Great Anzac Stories Page 5

  When I came to I found myself in Shrapnel Gully, with an A.M.C. [Army Medical Corps] man holding me down. I was still clasping my half-rifle. Dozens of men and officers, both Australians and New Zealanders (who had landed a little later in the day), were coming down wounded, some slightly some badly, with arms in slings or shot through the leg, and using their rifles for crutches. Shrapnel Gully was still under shrapnel and snipers’ fire. Two or three platoon mates and myself slowly moved down to the beach, where we found the Australian Army Service Corps busily engaged landing stores and water amid shrapnel fire from Gaba Tepe. As soon as a load of stores was landed, the wounded were carried aboard the empty barges, and taken to the hospital ships and troopships standing out off-shore. After going to ten different boats, we came at last to the troopship Seang Choon, which had the 14th Australian Battalion aboard. They were to disembark the next morning, but owing to so many of us being wounded, they had to land straightaway.

  And so, after twelve hours’ hard fighting, I was aboard a troopship again—wounded. But I would not have missed it for all the money in the world.

  Parables of Anzac

  At the end of the Dardanelles campaign, official war correspondent Charles Bean edited The Anzac Book, a compilation of verse, prose and art by Gallipoli troops that became a bestseller, with many Australian homes having a copy on otherwise sparsely populated bookshelves. It portrayed the Anzac troops who would later be named ‘diggers’ largely in their own words and images. Under the heading ‘Parables of Anzac’, a couple of yarns gave a glimpse of casual digger humour.

  From Shell Green

  From a Correspondent in Australian Field Artillery, ‘Sea View,’ Bolton’s Knoll, near Shell Green.

  I was looking out front the entrance of my dug-out, thinking how peaceful everything was, when Johnny Turk opened on our trenches. Shells were bursting, and fragments scattered all about Shell Green. Just at this time some new reinforcements were eagerly collecting spent fuses and shells as mementoes. While this fusillade was on, men were walking about the Green just as usual, when one was hit by a falling fuse. Out rushed one of the reinforcement chaps, and when he saw that the man was not hurt he asked: ‘Want the fuse, mate?’

  The other looked at him calmly. ‘What do you think I stopped it for?’ he asked.

  Another parable highlights the potential perils of using the crude periscopes the Anzacs invented to safely observe the enemy from below the parapet of the trench.

  Bill Blankson was a real hard case, happy-go-lucky, regardless of danger. Bill was out on sapping for over a fortnight, and at the end of that time had a growth of stubble that would have brought a flush of pride to his dirty face if he had seen it. But he hadn’t seen it—one does not carry a looking-glass when sapping.

  At the end of the fortnight he was taken off sapping and put on observing. Anyone who has used a periscope knows that unless the periscope is held well up before the eyes, instead of the landscape, one sees only one’s own visage reflected in the lower glass.

  Bill did not hold the periscope up far enough, and what he saw in it was a dark, dirty face with a wild growth of black stubble glaring straight back at him. He dropped the periscope, grabbed his rifle, and scrambled up the parapet, fully intending to finish the Turk who had dared to look down the other end of his periscope.

  He had mistaken his own reflection for a Turk’s.

  Silence of the guns

  In late May 1915 a truce was called between the warring sides on Gallipoli to bury the dead and rescue any wounded from no man’s land. Folklore has it that the blindfolded Turkish officer who came into the Anzac camp to parley was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, destined to be the first president of the Republic of Turkey. It was also rumoured that General Birdwood had taken part in the fraternisation between the Anzacs and the Turks dressed as a private soldier. Unlikely though these tales are to be true, they suggest the psychological importance of the event to both sides when, after a month spent killing each other, they suddenly smoked cigarettes together, talked and swapped mementos—and then went back to killing each other. Military orthodoxies on both sides were strongly against any kind of fraternisation, fearing that it would make the men soft and less aggressive towards the enemy. But on Gallipoli, war was such a new experience for most of the combatants—and the stench of the unburied dead was so nauseating for Turks and Anzacs alike—that these considerations were, briefly, put aside.

