Strangely, when the pub closed it was the man in the chequered suit who bought us a bottle of whisky and regaled us with a maudlin, but probably well-meant, speech about how he’d like to see us make the best of everything—poor darlin’s (a brogue overwhelming his Aussie twang)—and shook our hands as though asking forgiveness for a mortal insult. While we tried to tell him that we had it better now than ever before, so there was no question at all of us merely making the best of it.
We were on our way to the top-side of life.
Australian booze is stronger than New Zealand booze. We walked down to the waterfront (there was an awful lot of it) and turned towards the Pakeha’s berth (we hoped), Price cheerfully telling us how he had no sense of direction, not to mention a middle-ear problem that meant we young blokes would probably have to carry him. Alan was sick; Andy said to get that (the whisky) into him. I was trying to work out where my middle ear was (listening in the centre of my skull).
The ground was lurching about worse than the ship in the Karori rip. I was telling Palmer how I once went for a walk with my cousin and a couple of bottles of cider along the banks of the Takaka River and the shore kept jumping up and hitting me.
The wind was cold and black, coming off the steel ships’ sides as off a crowd of icebergs. I drank some of the whisky and fixed the fifth dent in the crown of my hat. We ran into a night watchman who shone a light in our faces and said we couldn’t go around the docks. Price argued with him that we wouldn’t be able to find the ship if we didn’t. Andy offered him a drink, but he showed us out the gates all the same.
After that all I remember is Andy trying to coax me up the gangplank when it was just getting light, and looking down at the water—luminous grey, hard, an overturned mirror.
I was drunk on parade. Not hungover, still happily drunk—and hungry, my stomach eating itself.
A number of men were missing; about twelve from our company, including John Price. John had made corporal just before we left Featherston, so Mac was concerned, displeased, determined to find him as soon as possible.
‘Who was with Corporal Price last night?’ he roared at the entire assembled company. Lance-Corporal Jardine glanced at Alan and me. The officer standing behind Mac was watching Alan doubtfully. Alan, I’d noticed earlier, was white and swayed slightly where he stood.
‘We was with him—we were, that is,’ I said.
‘Permission to speak, Sir!’ Andy’s voice further along the row. Mac stepped up for a consultation with him. At this point the anxious officer decided to do something about Alan. He came over to us. I think this was too much for Alan, who passed out. Teasdale and I moved to catch him. Teasdale, who was sober, succeeded; I found myself on my face on the deck.
Mac bawled, ‘What’s up over there!’ then, coming closer, said, ‘Oh, sorry, Sir.’
‘Take him down to the PMO, Private.’
‘On your feet, Thornton!’ Mac yelled. I got up slowly. Everything was swooping about and the day had divided into a couple of silver nails driving into my eyeballs.
‘Are you drunk, Thornton?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, Sir!’
‘Yes, Sir.’ I fixed my eyes on the crown of Mac’s hat. The officer said, ‘It’s all right Sergeant. Private—?’
‘Sir?’
‘Go on sick call today—but don’t ever come on parade drunk again.’
I took myself off.
John Price was discovered asleep in a park by a couple of Tasmanian sergeants in search of their own missing men. He didn’t lose his stripe, but the Lieutenant persuaded him that it was a good idea to take the pledge.
It rained heavily at the same time every night in the tropics. Most of the men couldn’t be bothered picking up and rushing into shelter in the early hours of the morning, so settled below decks. Still, some of us slept better in the open, despite being interrupted and sometimes soaked.
The convoy, five troop ships and two cruisers flanking them, moved lightless over a flat sea. Ahead of us was the Monowai, which in heavy seas always went down into a trough sideways, kicking up her stem like a testy mare. The smoke from her funnels streamed over us, and large flakes of smut spattered greasily hot on the page before me.
Alan cursed and sat up, startling me. I had thought he was fast asleep. He said, ‘This rubbish isn’t fresh air. Five degrees to port and we wouldn’t have this problem.’
‘Five degrees to port and we’d be off course.’
He peered at me, his hair ruffled and face still slack from sleep. ‘What are you doing?’
I shut the book.
‘Writing poetry?’
‘Trying to.’
He leaned forward, the blanket rucked up under his arms. ‘Read me it.’
‘It’s not finished.’
‘Well, what you’ve written. Please?’
I became self-conscious. Alan had read English for a year at the University before joining up. Unlike the Johns, Doug, Les, Bill and Andy, he knew the great poets.
‘Read me one of your finished ones, then, one you think is good.’
I opened the book, turned the pages, searched. ‘None of them are good.’
Alan smiled. ‘Then one you like.’
‘All right then.’ I paused dramatically, then read:
And now Alan Tom gets a show—
(By the way, he’s growing a mo.
It’s his sole joy and pride,
about fifteen a side.
He’s plucky to give it a go.)
Alan smoothed at the faint smear on his top lip. ‘It’s not that bad—’
‘It’s not bad? Thank you, and I thought limericks weren’t my forte—like moustaches aren’t yours.’
He ignored this. ‘Surely you’ve got some serious poems you like. Even I’ve been known to write a little serious poetry.’
