Ardnish Was Home Read online

  *

  Louise hates Doctor Sheridan, and therefore so do I. Every time he comes to the tent there is tension; she lets nothing slip and he knows it.

  She challenges him constantly. ‘And where did you train? Did you know Matron Murray at St Bart’s? Who was there? What do you think about this man’s fever?’

  He gets his revenge, I suspect, by prodding and poking me a lot more harshly than he needs to. Being treated by him is like being wounded all over again, rather than the silky healing caress of Louise.

  I can tell he wants to get away from us as quickly as possible, so thankfully his visits are short. Lots of other tents to visit, he exclaims as he departs.

  Louise is from Wales, and over time I learn about her family: her father’s hell in the coal mines and how it is her dream to be a farmer’s wife.

  I determine there and then that I will be that farmer if I am to survive – although making a living in the village is barely possible. So I tell her I will go home to be a fisherman and have my own boat, or else be a ghillie for the Astley-Nicholsons at Arisaig House. We don’t discuss the likelihood of my making it back alive at all.

  Every day, one of the nurses, usually Louise, takes off my bandage and cleans my eyes with some vinegar. It stings like hell, as it involves opening my eyelids. Today, I think for the first time that maybe I can see light with my right eye, but my eyelids don’t want to stay open and I cast the thought from my mind. The doctors tell me nothing, though it’s clear that my shoulder is well on the mend. I had big blisters on my face from the scalding water, but they have hardened and the scabs are coming off. Not a pretty sight, I know.

  Although I talk to Louise about fishing or being a ghillie, we both know that with my ruined eyesight there is little chance of either. I take some comfort in thinking I could teach the pipes, like my father, and there should be an invalid pension, too.

  Louise has a dog at home, which she loves. She hopes her little brother is looking after it. It’s a sheepdog called Daffie, which she rescued when it was the size of half a pound of butter. The neighbours had despaired of finding a taker for it, and the puppy would have been drowned had Louise not claimed him for her own.

  *

  ‘It’s getting light,’ Louise says. ‘I have to get things ready for breakfast. I hope there’s enough food for all the men. We need supplies soon.’

  Thinking of her, I drift off into a fitful sleep. What do people mean when they talk about falling in love? Is it constant thought about the girl, the wish to touch her all the time, the feeling of abandonment when they move on, or you feel you are being ignored? It’s not about marriage or children; it’s more immediate and personal than that. It’s deep inside. It’s raw and omnipresent.

  Thinking about Louise drowns out the pain. All my contact with her is soothing, caring, considerate. I wonder what she thinks of me. She makes me feel special – would she do all that she does for me if I wasn’t special? The question tortures my every waking hour.

  It is a problem: the nurses have had it drummed into them that getting emotionally attached to a patient is a disaster. He may be married, or he will get better and leave. Or even worse, he will die. In my case, I’m an unattractive redhead with two very serious injuries. I may not die now, but I will be disabled for life. Not the sort of person who would win her heart.

  Nevertheless, I yearn to tell her that she is the one for me and that we will run off together, that the hours are painful without her, and that when I sense her pass by without stopping, my heart lurches. I want her to sit beside me and tell me more of her life. But if she shows me any affection, I’m scared that my feelings will all spill out and everything will be ruined, that she will be posted elsewhere.

  ‘Bottle it up,’ I tell myself again and again. ‘Say nothing.’

  I have fallen in love with her though, there is no doubt of that.

  *

  Can it only be four months ago that we embarked? It had gone from summer in England to the heat of Egypt to the freezing wet winter of Turkey. The Lovat Scouts saw 1,200 of the best Highland men – young, eager, the pick of their villages – now reduced to half that number. The ones I come across in the tent are often about to die. They come from Applecross and Beauly, from Uist to Skye. Their communities will suffer greatly by the wiping out of their young men. The cities are cushioned – incomers will soon fill the houses or take the jobs. But in the Highlands, like my own Ardnish, the death of only two or three young men would result in a huge area becoming unpopulated within a generation.

