Читать книгу The Desert Column - Ion Idriess - Страница 9

SHRAPNEL GULLY,

GALLIPOLI.

May—The regiment has been all night under fire. Rifle-fire started suddenly. In one minute we could not hear ourselves speak. Came a hoarse whisper: “Fill magazines!” We jammed in the clips. My fingers tingled as the empty clips grated out of the magazine. Another hoarse whisper, and we fled down the shadowed ravines that gouge our big hill.

Then ugh-ugh bang! Shrapnel burst above us in an instantaneous black-grey cloud of smoke: bushes around bent as if under a hail-storm. We scrambled on a little faster, instinctively ducking our heads from the storm. Again came that long-drawn scream to apparently split with its own velocity—bang!—and hail whipped the bushes around. We crouched low as we slithered down the ravines, grasping any handy bush, steading ourselves with our rifle-butts, slipping and sometimes falling to scramble sheepishly up to the instant joke. The sun was sinking: it was a creepy feeling among those black hills: we did not seem to know what was happening: we were hurrying somewhere to kill men and be killed. Our own battery answered the Turks. The rifle-fire grew to a roar that drowned the voice of the man beside me. I felt as a stone-age man might feel if volcanoes all around him suddenly spat fire and roared. Doctor Dods in front suddenly fell on his knees. I caught my breath—it would be awful if the doctor were the first man killed! But he got up again and scrambled on. He did this several times. Instinctively I understood. The doctor had been to the South African war! The next time he ducked, I ducked. When he scrambled up, I followed suit—so did others, a sort of automatic ducking all along the line. Thus we quickly learnt the best, the quickest chance of dodging shrapnel. We had to. Immediately that scream came tearing directly overhead we would duck down flat. The doctor glanced around and we laughed. He is a long man and very soldierly, but has no dignity at all when he flops down so. He screwed up his face and winked over his shoulder. Then we all rushed forward again and burst through the bushes that lined a little road meandering through the hills. We were in the little valley again, with the big black hills enveloping us. They call it Shrapnel Gully.

It got coldly dark. If a man were home he’d be just at the sliprails letting go his horse before he went in to tea. Or a city man would he pushing open the garden gate. Bang! bang! whizz whizz, zip, zip, zip, zip, bang! zip, zipp, bang! bang! bang!—Hell’s orchestra, with additions, as the shrapnel burst in vicious balls of flame within the hollow basin: on the sides of the hills: above the hills-—everywhere! We dashed up that narrow “Road,” five hundred of us. Whizz, whizz, bang! then rrr-rrr-rr-rrr in a rattling stutter, tut—tut—tut tuttuttuttuttuttut, zip, zip, ping, zip, smack, zip! Bullets, machinegun and rifle, whined down from over the big hill before us, not all aimed directly at us, seemingly a chronic shower flying over the tops of the infantry trenches to rain down the gully. Harry Begourie stood absolutely still in front of me, his hand to his head, the blood hurrying down his right cheek. The doctor led him away. We ran on. “Halt!”

We all crouched by the roadside, among the bushes, by something solid, or in a sheltering hole. A man near me sighed in the darkness as he found a shallow dugout. For an hour we lived there, clinging to cold mother earth, an invisible regiment whispering among the bushes; a rustle when a man cautiously lifted himself to shift his bayonet more comfortably from under his belly.

Overhead screamed the big shells from our own guns, travelling towards the Turks and they were shrilled in chorus by the Turkish shells as they criss-crossed down into us. The shells made hell’s row in the dark and when exploding close dazzled our eyes with sheets of flame. Jagged fragments screamed into the bushes or struck rocks and screeched piercingly away. My body was alertly passive, but the mind was curiously thinking, “So this is War!” The rifle-bullets in the bushes were the devil. With the night they seemed to lose a lot of their nasty threatening force. They just chirped among the bushes like busy canaries. One landed under my nose with a gentle squeak, but the flying gravel stung my lips viciously. One tore the heel clean off Burns’s boot; the force swung his leg around. He laughed and called out to the invisible quartermaster for a “new issue!” Those unseen canaries were real nervy, one might thud into a man’s back at any second!

Muffled footsteps slow and heavy came down the dark gully. We strained our eyes as the shadowy forms of stretcher-bearers went by. I shivered involuntarily to the vanishing pad of their feet, for a man’s hand hung limply over a stretcher.

Then “Forward!” We arose and stumbled on up the gully. Not far though. We dived for the bushes again, for anywhere, and stayed there the whole night, cramped and shivering and cold, listening to the big shells trying to burst the very air above, to the ominous roar of rifle fire just ahead, to those damned canaries among the bushes. The rifle-roar in front made us certain that the Turks were attacking only a few yards away. We knew nothing. Most of us did not know where our officers were. They were scattered amongst us of course, but I doubt if they knew where they were.

“We are to be used as reserves for the trenches!” someone bawled in my ear.

“How the hell do you know?” I yelled, but got no reply.

When a sort of shadowy moonlight came there sounded a cracking rumble coming down the gully. We held our breath. “Guns!” Around a bend in the gully came some sort of animal dragging a squeaking, funny looking cart, a little cart that rocked and swayed over the uneven gully-bed. We could not see distinctly, but two other carts creaked slowly behind. The drivers walked, cloaked and silent, creaking past us with never a word. A voice from the night said distinctly, “Don’t their legs wobble funny!” The dead men’s legs were hanging over the rear of the carts.

