The Fires of Gallipoli E-Book

Barney Campbell

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 484

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'A wonderful, unsentimental novel about male friendship in wartime' Antonia Senior, The Times The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking portrayal of friendship forged in the trenches of the First World War. 'In this vivid and engaging novel of war and friendship, Barney Campbell shows us once again that he is a natural writer. This is a novel of men at arms of the highest quality'.Alexander McCall Smith Edward Salter is a shy, reserved lawyer whose life is transformed by the outbreak of war in 1914. On his way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign, he befriends the charming and quietly courageous Theodore Thorne. Together they face the carnage and slaughter, stripped bare to their souls by the hellscape and only sustained by each other and the moments of quiet they catch together. Thorne becomes the crutch whom Edward relies on throughout the war. When their precious leave from the frontline coincides, Theo invites Edward to his late parents' idyllic estate in Northamptonshire. Here Edward meets Thorne's sister Miranda and becomes entranced by her. Edward escapes the broiling, fetid charnel-house of Gallipoli to work on the staff of Lord Kitchener, then on to the Western Front and post-war espionage in Constantinople. An odd coolness has descended between Edward and Theo. Can their connection and friendship survive the overwhelming sense of loss at the end of the war when everything around them is corrupted and destroyed? The Fires of Gallipoli is a heartbreaking, sweeping portrayal of friendship and its fragility at the very limits of humanity.

Leseprobe

Praise for Barney Campbell’s first novel, Rain

‘No better on-the-ground description of Britain’s war in Afghanistan will ever be written. Rain is what Chickenhawk or, more recently, Matterhorn was to Vietnam. It’s unputdownable, except for when the reader needs to draw breath or battle a lump in the throat.’

EVENING STANDARD

‘The best book about the experience of soldiering I’ve read since Robert Graves’s First World War classic Goodbye to All That . . . Rain is a heartbreaking, brutally truthful first novel written with love and respect for the guys in the frontline.’

SUNDAY TIMES

‘Rain is not merely good, it’s remarkable. Powerful, at times unbearably harrowing, it captures both the fear and exhilaration of men pushed to breaking point.’

JEREMY PAXMAN

‘A wonderfully achieved, enthralling and moving novel of war. Its authenticity is as telling as it is terrifying.’

WILLIAM BOYD

‘Gripping . . . the ending is genuinely shocking.’

DAILY MAIL

‘One of the most powerful and emotional works ever written about British soldiers in battle. Troubling, funny, upsetting, exhilarating and deeply moving. You will never forget it.’

COLONEL RICHARD KEMP

‘One of the best novels about the Afghanistan war. Brutally honest, it could have been a memoir.’

DAVID AXE

‘Powerful and moving.’

CHARLES CUMMING

‘Extraordinary.’

SAUL DAVID

‘Utterly compelling.’

JAMES HOLLAND

In loving memory of my father,Andrew Campbell (1954–2021)

Ne Obliviscaris

The Midnight Skaters

The hop-poles stand in cones,

The icy pond lurks under,

The pole-tops steeple to the thrones

Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder;

But not the tallest there, ’tis said,

Could fathom to this pond’s black bed.

Then is not death at watch

Within those secret waters?

What wants he but to catch

Earth’s heedless sons and daughters?

With but a crystal parapet

Between, he has his engines set.

Then on, blood shouts, on, on,

Twirl, wheel and whip above him,

Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,

Use him as though you love him;

Court him, elude him, reel and pass,

And let him hate you through the glass.

Edmund Blunden

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Valletta, Malta, May 1915

The bar was packed. Smoke billowed out of the door, creating an inviting fug. Edward Salter and Bruce Haynes-Mattingly looked at each other. Edward shrugged and said, ‘Well, I’m game if you are.’

It was appreciably more welcoming than the one they had just come from, full of agreeable chatter rather than shouting, singing and the feeling of a fight about to break out. Edward went to the counter, worming his way through a few kilted Highland regiment officers in full throttle, and ordered a couple of large whiskies.

By the time he got back, Haynes-Mattingly had found a corner table, rickety on its battered and splintered legs. They sat in awkward silence as they worked out what to say; both were too new to the regiment to talk with any real candour and share what they were actually thinking. Edward himself had only completed his training a few weeks ago, having joined the army the previous summer in the war’s first frantic days, leaving his job as a solicitor in a firm in Brighton. They began to volley each other dull stories about their platoons, both trying to give the impression that they understood their soldiers far better than the other one did, without appearing to brag. It was a complicated act to keep up and Edward found it exhausting. He looked over Haynes-Mattingly’s shoulder to the Highland officers at the bar, envious of their fond camaraderie. After a while they both became increasingly distracted by the activity around one of the billiard tables, gave up talking and went over to investigate.

Shouts went up as one of the players – a bald and ruddymoustachioed lieutenant from another infantry regiment – potted the black with brio before standing straight and shaking the hand of his opponent. A captain, younger than his comrade and clearly the self-appointed compere, announced to the wider bar, ‘That’s eight games on the trot for the Snooker Socialist. More pockets than a tinker’s jacket. Roll up, roll up, pot’s now two quid; five bob buy-in and winner takes all. Any takers?’ Behind him the billiards maestro quietly sipped a whisky and then chalked up his cue. As no one else was volunteering, Edward stepped forward on a whim.

He shook his opponent’s hand, unable to register his name over the din, and they got down to it. The break wasn’t half bad and Edward soon took the upper hand, potting three on the trot. The cue felt good in his hands as he eased through the gears, the whisky burning benignly inside him. The crowd started to show its tension as his challenge grew first more credible and before long inevitable. Then, as he lined up a relatively easy shot to take his final ball off the table with the black perched over a middle pocket, he looked over to catch Haynes-Mattingly’s eye and wink at him theatrically.

