© 2021 Thefireflies, for Literotica
~0~
Darkness is our friend. So is dead ground, like the shell hole we now find ourselves hiding in. It's full of water, stinks like Anzac soup, the rot of corpses, but darkness also hides any dead sharing our cover. We can barely see one another's faces as we listen to rifle shots and machinegun bursts coming from all sides, bullets sporadically thumping into the crater lip.
I glance at Will, marvelling he's still with us because only minutes ago I was sure I'd seen him take an enemy bayonet to his chest. But here he is, alive and well, rifle slung over his shoulder and training his Webley Revolver on our two remaining prisoners. Of the other three prisoners, one's back in the trench with his head caved in, the other two managed to get themselves killed running through the cross-fire.
Will's whispering an order to young Archie and when the bullets eventually cease Archie checks if the coast is clear, signalling for us to follow, and we scramble up the crater and across no-mans-land, our two prisoners protesting, someone nudging them with the muzzle of their rifle, hissing at them to,
"Shut it."
Archie leads us straight to our lines, identifying ourselves to the sentries as the team of body snatchers, the nightly raiders of death to the enemy who think they're safe in their trenches, and the sentries mercifully do not open up on us with their Vickers, letting us jump into their trench.
It's lighter now and we catch our breaths; Will's over there examining his respirator which has a shattered eye piece where the sharp steel of the enemy bayonet caught on the metal rim, slicing clean through the rubber hose. Someone whistles, another calling him a lucky bastard because the blade must have stopped less than an inch from his heart. Archie takes the useless mask from Will for further examination and Will pats the young man on the back, thanking him for saving his life. Archie grins, teeth flashing white in early dawn's darkness.
"Better find a new one,"
I tell Will.
"Nah,"
Will says with a wink,
"I'll keep this as a souvenir to show little Jack when he's older."
I know he's joking, sure he'll see the quartermaster, but still add another two pence.
"Just get a new one, mate."
"Yes, Papa,"
he says, grinning, but he pats my shoulder and I'm confident he'll replace his respirator.
Perhaps it's later when the sky lightens with a new day, when Will's returned from interrogating the prisoners and debriefing with the brass, and somewhere in the distance the Hun artillery, the daily hate, opens up, shells whistling overhead, landing close behind our lines, the cacophony of explosions deafening. In morning's pale light a yellowish green fog approaches, about to envelop us and Will yells, "
Gas, lads, get your masks on now!"
Men fumble to put on our respirators and Will's yelling for everyone to check their seals, but I'm begging Will to put his mask on. He holds his useless mask, a look of acceptance in his eyes, saying,
"Tell Mary I love her when you get back, won't you, and make sure she and Jack are provided for."
He says these words so calmly.
But we're both choking and retching, falling, his voice is now harsh and eyes pleading, desperate, demanding, "
Shoot me, Alfie, please shoot me!
"
Suddenly I'm swaying in mid-air in the dark heat of hell, heartbeat pounding like horses in full gallop threatening to burst from my chest, sweat pouring off me. It takes a few moments to orient myself, the soothing vibrations and low throb of the ship's engines interrupted by a snuffle from a cabin mate, another calling out in his sleep, I think crying out for his mother. I've seen and heard even the toughest men on all sides of this war plead for their mothers.
Fuck the dreams, the nightmares, will they never cease?
Will didn't call for his mother; he looked me in the eyes and asked me to shoot him. He also asked me to tell his Mary he loves her, and make sure their boy, Jack, is well looked after. Sometimes he yells at me to put on my mask, and sometimes all three. But mostly he begs me to end his misery.
Will said all these things in the moments before he died.
I'm not the only one awake, for few of us sleep well. Some men cry, often calling for their mothers or sweethearts and wives, while other's call their long-dead cobber's names, or lay silent in their swinging hammocks, all of us sweating, the heat below decks oppressive. Thus, many of us make our way top-side to sit by the rail, as I do now. I can tell the ship has changed direction since yesterday, for the night sky is lighter off the port side now betraying dawn's sun hiding somewhere below the horizon, rather than off the ship's bow like it was the previous morning when we sailed east.