  Aubrey Herbert, a member of the Irish Guards, who spoke fluent Turkish, acted as interpreter for the Anzacs during the truce. He published his recollections in 1919.

  We were at the rendezvous on the beach at 6.30. Heavy rain soaked us to the skin. At 7.30 we met the Turks, Miralai Izzedin, a pleasant, rather sharp, little man; Arif, the son of Achmet Pasha, who gave me a card, ‘Sculpteur et Peintre,’ and ‘Etudiant de Poesie.’ I saw Sahib and had a few words with him but he did not come with us. Fahreddin Bey came later. We walked from the sea and passed immediately up the hill, through a field of tall corn filled with poppies, then another cornfield; then the fearful smell of death began as we came upon scattered bodies. We mounted over a plateau and down through gullies filled with thyme, where there lay about 4000 Turkish dead. It was indescribable. One was grateful for the rain and the grey sky.

  A Turkish Red Crescent man came and gave me some antiseptic wool with scent on it, and this they renewed frequently. There were two wounded crying in that multitude of silence. The Turks were distressed, and Skeen strained a point to let them send water to the first wounded man, who must have been a sniper crawling home. I walked over to the second, who lay with a high circle of dead that made a mound round him, and gave him a drink from my water-bottle, but Skeen called me to come on and I had to leave the bottle. Later a Turk gave it back to me. The Turkish captain with me said: ‘At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep.’ The dead fill acres of ground, mostly killed in the one big attack, but some recently. They fill the myrtle-grown gullies. One saw the result of machine-gun fire very clearly; entire companies annihilated—not wounded, but killed, their heads doubled under them with the impetus of their rush and both hands clasping their bayonets. It was as if God had breathed in their faces, as ‘the Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold.’

  The burying was finished some time before the end. There were certain tricks to both sides. Our men and the Turks began fraternizing, exchanging badges, etc. I had to keep them apart. At 4 o’clock the Turks came to me for orders. I do not believe this could have happened anywhere else. I retired their troops and ours, walking along the line. At 4.17 I retired the white-flag men, making them shake hands with our men. Then I came to the upper end. About a dozen Turks came out. I chaffed them, and said that they would shoot me the next day. They said, in a horrified chorus: ‘God forbid!’ The Albanians laughed and cheered, and said: ‘We will never shoot you.’ Then the Australians began coming up, and said: ‘Good-bye old chap; good luck!’ And the Turks said: ‘Oghur Ola gule gule gedejekseniz, gule gule gelejekseniz’ (‘Smiling may you go and smiling come again’). Then I told them all to get into their trenches, and unthinkingly went up to the Turkish trench and got a deep salaam from it.

  I told them that neither side would fire for twenty-five minutes after they had got into the trenches. One Turk was seen out away on our left, but there was nothing to be done, and I think he was all right. A couple of the rifles had gone off about twenty minutes before the end but Potts and I went hurriedly to and fro seeing it was all right. At last we dropped into our trenches, glad that the strain was over. I walked back with Temperley. I got some raw whisky for the infection in my throat, and iodine for where the barbed wire had torn my feet. There was a hush over the Peninsula.

  Furphy

  ‘Furphy’ was—and often still is—Australian slang for a rumour. It arose from the trade name of water and sanitation carts used in Egypt, around which the troops would gather to swap gossip. And there was plenty of it. W
ars are always hotbeds of hearsay and speculation, sharpened by a lack of official information. Soldiers naturally speculate about what they don’t know, think they know or would rather not know. From a morale and discipline perspective, rumours can be dangerous because they can negatively affect the will to fight. Officers at Gallipoli were especially worried about furphies in the relatively confined area in which the troops lived and fought. This story, contributed to The Anzac Book by ‘QED’ (probably from the Latin for ‘which was to be proved’), treats the problem humorously and also gives a feel for how small a space was actually occupied by the Anzacs.

  It was the colonel who propounded the theory first, on hearing some rumour more optimistic than reliable. ‘These furphies are the very devil,’ he said.

