The Soldier's Song (12 page)

How long ago was that? A week? Two? He couldn’t even count the days. All he could remember was the thirst, growing inside him like a tumour. It was the one thing that preoccupied him day and night. He’d seen it drive men mad. They craved water, craved it with every fibre in their bodies, but the searing sun was merciless, and the meagre supply of water the navy sent ashore came nowhere near slaking their thirst. In desperation, they tried to supplement their ration with water from the little brackish wells that dotted the hills, but that could only be had at a price. The Turks knew about their thirst. They knew they had their enemy pinned to the undrinkable sea, and they posted snipers to cover every well within sight of their lines.

That made Scimitar Hill the worst possible position to hold. At a mile inland it marked the furthest penetration of their lines, and if any water carriers ever made it that far, they did so only after everybody else had taken their dip. The trench was exposed too, hewn into a rocky hillside, devoid of shelter from the sun and a long way from the cool sea breeze. There was only one well and that was in a green hollow a few yards behind the trench. Before they even set out, Stephen had started to feel ill, and by the time he reached the position after the long march up from the shore his mouth was dry and cracked and he was seeing black spots in front of his eyes. His knees were trembling with the effort, and he had to steady himself against the wall of the trench for a few moments. Then he saw Kinsella, beaming at him like a friendly dog, seemingly impervious to the heat.

‘All right, sir? What about a drink of water?’

Stephen nodded, but suddenly lurched forward, pushing past Kinsella. He could smell the water but he couldn’t stop – his guts were in a knot again and he had to run to the slimy notch in the wall that served as a latrine. He hadn’t been there long when he heard the crack of a rifle and then the frightened shouts of his men.

They were crowded in the trench near the hollow, and it didn’t take long to see why. Feeling their eyes on him, Stephen crept along the trench and darted his head up just long enough to see what he had feared. Nailed boot soles, sunburned calves, and a sweat-soaked shirt with a ragged hole just below the collar. Kinsella lay stretched in the hollow, his tin mug clutched in his lifeless fingers as if he was still trying to fill it at the well.

‘I think he’s in them olive trees, sir,’ Sergeant Toolan said, when he dropped back into the trench.

Stephen nodded in agreement. The well was hidden from the Turkish trench, but there was an olive grove in no man’s land and the stunted trees could easily give a sniper the elevation to get a shot at the well. Stephen’s heart sank. The trees would also give the sniper the cover he needed to stay there all day.

The men knew it and they were taking no chances. They huddled in the bottom of the trench and looked at Stephen with wide, expectant eyes. His mind raced. He had to do something: in one stroke, the sniper had denied them the well, leaving Kinsella’s body as a grim reminder of his power. But they needed that water. He wasn’t the only dysentery case, and he doubted they could last until nightfall without dehydration taking a toll. It was barely ten in the morning and already the sun was unbearable, the baked walls of the trench hot to the touch and black flies swarming over everything.

But as he squinted into it, shielding his eyes with his hand, he wondered if that blazing sun might not save them. He tried to gauge its track, his mind working all the time. It depended on the sniper; if he was bold enough to stay in his post, then the sun might betray his position – but only if he was using a scope. That was a lot of ifs, but he didn’t see that he had any choice. It was a slim chance, but better than doing nothing.

‘Let’s get our sentries up, sergeant,’ he said, in an officious voice, trying to make it sound as if he wasn’t rattled. ‘Make sure they have periscopes and change the sentries on the hour. Heatstroke is the last thing we need in this godforsaken spot.’

‘Very good, sir,’ Sergeant Toolan said, looking relieved that somebody had given orders; that something was being done.

‘And I shall need a rifle, sergeant,’ he added, in a lower voice.

‘Right you are, sir.’

