Redemption - Leon Uris [182]
When I think about my early days, I recall my terror of him. Fond memories of Father are few. There was a time for many summers I adored going off with him to our summer home at Daars in Kinsale.
Father and I would go shark fishing. He picked mean weather and the seas lashed us cruelly, but what a master sailor he was! And when we pulled in those ugly gray monsters, the bigger the shark, the more daggerlike his teeth, the more we’d celebrate in unabashed joy.
I came to learn that my excitement was from destroying something evil and his came because I think he was trying to exorcise his own evil.
Then, we’d land and the instant his foot touched the pier, he was angry with me.
Come what may ahead, Mother, I shall not go under again. Come what may, I shall carry on to the end as a kind and decent man.
I have saved your letters for the precious day I would open them. The time has come and I pray that more are on the way from you and your dear friend, Gorman.
Your loving son,
Jeremy
61
Camp Anzac, Menu, Egypt, February 1915
The sudden eruption of the Anzacs from their entombment on the troopships was a wonderment for men and for boys becoming men taking their first steps beyond home.
Miracles, photographs from their geography textbooks, took life in the form of the Sphinx and pyramids all around them. Camels! Cloth-headed tops on the men…true and actual Arabs! Veiled women! It was the amusement park outside Sydney, wot!
To the Egyptians, this most recent onslaught, albeit peaceful, of another foreign army was absorbed with a shrug and the all encompassing allusion that it was “Allah’s will.” Unwelcome visitors had been the gist of their ancient and recent history, and soon the latest visitors would be absorbed in the bazaar that was Cairo.
These Anzacs were soldiers of great wealth receiving Pay of ten, fifteen, twenty English pounds a month, which would serve as a balm for the hell-raising they intended to impose.
Within hours of the Anzac arrival, a full brigade of vendors had established stalls at the camp gates, backed by a battalion of hawkers. Hundreds of young boys, whom the Anzacs called Terriers, hustled a variety of services. The lads from down under soon realized they were princes in a land of poverty.
Mena was a haphazard site that housed an old Ottoman barracks. When the British relieved the Turks of Egypt there were additions for a permanent base. While some of the camp was in ready condition, a feverish building program was under way by swarms of laborers from the city.
Camp Anzac became a flash flood of men and equipment with temporary two-man tent areas, jerry-built structures for supplies, hospitals, and hospital and command centers.
The day laborers—vendors and Terriers, the native Egyptians—were at the bottom of the social rung, picturesque and not entirely to be trusted. These men and boys represented the sole piece of imperialism, the living proof that some people are not fit to do anything in their own country other than serve the colonizer.
Until an orderly camp and training regimen were established, Cairo was out of bounds, and the only recreation was to hire a Terrier for a night climb up one of the pyramids. Even though there were quite a few broken bones and some deaths, pyramid climbing continued until the British officers took firm control.
The pommy officers all arrived tapping the same brand of riding crop against their riding britches above their riding boots. There were several cavalry units at Mena, but even the pommy infantry and artillery officers carried the riding crop as some sort of scepter of office.
The Aussies and New Zealanders whose lives had been relatively free of caste were nonplussed by the unfriendliness, formality, and vain arrogance of their new commanders. It came from the very tone of their ever so British voices and the look of their ever so British eyes. For the first time they were given a definite feeling