THE BIG FIGHT

Captain David Fallon, M.C.

THE BIG FIGHT

(Gallipoli to the Somme)

BY
Capt. DAVID FALLON, M.C.

New York
W. J. Watt & Company
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1918, by
W. J. WATT & COMPANY

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

CONTENTS

THE BIG FIGHT

CHAPTER I
From Australia to the Fray

When great historians with their learned pens shall come to set forth the complete story of the most sweeping and horrible war the world has ever known, I figure they may perhaps have need of such evidence, information and material as a man like myself can give. I mean a man who has been through the red hell of the vast conflict in places where it has flamed most fiercely, a soldier who has been eye-witness of its superb heroisms, its stupendous tragedies, scientific marvels, has undergone its tense emotional and psychological experiences, bears on his body its wounds, has seen at first hand with the amazement all civilization has felt, the cowardice, bestiality, utter moral abandonment to which a nation may fall in a mad dream of the conquest of the world.

My name is David Fallon. I am of the County Mayo, Ireland. And I’d ask your pardon for a word or two by way of boasting in stating that my ancestors for a pretty-long journey back into history, have always figured in the man-sized battles of their generations. My father, a naturalist, rushed away from gentle scientific pursuits in 1870 to bear arms for France against the Prussians. And it isn’t only because I’m Irish that I fought to get into this present big fight—and I did fight to get into it—but for the pertinent and additional reason that it was in France father met Mlle. Sarah Voltaire who not very long thereafter became Mrs. Fallon.

And small wonder, with my boy’s mind stirred so many an evening by the exciting stories of the Franco-Prussian battles my father and mother would tell us of in the glow of the old library fireplace, that I had no trouble electing the course of my life. I left the University of Dublin to enlist in the British army. I joined a Northumberland regiment, Nov. 19, 1904, and the military examiners were not at first quite so enthusiastic about the performance as I was for I offered them no Hercules. I was then only eighteen years old, a little under medium height and slim as a whalebone. A weighing machine as far as I was concerned escaped with the small effort of marking one hundred and ten pounds. But I was sound of eye, tooth, blood and heart and so they cordially handed me my uniform—even if they did have to trim off the sleeves of the tunic a bit.

It is only fair I should say for myself that I was a rather good boy—that the temptations besetting youths in the army have never left their marks on me. Not, believe me, that I was a sanctimonious kid—a good many miles away from that. But I was lucky in having a keen love of athletics and a pride of achievement in many branches of sport. There’s nothing like such a disposition to keep a boy clean and straight. Soccer, Rugby, swimming, wrestling, running—the opportunity for such games and contests was constant in the army and made me devoted to military life.

And boxing! Good heavens, the whalings I took! But by the same token, the whalings I handed out! There is no use my telling myself that just about here I should be content to hide my light under a bushel somewhat. I’ll not do it. The fact is I rose to the dizzy splendor of champion featherweight of the British Army in India.

Just a few words more in order to place myself at the time when the vast war began. I saw brief, uneventful service in China, then spent years in India, took part in many of the “hills scraps,” sporadic uprisings of the mountain tribes, dangerous and exciting enough encounters we regarded them then, petty memories now; stood before Lord Minto, then Viceroy, in Calcutta, 1908, and received from him the Indian Frontier medal, was promoted to sergeant-major and with the rank of staff sergeant major was detailed to the Royal Military Academy at Dunstroon, New South Wales, as instructor in athletics, general physical exercises, deportment and bayonet drill. This was my station when Germany began its brutal attack upon its neighbors.

And let me say right here that while in any event Australia would have made a sturdy response to Britain’s call, what Germany can put into its long-stemmed, china-bowled pipe and “smoke it,” is that were it not for the appalling, cowardly, barbarous crimes committed against the defenseless—the women and children of Belgium, there would never have been, as there has been, such tremendous outpouring of fighting men from splendid Australia; 400,000 of them out of a population of men, women and children numbering 5,000,000! All volunteers, you understand? It is the volunteer record of the war—not forgetting Canada’s mighty showing of 550,000 out of a population of 7,000,000!

It was not until Germany gave atrocious evidences of her disregard of humanity, not until its army had stalked in its giant size, a red-stained, moral idiot, through little Belgium, crucifying old men and women and children to the doors of their homes, ravishing girls and women, murdering the parents who tried to protect them; not until this enormity of degeneracy had passed into the history of mankind, did Australia take fire.

I know because at the very beginning of the war I was sent out to Sydney and Melbourne as a whip for enlistment—made scores of speeches daily in halls, parks, street corners and other public places. My hearers were many and they were earnest and thoughtful but deliberate as well. Enlistments came and numerously but not with anything approaching a rush. Your prospective soldier debated a good deal with his own personal interests, before he signed up.

But after Belgium! The crowds I addressed took the arguments for enlistment away from me—made the talk themselves, swarmed to join. Social ranks broke completely and almost instantaneously. Everybody flocked to the army—artists, actors, lawyers, merchants, clerks, larrikins, miners and the men from the vast, open places of Australia.

“British blood is calling British blood”

Brothers are these last in every degree of character to the American and Canadian miners, ranchers, trappers, cowboys; they are big, lean, brave, boyishly chivalrous men, shy of women but adoring them, willing to play romping dog any old time to win the smile of a child or the pat of its little hand.

It must stand as one of the most picturesque features of the war—the great distances these men traveled to the centers of population to offer their services to avenge the slaughter of the helpless in Belgium and to fight for the honor, prestige and life of the Gray Mother of the Empire.

Take for instance, John Wilson, gold prospector. He came out of the wilderness, fifteen hundred miles to Sydney, to join the colors; four hundred of it on horseback, one hundred of it literally hacking his way through a dense, trackless forest of giant gum and eucalyptus trees until he got to Bourke, whence, once a fortnight, a train leaves for Sydney. Thousands and thousands of John Wilsons made their way to the cities.

And from the distant islands of the Archipelago—Samoa, Fiji, Cocos, Madras, when the news of Germany’s infamy seeped into the men far in the interiors—the traders and planters in oils and nuts, the hunters of birds of paradise—they came out through the swamps, paddled their way on jungle rivers laboriously but tirelessly, determinedly to the coast and put themselves aboard the first ships obtainable. There occurred at this time a great shortage in crews for these ships, so that some were threatened with being held up for days or weeks for lack of men. Many well-to-do patriots, amply supplied with funds to meet the expense of a trip in the first cabin, signed up as stokers, seamen or deck-hands in order to expedite the journeys from the islands to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne or other coast communities where they might join the army.

And the larrikins, the hooligans, “hard guys” of the cities, gangsters, youths and men of lives abandoned to drink, drugs and other vices—Germany’s unspeakable cruelty in Belgium even stung such as these out of their indifference. In the early days of enlistment we had managed to win precious few of this class to the service. The majority of them had been sullen and derisive to our appeals to join the colors.

“Wot’s all this flaming war about, anywye? Blast the blooming war, I ain’t got nothin’ to fight about.”

That had been the characteristic response.

But the piteous images of children with bleeding, severed throats, of tiny human bodies dismembered, of decent girls and women subject to the foulest acts of vicious cowardice, sent the larrikins to us seething with rage and resolved, as it was especially hard for men of this sort to resolve, to accept the strict discipline of army life for the chance to spill the blood of the horror-makers of Europe.

As to these same larrikins, if you please, I would like to set down some more. Scrubby they came to us, most of them, pallid, undersized, some of them wretchedly nervous from drinks, drugs, under-feeding, bad teeth, all manner of irregularities of life due to poverty, due to vice.

But, “by the living God that made” them, once you’d repaired them—fixed their teeth, fed them, exercised them, made bathing instead of a drunk a daily habit with them, once, in short, that you’d properly set them up and, excuse the emphasis, but they made the damnedest best soldiers of the lot.

Not that the professional men, business men, open-air men who went into the ranks were not as heroic. A hundred incidents of the splendor of bravery that men of all classes displayed crowd my memory to take swift, sharp issue with the idea. But you see the larrikin—the designation used to be one of contempt with me but is something pretty close to affection now and I should say with several other thousands of officers as well—comes to you with the devil’s own experience of hard-knocks. He knows hunger, thirst, the misery of cold, of pains and aches he has no doctor to allay. And I would point out that one of these boys who has survived such conditions with a physique left good enough to get him into the army, must have started life with the flesh and blood make-up akin to the steel armor-plates and entrails of a dreadnaught. So when you take him and give him only half a brushing-up, the readiness of his response would (may I borrow the expression of an Ally?) certainly jar you. His face gets pink, his chest sticks out, the sneer he wore becomes a smile, the contemptible trickery he used to work turns to good-natured, practical jokes. He is childishly amazed to find that his comrades—the man who was a lawyer at home, or the other who was a tradesman or the very wonderful person who was a well-known feature in vaudeville and even—Gawd blime me! his captain likes him. And once he believes that—knows it and feels it then (another draft on an Ally) you’ve “got something!” The very gang training he has had when he banded with his pals to fight and cheat the law, that gang spirit with all its blind devotion is at the nod of his officer. He’ll go to hell for you even when he knows there is not much or any chance of coming back, and if all of his kind, whether out of Whitechapel, the purlieus of Canadian cities or the slums of Australia who have done that very thing of going into hell and not come back, might be called on parade it would be a big procession. Yet not of grief-stricken or agonized men but they who walk with fine, clear, steady eyes, and countenances wonderfully cleansed.

To move a little ahead of that day in a then fast-approaching October when the first twenty-thousand of us sailed away to get into the big muss, I’d like to tell a little story of the only larrikin I know of who fell flatly down on his job.

They had made him, to his fierce disgust, the Lord high keeper of a carrier pigeon. He was a person who wanted to get into the fight—Anzac for Boche, yes, two Boches or three. But here he had been made custodian of the carrier pigeon. He had never had a chance at a Boche. He must trail his officer at the rear of charging men. He must have the pigeon in its little box ready, so that should the officer command, the pigeon could have a neat little message as to reinforcements or success tied to his little leg, be released from the box when he would shoot up straight as an arrow above the roar and smoke of battle and home his way to the rear, dropping into a box at the commandant’s trench or dug-out station and when he dropped into the box causing a very sharp toned little bell to ring—a tone so sharp as to cut through the thunder of guns.

