, #Sagas, #Historical, #Australian & Oceanian, #New Zealand, #General, #New Zealand Fiction, #History
We were going ‘round the clock and suddenly found ourselves short of trail men. Chester decided to make a night run to Chatham’s and Ryder’s. It had a bad scent to it because the Turks had set up a shooting gallery atop the Valley of Despair.
I made a run to a distribution point up Monash Gully, staggering home close to midnight. Chester’s train had returned without him. Modi had been told that Chester had taken a light wound to the shoulder on the way to Chatham’s and told the trailmaster he was walking back to Widow’s Gully to get patched up.
Modi did not panic. The pair of us went to Widow’s and uncovered the face of every man there dead or waiting for evacuation or surgery. No Chester.
In the hours before light, I did something I had not
done in seven months of Gallipoli. I got on my knees and prayed.
We found him soon after daybreak on the side of the trail at Brighton Beach. He had frozen to death, curled up with his knees against his chest, not thinking to take a few of the blankets he was delivering to the post.
His wound was almost superficial. That was not what killed him. He had no strength or stamina left. He was so weakened that any hard blow was apt to do him in.
I did something else I had not done at Gallipoli.
I wept.
Late in November, secret plans came through for the evacuation of the Anzac Corps. Strangely, it was the best worked-out plan of the entire expedition. All heavy gear would be left so the men could travel unhindered. On the first night enough ships would appear to haul off as many men as possible and sail out of sight.
On the second night, the balance of the Corps would repeat the procedure. The problem was that on the second night, Farting Ferdinand and the other artillery might just light up the beach and the entire Turkish Army could pour down on us.
As fortune would have it, the main pair of eyes directing the Turkish artillery was an observation post called the Guillotine.
The Guillotine was in a freak position, so common at Anzac Cove. Mule’s Gully on our side of the line continued upwards and narrowed, with numerous S-turns. To make the Guillotine almost invulnerable, a sudden rise of sheer cliffs stood on either side of the gully. The post was embedded in solid rock and could not be reached by climbing over it or trying to outflank it.
The only option was simply to rush at it. The gully was so narrow that only two or three men at a time could make the final S-turn and mount a charge. God only
knows how many men we had lost in unsuccessful attempts to knock out the Guillotine.
A day after I had seen the secret evacuation plans, Corps advised me that all the mules were to be destroyed on the final night of the evacuation. We had gathered in nearly six hundred animals for the winter’s siege.
I told command I did not want these orders to go beyond me. The reasons for their destruction were simple. There was no way on earth we could evacuate the animals. They would be left either to freeze or starve to death, or to be used against us later by the Turks, or to be slaughtered by the Turks for food.
I did not want Mordechai Pearlman to be involved in this final horror. Having prayed for Chester’s life and wept for the death of my brothers, I saw no harm in asking God to grant me some sort of wisdom to help stave off a disaster on the second night of the evacuation.
After a staff meeting at Corps, Colonel Monash, of all people, came to my troglodyte to have a chat-up. We had come to care for each other as friends and I think he wanted some neutral ground to sit on and hear his voice aloud. He was a man with a large mind, somewhat like Conor.
“Sorry about the mules,” he said.
As he spoke those very words, a plan came to me. It would be a hell of a lot better sending these mules to a soldier’s death up Mule’s Gully charging the Guillotine, than it was to send his soldiers over the Nek against his wishes.
“I’ll cry a little for them as well,” I said.
“The rains have washed away the shallow graves of no-man’s-land,” he said. “This land will be eternal valleys and hills of bones, theirs and ours, and you can’t even tell the difference.”
He looked at me knowingly.
“Was it worth it?” he asked. “No one will ever know the true figures, but there were no less than a half-million
casualties, theirs and ours. Tens of thousands of them were New Zealanders and Australians. That’s a vast number for countries so small as ours. We have to find something out of this that didn’t make it an entire waste. What did you find out, Landers?”
“All men have a measure of cowardice in them. I learned that love of one’s mates can overcome your fears. I learned that every survivor of this horror must try to live a good life because he lives for many men.”
“That’s very decent, Landers. I’ll remember that.”
“And you, sir?”
“We came to this field of battle, Landers, I from a former penal colony proud of its wild men and free ways. You came from a place of pioneers, woodsmen, sheepmen, and farmers. Neither of us were truly defined as a people. We leave as Australians and New Zealanders with a clear definition of who we are as men and as nations. In a manner of speaking, your country and mine were born at Gallipoli. We have shown our stuff to the world and ourselves, and only by such tragedy did we have this moment to show it.”