‘To Rose?’
‘Mostly.’
‘My serious poetry is very serious, and a bit dull probably. But you did ask.’
I read:
For the remote chance of resurrection,
To be drawn from the forge fire-hard,
I have gone into the smelter.
To complete myself in deed, I will melt into history.
How will it ring in the armies’ alloy,
this metal my father mined?
How will the plough tempered to cut dull flesh
Be keen to cut quick?
The sea shushed at the ship’s side and the sky, moonlight diffused through cloud, gleamed an even, soft silver from horizon to horizon.
Alan nodded. ‘All that, and the possibility of being killed.’
‘Yes, but I think the quality of our death defines our life. I know that dying gallantly must be better than falling over, blue-lipped, in the street.’
‘Oh Christ yes!’ Alan agreed emphatically. Then we both turned our faces upward as large tepid raindrops fell about us. We threw off our blankets, and snatched them up—at one with the frantic movements of a number of figures strewing the deck. We ran under the foot-wide shelter of the overhanging upper berth, and the rain came down with sudden, suffocating force, leaping to wet our legs up to the knees.
‘And it is better than not knowing,’ Alan said, as though no action had broken our conversation. Like the ducks I startled once crossing the Wainui Inlet— three of which flew in a wide arc, two more of which set out later, flying straight for the spit, all meeting simultaneously—Alan’s thought and mine flew wide before the rain, and met again, defying disruption.
Sea, ships, horizon had all disappeared in the welter. The floating coal of a cigarette glowed in a dark doorway near us.
‘Not knowing how it would be, how I’d behave under fire,’ Alan added.
I drew my blanket up around my shoulders, out of the reach of the rebounding rain. ‘That’s what my poem’s about. Not knowing, and wondering—’
wondering luxuriously what I’m never able to know, at my face blankness blackness ashes airlessness. Disposs
essed from the beginning. You young prick you could have had your eighty years and never seen the world’s end
I felt now something strangely like the cold current which ran through my body when I submerged my hands in a hill stream in winter. As if part of my body was in a different element. In yesterday. Or in tomorrow. Our ship was near the Equator. Our arms were aching from our inoculations, and our sleep had been broken by the rain. But we were excited and full of vitality, at nineteen and seventeen discussing our deaths—our graduation into the great arena.
Then Alan said, ‘My blanket’s getting awfully wet. Make for that doorway, Mark.’
I made a skating run and Alan followed. It wasn’t a cabin door, but a hatchway. I got about a foot inside and was caught by someone’s arm. ‘Look out for the ladder!’
Alan slammed into me and we teetered, catching hold of the door, the rails, each other, crammed into a little space.
‘Why don’t you watch where you’re going?’
‘Look, mate, we just wanted to get out of the rain,’ I said, surly because my arm had been jostled and was throbbing.
‘This ladder leads to the officers’ cabins. If you let go of me, I’ll climb further down out of your way.’
I let go of him at once and he felt his way downwards. When the match flared up he was sitting halfway down. He looked up and offered us the packet of cigarettes. We reached out and he dropped the match as it burnt his fingers. By the light of a second match we watched him light two cigarettes in his mouth. He passed them to us, saying, ‘There’s supposed to be a pilot light at the bottom, but Treetop Freed broke it with his head the other day.’
‘We got the wrong door, Sir.’
‘Don’t say “door” in front of the crew, will you. Bad sense of direction, eh? Like your friend Corporal Price?’
Alan started coughing, ashamed at the recollection. I laughed. ‘He did take the pledge, Sir. He had one of those cards, so he filled it out and posted it back to his minister.’
‘Good for him.’
‘Sir—?’ Alan paused, between eagerness and shyness.
‘Hmmm?’
‘You used to bowl for Christ’s College, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, nineteen hundred and eight, and nine. Is it your school?’
‘Yes, Sir, I left in ’13.’
‘What’s your name, Private?’
‘Thomas, Sir.’
‘Are you Gilbert Thomas’s brother?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Mounted Rifles, wasn’t he? Wounded at Chunuk Bair.’
‘He died in Alexandria six weeks ago of wounds, I’m afraid to say.’
There was silence a second and the little red light of the cigarette descended, trembling. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Was he married?’
‘No, Sir.’
The Lieutenant drew on the cigarette and his face appeared—under-lit, red points of light in his eyes—then disappeared again.
‘What was it like, Sir, Chunuk Bair?’
‘Bad.’ Sensing our dissatisfaction with this reply he added, ‘But since I was there with friends—well—I didn’t mind so much.’
‘I think it’s marvellous to be part of a great movement in history!’ I blurted out.
‘Embarking on a noble errand, to bring freedom to the oppressed and degradation to the tyrant?’ said the Lieutenant, sounding like a newspaper editorial.
‘Well—to do our bit!’ I answered, defensive.
‘I expect you’re right, Private.’
I sat in silence, feeling disquieted and resentful. In our short exchange I felt I had come up against not just the voice of experience resisting my uninformed ideas, knowing cynicism against young idealism, but something elusive, diffident, yielding. He didn’t argue with me; he mocked me, then left me with something he considered to be an illusion.