He took the weapon that was silently passed to him and walked along to the sap that cut into no man’s land near the northern end of the trench. This was a crude scrape that had been dug to allow patrols and listening parties to crawl out into no man’s land. It wasn’t very deep, but at least it was covered. With the worried eyes of his men still on him, Stephen crawled into the sap. Creeping slowly on his elbows – he couldn’t make a sound, even under the cover of the brushwood roof – he reached the end and lay dead still, watching the green leaves of the olive grove a hundred yards away.

The heat was overpowering, smothering, lying over him like a thick blanket, but he didn’t move a muscle. He thought of the hours he’d spent hunting with his grandfather, learning patience, stillness. He used to let his mind roam where it would, almost free of his body, and soon he would be only dimly aware of his grandfather, sitting like a stone beside him. But they had always done their waiting in a mossy ditch or on the riverbank, with the mist curling around them and no sound but the lap of the water and the distant boom of a bittern. Now he was in a reverberating stone oven with his face pressed into hot rock and his guts heaving and knotting spasmodically. His tongue felt swollen and furry and he was bathed in sweat just lying still.

What made it worse was the exposure. The end of the sap was open to the Turkish trench, and his only cover was the deep shadow from the roof. He couldn’t move or make a sound; not when the heat grew so intense that his head swam and running sweat blurred his eyes, nor even when his bowels gave an intense spasm, as if a giant hand had twisted them.
Bloody stupid idea.
Slowly the sun swung through the sky, the heat building mercilessly through the afternoon, growing hotter and hotter, until he thought he would suffocate.

Then he saw it – a white flash in the green of the trees. He waited, holding his breath, and it came again, steadier, the twinkling of sun on glass. He eased the bolt closed and brought the rifle up. His grandfather was beside him again, whispering to him to move steady and sure.
Take your time.
He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and then, with one last long breath, heaved himself out of the shadows and into the blinding sun. The rifle came up snug against his shoulder and he pushed the barrel against a rock, pivoting, swinging the sight onto his target as he hissed half his breath away and felt the trigger giving under the pressure of his finger. Crack! He saw branches nodding in the olive grove. Something thumped to earth, but he was already scrambling back through the sap, feet first, pushing with his elbows.

He had no time for congratulations, but dropped his rifle and ran back to the latrine. When he came out again there was a mug of water waiting for him, and a different feeling in the trench. The curse was lifted. The men were still sunken-eyed and filthy, but they were soldiers once again.

But just as he emptied the mug, the screaming started. It came from the olive grove: a low moan that rose to a high-pitched shriek before dying away and starting low again. A white flag appeared over the Turkish trench and two stretcher-bearers came out, but a volley from the sentries sent them scurrying back again. Normally both sides let stretcher-bearers go about their work unmolested – but not for snipers. Snipers would die where they fell.

This one was a long time dying. The screaming went on all through the afternoon, grating on his nerves and turning his triumph to unease. He ordered the sentries not to fire if the stretcher-bearers came out again, but with little hope that they would try. Finally, just after sunset, it stopped – but the silence that followed was almost worse. When it was fully dark he ordered Sergeant Toolan to take a patrol out to the olive grove and burn it.

He had no appetite, but he made himself sit down to his dinner of bully beef and biscuit. He knew he had to eat and, besides, there was the letter to Kinsella’s mother. As he ate, he wrote – mechanically brushing the flies from the paper and then his plate with one long-practised gesture. All he knew about Kinsella was that he had an older brother in the army, and he hoped to God this wasn’t the second letter the poor woman was getting. As usual, he wrote that her son had died quickly – it was the truth for once – but in the quiet of the dugout he couldn’t get the sniper’s screams out of his head. He’d probably killed men before, but this was the first time he had done so deliberately, coldly. May you die roaring, said the old Irish curse, but it bothered him now. He was still in a daze, with his pen poised over the paper, when Sergeant Toolan coughed politely outside and asked if he would come and have a look at the sniper.

Something was amiss: he could tell from Toolan’s diffident manner, from the way he dropped his eyes as Stephen came out of the dugout. The scene in the trench was like a wake, with the corpse laid out by candlelight and the eerie orange glow from the blazing olive grove. But he shuddered when he saw the body; it was unmistakably feminine, a young woman – almost a girl. Her bare legs stuck out from a rough canvas smock that was soaked with blood around her midriff. That explained all the screaming. There was no worse way to die than from a stomach wound.

