The Game - A Short Story of Gallipoli 1915

Chapter One

December 1915 - The Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey

"You fellas just just take your time on this one, alright?” The soldier at the fire-step, cigarette jammed into the corner of his mouth, Lee Enfield rifle lazily in hand, turned his attention momentarily away from watching No Man’s Land to offer his advice to the two medics. “He’s a goner.”

 

Watching from a shallow dugout that he’d built into the back wall of the trench, Sergeant ‘Big’ Jim Barnes found that he couldn’t disagree. He watched the two men, their white armbands as dirty as the rest of them, gently roll the horribly-wounded soldier onto the rickety stretcher. The boy from Kyabram in Victoria, barely a month removed from his nineteenth birthday, was a mess. He’d been shot in the chest, not close enough to the heart for a quick death, instead consigned to a slow and painful one, the sucking chest wound expelling blood at an alarming rate. The boy’s skin was as white as a ghost, pale and clammy.

“Bring us a beer up next time, would ya?” Another wise-cracking digger piped up, earning a laugh. Humour was about the only thing – other than Turkish enemies – that the Australians weren’t lacking in. “And make sure it’s a cold one. I’m not drinking it the way the bloody poms do, that’s for bloody sure!”

Quickly, the wises cracks died away as the boy from Kyabram began to moan soullessly, the sounds floating up and down the trench, a mournful accompaniment to a day that had already brought news of another Australian attack repelled near Lone Pine. Yet the boy’s suffering meant little to these veterans, for whom death had been a constant, like sunrise and sunset, since April. Eight months on the Gallipoli Peninsula turned a man into a calloused individual, a shadow of his former self. It was the only way to survive such horror.

The medics lifted the stretcher, one man at each end, to about waist height and moved slowly down the trench, copping advice that they hadn't barely flinching as the machine gun post near where they’d collected the wounded man from opened up, thoroughly spraying the trench opposite with bullets. Back and forth, the gun swept, burning through the best part of a full ammunition belt, before falling silent once more, and now the sharper crack of Lee Enfield rifles filling the breach. There wasn’t such a thing as a lull on Gallipoli, not even in the dead of the black night.

It was a sort of retaliation, one that the Turks surely expected fairly quickly. Their talented sniper had struck once again, and so came the only payback that the Australians could easily dish out. Their enemy, collectively known as Johnny Turk, weren’t fools. None would have their heads anywhere near the top of the trench, Jim knew. To do so was to invite death. After all, the Australians had a few good snipers, too.

Shuffling past Jim went the medics, who had one of the most thankless of all the tasks on Gallipoli, and he caught sight of the boy on the stretcher, white-faced, shivering more than was normal, despite the sudden temperature drop that had afflicted the Gallipoli battlefield in recent weeks – the northern winter was coming, after all – and shook his head. The lead medic noticed, and seemed to shrug his shoulders. Veterans knew when a wounded man was as good as dead. This one probably wouldn’t make it back to the aid stations on the beach, let alone to operating rooms on Lemnos Island. The grotesquely purple stain on the dry dirt of the wall, where the boy from Kyabram had been standing when shot, told the story: the Turkish bullet would prove to be a mortal wound.

“Good work, you blokes,” Jim called after them, meaning it. Carrying the dead and dying from the front line to the beach wasn’t an easy task. As far as he was concerned, doing it without a weapon in hand was madness.

Watching from a neighbouring dugout, Angus Laidlaw shook his head. “Bloody hell, I really liked that lad!”

“Me, too,” Jim admitted. Despite his silent vow not to grow too fond of any of the new arrivals, who seemed to cycle through at a rate of two or three a week, he’d liked the Kyabram boy, had liked listening to stories of rural Victoria, a far cry from his own home, Broken Hill in outback New South Wales.

But now the Kyabram boy was dead – or, if not quite dead yet, certainly as good as. There would be no recovery. Like so many countless thousands of diggers before him, he would likely be dead on arrival at the beach, and from there, another name for the Casualty List that would reach London first, and then, later, Melbourne, manifesting itself as a fresh dose of bad tidings in the morning newspapers.

Jim looked up at the man on the fire-step, who used a crude wood-and-mirrors periscope to look out into No Man’s Land. “Anything brewing, Crowey?”

Private Ross Crowe shook his head, suddenly the bearer of bad news. “Not a bloody thing, mate.”

“Alright, you blokes, listen up,” Jim commanded. “That fucking sniper’s gotta go. I’m not gonna sit by and watch him keep shooting our mob. Crowey, you got a line on him?”

“Nah, mate, nothing. I’m good,” Crowe said immodestly. “But I’m not that good.”

“Plan B, then,” Jim said, shrugging his shoulders in Crowe’s direction. In truth, the private was an excellent lookout, perhaps the best in the entire platoon, but the problem was that Crowe knew it, and liked to tell all and sundry.

“Do us all a favour, Crowey! Stick your worthless head up and help us find him! We’ll thank you later,” a voice called from down the line.

Crowe turned away from the periscope to scan the trench for the likely deliverer of the latest barb. “Pop your own head up there, ya bludger! Christ knows it isn't doing anything other than keeping your flippin’ ears apart!”

