Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 12, Issue 2 Read online

  Review of Australian Fiction

  Volume Twelve: Issue Two

  Zutiste, Inc.

  Review of Australian Fiction Copyright © 2014 by Authors.

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  Percy’s War Jason Fischer

  Afterparty J.J. Irwin

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “Percy’s War” Copyright © 2014 by Jason Fischer

  “Afterparty” Copyright © 2014 by J.J. Irwin

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  Percy’s War

  Jason Fischer

  The troopship crawled across the ocean, belching steam and smoke. Men slept in the hold, damp and listless, just existing. Between the toilet buckets and the cramped quarters, measles and typhoid swept through the soldiers.

  Percy Altschwager was one of the last to fall sick. He played cards with the other new recruits, until no one in the hold even had the strength to sit upright. His headaches gave way to a blood nose, and he felt his pulse growing slower.

  Next week he would get the fever, and shit pea soup into a bucket day and night. He would either recover, or die on the SS Port Darwin. There’d been two burials at sea in the last week, and the thought of sliding into the ocean in a canvas bag gave Percy the chills.

  He was nowhere near the war, but death had already brushed back his hair, whispered in his ear. You are mine, the reaper said in a particularly vivid dream. Maybe not today, maybe not in a month, but you have heard me, and now we are friends.

  Other dreams came as he groaned and sweated in the dark, pitching from side to side in the rough seas. He was on the farm back home, shooting rabbits, except the rabbits were now other men, and they came for him with bayonets fixed, and then his gun jammed, then it wasn’t a gun at all, simply a hoe, and then the enemy was upon him. Newspaper caricatures of the Hun, complete with pointed pickelhaube, hands dripping with blood.

  Other times he had an awful kind of waking dream, where the soldiers around him rose up and murdered him in the hold, only for him to wake fully and find it false.

  As the fever gripped him fully, he saw monsters, creeping shadows that had the faces of beasts. In his dream logic he knew that they came for toes and fingers, and he began keeping cigarettes in his toes to ward them away. Some wag stole them as he raved and slept, which he took as proof that the hallucinations were true.

  Worse was the dream where his wife Florence stood in the doorway, calling out his name. Percy cried out that yes, he was here, but she called him a liar, wanted to know where the real Percy was. ‘You must come home,’ she insisted. He denied that he’d enlisted to get away from her and the baby in her arms. Little Dorothy cried and cried and Percy wailed at this dream most of all.

  In a lucid moment, he took this as an omen that he would not be coming home; that he was never to see his young family again.

  As the ship boomed and shook under the onslaught of a fierce storm, he knew with all certainty that a giant was out there, beating the hull in, and he screamed it till he was hoarse.

  Then, the fever broke. He was as weak as a newborn foal, unable to stand, bones aching, but he was alive.

  ‘I am a dead man,’ one of his neighbours moaned in the gloom. ‘Won’t be nothing left of me for the Hun to shoot at.’

  ‘The Hun’s right next to you,’ someone else said. Percy marked the man as Deegan, a stablehand from Melbourne. He was the owner of a drooping handlebar moustache and more wit than tact. ‘That bloody boxhead’s signed up to fight all the other boxheads.’

  ‘I am Australian,’ Percy said, coughing. The other soldiers jeered him, some good-naturedly. If he’d been a Turk, there would have been more trouble. Gallipoli was fresh in everybody’s minds, as was the action in Palestine.

  Some of the German settlers enlisted under assumed names, but Percy refused to. His brother Bernie was raging through France with the 10th Battalion as an Altschwager, locking bayonets with the Bosche. There were others who kept openly German names on the SS Port Darwin, including a man named Blucher, dour but free with his cigarettes. Percy became friendly with a Russian named Anatoly Fyodorov, an émigré out of Sydney.

  The Altschwagers thought of themselves more as Prussian than German, but a surname full of harsh sounds was a millstone these days.

  Percy’s fever was beginning to break as the ship reached the Dead Sea. He managed to reach the deck, and clutched the rails, shivering as he looked on the burnt desolation of Egypt. He helped the crew with what odd jobs he could manage, as half of them were in their bunks now, sweating and leaking from both ends.

