Redemption - Leon Uris [251]
On May 16, I’ll never forget the day, I woke up to a revelation. It came through to me so clearly I bolted into Malone’s quarters without invitation.
“Get up, Colonel,” I suggested.
He pulled his naked butt off his cot, sat on its edge and got me into focus, quickly. At Quinn’s Post a man could wake up within four seconds and be on the alert.
“I’ve got an utterly clear message about something,” I said.
“Ummmm,” he rumbled.
“I know when the Turks are going to attack.”
“Sure you do.”
“It came to me, just like that.”
“Quinn’s Post does this to people. It may be the heat, Landers.”
“That’s exactly what it is, Colonel, the heat.”
Oh, that awful look of his. It’s not fair looking at a man when you can’t see through his eyebrows.
“The Turks are going to attack at midday.”
“You nudged me out of my sleep for this? Go play with your mules. They’ll attack at dawn as any God-fearing Moslem or Christian or Buddhist army would. An attacking force wants all the daylight they can get. If they attack at midday they’ll give away seven, eight hours of light.”
“Colonel, look at our lads at midday. The lot of them are seeing double and hearing weird voices. They can barely move a limb.” Thanking God I was talking to a New Zealander and not a pommy, I dared continue. “Suppose the Turks rest their men all morning in the shade, pump them up with water and a whiff or two of hashish. They’ll be able to hit us like a thunderbolt, and ourselves with less than no energy.”
Malone heard me.
The red-alert troops were put down in the trenches where it was apt to be twenty degrees cooler, but the observation posts were tripled and rotated so that our eyes never left the Turks. Observers were dead-on focused on the gullies running off Bloody Angle and the Chessboard, where we felt for sure the attack would begin.
“Watch for puffs of dust, particularly a line of dust. If the noise level drops, it could mean they are tensing up to make a charge.”
Each morning Malone snapped, “Looks like you’re right again, as far as today is concerned.”
May 20, 1915—1150
Elgin, Spears, Stevens, and I were down to drawers again. In the trenches, the alert battalion waited bare-assed, sharpening their already razor-edged bayonets.
You know how you can sense…smell things…without a coherent reason? Yurlob Singh’s yoga had rubbed off on me. I knew it was the day. I mean, I really knew. And I knew that when the Turks didn’t hit us at dawn, it was going to be high noon. I knew it would be high noon because German and Turkish officers don’t have any more imagination than British officers.
What I felt must have started running through our trenches. Suddenly, the men who were going to lay up ladders to bridges over no-man’s-land began to tense up. The alert battalion, Otagos, South Islanders like myself, were on their feet.
About three minutes to noon, my squad and I went to our own observation post.
Look! Fucking look!
Turk Gully #3 had a strung-out cloud of dust a hundred yards long and it was drifting. The high racket of the shells audibly fell and fell till it became quiet like we were on the moon.
Colonel Malone tore up a ladder, crouched, and looked.
A whistle went off from Pope’s Hill Observation Post.
“Colonel. Pope thinks it seems Abdul ready to swarm.”
A second whistle blasted from Dead Man’s OP.
All noise from the Turkish lines stopped! Then, a droning sound rose on the air like a trillion bees buzzing.
“Let’s go, lads!” Malone cried. A bridge was lifted up from the trench and laid over its top. Malone ran across it into no-man’s-land but no one followed. I looked down in the trenches. The alert battalion was frozen. I grabbed my pistol and fired into the trench side.
“Get your asses up here!” I screamed.
Over the way, still out of sight, the buzzing swelled to a steady hum. Our men started up. I threw them bodily over the bridge.
“More bridges! More bridges! Follow the Colonel!”
The hum from the Turks exploded