Well, one night on such a charge the officer missed his larrikin and not long afterward the pigeon for whom the larrikin had so long been valet, plopped into his little box at the commandant’s dug-out, making the sharp gong clang incisively. The battle was roaring fearfully, but the commandant got the ring, retrieved the pigeon, slipped the little message roll off its slender leg, spread the message, swore first and then laughed.

“What is it?” his aide asked eagerly.

“I should,” said the commandant, “have him arrested and shot, but I don’t think I will.”

“Who?”

“Capt. ——’s larrikin.”

“Why?”

“Look at the message he’s sent by the pigeon.”

The aide read a message written in the heat of the engagement, but with the stencil-neatness that larrikins acquire in the military schools:

“I am tired of carrying this dam bird and have gone into the fite.”

No signature.

CHAPTER II
From Australia to the Fray (Continued)

That carrier-pigeon soldier had my sympathy for I had undergone his same sensation of exasperation at the very beginning of things. This was when I heard back in August, 1914, that because of proficiency as physical instructor and drill master, it was the intention of my superiors to keep me at post at the Royal Military College at Dunstroon in New South Wales—keep me there to fit other men to go into the fight. I am no bloodthirsty demon and I am no brother to the Hun, but having been a professional soldier all my life what could you expect me to be but hopping mad when it would appear that I wasn’t going to get in the greatest fight of history, when it looked as if all of the huge, smashing fight I would see would be from the side-lines? Surely that would be a great deal like asking a prize-fighter to accept a job as a dancing master!

Well, I was Irish enough to battle for what I considered my rights. I kicked strenuously. These kicks got something of sympathy from my immediate superiors and so found their way higher until finally I was in actual correspondence in the matter with Mr. Pierce, Australia’s Minister of Defense. To him I set forth my case vigorously and often and if he was, perhaps, somewhat amused at my insistence he was just enough to take into consideration the good points I offered for myself, my long service, my Indian Frontier medal, and in the end, to accept my own estimate, that I would be of greater value handling men on the actual front than being school master to the rookies at home. There were among the professional soldiers, I further pointed out to him, older men as able as I in training men and who had families dependent upon them, whereas I was not then thirty years old, and possessed no close family connections who would suffer materially if I should go the way that so many splendid, brave officers and men of my country and of France had already traveled—to the hospitals, the German prison camps or those rough-and-readily builded, nobly impressive, shell-swept graveyards which had come to existence in France.

Now, perhaps, had I been clairvoyant, had I been able to see ahead what was shortly to come—the savage, awful experience in Gallipoli, the murderous, weary days and nights in Flanders and the Somme, the long suffering, the tremendous scientific ferocity of it all, well, perhaps I might not have tried so hard to bring the Minister of Defense to my way of thinking. And, yet, while ducking the appellation of hero as I would duck a Boche bomb, after all, I think that with present knowledge of what comes to a man in this great war and what can come to him, I would still have tried for my chance to play my part in the great game. What soldier worth the name would not?

Well, soon enough there came a day that found us—the First Division of the Australian Expeditionary Force—on our way. We had no clear idea of whither we were bound. We thought for the most part that we were going straight to the fighting in France. There were thirty transports in all. My own crowd, about twelve hundred strong, were aboard the Themistocles, a converted White Star Liner that formerly traveled between Australian ports and Aberdeen, Scotland, a goodly-sized ship she was of 13,000 tons. From every other port of size in Australia other troopships had come laden. At Sydney the entire thirty were mobilized and with the Australian fleet comprising some of Britain’s greatest dreadnaughts, a complement of Japanese destroyers and a French cruiser or two we set forth on fairly smooth seas.

At all the ports where the populace got hints of the time of sailing of the ships there were great demonstrations and likewise impromptu demonstrations of liveliest enthusiasm met us whenever we appeared parading on the streets, to say nothing of the crowds that came to cheer us at drill in our camps.

For by October, Australia had come to know how tremendous and frightful a war Germany had planned, how viciously and hatefully Germany had resolved to strike at the very life of the British Empire and Australia began to realize that if the British Empire went under, she herself would eventually have the Hun at her own throat.

It wasn’t only the news of the mammoth operations which had started in Europe that brought this realization. Things had happened “at home.” The German propaganda secretly, maliciously taking advantage of a democratic country’s open hospitality, had effected bomb outrages, and worked insidiously to bring about strikes in the coal and iron mines and strikes on the railroads, had worked the same despicable “below the belt” tactics in the Archipelago as she has in America. And the cables were constantly bringing news of fresh, cowardly outrages upon the old, and the women and the children of Belgium!

The firmness of Australia’s premier, the effectiveness of Australia’s police in its cities and of the Government’s secret agents as well (once the German propagandists had revealed their hands) soon began securely to tie these same hands of the promoters of German frightfulness. But the people by this time had been worked to a towering rage and as we started away in our troopships, great crowds in the cities were riotously asserting their resentment. They wrecked scores of German shops, battered them into ruins and put them to the torch.

With none of us knowing that Gallipoli was ahead we settled down to make our ocean voyage. Where—we didn’t know at the time it was to take us, but we did make it as enjoyable as might be in crowded bunks and where we were forever touching elbows on the jammed decks. Men never sailed on an expedition of war in better spirits and greater confidence. The regular soldiers and amateur soldiers were about evenly divided, but the amateurs were swiftly coming into line in physical fitness and expertness in drill. Still there were some funny incidents due to the novelty of the life that many of our men were leading. As for instance, a little deck sentry, whom I approached one day and who looked at me and said: “Are you an officer?”

“Can’t you tell that from my uniform?” I said, nodding toward the sergeant-major’s chevrons on my arm.

“Well, then,” he said, suiting the action of the word, “I suppose I will have to chuck you a blooming salute.”

We got together for all kinds of athletic fun—wrestling, potato and wheel-barrow races, running races, but principally the sport was boxing. Then there were serious-minded men who liked the sports all right, but organized a sort of debating society. There were no lack of interesting principals for this organization. There were professors from the Australian universities, Captain Knyvett for example, who had been the professor of psychology at the University of Brisbane, and there were scores of his class. The debating club discussed everything from Sanskrit to how to fry an egg or bayonet a Boche.

One of two great excitements of our journey was furnished by “Bushy Bill,” a reckless larrikin of Melbourne. Bushy declared one evening a few minutes after dark that he could do something that would stop the whole fleet. We asked him what his little notion might be, but he declined to tell. He said, however, that he was willing to wager a pound that he could succeed in his threat. Somebody took him up and the instant he did so “Bushy Bill” put up his pound note and also pressed into the hand of a friend all other money and valuables that he had in his pockets and without another word, hopped over the taffrail and into the sea. Naturally the cry went up immediately of “Man overboard!” Noisy signals were exchanged between ships of the fleet, searchlights began to play widely in all directions, and afterward we learned that in every other ship of the fleet, where like ourselves everybody was on tenterhooks in expectancy of a raider’s attack, the Emden possibly, orders were swiftly signaled for the ships to deploy. The Themistocles stopped and backed. Meanwhile, two soldiers had gone over the side for the rescue of “Bill,” believed to have been suddenly stricken with insanity. Following the two men who plowed through the waves to his rescue, a boat was lowered.

Bill was all laughter and excitement when he was hauled aboard, enthusiastically claiming to have won his bet, which was promptly paid, but then Bill did some prompt paying. This was in the way of entering on a six-months’ sentence in the brig, which held him for weeks also in the guard house when our division got to Egypt.

Only the next day came a more thrilling event. This was when our wireless told us that the depredations of the vicious raider, the Emden, had been brought at Cocos Island to a swift end by the Sydney.

Of course, there was tremendous rejoicing. On all the boats, at all the “parades” (the assembling of the soldiers for afternoon drill), the news of the sinking of the Emden by the Sydney was “read out.” Commanders made no effort to stifle the cheers that arose.

One of the boys composed a parody on “Tipperary” to celebrate the event, which we sang with greatest vim and vigor all the way to Gallipoli and afterward. It was worded this way:

“It’s a long, long way to Cocos Island,
It’s a long way to go,
It was there the Sydney met the Emden,
And made old Kaiser Bill swear,
It’s a long, long way to Cocos Island,
But the Sydney boys got there!”

You can imagine that aboard this crowded ship, with men of all types and character, and with all the rough play aboard, that it would not be just the sort of a place for a girl. Yet we had one aboard. We didn’t know it for some time after we were out, because little Betty Grainger, in devotion to her sweetheart, had not only cut off her long, golden locks, but had deliberately roughened her hands with toil, the more to make good her disguise as a boy. Somewhere she had secured a uniform. In those days the uniforms were of all manner of irregularities; anything in a color and shade of khaki would serve. The very style of military uniform belted with a skirt effect of the coat and loose riding breeches would enable a girl to successfully disguise herself. Betty did until one night when the men were playing a romping game of “tilt the cart,” wherein your idea was principally to upset your neighbor by a quick grasp of the legs and a heave of him over your shoulder. When an unsuspecting rookie grabbed Betty and sought to “tilt the cart” she uttered a most unmanly scream. The men gathered around to further “rag” this effeminate boy when Betty gave further evidence of her real sex by bursting into tears and scratching their faces. And then “Long Jack” Kennedy, of Melbourne, suddenly sailed into the men surrounding her, forgetting the camouflage that Betty sought to enact, picked her up in his arms and faced the crowd with an outburst of oaths. That settled it. Betty, who had registered as George Grainger, was known for what she was. But even the authorities of the ship felt no bitterness toward Betty. She was given over to the care of a company of nurses aboard the Themistocles, and tried very hard to make herself useful, but because of the deception she had practiced the commander ordered her put off at Perth.

