The Animal Stars Collection Read online

  ‘Hopefully that’s the manure. If not, you can wash him.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The voice sounded resigned.

  The second man stepped towards Dimitri. He gestured to the donkey, then held out something on his hand.

  Dimitri grinned. He shook his head.

  ‘He wants more money, sir.’

  ‘Damn and blast it, fifteen shillings is more than a peasant like him will see in a lifetime. Make it a pound then. But tell him we’ll only pay that if he can find us another donkey, too.’

  More arguing. But Dimitri sounded pleased. He gave the donkey a whack on the hindquarters, though not a hard one, to seal the bargain.

  ‘He’s ours, sir. And the farmer will find us another donkey, too.’

  The first man gazed at the donkey with disgust. ‘I can’t tell you how much that delights me. Let’s hope the creatures earn their keep carting water. Now get those panniers off him and take him to Lieutenant Gorman. You’d better wash and clip him first. His coat’s as long as a goat’s. Looks like the beast is crawling with lice.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The second man took the lead rope unwillingly.

  Suddenly the weight was gone from his back. The donkey began to walk, leaving Dimitri and his stick behind.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Donkey

  Moudros Harbour, Lemnos Island, 20 April 1915

  It was good to be free of the weight on his back. It was good to have all the hay he could eat, too, and fresh water in a bucket next to where he was tethered. It was wonderful to be away from Dimitri, and best of all to be free of the big stick.

  It was not so good to be washed. It was cold and wet. But at least the washing and the clipping were soon over. Then there was nothing to do but stand and eat and watch. It was a luxury he had never had before.

  So much to eat! And so much to see. Horses and mules and other donkeys—and men and ships. So much to smell and listen to. Even better, there was no one to hit him when he called hee haw! to the mules and other donkeys and heard them bray back in reply.

  It would have been even better if he could have nosed around, tasted the leaves on the shrubs or that bit of grass just out of reach. But all in all he was content.

  And then things changed again. To start with all the men left—or nearly all of them: first on small boats then onto the big ones that swayed to and fro further out in the harbour. Most of the big boxes were taken too, as well as the bales of hay and the mules.

  Then it was the turn of the donkeys. The men led them down to the white sand of the beach and over to the new pier that jutted into the water. The donkey watched as one by one each donkey had a big strap put around his middle and was raised off the jetty, then swung out over the water and lowered into a small boat.

  One of the donkeys yelled and kicked. Hee haw! Hee haw! But his frightened cries made no difference to the men.

  So when it was his turn he didn’t try to kick or bite. He had learnt with Dimitri that there was no use arguing with men. All it got you was more pain. So, despite his terror, he just looked at his hooves and tried to ignore the big strap, shutting his eyes when suddenly the ground vanished from under him, frantically stilling himself so he didn’t struggle as the air swished on all sides.

  Then his hooves touched solid ground again. He opened his eyes. But this ground wasn’t solid. It swayed and bounced just like the sea around him. The movement grew worse, for now the boat began to pull away from the shore.

  Ahead of him he could smell even more smoke, big ships and many men. He could smell the terror of the other donkeys, and smell his own fear too.

  But there was nothing he could do.

  The donkey stared at his hooves and struggled to remember the good things, the taste of hay and fresh green leaves, as the boat carried him towards the ships, away from the island and Dimitri and all he had ever known.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jack

  Onboard the troopship SS Devanha, Moudros Harbour, Lemnos Island, 23 April 1915

  Jack leant on the ship’s rail and felt the wind buffet his face. It smelt of coal smoke from all the ships around him, and a distant hint of spring as the island turned green after the mud of winter. Aye, this were a poor country, all right.

  The land beyond the harbour still looked peaceful: clusters of rough white houses on steep bare hills, black-haired goats and oxen like toy animals in the fields, and patches of wheat in a glimpse of valley. But the shore was bloomin’ madness: lines of tents blown down in last night’s storm; half-built huts; men in uniforms of all shades of khaki; officers who looked like they had broom handles stuck up their bums telling other poor blighters to do the work; and a few nurses with veils blown every which way by the wind, trying to stop their long grey skirts blowing up to their knees. The noise was like a thousand brass bands gone mad—yells, bells and pounding.

