Redemption - Leon Uris [248]
Other innovations came about through necessity. We were able to scan the Turks through homemade periscopes. Other periscopes were rigged so they could be used to aim snipers’ rifles. When we received new Enfield rifles, our sharpshooters, sighting in through periscopes, became so accurate they could shoot through the Turkish firing loopholes.
If the racket didn’t get you at Quinn’s, the smell would. When a man went down in the narrow waist of no-man’s-land, it was impossible to get him back. The vultures became so fat they could hardly fly and began to leave the corpses to rot under a sun that shot the temperature up over a hundred degrees every day.
Our dead who went down in our trenches were stacked at a far end. We’d wait until the wind blew toward the Turkish lines, then pour on petrol and set the corpses afire.
At 0430 my squad gloried in our new socks and boots. Our party consisted of my lads, Major Chris, Lieutenant General Brodhead, and his right-hand strategist, Colonel Markham.
I took them up the eastern wall of Monash Valley where we passed less than two hundred yards from the German Officer’s Trench, a major Turk stronghold.
Yurlob had carved out a mule track from where Monash Valley forked and one of the gullies led into the rear of Quinn’s Post. Turks always had this spot under surveillance from Bloody Angle and the Chessboard.
Without mules we were able to crawl the last fifty yards without drawing fire. It amazed me how General Brodhead and Major Chris and Colonel Markham always looked like they had walked out of the tailor’s shop, while me and my lads looked ravaged.
I was fascinated by the easy way Brodhead had as he moved through the trenches chatting up the troops, earnestly hearing their input and totally sympathetic about the trials of life at the Post. Brodhead went beyond the automatic stiff upper lip crap the senior Brits seemed compelled to dish out.
Brodhead and Markham went into Colonel Malone’s headquarters dugout and after a few minutes I was called in.
“Landers, how far can you get us up the ridge toward Russell’s Top?”
It hit me in the stomach. I wanted to say “About six inches” or “Depends on how anxious you are to die.”
“How many in our party and what do we want to do?” I asked.
“Colonel Markham, Colonel Malone, and myself. We want to take a look at the Chessboard. Can you do it?”
“We can do an in and out,” I said. We’d been running supplies to the outpost at Pope’s Hill but came in from another direction.
“What we’d really like to get a look at are the four or five gullies falling off Bloody Angle,” Markham said.
I looked at Malone’s map table. “There’s a ditch up Dead Man’s that practically touches the Turkish lines, very close. I’m talking five, ten yards. I think we can see the gullies from there. I should tell you, sir, if the Turks engage us, we can’t be rescued.”
“Let’s have a go at it, what?” Brodhead said.
Well, his uniform was going to get messed up on this one. I had learned from the time I was a kid that you can be standing five feet away from a lost lamb and not see it. If a man plays the brush and little bumps in the land correctly, he can hide his body almost anywhere.
The shallow ditch and deliberate slow movement could put us on a U-turn we wanted. A hundred yards…a hundred minutes…right near the end, I spotted a triangle of land mines and looked for trip wires…shit…I hate snipping trip wires….
Click! Only pliers, but it sounded like a cannon.
Bloody Turks had the mines set so we couldn’t get around them without waking up their army. We had to crawl through them…I hummed the Maori farewell song under my breath…“Now is the hour for us to say good-bye”…did they read my signals…three mines, go through them…
Close your mouth, Brodhead…the sun is going to bounce off your smiling teeth…
Wa…Wa…Wa…Wa! Lookee