Black Diamonds Read online

  I think about fucking off AWL, but that’s not likely to make a difference either. Except to make me a proper coward. Welcome to Pozieres, then. A proper Australian assault.

  Approximately 0300 hours, well back, in some officer’s empty bunker, resting for a tick. I’m in charge of three blokes I’ve pulled out: two of mine, a corp and a sap, who I’ve decided will not be making another run of ammunition tonight, and an infantry private who I don’t know: he can’t speak to tell me anything, and I can’t prise his fingers from around his tags. I can appreciate that. He looks about sixteen. Shoved him in here a minute ago after I saw him wandering along the top between the trenches like he’d lost his last sixpence for the train home to Woop Woop. I’m still catching my breath. My blokes are all right, sort of, or will be after a break, though I think the sap is deaf: I practically had to shove him in here, because he either couldn’t understand me or wanted an argument. Can’t move them out yet, because the end of the world is going on above us and dead and wounded are jammed along the trench outside the entrance now. We’ll stay put till … till we don’t, and I can palm them off onto someone else and get along to what I should be doing now, which is further back still, with Stratho and Foley, repairing the ammunition supply lines, and hoping I get cholera while I’m at it.

  Now a Tommy major sticks his head into the bunker, right in my face, and says, or yells because he has to: ‘Who are you and what are you doing in here?’ Like he’s caught us having a sly smoko in his office.

  ‘Ackerman, Sergeant.’ It’s official now, as official as my lack of a salute, or anything resembling an identifiable uniform at the minute. ‘Engineers. With bewildered. Sir.’ If it’s any of your business.

  Makes no sense to him what an Engineers NCO is doing in here with these head cases, but little of sense is going on. The Australian infantry is advancing, and is getting slaughtered. Advance? Jesus. But we must have pissed off Fritz because the retaliation is screaming: We’re going to bury every last one of you fuckers. Today.

  ‘Get them out of here,’ says Tommy major.

  ‘That’s the idea. Sir.’ And who the fuck are you when you’re at home?

  I realise I’ve seen him before, a week or so ago, overseeing the tying up of one of his corporals, to a pole behind the lines, to leave him there overnight. Very medieval. Don’t know what the corporal had done, probably drunkenness, or maybe he didn’t want to push on and had made his opinion clear. It’s an unwritten rule in the AIF that we of the lower orders have permission to pervert the course of British justice whenever we see it, so Stratho and I waited till the major and his copper had gone then untied the bloke. Stratho stopped to have a smoke with him, and when he caught up with me later he said the corporal had decided to stay put anyway, untied, sitting by the pole. Can’t credit it, can you.

  Maybe this major is aware of our attempt at bad influence, because he’s eyeballing me. Unbelievable, given the circumstances, but that’s what he’s doing. I give him some back: go on, have a go for nothing, you little shit. He goes to piss off, but then steps back and yells at me: ‘You lot really are animals.’

  That was a bit unnecessary, I think, but I find out why later back in camp.

  Half-a-dozen of our blokes herded their twenty or so German prisoners into a deep shell hole during the night and threw Mills bombs in at them; they’d tied them to each other first, so they couldn’t run. Mixed responses among us, but I’m revising the issue of my nationality again. Still, I’m not in the infantry.

  Dunc is disgusted. ‘That is revenge. That is the ugly Australian. The big man with a small mind. The big country with a two-inch cock.’

  He’s cleaning his toenails again as he says it, and clipping them, like it was nothing less than expected.

  I say: ‘We don’t really know what it’s like, though. To go over all the time, and to …’

  He looks across at me like I’ve got two heads. ‘I don’t know what your politics are, Ackerman, but I can take an easy stab at them, and I’m not averse to breaking rules myself, no stranger to the frustration of wanting to make them too, but self-control should be a given, in every situation for every man beyond the very, very frontline. They had time to think before they acted, and didn’t.’

  Fair enough.

  He adds: ‘You might be interested to know that the instigator was not one of yours, but a filthy rich, British-educated grazier’s son from Victoria. And he will not be punished. The incident won’t be recorded. It didn’t happen. Put that in your class-confusion notebook and remember it. The best and the most decent here are your lot, those with nothing but everything to prove about themselves. They are the ones the Germans are really afraid of. Because they go hard, they go together and they make a proper job of the bloody impossible. Just don’t stop till they’re called off. And they do not pretend that this is not barbaric enough.’