  The war in Gallipoli had been going badly. General Hamilton wanted more troops. We had been expecting to go to the Western Front, but we all agreed that Turkey sounded better. In early August 1915, two regiments of us Lovat Scouts were loaded onto a ship called RMS Andania at Devonport.

  The mood amongst the men was high. We enjoyed the summer sun on deck, playing cards, eating well and enduring the endless exercises the sergeants put us through. Three weeks later, we were in Malta for refuelling and to take on supplies, when we discovered that the ship alongside had many injured from the Scottish Horse regiment. Several of our men went across and talked to them. Our boys were shocked by what they heard: pointless attack after pointless attack trying to gain precious ground, with Turkish machine-gunners placed at the top of the hills with unrestricted views down onto our position. Of the 700 in the regiment, two thirds would get killed or injured in a single push. And the lack of water was critical. These men had been fighting in 100 degrees with no clean water; they said that while the injured were lying on the beach, waiting to be collected, they would go across to the water pipes from the ships and pierce them with their knives just to get a drop. These stories sobered us up a bit.

  One day the Scottish Horse called for some piping, so myself and another went on deck and played a few jigs and reels to cheer everyone up. It clearly didn’t get everyone’s approval – one English officer told us to shut up or he’d put us in chains!

  From there we travelled to Alexandria in Egypt where we stayed for a week. This included a forced march for a day and a night to ‘give the boys some exercise’. We also had some shore leave, and Sandy, myself and three others from our platoon found some bars and a nightclub to enjoy. It was bewildering and exciting for me. There were men from all over the world – in turbans and Aussie hats, Foreign Office men in crisp white shorts, Africans and Indians, officers and privates – jostling at the bar, with the good-natured shrieks and shouts of soldiers on a night out. Voluptuous women would sit on our knee, encouraging us to smoke a hookah and buy them a drink, only to float off the minute they had it in their hand. We would dance until long after daybreak and then stagger back to our lines, giggling at everything and anything.

  In Egypt we had unloaded our ponies, shaggy Highland beasts more used to the cold moorland of Wester Ross than the dry heat of an Egyptian summer. When we signed up for the regiment, we were paid more if we bought our own mounts with us – many of them had been carrying the Scouts’ children on their backs just a few months before.

  Now loaded onto two smaller ships, the SS Sarnia and SS Abasseieh, we set off again and, after a brief stop on the Greek island of Lemnos, we finally arrived off Gallipoli on 26 September. The sight as we arrived was extraordinary: dozens of ships were at anchor. The hospital ships, the Gloucester Castle and the Essequibo, were lit up with bulbs and had red crosses painted on their sides. Our battleships were pounding the hills, and little boats were scurrying back and forth, taking ammunition and food onto the beach and returning with injured men.

  We were moored opposite Suvla Bay, the northerly point of the invasion. The Australians and New Zealanders were at the southerly tip fifteen miles away, with other troops spread in between. Most of our boys stood watching on the deck as we steamed in, a knot of fear in even the bravest man’s stomach.

  We sat at anchor for half a day, waiting for the order to disembark, and as darkness fell we were loaded into covered boats called �
��beetles’ to take us onshore. The beetles were new. When the landings first took place months ago, the men sat exposed in open lighters, offering the Turks the opportunity to direct their fire straight into the boats as they landed on the beach. In many cases, not a single man made it onto the sand alive, and the boats would float back and forth full of rotting corpses in the heat of the summer.

  *

  There is some excitement in the tent. A hospital ship has returned from Malta and casualties are being chosen to go out to it. The most seriously injured take priority.

  Louise comes along. ‘We’re putting some injured on the ship, DP, but I’m afraid it won’t include you. I’m so sorry.’

  An officer is directing stretcher bearers. ‘Take him . . . and him. Be careful with him. He’s got a broken back.’

  Within a day, the tent is full again.

  *

  The first week after we landed we were on fatigues, taking water bowsers up to the front, putting up tents, carrying stores and so on. There was one huge advantage: we could swim in the sea. Everyone did and without a stitch of clothing.

