The Animal Stars Collection Read online

  Down…down…the sea caught him; it was all bitterness and cold. The water filled his nostrils and his mouth. His legs struggled for a footing. But there was nothing, only water all around.

  There was a shape below him, a donkey, sinking to the bottom, not struggling. It wasn’t a proper donkey shape at all. Donkeys should be standing, sitting, lying, not with their legs like drifting weed…

  It was the sense of not rightness that made him think. He was frantic—terrified—but suddenly he knew…

  Up was that way. Up there was air and light.

  That was where he had to get to, if he wanted to live.

  He struggled up, and gasped.

  He swallowed water, salty and horrid, but he could breathe at last. He could smell again, too, not just the scent of sea and ship but land, hot rock, dry bush.

  Safety was over there.

  He thrust his nose towards it, towards the sweet familiar smells.

  Another splash behind him and a desperate hee haw from above as yet another donkey was hoisted over the rail. He felt himself sink again but his body remembered—to stay up, you moved your legs like this, you held your head this way.

  At first he only thought about how to breathe, to keep his head out of the water, to face the distant smell of land. Then slowly he began to realise—the land was getting closer.

  He struggled harder now, working his legs almost as though he were running. He hadn’t run since he was a foal—a human couldn’t keep up if you ran, and it was a waste of eating and sleeping time to run when you weren’t working. Now he tried to run in this strange new world of water.

  The shore grew nearer, and nearer still.

  A barge floated past him. A voice yelled, ‘Keep going, Neddy!’ Humans cheered. But they didn’t matter.

  Nothing mattered but the shore.

  The noises were louder now. He could make out men struggling towards the beach. A body floated past, and then another, smelling of blood.

  He ignored them, his eyes fixed on the shore.

  It wasn’t much: a scrap of sand and rock below the cliff. Then suddenly his hooves struck ground, there beneath the water. He could run, or wade—another unfamiliar motion—as the water tried to drag him back. Then he was free, out in the blessed air.

  Men around, and noises. Beside him a human thrust his bayonet into the cliff to hoist himself up.

  The donkey sniffed, assessed.

  That way…

  The slope wasn’t as steep here. And it was away from the climbing men. He could smell fresh water—or the memory of it. When it rained, water would flow through here to the sea.

  He struggled up the gully, legs trembling but his feet sure on the strange rock. Suddenly there were bushes around him, and grass.

  His throat burnt. His eyes stung. He still shivered from shock and terror. He needed fresh water, and the quiet familiarity of home.

  He settled for a mouthful of grass, and then another.

  CHAPTER 7

  Jack

  Gallipoli, 25 April to 26 April 1915

  Half an hour after they’d landed, Jack and the other surviving ambulance men were sweeping across the beach, dragging the dead into piles so no one would waste time mistaking them for the living, giving what help they could to the poor blighters whose blood soaked into the white sand.

  It weren’t much, Jack reckoned. White bandages that turned red as soon as they were put on; dripping on a bit o’ iodine to try to stop infection; and morphine for the worst cases, for the men whose screams were loud as gunfire. What was it Ma always said? You did your best, and weren’t no one who could do more.

  Ma had done her best all her life, never complaining as Dad grew weaker, holding his hand when the pain grabbed him bad, singing even when she scrubbed the floor or emptied out his bedpan. You did your best…

  Well, he’d do his best here, too. At least now the firing was mostly away from the beach, aimed instead at the boats as they made their way ashore, or at the men desperately trying to get a foothold up the exposed cliffs.

  The sun danced across a thin line of cloud, well above the horizon. The beach seemed to melt in a great hot wave of light. But there were shadows on the sand now, too, from boxes of stores and ammunition brought ashore. At times it was hard to tell which were shadows and which were pools of blood.

  ‘Hey, Simmo!’

  ‘Aye?’ After seven months it was still hard to remember his new name.

  ‘Word is that our boys are retreating back down the cliffs to the beach again—the firing’s just too heavy. The battle will be all around us again soon. We need to get all the wounded to the rowing boats.’

