Call of the Kiwi (44 page)

Shortly before daybreak, the first machine-gun salvos boomed. New attack waves began—and new dead. The Battle of Lone Pine, as the August offensive was later called, after the most hard-fought-for trench, didn’t end for another five days. Though the official communiqué relayed that the ANZAC’s advance several hundreds of yards into Turkish soil had been a success, they had paid for it with nine thousand dead.

Roly had found Jack on the morning of the second day. He could easily have spent hours searching for his friend among the hundreds of men lying in dense rows had Paddy and Dr. Beeston not been at his bedside, where the doctor was inspecting his wound. Jack was unconscious, but he was breathing and no longer spitting blood.

“O’Brien?” Dr. Beeston asked as Roly approached. The doctor’s face had looked almost as pale and sunken as his patient’s. “Does he have you to thank for still being alive?”

Roly nodded guiltily. “I couldn’t leave him lying there, sir. Naturally I know that—I’m prepared to accept the consequences.”

“Oh, forget that,” Beeston sighed. “If it makes you feel better, I overstepped my authority as well—or stretched it. We have our guidelines. We shouldn’t try and play God.”

“Wouldn’t we have been doing that if we’d left him lying there, sir?”

“Not in this sense, O’Brien. Then we’d have been sticking to the rules. God—and feel free to take it as blasphemy—knows no rules.”

The doctor carefully covered Jack. “Take care of him, O’Brien. Otherwise he’ll get forgotten in this chaos. I’m going to arrange for him to be evacuated on the
Gascon
tonight.”

The
Gascon
was a well-equipped hospital ship.

“To Alexandria, sir?” Roly asked hopefully. Transfer to the military hospital in Alexandria for a wounded man generally meant the end of the war for him.

Beeston nodded. “And you’ll accompany him. That is, you’ll accompany the transport. Someone’s played God with you too, O’Brien. Someone with good connections. Your marching orders back to New Zealand came yesterday with the reinforcements. Apparently an invalid in Greymouth who’s very important to the war effort can’t live without your care. It seems that New Zealand coal production would grind to a halt without you.”

Despite the circumstances, Roly could not suppress a grin.

“That’s too much of an honor, sir,” he remarked.

“I dare not make any judgments. So pack your things, soldier. Take care of our friend, and for heaven’s sake, stay out of the line of fire, so nothing happens to you now. The
Gascon
is leaving at fifteen hundred hours.”

Jack had been considerably closer to death than life when the hospital ship arrived in Egypt, but he was tough. Roly’s intensive care had contributed significantly to his survival. There were far too few medics for the number of heavily wounded men, and some of the soldiers died while still on the ship, others shortly after arriving in Alexandria. Jack held on, however, and eventually regained consciousness. He looked around, registering the suffering around him and that he had survived, but he had become a different person. He was not stubborn or grouchy like many other survivors, and he politely answered the doctors’ and nurses’ questions. But beyond that he seemed to have nothing to say.

Jack had requited Roly’s jokes and encouraging words with silence—and made no effort to overcome his weakness. He slept a great deal, and when he awoke, he gazed silently, first at the blanket on his bed and then, much later, when he was allowed to sit at the window, out at the sky. As Jack listened to the call of the muezzins over the city, he thought of what Roly told him Dr. Beeston had said: “God doesn’t stick to rules.”

Jack’s convalescence had stretched out over many months. Although the wound healed, he lost weight and suffered from chronic exhaustion. Roly had remained by his side throughout. He ignored his marching orders, and the staff doctors in Alexandria did not mention them. The hospital was hopelessly overcrowded, and every caretaker was needed. Besides, the urgency of his return home had lessened markedly since Tim Lambert had learned that Roly was out of the line of fire.

In December 1915, the British leadership had evacuated the shores of Gallipoli, which had come to be known as ANZAC beach. As they left, they blew up the trenches.

Roly had told Jack breathlessly about the successful action.

“They hit the bastards one last time. A whole bunch of Turks went up in the explosion.”

Jack sank his head.

“And for what, Roly?” he asked quietly. “Forty-four thousand dead on our side—more on the Turks’, they say. All for nothing.”

That night Jack had dreamed again of the battle in the trenches, of thrusting his bayonet and shovel into the bodies of his opponents over and over. Into forty thousand bodies. When he woke up drenched in sweat, he wrote to Gloria and described the withdrawal of the ANZAC troops. He knew she would never read the letter, but it was a relief to write it down.

A persistent cough had plagued Jack that winter. Seeing how thin and pale Jack was, a doctor diagnosed him with tuberculosis and ordered his transfer to a sanatorium in Suffolk.

“To England, sir?” Roly inquired. “Can’t we return home? There are sure to be tuberculosis sanatoria there too.”

“But no military facilities,” the doctor said. “You, Mr. O’Brien, can return home.”

“But I haven’t officially been demobilized,” Roly objected.

“No, you just have six-month-old marching orders. Do what you like, O’Brien, but get out of here. We can smuggle you on the ship to England, but you should leave your unit before someone sends you to France.”

Roly had sought work on a farm while Jack lay in the wan sun of an English spring staring into a matte-blue sky. He visited Jack as often as he could, and when the sanatorium’s services were expanded to include invalids from the war, he found a job as a caretaker. Tim Lambert approved his leave of absence but asked for regular news about Jack. Jack’s mother, Tim wrote, was very concerned. Roly could imagine. Jack, however, did not respond when Roly suggested that he dictate a letter.

Jack saw the grain in the fields ripen; he heard the songs of the harvesters, observed the way the fall painted the leaves yellow. In the winter he stared into the snow but only saw the bloody sand of Gallipoli. Another year passed during which his health did not improve. Sometimes he thought of Charlotte, but Hawaiki was far, even farther than America, or wherever Gloria might be.

“Three and a half years, and we’re still at war,” Rory had mumbled as he flipped through the paper that lay on the table next to Jack’s recliner. It was an unusually warm day, and the nurses had taken the convalescents into the garden. “How is it supposed to end, Sergeant McKenzie? Will someone win, or will we keep on fighting and fighting?”

“Everyone’s already lost,” Jack said quietly. “But naturally the end will be treated as a big victory, whoever celebrates it. I also have cause to celebrate. The doctors are sending me home.”

“We’re going home?” Roly beamed.

Jack smiled weakly. “They’re assembling a transport of disabled vets. All the men with amputations and the blind who can or want to be sent home right away.”

“Then I can come with you. They’ll need caretakers, won’t they?”

“They’re looking for volunteers among the nurses,” Jack said.

Roly’s whole face had shone. “It’s strange,” he said. “When it began, I wanted to go to war so that no one would tease me about being a male nurse anymore. But now I’d even throw on a dress to get to go home as a nurse.”