  One sharp-witted lad shouted, ‘Sir, if we get a mirror we can reflect the glare off Gillies and blind the Turks!’ True enough, there can be few whiter people than a red-haired Highland lad on his first trip to a foreign country. I blushed, only adding to the effect.

  Colonel Willie Macdonald was our Commanding Officer, and I was his batman and piper. He set up a crack company of snipers to which I was seconded.

  Ever since I’d signed up I’d noticed that the other regiments think us odd, travelling as we do on Highland ponies, telescopes around our shoulders. And there’s the curious, familiar relationship between us and our officers, which is in stark contrast to the extremely formal relationship of the officers and guardsmen of the English regiments.

  Like the rest of our officers, Colonel Willie is one of the lairds, and is the owner of the Long John whisky distilleries in Fort William. He and I get along famously, and he is always keen to know how my father is faring. Although I spent almost two years with old Tearlach Maclean on Canna distilling illegal whisky I never told the Colonel about it, but he knows I know a lot about whisky.

  He was at Peanmeanach when I got back from Canna a year or more ago; there for some fishing with his brother. He’d arrived while my father and I were out, and was having tea with my mother. The table was covered in drawings of a spirit receiver that Tearlach was keen to have. He raised his eyebrow at me when I came in and scrambled to collect the papers together, blushing the same red as my hair.

  Us snipers would, on occasion, lie in some scrub for days on end, often within yards of the enemy, waiting to get a shot at an important officer. Being stalkers, which most of the Scouts were, we had a real familiarity with a rifle and a 250-yard shot was quite feasible, as my friend Sandy was to demonstrate before too long.

  From early October the regiment was moved into the forward trenches. The men we replaced looked haggard and exhausted. Many were wounded. Despite this, there was a bit of banter and some helpful words as we moved into their positions: ‘Don’t put your head past here, and don’t go further along than that bush . . .’

  They were full of good advice. In the three weeks that they had been here there had been a major push by our troops to take the hilltops, yet despite huge losses on each side, not an inch of ground had been gained and the men were in a desperate state.

  Within a week we, too, were in a similarly bad way. The rotten food, the water (when there was any) that tasted of decaying meat, and the relentless spells of heavy freezing rain all took their toll. Bodies were everywhere: our own and the Turks. Many were just out of reach, and an attempt to reach them and take them off for a burial would result in a shot being fired. It was just far too dangerous.

  There had been a couple of armistices over the summer where troops from both sides dug communal pits and exchanged cigarettes with the enemy. The Turks often burned their dead, causing an even worse stench and making us retch for days. In one trench, a hand stuck out of the bank and men shook it as they passed by. I couldn’t even look at it.

  Many men had severe dysentery. The smell, the excruciating embarrassment and discomfort. Quickly, terrible sores became the norm. A couple of times there was an extraordinary downpour, with inches of rain or snow falling in two hours.

  Our trenches were flooded, and we were pretty sure that the water that poured down the hillside came from evacuated Turkish positions beyond us. There was no medicine that made any difference, and at one stage in early November, seventy per cent of our troops had to be pulled off the front line. Rations were infrequent and pretty dire.

  Sandy and I were fine, however; we gobbled down any food that came our way. Sandy would chuckle, ‘It’s just like my mother’s cooking. If you can survive hers, then you can survive anything.’

  There was the odd laugh, as often occurs in times of crisis. Captain Kenny Macdonald from Skye was the duty medical officer, and as the number 9 pill for diarrhoea had long since run out, he would issue numbers 7 and 2, or 5 and 4 instead.

  I recall an English soldier saying, with admiration in his voice, ‘If there were any soldiers in the world who could enjoy the terrible rain and freezing cold, it would be the Lovat Scouts.’ It was a strange comfort.