I had orders cut for Mordechai Pearlman to go to Lemnos to survey our supplies of timothy hay, grain, blankets, and equipment for the balance of the winter. He still had no idea the mules were to be destroyed or an evacuation was to take place.
Even as I gave him the orders, I feigned complaining that it would be difficult to spare him, even for a few days. I believed I had duped him. He didn’t realize he was not going to return…or did he?
I took him to the dock, slapped him on the back and told him I’d see him back here in a couple of days, gave him a hand into the boat, and tossed his gear to him.
“Thanks, Rory,” he said, “for everything. There’ll never be another one like Cairo.”
After his boat pulled away, I whispered, “I love you, man.”
“You requested to see me, Landers,” Brodhead said.
“Yes, sir. I believe I have an idea to knock out the Guillotine. If the Turks have to go without their eyes, we might be saved from artillery on the final night—”
“God, I wish we could. If the Turks get wind of us, it might mean a massacre, or at least they’ll take thousands of our lads prisoner. I’ve been trying for six months to get the Guillotine. How the hell? We have to send men through the S-turns two or three at a time.”
“How about stampeding the mules into the Guillotine?”
“My God,” he whispered.
“We have to destroy the animals, anyhow.”
“My God,” he repeated, “it would certainly create a tremendous diversion. The Turks might either freeze in their positions or rush their reserves over there. It might just keep the beach clear for a few precious hours.”
We set a line of fire blazing behind the mules and hustled them along, screaming and lashing at them, and they soon rampaged up Mule Gully through barbed wire, up and up into the S-turns, rolling over each other as the gully narrowed.
Flynn and I with two others tracked a path maybe used in ancient Greek history that roughly followed the gully line. We waited until the animals began hitting the final turns, hoping that our presence would go unnoticed.
The cries and screams of these beautiful soldiers was all but unbearable. As they hit the last turn, Flynn and myself and other lads, loaded down with Turkish grenades, stood on a wee narrow path ten feet over the top of the mules.
As they turned the bend, up went Turkish flares and the last fifty yards of the “charge” was illuminated. The Turks
blazed gunfire from two weapons. Animals in front collapsed, while other mules behind them kept coming…coming…coming…piling up right in front of the Guillotine.
Oh God in heaven! One of the lads skidded down into the gully, and was mangled and crushed by the mules in an instant.
Now or never!
We hopped on a rock unseen, for the Turks had their hands full stopping the charge—one…two…three…four…ten…eleven—twelve grenades erupted right on their nest.
Get the hell out fast…fast…be careful now, don’t slip into the gully….
I felt very light-headed and warm…. What the hell does a man do on his knees and not able to stand up! What the hell! Blood was pouring down my front….
Flynn jerked me to my feet.
“Hang on to me, Landers, we’ll get you back, cobber, we’ll get you back.”
Secret Files of Winston Churchill,
Christmas 1915
The greatest generals appear to be the historians of future generations who had no decisions to make at the time the history was being made.
When all the commissions of inquiry are done, the finger-pointing and the cover-ups and the lying and the justifications are told and retold, I realize that one glaring fact shall remain, and that is that the name of Winston Churchill will forever be synonymous with one of the greatest disasters in military history.
What I say here is that the knowledgeable men of high station, men who created the world’s greatest empire, favored the military and political strategy of attempting to open the Dardanelles. It was their judgment that Gallipoli was a naval and military probability, if not possibility.
What fell apart subsequently will fill hundreds of volumes yet unwrit. But to infer now that the plan was of evil or foolish intent or too much of a risk, or that it was undertaken to advance individual careers, or that we did not have compassion for the lives of our troops, is a damnable lie.
I could stand before the Parliament or any commission and argue my case. I could enlighten them on blunder upon blunder that was not my doing, but I choose not to spend the rest of my life pointing my finger at the competency of many generals, admirals, and ministers. No, I shall be the flogging boy for them all.
As First Lord of the Admiralty, I made my share of good decisions and my share of poor decisions. What is deplorable is the accusation that I did not care. It will not be remembered that many undertakings occurred after my resignation. It will be little remembered that most of the decisions were always beyond my control.
The War Council went into the venture with great confidence. After the failure of our naval firepower to produce the expected results, and after meeting unexpectedly fierce Turkish resistance on the landing, the entire venture began to cloud.
Resolve to win this campaign, and the means with which to win it, began to vanish in our highest councils.
