“What
do you reckon’s going on, mate?” Angus asked as they left the front lines.
“Nothing
good, I’ll promise you that,” Jim replied gravely. It was always the way,
because Lieutenant Evans only ever appeared when something bad was about to
happen. “We’ll be getting shot at, for sure and bloody certain.”
Amongst
the platoon, the conflict between the sergeant, who was well regarded, and the
lieutenant, who was not so well regard, was well-known. The two men see eye to
eye on anything – they had been at loggerheads since training in Egypt, so
Evans spent little time in the section of trench where Jim was in nominal
command, preferring the solitude of his dugout further down the line, where he
filled up innumerable diary pages. With what, exactly, Jim had no idea.
That
suited Jim just fine. He didn’t like Evans one little bit, but he pushed those
thoughts to the back of his mind, and wondered what idea Battalion had come up
with this time. Actually, he suspected that, like on most occasions, whatever
was being put forth now, by way of a plan – it was always the next plan that would break the stalemate,
or so the diggers had been told again and again – had come from General
Birdwood’s General Headquarters.
Down
on the beach, and further afield at the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force
headquarters, they were experts at thinking up lame-brained schemes that did
little more than get Australians killed. No one who had spent any time at
Gallipoli had been immune to the stunts and strategies that the British
generals who ran the campaign had thought up.
Popular
amongst the Australians was the thought that it was the British planners who
posed more of a threat to their lives than the Turks. Also popular: the guarantee that if the Australian
generals had been in charge of the campaign, then perhaps they might have
reached Constantinople after all.
As far
as horrible decisions went, the one that always came first into Jim’s mind, the
most glaring of all examples, was the madness of charging Turkish defences at
The Nek. That costly action, on the same day as the successful attack on Lone
Pine, had cost a lot of light horse troopers their lives – completely
unnecessarily, as the British landings at Suvla Bay, for which the attack on
the Nek had been a diversion, had finished. Whilst the Australians had died
charging across a No Man’s Land of less than twenty yards against dozens of
machine guns, the British had sipped tea on the sand. No Aussie had forgotten
about that stunt.
“At
least we’re away from the lieutenant for a spell,” Angus said, trying to swing
his friend’s mood around as best as possible.
“Yeah,
you’re right about that. Still, I don’t like it. This stinks like the work of
some bloody fool pommy staff officer,” Jim opined, turning to offer Angus a
grimace. “I can smell the stench of it from here.”
‘Here’
was a hundred yards from the beach now known as Anzac Cove. The two men were now
in the network of trenches that ran along the very top of the ridge that had
been the first defensive position established by the Australians and New
Zealanders on the first morning – the first morning when their objectives had
been miles inland. It seemed a long time ago when they had been clinging to the
cliffs, gouging and clawing for survival, yet the line hadn’t advanced much
more than a third of a mile in some areas.
In the
following nine months of fighting, no digger had come close to capturing what
they’d been asked to try and capture on the first morning, the plan concocted
by staff officers in a room somewhere falling completely apart. Only those who
had been taken prisoner had come within a stone’s throw. Constantinople for dinner had been the cheerful saying before the
landings in April, and a lot of men had believed that it would be a quick and
easy campaign. It had, of course, become the opposite, and now Jim was certain
that the only way he’d ever see the Turkish capital was if he were taken
prisoner and jailed there. Needless to say, that wasn’t how he wanted to end
his war.
In the
early days of the campaign, the steep ascent from the beach to the first ridge line had been one fraught with great danger. It had taken many months to
clear all the Turkish snipers and machine guns from along the length of the
beach, and it hadn’t happened until many Australians and New Zealanders had
been killed. The snipers had been particularly troublesome, especially for the
diggers on fetch-and-carry duties. Loaded down with supplies, negotiating goat
tracks up a steep hill, with snipers in the area was a disaster. Clearing the
way just to get necessary supplies to the front line had been a herculean task,
and it had cost the many men their lives.