  He’s gone back to his toenails and there’s a small splash on his knee. He meant that. Not sure what I think about that.

  I want to ask him again why he’s here, but it’s just not the right time.

  Very, very last act of stupidity performed at war. Stratho’s been hit in the arse, as he deserves, and he can’t move, this side of no man’s land, not too far, but Foley couldn’t get him back. It’s not funny. Apart from the obvious logistical problem of dragging Stratho back to our line in the middle of the end of the world, Foley’s got a hole in his shoulder the size of a fist. I tell him to get on and get seen to and I’ll get Strath. Somehow.

  In the time it’s taken for Foley to get back and stumble into me, Stratho has probably bled to death already or too close to bother by the sounds of it: half his backside is missing in action. But I have to. Even if he is dead, I just don’t want him to be there. I want him to be taken away so he gets buried somewhere, properly. This is why you should not have mates. I’ve done fairly well on that score, but Stratho is a special case. Duncan would probably disagree, but he’s not here. He’s snug in with the brass getting his orders. Good for him. I’ve just come back from camp, I’m in full uniform, and squeaky clean, hair clipped so close I’ll frighten the lice; I should be on my way to the brig’s digs to see what can be done to strengthen the roof, to stop it falling in on him every second night; he can wait.

  It’s quiet now, relatively, the sun is just about setting on this fine, early August evening, and it will be in Fritz’s eyes, so there’s no time like the present to make a leap over the top, belt up to the wire and find him. I do. He’s dead. His mouth is slack like he’s fallen asleep pissed. I sit down next to him and watch the sky change from grey to purple as the sun sets behind us. This land between us and them shows no sign of the village that once was: it’s the shadow shapes of dead men and wire and machine-gun metal sailing through the air above a kind of desert of dirt full of cracks and holes. It sits on a ridge that they reckon is just about to belong to the Australian infantry. What a victory that’ll be. It’s hard not to stay here and just look at it. Like I’m not really here. You big girlie cunt.

  But not for long.

  Sundown is Fritz fireworks like they are going out of fashion; bang on time. He doesn’t like the dark here; flares are up before the sky is barely black. I can’t leave Stratho here. So I pick him up. He’s not that big, when you’re not thinking, and we’re off, as a shell lands a polite distance to the left and front of me. Stratho takes the brunt. Good on him. And we’re flung back, into a hole. On reflex I put my arm out, like a complete idiot, and feel a sharp twist, snap and crunch as we hit the bottom, a few yards down. It’s all going on. Mad. I’ll just lie here for a while in the bottom of this hole, with Strath on top of me, and pretend that I didn’t just do that.

  But not for long.

  Fritz is sitting in this hole with me. He looks like that bloke I grabbed the other night. About sixteen, maybe less. He looks like I should look: scared shitless, spragging in the dark. Except I’m a bit elsewhere at the minute. Like when you fall off your bike and clock yoursel
f and you think, how did that happen? Before the fact registers.

  I can’t stop looking at him, as he’s looking at me, and I’m a bit hysterical now. There’s a break in the shelling as I wear myself out and fear and pain hit me.

  He edges closer and says: ‘Du bist ‘n Australier.’

  Picked me in one. Don’t need German for that, but it’s amazing how quick memory can work in an emergency, or in a place so far from understanding you’ll grab at anything. I say: ‘Und du bist ‘n Fritz.’

  He says, quite seriously: ’Nein. Ich bin Johan. Johan Schultz.’

  I laugh for five minutes, I swear, despite myself. And he just keeps staring, can’t blame him, and he’s armed all right. Everything I can see plus more no doubt. My rifle is pinned under my back, between my back and my arm. Which is wrong in every way. Pig’s fucking arse. I say, for what it’s worth: ‘Can you help me? Gefallen tun …? Hilfe?’ pointing with my left hand at Stratho.

  ‘Ja.’ He gets up and rolls Stratho off me. Unbelievable, danke. He says: ‘Sprechen sie Deutsch?’