The Suvla Bay landing was a disgrace to British arms. Field Marshal Kitchener was the man responsible for the appointment of General Darlington and General Stopford. Yet we do not hear Kitchener damned.
My most terrible personal moment came when I had to inform Lady Caroline Hubble that both her sons had been killed. Through my own sorrow I found majesty in the way this magnificent woman handled the most wrenching moment of her life. Her continued display of dignity and courage during the months of grief was incomparable.
Lord Roger Hubble was informed of the tragedy by cable, which reached him at his summer home, Daars, near
Kinsale. The account is thus: Hubble, an aficionado of shark-fishing, ordered a small craft readied, although a terrible storm was sweeping in. Forewarned, he sailed deliberately into a fierce gale. Flotsam and jetsam of his boat later washed ashore, but his body was never found.
Thus, at the age of forty, my career stands on the threshold of disaster. Apparently I am still of sufficient value to His Majesty’s Government to have been recalled from my regiment in France to become Munitions Minister, although I no longer have a seat on the War Council.
Can I overcome a half-million casualties of Gallipoli, or must I die with its stigma engraved on my tomb? I am determined, because of this disaster, to continue to find a way to serve. I shall serve so well that in the end Gallipoli will be a footnote rather than the name of my volume.
I do not know how leaders must bear the result of having caused death in battle. There is no textbook written to give one guidance on the subject. Every king, every general, every minister, every president must deal in his own way with the deaths that result from his orders. May God have mercy on him who ends up with a Gallipoli.
I shall do my best, in future writings, to precisely explain my role and my thinking. Can I ever cleanse the gnaw in me? Perhaps some future day will allow me to make a cleansing gesture.
WSC
To refresh your memory, I am Theobald Fitzpatrick, the son of Atty and the late Desmond Fitzpatrick. I inherited enough of my father’s legal skills to carry on his life’s work as the barrister for the republican movement. His partner, Robert McAloon, is now my partner, though of an age where all motion is accompanied by a creak.
My mother had been Conor Larkin’s lover for several years, since he returned to Ireland from America after his prison escape. He lived life on the run, the most wanted man in Ireland, and brought the Brotherhood up to a very respectful fighting level.
He was killed leading the raid on Lettershambo Castle. Some say, and not without a touch of wisdom and truth, that Conor saw a torturous road ahead, bound to end in life imprisonment or violent death. He also realized he could not continue his function as a loner in a Brotherhood growing large with a cumbersome Supreme Council.
Finally, he could never live a normal life for a single day with my mother. So, Conor wrote his own amen by blowing Lettershambo Castle halfway to Scotland.
The death of Conor Larkin at Lettershambo Castle spelled a loss of will and strength in my beloved mother, Atty Fitzpatrick.
When my own father, the late Desmond Fitzpatrick, died of the heart while arguing a republican cause in the
Four Courts of Dublin, Mother mourned in measured tones of dignified dignity with never a display of public desolation.
Such was not the case for Conor Larkin.
The British returned the bodies of Conor and Long Dan Sweeney. What followed, in defiance of British law, was a public lying-in-state followed by graveside oratory over Long Dan Sweeney that ascended them to martyrdom.
My mother accompanied Conor’s casket in a simple cortege over the breadth of Ireland all the way to Ballyutogue. At each crossroad, town, and village, a new honor guard of Home Army would accompany him to the next gathering. Children laid flowers on the roadway, women wept and prayed, and men were nudged by long-dormant stirrings for freedom.
When, at last, Father Dary Larkin put his brother to rest alongside their father in St. Columba’s churchyard in Ballyutogue, Mother flung herself on Conor’s grave as a spontaneous keening erupted from mourners from Derry and Donegal and then, from all over the land.
Mother’s lifelong posture of composure was flown as bitter-thorn wailers purged their grief through uncontrolled leaps in and out of madness. They spilled from the Larkin cottage and clogged the wee paths, dancing and howling around Conor’s cairn.
Mother stretched her distraught body upward like a banshee and joined the night keeners, rending her clothing and hair and flesh through ten hours of darkness until the damp-chilled dawn finally broke and she crumpled.
Aye, all of Ireland now knew that the whisperings about Atty Fitzpatrick’s clandestine love with Conor Larkin were true. When my sister Rachael and I were able to pull her from his grave, she remained in the Larkin cottage until a week later, when the final revelers had exorcised themselves and drifted back to their own fields and villages.