As he did so he lost his stride. Next to Haynes-Mattingly was a man whom Edward had not seen before and who raised his glass to him in a good-luck gesture, face lit up in an enormous smile. Caught off guard, Edward parried the shot, hitting the cue ball a fraction unsoundly so that the target ball cannoned limply off the sides of the pocket. A sigh went up from the crowd.

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead in frustration. His opponent methodically chalked his cue with a fastidious elan, before appraising the tip as though he were inspecting one of his soldiers on muster parade. He swiftly took his own remaining balls off and then firmly potted the black. Cheers went up again. He held his hand out to Edward and said, ‘Good game, laddie. You let me off the hook there. You deserved to win. What did you say your name was again?’

‘Salter, Queen Anne’s Own. Yours?’

‘Attlee. East Lancs.’

‘Well, best of luck with the next victim.’

A new challenger having been found, Edward retreated to where Haynes-Mattingly stood with the man who had distracted him. He wondered if this might be the new platoon commander they were due.

The new arrival held out his hand. ‘Theodore Thorne. Six Platoon commander. I hear you’ve got Five.’

Edward looked him up and down, meeting his hand. ‘Hello. Pleased to meet you. Edward Salter. Yes, Five are mine, lucky mob that they are.’ He grinned self-deprecatingly, hoping he would thus convey a deep sense of familiarity with his men and mask the fact that he barely knew them. Thorne’s honest and open face laughed dutifully at his line. Edward liked his confidence.

‘Would you like us to call you Theodore?’

‘Theo, if you like. Or just Thorne. I’m not really bothered.’

‘How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?’ From the look of him he could have been any age between eighteen and thirty.

‘Twenty-two.’ Not so far removed, then, from Edward’s twenty-five.

‘What were you doing before all this?’ He flicked a hand behind him as if to encapsulate not just the bar but the Dardanelles expedition in its carnival entirety.

‘Nothing much, pottering round at home really. I’d just come down from Oxford. Preparing to go to the Bar.’ He nodded over to the crowd behind him. ‘Talking of bars, fancy something?’

Edward smiled and wiped a smear of sweat from the corner of his eye. ‘I’d love one. Beer, please. As cold as possible.’

They waited for him to fully disappear into the noise and Edward looked back to the billiard table where he noted with some satisfaction that his successor had been made short work of and the pot had now risen accordingly. He belatedly realised that Haynes-Mattingly was trying to talk to him and leant in closer, cupping his hand to his ear. ‘What was that?’

‘I said, seems an all right man, doesn’t he? Green as hell though, eh?’

Edward paused as he assessed their brief interaction, then replied, ‘Yes. He does seem all right. Cocky, maybe. And green, definitely. But then again, we’re all green, aren’t we?’

Haynes-Mattingly frowned in acknowledgement and downed the rest of his whisky just as Thorne reappeared with the next round.

‘How on earth d’you manage that? Crowd’s yards deep,’ asked Edward, glancing at the barmaid who had been hatchet-faced to everyone else all evening.

Thorne grinned. ‘Wink and flash a smile. Usually does the trick. Cheers, anyway. To our poor soldiers.’

Edward laughed and they clinked glasses.

There was a brief disturbance as the recently defeated billiards player bundled past them, slurring to nobody in particular, ‘Right, let’s get down to these famous whorehouses.’

Haynes-Mattingly smiled as he tottered off. ‘Good luck to him. He’ll be begging old John Turk to shoot his balls off for him.’

‘Eh?’ said Edward.

‘Come on, man. Port city. It’s rammed with sailors at the best of times but roughly a hundred thousand lads have come through here in the last few weeks. Last chance to see some brass. Every bit of skirt in town will be carrying about three dozen diseases. At the very least he’ll get a bout of crotch rot.’

‘Should we not go and tell him?’ asked Thorne.

Haynes-Mattingly lit a cigarette, cupping his hands so that the flame threw yellow and black chiaroscuro over his face. After taking a long first drag, he said, ‘Nah. Little shit has to learn somewhere, doesn’t he? I would stop him, if he were our mob, but he’s not, so I won’t.’ He tilted his head back to exhale a huge plume of smoke and smiled, the slight gap in his front teeth showing in the dull light.

Thorne looked quizzically at Edward, who raised his eyebrows a little as if to say that this behaviour was typical.

Edward was amused by Haynes-Mattingly’s total lack of censoriousness. He wasn’t sure he could trust him to have his back, but he had a good sense of where his moral compass pointed, which was in the direction of whichever course of action would be most beneficial to Haynes-Mattingly.

Haynes-Mattingly downed his drink quickly and then made his excuses, saying he was going to bed. Edward rather suspected he had picked up an idea from the young officer who had just staggered past them.

Edward and Thorne stayed in the bar together. The Highland regiment officers started more toasts, including to Ian Hamilton, the general commanding the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, and finally to Lord Kitchener himself, the secretary of state for war. Edward and Thorne joined in enthusiastically and when the hubbub died down Thorne smiled and said quietly, ‘I hope he’s got his act together on this one. An awful lot of chaps are going to be in an awful lot of bother if he hasn’t. Here, one more time to the old boy. To Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. May Edward Salter and Theodore Thorne be ever at the front of his mind.’

They raised their glasses in a final toast.

CHAPTER TWO

In the following days it became clear that Thorne was indeed a most welcome addition to B Company, whose mix of officers Edward had found to be a little dysfunctional and jarring. Paul Rossi, the company commander, was perfectly pleasant and friendly in his clipped, frank style, but not a great greaser of the wheels of conversation. Haynes-Mattingly tried gallantly if ineffectually to add some humour but always got it slightly wrong with his sharp-elbowedness and bite.

Meanwhile the second in command, David Marks – a bluff, hearty type with a loud voice that clearly grated on Rossi inordinately, although he was too polite to say it – lacked the finesse to bridge the gap between the company commander and his platoon commanders. The other platoon commander, Harold Tufnell, was nineteen if he was a day and, while personable enough, was possessed of such little bearing, made worse by a ratty weak chin and lank hair, that it was amazing that he had been granted a commission at all. Company orders groups and mealtimes together were slow, stop-and-start affairs, with no free flow of conversation. Each man’s residual fear of making a fool of himself limited any kind of growth of familiarity, let alone friendship.

