Ardnish Was Home Episode 9

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 a difference, and at one stage in early November, 70% 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 some 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.

Mistake

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, 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.

Clear view

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.

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 200 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 immediately began to use it for target practice with their artillery.

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 on to 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!

The battle was really about sniping, with sharpshooters from both sides trying to take each other out

Ardnish Was Home is published by Birlinn. The third novel in the series, Ardnish, was published in 2020. www. birlinn.co.uk