Redemption - Leon Uris [264]
“Good question, Landers. We’ve experimented with transferring blood. Sometimes it does work. Too many times it brings on instant death. It appears that there are different classifications of blood.”
“By race?”
“No, not by race. By some set of ingredients which we cannot identify or group. Look, at least we have ether to work with, and morphine, iodine for infection. Wars of the last century didn’t have much of anything—saws, knives, and stitches. Here, let me have a look at your stitches.”
I stood in the water.
“How you escaped infection, I’ll never know. So, the best I can do here is operate before we put them aboard ship for Alexandria…those who have a chance.”
“Losing many wounded aboard ship?” I asked.
“Hundreds. I’ve demanded a pair of proper hospital ships. We’ll see how far my carte blanche goes. Why I really asked you here was to get your opinion of where I should set the major surgery. At Widow’s Gully we have a measure of safety from Turkish artillery, but it’s very tight quarters with little possibility of assuring proper sanitation. However, if I set up in the Red Cross tents, I’d be wide open to Turkish gunfire. What do you suggest, Landers?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’m not Solomon.”
“I’ll make the decision,” Norman said, “but I could use the benefit of your thinking.”
I’ll make the decision, he said. Phew! Both decisions could be wrong, but he didn’t shirk. He’d make the decision fifty times a day about who had the chance to survive long enough to get to Alexandria…and who died here…. I could not help but feel deeply for this man. Without his mask of indifference, without his ability to accept the responsibility for many, many deaths…lives could not be saved. No wonder the bloke seemed to be made of cast-iron.
“Well, let me see. The Red Cross tents are preferable for you?”
“Yes.”
“Up till now we’ve honored each other’s Red Cross. Our tents are wide open. So far, so good, but the Turks are nobody’s sweethearts. I wouldn’t want to be their prisoner. Modi—Dr. Pearlman, the chap you gave me the dysentery medicine for—is from Palestine. The Turks beat him across the soles of his feet with a thick branch. Crippled a lot of his friends that way. The Turks also have a big thing about raping male prisoners. But even if they didn’t fire on the Red Cross tents deliberately, mayhem and loss of fire control happens here all the time. A few shells can fall short or otherwise go awry. There’s another major risk. Our own naval gunfire has killed hundreds of our men. Wouldn’t there be added tension on the surgeons operating during a bombardment?”
“When in doubt, take cover,” he said.
“I may be wrong but I think those tents are going to get hit.”
“Well, thanks, Landers, you’ve helped awfully. You’d think the Turks would be running low on ammunition after a while.”
“They’ve opened an ammunition factory south of Constantinople. It’s about the only correct intelligence we’ve gotten.”
* * *
The sappers and engineers created a mammoth cave in the east wall of Widow’s Gully, roofed it with steel and piled up to twenty feet of sandbags and earth…too tough even for Farting Ferdinand.
As June wore on, the heat kicked up to 130 degrees at times. Down at Cape Helles the Brits made another futile attempt at Achi Baba. At terrible cost they advanced about a mile up the peninsula and never got another inch of this wretched ground. This offensive was utterly puzzling. As I was privy to official field reports I sorrowfully came to learn that not only could staff be monumentally incompetent, but they could also be monumental liars about the whys and wherefores. Disasters were being encased in the poetry of fantasy.
Of the original gaffers and Major Hubble, one man stood out as potentially the finest officer of us all, and that man was Chester Goodwood. Seemed like the entire Anzac depended on the way he ran the beach.
Chester had two assets. The first was an ability to sense requirements and future shortages