Thorne’s arrival changed all that in a stroke, bringing them all together from scattered and gritted sprockets into something like a fluently moving unit. Something about him just gave them all a desire to be the best version of themselves. Even Tufnell came out of his shell slightly when Thorne was around. He also somehow tempered the rough edges of Haynes-Mattingly.

The days in Valletta passed in a welter of confusion, impatience, waiting, hurrying up to move somewhere before eventually moving only two hundred yards and then waiting there again, only this time no longer in shade. And everywhere the heat, the bustle, the smells, the Mediterranean patchwork of noise. The huge military presence of British, Australian, New Zealander and French troops mingled in jam-packed proximity with the locals as the city grew into its role as a staging post for troops headed east to the Gallipoli Peninsula – known by all just as ‘the Peninsula’. Landings had started there in April and bitter fighting was now well-established as the Allies sought to seize control of the Dardanelles straits and force a way into the sea of Marmara, capture Constantinople and so knock Turkey out of the war.

The expeditionary edge to the air was indescribably exciting. Everywhere around Valletta was activity. Buildings were being hurriedly converted into military hospitals to cope with the pulses of hospital ships that came back daily from the Peninsula. Teams heaved requisitioned beds through the streets as though they were stagehands getting ready for a play. Engineers hauled vast drums of wire to rig up lights in the rooms that were to become wards. Packs of nurses immaculate in their blue and white uniforms thronged the streets, sometimes passing in chaste silence, sometimes chatting and cackling.

Tempers in the battalion frayed as rumour and counter rumour flew backwards and forwards. Were they going to Cape Helles on the Peninsula as they had been told when they had left Southampton? Or would it be Cairo, which now felt an enormous letdown.

One morning, the battalion trooped onto a ship where they were packed into the lower decks and baked in its bowels until evening. It seemed they were finally on their way, although no one knew where exactly to. B Company took up a compartment between two huge bulkheads, a hundred men nearly on top of each other, their hair matted with sweat and many of them topless due to the heat, skin glistening in the low light.

Edward, bored, clambered half-blind over a few of his platoon to get to Thorne, who was deep in conversation with a few of his own men about what each had been up to the previous summer before war had been declared. He noted, not for the first time and with a mix of admiration and envy, how good Thorne was at speaking to soldiers, with the quiet, unshakeable confidence of someone who had been popular all his life and who knew instinctively how to establish an easy communion with anyone.

‘Room for a small one?’ said Edward as the conversation wound up, and Thorne budged along for Edward to squeeze in next to him, the floor a mess of packs and rifles.

Carrying on the theme of his previous conversation, Thorne turned to Edward and said, ‘So what were you doing when Franz Ferdinand got shot?’

‘You won’t believe it, but I was actually in Russia.’

‘Russia?’

‘Yup. I was visiting my old governess. My father worked in St Petersburg with his textiles company for a few years; moved there just after I was born. Katarina Kovalyova was my governess. My first true love. I doted on her. Now, sadly, she’s Mrs Zubareva. Married a grim engineer from Moscow. Rather like my sister, Cynthia, who married a grim engineer on the railways in India. Dreadful man. Story of my life; both the women I’ve ever loved stolen from me by engineers. Anyway, I was staying with the Zubarevs on holiday when the news came through. Don’t know if I saw what way the wind was blowing exactly, but I pretty soon guessed that I needed to get back home so I cadged a ride on a merchantman back to London. And then the rest of the summer happened as it happened.’

‘Do you still speak Russian?’

‘Just as a hobby. There was a chap in Brighton, an old boy from Yekaterinburg who repaired pianos. I’d often go and meet him after work and we’d chat away. Quite fun to keep it going.’

Thorne waved his hand to indicate where they were. ‘But why all this? Didn’t you want to say you spoke it so you could get some intelligence job? Cloak and dagger spy stuff?’

‘Not really. Rather fancied just being in the normal army. I’m sure if they really need someone they’ll find me.’

Thorne smiled. Edward was about to ask him more about what he had been doing himself but a low murmur started going round the hold. Were they finally to be told where they were headed? Edward was convinced that they were still going to the Peninsula, with Thorne sure that it was Cairo, saying, ‘Either way it doesn’t really matter. We’ll still get a suntan.’

They were quiet for a while in the heavy twilight before Thorne went on. ‘You know I’ve seen the Peninsula before?’

‘What? When?’

‘A couple of years ago. Summer before my final year at Oxford.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Travelling round the Lycian coast, way further south. Just me on my own. It was a great trip. On the way back to Constantinople to get the train home I decided on a whim to stop off at Troy, just to see what it’s like.’

Edward smiled. ‘To tread in the footsteps of Achilles, eh?’

‘Bugger off. I hate that claptrap. All that grandstanding and navel-gazing about us being the heirs to the Trojan war. Never liked the Iliad anyway.’

‘Heresy!’ Edward laughed. ‘Or are you being like people who say they hate Mozart, just to stir a reaction?’

‘Maybe a little. But for me, it’s just a load of loudmouths babbling away about glory and never any mention of their soldiers or the common man. I mean, maybe with the exception of Sarpedon. Look, I’m no bloody socialist but that entire poem is pampered aristos falling over themselves to see who can gain the most honour.’

‘Says the pampered aristo.’

‘Touché. But, you know, the Iliad’s still the Iliad, so I had to stop and see Troy. I remember quite clearly looking across the water and seeing the Peninsula.’

Edward waited a little as Thorne paused, seemingly serious at last, before saying, ‘Go on.’