  Now, I had a theory about Furphy. I was waiting for an opportunity of following it up, and it came this way:

  I was on the beach one day when a friend met me and asked if I had heard the latest dinkum. On learning that I hadn’t, he informed me that Greece had declared war on Turkey, and was going to land 100,000 men within the next few days on the Peninsula. I inquired for the source, and he said he got it from the beach towards the left. I asked what the man was like. That sort of puzzled him. He said he was a tall man—no, he thought he was only middle height or perhaps a bit on the small side. His hair was dark—no, now that he thought a bit, he fancied it was fair. In fact, the more he tried to describe him the less could he remember him. ‘He’s my Moses,’ I said, and hurried off in the direction he had gone.

  Passing through the sap to Shrapnel Gully, I met another friend.

  ‘Heard the latest?’ he inquired. I said ‘No.’

  ‘Four Italian staff officers seen on the beach today,’ he said breathlessly.

  ‘Two hundred thousand Italian troops being sent here.’

  ‘Who told you?’ I asked.

  ‘Fellow just going into White’s Valley.’

  ‘What was he like?’ I inquired excitedly.

  ‘An ordinary fellow—not tall, and not short.’

  ‘His hair?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t dark—yes, it was—no, I don’t know.’

  ‘How did he walk?’

  ‘I never noticed,’ he said; ‘in fact, he didn’t seem to walk at all.’

  I left him standing, and got down the sap and over into White’s Valley in a record time, and bumped into another acquaintance.

  ‘Heard the news?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why, three hundred thousand Italians have landed at Helles, and Achi Baba is to be taken tonight.’

  I asked who the informant was, and he began to flounder into contradictions. I rushed off, knowing that I was well on the track of Furphy.

  In Victoria Gully I heard that Roumania had declared war, and 400,000 troops were marching through Bulgaria to Constantinople.

  ‘Who told you? What was he like?’ I gasped at the teller.

  ‘Just a bloke,’ was the answer, ‘’E ’ad two legs, two arms and a ’ead, two eyes.’—Then he added in a puzzled fashion: ‘But, dammit did ’e?’

  I didn’t wait any longer, but was off again. At Shell Green I heard that a man—just a feller, rather—had told them that the Russians surrounded and captured Hindenburg’s army, and that 500,000 Russians were to make a landing in Turkey. The Russian officers were here already. The man who had seen them had just passed five minutes before, I wasn’t far from Furphy now.

  At Chatham’s Post they were buzzing with excitement over the news that 600,000 French were going to be landed between Kaba Tepe and Helles.

  I asked if they thought it was true, and they assured me that they had heard it from a man who looked as if he knew. No two descriptions of him, however, agreed. I was getting closer to Furphy.

  I hurried along the trenches as fast as I could, but got no information till near Lone Pine, where I heard that a big mob of Turks was expected to surrender that night. It was said they should not face the prospect of the coming landing of the whole Italian army. Besides, they were short of food and water, they were being badly treated by their officers, and their guns had hardly any ammunition left. A 75 just then knocked a portion of parapet over me. I remarked that anyone could see the information was right about Abdul being short of ammunition, but where did the information come from?’

  ‘A fellow that just went by,’ they said; ‘looked like a staff officer.’

  Getting near Steele’s Post, I saw in front of me a man with an indescribable gait. He seemed to float along instead of walk. It was Furphy!

  I hurried, but seemed to make no gain on him. I began to run. Near Courtney’s Post I was twenty yards from him, and called to a man to stop him. My quarry brushed past, I put on a spurt, I was within about five yards of him when, all of a sudden, he sank into the earth. As his head disappeared he smiled an oily grimace at me.

  I noticed that there were small horns behind his ears.

  Leaving Gallipoli

  Despite the insistence of Winston Churchill, the first lord of admiralty, and General Sir Ian Hamilton that the campaign could be won, the decision was made by Hamilton’s replacement, General Charles Monro, to withdraw from Gallipoli. The evacuation of the Anzacs from the peninsula took place on the night and morning of 20–21 December 1915. Machine gunner Cedric McKail, 28th Battalion, wrote home to his mother from Tel-el-Kebir a month after the evacuation. As well as describing his withdrawal he also writes about the aftermath of the fatal charge of the Light Horse at the Nek in early August.