  ‘No, just a bit,’ I say and I let him know about the rest as I sit up.

  He says: ‘Arm gebrochen. Schlimm, ja? Das muss weh tun.’

  Hurts? Ja. Very ja. To buggery. Oh boyo, don’t look at it.

  Then he starts saying something else to me, but I can’t understand him, apart from heute, sterben and Australier: today die Australian; which would be alarming if there was any threat in it. He’s not threatening; he sounds like he’s praying as he says it again; he’s shaking, beyond terrified. Can’t hear him above the gunning now anyway and I yell at him to write it down; at least I’ll have a souvenir of this moment if I ever get out of here. He takes out a little pocket book and pencil, scribbles it down, tears off the page, then leans over and shines his torch on it for me. I read it, but I’m not sure I’ve got it right. I stick the paper in my top pocket, in with Francine and my compass. He says it a few more times, louder, above the artillery, to the artillery.

  ‘Shush,’ I tell him: ‘Shut up. Schnautze!’He’ll draw attention to us, and I’m happy here with my mates Stratho and Johan, thank you. He gets the point, and now I think I’ve worked out what he was saying: Heute muss ich sterben und ich will von einem Australier umgebracht werden. He thinks he’s going to die today, and he wants to be killed by an Australian. Well, it won’t be me who kills him, and not just because I couldn’t hold a rifle let alone pull a trigger at the minute even if you asked me nicely.

  So we just sit here for ten million years, hour after hour, as the shelling goes on and on and on. Oh Jesus. Jesus. I’m waiting for one to hit us, listening to the whistling as they come close, trying to guess where the next one will land and when this hole will swallow us. And I think I might be praying too. They reckon your life’s supposed to flash before your eyes at times like these, but apart from apologising endlessly to Francine, which I’ve been doing for the last three weeks anyway, all I see in my mind is Pete, my big brother, saying: ‘Don’t sook now, save it for Mum — do a good job and you might get the day off school tomorrow.’ I was about ten, and I’d scraped half the skin off the palm of my hand, falling back into a dry creek bed, when he saw me, on his way home from work. I think that sort of memory is called wishful thinking. Did my best: but no chance Mum was going to let me off school: ‘Glückskind — nichts gebrochen.’ Well, Mum, the arm’s fairly well gebrochen now.

  Eventually, we’re not dead and the rampage above us settles right down, exhausted, and I say to Johan: ‘You want to come with me? Kommst mit mir …?’ May as well make a run for it now.

  ‘Ja.’ He gets up. I think he knows what I’m asking him: does he want to stay here and be killed by an Australian or get packed off to prison camp? I hope that doesn’t mean the same thing; maybe he doesn’t care.

  ‘Give me — geben…’ Can’t think of the word for rifle, never came up in conversation with Mum, so I point.

  ‘Ah — Waff en,’ he says and he hands over the lot, even his frigging knife.

  There’s hardly anything of him he’s so skinny, but he throws Stratho over his shoulder and takes him with us. I’m crawling up the slope of the hole and he says, like the kid he is: ‘Das muss dir echt weh tun. Echt schlimm, ja?’ and reaches back to pull me to the top. I want to cry; I am hurting. Seriously, for the whole bloody lot. He can’t be more than fifteen.

  When we hop down into the trench, who should be there but Tommy Major Nobody. Good: let the Brits have Fritz Johan; they won’t kill him — they might even give him a cup of tea if he calls them sir. I see clearly now that Tommy major’s younger than me too; looks as though he’s only just started shaving, but then a lot of Brits look like that, don’t they. I say, dumping the weaponry at his feet: ‘Fritz is yours, but you can give James Strathlyn to the Ambulance.’ And you’d better fucking organise it, you safe-and-sound fucking major fucking major piece of shit, or I’m going to come back and kill you myself. With something blunt in my left hand. Not sure if I actually said that last bit or not.