‘Honestly can’t say I’ve seen a more nondescript piece of land in my life. I mean, I bet there are valleys and gullies and high ground and places to bathe in the wine-dark Aegean and watch the rosy-fingered dawn every day and all that rot, but at no point did I ever think, “Oh my, what a signal honour it would be to go there and get my face shot off by a Turk.”’

He wound up and said, ‘Now, I know I’m the junior platoon commander here, but shall we go and find out what the hell’s going on? At least get some fresh air? This place reeks.’

Edward nodded in amusement.

They made to pick their way out of the humidity of the hold, when the burble of low chatter and snores around them stopped and the eyes of the company as one turned to the door. Rossi stood silhouetted there, his nasal voice rising to reach all the men. ‘I’ve just come from the CO. I’ve got good news and bad news. Good news – we’re not going to Egypt; we’re going to Helles.’

A weird mix of excited gasps, groans and low cheers reverberated around the metal walls, as though Rossi had his foot on a sustaining piano pedal. ‘The bad news is we’re not going to get there for a while. We’re going to Lemnos, where the battalion is to provide garrison guard at Mudros harbour. But only for a couple of weeks. And then Helles.’

Sensing the downward shift in mood at this delay, he reasoned, ‘Cheer up, chaps. It’ll be a good opportunity for training—’ more groans ‘—and the Turks aren’t going to go away. There’ll be enough opportunity for you to all have your fill of scrapping by the time the summer is out. Even you, Baffle.’ Laughs went up from everyone and Rossi added, ‘One more bit of bad news. This isn’t the ship. We’re going next week. We’ve got to be off here in twenty minutes for some other mob. Sergeant Major, carry on.’

The groans multiplied over each other and Rossi left, replaced by Sergeant Major Leyburn barking at them to gather their kit together and get a move on.

Thorne and Edward lay back for a moment to wait until there was space to gather their gear. ‘Who’s Baffle?’ asked Thorne.

‘You haven’t met Baffle yet? My platoon, one of the lance corporals. Famous regimental character. Should be a sergeant, at least, but he keeps getting busted down for fighting. His nickname’s “Three Bar”, as he’s either propping up the bar, beating people with bars or behind bars. He’s quite a character. Charming chap though.’

‘Hey, do you reckon we’ll get some time to explore Lemnos?’

‘I imagine so. Not sure how much goes on there though. Why d’you ask?’

The hold now having largely emptied, Thorne stood up and started to put on all his kit. ‘Long story. You’ll see.’

CHAPTER THREE

Edward’s lungs felt as though they were bruising as they heaved and heaved, trying desperately to get oxygen round his body as he scrambled up what seemed to be the final stretch of the mountain after Thorne. His tunic was dark with sweat and every time he paused a hundred flies – death-black and hateful – descended on him. They were making fast progress, desperate to escape the lee and allow the wind to blow the devils away.

After a series of false summits, the slope finally fell away and he saw Thorne on the top, bent double, hands on knees, smiling back at him, a tossed forelock of his mousey-blond hair drooping down over his face. Edward joined him and they looked down at the spread-out majesty of the island beneath. To their west the enormous quilt of Mudros harbour was studded with battleships and cruisers, smaller destroyers and lighters beetling around them. Around its lip dust was being kicked up from the British and French camps at the shores as the men woke up to another day. A troopship was entering the harbour; impossible to know if it was coming from Britain with fresh men, or from the Peninsula with broken ones, bound for the teeming hospital.

Edward took his water bottle from his haversack and drew heavily from it. The blue of the sea spread all around them was of a kind he had only ever read about before and was fringed in the distance with a creamy, biscuit-yellow line. Turkey. His first glance of it. It was, as he started to rationalise what he was seeing, an extraordinary feeling, taking in not just the here and now of Lemnos’s dirt and dust under his feet but of Imbros in the middle distance and then, slightly hiding in a faint haze, the Peninsula. It took him several minutes to try to articulate properly but in the end he just said, simply, ‘It’s magnificent. I feel like a god up here.’

Thorne wasn’t listening to him, intent on looking to the east through his binoculars. Seeming to have found what he wanted, he turned round and surveyed the whole of the island to their west, his top teeth biting into the lower lip in frustration. ‘Bugger. Bugger, bugger, bugger. It’s impossible.’

Three weeks into their stint of guard duty at Mudros, the battalion was on a rest day. The initial excitement at being closer to the Peninsula – now only fifty miles away and near enough on some nights for them to hear the artillery – had faded into bored contempt once they had realised there was nothing to guard against. All the companies’ officers had had their work cut out devising ways to keep the soldiers occupied, there being only so many times one could practise digging or trench routine and only so often one could zero a rifle.

Rossi, a stalwart of the Territorials before the war, and so already well-versed in the management of boredom, was good at encouraging skits and entertainment, with Edward memorably putting in a stint as a pantomime dame and being propositioned by Baffle; for B Company, at least, the Lemnos stay, while dull, had not been unduly tiresome.

They had all been given a Sunday off. Early that morning, as Marks, Haynes-Mattingly and Tufnell snored off hangovers in the tent they all shared, Edward had been shaken awake by Thorne who had whispered, ‘Come on, we’re going on a secret mission,’ before leading him out of the garrison to a Greek with a handsome black horse and a cart.

‘Where did you find him?’ Edward had asked, still rubbing sleep from his eyes and yawning, not quite understanding why he was up and about.

‘Made friends with him a few days ago. A few bob and he’s ours for the day. On me, I insist. I love the horse; he’s rather like the station one at home.’

As the day had opened up, they’d settled into a lull, sitting on the back of the cart as the horse went on at a comfortably sclerotic pace. Overnight rain had stopped the wheels kicking up any dust, and they’d sat with their legs dangling, looking at the expanse of the harbour growing bigger as they got further away from it.

After an hour or so, the farmer had stopped and pointed to the hills about a mile away, behind scrappy low orchards and olive groves through which the cart would not go. In sign language, and some pidgin ancient Greek, Thorne had seemed to reach an agreement with him that he would meet them back there at four o’clock, and then he went on his way, leaving them surrounded by the hot day and the chatter of crickets.