* * *
During that week a disturbing scenario developed. To be direct, the mutual offerings of consolations between Rachael and Father Dary did not appear to be very ecumenical in nature to me.
As the waking week played out, I and others drank the public house and shabeen dry. Between hail-and-farewell toasts to the deceased, I did not know whether I should spend my time comforting Mother, who remained beyond my reach in any case, or to step in between an obviously budding forbidden romance.
Sorrow will out, and at last I was able to pack my two girls back to Dublin where Rachael went into a familiar role of becoming Mother’s older sister. I thought this no time to offer Rachael unsolicited advice about the problems of falling in love with a priest.
Father Dary…mind you, it is not possible to dislike this man…had blazoned a light of hope in hopeless Derry. He fronted for an ailing Bishop with great compassion. Father Dary was much loved and far too liberal and, thus, in constant and deep trouble with the hierarchy.
He had been aloof from the Brotherhood. He took me aside during the funeral and allowed that he might be amenable to listen to us on special occasions. Was this due to his brother’s death? Or, just possibly, my sister Rachael’s beauty? After we left Ballyutogue, Father Dary did seem to find an inordinate amount of church business to bring him down to Dublin.
As for Mother, after a lifetime of hard sledding in the movement, she “hit the wall.” The robustness that she carried off on the stage as “Mother Ireland” or that empowered her to blast her way through a meeting of the Brotherhood’s Supreme Council was no longer there.
Her grief for Conor Larkin seemed consummate. She had worked with and supported two great, powerful, and daring men. With them both in their graves, her own
energies were spent. She wisely withdrew from the Supreme Council of the Brotherhood but continued a significant, though lesser, role of elder statesman.
It is to be remembered that the raid on Lettershambo Castle gutted the upper echelons of the Supreme Council. Although not a member by choice, Conor was a spiritual leader as well as our most brilliant organizer and tactician in a land lamentable for the lack thereof.
Long Dan Sweeney was the revolution that was. His legendary glories going back to Fenian times irrevocably evolved into myth.
We lost our dear Lord Louis De Lacy, a mystical Gael who gave his barony to train our people. Loss of Dunleer was devastating to us.
And God love him, little Seamus O’Neill, the author of brilliant, stabbing, mocking, logical words, was dead in Lettershambo and, after all, words were one of Ireland’s few weapons.
In the transition a tobacconist, a former bartender, a roving Irish soldier of fortune, an academic, a labor leader, and, depending on one’s definition, one, two, or three poets took over the Supreme Council. It was an Irish stew without a single substantial military ingredient.
I, of course, carried on the role assigned me at birth, to do my stuff in the Four Courts. They did not name me Theobald for nothing.
As the year 1916 came into view, dark clouds lifted from a number of issues.
The war in Europe was going to come down to a numbers game. The side that could absorb their casualties best would be declared the winner.
The big fellow in the numbers game was American manpower. America was still not committed. Ireland,
therefore, had to supply its share of fodder until America could be lured in on the side of the Allies, but Ireland was a wee player in the numbers game.
American sentiment had always been strong for the Allies. France was America’s first ally and vital to America’s gaining her independence from England in 1776.
Britain represented America’s principal heritage, her language and culture, and much of her original population.
On the other hand, America had to be concerned with her large German population, as well as a large Irish contingent, vocal and with republican leanings.
Wars are generally undertaken when a greedy nation or greedy alliance has a surplus of food and munitions and men. Men are the most expendable. Wheat is much more difficult to come by, as England learned when the Dardanelles was closed and Ukrainian wheat became unavailable.
Well now, no ambitious nation or alliance is going to admit to being
greedy
, is it? It is imperative for a nation embarking on a war to invent and superimpose a more noble reason than greed.
The American Revolution gives a clear and stunning example of changing cause in midstream. The Revolution began throughout the colonies as a series of disconnected and scattered forays protesting British inequities, mainly in taxation.
Difficult for one to blow a tax protest into a full-blown people’s revolution. Thus the revolution elevated itself, donning the most magnificent mantle in human history by declaring it was really a war for independence and human dignity.
Take the American Civil War. This conflict came about to save the union as the result of two different economic, cultural, and moral entities trying to exist within a single nation.
Over a time, as the war developed, the brilliant Mr. Lincoln reinvented the far nobler cause that the abolition of slavery was what the war was really about.
This war now engulfing the European continent came about because two greedy alliances lusted for more of each other’s empires. However, recruiting posters could hardly read: JOIN THE ARMY BECAUSE WE ARE VERY GREEDY.