  He would have sworn, but his lips were too dry—he’d drunk half his water already and given the rest to men desperate from blood loss. No water seemed to have been unloaded yet from the big ships. Daft blighters, he thought vaguely. Them officers think we’re camels. He nodded instead.

  They worked in groups of four now, him and three others (instead of six of them as they’d been trained), each man carrying one corner of the stretcher. There just weren’t enough stretcher-bearers to do the job.

  Jack felt his hands could do it by themselves by now. He knelt by another man, small as a monkey, with grey stubble and skin brown under the eyes from blood loss. Jack knew that look too well already.

  No time for gentleness. He glanced up at the others in his team (What were their names? No time to ask, much less find out what had happened to the mates he’d trained with.) then rolled the little man onto the stretcher, trying to ignore his scream, loud as a seagull.

  ‘Sorry, mate, trying to save thy life here. Ain’t nowt else we can do.’

  The man looked at him, uncomprehending, lost in the pain.

  The four of them lifted up the stretcher and ran with it towards the loading station along the beach. The man grabbed the edges of the stretcher, convulsing every time they took a step. No time to reassure him. No time to dodge the bullets either—once you heard the shot it was too late anyway, wasn’t that what the old soldiers said? There was only ever one bullet with your name on it, so the others couldn’t hurt you. They said that too.

  It were simpler, thought Jack, to believe that were true.

  They rolled their passenger onto the sand like they’d been taught, trying not to hurt him worse. Should have put him into a boat to carry him to hospital, but the boats were still bringing more poor blighters in to be shot at too. Should have put him in a tent at least, but none had been put up yet. Should have laid him on a tarpaulin but there weren’t none o’ them, either.

  Jack’s hands were red then black as the blood dried and more layers of blood coated them and dried in the morning’s heat. His face was probably bloody, too, and his uniform splattered.

  The sun rose higher. The light blazed from the sand and water. Impossible that there could be so much light in the world. Impossible that there was so much noise, or blood, thought Jack, lifting his end of the stretcher again (the poor sod on it with half his face shot off, the white bone eerily whiter than the boy’s teeth). No time to think, to eat or drink. No food or water anyway. No time to think of safety. What safety was there, in a world like this?

  Impossible, anyhow, to think of yourself when the poor sods around you were bleeding. A bloody stump that had been some bloke’s arm. Another boy shot in the thighs, almost cutting the kid in two.

  Oh, God, he thought, gazing down at the boy’s blue lips. It were a prayer, not swearing. Who would have known that blood could spurt so high? He had to wipe it from his eyes before he bent to try to fix a bandage around the boy’s leg. The blood welled onto his hands like it were pushed by a ship’s pump.

  Doing my best, Ma, he thought. Doing what I can. You can’t do more.

  No more splints. He glanced around, trying to find something to use instead. Driftwood? No, that had been used up too. Finally he grabbed some dead bloke’s bayonet. Funny, he thought. Use the dead’s leftovers to save the living.

 
One of the others in his stretcher team nudged him. Easier to nudge than try to speak over the noise. He pointed at another man lying curled nearby, his face in the sand, a black puddle between his shoulder blades.

  Living or dead? They ran to him, and Jack turned him over. Another Aussie, his face tanned except for the white line near his hair where his hat had been. The eyes stared sightlessly at the sky, but he were still breathing. No point bandaging him, not with a wound like that. Pray for him? Nay, someone else could do that, someone far away, with more time than him. He hoped the poor blighter had someone to pray for him, like he had Ma and Annie.

  All Jack could do was roll him, grab his end of the stretcher, lift, and run, and then go back for more. In between, for a change of pace, unload equipment and hope like hell some was medical supplies.

  Or water.

  What flaming drongo, thought Jack, licking his dry lips, tasting the tin of other men’s blood, decided to send men into battle in a place with no fresh water? What stupid sod decided to send them into a hell where the enemy controlled the heights?