For the next two hours they had laboured up the hill wordlessly, pausing only to drink water, neither wanting to preempt what they knew would be an extraordinary view by turning round to take it in too early.

And now they were at the top. Edward span around, his arms outstretched, marvelling at the absurd omnipotence of being able to see almost the entirety of the key locations of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. He felt better than he could remember, as though he was finally enjoying being a young man. He took his shirt off, feeling the sweat on his chest hair chill and noting how absurdly white his torso looked next to his nut-brown forearms.

Thorne was still cursing, alternating between his map and binoculars, now looking out to Turkey and then back over the rest of the island. For the first time Edward noticed the size of his map.

‘Where on earth did you get that from?’

Thorne answered absent-mindedly, ‘Oh, a pal from school on one of the destroyers. It’s great, isn’t it? Takes in the whole of this part of the Aegean. Don’t worry, it’s fine. I’m giving it back to him tonight.’

‘What the hell, if you don’t mind me asking, are you doing anyway? Just enjoy the view. You’re like an umpire fussing over some blades of grass on a wicket.’

With a sigh, Thorne relented, putting the binoculars down. With a child’s flexibility he collapsed his leg muscles to sit down cross-legged exactly where he had stood.

‘Right,’ said Edward. ‘Good. Now, what are we doing here?’

The disappointment in Thorne’s voice gradually gave way to enthusiasm. ‘In Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, there’s a passage narrated by Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra in which she says that she knows that Troy has fallen because the beacon chain that goes from Troy all the way across the Aegean to Mycenae has been lit. She lists the names of all the mountains on the way that had a beacon on them. There’s about eight or nine or so in all, and there are some lines missing from the passage. But the first part survives intact, and it’s quite clear. With a map and a bit of initiative you can have a fair stab at where they would have been. With me so far?’

Edward nodded.

‘The beacon starts on Mount Ida,’ continued Thorne, ‘just behind Troy. That’s easy enough – you can see it to the right of the Peninsula.’ He jerked his thumb behind him dismissively in its general direction. Edward thought he could make out a low rise in the hazy strip where he thought he ought to be looking. ‘But the next bit is why we’re here now. The second beacon in the passage is on Hermes’ Mount on Lemnos, which is this, here, I think. Well, I can see Ida, fine, but the problem is that the next beacon is on Mount Athos, south of Salonika, and that’s what I’ve been trying to find. We’re on the wrong side of the island for it and you can’t see it at all for the other damned hills.’

‘So the passage is wrong?’

‘Not necessarily. I mean, the description makes broad sense. You would go from Ida to Lemnos to Athos, but the thing is you need more than one beacon on Lemnos to do it.’

‘Is that so bad?’

Thorne clicked his fingers. ‘I mean, not really, but it just loses a bit of its simplicity and elegance. It would have been so good if it had worked. And my old tutor would have absolutely loved it if it had. We always had this thing about how great it would be to one day create the beacon chain again.’

‘We could have done all this from a map and trigonometry, surely?’

Thorne’s eyes widened as if it was the stupidest question he had ever heard. ‘Of course we could. But where would the fun be in that?’

He dug into his pocket for a handkerchief and accidentally brought his wallet out too, spilling it onto the ground, several of its contents caught by the breeze and blowing around the dust.

Thorne swore and scrabbled around on his knees, trying to gather everything up. Edward got down too and intercepted a photograph as it skimmed towards him.

Thorne managed to recover the couple of other loose pieces, looked over at what Edward had done and said, ‘Thank Christ for that. Thanks, old chap. Nearly gave me a heart attack.’

Edward gave the photo a reflex glance, more out of instinct than interest. It was of Thorne and a young lady at the piano in evening dress, he sitting and she standing behind him. His hands rested on the keys as he looked back at the camera while she held his shoulders, also caught in mid-turn backwards as though surprised by the photographer. In the background was the curve and sweep of a grand staircase.

Edward reddened and, holding it out, said, ‘Sorry – couldn’t help it. Nice picture.’ Thorne took it and slid it back into his wallet, a natty red leather one. Edward didn’t want to say anything more, intrigued though he was. He didn’t think Thorne was married. Sister? Fiancée? Perhaps even his mother, if she had had him very young. He knew Haynes-Mattingly would have probed immediately and would already be extemporising fearlessly on some lewd conjecture.

Thorne seemed to read Edward’s thoughts. ‘Nothing very interesting, I’m afraid. Me and my sister at home. Taken at Easter last year. I’ve always liked it; makes us look far more musically serious than we actually are. We look like a pair of composers, don’t you think?’

They stayed up on the summit for another hour, lying down to bake in the sun before a slight drop in the breeze augured the afternoon getting ready for evening. They dressed and made their way down the hill, meeting the farmer as arranged at the rendezvous. On the way back Thorne, with a Labrador’s ease, slept in the back of the wagon while Edward sat, rubbing the dried sweat and salt from his forehead and creases around his eyes, enjoying their tang in his mouth.

The wagon went over a bump and the jolt woke Thorne. He sat up and after a moment, unprompted, said, ‘My photograph. You know that was taken the day before old Franz Ferdinand was shot? I’d just come home from playing cricket and as I was getting changed for dinner, Miranda – that’s my sister – came into my room with a lemon, an ice bucket, a knife – devilishly sharp – and a bottle of gin. I poured the drinks and, like a surgeon, she sliced off a strip of peel, cut it in two and dropped them in to the glasses at the last moment. We always had this line one of us would say after the first sip, “The only thing better than the first sip of a martini is . . .” and then the other would say “. . . the first sip of the second martini” and we’d down the first one and pour a second. So by the time we went down to dinner we were quite well oiled. And my mother made us pose for the photograph at the piano. Somehow, we both manage to look semi-compos mentis though, don’t we?’

