Where the Line Breaks Read online

  On the day they found out, he popped a bottle of Veuve in the office, and Em came home tipsy, and she felt it was necessary that I take her out to dinner.

  La Porchetta wasn’t what she had in mind. Take me somewhere nice, she said.

  Somewhere nice had starched white tablecloths and multiple sets of cutlery, diminishing in size on either side of the huge plate they set in front of us – I ate my starter using the lobster fork like an idiot – the food was tiny and expensive, and the waiter was some slick-haired bastard who talked exclusively to Em, like I was invisible.

  55 See Hayden, Unearthing the Unknown Digger.

  56 As identified by Hayden, Unearthing the Unknown Digger, p. 221.

  57 Curtin-Kneeling finally replied to me, three months after I’d outlined my thesis plans to him in a long email. ‘Sorry, Matt,’ he wrote, ‘but I just can’t believe it. It can all be written off as pure coincidence.’ Such a fuckin’ let-down. I’ve had three rums tonight. I emailed Jennifer Hayden, and she said not to listen to him – the proof is in the putting it on paper, she wrote back, which I’m only just getting now. The proof is in the pudding. Y’know she started out in a university library, too? Same university where I completed my bachelor’s and seventy-five-odd years earlier Alan got halfway through his. Pure coincidence? Fuck off. I told Jennifer we should meet up next time she’s in London, but she hasn’t replied.

  I’m writing because I can’t sleep. Had the party for the Prof tonight, in this amazing house up near Hyde Park Corner. I only got home a few hours ago. I was roped into working the coat-check. Weird night. Em seemed happy though. She did an amazing job. I didn’t see her except as a blur of red, running around organising the DJ and caterer and bar staff. I handed my last coat back around half-twelve, and then walked upstairs to see if I could help tidy up. The place was decked out in balloons and ribbons – you’d think he’d won a Nobel Prize or something. Em was in a corner, wobbling on tiptoe on a plastic chair, attempting to untie ribbons. Her peacock feather headdress was dangling away from her hair, looking like I felt.

  What can I do, Em?

  Despite announcing my journey across the room through mountains of crushed plastic cups, empty champagne bottles and littered confetti, I managed to surprise her, and she laughed, drowsy-silly with tiredness, endorphins, alcohol, god-knows-what. She looked down at me, or at somewhere over my shoulder, and shrugged.

  Are you drunk? I said, sounding like my mum.

  Nothing, Matt, you should go home. Her new black heels were hanging by their straps from a chair, her stockinged feet comically small on the plastic chair.

  I thought I was coming back to yours?

  She does this, changes plan throughout the night, keeps you on your toes. Sends you home without a goodnight kiss. I’m used to it. How many times have I told her I loved her spontaneity? It goes both ways.

  Back to yours? I repeated, hearing the beg in my throat.

  It was amazing, Matt. They really, really got into it. She was already turning away from me, reaching up for the knot of ribbon tied out of reach above her head. Like, amazing costumes, and everyone loved the music. Trent was worth every penny.

  The chair wobbled when she stood on tiptoe.

  Trent?

  The DJ.

  She had a long run in her stockings up the back of her thigh. I should have offered to get up on the chair for her, but I was upset about not getting to go home with her. Childish, I know.

  How’s the Prof? I saw him arrive, wearing a tweed tuxedo, which I hadn’t known existed.

  Drunk. Pretty sure he went into the toilets with one of his postgrads an hour ago.

  That’s disgusting.

  That’s what happens.

  I could hear the alcohol on her breath, the way her accent sharpened into caricature after a few vodka-cranberries. When she turned around she was smiling, but as I helped her down from the chair her grip tightened. I turned, and the Prof was standing in the doorway, an electric-blue bottle of alcohol in his right hand.

  Matt. Libation? he yelled across the room in that way drunks do when you’re alone. Em’s eyes shot to mine then away, too quick for me to make out what they wanted, what she was trying to say.

  No thanks, I yelled back. Heard you’ve had a good night?

  Em squeezed my hand, and I couldn’t help smiling.

  You should head home. Cheers awfully for all your help. He slurred his words a little, but he walked in a straight line across the ballroom floor. About halfway across he raised the bottle, and poured a stream of clear liquid through the speed pourer in its neck into his open mouth.