  He’d signed on to his first ship when he was seventeen, two days after Dad had died, leaving him free to see a bit o’ the world—as long as he sent his wages back to Ma and Annie, o’ course, to see them right. But it were still grand to see a new port, even this island, poor as a mouse in an outhouse.

  Who’d have thought that young Jack Kirkpatrick from South Shields would turn into ‘Simmo’ Simpson, a stretcher-bearer in the army with a bunch of Aussies? (It had been better to enlist under his middle name—you never know what past shenanigans might catch up to a blighter if he gave the army his real identity!) Good blokes, the Aussies. He’d liked his years wandering from job to job in Australia. But the Aussies were only a small part of all this chaos.

  Most of the troops were English, like him, as well as some from New Zealand and even from India. Most of them had come to fight the Hun, or Johnny Turk, depending who they met first. He and his Aussie cobbers had trained to carry the wounded from the battlefield, six men to each stretcher.

  He’d have been more than willing to fight. But this was the job he’d been given. He grinned. Mebbe because he were a big strong lad who could cart a bloke off from the battlefield. And being a stretcher-bearer weren’t bad, despite the grub and daft officers. It felt right, somehow.

  Jack’s grin grew wider. All this for five shillings a day—four of which he sent home to Ma and Annie, keeping the rest for a bit of extra grub. Not that there were much to buy in this place. What he wouldn’t give to have one of them Egyptian hawkers turn up here, offering oranges or chocolate or hard-boiled eggs. Army rations! You’d think they were feeding a mob of sparrows, not men.

  He stared about him again. The vast harbour was so full of ships that it was impossible to launch a small boat to get from one to the other. Battleships; converted passenger liners; coal ships; troopships from Australia and New Zealand; the giant liner RMS Mauretania, which carried seven thousand soldiers; trawlers that had sailed down from the North Sea; ferries and tugs from the quiet rivers of England; and even the mighty HMS Queen Elizabeth, now guarding the entry to the harbour. All had been brought to this small Greek island.

  He’d met a few of the locals during the week, when he and the others in the ambulance unit went ashore each day for training and drilling in the makeshift quadrangle by the tents. All men. Either the island had no women, or—more like, thought Jack—the men had taken damn good care to keep their girls out of sight of any soldiers.

  The Lemnos blokes were wary, too. There was none of the pestering to buy everything from postcards to fresh fruit that he’d known in other ports—maybe because on Lemnos there was nothing to sell. The men wore sheepskins, badly tanned, or what smelt like goat hide. Many were barefooted, though some wore sheepskin shoes or sandals. They mostly used barter instead of money, but they had little to exchange: just meat and a little honey or flour ground by the windmills with their giant sails. Jack had tasted the local bread—hard as army biscuit, it were, with as much grit in it as the beach at home.

  Jack reckoned the islanders would be glad to see the invaders go.

  Rumour had it they’d sail tomorrow.


  All ships ran on rumour, as much as on coke or coal. (Jack had found that army ships were the same in this as the other ones he’d worked on.) According to the latest rumour they were all supposed to land on a place called Gallipoli Peninsula, at the entrance to the famous Dardanelles Straits. They’d practised the landing the day before, soldiers in full equipment clambering down rope ladders onto the barges, which then took them ashore.

  From Gallipoli it’d just be a short march to capture the Turkish capital of Constantinople—or that’s what the high-ups said.

  Some cocky blighter had already painted one of the ships with a blooming big sign: ‘To Constantinople and the harems’. Jack wouldn’t mind conquering a harem, but he reckoned there were fat chance o’ that.