  Flying the British maritime ensign, the SS Port Darwin pushed past the queue of merchant ships and repurposed cruise liners. They did not stop in Port Suez, but rumbled through the straight cut of the canal, steam blaring and whistle tooting defiantly.

  The canal was a blue vein pushing through a desert. Sand and alkali flats stretched from water to horizon, blindingly white to Percy’s eyes after so long in the dank hold.

  Rude huts dotted the landscape, and a boy chased a handful of goats with a stick. There were ruins here and there, but nothing so noble as the Pyramids he’d seen drawings of. What remained were faceless shapes, the odd mark on a stone mostly swallowed by sand. The scars of housing cut into rock faces, sometimes still occupied by the locals. Nothing was left worth the bother of digging up and looting.

  He’d never seen a more desolate place, and knew that any prayers for safety and succour would go unanswered here. If God had ever been here, he’d turned his back on this land a long time ago.

  The steamship stopped at Ismailia, the halfway point of the canal. Most of the soldiers were able to walk off the boat, holding each other up and coughing, but some of the men had to be stretchered down the ramp. Percy volunteered for stretcher duty, and helped haul a man stricken by the measles.

  ‘Too bright,’ the man moaned, and Percy called for a wet rag to put over the man’s eyes. Every inch of the man’s skin was covered in spots, and the man hacked away, a deep rattling cough. He smelt awful, and had the stink of sour shit, and beneath that the deeper smell of a man in poor health.

  The ragged line of men and stretchers passed through the busy township. The locals watched them pass, huddled in doorways and leaning out of windows. Percy felt shocked as he saw the white eyes and teeth buried in dark faces, chattering in their babel tongue as they drew back on hookahs, playing cards and dominoes and sipping on tiny cups of pitch-black coffee.

  He’d seen the black fellas back home, and the odd Chinaman, but these people seemed truly alien to Percy. The script on their shop signs curled and defied reading. He felt the buried hostility of the locals as the Australian soldiers passed through their bazaar, a line of hacking men winding through the mules and camels and the odd motor car.

  It was a cacophony of screaming hawkers, of fruit and goods he couldn’t even describe. Haunches of meat swung from hooks, crawling with flies, and children ran alongside the line of soldiers, hands out as they begged for coins and sweets in French and English.

  These people had seen Caesar and the Greeks come and go, and Napoleon was a fading memory. Percy knew that one day, the ancient sands would scour away the light touch the British had on this land. Egypt felt like a place for forgetting, where time itself was the millstone grinding away at life and memory. He remembered the feeling of death on the ship, and knew that the reaper kept a very fine house in this land.

  The army containment camp was well out of Ismailia, on the shores of Lake Timsah. Camp Moascar was a white city, with row upon row of white tents reflecting the sunlight. Sun-bronzed men rod
e beautiful horses along the beach, and the crackle of rifles at a target range peppered the background hum of the crowded camp.

  It must have been 110 degrees in the shade, and Percy found it hard to fix on the line between the sand and the colourless sky. He’d laboured in wheat fields and worked outdoors for most of his life, but he’d never faced a sun so oppressive, so determined to roast him alive.

  ‘So this is home now,’ said Fyodorov, who huffed away on the other end of the stretcher. Percy nodded at the Russian, and helped him deposit the sick man at a clapboard infirmary.

  He found out later that the man with measles died during the night. Percy imagined what it must have been like to choke on your own phlegm, and in a dark corner of his mind, he wondered if he should envy the man for the blessing of a peaceful death.

  On paper Percy was in the 54th General Service Reinforcements. This body was carved apart by his superior officers, and cannibalised into units found wanting of men. A leather-throated sergeant chivvied Percy and the other new recruits through a series of exercises, rating their abilities.

  Running through the sand in full kit, Percy slid to a halt just before a rope, wrestling with the bolt on his big Lee-Enfield rifle. The .303 thundered again and again, and he pipped the target more often than not.