  We got another mail yesterday and I received your letter and papers. It’s A1 being certain of a letter from home by every mail. It is nearly 11 months since I left home for Blackboy [Blackboy Hill depot], though it seems much longer. The days on the peninsula seemed to pass wonderfully quickly; even now I can hardly realise that we were there over three months. Of course, every day was much the same as the previous one, and Sunday didn’t exist, so there was nothing to mark the passing of the weeks. As you remarked in your letter, it does seem hard that all those poor fellows should have been killed in taking the bit of country we had, and then for us to have to give it up, but the fact that very few lives were lost in the evacuation is something to be thankful for. Had there been some blunder, or if the Turks had managed to get a spy into our trenches, as they had often done previously, very few would have got off with a whole skin.

  During the last days it gave one an eerie feeling to think that a paltry handful of men were holding back thousands of the enemy, and our trenches seemed quite deserted after all the crowd had gone. On the last night, in all the trenches close to the Turks, we tore up blankets and put them on the ground so that they would not hear any unusual noise while we shifted guns, ammunition, etc., and we all wore socks over our boots. As you will have read long before this it was a complete bluff, and even when we exploded an enormous mine between the trenches, instead of taking it for an evacuation, they thought we were attacking, and opened a [sic] fire with rifles and machine guns, that made us feel very thankful that we were not. The rifle shots merged into one continuous roar as Jacko got the full strength of his supports to work, and the air above us was full of the whistling and cracking of bullets so that you could hardly hear yourself speak. The Turks must have been as thick as ants to put up such a fire, and must have had dozens of machine guns.

  The part of the trenches we evacuated, known as Russell’s Top, was the place where the Light Horse got cut up in that charge. There was a ridge about 30 yards wide connecting our trenches and the Turks. Along all the rest of the front is a deep gully, so that the Nek as this ridge was called, was the only place where a charge could be made. The Turks had all their machine guns trained on this spot, besides searching it with rifle fire right through the night, and continually dropping bombs on it. The scrub, which is dense all over the hills, is cut right away here with the fire, and the place is covered with the bodies of those who dropped in the charge of the Light Horse. Even in death they got no res
t, as bombs which dropped short of our trenches were continually blowing the bodies into the air. I remember one day a clenched hand was blown right over our trench. Sometimes with a land wind blowing the stench was vile. What it must have been a few days after that charge, one can imagine.

  We are looking like a lot of scare-crows as we have had no new issue of clothes yet, and are wearing those we left Gallipoli in, but expect a new rig-out any day. I shall be glad of the steel shaving mirror you are sending, as I have broken enough looking glasses in my pack to give me bad luck for life . . .

  At Pozières

  The action known to Australians as ‘Pozières’ was fought in France from July to August 1916 and was part of the battle of the Somme. Captain Norman Malcolm of Adelaide wrote home about the Pozières he and his men went through.

  I went over with the first line on August 8, after leading the battalion on to the tape line—I had reconnoitred the position the day previously. We had a terrific barrage, said to be the heaviest ever put up—all high explosive with instantaneous fuses and it cut everything to pieces. It was a very foggy morning, and this, with the smoke of the bombardment, made it impossible to see further than 8 to 10 yards. Consequently, although we started in line, it was only a matter of minutes before we were in a column of lumps, having only the faintest idea of direction. However, we collected what men we could and pushed on, sometimes getting into our own barrage, and at other times losing it completely. Still, the fog saved us many casualties, and we had only to collect our souvenirs and get forward. Our division reached its objective, which was about three miles, up to time [on time]. During the advance we took innumerable prisoners and a tremendous amount of booty, including several headquarters, and batteries of field artillery. Soon after reaching our objective, a corps of cavalry passed through our ranks, followed by another lot of our infantry divisions, while tanks cleared the front, and armoured cars whizzed along every road, shooting everything on sight.