  Nah, it would be bad. At first he and the other stretcher-bearers had been told to expect 3,000 wounded men at Gallipoli. That had been changed to 10,000—too many for the tent hospital here at Moudros Harbour. Besides, each hospital ship could only take seven hundred patients at a time. Jack weren’t too crash-hot at arithmetic, but even he could see there weren’t enough hospital ships or even stretchers for that many. The wounded would have to sail to Malta, or even on to Egypt—a long journey for a man with bits of shrapnel in his belly, or an arm blown off by mortar blast.

  Earlier that day the captain had read out a message from Lieutenant General Birdwood, the ANZAC Commander.

  ‘…we are about to undertake one of the most difficult tasks any soldier can be called upon to perform. That we will succeed I have no doubt, simply because I know of your full determination to do so. The success of the operation will be a severe blow to the enemy. It will go down in history to the glory of the soldiers of Australia and New Zealand.’

  Sure as eggs, when officers started to talk about glory you knew that you were in for it.

  Aye, thought Jack, it were going to be bad.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jack

  Onboard the destroyer HMS Ribble, the Aegean Sea, off Gallipoli, 3 am, 25 April 1915

  It was.

  Jack stood jammed between the others on the deck. Like sardines in a tin we are, he thought. The crowding was made worse by the bulky kit each man carried. Out in the darkness the moon sank into blackness that could be sea or land. Dawn came slowly, the ink of the sky giving way to grey. Grey sky, grey sea, six grey destroyers in a line about a hundred metres from the beach.

  Jack squinted, trying to make out details of the shore ahead of them. That was where they had to land, wrench it from the enemy. Steep cliffs, a cove with what looked like white sand, shrubs of some sort flowering…

  Gunfire burst from the shore, like fireworks at a bonfire. Someone screamed on the deck near him. A man close by stared down at a red stain spreading across his shoulder.

  Someone nudged Jack. It was time to go. As he clambered up over the rail and grasped the rope ladder he could see men being carried below deck, wounded already.

  Or dead, he thought. One at least looked like he was a goner. And we ain’t even landed yet.

  The ladder swayed against the side of the ship as he climbed down, bumping against the metal so that he skinned his knuckles. He dropped the last few feet into the rowing boat, and felt it sway in the water. He sat at one edge of the boat, and waited as the rest of the men made their way down.

  It was crowded when the boat was full, too crowded to duck if they came under fire again. No point ducking anyhow, Jack reckoned. If the bullet didn’t hit you then it’d hit your mate.

  The barge in front of them began to move, towing the rowing boat over to the shore. The overloaded boat wallowed in the water, the waves splashing up and onto Jack’s uniform.

  Another burst of machine-gun fire ripped across them. The man in front of Jack slumped onto his oars, his head a weeping mass of brains and hair and blood. Someone else gave a bubbling cry.

  Gunfire slashed across them again.

  His boat was nearly at the shore now. One of the men on the barge towing them gave a signal. He untied the rope that looped barge and boat together. Jack moved the dead man till he lay across his lap, so he could grab an oar. The blood soaked into his uniform. He reckoned it wouldn’t be the last time that would happen.

  Funny, he’d have thought he’d have felt more. But it was like his whole life was pressed into one small point. No time to feel, he supposed. He began to row for the shore with the others as the barge made its way back amidst the shell fire to the destroyers for another boatload of men.

  The grey light on the shore was lit with bursts of red and green and yellow now, like some kid had gone mad with fireworks. Shells screamed above them. Bullets slashed across the sea. But the boat moved slow as a slug among the cabbages. The crush of men made it impossible to row properly; and anyway, lots of the oars were unusable, most like, with bodies slumped across them.

  The boat shuddered as its bottom hit sand. The beach wasn’t far away now, just a short dash through the shallows. For a crazy moment he remembered paddling in the waves as a nipper back home. There was no way to move till there was a space to clamber free of the oar. He waited as the first men jumped into the water, their faces white as ghosts in the growing light.