He paused and seemed to lose himself in memory for a while. Then he smiled and said, ‘And you know, when we had that second martini, I made a toast. “To the summer.” And she replied with, “To the summer. And many more like it.”’ He laughed and said quietly, ‘And now this. What a bloody mess.’

After arriving back at the harbour, they walked into camp, the bay ahead of them a huge glittering expanse of metal ships glinting against the setting sun. In the mess tent they found Haynes-Mattingly playing a game of backgammon with a subaltern from A Company, Daniels. He winked at them conspiratorially and mimed to be silent; it became clear he was in the process of destroying his opponent who presently threw in the towel and stormed out, having lost what looked like several pounds. Haynes-Mattingly grinned. ‘Nice little earner, this lot. Hook, line and sinker. Bluffed him for a few games that I was a duffer, he fell for it and then I cleaned him out. Four of His Majesty’s quid.’ His face then fell a little and he added, ‘Buggered if I know what to do with it though. Sod all places to spend it. Hang on, what the hell do I do with it?’

Edward sat down in a chair opposite him. ‘You could send it home.’

‘No chance. Bloody wife will only go and spend it. Just have to keep it on my person. Oh well – at least if I cop a shell I’ll go out in an explosion of banknotes. Could look rather good. Where have you characters been anyway? Thick as thieves, you two.’

‘On some wild goose chase that Thorne invented only to find that the goose wasn’t a goose at all. It was a measly old pigeon. All to do with Aeschylus’ Agamemnon . . .’

Haynes-Mattingly groaned and held out a palm. ‘I’ll stop you there, old boy. You public school types and your bloody obsession with all that stuff.’

Edward admitted defeat and raised his eyebrows in apologetic acknowledgement.

‘Anyway,’ Haynes-Mattingly continued, ‘from what I hear there’ll be precious little chance for you two to carry on all this tomfoolery. Rumour has it the brigade commander wants us out on the Peninsula sharpish.’

Edward stopped and tried to assess what it was that he felt at that moment, surprised at how bloodlessly he reacted. Haynes-Mattingly was a great one for rumours, but the offhand way in which he had relayed this one lent it more authority than his usual utterances. Edward felt his gaze upon him. Knowing that he had to say something that would at least make him not look utterly terrified, he somehow managed, ‘Well, I hope the food’s a damn sight better than here.’ That picked up a quorum of chuckles to show that he had passed the test. Emboldened, he sat down in the chair opposite and added, ‘So not long for me to take those four pounds off you and your loaded dice.’

‘As if I’d do a thing like that.’

They were indeed not long for Lemnos. The next evening saw the commanding officer address the battalion, all six hundred soldiers sitting on a low sloping bank as he stood before them. Colonel Ackrill was an old Indian Army man who had retired in 1913 only to be mobilised again a year later at the advent of the war to take over the newly formed battalion and whip it into shape. He had done an inordinately good job despite the fact that he looked like someone who would need help whipping cream. Slight and bookish, and lacking the moustache that would have lent him a more military mien, he had the demeanour of a benignly remote academic. His rather uninterested air made him seem to regard the prospect of the battalion fighting like a father regards his son’s first proper game of schoolboy cricket – of interest, certainly, but not particularly worth losing sleep over. His first name was Raymond, which seemed to Edward rather apt.

His speech was, to Edward’s mind, not exactly a rousing call to arms, something the colonel himself acknowledged, saying, ‘I’ll keep this simple, gentlemen, I know it’s late.’ They were to leave in four days for the fighting on Cape Helles at the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. There the British and French were trying to sweep the Turks back and so link up with the Australians and New Zealanders established some miles to their north. Holding the whole Peninsula would allow the navy to push through the Dardanelles and so toward Constantinople.

He focused on the necessity of victory to the swift conclusion of the wider war and the difficulty of the terrain they would be fighting on. They were up against a determined and skilful enemy who was fighting in his own country, but they could count on the navy and their allies on the Peninsula, throwing in for good measure: ‘Even the French on our right flank are doing a good job, they say.’ He couldn’t say exactly what they would be doing on Helles but whatever it was he was sure the battalion would acquit itself favourably. He kept it brief and to the point.

Afterwards, as the officers dispersed back to the mess, Haynes-Mattingly said, ‘Well, I suppose he obeyed the golden rule of making speeches like a tart’s drawers; long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to keep you interested.’

When the day of departure finally came, a succession of lighters were to ferry them out to the ship. An hour before the first one left, the colonel gathered the officers together for a photograph. A camera on a tripod was set up, a nervous-looking lance corporal clerk from HQ Company detailed as photographer.

Edward stood next to Marks and Haynes-Mattingly and behind Rossi, who was in the front row. Thorne and Tufnell, as the youngest officers in the battalion, sat cross-legged before the front row like a pair of schoolboys.

In between the takes, Edward glanced to his left and right and tried to impress the scene into his mind’s eye: Thorne with his slightly-too-long hair hanging over his collar; Haynes-Mattingly with his cap tilted artfully in the affected manner with which he tried to achieve maximum rakishness; Rossi fastidious and fussy over his uniform, his tie kept in check by the tiny gold pin that his wife had given him. The colonel himself sat like a tiny sparrow in the middle of them, his worn uniform yellowed by years of foreign sun and comically different to their own ones – issued only months before and still scratchy in their newness.

Edward knew that the law of averages, the law of war and the law of sheer bloody obviousness all demanded that this would be the last time this exact group would ever be together. Still, however, some sprite of a hope jumped in his head that they might all survive unscathed, might all gather in the same arrangement for a second time in a few months.