  I’m walking him out, Alistair. What time is the van coming?

  Em led me around a table.

  As he approached, I could make out the large red stain on his untucked white shirt, the lipstick smudged across his cheek. He held forth the bottle. An offering. I shook my head.

  Sure I can’t stay? Help pack up? I asked him, but he laughed, and poured more vodka into his mouth.

  No, you go get some sleep (shleep, he pronounced it). We’ve got a van coming at three to take the props back to mine, then we’re done. We’ve got this. This woman runs a tight ship. He saluted Em, then gestured toward the bar, the bottles of wine, champagne, tequila, rum and whiskey lined up along the back. Take a bottle if you want? Otherwise we’ll have to drink it all ourselves.

  He laughed like he’d said something hilarious.

  I mumbled a thank you. He started doing a drunken-swaying-dancing thing, sliding his feet along the carpet, crushing empty plastic champagne flutes back and forth to a tune only he could hear. I walked over to the bar, sized up the rum, and popped it in my bag. When I turned around, he’d taken Em’s hand and was spinning her, unsuccessfully, like a ballroom dancer would twirl his partner, his other hand holding the bottle of vodka. He went to dip her, and she leant back in his arm, the perfect choreographed finish, and then he brought the bottle to her mouth and poured, and kept pouring, until vodka was spluttering from her lips and running down her neck. She coughed, spraying vodka almost to where I stood, and pulling herself to her feet, staggered away from him.

  The Prof laughed a long awkward Hugh-Grantish laugh, and walked past me, heading for the bar. I hadn’t moved. Em pulled one of her long white gloves from her bag and wiped her mouth and neck. I felt my feet move, but slowly, like magnets were dragging them back to the carpet. Behind my back the Prof was singing some tuneless rap song, alternating between quiet murmuring and shouting.

  I took Em’s hand and led her down the stairs.

  Is he going to be alright?

  Yeah, he’s just drunk.

  Will you be alright?

  You can get the night bus, right? She’d stopped in front of the mirror in the foyer, and was trying valiantly to rearrange her peacock feather. Thanks. For tonight.

  I can stay, if you want.

  I walked back to her, pulled her into a hug, head on my chest, feather tickling my nose. On tiptoe, without her shoes, she comes up to my chin. There’s something about that smallness I adore. Everything else can fuck right off. All I want is that moment with her head on my chest and her stockinged feet, on tiptoe, in the thick red carpet.

  I’m scared, she said quietly.

  I thought I’d misheard. She looked up at me, her eyes wet. We kissed, and her lips were rough, her tongue urgent. Aggressive.

  I’ll stay. I’ll help take things to his, and then we’ll go back to yours and sleep. Like, all weekend.

  She shook her head.

  If anything happens, I’ll never forgive myself, I said, and Em dropped her eyes, the feather bobbing in my periphery. We could hear the Prof rapping upstairs. We stood that way for a moment or two, waiting, like it could come down either way.

  I’ll call you tomorrow, she said. She reached up for a kiss, led me to the door, and then walked back inside. I waited for a moment, staring at the door. The night bus was pulling up at the bus stop. I ran to catch it.

  I
sat on the top level all the way home, an entire seat to myself, until a drunk undergrad in a purple hoodie sat down next to me and started discussing how close he’d been to going home with this ‘fugly chick’ with his mates in the seats behind. I kept thinking about the vodka trickling its way down the tendon in Em’s neck, the sound of her gagging on the liquid. I hate men. I hate drunks. Fuck, I hate undergrads. Around Camden I watched a group of drunken girls gaggling around the bus stop heading back the other way, starting their night. One girl sat on the ground, her dress hiked up around her hips, her bright yellow underwear on display to the world. Her friends didn’t care. No-one cares.

  It’s four thirty-six in the morning, and I can’t sleep. I keep replaying the evening in my head, wondering if I did the right thing. Wondering what Alan would have done. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have left Em behind. He would have punched the Prof in the face and damned the consequences. He’d have lost his job but won the girl. He’d laugh about it and write another poem.

  I feel drunk, but I’m not drunk. I’m sleepwalking through everything, writing instead of reacting. I deserve better. Alan deserves better.

  Em deserves better.

  Speak of the devil – Em’s calling my mobile.