  Tommy wants to ask me questions; I definitely tell him to fuck right off, tell him to speak to Duncan if he has a problem with anything. Johan’s dropped to his knees now, with relief, I think, and I say; ‘Auf Wiedersehen.’ I’ve had enough of this, I realise, finally. It’s all over for me. I’m taking my dishonourable discharge and going home, when they let me out of prison. They won’t shoot me for refusal; no one in the AIF has been shot for being a goose or a coward; in fact, never heard of anyone having been shot by AIF court martial ever. They’ll just lock me up with all the others that are having problems with their behaviour. I’ve heard there are quite a few; more Australians than any other type of ally in military prison: we do everything in a big way.

  It’s just after 0300 hours, my favourite time of day, and I haven’t done anything I was supposed to be doing tonight, so I start wandering off through the trenches back to the road, back to the camp. I’m so out of my mind that I don’t think to hand myself in to the Ambulance and get my arm seen to, have a nice rest in dock for a few weeks or several, care of my own stupidity. It looks like it’s been put on backwards, but there’s no blood, not a scratch on me, and it’s not hurting any more, so I don’t care. Duncan was right: I don’t panic for anything on the job, don’t miss a fucking duckboard, I know so clearly where I’m going, but I am definitely insane. Saublöd. It’s not shellshock; I’m not shaking, not now; it’s just me. Broken in half, mission complete. I couldn’t hold one full thought in my head right now if my life depended on it. It occurs to me that my life probably does depend on it, and I have a laugh at myself as I hit the road.

  It’s just on dawn when Duncan catches up to me, as I’m nearing Albert. I can hear him yelling, ‘Ackerman! Ackerman!’ as in stop this minute you idiot, fifty or sixty yards behind me. But he can talk to me when I sit down again, when I get to the huts in camp. Got to get my kit, my letters from France are in there, and I’m cold, I need her jumper, so I’m ready for when they take me to the lockup. I’m not stopping here. Besides, you never know who’s lurking around Albert; it’s not a good place to stop. So I’m not stopping. Not for anything.

  But I am apparently.

  I can hear it coming under the buzz of the aeroplanes. The whistle sails through the air. I stop, but I am that confused I don’t take cover. I just stand there as it hits the ground in front of me. Not exactly, but near enough is good enough to do the job.

  FOUR

  AUGUST 1916–DECEMBER 1917

  DANIEL

  ‘Just keep quiet and be still, will you,’ Duncan is saying. He’s pulled me into the ditch and is trying to stop the bleeding with the towel from his pack. I’m not mad any more but I’m not cooperating either. I can hear France screaming inside my head, like she did that night her father died, and I am matching her for breath and volume. I started up as soon as I saw the size of the hole in me and kept going as Duncan started pulling out the khaki and pouring iodine in it, pushing the inside of me ba
ck down. Even though we’ve all seen something like this before, it’s a bit different when you’re looking at your own; there are some things about the way you’re made that you really don’t want to know. I wish I didn’t know, too, that a hole like this means you bleed to death fairly quickly or die of shock before anyone can do anything for you. I’m not keen on either of these, but I shut up now; try to: Dunc looks like he knows what he’s doing, and he’s just doing it anyway.

  He’s already sent off for me to be collected, and now he’s shoving a piece of wood between my legs, looks like a bit of window frame, and he’s tying them together with a length of rope. Always hated carrying rope in my pack: it’s heavy and never long enough to be useful for anything. Dunc’s found a use for it, though: an extremely painful one. Then he picks up my arm, says ‘For God’s sake, Ackerman,’ strapping it to my side with my belt and I don’t know what pain is any more. It’s a whole new world in itself. Special one, just for me.

  Dunc says, ‘I’ll speak to you later,’ and the last thing I see as I’m carried off is Madonna and her baby, still hanging on over the road. I want to know if I have a son or a daughter. I’m not going to die. Not like this. France is just blinking at me now, and I’d very much like to pass out.

  The last thing I hear is Dunc yelling out: ‘Stop.’ A motor turning over. An argument. And I’m on the back of a lorry. An empty ammo truck, I think. At the first jolt I would start screaming again if I could understand anything.

  FRANCINE

  Postman comes. My old friend Mr Symes delivers it personally. At first I think they’ve made a mistake because it says Sgt D Ackerman. Sgt is a sergeant. They’ve got the wrong man. But they don’t, I know. And even though I know, it still takes a small eternity to believe it.