Redemption - Leon Uris [245]
Map #3—Gully to Lone Pine—2 miles. Beach south and into Victoria’s Gully. This post is shit city…
Map #4—Gully to Courtney’sPost—2 miles…
Map #5—Rhododendron Spur
Map #8—The Apex
Map #15—Plugge Plateau
Map #19—Taylor’s Hallow
Map #25—Beauchop Hill
Map #31—Guillotine Ridge
For a tad of relief I put casual comments like, “This is your lucky day” or “Congratulations, you made it again” or “Spectacular view of sunset, a must” or “Make pee-pee before crossing open ground.”
Major Chris admonished me to quit the editorials until Lieutenant General Brodhead found them amusing. You might get an idea now of how the battlefield ran. Starting at Mule Gully there were some thirty-five fingers or routes, each of different length and over different terrain, leading to our perimeter. We did not have a solid front line. Some forward positions were heavily dug-in trenches, some were observation posts, some were along ridges, trenches, and others were nests to cover gaps in the line. The perimeter was zigzag, a disconnected labyrinth. My route maps became invaluable in pointing out hot spots, detours, cliffsides, dead ends.
Spears, Happy, Elgin, the machine gun and I were off at daylight and we became the team. Only trouble was, it never really stopped or started. As soon as we got back to battalion headquarters at night we’d have to work out two or three new route maps with the cartographers through part of the night. There was never a night that an extra hand wasn’t needed at the paddock or with the wounded or something got crapped up with the boats in the cover or the Turks hit a dump of supplies.
I was getting down to the last of the trail maps when a new duty was added. I suppose my squad was doing its job too damned well, because General Brodhead took a liking to us, or possibly he thought we were charmed because we’d gotten through so far without a casualty. The General made daily sweeps of the front lines. Many of the places were simple to reach, so simple even his staff officers could find the way.
However, when it came to the “fun” places like Quinn’s Post, we’d escort him. Quinn’s was nightmare land. When Colonel Malone had taken it over, it was the most miserable shithole on the face of the earth.
He forced the troops to make the place livable, for as long as one remained alive. The no-man’s-land in front of Quinn’s Post ran from twelve to twenty yards from the Turkish lines. I do not lie—twelve to twenty yards. We and the Turks could hear each other complaining about rations.
My lads were feeling mighty haughty about the “honor” of taking Brodhead to worse places on the line. I felt it no great honor and I must have worn it on my face once too often.
“If you don’t like the detail, Landers,” he said to me, “we can assign you to General Godley.”
That was the second time I realized Llewelyn Brodhead was more or less a human being, after all.
A little over two weeks into the campaign we’d had one of those really sorry days. We were drawing up our last map and what should have been an easy route map from Camel’s Hump. The fucking Turks liked to dress themselves with brush, so they’d look like mulberry bushes. They sniped at us all day. We crawled on our bellies for at least seven hours.
As we entered our command area, our nightly salute from Farting Ferdinand, a big mobile Turkish gun, hit too close to make it funny.
The route to Camel’s Hump was full of nuances, like that weird angle from which the Turks sniped at us today. I suppose all cartographers are humorless or they’d be something else. We finally finished our work and remembered we hadn’t eaten all day.
Happy to draw rations we retreated to the squad’s cave.
“What the hell’s this?”
“New ration tonight. The regular bully beef ration had rotted in the sun. Half of headquarters has dysentery.”
“I’ll be. Chicken in aspic. Well, well.”
“What’s aspic?”
“Aspic is like a high-class jelly you float fancy dishes in, I think,” I explained.
The label didn’t quite explain that by chicken, they meant chicken feet. By feet, we got it with