  The bullets skittered across the beach like giant fleas kicking up the sand.

  Lift, roll, run. Lift and roll…

  Men muttering. Men screaming things that never should be repeated, not the last words you’d send to any family. Nah, thought Jack, you’d tell them the poor blighter died peacefully in your arms, not with his guts hanging like Mr Punch’s sausages over the stretcher’s edge.

  Darkness began to cling to the cliffs. The sea turned grey again. At first he thought it was his weariness but then he saw that it was only night. He could see the guns flash again now, as well as hear them.

  More boats were coming in under cover of the darkness, carrying more equipment to unload. Almost impossible to tell what it was; quite impossible to keep it dry, or free of sand. Dimly he heard the bloke holding the far end of the stretcher mutter, ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Two am. Why? Want your evening cocoa and nanny to tuck you in?’

  Brief laughter in the darkness as he and the other three staggered up the beach with another load. And then came the blessed call.

  ‘Right, men! Stand down!’

  He dropped onto the sand at the back of the beach. The breeze were cold as the wind back home, almost, but the sand still held a trace of the day’s warmth. His cheeks glowed from too much sun and wind. His stomach rumbled once to remind him he hadn’t eaten for…how long? A day? Or was it two now? He had lost track.

  He slept.

  ‘Wakey, wakey. Breakfast’s served.’ It was a grunt beside him. He didn’t know the man’s name; hadn’t seen Bertie or the rest of the gang in all the mess since they landed. He wondered if they’d got it, and how bad.

  Another dawn, just like yesterday’s, grey sky, grey water. Only difference was that they were on the land now, not the sea. They’d slept what, two hours mebbe?

  He rummaged in his pack for the food they’d been given on the ship: a can of bully beef and a bag of army biscuits, now a sodden mass of salt water and crumbs. At least it weren’t green and wriggling. He ate it, though it made his thirst worse.

  ‘Any water, cobber?’

  Someone waved him to a kerosene drum, a third full. He dipped in his pannikin and drank it straight off, and then another.

  ‘Come on, form ranks now…’

  ‘What’s up then?’

  ‘They’re taking us off. Back to the ships. ‘Bout flaming time too. No way we can take this place, with the Turks up above us. Damn fools, the lot o’ them.’

  He meant the generals, the officers higher up.

  Jack gazed out at the puffs of smoke around the destroyers in the bay, and nodded. No need to say nowt. All officers were dafties. Only the rich got to be officers, which meant they’d never had to haul a bag of sugar, or feed a family on tuppence. Never had to learn nowt about the world, he reckoned, except how to order blokes about and take the profits.

  He lined up with the others and did a rough count. Only half the number of men they’d had the day before, he reckoned. Half of them gone, dead or wounded, on the first day.

  None of his close mates left either, he were sure of that now. Dead? Wounded and back at the ships? No way to tell. No way to find out either, till this was over, till they’d left this corner of a foreign hell, Gallipoli.

  They waited. The sun rose higher. His mouth felt like some blighter had sucked the moisture out. The firing had at least moved away from the beach again. At last another order came.

  Jack grimaced. What had he just thought about daft officers?

  They were staying.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jack

  Gallipoli, 26 April 1915

  They were divided into groups now, some to fill sandbags to make thick walls, others to dig trenches, for some shelter from Turkish snipers. At least, thought Jack, the sandy soil would be easy to shift.

  ‘You lot! Take the stretchers up the gully and look for casualties.’

  Jack grabbed a stretcher and looked around for another three men to help carry it. But even the men he’d worked with yesterday were nowhere to be seen.

  Dead, too? Wounded in those hours of shelling as they unloaded equipment from the boats?

  A foursome was gazing around, hunting for a stretcher. Just not enough stretchers, nor men to carry them neither. Jack handed his over. ‘I’ll carry ‘em on me back.’

  Funny, he thought, to be alone among so many. But that had been his life. Friends came and went—or, most like, it were him that wandered on. The only constants in his life were Ma and Annie.