  There was a burst of noise, so loud his ears still rang even when it was over. He shut his eyes automatically. When he opened them again—a second later, perhaps two—the men on either side of him lay with wide eyes staring at the sky, blood spreading across their uniforms. Funny, he thought. He’d always reckoned blood was red. But this looked black…

  Nowt he could do for them now. He swung his legs over the side of the boat and helped drag it up through the shallows onto the sloping shore. Already swirls of blood muddied the water, proper red blood now, like some daft blighter had poured raspberry jam into the sea.

  It was quicker going once he was out of the water. He sprinted across the beach towards the cliffs, waiting for the burst of noise and pain that meant he had been shot. But lucky for him the snipers were concentrating on the next landing party now. He reached the edge of the beach under the cliffs, and flung himself down to catch his breath. He reckoned that a man lying down were less of a target than one standing.

  The barges still towed the small unprotected boats from the ships. How many will die today? he wondered. Already he could see a great pile of what looked like dead men, a hundred perhaps, gathered in a heap below a white fisherman’s hut on the hill. Then one of them moved. Some poor blighter trying to cover his face as sniper fire raked over him again, thought Jack. Some in the pile were still alive.

  So, he thought, gazing out as men screamed and dropped, at the bodies lying half in the water, at the men up on the cliffs digging their bayonets into the dirt to help them climb while the Turkish snipers fired from above, this is the world of war.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Donkey

  The Aegean Sea, off Gallipoli, 8 am, 25 April 1915

  There comes a time in pain and terror when you can take no more, when you simply stand there in the stinking hay, the smell of damp and fear around you, thinking of nothing, trying to smell and hear nothing.

  The donkey stood in the depths of the ship, his mind blank with terror. His throat longed for water. He was hungry. His leg hurt too, where he had bumped it when the ship lurched.

  Another donkey screamed behind him, a hee haaaaawww that just went on and on. The donkey ignored it. There was nothing he could do, no comfort he could give, tethered here in the darkness.

  The ship stopped. But he knew nothing of it, not even when the noises changed above: the sound of small boats splashing next to them; the stamp of feet.

  Suddenly the noises changed again, so loud, so horrible that his ears rose automatically and he began to shiver, jerked from the emptiness.

  Acckkkacaakack! Accckkka ackkka ack!

  The sounds were distant, but so loud and so many that the ship seemed to vibrate with the noise. Now he could hear screams, too—human cries of agony and fear.

  He didn’t care
for humans. But sounds like that were horrible from any animal, goat or sheep or human.

  Dimly he was aware of other noises too: two humans arguing, down in the stuffy rankness of the hold.

  ‘I said get them off this ship!’

  ‘But, sir, there’s no room for donkeys on the barges.’

  ‘What do you think we should do with them, eh, sailor? Take the blighters back to Moudros with the wounded?’

  ‘No, sir. But—’

  ‘Horses can swim, can’t they? Chuck the donkeys off and let them find their own way to shore.’

  ‘Donkeys aren’t like horses, sir. They’re terrified of water—’

  ‘I gave you an order! We sail in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘After all,’ the voice was further away now, ‘they’re only animals. Men are dying out there, sailor—’

  Suddenly there was movement around him: humans were untying ropes and fastening slings. The donkeys broke into terrified braying as they were lifted from the hold.

  Heeehawww! Heeehawwww!

  More donkey screams from up above…

  Then it was his turn.

  The hands were not unkind. They were simply busy. This was just one job among a hundred others. Outside, men they’d sailed with fell to bullets as they waded to the shore. The waves flowed red with blood. The pain of screaming donkeys was little compared to that.

  He didn’t struggle. He knew struggling against humans meant more pain. But he shivered as the strap was fastened round his middle again, and he was hauled up, up, into the light.

  It was early morning. The light was soft, but still harsh against his eyes after the long darkness of the hold. He couldn’t see. But he could hear: the cries of donkeys, the screams of men, the shrieks as explosion after explosion ripped the air.

  The hands urged him forwards. He walked across the deck, unaware of what was happening, blinking as his vision cleared. All at once the strap around his middle tightened again. He flew up. Then without warning the strap was gone—and he was falling.