We had a short stop and walk around Colombo and then at Suez. Four days later found us in an even stranger environment for Australians. We had landed at Cairo—the first Australian Expeditionary force, part of General Birdwood’s Division which besides our contingent, comprised the 29th English Division (regulars). The Zion Mule Corps, a detachment of French troops, four regiments of Ghurkas, several native Indian regiments and the Indian Supply and Transport corps. Although no efforts were made to put up barracks or permanent buildings, it was soon evident that we were to be kept in our Egyptian camp for some period of time. The magnitude of the commissary arrangements, the settlements of the regiments into a general plan of a large and permanent encampment, made this only too plain. We had all been hoping and cheering for our advent to France. At this time we were, as I believe, merely held by Lord Kitchener to further our training. For the conquest of Gallipoli—that red hell of disaster—was not in the books of our commanders.

German propaganda of the foulest and most awful sort swiftly made its appearance at Cairo. German agents (medical men in this case) we were afterward to learn, had gone among the women of the port, and advised them for their own protection to submit to inoculations that would armor them against the advent of the great thousands of soldiers. They were told the Australians would of a certainty spread a strange and deadly plague. In reality these agents inoculated the women with the most awful disease, and in this way laid a plot of destruction against our forces, which I am sorry to say met with some degree of success before the discovery of the infernal plan.

Moreover, German propagandists had corrupted countless of the proprietors of the small resorts where liquor and gambling were to be found, had instilled all the inhabitants and keepers of bazaars in the native village of Cairo with ideas of secret assassination of our men for gain. Also after the arrival of our soldiers these insidious workers did all they could to promote an enmity between the natives and the Anzacs. The result of this campaign was nearly as sinister as that of the inoculation of the women. Our men on leave were drugged and secretly murdered, their bodies made away with, with a skill that defeated all efforts at tracing the crimes. It is a fact that at least two hundred and fifty of the first division of Anzacs encamped at Cairo never returned to their regiments, and no trace of what had befallen them, which doubtless was most sinister, has ever come to our exact knowledge to this very day. So thoroughly had the natives been instilled with an enmity toward us that the atmosphere and conditions between us became intolerable. The natives assumed a surly and insulting aspect toward us, and we in turn, I presume, swaggered and frowned and treated them with growing sharpness. With the full extent of the villainy that had been plotted and achieved against us in the matter of afflicting hundreds of our men with horrible disease and of assassinating fully two hundred and fifty others, there came a night when resentment burst forth among a large company of the Anzacs and took the shape of a fierce, violent and deadly reprisal.

The men secretly collected, armed themselves with revolvers, secured paraffin and oil torches, and some even took up bombs.

They rushed through the native section of the city especially among its disreputable resorts, and did their utmost to destroy it utterly by the flames of their torches, and where resistance was met, did not hesitate to use their fire-arms and bombs to kill. It was a night of horror in Cairo. But the crimes against us had been more terrible than the revenge. This summary and deadly action discredited the secret German agents and their influence and brought about from the natives a subserviency and desire to propitiate the Anzacs equal to their attitude of enmity before. It was a drastic measure that was taken, but under the circumstances, it may be left to the judgment of the reader as to its justification.

There was intensive drilling in our cantonment, called Mena Camp, near the Pyramids of Gizeh, but just the same we found time for the indulgence in many sports, especially horse racing, camel and donkey riding, hunts for buried treasure among the sacred tombs of the ancients, and one party of the boys really returned to camp with a genuine mummy for a prize.

But nevertheless, life became monotonous and we were all anxious and alert for an opportunity to show ourselves in the fighting. It was coming soon enough, though we didn’t exactly know it then. But we realized that action was soon to begin for us when 10,000 men—500 of my own attachment aboard the Euripides, set sail under a convoy of twenty war ships, including the great Queen Elizabeth, Prince of Wales, Tiger, Triumph and French boats in the early part of April, for Lemnos Island in the Greek Archipelago. The physical aspects of this country were nearly identical with those we were to meet in the landing of Gallipoli. There was a vast promontory coming down to open water, always at a tempestuous degree, and there we went into a new form of intensive training. This consisted of lowering the boats in the choppy, stormy waters, landing the boats in the perilous surf, wading to our knees in water, swimming under the burden of our knapsacks, making numerous landings, digging ourselves in, and target practice at imaginary Turkish batteries, the real character of the batteries at Gallipoli having been discovered and reported by efficient British and French spies. When we were ready this was the order that came to us from our Commander, General W. R. Birdwood:

LANDING ORDERS.

Australian New Zealand Army Corps.

Officers and Men: April 1915.

In conjunction with the Navy, we are about to undertake one of the most difficult tasks any soldier can be called to perform, and a problem which has puzzled many soldiers for years past. That we will succeed I have no doubt, simply because I know your full determination to do so. Lord Kitchener has told us that he lays special stress on the rôle the Army has to play in this particular operation, the success of which will be a very severe blow to the enemy indeed, as severe as any he could receive in France. It will go down in history to the glory of the soldiers of Australia and New Zealand. Before we start, there are one or two points which I must impress on all, and I most earnestly beg every single man to listen attentively and take them to heart.

We are going to have a real hard and rough time of it until, at all events, we have turned the enemy out of the first objective. Hard, rough times none of us mind, but to get through them successfully we must always keep before us the following facts: Every possible endeavor will be made to bring up transport as often as possible; but the country whither we are bound is very difficult, and we may not be able to get our wagons anywhere near us for days, so men must not think their wants have been neglected if they do not get all they want. On landing it will be necessary for every individual to carry with him all his requirements in food and clothing for three days, as we may not see our transport again till then. Remember then that it is essential for everyone to take the very greatest care not only of his food, but of his ammunition the replenishment of which will be very difficult. Men are liable to throw away their food first day out and to finish their water bottles as soon as they start marching. If you do this now, we can hardly hope for success, as unfed men cannot fight, and you must make an effort to try and refrain from starting on your water bottles until quite late in the day. Once you begin drinking you cannot stop, and a water bottle is very soon emptied.

Also as regards ammunition—you must not waste it by firing away indiscriminately at no target. The time will come when we shall find the enemy in well-entrenched positions, from which we shall have to turn them out, when all our ammunition will be required; and remember,

Concealment whenever possible,
Covering fire always,
Control of fire and control of your men,
Communications never to be neglected.

(Signed) W. R. Birdwood.

I am here reminded of an incident regarding this human, kindly commander that may have a smile in it for the reader.

The Australians or Anzacs took pride in distinguishing themselves by the wearing of an emu feather (the feather of their native bird) in their caps. No Anzac was happy without an emu feather in his cap. I have already said how willing and anxious the Australians were to make good in their military duties, but how hard it was for them to enter strictly into the conduct demanded by militarism.

A certain sentry didn’t salute General Birdwood, who at that time wore no emu feather in his hat, an omission the Australians resented.

“What do you mean, sir,” demanded General Birdwood, “by not saluting me? Do you know who I am?”

“No, who are you?”

“I am Birdwood.”

“Then,” said the sentry, without any loss of his own dignity, “why don’t you wear a feather in your cap as a bird would?”

The general stared hard at the man for an instant, tried to frown, but laughed instead, and there was no court martial.

CHAPTER III
Gallipoli

Today all is quiet at Gallipoli Peninsula. The rows on rows of wooden crosses at Anzac and Helles, at Nibrunsei Point and Brighton Beach, look out over the Ægean Sea, doubtless blue as it ever was. The dead who lie beneath these little monuments of great deeds—the crosses amid the dwarf holly bushes that clothe the western slopes—have reached their rest. In the scrub Lee-Enfields lie rusting alongside shattered Mausers. The pebbles on the long bleak beaches are mixed with shrapnel bullets, and in the sand and the dunes west of the Long Sap are buried bones and scraps of leather, clips of corroded cartridges, and shreds of khaki clothing.

We had no false idea when we left Lemnos Island, eight transports carrying our particular 3,000 Australians, twelve more carrying the remainder of General Birdwood’s division, as to the difficulty if not impossibility of the task ahead. Our training at Lemnos Island had shown some of the difficulties, especially the business of landing through choppy seas or narrow beaches under frowning cliffs and then scaling those cliffs. The Turks with their German officers had had their warning in the attempt to force the Dardenelles by the allied forces in January. It was absurd to think that they would be surprised by any movement we could make only a few months after. We discussed the improbability of success quite openly. We went over the old defeats in the history of the Dardenelles, the defeats when Helen of Troy figured as the object of conquest, the defeats of the Crusaders and of Constantine. As I say, we didn’t have much hope, but nevertheless, we were all glad that the time had come when the training was at an end and we were to go into the fight. Personally, I set about the same task as the others. On the eve of the battle I wrote to my solicitors, Garland, Seabourne & Abbott, as to the disposal of an insurance policy I had. I had no wife, sweetheart or parents and decided to make an old and pretty-crusty uncle of mine in England—he had given me a whaling or two when I was a boy—the beneficiary.

I had gathered before leaving Australia ostrich and emu plumes and had made photographs of my companions, had purchased in Egypt the pretty little flower books made up in their pages of pressed flowers, had acquired sandal boxes, silk handkerchiefs and quite a quantity of “Turkish delight,” as we always spoke of our tobacco. I made up many little packages as mementos to girls I knew, to friends, and in common with the others gave them over to the postal clerk of the Euripides.

Of course, the world knows the fate of the Euripides, and so my will and all my packages of gifts and letters never reached their destination. But after the men had made these final dispensations of their little properties, had written their private secret hopes, fears, and expressions of affection to loved ones, the sadness of that period swiftly passed from us and we began to laugh and joke at the prospect of what was ahead. We even went so far as to make a sweepstake to be won by the first man to land on the Peninsula. We came to anchor at, I should say, about two o’clock in the morning off what we have since designated as X. Y. Z. beach. This is at Kaba Tepeh. The other detachments of General Birdwood’s forces were spread at anchorage up to and beyond Suvla Bay. The particular stretch of territory that we were called upon to capture was about 500 yards long. It was a nearly straight line of coast. The beach was two hundred yards in width with a gradual rising of sand dunes tufted with dwarf holly bushes and miniature table lands, which finally resolved itself into sheer cliffs, some of them high and sharp like fangs, others rounded, in all giving the impression of the open, snarling jaw of some mammoth animal with scraggy teeth.