  Next he ran up to a row of sandbags, fixing bayonets on the run. Some wag had painted ‘KISS THE KAISER’ on one, complete with a scowling caricature of Kaiser Wilhelm. Percy made for that one, and found himself stabbing the sandbag next to Fyodorov. Deegan reached the bags a moment later, and laughed at the vigour with which Percy applied his bayonet to the cartoon face.

  After ten thrusts with the bayonet, it was time to run up to a picket line of horses. He realised he was coming third out of the large group of soldiers, and smiled, thrilled at the speed he was making. Percy struggled into his rifle sling while he was still moving, and swung up and into the nearest saddle. He’d picked a mean-looking brute, a white stallion with a patchy coat and wild eyes. Before he could get both feet in the stirrups, the big horse pigrooted, feet in all directions as he tried to shake Percy loose.

  ‘Settle down, ya mad bugger!’ Percy yelled, white-faced as he tried to stay on the horse’s back. Eventually he fought the horse into some measure of control, and raced for the finish line, now several lengths behind the other riders. The horse was frothing and panting by the time Percy reached the end, dead last.

  ‘Useless bloody nag!’ Percy scowled, dismounting to the sarcastic applause of his friends. The horse calmed down, and let Percy pat his neck and eventually his nose. His wild eyes grew calm.

  ‘Easy lad. We’re alright now.’

  In that time, the horse had moved his head up, slowly and calmly. Nuzzling, as if hoping for a sugar cube. Even as Percy was congratulating himself at calming the beast, the stallion lunged with one quick motion and nipped his fingers. He drew blood, and Percy hopped away, swearing and clutching at the torn skin.

  ‘Look out, he’s got a taste for Germans,’ Deegan joked. ‘Best horse in Egypt, that.’

  To Percy’s surprise he was reassigned to the Light Horse, and his heart thrilled. After the charge of Beersheba, the Australian Light Horse were heroes, legends to match the Anzacs at Gallipoli.

  I cannot wait to tell Bernie! he exulted, and wondered if his brother was well. He’d taken a round in France last year, but last he’d heard Bernie had recovered and was back at the front. Percy kept all of his brother’s letters, and had thrilled over his exploits. It hadn’t been much for him to enlist at nineteen, and leave behind his young bride and child, the grind of labour work, the normal worries of life.

  He had run away to war, for one last adventure.

  While they were mustering up with the rest of the 1st Light Horse, a British lieutenant rounded up Percy, Deegan, Fyodorov, and another man, a beanpole lad with a perpetual drip to his nose. He quietly introduced himself as Lawrie, an apprentice carpenter from Auckland.

  ‘You men, come with me,’ the lieutenant said. ‘You’re in Machine Gun Squadron.’

  The men looked at each other. ‘But we’re in 1st Light Horse, sir,’ Fyodorov said.

  ‘You now have a horse and a machine gun, private,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Fall in.’

  They spent days training with the gun, an enormous water-cooled Maxim. Their job was to place a forward machine-gun nest when needed, leading extra horses laden down with the gun and boxes of ammunition. Percy thought that the gun was squat and ugly, the thunderous bastard of a cannon and a rifle.

  The fire-team rotated between gunner and reloader, feeding belt after belt of bullets through the hungry gun. The other two positions were as spotter and range finder, well clear of the weapon. There was every chance that enemy artillery would fall on them the moment they opened up. Apart from the few sandbags they brought along and whatever natural cover was available, Percy knew they’d be terribly exposed on the field.

  So close to the capture of Jerusalem, it was immediately suspicious that there were so many empty machine gun crews. He wondered why Command would trust a new crew with such a powerful weapon, and it didn’t take long for him to puzzle out the answer.

  They were expendable.

  Percy took his turn behind the gun, and was awed at the destruction at his fingertips. It was capable of 600 rounds every minute, and it bucked in his hands, smashing the distant wooden targets into splinters. Short bursts, he remembered, watching the steam rising from the barrel. It would be too easy to give in to the power of the weapon, to sweep it across the landscape, but the barrel would overheat, melt if he went for long enough.