A
herculean effort, too, had been securing this last line of defence as the front
line had slowly crept forward, with the loss of many Australian and New Zealand
soldiers, but the immediate danger of one line break pushing the entire
expeditionary force into the ocean had come and gone, though there was never a
moment that went by in the front lines where the spectre of a massive attack
didn’t hang over the Australians and New Zealanders. The difference now was
that there would have to be multiple line breaks to fold the ANZAC house of
cards in. Back then, one would have done it.
For
men who were adept at scrambling up and down gullies – and by now, there
weren’t many who weren’t – the trip down to the beach was easy enough. As usual,
the narrow strip of sand was a haven of activity: everything from Navy sailors
unloading boxes of supplies to pens of barbed wire for Turkish prisoners and
soldiers swimming offshore, an event that always attracted the attention of
enemy guns. Everything on Gallipoli was hazardous to a soldier’s health, but
that didn’t stop them from chancing their luck. Everyone loved a swim in the
brilliant turquoise-blue ocean.
Battalion
Headquarters was a sandbagged hut with a corrugated iron roof, dimly lit and
jammed hard against an outcropping in the cliff. The way it had been built,
nothing but a direct hit – or perhaps a series of them – would bring it down,
and being in the shadows of the towering cliff made that almost an
impossibility. Typical of the staff officers and powers-that-be, Jim thought.
They were seldom in danger, whereas the men on the front lines were seldom out
of it. Such a was what ensured the diggers had a less-than-favourable opinion
of the ‘brass’.
“This
should be interesting,” Jim muttered to Angus as they were ushered inside.
Major Arthur
McCaskill was the only officer present whom Jim and Angus had seen before. It
was a large gathering, considering the relatively small size of the
headquarters building. Looking around, Jim saw a knot of four staff officers,
quite recognisable due to the red bands on their uniform caps, and noticed that
they’d all turned to appraise the newcomers. Most had thinly-cropped
moustaches, as was the apparent fashion amongst British staff officers. Jim
didn’t get it. He’d either been clean shaven or had taken to wearing a heavy
beard, nothing in the middle.
“Barnes,
Laidlaw,” McCaskill said by way of a greeting, his words barely distinguishable
underneath a thick Scottish accent. The major was very popular amongst the men
he commanded. “How are things on the front line this morning?”
“We’re
keeping the Turks honest, sir,” Jim replied. He didn’t add that they couldn’t
hope to do much more after being sold down the river by the English from Day
One of the campaign. If there was one thing that the Army didn’t appreciate, it
was insubordination – and particularly the British Army.
“That’s
what I like to hear.” The major turned and gestured to one of the staff
officers, who now stepped forward. “This is Captain Hadley , joining us here from
General Sir Ian Hamilton’s headquarters. The captain is here at the behest of
the commander-in-chief.”
Immediately,
alarms bells went off in Jim’s head. He absolutely knew that something strange
was going on, because majors didn’t normally introduce captains. It was the
other way around, unless the captain in question – in this case, Hadley, the
Brit dispatched here on behalf of the commanding general – was someone of great
and unusual importance. A few things were starting to add up, and Jim didn’t
like the total. He knew he’d been right
before, and he hated it when he was right. There were too many staff officers
here for nothing. He knew what was going to happen: he and Angus were
definitely going to get shot at.
Hadley,
a youthful-looking man, nodded stiffly, and was quickly underway with the
business at hand. “Major McCaskill and Lieutenant Evans lead me to believe that
you, Sergeant Barnes, were a handy cricketer back in Australia.”
Of all
the questions Jim had been expecting from the British intelligence officer,
that was the furthest from left field. Even so, he nodded agreement. “I was
alright, sir, Better boxer, but I could roll the arm over a bit if someone
needed a little spin late in the day when the pitch was starting to break up.”
“Good
to know,” Hadley said before he turned to McCaskill and nodded, having made up
his mind almost in that instant. “Major, this man will do splendidly, I think.”