The nobler cause had to be discovered, invented, or found under a rock, did it not? What emerged, heroically, from the Allied viewpoint, was that this was a “war to save democracy” for the world and affirmed the rights of small peoples to their freedom. Belgium, for example.
However, most nations burn the candle at both ends. The Allies, in addition to saving the world for democracy, fully intended to snatch for themselves the German, Turkish, and Austrian colonies.
A number of tiny nations took the Allies at their word and reserved a seat at the postwar peace conferences and treaty signings.
Among these small peoples were the Irish, who had surely earned at least a voice in the future of their country by the Irish blood now being spilled in defense of democracy.
Ireland represented a spearhead of discontent. If the Irish came to the peace table with their very own representatives, it could set off a chain reaction throughout all of Britain’s colonies.
It became paramount to England’s postwar strategy to keep especially the Irish away from the peace table. Britain could not defend or justify this business of waging a war for democracy if the Irish dared to show up.
Thus, England launched a well-devised campaign against Irish independence:
“The British Parliament has already passed an Irish Home Rule Bill that was agreed to by the Irish Party.”
“We have thousands of Irishmen, all volunteers, in British uniform. Obviously, they must have felt very British themselves to enlist.”
“We have permitted the Irish to form their own Home Army to defend Irish soil.”
“Certain Irish scoundrels are sleeping with the Hun.”
To which I answer:
“The Irish Home Rule Bill demands Irish loyalty to the British Crown and allows the British Parliament to veto any legislation passed by an Irish government. The Irish Party is one election away from extinction.”
“Thousands of Irish joined the British Army because it was the best job offer they had ever had.”
“The Irish Home Army is of Gilbert & Sullivan caliber, its men armed with fierce broomsticks and century-old blunderbusses.”
However, I never got to present my case to Woodrow Wilson. The British case sounded good to the American president because he wanted it to sound good. The big boys weren’t going to let the little fellows screw things up, and alongside the British, the Irish were small potatoes, so to speak.
Although the Irish had come to America under the most abominable conditions, fleeing tyranny and deprivation, their support for the old country was boisterous but weak. Once the St. Patrick’s Day Parade down Fifth Avenue broke up and the pubs were drunk dry, their net effect in Ireland didn’t amount to much.
In Ireland itself, the nation had been beautifully divided by Dublin Castle’s centuries of underhanded intrigue.
The cornerstone of British power in Ireland lay with an Anglo-Ascendancy awarded vast acreages of our land for
the initial conquest and colonization of the country. These were the landed gentry, the bankers and factory owners, a privileged class intent on staying privileged through loyalty to England.
Ascendancy power was supported in one province: Ulster. By the importation of a Protestant population, it was likewise rewarded with privilege.
The Catholic middle class, such as it was, didn’t want the boat rocked, and the Catholic hierarchy, protecting its own well-being, considered the Crown its benefactor. The Church did ugly work in purging generation after generation of Irishmen of their nationalistic aspirations.
Otherwise, Dublin Castle had set up a large Catholic constabulary and systems of briberies, small civil service jobs, spying, and whatever else was needed to keep the lid on the pot.
This left the Irish masses the most wretched in Europe, with more than three quarters of the population in a perpetual state of misery and subservience.
Once the Irish nation of her great Celtic chieftains had been shattered and scattered early in the 1600s, future risings from Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet on through the Fenians were paltry affairs led by enormously courageous men, dreamers who ended up on the gallows with their necks hoicked in half after making a gallant speech from the dock.
These words became our mythology.
A Gaelic revival in recent times tried to connect that glorious past to our miserable present, but lost much of its zeal with the death of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Ireland had been committed to the war with England by a discredited John Redmond and a defunct Irish Party. Sinn Fein, the new republican political entity, was starting to win the minds of Irishmen, but elections were to be a long way off.
Indeed, the British felt so secure that they called for a draft of Irish youth into the Army in early 1916. What they were telling the Irish was…“You aren’t Irish and WE OWN YOU.”
This jangled a nerve. It is one matter to volunteer for the Army, but it is quite another to be forced to serve. After centuries of trying, the British still could not understand that Irishmen did not consider it any great honor to be British.
Even though the British gingerly backed away from Irish conscription, the republican movement, led by the secret Brotherhood, knew that the Irish were being set up for yet another betrayal.
Conor Larkin had wondered if the Irish people could ever be awakened from their centuries of lethargy. Actions like Sixmilecross and Lettershambo said that there were a few good men left to keep the flame from flickering out.