Redemption - Leon Uris [247]
We sat in chest-high water with a sense of happiness never to be duplicated. I know we hadn’t slept for two days and we had to report to command in a couple of hours, but we talked that night.
Dan Elgin, our gunner—hell, he was a farmer, you could tell that from a mile away. But do you know, his hobby was watching birds. He had drawn over a hundred varieties from the woods by his farm near the Rotorua Volcano. Well, there weren’t many birds hanging around here except vultures, and we were thankful for them. They kept things tidy in no-man’s-land.
Dan was worried that many species in the NorthIsland were becoming extinct because of the logging. It was the first time I ever thought about the fact that New Zealand could run out of birds, although we’d nearly run out of our national bird, the kiwi, because it didn’t have wings to escape its human predators.
Elgin had a wife and daughter, as well, but hardly mentioned them.
Happy Stevens of Palmerston North was a shoolteacher. Here, I thought he was more like Cherster’s age and all along he was an elder in his late twenties. The grin—that’s what made Happy look young.
Spears didn’t say much, never did. One would have the feeling he came from a background of poverty and hid whatever family life there might have been. To his credit, he didn’t invent a nonexistent existence for himself, as many of the lonely do.
I was the only South Islander. God, I wanted to be able to talk about Ballyutogue Station. Anyhow, I laid it on thick about the beauty of the South Island.
It was a nice night, not from any secret revelations, but suddenly the four of us were New Zealanders, and somehow that meant terribly much to us.
We were nearly too tired to stand up but we got to wrestling in the water, then staggered back to our caves to catch the two hours and five minutes sleep due to us.
* * *
Quinn’s Post. A piece of land in hell so nasty the devil exiled it to Gallipoli. It nubbed forward like the prow of a ship hanging out as a standing invitation to the Turks all around to pour in gunfire.
Quinn’s Post was at the open end of Monash Valley, the most strategic position on our line. If, indeed, the Turks ever cracked it, they would be able to pour into Monash Valley to the sea and split our forces in half.
Abdul stacked his forces around Quinn’s Post in a series of positions with ominous names: Bloody Angle, which gave them a view to the sea; the Chessboard, a brilliantly conceived series of square trench works that blocked us from every direction; Dead Man’s-Ridge (there must be one in every battle zone), which had a series of hidden gullies funning off it toward Quinn’s.
In a word, Quinn’s Post probably faced the most heavily fortified acre of land in the world.
A trench line down from Quinn’s Post ran for a quarter of a mile through our forward positions at Courtney’s, Steele’s, on down to Lone Pine. The Turkish trenches and ours in this quarter-mile stretch were pressed so close to one another that no-man’s-land was a mere twelve and twenty yards wide. We could damn near use each other’s latrines.
When Colonel Malone, a New Zealander of few words, took over the Quinn position, he had the shovels going twenty-four hours a day until our concentration and connection of trenches dulled the Turkish ambitions.
Every few feet at Quinn’s Post there was an earthen step to a vertical niche so a rifleman or machine gunner could stand and have a field of fire.
By daylight nothing could move above the trench line without drawing a blizzard of gunfire from the Turks. By night, they had a weapon unknown to us, hand grenades. A couple of nights I had to lay over at Quinn’s Post and the grenades never stopped.
I pulled up all the corrugated metal and heavy mesh I could find on the beach and took it to Quinn’s and they roofed their trenches with it. The roof was set at an angle so that when a Turkish grenade landed, it rolled back down into no-man’s-land, hopefully before it exploded.
At last we found