After several efforts it was deemed that at least one picture would be good enough and the colonel stood up and turned to face them. Taking his cap off to run a hand through his hair, he was silent for a little while, scanning them, thirty-odd in all, with something approaching a hint of sadness. ‘Well, gentlemen, I’ll see the company commanders on the boat, but for most of the rest of you, I won’t see you until we’re on the Peninsula. Look after your men, good luck and God speed. Hold fast to your marksmanship principles and look after your rifles. They’ll see us through.’ He paused as if on the verge of saying something lengthier but held it in, turned, smiled and said to the lance corporal standing nervously behind him, ‘That’s it. I look forward to seeing the photograph.’ He put his cap on again and walked away towards the beach, hands behind his back as he whistled to himself. The group broke up and went to join their men.

A few hours later, the battalion was on its way towards Helles. Edward stood on deck, surprised to be almost alone save for a few of the ship’s crew. He waved to the escorting destroyer and then felt rather foolish for doing so, looking round self-consciously to make sure he hadn’t been seen. He leant against the railings and watched the ring of hills around the bay as they receded first into the haze and then into the sea behind them. He thought about the photograph and how he should like to see it printed, as though its record of them all together, strong and healthy and safe, would somehow act as a blanket, a memento of a time when everything was all right.

PART TWO

CHAPTER FOUR

Edward rolled over the hump, lay still on his back and looked above him, taking in the gulf of black and diamonds. For a few seconds it seemed that he was the only man on the Peninsula, and then the low shuffling of Baffle and Mason came to him and he felt a hand grasp his ankle. A firm finger tapped twice, meaning it was Baffle; Mason was one tap. He raised his head slightly and could just make their shapes out, darker black against the black enveloping them. Far away, machine gun fire sounded, but so distant and diffracted that to a layman it might have sounded like an unusually loud cricket. Then silence. Edward waited for it to start up again and, when it didn’t, rolled back onto his front. Elbow by elbow, painfully slowly and with his nose scraping the dust, he pulled himself along another couple of yards. Then he stopped again, waited for the grab and tap on his ankles, waited some more and carried on.

All three of their faces were caked with boot polish and each had a revolver – Edward his own and the two soldiers having borrowed theirs from Thorne and Marks. ‘Ever fired one of these?’ Edward had asked them as they’d prepared to leave the trench. Baffle had looked at the weapon with a sneer, replying, ‘No, but it can’t be fucking hard, can it, sir? Just point it at some cunt’s face and pull the trigger, surely?’

Behind them, now some forty yards away, two platoons of the company stood line-abreast, rifles cocked, safety catches off and fingers ghosting pressure on their triggers to lay down a blanket of covering fire if the Turks heard them and they had to run back.

Edward and his tiny patrol were out to try to gauge how far apart the two front lines were from each other in advance of a planned raid on those same trenches on one of the following nights. They had left the trench, worming over the lip of the parapet, at 23:00. It was now 01:20. In the trench Rossi was starting to get nervy, though when he could sense the same impatience in the soldiers, standing in their rictus poses for so long, he realised he had to suppress it. He patted each man he came to on the back, trying to prolong even slightly the adrenaline that had kept them alert for the first couple of hours.

To Edward, out in the scrub, it felt in his blindness as though he had only left the trench ten minutes ago. There was a cord clipped to the rear of his belt that Thorne had been feeding out since he had left. When he got to where he thought the Turkish front trench must be, he was to reach behind him, tug it several times and then unclip it, so that Thorne could then mark exactly how much had been used. The mission had come down from battalion and Rossi had given it to Edward’s platoon, his clipped and bloodless orders ostensibly giving Edward perfect liberty to send whichever three of his soldiers he wanted, but with an unspoken inference that there was no circumstance whatsoever under which it would be acceptable for Edward not to lead it himself. Baffle had not been hard to choose, being the most obviously violent of his soldiers, and Mason he chose purely because he was next to Baffle at the time. It helped that Mason was the chalk to Baffle’s cheese, quiet and unshowy against the other’s constant chirping and chatter.

This was the first action of any note to have been taken by B Company and Edward had felt like a celebrity ever since word had got round the men, though he knew inside that anyone with any experience of real fighting, like the company that they had replaced in the trenches only that morning, would have thought it small beer. After several weeks in the line, their predecessors had managed to seize these new positions in an attack that had ‘ironed out’ a little salient and thus rationalised the brigade’s frontage. It also meant that B Company now looked out over land as yet unspoilt, save for a few shell holes, by the trench fighting which had rendered almost every other part of the line nearly unbearable.

At these other places the line was infused with the stench of bodies in states of decomposition ranging from the newly butchered and still bleeding to bags of bones, which were only kept in some semblance of human shape by their clothing, scraps of meat and tendons hanging off the parts that the birds and rats couldn’t get to. And everywhere, layered on top of anything that could ever decompose – skin, blood, flesh, food, vomit, shit, hair – were flies. Millions upon billions of them swarmed and then landed onto their countless others in a sick black impasto, the sight of them already so firmly stuck in Edward’s memory that when he closed his eyes and thought of them he felt a pull at the back of his throat.

At least here, however, in this recently taken and unsullied part of the line, they were spared temporarily the wriggling, seething carpets of them that were all over the rest of the Peninsula – covering dead horses, severed limbs, biscuits and backs of necks; finding their way into yawning mouths and bullet wounds; flying from latrines to food to open wounds and then back to the food, dropping larvae, infection and dysentery from their hideous bodies onto everything they touched.

On Edward pressed in his crawl, every pebble felt by his elbows, knowing that every movement he made took him that bit closer to the Turkish line. Every time he paused, he made a conscious effort, for the first time in his life, to try to pump as much blood to his ears and try to get them to be as sensitive as possible. He felt a sharpness and focus, a purity of thought and action, that he had never thought possible before, and he had to stifle a sudden laugh at this newness.

He blinked several times to try to zone back in on the task. And then, just as he tensed to shuffle forward again, he heard a voice, quite clear, speaking a low, easy phrase lilted at the end in a question. Behind him, he sensed Baffle and Mason tensing up too. Then a couple of seconds later a reply came, heavier and grumpier, ending in a little chuckle. Any doubt that he had about his ability to judge distance accurately vanished – he knew exactly how far away the voices were: no more than four yards. A pride at having got so close to the trench was replaced by a horrible tingling through his capillaries to his fingertips, like coolant in an engine, at being so close to the opposite line.