Our battle ship pinnaces, that is to say, barges, were launched and sent out to the different transports to take aboard the landing parties. Each man as we stood at parade on the decks before being ordered to the pinnaces had for his supplies as indicated in General Birdwood’s orders, his rifle and bayonet, 150 rounds of ammunition and three days’ rations, which consisted of his water bottle holding a quart of water, furnished by the clear springs of Lemnos Island, a tin of bully-beef to the weight of half a pound, as many biscuits as he could take on, while leaving room for his emergency tin which holds tablets of concentrated beef and cakes of chocolate. Besides in your pocket you had your first-aid kit, a small roll of bandages and a vial of iodine.

Weirdly began our great and deadly adventure on this coveted stretch of the Ægean Sea which if we could conquer made possible the breaking of the historic barrier of the Dardanelles. It was a stretch of coast we were soon to wash with our blood as literally as the Ægean’s waves wash the self-same shore.

The long procession of transports and their grim battleship escorts had stolen up in the night, a widely-spread yet organized, concrete group of slowly-moving, black, gloomy monsters. Every light aboard each ship had been ordered out. Not even the pin-head flame of a cigarette might show on any deck.

The only light we had was the faint green gleam that filtered over the smooth waters from a moon that had begun to wane and had, indeed, at this hour of three in the morning, nearly fallen behind the ragged jaw of the black cliffs.

I can tell you that we most heartily wished this moon in —— well, anywhere than shining just then upon this particular spot of the earth. We little cared for a moon to direct a spotlight on our surprise attack. It looked like an evil moon to us. Or rather, it looked like the evil, watchful eye of our enemy. For all of us knew well enough what was behind those cliffs—about two miles or thereabouts behind. Oh, we knew well enough that there lay the Turks and their big, German-managed guns.

The Turks couldn’t very well hear me talking at from four to five miles, yet such was the consciousness of the danger of our adventure and such the hypnotism of the scene that when I spoke to the comrade next to me, it was in a whisper.

“I wonder,” I said, “what that old green eye of a moon is looking at back of those dark, old cliffs? I wonder if he sees the big guns drowsing and the garrisons asleep or——”

“What he’s seeing,” said the man at my side in a grumble, “is the heathen blighters getting ready to bang hell out of us!”

“Cheerful beggar you are,” I whispered back the more gloomily because I was one of those who had argued and felt certain that we were not to take the Turks by surprise.

And now the men had assembled on the decks as soft-footedly as they might. They had gathered in the darkness into orderly rows like big companies of phantoms. The ships’ crews worked as spectrally and nearly as silently as the lowering of ladders and the launching of the boats would permit. Even the groaning and wrenching of the chains and cables seemed subdued and ghostly. Small steamboats each with a swerving tail made up of barges and small boats panted alongside the transports and battleships. With wonderful precision and swiftness the great ships spawned hundreds on hundreds of smaller craft, thousands on thousands of men, crowding the waters with them for as far as you could make out whichever way you looked in the faint moonlight.

“Fall in Number Nine platoon!” came the growled order.

That was my command.

I quickly had my men groping down the companion ladder. There were sixty in my special charge. By the time I had them all aboard and had stepped into the barge myself where we huddled with fully two hundred more, the voice of our cocky little midshipman sounded. He sat most correctly erect in the stern, his cap at a jaunty angle, his slender neck in its broad white collar. He was so very young and boyish but he had an alert and business-like eye.

“Full up, sir,” he said smartly.

God bless and care for that gallant little chap! I can’t help fervently wishing it as the memory of him comes to me now. He was only sixteen—the treble of childhood was still in his voice. But in it as he gave his orders then and afterward as well when frightful peril came, were the steadiness and the coolness of a brave man—the sort of man he must have become if the dandy little youngster had not been destined for death with those many, many others on this April night.

The men in our barge as it bobbed about began to pass jests, in whispers, of course. Not that they felt giddy—funny. Or, yes, in a way, a bit giddy—nervous tension, you know. Like a small boy whistling in the dark. And yet willing and eager to meet whatever dragon might be there. For now we felt and knew that all we had trained for, prepared for, thought about, imagined—the big time of actual warfare was at hand. That was what was most alive in every man’s mind. But they joked.

“I’ve remembered you in my will, Jimmy,” said one to a pal two rows behind him. “You’ll get nothing short of a million, my son.”

“What—‘cooties’?” demanded Jim. I think I need not stop to describe “cooties,” those “bosom friends” of the trenches.

“Don’t waste your millions on him, Bob,” advised another. “Just leave’m a lock o’ your ’air.”

A small but very sharp voice cut in:

“Silence!”

It was the middie, but for all save the pitch of the voice it might have been a veteran commander.

“Cast off and drift astern,” directed a basso from the transport’s deck.

Our little man expeditiously carried out the order and slowly we drifted astern until there came sudden twangs from the hawsers, startling because everything had been so quiet or muffled before. This was as the hawsers coupling boats and barges went taut as each boat in succession, filling with men, drew suddenly to a halt its drifting predecessor.

Two of the men in our boat who were standing were caught by the jerk of the hawser and snapped overboard. They were fished out with boathooks under the rapid, cool direction of the indignant middie.

“Disgusting carelessness,” he called the incident.

The Military Cross

When all the boats of our string had been filled, there came the order to the tugs: “Full steam ahead!”

Our tug was quite ready for it. Our string straightened out in a jiffy and we got off to a racing start—bounding, dipping and rolling. Sometimes we shot ahead in a straight line, sometimes in a half circle.

“God bless that damned old moon!” said a man near me. His jumble of reverence and profanity came from the fact that the old green wicked eye of a moon had blinked out behind the cliffs. A moment before I had looked back and could see the battleship coming on slowly in our rear with the obvious purpose of covering our attack.

Then I couldn’t see a blessed thing. The green waters had turned to ink. You only knew your comrades were with you in the same boat by the press of their swaying bodies against your shoulders and your ribs.

About this time some of the gay Johnnies got another severe reprimand from our kiddie commander. They had undertaken to rise and were holding their bayonets out over the waters like fish poles, chaffing one another as to which of them would catch the first Turk. All said they wished it would be a particularly fat one—say, a three hundred pounder.

But the middie’s eyes had got used to the inky darkness and he spotted the jokers.

“No skylarking and silence all!” said the infant “vet.” The men were pretty well on edge by this time. And, as the world generally knows, the Australian does not put much store in military discipline. But these men obeyed the little boy on the instant—all save one who though as quick as the others in resuming his proper place in the boat, disobeyed sufficiently to remark in a whisper, good-natured and admiring:

“Who’d ’a’ thought we had admirals so blarsted young!”

And by this time we were within two hundred yards of the shore. A man near me voiced the impression we all were getting.

“Shouldn’t wonder,” he said, “if we’re to surprise them after all.”

Then suddenly out of that weird darkness, that curious silence that had been disturbed only by the rapid, half-choked panting of the steam tugs, the surge of the water against the sides of the barges, the whispers, the occasional smothered laughs—all soft sounds—there came hell—veritable hell if ever hell comes to men on earth! And it came with a tremendous roar!

CHAPTER IV
The Ghastly Landing

There was a swift, sharp lightening of the sky back of the gaunt, black cliffs and our boats seemed thrown out of the water, thrown up into the air by the rocking thunder of the heavy guns of the Turkish batteries behind those cliffs. The water that had been so smooth an instant before, that was, in fact, so treacherously smooth, as had been the silence, was stabbed and chopped and sent into wild spume by a great rain of shells. Blinding blasts flared as suddenly as here and there a boat with its living load was struck and shattered. Screams and hoarse, impulsive cries began to mingle with the explosions.

Then the cliffs and the sand dunes spat deadly fire at us. In the darkness I could not, of course, see it all. But it would seem from what afterward I was able to learn that not one of the pilots of the steam tugs thought of turning back. I could not see it all and had no time to think of much other than myself and my platoon, a very few seconds after the bombardment from the big guns of the forts began dropping their big shells and the hail of the machine guns sang among us.

Surprise?

They had our range as surely as if we stood ten feet away from them. The water was cluttered with the accurate assemblage of their shots. Our battleships had begun an angry, heavy retort but whether their great guns were finding the marks, of course, we couldn’t know. It would have been a mighty comfort to us then to feel that these shots were smashing the Turks.

There was no indication of it. Their fire became more and more and more intense. Boat after boat was being smashed. In not more than three minutes after the enemy began his bombardment against our landing, my own boat went to smash. A shell struck it at the bow. It shattered the boat and must have killed at least a dozen men. I, fortunately, was in the stern. With my comrades I was hurled into the air and the next realization was that I was far over my head in water and that the first thing I must do if I was not to drown was to get rid of my heavy knapsack.

Thank the Lord, I had been a sturdy swimmer since childhood. I can’t begin to picture to you how many scores of my comrades, unable to swim or weak swimmers, died then and there—how many of them with knapsacks on their backs and guns and bayonets in their hands yet remain at the bottom of the Ægean Sea, a curious spectacle for the fish.

I fought my way to the surface. And I clung to my gun and bayonet. I clung to them as frantically as any drowning man is supposed to clutch at a straw. For the only escape from drowning was to get ashore and ashore I knew there would be small hope for me without my bayonet.

When I got to the surface other chaps were struggling all around me.

“Help each other get rid of these knapsacks,” I yelled when I got my breath. “It’s our only chance or we’ll drown like rats.”

So we struggled about aiding one another free of these encumbrances. We had also to let our ammunition belts go and held on only to our guns. The shore was not far off now and we swam for it. But as we drew near—very near—within fifty feet or so, we encountered a devilishly ingenious snare.

The enemy had constructed on stakes in eight feet of water a barbed-wire entanglement along more than two miles of the beach. I was overhanding it for shore, supporting my rifle in the other when I ran my face full tilt against the barbed wire’s fangs. Others of my comrades did the same. They cursed and moaned. We hung on to the barbed wire but ducking every instant for a scream of bullets was all around us.