But, Christ! He’d shot a woman – killed her. Was she a civilian, a shepherd who wandered into no man’s land? Relief flooded through him when he picked up the rifle lying beside her – a modern German Mauser with a Zeiss telescopic sight. She was the sniper all right, no doubt about it. She had shot Kinsella, and God knew how many before him. But there was an uneasy guilt in the faces of his men, as if they had conspired in murder. He might have shot her, but they had condemned her when they fired at the stretcher-bearers. He knew he ought to say something, offer some justification – but what? Curious, he brushed hair away from her face and caught his breath. What had he hoped to find? Some evil cast to her dead eyes? Some sign that marked her a murderer? But even filthy and bedraggled and sunk in death, she was beautiful.

He laid the rifle down and turned away, and the men simply nodded sympathetically. Mahony knelt beside the firing step and started whispering an act of contrition into her ear, his rosary beads clicking in the silence that filled the trench. He wanted to tell him not to bother, that she was most likely a Muslim, but he held his tongue. There was a kindness that not even the war could root out; they were only giving her what they would wish for themselves, and it was best to let them have their rites.

Inside the dugout, his unfinished letter to Mrs Kinsella was still on the table, but he couldn’t face it. He lay down on the bunk and closed his eyes, but he could hear the girl screaming. Even when he put his hands over his ears he could still hear it, and as sleep crept up on him, he could taste the bile rising in his throat.

V

By the time Stephen got home he was sick of hospitals. The one at Lemnos had been welcome because it was the first. After the torrid heat of Turkey it was clean and cool and peaceful, but he didn’t have long to enjoy it. Fever struck on his second night and for the next week he was racked by shivers and sweats and delirium, so the next thing he remembered was waking in Malta, in another hospital; another long room with distempered walls and a cool breeze whispering between the beds.

A week passed before he was fit to move again – a week of staring at the ceiling and wondering if this was real, or if he was just asleep in a roasting hole in Turkey and would shortly wake to the filth and flies. But reality slowly gained ground. On the voyage south he was able to taste the fresh scent of the sea, and when the hospital ship docked in Alexandria he could feel the pulsing chaos on the quays before he was plunged bodily into it on his stretcher, carried shoulder high through teeming hordes of urchins thrusting their wares at him, ‘Eggs a cook! Eggs a cook!’

Then another hospital, but the same distempered walls and long rooms. He began to wonder if they built these places to a pattern. It was evening when he arrived, and there was a monastic liquidity to the silence that seeped out of the shadows. When they left him he closed his eyes and felt himself sliding into it, as if he were sinking into water. Opening them again, he found it was morning, bright sun piercing the windows. A doctor was sitting beside his bed. He was poring intently over a chart, and his bare brown knees stuck out through the open front of his white coat.

‘G’day, lieutenant,’ he said, with a flat Australian twang. ‘How are you this morning?’

Stephen blinked at him. For the first time he had slept right through the night, a deep dark sleep undisturbed by fever or nightmares. He felt refreshed, but at the same time frail and disoriented.

‘Where am I?’ he croaked.

The doctor smiled. ‘The Australian Military Hospital in Alexandria. You’ve been very sick, but I think your fever’s broken now. I bet you’d like a drink of water.’

Stephen pushed himself up in the bed, licking his dry lips. Water! Good clean water, in a glass! He gulped it down like a greedy baby until the doctor gently pulled the glass away.

‘Easy there, mate. You’ll make yourself sick. Why don’t you leave some for later, eh?’

He sank back against the pillows. The ward was noisier now, with men walking about in dressing gowns and pyjamas, and blue-smocked nurses working around the beds. But his companion didn’t seem in any hurry to leave. He picked up his chart again and started making notes, humming quietly to himself.