For a moment he lay still, before being seized by the twin imperatives of having to complete the patrol and the knowledge that if he stayed there he was a dead man. Two hands landed on each of his calves – two taps on his right, one tap on his left. Baffle and Mason. In answer he lifted both his legs twice, hinging them at the knee to signal that they were to turn back. Reaching behind his back he unclipped the twine from his belt. Thorne would reel it in once they had got back. He made to worm himself around but stopped himself upon realising how loud it would be, so wriggled backwards instead, feeling the two others do the same until they had covered enough ground to distance themselves and turn around.

When they were set they continued their crawl, faster now and with an abandon growing with every foot they got away from the Turks. Then a scrape of metal that Edward recognised as a rifle being slowly cocked came from his front left, only two yards away. He froze, his mind flicking through thoughts and options. Not Baffle or Mason; they were behind him and, judging from their lack of movement, they had heard it too. They could conceivably have crawled in a circle and be back at the Turkish line where they had already been, but surely not. There was no way it was their own line yet, unless they had crawled at an extraordinarily fast pace.

He reached blindly to his front and side, tracing his fingers over the earth to feel for the twine that he had let go, cursing himself that he had discarded it. Then there was the same low deep voice that he had heard in the Turkish trench, coming from exactly the same direction as the rifle sound. His brain thumped with confusion. He played through what he knew: when he had first heard the voice it was to his ten o’clock. Now, having crawled back in a straight line it was still to his ten o’clock. At the very moment he realised what had happened he felt a body crawl up alongside him, so close that at times it was on top of his. Mason put his mouth to his ear, his moustache scouring Edward’s lobe. ‘Sap, sir,’ he whispered.

His brain cleared. They were crawling parallel to a sentry’s sap trench – an advanced listening post – that the Turks had dug out into No Man’s Land perpendicular to their main trench. The man they had heard had – presumably – just taken over in the sap. If it hadn’t been the same voice that he had heard then the chance of guessing what had happened would have been remote.

Edward figured they had two choices: one, to carry on crawling back to their lines, hoping that they could remain undetected; or, two, crawl towards the sap, drop into it and kill the sentry, assuming there was only one of him. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, for this first night at least, he continued on his crawl, shuffling to the right a little to get as far away as possible from the sap. For the first few feet he moved painfully slowly, hoping the others had got the message about heading back – he could just imagine Baffle deciding to take matters into his own hands.

Then, in a chance that made him want to shout with joy, his little finger hooked on the twine that he had let go earlier. Confident now that they were far enough away from the sap to be able to do so, he measured a whisper that he was sure would die almost as soon as it was past their ears and said, ‘I’ve got the route. Let’s go.’ He turned round to crawl off faster and surer than he had done all evening. It was as though the twine, with Thorne at its end, acted as an umbilical cord, feeding his limbs and muscles with a new invincibility. Faster and faster they crawled, and it was only a change in the scent of the air – a waft of tobacco mixed with sweat hitting his nostrils instead of the usual musty sterility of the dirt – that made him stop and feel forward a little. There it was, the lip of their own parapet.

He bundled himself over and turned back to help Mason and then Baffle into the trench too. They collapsed into its shelter, feeling the sides protecting them like mice burrowing into hay. The low candlelight from the lanterns that hung along the walls of the trench was shockingly bright to Edward’s eyes as they panted in great heaves, their lungs desperate to get oxygen round their starved muscles.

‘What’s the time?’ he said to nobody in particular and Rossi replied, standing above him. ‘Zero four hundred. How was it out there? Took your time, eh? Thought you were crawling all the way to Constantinople. Patrol report in my dugout in an hour. Zero-five.’ With that he melted down the trench away from them and Edward heard Baffle mutter, ‘Fucking stuck-up knobhead.’

They stood up and Edward sent them to get as much rest as they could before dawn. Thorne appeared next to them with a rifle. ‘Yours, Mr Baffle, I believe?’

‘Ar, thanks, sir, was hoping you’d forget about that. Was getting used to the Webley. Don’t want to go back to lugging that piece of shite around.’ They swapped weapons and Baffle then left, while Edward and Thorne sat back down in the nook of the trench. Silence fell for a while as Thorne let him gather his thoughts.

‘Want one?’ said Thorne eventually, lighting a couple of cigarettes and putting one straight into Edward’s mouth without waiting for a reply.

‘Thanks.’ Edward took a long draw.

They sat some more, smoking and looking through the gloom as it slowly faded until they could pick out all the details of the side of the trench facing them.

‘You know what one of those heirs-to-the-Iliad bores would have made of all this, don’t you?’ said Thorne.

‘No, what?’

Thorne nodded over at the remainder of the twine, Edward’s lifeline, rolled up round a stake. ‘Ariadne’s thread.’

They both laughed quietly. Edward said, ‘God, can’t you just imagine them?’

‘Do you want to know how far you went?’

Edward exhaled loudly and shrugged. ‘Honestly, it could have been anything from five to five hundred yards. I have no idea.’

‘Sixty. With slack bits and tangles I’d say their lines are fifty yards from ours. I’ve told the OC. Don’t worry about all that curtness when you got back – I think he likes to put out this image of him being a cold fish. All the time you were out there he was up and down the men, keeping everyone alert. I must say we thought you lot had been captured at one point you were out so long. It was torture for us back here, so God knows what it was like for you three. How was it?’

Edward couldn’t believe he was hearing the words come from his own mouth as he replied, ‘It was bloody marvellous.’ He paused for a moment more, smiled to himself and got up. ‘Right, better go and do the report.’ At that moment, veins still flush with the dregs of his adrenaline and buoyed further by being back with Thorne, he felt invincible. Could it somehow stay like that?

CHAPTER FIVE

A