  CHAPTER 3: Ideological similarities in the poetry of the Unknown Digger as evidence for Lewis’s authorship: How Lewis’s service history and moral code compare and contrast with the Unknown Digger.

  Alan Lewis was an exemplary soldier and a beloved officer – ‘the bravest man I ever met’, as one of his former charges put it.58 Lewis fought valiantly at numerous battles throughout his distinguished career, and was awarded the highest commendation any Australian soldier can receive, the Victoria Cross, following his untimely death. His career has been written about many times, though I often find myself returning to Nicholas Curtin-Kneeling’s stellar biography, From Busso to the Holy Land, in my own research.59 Curtin-Kneeling’s book was one of the first studies to consciously humanise Lewis, revealing his flaws and insecurities, and in doing so, altering his status from heroic godlike figure to that of mere mortal. For this, we can be grateful. Prior to the publication of From Busso to the Holy Land, Victoria Cross recipients walked in rarefied air, and were deemed untouchable by the general public. As a consequence, it was difficult to empathise or identify with them. In contemporary parlance, they were not ‘relatable’. The idea of any VC recipient writing the heartbreaking poetry of the Unknown Digger was unimaginable. But with the exposure of Lewis’s fallibility came a three-dimensional complexity, and Curtin-Kneeling’s insights provided a sudden portal to the themes and ideologies of the poems of the Unknown Digger.

  One such revelation – the echoes of which reverberate through the poetry he would come to write – and the most important for me in demonstrating his human fallibility and thus, perhaps a wellspring of poetic inspiration – occurred during his training period in Camp Mena when Lieutenant Lewis received the first and only disciplinary blemish on his record for his actions in the regiment’s primary live-fire training exercise. Lewis was given orders to ‘advance on the precise coordinates, await the cessation of the shelling at a specified time, and then capture the objective with the whole section’, which at that time was under his command.60 Confronted with a miscalculation in bomb schedules and forced to wait, Lewis’s close friend Sergeant McRae opted to lead a small group of men around the threshold of the bombardment and capture the objective from a different angle.61

  Instead of rejecting the idea out of hand, Lewis, perhaps swayed by his friendship with McRae rather than analysing the potential risks, allowed McRae to proceed. McRae’s rashness, and Lewis’s approval, ultimately led to the death of one Trooper Richardson, and the wounding of another, Trooper Morrow. Sergeant McRae was subsequently demoted to trooper. Lewis was given a reprimand, but held his position, and learnt a valuable lesson. It was the first time he had been required to write a letter home to a family detailing a casualty of war. The mistake clearly played on his mind, as he wrote about the incident in a letter to Porter, ultimately never sent, sections of which were found in his notebook following his death:

  I wrote a long letter to you what feels like days ago, and I find I cannot send it. It says entirely the wrong things. I worry you won’t recognise me when I return.62

  What is particularly interesting about this unsent letter are the minor differences it contains to the version that eventually made its way to Porter, which includes a brief sentence about losing a soldier in a training accident, and a redacted line where the censors deemed Lewis’s thoughts too provocative or sensitive to risk exposure. Lewis, wishing to spare Porter the terrible details, but also to hide, or assuage, his own guilt, writes:

  Today we played at war games in the sand, and unfortunately I lost a young boy, barely a child in the chaos of the shelling. It fell to me to write the letter home to his family, which was made even harder when his address turned out to down the road from the University of Western Australia. Tomorrow we move on.63

  One can only imagine how difficult it was for a gallant and chivalrous man like Lewis to accept that his own decision had led to the death of a friend; how terrible he must have felt for allowing McRae’s plan to go ahead, and how badly he must have wished for events to have unfolded in a different way.64

  It was this information of Curtin-Kneeling’s, which is never mentioned in citations or hagiographies, which ultimately convinced me that Lewis was the Unknown Digger. Before learning of his shortcomings, I had an image in my mind of Lewis as the unimpeachable hero, but at the training exercise at Camp Mena, in the heat and the dust and the dirt, Lewis abruptly transformed into an ordinary Australian, like me, like my grandfather, trying to do his best in a bloody difficult situation. Most significantly, some specific lines from ‘Thoughts on Rising’ came to me:

  On hearing this

  The battlelines, redrawn

  And man is sand, slipped

  Trickling in the morn’