At daylight we crawled out of our retreats, the officers trying to sort out the hopeless muddle of squadrons and troops. Gillespie sat on a stone, six feet of patience, trying to get some dirt out of his eye.

Anyway, we got back to our “camp.” Now we have shifted and are digging out fresh lodgings as yesterday’s are too abundantly supplied with shrapnel. Only a very few of us were hit last night. Providence may have smiled on us, but I’ll bet our quick instinct for crawling into any available “burrow” shielded us a lot, too. The cracking of rifles is still menacing, but mainly from snipers. The rifles never cease; every minute they crack! crack! crack!

Strange! a few birds are flying about, merrily chirping, while the air is trilling with death!

I was a fool this morning. I saw such a bonza pair of Turkish top-boots, almost brand new, sticking up out of the ground near my new dugout. I pulled at one boot and out came part of a Turk’s leg.

All along the paths leading to and from the trenches are the graves of the poor Aussies who have been shot. A man grows wary where he walks—many of the graves are so shallow. They could literally call this place “Death’s Gully.” I’ve only been here a few hours, but, by Jove, I’ve seen some dead men. And old dead ones make their presence felt right up and down this great gully.

May 22nd—A party of us volunteered for a sapping job last night. We left camp at eleven and followed the road, which is the gully bottom, meandering up to the firing-line. Across the gully are built sandbag barricades which shield a man just a little from the death-traps along the road. We would bend our heads and run to a big barricade, lean against the bags until we panted back our breath, then dive around the corner and rush for the next barricade. The bullets that flew in between each barricade did not lend wings to our feet for nothing could have made us run faster. A few hundred yards ahead of us and high up is the firing-line, perched precariously on a circle of frowning cliffs. The Turks have an especial trench up there which commands our “road.” This trench is filled with expert snipers, unerring shots who have killed God only knows how many of our men when coming along the road.

None of our party were hit. Eventually we reached the farthest bunch of sandbags, stacked higgledy-piggledy on a shadowy mound directly beneath the big cliffs by Quinn’s Post. It was pitch dark up by the cliffs. On the cliff and hill peaks the rifles fired like spitting needles of flame. The firing was not heavy, but numerous bullets came thrillingly close.

Our object was to cut a trench from a sap, through the little rise back towards the Gully, and thus save the necessity of walking along that particular danger-spot of the tragic road.

The night, away from the bases of the hills, was only semi-dark. The bullets coming so far were mostly high shots flying over the tops of our trenches which clung to the cliffy hills above.

We set to work, a shadowy line of us working in pairs and, by Jove, we did work. We made that dirt fly digging ourselves in. I had a queer impression of grave-diggers in the night who were digging their own graves.

The bullets began coming faster and faster and each man felt mighty glad when he had scooped a hole down three feet and thus had partial shelter. We could dig on our hands and knees now. Then one poor chap, Watson of H Squadron, was shot clean through the head.

We worked in a sweating hurry as the night’s inferno began, thankful that the tall hills sheltered us greatly from artillery-fire. But there came a rain of vicious bullets. One smacked a clod of earth down my neck and the old spine shivered to the grisly dirt. Heaven only knew what germs were in that soil from the battlefields of ages. We belted into the digging again. A bullet sighed clean through Nix’s hat. It rained bullets for a while and we crouched in our holes like anxious mice, wishing they were deeper. To an awful roar and a flame that crimsoned the sky we gazed awe-struck above our burrows. We breathed intense relief when we realized it was only the Japanese bombs, and not the whole world blowing up. We had brought those bombs along in the Lutzow—a present, I believe, from the Japanese government. Our fellows were now passing the gift on to the Turks and I did not envy the poor devils the receiving. At the same time, the knowledge that we Australians can fight courageously in these bloody battles, using and struggling against the most terrible modern weapons, filled me with a deep feeling of satisfaction.

Straight up from the cliff’s black edge there rocketed skywards two flaring bombs. They descended directly into the Turkish trenches. For breathless seconds the rifle-fire ceased, then came a tearing roar that shook the very ground. In streaks of blackened flame there spewed up a smoke-cloud blacker than the night. Some Turks were panic-stricken. In inky silhouette we glimpsed them, like toy men, away up on the cliffs as they sprang from their trenches to run. But the air vibrated to the machine-gun and rifle-fire that was turned on them. And thus the game went on all through the night. After our working shift, we lost no time hurrying down that “zip—zipping” road to “camp.”

...Last night we were sapping again, right up at Quinn’s Post. None of my particular crowd were shot, but we are so tired and sleepy! The air was foetid with the smell of dead men.

We are frightfully tired, but have to shift camp once more.

...The infantry are quite cut up—not over their terrible losses, but because of one man, Simpson Kirkpatrick I think his name is. He was known everywhere as “Murph. and his Donk.” At the Landing he commandeered a donkey and ever since has been coming and going from the distant firing-line to the beach with wounded men. He worked day and night, plodding along unscathed under fire till all thought he must be protected by supernatural means. His colonel long ago told him to carry on all on his own; to do whatever he liked and go wherever he liked. He has been a little army of mercy all on his own. Yesterday morning, I think it was, he went up the valley and stopped by the Water Guard where he generally had breakfast. It wasn’t ready so he went on, calling, “Never mind, give me a good dinner when I come back.”

He never came back. Coming along the valley holding two wounded men to the donkey he was shot through the heart. Both wounded men were wounded again.