I can’t tell you how many of the landing boats were smashed in the landing at Gallipoli. None I believe knows with accuracy. How many men were drowned outright none either can exactly tell. But there were hundreds. Nor how many men, exhausted, striving for the shore, were caught and held like netted fish in that barbed-wire entanglement will never be known. That scores—yes, hundreds were, I cannot doubt. Some of the men immediately around me I know were lost in the effort to get past it.

It was too closely netted to get through it. Some possibly floated or were lifted over it by the roll of the surf. I know only how I made my own way out of the trap. And that was by drawing myself down along the barbed strands until I found a space some two feet between the barbed-wire barrier and the sea-bottom. And I crawled through!

A few strokes after that and I was able to take to my feet and wade out. Well, hardly that. I plunged, stumbled, fell and finally crawled out on the bullet-spattered and shell-riven sands.

I wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the bullets or the shells. Honestly, I was too exhausted. Had there been an enemy to meet me as I flopped on the sands the worst I could have done to him by way of resistance would have been to pat him on the cheek. If that much. I just flopped and panted and panted. And as my breath came slowly, very slowly back to normal I was astonished to find that my rifle and bayonet were still clutched in my hand.

Fortunately, the enemy’s own shells smashed their cunning, barbed-wire, under-sea entanglement and such sections of it as were not ripped in that fashion were made harmless by plucky bombing parties in battleship launches.

I didn’t lay very long gasping on the beach for the music of the bullets made me realize grimly enough that I wasn’t out surfing. I staggered to my feet and began to take general notice. The boats that survived had spilled their men into the surf and the men, huddling and scared, had nevertheless carried on. They were fast crowding the strip of beach. Officers were snapping out commands—heroically holding their presence of mind and organizing their men. Organizing, that is, what they could find of them, or any men, for that matter, that they could find around them.

All these things had now become visible in the dawn—the sudden dawn of the East. You must understand that the bombardment was ceaseless from the forts, the guns of all our ships roaring back at them the while. But it was the machine-gun fire and the rifle fire from the Turks concealed among the sand dunes and the clefts of the cliffs that were tearing our men down. Sometimes the big shells smashed holes in the beach and sent up great clouds of sands that settled blindingly down upon us.

Our landing party was grotesque and wavering under the frightful storm. Shouts, yells, screams of pain, cries of alarm merged into a great clamor. The most heartening thing, somehow, in the darkness had become the Australian cry of “Coo-ee!”—sharp and musical, in which men had called themselves together into groups. When the dawn came I was able to find twelve of the sixty men of my command.

There was no living on the beach. The only way out of that immediate hell was to charge across the sands and get into the shelter of the dunes, to fight our way to the base of the cliffs and get away from the shells of the cliffs, and to fight our way into enemy trenches in the table-lands and rout the snipers from their lairs.

Don’t ask me how we did it. I am only prepared to describe how myself and my dozen men accomplished it. I wasn’t, you see, exactly on a sight-seeing party.

In my little group of twelve who had been tossed into the ocean and made their way through the wave-submerged barbed wire we didn’t have a thing to fight with but the cold steel of our bayonets. Our ammunition belts had perforce been abandoned with our knapsacks and were at the bottom of the Ægean.

But His Majesty’s warships were giving us a lot of aid. Their great guns were turned off the distant Turkish forts for a while and their lighter armament was also brought under full play and together they swept the dunes and cliffs above us with a merciless fire. Actually we saw the bodies of our enemies, clusters of them, spouting from the places of their concealment, saw legs, arms and heads flying wildly in the air.

But back of me along the mile and more of beach there was a terrible litter of our own dead. And every minute somewhere near me a man was going down.

We got up those sand ridges any old way—by digging in our bayonets like Alpine staffs, clawing with our free hands, scrambling with toe-holds and fighting up on all fours.

We had just gained a knoll of sand and bush and taken protection behind it for a minute’s breathing when one of my men, one of those sturdy cattlemen who had made their way out of the wilderness to get into the war for civilization, went down with a bullet in his leg.

“Nothing much,” he said, as I bent over him to examine the wound, “and don’t stop for me. Go on and come back for me later or maybe the Red Cross lads will find me. A little thing like this isn’t going to——”

He was smiling as he talked, but suddenly his head fell back, his smile widening into a horrible grin. A bullet had taken him in the neck. He was done for.

Of course, and luckily, there were only a few of our thousands that had been blown out of their boats and most of the lusty fighters of the landing force had their ammunition in hand. They were going after the Turks with rifle volleys of deadly accuracy.

Having come alive through the terrible ordeal of that shell and bullet strand of open beach, the Australians and New Zealands were fired to the highest fighting pitch. Companies of them sang as they climbed and pushed and struggled along—sang or rather yelled snatches of all manner of songs though they didn’t sound much like songs. More like strange, sustained savage war cries.

There was no staying the impetuosity of some of them.

When we had gained the upper ridges under the very face of the cliffs and a furious mêlée it was till we got there, orders flew from the lips of the officers for the men to stop and “dig in.” The ragged sandstone cliffs were pierced by hundreds of tortuous pathways and there was no telling what traps might lie in these crevices and mazes. The enemy had already given evidence that in tunnels in the cliffs were located batteries from which had come the most withering of fires until the warships’ guns got after them. But beyond the face of the cliffs it was foolhardy for any officer to lead his men against an enemy save one in full retreat. And although it was evident by this time that we had the Turks on the run, it was equally evident to our officers that their commanders had been so confident in the frightfulness of the fire upon the landing parties and the impediments of barbed wire they had planted in the ocean, that they had not massed a strong force in the sand dunes on the face of the hills. The probability of a much stronger force back of the cliffs practically amounted to a certainty.

And although we had the Turks on the run, their forts two and three miles away were still pouring their fire without an instant’s let-up on the beach and for half a mile or more into the water.

But, in spite of orders, hundreds of our warriors refused to stop. They charged right on through the pathways and tunnels in the cliffs. We never saw them again. Those that were not killed were captured by the Turks. We used to say in speaking of them afterward that they had “gone on to Constantinople.”

My little band, now numbering eleven, I brought together on a shelf near the face of the cliffs and we tried to dig in. But we had only our bayonets for implements and the ground was a hard, brittle admixture of sand and stone. So, instead, I ordered them to gather a sufficient number of the chunks of rock that had been shattered from the face of the cliffs by the battleship’s big guns and we constructed a horseshoe shaped retreat—one that would protect us against an enfilade. In this we esconced ourselves and looked from time to time on the bombardment, going as furiously as ever between the warships and the distant forts with an occasional vicious spurting exchange between our light land batteries which we had got ashore in the face of everything, and the hidden batteries that still held on among the cliffs. But mostly we snuggled with heads well down below the walls of our little forts for the bullets of snipers were pinging all around us. And you can imagine they had made things damned merry for us while we were doing our bit of architecture. The Turks at the time must have been pretty well demoralized for let me tell you that, in ordinary circumstances, the Turk is altogether too accurate a shot. As it was, there was only one member of my little crowd who got hurt—a Melbourne boy who had two fingers ripped off his left hand as he was shoving a big, ragged chunk of sandstone in place on the fortress wall.

Just as we had settled down to hold out until nightfall should take from us the uncomfortable job of being targets for snipers, I was startled by a big, horny-handed man in my company, a fellow with a cave-man’s face and wicked eye. He had suddenly started blubbering. Before any of us could stop him, he jumped to his feet, showed himself head and shoulders above our baby fortress’ walls, and shook his fist fiercely in the general direction of the Turks. Their snipers answered him with a furious spitfire of bullets. We dragged him down and I demanded:

“What the devil’s got into you, anyhow? Want to get us all killed?”

“The little admiral!” he roared back at me in fury. “I was thinking it was those dogs and their guns killed that kid—I tried to get to him when the barge blew up. Plucky little devil! He was hanging on to the stern and yelling orders to us to be ‘Steady’ and ‘Hold on.’ And then another shell hit the damn’ thing and he was gone.” He tried to get up again, but we held him down. “The damn’ kid-killing bunch of dogs!” he yelled.

But there were other hearts, yes, thousands and thousands of hearts as staunch as the “little admiral’s” in that red day of horror. There was the work done by the Australian Army Service Corps—landing a steady procession of boats loaded with medical and food supplies as well as ammunition, fleets on fleets of these boats from the transports and battleships moving to shore with the coolest regularity with the waters around every one of them constantly thrashed by tons of falling shells. Scores of the boats were blown up. But the others never stopped only where there was a chance of rescue of the men flung from the shattered boats.

The stretcher-bearers and the doctors we could also see working calmly among the sand dunes, ignoring snipers’ bullets as though they had been harmless flakes of snow. Slow and painful files of the wounded—those who could walk or stagger along were being guided to protected places until the coming of night might enable their removal to the hospital ships.

As for the dead whose countless prone bodies strewn upon the beach with curious pitiful inertness so different from that of sleep, that you know instinctively means death—there was no use then risking live men to give the dead the attention, to award them such decencies of care and burial as were their due. This also would be the work of the night. Yes, and with many a man as he worked over the graves of his fallen comrades pitching into that grave, himself become a dead man—betrayed to a sniper by the moonlight’s gleam.

Twilight veiled the sun and then very suddenly black night came.

Well, we had done the thing, done what many men of authority had thought it would be impossible for us to do, what Lord Kitchener was afterward to describe as one of the most brilliant feats of bravery and soldiering of the war. We had effected a landing at Gallipoli. Perilously we were to hold our place on this narrow little peninsula, this back door of the Dardenelles, for months to come.

But at what a price! And through what suffering and horror!

Out of the 20,000 men who landed at Gallipoli by my own observation and all report, I do not think that 1,000 are alive today!

CHAPTER V
Holding On

Our little fortress or “sangar” could be likened to a cauldron for it was constantly surrounded by fire—the bursting, flaming shells, and the pepper of snipers’ bullets like the sharp bubbling of boiling water to “carry on” the likeness of a cauldron. Down on the beach at the first ridge of rocky embankment the engineers had most bravely under a frightful fire blasted great dug-outs for the establishment of headquarters, a hospital, and the first station for the storing of supplies.

There never was an instant’s cessation of the storm of Turkish shells from the batteries back of the cliffs, but other little companies like my own had gained a foot-hold on the first ridge and held on desperately.