  Now it were just him again, without the cobbers he’d made since he joined the army. But somehow that felt right, too.

  It was almost as though he could hear Ma, and see her sitting in her chair in the kitchen far off at home. ‘Tha never knows what tomorrow’ll bring, my son. Tha can only do thy best, now.’

  ‘Aye, Ma,’ he whispered. ‘I will and all.’

  He headed up the gully.

  It was narrow: a rutted gash of erosion between the gloomy hills. Even at midday Jack reckoned it’d be mostly shadow. Now, with the sun still low, the gully looked like a chicken’s bum, all dark and fissured. Smelt like one too, he thought. Already the gully and the thin crescent of beach below smelt more of death than of sand and sea.

  Now and then flurries of dirt danced in front of him, kicked up by a sniper’s bullets. Johnny Turk was watching from the hills above.

  No need for a map. Just head up towards where the firing was loudest. No need to go far, either, for even here the wounded lay, faces in the dirt or looking pleadingly towards them, men whose only hope of seeing home again was the ambulance men and their stretchers. It made him sick to his stomach to leave blokes lying there, crying out to him, lifting weak hands to try and catch at his trouser legs. But there was no point trying to carry men with their guts hanging out or back wounds or stumps for arms, not when they had to dangle against his back. No way they’d make it back alive.

  By mid-morning more bodies crowded the beach: piles of the dead that there had been no time to bury, each with a busy cloud of flies; and the moaning, bleeding lines of wounded. From the other end of the beach they looked like matchsticks some kids had lined up for a game. The barges still couldn’t spare the time today to load on wounded men—they had been ordered to fetch reinforcements as soon as possible.

  More poor bastards, thought Jack, to die in these bloody hills.

  A few tents had been put up now, enough for some wounded officers. The rest lay in the sun, their lips cracking, their faces turning as red as the blood on their uniforms. As the blood dried, it went hard and black, except where the wounds still bled.

  More flies came, like they’d heard from miles away there was a feast, the best ever, in this wasteland of Gallipoli.

  At last a few of the wounded were being sent back to the ships. Long before midday they ran out of stretchers. You couldn’t move a badly injured man onto the barges withou
t a stretcher or take him onto the ships from the barges without a stretcher either. There were just more casualties than stretchers. At times it seemed that every man on the whole barren shore must have been wounded six times over.

  But men were still alive out there. Every scream of a bullet overhead might mean another man lying in the sun, his blood and life seeping from him while he waited for help.

  You needed two men to carry a stretcher, and each stretcher could only carry one man. Now, with so many wounded, many stretcher-bearers went out by themselves, treading their way among the rocks of the gully.

  Which suited Jack fine. His mates were gone. Somehow he couldn’t bear to find another team, just to have them vanish again, one by one. It was quicker going up the gully by yourself, without the bulk of the stretcher.

  The gully had a name now. Shrapnel Gully. No one knew who’d thought of it, but soon everyone was using it. There was Dead Man’s Ridge and Bloody Angle, too, where Turkish snipers let you have it when you walked below.

  It was strange, how another land could become familiar so soon. As though giving it a name made it yours. Already it felt like he had been here for years, not hours, almost as though he was one of the shadows on the hills.

  How many men had he carried down to the beach now? Not enough. No matter how many poor sods he lugged back it was never enough.

  You did what you could. That’s all.

  A man limped past him, one arm a sodden mess, strapped by a blackened bandage to his chest, his good arm half carrying a friend with a rough bandage about his thigh.

  Jack scrambled over the rocks to them. ‘Need a hand there, cobber?’

  One of them shook his head. ‘We’ll make it. There’s worse off than us. Like him up there.’

  Jack peered up the gully to check for snipers—there were no point ducking at every shot like a jack-in-the-box, but it was just plain daft to step out in front of Johnny Turk yelling, ‘Here I am, mate, have a go at me.’ He didn’t have to trudge far up the gully before he found another man, slumped by a bush as though he’d been making for its shelter. Jack knelt beside him.