“Pipe down, both of you, or you’re on fetch and carry duties for a week,” Jim promised. “But we do have to smoke out the bloody sniper.”

“We’re fucked without Smithy,” Angus said, a helpless look directed at his friend.

Jim nodded enthusiastic agreement, wearing the same hopeless look, though there was frustration, too. The whole campaign had been one giant, violent frustration. “Too right. If that bugger hadn't gotten blown to smithereens on the shitter, we could set him up to have a go at this bastard. No surprise that their fucking sniper suddenly got more brazen after Smithy left us.” Men being shelled to death whilst suffering from diarrhoea was a common problem, the latrines long ago zeroed in on by Turkish guns. Their best shot, Smith, had exited the world in that manner.

“We can toss someone’s hat up on a bayonet, try and to get him to fire a shot?” Crowe suggested.

Angus shook his head, a definitive ‘no’. “This bloke’s good – he’s lying doggo out there, just waiting for some poor bastard to wander into his sights. A shooter that good isn't going to fall for that trick, Crowey. We’d just be insulting his intelligence.”

“Hang on a minute, you blokes! Maybe Crowey’s onto something,” Jim said slowly, his mind working. “Gus’s right: the sniper’s too good to be fooled by one hat, but if we give the bugger a few things to look at, it might convince him that we’re fair dinkum. I reckon if we get an idea of where he’s hiding, we might be able to lob a grenade or three in his direction and end it quick.”

“Worth a shot, I reckon,” Angus judged. “I won't feel too bloody safe in around here until we know we’ve got him!”

There was one thing that neither veteran wanted to consider: it was entirely possible that the sniper wasn’t in contact with his comrades, preferring to use the cover of the low, unpleasant scrubby bush that littered the battlefield in numbers only fractionally higher than the bodies that littered it, too. Snipers – Turkish and Australian ones – had been known to do that, setting up away from their nearest comrades to make detection harder, returning only under cover of darkness, when it was nigh on impossible for their enemy to track them. 

It was the sort of discipline that Jim didn’t think he had in him. He was more a bull-at-a-gate sort of person, preferring to rush straight in and deal with the problem as quickly as possible, and his nickname had come from his days as a handy boxer in rural New South Wales. He’d never been about finesse there, and hadn't ever been about finesse here on the Gallipoli Peninsula, either. Blunt force and speed, he thought. That was the combination by which he’d had his various successes in life.

 “If we rig up three hats, maybe an officers’ cap if we can find one, and Crowey keeps an eye out, we might just get the bastard to give himself away,” Jim thought aloud. It was the oldest trick in the book, but he’d had success with flimsier plans in the past. “Then, maybe, we’ve got a chance.”

“You reckon he’ll fall for it?” Angus didn’t, and his tone of voice suggested as much.

“Mate, I’m fucked if I know, but I also know we’re fucked if we don’t try something. I’m sick of that bastard Turk cramping my style and I’m sick and bloody tired of seeing that bastard pot our young blokes before the poor buggers ever get the chance to learn how to survive here.”

Angus smiled, and held his hands up, palms out: surrender. “Easy, mate, I’m on your side.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry,” Jim said, meaning the apology. He was aware of his own combustible temper, and at times couldn’t quite control the fiery anger. “It’s just that every time I see another one of our youngsters get shot, it makes me think of my own brother. He’ll be over here before too much longer and I don’t want to see him – see the same thing happen. Us old blokes need to show them the ropes, and we can’t with that good a sniper on the other side.”

“Joe’s big enough to look after himself and you know it,” Angus reasoned with a smile, noting that Jim had characterised all the veterans as old men, even though they were scarcely a year or two older than the reinforcements. Physically, anyway. Mentally, the Gallipoli veterans had aged a decade and more, or so it sometimes felt. Especially when the going was particularly tough. “Big enough to kick your arse, too, mate.”

Jim grinned at that. “Too bloody right, smart arse youngster.” He looked hard at his best friend and that grin changed to a grimace as he considered the task still ahead. “Either way, Gus, we need to get that fucking sniper! The sooner the better, I reckon!”

A loud, almost mocking voice from behind said, “Sorry to interrupt your personal crusade Sergeant Barnes, but there are orders pertaining to you.”

Oh Christ, Jim muttered. It was that high-pitched voice that sounded too much like nails being dragged down a blackboard for his liking. “Yes, sir?”

“You are to report to Battalion Headquarters on the beach,” Lieutenant Jonathan Evans said, his clipped tones those of an English gentleman. 

The look on Jim’s face suggested that there were far better ways of spending his time than leaving the front lines. “What for, sir?”

“Because I’ve ordered you to, Sergeant,” Evans replied testily. He wasn’t English, but he had apparently decided somewhere along the way that affecting an English accent was appropriate when commanding men. 

“On his own, sir?” Angus asked, hoping that he could convince the lieutenant to let him go with his friend.

"HQ asked for two capable men,” Evans revealed, an unintended compliment. “So, you can accompany him, Corporal Laidlaw – and you should be quick about it."