Something like organization was coming out of the chaos. My men were showing no signs of panic. I dispatched two messengers back to the beach to report my position, the number of men still with me, and to secure food and ammunition. These men in common with other messengers sent from similar small strongholds on the ridge, had a most dangerous duty to perform. They ran the gamut of intense fire. Many of them were killed. But my men successfully returned. They came laden with bully beef, biscuits and jam. Our emergency rations had disappeared hours before and we were brisk enough in opening the boxes and tins and strengthening ourselves with bully beef, biscuits and jam.

The organization at headquarters went on with remarkable efficiency considering the stormy environment. I soon received a reinforcement which brought my reduced company of twelve men up to my original quota of sixty.

In the protection of night relays of messengers worked briskly in bringing to us rifles and ammunition to complete our supplies. Not that these messengers had any easy pathway. The storm of shrapnel was ceaseless and it was a bright night. We were as grateful for the ammunition as for the food because, as I have already told, all the men of my detachment had been blown into the water and in the saving of their own lives had necessarily abandoned their cartridge belts.

The Turks were still firmly holding a ridge some eighty feet above us from which throughout the night they kept up a playful attack of machine guns, and their snipers were tireless. My men were so annoyed at these attentions that I had some difficulty in restraining them from making sorties. One of the men recklessly stuck his head above the rocky wall of the “sangar” and queried:

“Where are the Turks?”

“Over there,” I said, with a nod toward the ridge.

“Don’t they ever show themselves?” he demanded indignantly.

“Put your head down, get down, you chump, or you’ll never live to see one of them,” I told him.

Another time a sniper’s bullet ricochetted around the rocky wall of the “sangar.”

“What’s that?” demanded one of my men.

“A ricochet,” I replied.

“Don’t we use them, too?” asked this guileless rookie.

Fortunately for us the Turks on the ridge above were not possessed of bombs. They tried to make up for this deficiency by hurling at us huge chunks of rock that had been smashed by our battle-ship attack from the face of their sandstone cliffs.

We made them a better retort. We took our bully beef tins and jam tins and tobacco tins, loaded them with broken stones and cordite taken from our rifle cartridges, and messengers were dispatched to return with other forms of explosives and fuses to aid us in the completion of these amateur weapons of war. We lighted them from our cigarette ends and hurled them in whatever direction a Turk had betrayed his presence. Sometimes they would explode prematurely and not a few of the bombers of that night had their faces blown away.

Dawn found us still in possession of the first ridge. While we remained there inactive and before any order had been given to indicate that we were to assault the upper ridge, there came an order which aroused my wonder and opposition. It was to “Fix bayonets!”

Obedience to this order all along our position brought about a startling betrayal of the whereabouts of the entire force, for the sunshine glittered brilliantly on the steel blades and fairly telegraphed the location of all our quotas to the enemy above.

I knew there must be some mistake and cried to my men, “Unfix bayonets! Who the hell gave that order?”

I never found out, but I have very definite suspicion. I am certain it was a false order circulated by spies, which we were subsequently to discover were among us.

It is a fact that the German spy system even invaded the very personnel of the British army. My platoon sergeant, Merrifield, summarily accounted for one of these spies. This was some weeks later, at the attack at Lone Pine. We had won the position and we were consolidating, improving upon the trenches and the strongholds which we had captured when the order come down from the left, “Retire! to the first line.”

I shouted “Stick where you are! Who gave that damned order?”

I sent up Merrifield to make inquiries and as he was making his way along the line asking the men where the order had come from, it was pointed out to him that a man on the left started the order. Merrifield went up to him and asked who gave that order to retire. This man replied “Lieutenant Wilhelm.” We had seen enough of spy work since we left Australia and Merrifield, rushing up, faced Wilhelm. He did not stop to question him. He read in the man’s countenance the appearance of a Teuton, the broad face, high cheek-bones and broad neck. And Merrifield took long chances but was too enraged to consider that. “You damned square-head,” he shouted, and with the utterance of the words killed the lieutenant with his bayonet. Wilhelm’s attempted treachery not only cost him his life, but did not gain its end, for the order never got any farther. On examining his person, we found letters, photographs and a signal code, all going to show that however recklessly he had acted, Merrifield had made no mistake.

The night of the second day found us in positions higher up among the sandy table lands and ridges and dug into positions that we were to hold for a few weeks waiting for reinforcements, which were coming up from Egypt.

The Turkish snipers occupied a great deal of our attention all this time and they were a cunning lot. They were adepts in the art of camouflage—an art which was new to battlefields at this time. Their favorite method of deception was to paint their bodies green, to shroud their heads with the natural foliage of the country, moss and holly-bush twigs. With this arrangement they could conceal themselves as neatly and completely as snakes in the grass. They not only hid in the shrubbery, but successfully concealed themselves in the stunted trees that grew among the rocky crevices. The cliffs themselves gave them a tremendous advantage. In this they had drilled shooting boxes—holes in all manner of secret recesses large enough to hold their bodies.

But we did not permit them to pot us wholly undisturbed. Many of our men made night expeditions that silenced forever our hidden hunters. One of my bush men came back from such an expedition with a startling souvenir. It was nothing less than a head of one of the Turkish snipers—the face of the ghastly object painted green, twigs enmeshed in the hair and sticking out of the ears.

But after a while we were to meet the Turk and find him not such a bad fellow. I asked the prisoners we captured why they were fighting. They said, they didn’t know what they were fighting for, but they just wanted to have a fight. A rejoinder which an Irishman like myself could appreciate. In a conversation with an educated Turk I asked him why they allowed the Germans to be the master. He replied that the Germans had for the last forty years over-run his country and taken over the direction of the civil, the military and the naval affairs of his nation, and they were so strong, dealt with the Turks with such an iron hand, that there was no commencing a mutiny. It had been tried and proved a fiasco.

During the months of July and August when the sun was very hot and the ground very dry, and the flies and the mosquitoes were everywhere, water became scarce, for it was a waterless land we were on. The Turkish prisoners, so friendly did they become with us, went back to their own lines and brought us water. We sent others back to try and persuade their kind to come over and give themselves up. We fed them well, gave them the best that we had, and made jolly good fellows of them, as they were indeed. They had given us a good fight and we appreciate a good fighter. Though they went back to their own lines they would always return and brought us frequently gourds of fresh water. The water that we got ourselves was coming from Murdos and Lemnos Islands. It was brackish and it stunk. We were only allowed one pint per man a day, a stingy ration under a tropic sun. The Turks said they brought us water because when wounded Turks lay gasping for water, we had given them of our own.

Then the time came when we were getting an extra supply of jam, and there were only two kinds of jam issued—plum and an apple and apricot combination. Of course, that set us all grumbling, soldier-like, because we didn’t get strawberry. One day one of the men hit upon the idea of exchanging this jam with wine with which the French soldiers over Suvla Bay way were liberally supplied. This exchange went on for about a fortnight, and there were happy times in the trenches. Then the French got fed up with this sameness of jam and our stocks dropped below zero. So we had to look out for another customer. One of our boys hit upon the idea of exchanging the jam with the Turks. During the day we put up our articles of exchange—jam and bully beef on bayonets and held them up in prominent positions on the front line trenches. And we waited anxiously as to what was going to happen, and lo! at night we heard and saw the Turks crawling through the brushwood and scrub, growling and muttering to themselves as their whiskers were caught on the twigs of the bushes. When they reached the front-line trenches they took off the articles of exchange and put in their place wines, cigarettes and Turkish “delight,” as we always called the tobacco. That showed us that they didn’t want war and we knew we didn’t want war, but the Germans wanted it and as long as they wanted it we had to keep going.

Likewise we had other experiences that were not all grim, but they were exciting. For instance, our bathing parties on the beach. We didn’t have to bother with bathing suits or summer-resort regulations, but we had the novelty of bathing to the accompaniment of shell fire. When we saw shells diving we dived to get out of the way.

Gallipoli at this period of the year was a frying pan. Men found their uniforms intolerable. We cut our trousers into “knickers,” abandoned our tunics, and did all our fighting in bare knees and shirt sleeves. Our enemies got a wrong impression from this. Turkish prisoners told us that the report among them was we were falling so short of supplies that we were cutting our trousers in two to make double the number of pairs. The idea of our poverty of supplies was further strengthened by the fact that many of our men abandoned shirts entirely and moved about like savages with bronzed bodies naked of all covering save the knickers and their socks and boots. Our aspect and the fact that our men went after them practically always with a bayonet, won for us from the Turk the respectful sobriquet of the “White Ghurkas,” the Ghurkas being famous for their fondness and expertness in the use of the knife.

Not to give the reader too happy an impression of affairs as they stood with us in Gallipoli after the night of our desperate landing, it might be well to note here that of our original landing force of 20,000 there had been at least 5,000 casualties among us. The night of the landing in the storm from the Turkish forts, the cliff batteries, the machine guns and the snipers, and also the drownings, fully 3,000 men had been killed or wounded. In the intermittent fighting of the following weeks preceding the attacks on Lone Pine and Chocolate Hill, the work of the sharp-shooters, added to that of many small engagements, had further depleted our numbers 2,000 more at least. We had held our own under these harrowing circumstances from the last of April until August when the second division of 20,000 new Anzacs came to join us.

In the fleet of transports that bore the fresh contingent of Australians and New Zealanders, was the Southland, she who was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. The men who arrived told us a most interesting story of the experience of the Southland and the 1,300 troops aboard her. It will be recalled that after being torpedoed the Southland had a remarkably long life. She was kept afloat for hours until beached on a rocky strand. The descriptions we got of the behavior of the Anzacs and her crew were thrilling in the courage, cheerfulness and display of humor on the part of hundreds of Britishers, who had no way of knowing at what moment the wounded ship might plunge to the bottom of the sea.

One of the things they did was to hold an impromptu auction sale of the crippled Southland. Bids for the great boat, whose cost had been a half million, started at a shilling and while she was being battered on the sand and rocks, rose to the majestic sum of one pound. She was knocked down at that price to an Anzac, who later, in all hopefulness, was to file his claim of ownership with the marine registry at London. He announced his intention after the war of taking the Southland back home with him to make of it an Australian bungalow.

