The Green Mill Murder by Kerry Greenwood

getting yer head blown off. But we died, my word we did. The dead lay between the lines, and swelled up in the heat, and stank. After a month the slightest scratch turned septic. And the big guns firing High Explosive, they never stopped, us or them. After a while you could tell what gun was firing by the sound. Them Turks could fight, too. “Allah!” they’d yell, and we’d scream, “Said baksheesh!” or, “Eggs-acook!” like the wog traders said in Cairo, or, “Australia will be there!” And they’d reply, “Australia finish!” and we’d yell, “Diggers!” They were all right. They was caught in the same trap as us. Couple of times we organised truces to bury the bodies. And we’d swap, sometimes, our rum for that arak what tastes like petrol.’
    ‘Did you see Simpson and his donkey?’ asked Dot. Bert smiled.
    ‘Yair. Murph and his Donk. Seen him walk the length of Hellfire Gully, down the sap, with a man on the donkey and another leaning on him. And Jacko Turk had two machine-guns fixed to fire the length of that gully, and the big guns was watering the ground with H.E. He copped it, though. Later. Most of us copped it.’
    ‘Where did you meet Cec?’ asked Phryne.
    ‘Lone Pine,’ said Cec. ‘That’s what Bert means about hell. Lots of blokes in Flanders whinged about the mud, said that hell was mud, deep enough to drown in. But hell ain’t wet. Hell’s a little tiny boiling-hot firing possy on a hill, where the grease from dead men drips on your head and you stink, and you scratch your skin off with lice, and big brown maggots drop in your face. I dreamed about them maggots for years. You couldn’t eat because the blowies rushed into yer mouth as soon as you opened it. By then Bert’s blokes was all gone, and there was only three men left in my company; we were palling up. I got sent up to Lone Pine and the first thing I saw was Bert’s face, peering up over the edge, and a Turk sniper about to get him, so I shoved him down, and we was mates.’
    Cec, unaccustomed to long speech, took a gulp of pastis.
    ‘You got the sniper, too,’ added Bert. ‘Through his loophole. A bonzer shot. We’d sit up there for two days, breathing in that stench, and wishing we hadn’t decided to be soldiers. Oh, dear Bill, what a bastard it was.’
    ‘How did you get out?’ asked Phryne. Bert looked indignant.
    ‘Cec and me was originals. They let us go last, when they gave it up as a bad job. We set up the water-fired rifles and a few nice surprises for the first Turk that got into our trench. It was awful, leaving. Leaving all our mates behind, running like yeller dogs. I was walking around, setting up these rifles, and trying to explain to the mates we was abandoning that we wasn’t running away, we was under orders. They tell me that it took two days before Johnny Turk dared to advance. We’da had him stonkered, if we’d started in time,’ said Bert. ‘They took us off to Cairo again—Jeez, I hate Cairo!—on a nice hospital ship, with sheets and blankets. Cec had enteric, and I had a bit of shrapnel in me knee, which had swelled up like billy-oh. We was pretty sorry for ourselves. But the navy was bonzer. They sat us on deck and scrubbed us raw with sea-water soap, and I never felt so clean. Then they gave us new clothes and stew with meat in and the first orange I’d seen since I left Melbourne. Then a nice nurse led me to a clean bed and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Eh, Cec?’
    ‘I wasn’t looking at the nurse,’ said Cec, grinning, ‘I was looking at the food. Cocoa so thick you could stand a spoon in it. Bread with real butter. Tea with milk. And the chats had gone. I was patterned all over with red dots from louse-bites.’
    ‘Yair, they call them the Glories of War,’ said Bert. ‘So, we arrived in Cairo wearing badges of rank and blankets, and they put us in hospital again. But that ain’t where your missing man got his shell-shock, not if he was with us. We were