  His ears ringing from the cacophony, Percy thought back to a time he’d worked with his father during harvest, threshing wheat with the new steam-driven machine. One of the workers lost his arm to the spinning belt, had it plucked out of his shoulder socket in the blink of an eye. He thought that had been pure power, terrifying when witnessed, but as the brass shells spat out and collected around his feet, Percy knew better.

  He’d never fired on a man in anger, but the thought of unleashing that awful gun on the enemy gave him a dark little chill. He hoped that Bernie would be proud of him when he saw action, when he sent dozens, no, hundreds of Turks up to whatever passed for their paradise.

  When they’d been dismissed, Percy and the crew made their way back to the tents they’d claimed in the 1st Light Horse section. A nearby group had a lamb on a spit, and called them over to join in. Flasks of grog did the quiet rounds, and soon the soldiers were merry.

  ‘Bought the lamb off a Bedouin,’ their drunken host proclaimed. ‘A celebration like this deserves better than bully beef and hard tack.’

  ‘Celebration?’ Fyodorov asked.

  ‘Our lads have broken through the Hindenburg Line,’ the man said. ‘Beginning of the end. Kaiser’s finally been licked.’

  ‘Typical. Bloody Bosche gives up as soon as I get here,’ Deegan said. ‘Hope I pip some Turks and boxheads before they slink away.’

  ‘The war’s as good as over. You and I will be home by Christmas, mark my words.’

  Percy clenched his fists tight, and at that moment his jaw could have cracked a walnut. He’d arrived in time to see the curtain fall, and no more. The flask passed into his hands, and he took a sullen swig, and then another.

  For days the camp had been like a kicked anthill. The train brought reinforcements, cars full of men and horses from Cairo. Every day, more munitions and supplies arrived, stacked into teetering piles under armed guard.

  A squadron of aeroplanes arrived from France, wooden bumblebees that terrified the horses and kicked up all the dust on the makeshift airfield.

  The quartermaster had assigned a random handful of horses to their machine gun crew, and with some horror Percy recognised the monster that had chewed his hand bloody. He decided the beast wasn’t fit to ride, but would do for carting the enormous Maxim gun around on the battlefield.

  ‘I’ll call you Murdoch,’ he said, thinki
ng of a mad Scotsman who lived the next valley over back at home. The man was known to take a swing at anyone who looked at him queerly, and Percy had never seen the man sober in all of his nineteen years. Murdoch the man was wild and furious, and this name fitted the horse well.

  The sergeant was drilling 1st Machine Gun Squadron relentlessly. All twelve machine gun teams took off at the sound of his whistle, horses at a quick trot as they raced to their positions.

  ‘What do you think is happening?’ Fyodorov asked Percy, as they assembled the Maxim for the tenth time that day.

  ‘I’ve heard we’re going in to help with the mopping up in Palestine,’ Percy said, attaching a water canister to the cooling system on the gun barrel. ‘Then, we’re pushing through to Syria.’

  ‘You don’t have to look so happy about it,’ young Lawrie said, wiping his drippy nose on his sleeve. ‘I thought we were going home.’

  ‘None of us are ever going home,’ Deegan said. ‘We’ll go to the next valley, and then the next town on, and next thing you know we’ll be in China, soaking our toes in the ocean because we’ve run out of people to shoot at.’

  ‘Fire!’ their sergeant roared, and there was no more talking, only the deafening timpani of the gun. Deegan laughed, hosing the targets down with a neat stitch of bullets. Then, the next whistle came, and it was time to pack up the gun, barrel still warm. Murdoch fussed as the weight settled on his back, eventually taking a carrot from Percy with sly eyes.

  ‘Bite me at your peril, beast,’ he said, and the horse feigned innocence.

  Next whistle, and the next, and then another to start the whole process again. Hours later Percy slid into his bedroll, exhausted and asleep almost instantly.

  A mosquito danced around his face and neck that night, drinking deeply. Percy scratched away at the itch and did not even wake.