Redemption - Leon Uris [244]
Life around Mule Gully and battalion headquarters could have been worse. We were under constant fire, although Mule Gully itself proved to be quite safe. The Turks rarely let a night go by when they didn’t probe the head of the gully just to make sure we were still on guard.
The real crappy part of soldiering was that there was never a moment when you could, of good conscience, not be working. Digging…digging to make small safe areas for the wounded awaiting evacuation. Digging in pairs for personal rectangular dugouts straight into the hills, like to slide a coffin in. Troglodyte dwellings, as ancient cave men knew. Repairing the piers that the Turks hit daily with artillery fire.
Armies dig. Armies never stop digging.
We shored up the entrances to our troglodyte cave homes with sandbags and whatever timber we could locate. We covered the dirt floor with brush so it would not turn to mud on our bedrolls. It turned to mud anyhow. We wrapped the roofs and sides in is in glass and rubber sheets and canvas to cut down on leaking.
What the hell, it was home. It got a little bigger and fancier each day. Photographs we had purchased in Cairo went up on the walls, a few trinkets taken off the Turks, a little tea fire, piss pots, all made it homey.
Yurlob and Modi never left the paddock. Chester and Jeremy bunked in with me.
Jeremy Hubble and Chester Goodwood ran a good part of the beach operation. Jeremy proved himself to be an officer of quality. I’m not saying it because he’s my cobber. What he gave, what every good officer gave, was a feeling that he knew what he was doing. He moved thousands of tons of war supplies to the men who needed them with very few screwups.
The wounded coming down from the lines were set into Widow’s Gully for the night in a safe area Jeremy had carved out, and he had them evacuated, two, three, four hundred a day, gently and quickly.
Jeremy was responsible for keeping the piers operating. Repairs were done constantly under Turkish fire. He went through the heartbreaking exercise of getting big cannons ashore and into emplacements, only to have the Turks destroy them in three days.
Naval gunfire, you ask? Well, sometimes it was “go” and would pin the Turks down and cover an advance. Sometimes it didn’t work. Too many of our men were taken down by our own guns.
If Jeremy was smart, Chester had to be credited for half the brains. Chester Goodwood knew where every box of gear was warehoused, which company was on the lines, what each post required on a daily basis, whether the mules had hay, and whether we had our foul stinking rations; he screamed for more water tankers, demanded clean boats to evacuate the wounded, sensed a shortage coming up, and headed it off. Can you imagine, a seventeen-year-old officer and a former drunken lord, beach-mastering such an operation!
I’d manage to see one or the other for a few minutes a day, and if we were lucky enough to go off duty together for a few hours, we’d hunker down in our bunker, review the world situation for a minute and a half, and fall dead asleep.
Yurlob’s arrival freed me from the yard. I took on the most urgent detail. We had landed with maps so obsolete they must have been surplus from the Homeric period of Ancient Troy. Corps had a good team of cartographers correcting the maps and detailing every hill and gully, but what I had to do was NOW.
I needed to mark all our forward positions, number them, and draw a route map from Mule Gully to each post citing landscape peculiarities and Turkish hot spots.
Map #1—Gully to Chatham’s Post—1 ¼ miles. Beach path as marked. Best time to dispatch is late afternoon (1530-1600) as sun is directly in Turks’ eyes. Safe route to return after dark. Danger points: Turks on eastern ridge of Valley of Despair. There is a fifty-yard gap between Ryder’s Post and Chatham’s. Have covering fire laid down, enter post through Perry Draw for maximum cover. Chatham’s is our southern anchor and a daily target for Turkish artillery fire. Expect to return with twelve to fifteen