Alan said, ‘Can I ask, Sir—if you don’t mind—you’re our temporary OC, but who’s going to be our OC in the field?’
‘The word is that Captain Green will be taking charge of the company at Tel-el-Kebir. He’s been in the hospital at Alexandria. That is if we don’t go through Cape Town, in which case he’ll join us at Sling.’
‘Ah.’ Alan probably wanted to ask what this Captain Green was like, but didn’t dare.
‘You must lose an hour’s sleep every night, waiting for the deck to dry off,’ the Lieutenant observed.
‘But the hold’s so stuffy, Sir—I don’t like it, and Mark can’t abide it, he lives in the high country.’
‘That’s right—I’m a stalwart farmer and I don’t play cricket!’ What began as an echo of the newspaper’s ‘stalwart farmers, the backbone of our fighting forces’ had ended up as a tetchy outburst.
But the Lieutenant laughed and was still giving an occasional chuckle a minute later.
Alan was as still and quiet as if someone had just clubbed him into unconsciousness. Finally he said, ‘Mark!’ reproachfully.
He was right, and I decided I had better apologise. ‘Pardon me, Sir.’
‘That’s all right, Private.’ He got up, struck another match to light his way down the ladder, and left us.
When the warm wind had swept most of the rain from the deck we went back to lie on the damp wood, and slept.
Just before sunrise I rolled over and opened my eyes. There were no clouds, and therefore no sense of the curve of the sky, no zenith, and for the eye, no ascent outwards—just a blank, pale, tropical blueness, bleaching whiter as the sun came up.
Half an hour till reveille. The Monowai had dematerialised in the radiant path of sun on sea. I went to the rail and leaned over, heat covering my face, reflected from the water. Spreading the fingers of one hand I stared at it, a shadow against burning white light, brightness lapping around its edges, obliterating its singular, human shape.
Andy was lying on his bunk, his jaw wrapped loosely in two socks tied together top and bottom. He’d had the last of three rotten teeth pulled by the dentist the day before.
Alan and I came and leaned over him, Alan waving the paper to and fro. ‘We’d like you to hear the last of our article for the shipboard magazine. We’re landing soon and it has to go to press.’
Andy moaned.
‘We’d like to know your opinion.’
‘Why all of a sudden?’ he said indistinctly. ‘You’re both so sure of yourselves when it comes to putting pen to paper.’
‘Oh come on!’
He wriggled into a sitting position and folded his arms across his stomach. ‘All right, I’m listening.’
Alan cleared his throat, assumed a declamatory pose and read: ‘There we have it; a selection of the best from the poetry competition. Many more were submitted, for the most part, like these, concerned with the ever more distant aspect of home. Bittersweet retrospect! Yet we are soldiers and our minds must turn to what the future offers.
‘“What lies before us?” we ask ourselves with trepidation, then eagerly, with courage, contemplating the horoscope of fate. Asking which: Life that dies? Or dies not but endures pain?
‘No, brothers, we cannot see. We are still nestling in visions of the past. The glass is merciful. For we dwell neither in grief nor longing, our spirits are alive in us, in the present. We are risen from our dead selves. Need more be said?
‘Here, in the full, top half of the world, there are great things to be seen and done. The voyaging vessels of our lives will soon be brimful, and we will become as clear glasses looking both before and behind.’
Andy made a thoughtful noise, pursing his swollen lips. ‘“Brimful vessels” is a bit odd, isn’t it? I mean, if they are “overflowing cups” that’s all right. But you wrote “voyaging”—’
‘That’s because they were cups and ships at the same time,’ Alan said impatiently.
‘In which case, if they’re “brimful” ships, they’re sunken ships.’
‘Oh blast!’
I said, ‘We’ll change it then. Let’s take out “voyaging” and mean only “ves
sels” as in “cups”. Sinking ships are a bit inauspicious.’
And that’s what we did. We struck out ‘voyaging’ so ‘vessels’ meant only ‘cups’. It went to press. Our souvenir magazine for the men to send home.
But they were overturned cups. The torpedo cutting through the Channel’s calm waters in July of 1917 fulfilled the black magic of our clumsy grammar, reinserting the word ‘voyaging’, and sinking the vessel.
Another ambulance arrived and we got up from under the birches.
One man, who had been kneeling as if praying to a tree, wrapped his hands around its trunk and refused to move. He wouldn’t look at the men coaxing him, he just kept shaking his head, as if bothered by flies. He kept saying, over and over, ‘It’s settled on me,’ and I thought he meant some insect he imagined was plaguing him.
Thinking about it later, I realised he meant the long-range shell, which had long since burst, knocking our ambulance off the road. He was still waiting for it to explode; some explosion within him had deafened him to the sound of its bursting.
They prised his hands from the tree and thrust him in the ambulance, stiff and screaming. At the Casualty Clearing Station they took him away.
The doctor lanced my boils and the filthy chat heads poured out with the pus. I was feverish for a week and the boils were lanced several times.
When I moved on to the convalescent camp my scars grew over with tight, purplish white skin. I had another week eating cream in my oatmeal, then was pronounced fit.