The Southland they told us landed with her nose high in the air, and there was rivalry as to who should be the last to leave the ship. Men scrambled up the steeply slanting deck, clinging to rails, cabin doors, and any other object offering hand- or foot-hold. There were big bathing parties around the wreck, before the men were picked up by the launches and barges from the other transports and battle ships. In the first of the shock from the torpedo and when all were in expectancy of the Southland’s going down, the men assembled on the decks and bravely set up the Australian song composed by a British naval officer, which had become dear to them:

“Gather around the banners of your country,
Join in the chorus or the foam,
On land or sea, wherever you be,
Keep your eye on Germanee.
England’s home of beauty has no cause to fear,
Should old acquaintance be forgot?
No! No! No! No! No!
Australia will be there, Australia will be there!”

CHAPTER VI
Giving Up Gallipoli

In looking over the notes and papers I have collected to aid me in the preparation of this book, memory is vigorously stirred by a clipping of an article from the Sydney Mail of October 31, 1917, written by a fellow officer who prefers to remain anonymous. He wrote well of the familiar scenes of the famous battlefield as they would appear today. Following is an extract:

“The ‘Vineyard’ has blossomed and the small green grapes cluster on the vine. The well by the fisherman’s hut has run sweet once more. The cave dwellers by Shrapnel Gully, Quinn’s Post and Courtenay’s are as quiet and still as tombs. Grass and weeds have grown over the winding paths that thread the valleys and scrape the hilltops. The sandbags of the traverses have rotted and burst, spilling their earth on the litter of these battles of yesterday. And out through the chessboard field the grave-mounds of earth that we pattered down with spade and entrenching tool have blossomed with wild flowers and green grass. The warm, tideless Ægean washes these empty beaches where once thousands of men from the Empire’s back-blocks made war as it had never been made before.

“Two years ago forty thousand men walked these paths. They slept in these dug-outs, or in the trenches, and the detonation of the guns of the warships shook loose the earth and sand above them so that it rattled down in their faces, waking them from dreams of home to an uncomfortable reality. Think of those three days two years ago! Think of the waterless fight for Chocolate Hill; of the wounded lying in the brushwood and waiting for the sweeping grass fires to reach their resting place. Men lay there unable to move; some of them not able to pull their water bottles from their web-slings! Think of them and remember them, for in all wars there was never a more gallant forlorn hope than this one.

“Lone Pine, Chocolate Hill, Sari Bair and Biyuk Anafarta were goals set far ahead. Many reached them and never came back. Lone Pine was attacked on August 6 and of all the attacks at Gallipoli, this was, perhaps, the most terrible. The Turkish trenches were supplied with head covers made of stout timber. Under these were loopholes from which the Turks fired with temporary immunity at the advance Australian battalions. The enfilade fire was terrible, but the men bodily lifted the timber beams and dropped feet first into the dark trenches beneath. By 5:47 P. M., 17 minutes after the first advance, we held the trenches. At 1:30 the same night there came a terrific counter-attack headed by scores of bombers. For seven hours the counter-attack pressed, wave on wave of Turks coming from the very parapet often to be shot and fall into the trench. One Australian brigade, only two thousand strong, carried this work in the face of an entire enemy division and held it during six days’ counter-attacks. A thousand corpses were in the trench system after the occupation and to make room for the fighting men these were stacked in piles at intervals between the traverses.

“There was one example there that will never die. The 7th Gloucester lost all their officers and senior non-commissioned officers, but they fought on, mere isolated groups of men and the privates and lance-corporal, green troops of the New Army from midday until sunset! The Lancashires, the Hampshires, Gloucesters, Australians and New Zealanders—all did men’s work in those days. None of their deeds will die, none of the names of men or regiment will ever be forgotten.”

I was in the attack of Lone Pine which carried our armies nearest to the goal of capturing the coveted strip between the Ægean and the Straits of Dardanelles. I got my first wound of the war in the winning of these timber-roofed trenches, a bayonet thrust in the darkness ripping my right hand open but doing my hand in the matter of its future usefulness no permanent injury.

Reinforcements had come to us till our numbers stood at forty thousand, but with the reinforcements also came aëroplanes which later “spotted” for us the information that the Turks on the tops of the ridges outnumbered us by many thousands. They had also the support of the great guns of their forts although our battle ships had made the contests in artillery fairly even duels.

Lone Pine Hill was the most prominent ridge on our front. It was so named because the sweep of our fire had leveled a small forest so completely that only a single pine tree remained. Its foliage had been entirely blown away. There was left of it but its broken trunk and two gaunt limbs, blackened by explosions and upraised, curiously resembling the arms of a soldier in the act of surrender. We took this to be a good omen when on the afternoon of August 6th our orders came that on this night we were to mount these 500 yards of rock, stubble and moss and possess ourselves of this highest point of the enemy positions.

We felt all confident. With reinforcements of our own Anzacs had come moreover big supplies of ammunition, machine guns and additional artillery.

But also we knew the way ahead to be a hard one to travel and our aëroplane observers in their reports and photographs had shown how deeply and firmly the Turks under their German officers had fixed themselves in the trenches on the summit of Lone Pine.

Nearly all the attacks up to this time had begun in the dawn. This time the attack was ordered immediately on the fall of darkness. The strategy succeeded. There is no doubt that a night advance was a big surprise for we had made our way up along two hundred yards of ground before they suspected our coming. Then they flashed their star-shells in the sky and swept us with a howling fire. It stopped us for a time, but we pulled ourselves together and held on until our commanders were certain that the Zion Mule Corps under Colonel Paterson, the famous Jewish contingent in this action at Gallipoli, were behind us with their sturdy animals heavily laden with the bombs that we already knew to be so vital a weapon in trench-storming. They used the mules as well to bring us additional machine guns. But most of all we needed a chance to catch our breath. Our halt did not in the least mean our doubt of ability to get those trenches. It was part of good wisdom that our men should not attain the top of the ridge winded and exhausted from the climb.

We halted crouching behind the rocks and knolls, gasping at first, for only about five minutes. Then we started to cover the rest of the climb and give the Turks and their German commanders “what for.”

The Turkish trenches, it must be understood, were built in the hillside and their timber-roofs slanted toward us. These roofs were honeycombed with loop-holes from which their fire snarled at us as we came. Its first effect was deadly, but there was no wavering. Against the geysers of bullets these covered trenches were throwing up we simply went to work with our trench knives and bayonets, used them as crowbars and ripped the timbers loose. We blew the timbers into the air as well with bombs although many of our men were disabled, being wounded by big flying splinters in the process. We dropped right in on top of the Turks and fought them hand to hand in their own dug-outs. It was fast fighting and we swiftly overwhelmed them. I recall to the reader as accurate the statement of the writer in the Sydney Mail that we captured Lone Pine Ridge in seventeen minutes of direct attack.

The Turks fell completely away from Lone Pine Ridge and retreated fully a mile across a shallow valley and on to another ridge where we knew from our aëroplane scouts they had another strong position. In the judgment of our commanders we must be content to hold the elevation, the next advance, if it were to be undertaken, would have to be with the aid of tremendous artillery force in the taking of the great Dardenelles forts themselves.

From 6 o’clock in the evening of August 6th until half-past one the following morning you might have supposed that the Turkish soldier was a phantom for all we ever saw of him. But the batteries of the big forts never let up. For six weeks they were to hold us under a fire night and day. It wasn’t exactly continuous, but you never could tell when it would open up and never a day or night passed that did not find us under attack.

At half-past one o’clock in the morning of August 7th the Turks came back, seeking to regain the Lone Pine position. They fought us fiercely. They stormed their way against terrific machine-gun fire to the very brink of our trenches. Sometimes they got into the very trenches themselves and our men found them hard fighters in hand to hand struggles and, not like the Germans as we were to discover later, cowards under the rip and stab of cold steel.

They were tireless in attack. We sent back waves of them, but other waves came on. They, too, had their battle songs, or I should say song. It was always the same tune they sang in swooping at us, a curious whining refrain that would suddenly end in a high note of ferocity or anticipated triumph.

There was a man at the end of the trench that we had taken who did not belong to my battalion, but who had jumped into the trench suddenly with a whole box of bombs in his arms and who before he got finished with that night’s work had won the Victoria Cross. I saw him in the thick of a fight passing out bombs with splendid strength and swiftness. Besides as I kept watching him he was tireless. He stopped rush after rush of battle-mad Turks as they tried to force their way into our dug-outs. Noting his effectiveness, I gave orders to keep him well supplied with bombs. I ordered two men behind him for relief, but he kept constantly shouting back that he was feeling fine and able to carry on. In the morning that particular fight was over and around the section of the trench where this man fought we counted forty-seven Turkish dead. He wasn’t scratched. My memory is playing me badly at the moment and I can’t give his name. He was, however, sufficiently recognized in the official dispatches which in naming him identified him as a famous cricket player of Australia. His bowling arm had certainly done noble work that night. Without the tireless stream of bombs we kept in the air at the enemy I am not sure that we could have held on to our particular section of the trench.

Official dispatches have told how we hung on to these advanced trenches from August until October, how the Turk was kept in subjection in so far as the territory we had so vigorously acquired. We settled down in the sandstone hills and grimly endured through these months an intolerably monotonous life.

We almost welcomed the blizzard that struck us in the latter part of October because of the change it gave us, that is to say, we welcomed it the first day when the snow covered the ridges and thousands of British soldiers turned into rollicking boys. We snowballed each other, we mixed our jam with the clean white snow, called it sherbet and gobbled it, improvised skis out of the bottoms of barrels and shot over the ridges like human darts, built snow Germans and snow Turks and knocked them over and one company created the greatest attraction by building a big snow Kaiser which we bayoneted to pieces with great shouts of laughter.

But we had to pay for this fun in the succeeding weeks in which the trenches remained frozen and the air bit into us cruelly. It was a big change from the blazing heat of the summer climate on the peninsula to the arctic weather that swept so suddenly down. And many new crosses were erected in the hillside cemeteries over the graves of men who died of pneumonia. Thousands were tortured by pneumonia and the minor infliction of frost-bite.