  Lost between the breaking and the dawn 65

  I am convinced Lewis wrote these words while fighting in Gallipoli, reflecting on his time in Egypt.66 The poem contains allusions to the Egyptian desert, sand and heat (fiery, furnace, sunrise, haze), and the writing style is less flamboyant, one might argue simpler (‘and let this sun/set on dreams/lead us to the south/again’) than some of the later poems, where the poet seems more sure of himself.67 It clicked into place. The lines of Lewis’s unsent letter following the accident – ‘I worry you won’t recognise me when I return’ – mirror the same sentiment as the poem: man is sand, constantly moving, and never able to be pinned down. It is hard to conceive the two lines not being written by the same hand. They push the same ideological themes: life is fleeting, and we must be ready to act, or make a choice, or fight, or flee, in a single instant. We must redraw our battlelines again and again.68 Lewis’s humanity is reflected in the poetry of the Unknown Digger.

  Theodore Shuckman, in his article ‘Literary Allusions in the Poems of the Unknown Digger’, notes: ‘for the Unknown Digger, sand is a friend, sand is a welcome companion, sand is a constant reminder of home’.69 And yet in ‘Thoughts on Rising’, man becomes sand and, like the last grains slipping through an hourglass, sand becomes mortality, signalling the end. Which seems an absurdly elaborate way of stating that things change, or that what you thought was one thing, can rapidly become something wholly different. In learning of Lewis’s initial faltering steps as a commander, the poetry of the Unknown Digger came sharply into focus for me. I believe it was this extraordinary event which shaped Lewis’s ideology as a soldier: rather than ordering others around, Lewis became known for doing things his own way, himself.70 Rather than face the possibility of another disaster like the training run, he spurred himself on to greater heights. As he wrote in a letter dated 16th May 1916, following his return to his regiment after a long stay at the Anzac Hospital on Lemnos:

  Ordering a man to attack is one thing, knowing a man will hold his
position next to you in the line is another. As Nugget is fond of saying – if you want it done right, do it yourself.71

  One might even argue that without this blemish on his otherwise spotless record, Alan Lewis might never have accomplished the acts that made his name. Would he still have charged into the unknown, if he hadn’t first learnt the hard lessons of the Egyptian desert?

  The recognisable ideological equivalency with the Unknown Digger is obvious. In countless poems, such as ‘The Morning of the Attack’, ‘The Billjim’, ‘Strewth’, ‘Jackdaw Lane’, ‘Between the Lines’ and many more besides, a similar entreaty toward self-sufficiency is expressed.72 Who could forget the wonderfully glum protagonist of ‘Furphy Does His Rounds’, who laments ‘this b-----d trench won’t ever move/without the work of me’?73

  It is true that not every poem written by the Unknown Digger espouses an individualist outlook. Prominent anti-war poems like ‘Anzac Bay at Midnight’ and ‘The Groyne’ maintain a staunch pluralist viewpoint, arguing from the perspective of a doomed, certainly, yet ultimately optimistic, ‘we’.74 The anti-war poems, which Jennifer Hayden argues convincingly were written later than most of the others in the collection, nevertheless manage to reflect the ideological standpoint of Alan Lewis. Indeed, by the end of his service, roughly analogous to the period when these anti-war poems were written, Lewis was writing letters home in a similar vein. In one letter potentially written only a matter of days before his death at Har Megiddo, he writes almost exclusively in this disembodied ‘we’:

  It’s been years now, surely, that we have been riding, passing the same watering hole, the same small tangle of buildings that calls itself a village.75

  The parallel of his tone and description in these letters to the pluralistic, anti-war – sometimes even nihilistic – poems of the Unknown Digger are at once strikingly obvious and eerily prescient. Whatever arguments critics might present about Lewis being an untouchable hero, ‘removed from the common man by his uncommon deeds’, the revelations in Curtin-Kneeling’s immaculately researched work argue otherwise.76 The parallels in philosophical outlook, and, crucially, the evolution of said philosophy through the duration of the war, confirm that Alan Lewis and the Unknown Digger trod the same ground, fought the same battles, breathed the same desert air; in short, lived the same life. The Australian champion of Har Megiddo, The Nek and Gaza, and the legendary Australian poet of ‘The Morning of the Attack’, ‘The Billjim’ and ‘Ken Oath’, are surely one and the same.