Redemption - Leon Uris [271]
“We’ll go up, just a few yards at a time,” I said into his ear. “If we hear any activity, freeze. We do not want to engage them. Got it?”
His idea of slow and steady and my idea of slow and steady were not at all the same. He scampered up like a jack rabbit. Jesus now…I had no choice but to try to stay in his footsteps….
Just like that!
We were hauling each other up like Alpine climbers. Suddenly, out of the sheer crumbling dirt and lying there in the tall brown grass—Jesus, Mary, Mother of God…we were on Chunuk Bair!
Willumsen slithered his slimy best so a mongoose would not find him and I kept watching his heel and tried to stay on it. We went in a hell of a-ways, maybe twenty-five yards, and the field opened.
The light was right fair. There were no visible fortifications such as the Turks had at the Chessboard, Bloody Angle, and the Nek, which made Quinn’s Post so inhospitable. Nor was there the carnage of battle.
It was bloody simple. So long as the Turks had an impenetrable moat, the Ravine, protecting the plateau, they didn’t have to keep much of a force on top and expose them to a pounding from the naval guns.
Let’s get the hell out of here!
Next morning at Joshua Malone’s bunker, the Major, Jeremy, and I watched as Willumsen’s dirty fingernail traced a route through the Ravine to the spot he and I had gone up on the plateau.
“God,” Malone whispered, “this is the top of the milk. What’s your name, son?”
“Lance Corporal Willumsen, sir.”
“You’re not going to sell any secrets to the Turks, are you now?”
“Are you shitting me, Colonel?”
“Willumsen, you are now on a ‘need to know’ clearance. Lads, are we going to be able to take the Kiwi All-Black Battalion through the Ravine at night without detection?”
“The Turks don’t like the Ravine at night,” Chris said.
“I agree,” Jeremy added. “Every time we engage them they pull out. I think they patrol the Ravine as a matter of routine.”
“Problem as I see it,” Chris said, “the Turks are watching the Apex down to Rhododendron Spur very closely.”
“But suppose,” Colonel Malone went on, “you withdraw Kiwi from the line at dark and are replaced, then Kiwi moves behind our own lines north, past Beauchop Hill. Keep moving up to Australia Valley and then come down the Ravine on the second night to the base of Chunuk Bair to attack on the third morning.”
“That’s a long walk with a thousand men without being seen,” Chris said.
“The question we have to ask Lance Corporal Willumsen is whether or not he can lead us down the Ravine in the dark, and I’ve got to tell you, the climb up to Chunuk is a man-killer,” I said.
“Just why are we going to try something like this, sir?” Jeremy asked. “We know the Turks keep several divisions of reserves behind Chunuk Bair.”
Colonel Joshua Malone eyeballed us. “Grab your girdles, lads. In five days the British are landing a corps of four divisions at Suvla Bay.”
“Four divisions!”
“About time!”
“Glory!”
“My Gawd!”
“I see that you heard me,” Malone said, going back to the map and pointing to Suvla Bay, a few miles up the coast onto gently rising land leading up to a semicircle ring of ridges.
“The Turks do not keep much on Ridge 269, because there’s been no need to, and their reserves are below. So…the Suvla Corps lands, pushes quickly up to 269, while we launch a surprise assault on Chunuk Bair. Suvla Corps then connects with our left flank. Then, let the bloody Turks try to throw us off.”
We studied Suvla Bay with its soft rise and salt lake to the easy height of Ridge 269.
“Suvla Bay,” Malone said, thinking aloud, “is where the fuck we should have landed in the first place.”
Our excitement sent us shivering with hope. If we could nail the Turks on this one, it would have all been worth it. The lot of us, including Lance Corporal Willumsen, went down to Corps where he detailed the prospective long march of the Kiwi All-Blacks to General Brodhead.
The final plan was so simple that it would be difficult for even the general staff to fuck up.
We’d do our night crawl down the Ravine to the foot of Chunuk Bair,