McCaskill
nodded. “As you wish, Captain.”
Like
he was back in the classroom, Jim half-raised a hand. “Sir, I’m not exactly
sure what’s going on here.”
“I am
of a mind to detail to you a special mission, Sergeant Barnes. That is, if you
are willing.”
Jim
exchanged a wary glance with Angus, and glanced around the room. He hated being
the last to know. “Seems to me, sir, that we’re the only blokes at this party
who don’t know what’s going on here. Are we going to get let in on the secret?”
“Indeed,”
Hadley answered. “The good news, Sergeant Barnes, is that you’ll get a chance
to show us your cricketing skills – and you as well, Corporal Laidlaw, if you
are indeed in possession of any?”
Jim
stared hard at the British officer, scarcely able to believe what he’d heard.
He wasn’t even sure that he’d heard right, wondering if the constant thump of
the big guns had played havoc with his hearing. He thought he’d heard Hadley
say that there would be some time for a cricket game... “Begging your pardon,
sir, but what on earth do you mean?”
“We’d
like to keep the Turks busy for a little while – tomorrow, in fact,” Hadley
explained, his slow reveal gaining speed. “So, you and some of your fellows are
going to hold a cricket game. The catch is, Sergeant, that this will be a game
on Shell Green, in – “
“In
full view of the bloody enemy,” Jim finished, growling the words. He knew very
well what Shell Green represented, and didn’t need some Johnny-come-lately
British intelligence officer to spell out the facts. He was seething with
anger. “Sir, forgive me for saying so, but this is madness. It’s sheer bloody
madness! Every Turk gun worth two bob’s got all of Shell Green sighted down to
individual blades of grass. We’ll be sitting ducks up there.”
“Come,
come, Sergeant Barnes,” Hadley chided lightly. “You don’t strike me as the sort
of man to shirk a little taste of danger!”
If the
comment was supposed to have calmed Jim down, it didn’t work. He felt his
temper rise and was uninclined to keep it in check. “I’ve never backed down
from anything in my life, sir, but there’s a difference between taking your
chances in the trenches and even during an attack, but standing out there on
the only flat bit of land on the whole peninsula playing cricket whilst the
bloody Abduls drop shells all over the place? That, sir, is inviting death. I’d
be best off shooting myself in the head with your revolver here and now. Save
the bloody Turks some ammunition.”
“Strikes
me as a bunch of us asking for a bit of trouble, sir,” Angus commented, dryly
observing the understatement of the millennium.
“A
whole bloody lot of trouble, more like,” Jim replied more forcefully. “Sir, is
this an order?”
Captain
Hadley shook his head. “No, Sergeant, this isn't an order. We’re asking for
volunteers and you were suggested, by Major McCaskill as someone who might
volunteer. Is that not the case?”
McCaskill,
who had been thinking along the same lines as Jim concerning danger and
futility, now looked at Hadley and made a none-too-subtle noise. “Captain, if
you’re asking these men to take such a risk, volunteering or otherwise, perhaps
they would be more likely to be acquiescing if they are armed with some
understanding of what this is meant to achieve.”
For
his part, Jim had no idea what ‘acquiescing’ meant, but if McCaskill’s request
meant that he would get an explanation as to why anyone wanted to hold a
cricket game on Shell Green, then he was happy to feel like the
least-intelligent man in the room. He couldn’t work out what the plan was. It
wasn’t as though a mere cricket game would act as a diversion for something
else.
“Very
well then,” Hadley agreed after a minute’s awkward silence. “As long as you two
men swear to not to breathe a word of this to anyone.”
“Won’t
tell a soul,” Angus promised.
“Yeah,
cross my heart,” Jim said tersely, completely unable to imagine what sort of
explanation would make him feel any better about what he was being asked to do
– to volunteer to do, which was the same thing as an order when delivered by an
officer from the commanding general’s headquarters. But he would listen, anyway.
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