  One night a Turkish patrol blundered into our line by mistake and was captured. I never saw them myself, but apparently they, too, were in an awful state. They were sent down to an enclosure on the beach for questioning. A plan had been hatched that the prisoners would be well treated and allowed to escape in the hope that they would go back and encourage others to surrender. And so a Turkish work party was sent off, unguarded, to collect firewood, but at the end of the day they dutifully returned, laden with mountains of wood. They knew where they were better off. We heard that a lot of prisoners on both sides had been shot as soon as they were captured at the early stage of the campaign.

  The battle was really about sniping, with sharpshooters from both sides trying to take each other out. Sometimes, even in the relative safety of a trench, a couple of our men would be shot and it would take several days to identify where the Turkish sniper was or, more usually, where he had been.

  The Turkish prisoners told us about one of their snipers, who was nicknamed ‘Percy’ for some forgotten reason, who had a tremendous hit rate on our men. Because of him, during the month of November we lost many men.

  Angus McKay, an experienced deer stalker from Strathnaver, became obsessed with getting this sniper, and forged a plan. He made himself an entire suit of clothes with grasses stitched in, and darkened his face and hands with creosote he’d got from the store. He then wound a khaki bandage around his head, sprouting grass and twigs. We heard that a sergeant jumped out of his skin when he rested his tea on a knoll, and the knoll moved off.

  McKay headed off alone one night to get into a position that had a clear view over their lines. He took only a wet rag to suck and no food. No mosquito would make him flinch, he told us. We all agreed he must be hardened by the ferocious midges of Helmsdale.

  Anyway, a week passed and he still hadn’t returned. We assumed he must have been captured or shot. But then, one morning, he was back. Terribly skinny, with eyes staring out of a blackened, hollow face. McKay had been lying in a gulley a hundred yards behind our lines, maybe two hundred from the Turks, having identified a bit of brush where he thought a man could hide. He watched and watched that bit of brush, and finally shot Percy, just before the fellow could shoot him. McKay was celebrated up and down the lines. The deciding factor for him, he explained, was that no bird would sit on the branches of the bush – they always veered off at the last moment.

  Apparently, when the campaign began there was very poor medical cover, with only two doctors for the 100,000 British troops. The huge losses meant that many injured were lying covered in blood and sand in rows along the beach in the blistering heat of the summer for days, waiting for attention. When they were
ferried out to the hospital ships they would often not be allowed on as they were full.

  But in the last few months, things got better, when the Queen Alexandra nurses set up tented medical stations on the beaches.

  One day, in the trenches, I was sitting trying to get a nail that was coming through the heel of my boot when one of our planes flew over. It circled a bit and was clearly in trouble; you could hear the engine stuttering. All the Brits were watching, and the Turks, too. As it came in to land on the dried-out salt lake, one of its wheels collapsed and it toppled over. The pilots leaped out and scampered off, which was just as well, as the Turks, just for the hell of it, immediately began to use it for target practice with their artillery. And my God, they were accurate.

  HOME

  Louise is asking me about my boyhood friend, Sandy . . .

  I haven’t said much about him yet. He and I were only a year apart in age and had been brought up side by side in Peanmeanach. We were the only two of our age, his mother Mairi and mine were sound friends, and I can’t remember ever being apart from him. We were twins, in a way.

  His father was away at the fishing for weeks at a time, in Mallaig or Ullapool, following the herring. It was hard work. The boats would be offshore, even throughout the winter, with no shelter from the worst of the weather. They would come in laden with their catch, which would be unloaded onto the shore, where women would gut and salt the fish before stacking them in barrels and sending them off to the cities.

  Sandy and I often played on the beach in front of the house, fetched water from the spring for the old folk in the village, and had a good time together, always outside. Even in the rain Sandy’s mother would chase us out with the word ‘Machashaw!’ Get out of here!

  Three days a week, a teacher would come across from Arisaig and teach us in the smartest building. The school board built it at about the time I was born. Well, the school board paid for it; it was our fathers who built it. It had cut stone, rather than the round field stone that all our croft houses were built from, and a slate roof rather than heather thatch. Two rooms: one of which the teacher lived in, then the school room. There was a privy out the back, with running water. We had nothing so smart at our house.