I hear myself whisper, "Heading south again."
For so long I didn't think I'd see another dawn. And still, every dawn could be our last. A few have slipped over the rail in the night, the ocean taking their pain and suffering in her cold watery bosom. I shudder to think and gaze to my right, towards the bow. There's a figure several feet away, and though I can't make out his features in the dark, I can see the unlit pipe hanging from his mouth. Smoking is banned above decks between dusk and dawn, lest the glow from a cigarette or pipe gives away our position to any enemy vessel such as a raider or U-boat, as unlikely as the possibility sounds so far from Europe.
The man takes a deep breath, the sound of his inhalation matching the hissing water streaming by the hull below us, then proclaims, "I can smell her, maybe a day or two away."
I inhale lightly, but my lungs burn, a searing pain sending me into a hacking coughing fit. Yet there she is among the salt laden air filling my nostrils! Barely perceptible, but the smell we all grew up with, a smell we took for granted all our lives is unmistakable, the smell we've long missed; the scent of the Australian bush, heavy with Eucalyptus oil.
I'm coughing again, gripping the rail, gasping for breath, lungs on fire.
"You alright there, cobber," the man with the pipe asks.
"Chlorine gas," I choke out between coughs, "Place called Passchendaele."
"Ah, you unlucky bastard." In the dark I can tell he's nodding, then turns to face me, a crutch I'd not noticed holding him up where he's missing his right leg below the knee. "I copped it at Messines."
"I was there too, cunt of a stoush."
"As they all were. Me leg's still there with some of me cobbers, feeding the worms."
They must be some of the best fed worms on Earth, and it's all we need to say before turning to face the new dawn as more men appear at the rail; men missing arms and legs, or have terribly scarred skin, or like me, their lungs are damaged, some damaged in more ways than one. All of us have minds and souls damaged too, with unspeakable horrors still visiting us, even after all our time away from the front, even this close to home.
~0~
We put into Fremantle and the West Australians among us prepare to leave the ship.
"I'll have a drink for yer all at the first pub I come ta," says Cec Morgan, a sheep farmer from somewhere here in the west. "Reckon I'll be pissed in about half an hour."
"I hear ya can't hold ya liquor any more, cobber," I say with a straight face, holding out my right hand to his missing right hand.
Everyone laughs, especially Cec, and he places his stump in my palm and shakes it up and down, and laughs. "I'll have to learn to use me left, but got other uses for me, ah, extra-large short arm here. The girls are gonna love it, it's the right shape and all. Tried it out on a pommy nursing sister back at the convalescent home."
"And she loved every inch of it, or so we heard a thousand times or more," Dennis Burke says in a mocking tone, which is what I'm sure we're all thinking, and Malcolm Byrne grins and winks, saying, "You'll need that thing since Jerry shot your middle leg away."
All of us are laughing, and our cabin-mate Cec grins and gropes at the bulge in the front of his trousers and shakes his head. "Jerry's a lousy shot and only took me left nut."
We slap him on the back and someone shoves a lit cigarette between his lips, and he grins again, hoists his kit bag, turns and heads towards the line of men waiting at the top of the gangway. A man with no legs is lifted over the side in a bosun's chair, and as he swings by I can see the look in his eyes; the vacant stare, and no one's laughing anymore. Someone does call out, "Good luck, Digger," and he doesn't even turn.
The rest of us remain aboard, unable to disembark for the short duration of the ship's stay, and I spend a great deal of time with my own vacant stare, gazing out across the tops of the dock's timber warehouses between us and the town beyond, the roofs of houses being the first hint of civilisation we've seen for a long time. It's home, but not home as I know it because it's much too dry and flat, and I'm not paying too much attention anyhow.
Our ship leaves in the morning and we don't make landfall again for several days, skirting the south-west corner, then heading east across the rough seas of the Great Australian Bight, swinging in our hammocks at night, for there isn't enough fixed berths for all of us, and later the morning sun rises off our bow again.
During a fit-full sleep several nights later, one of the boys starts banging on cabin doors, yelling, "We've turned north into Port Phillip Bay, lads!"