Long ago water had become too precious a thing to be used for shaving and our men had become as whiskery as the Turks. One fellow one morning looking through his trench periscope caught a reflection of himself in its mirror. He had grown a foot and one-half of black whiskers, but hadn’t realized the change it would make in his appearance. So he let a yell out of him to give us the alarm that the Turks were at our trench. But his own magnificent growth of black whiskers had deceived him.

We lived so long in these trenches that were so much like rabbit warrens that we had got to calling ourselves rabbits and one disconsolate man of mine that I found sitting in the trench one day and asked of him what might be the cause of his deep dejection answered:

“I am waiting for my ears to get longer and my tail to sprout.”

I come now to a day in November, to be exact the 25th. This was to be a historic event for us Anzacs and will doubtless rank as a historic event of the war. It was the visit of Lord Kitchener to Anzac as we now call the two miles of Gallipoli strip we held. I am not in a position to make the statement authoritatively, but I think his coming was a complete surprise to the commandants. It certainly was to the rank and file. He arrived on a man-o’-warsman. Of course, great honors were paid him. The Turks were no longer active and the commanders had no hesitation in assembling fully ten thousand men on the beach to stand in review before the great leader. I was fortunately among them. I had, when in service in India (1906–1911), been a participant in the famous Kitchener maneuvers.

I naturally looked at him searchingly to note what changes might have been wrought by the war and its responsibilities. He did look older as he stood before us—much older. He was a little stooped, but in the stride of his long lean figure he was as vigorous as I had ever seen him. And his eyes were keen and full of light and strength as he stood before us. It wasn’t until days later that positive orders came when we learned officially that Gallipoli was to be evacuated. But he practically told us that fact that day. For a brief talk to the army followed his visit and inspection of three hours of the front trenches, his own observations with glasses from certain places of vantage, a submission to his consideration of all the aëro-photographs that had been taken of the Turkish positions and strength and a long conference with the supreme commandant of the period, Sir Charles Monro.

I will try to repeat Lord Kitchener’s words to us as literally, as accurately as memory will serve. He said:

“The King and your country appreciate most deeply the great work you have done. To have effected a landing on this hostile shore and to have held it as splendidly as you have done is in itself a great triumph for British arms. I regret that the necessities of our armies, in conformation to other plans drawn, may not permit you to remain to complete this noble success.”

And so Kitchener left us. His visit was not longer than twenty-four hours—in fact, the man-o’-warsman that brought him into Anzac Cove slipped away in the darkness, sometime before dawn.

But from that day we knew that all the perils and hardships we had endured in the fight for Gallipoli were to be crossed out in the record of results of the war. There began from November 26th a silent, secretive movement to effect our evacuation.

It must go down in history that this was most subtly done. If the Turks had ever suspected that we were thinking of withdrawing, they might have in the last two weeks of the evacuation, at least, swooped down and slaughtered the third of the force which was actually left on the Gallipoli strip. We used countless schemes of deception. To be specific we would send away boat loads of a thousand men in the night, but in the daylight land boat loads of a hundred to fool the Turkish observers into believing we were landing new forces. In the same way we would transport thousands of boxes of bombs and cartridges out of the trenches and the harbor in the night to the battle ships and in the daylight land from our barges, steamboats, pinnaces and launches, thousands and thousands of empty boxes that had contained the ammunition.

As we also withdrew our effects from the front-line trenches, our engineers displayed the greatest activity in making of all these trenches and barbed-wire entanglements the most ingenious of mechanical man-traps. Any force of Turks which attempted to swoop down the ridges against our slowly departing brigades would confront explosions of mines wonderfully camouflaged along the goat paths that were the only roads to have passed through the barbed-wire barriers and in and over deserted trenches would have set ablaze other deadly outbursts of explosions. We also had set cunningly placed rifles on our outposts which would have been set off by any prowling Turkish scout, kill him in all probability and at the same time give us an alarm.

We were not without our expressions of sentiment in abandoning Gallipoli for which we had fought so hard. We went among the rocks and heather and gathered wattle, otherwise known as memosa which is a sort of holly whose berries are yellow. It is the winter flower of the Gallipoli peninsula. We fashioned these into thousands of wreaths and in the very last days of our departure placed them on the graves of our dead.

And frankly we had no great resentment against the Turk. He had been a hard fighter but always a fair one. He had always battled as man against man. Somehow, his German officers had never been able to make him, if they tried, the barbarous, underhand, contemptible fighter into which I was soon to learn they could develop their own German soldier.

As a matter of fact, we left friendly signs behind. One placard read: “Au revoir—Brother Turk. Hope to see you again.” Another placard read: “To long Whiskers.”

One dug-out showed a placard announcing: “Anzac Villa—To Let for the Season. Beautiful Sandy Beach all to Yourself. Splendid sea view. Home comforts. Lots of pleasure and excitement.”

Since Gallipoli German propagandists, with an idea of humiliating England in the world’s opinion, have spread reports that if the British forces had held out a month longer we would have triumphed on the peninsula—that the Turks were on the verge of surrender.

Such reports are childish in their palpable falsity. As a matter of fact we were less than 40,000 men against 500,000. Against the great guns of the Turkish fort we had only in like artillery the great guns of our battle ships. And the battle ships were being menaced by submarines. It is only for me to set down that the great Kitchener going thoroughly over the situation forced the evacuation that was so masterfully managed.

CHAPTER VII
Compliments of the King

“Official documents”—the words convey the impression of dry reading—but I do not think those will be so found which have to do with the historic episodes of the landing at Gallipoli and its evacuation.

There is Lord Kitchener’s message to the Anzacs and in addition to its nobility and eloquence and the dignified State diction in which it was couched, there is the little addition of Gen. Birdwood, informal and affectionate, which touched us as deeply, made us feel as proud as did the message of his Majesty and Lord Kitchener.

This message, which came to us after Lord Kitchener had addressed us and strongly conveyed without positively stating the Empire’s decision of a withdrawal from Gallipoli, was as follows:

LORD KITCHENER’S MESSAGE.

Australian and New Zealand Army Corps

Special Army Corps Order.

November 25, 1915. Lord Kitchener has desired me to convey to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, a message with which he was specially entrusted by the King to bring to our Army Corps.

His Majesty commanded Lord Kitchener to express his high appreciation of the gallant and unflinching conduct of our men through fighting which has been harder than any yet seen during the war, and his Majesty wishes to express his complete confidence in the determination and fighting qualities of our men to assist in carrying this war to an entirely successful termination.

Lord Kitchener has ordered me to express to all the very great pleasure it gave him to have the opportunity which he considers a privilege, of visiting “Anzac” to see for himself some of the wonderfully good work which has been done by the officers and men of our Army Corps, as it was not until he had himself seen the positions we had captured and held, that he was able to fully realize the magnitude of the work which has been accomplished. Lord Kitchener much regretted that time did not permit of his seeing the whole corps, but he was very pleased to see a considerable proportion of officers and men, and so confidently imbued that the grand spirit, which has carried them through all their trials and many dangerous feats of arms, a spirit which he is quite confident they will maintain to the end, until they have taken their full share in completely overthrowing our enemies.

Boys! We may all well be proud to receive such a message and it is up to all of us to live up to them and prove their truth.

W. R. Birdwood.

Major Gen. A. Lynden Bell, Chief of the General Staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary force, issued the order for the Evacuation of “Anzac.” It was such as to take the sting out of it for us who had fought so hard, but must relinquish what we had won. I think it will be found as interesting a document as that which has gone before.

The Order of Evacuation read:

General Headquarters, December 21, 1915. The Commander-in-Chief desires to express to all ranks in the Dardanelles Army his unreserved appreciation of the way in which the recent operations, ending in the evacuation of Anzac and “Suvla” positions, have been carried to an issue successful beyond his hopes. The arrangements made for withdrawal, and for keeping the enemy in ignorance of the operation which was taking place, could not have been improved. The General Officer Commanding the Dardanelles Army, and the General Officers Commanding the Australian and New Zealand and the 9th Army Corps, may pride themselves on an achievement without parallel in the annals of war. The Army and Corps Staff, divisional and subordinate Commanders of their staff, and the Naval and Military Beach Staffs, proved themselves more than equal to the most difficult task that could have been thrown upon them. Regimental officers, non-commissioned officers and men carried out, without a hitch, the most trying operation which soldiers can be called upon to undertake—a withdrawal in the face of the enemy—in a manner reflecting the highest credit on the discipline and soldierly qualities of the troops.

It is no exaggeration to call this achievement one without parallel. To discharge and withdraw from a bold and active enemy is the most difficult of all military operations; and in this case the withdrawal was effected by surprise, with the opposing forces at close grips—in many cases within a few yards of each other. Such an operation, when succeeded by a re-embarkation from an open beach, is one for which military history contains no precedent.

During the past months the troops of Great Britain and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, Newfoundland and India fighting side by side have invariably proved their superiority over the enemy, have contained the best fighting troops in the Ottoman Army in their front, and have prevented the Germans from employing their Turkish allies against us elsewhere.

No soldier relishes undertaking a withdrawal from before the enemy. It is hard to leave behind the graves of good comrades, and to relinquish positions so hardly won and so gallantly maintained as those we have left. But all ranks in the Dardanelles Army will realize that in this matter they were but carrying out the orders of his Majesty’s Government, so that they might in due course be more usefully employed in fighting elsewhere for their King, their country and the Empire.

There is one only consideration—what is best for the furtherance of the common cause. In that spirit the withdrawal was carried out, and in that spirit the Australian and New Zealand and the 9th Army Corps have proved, and will continue to prove, themselves second to none as soldiers of the empire.

A. Lynden Bell, Major-General.

Chief of the General Staff, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.

There was also posted for our information an exchange of telegrams between King George and Sir Charles Monro, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, which should also be given here.

From Buckingham Palace came the following to Sir Charles Monro:

December 20th, 1915.

It gives me the greatest satisfaction to hear of the successful evacuation of “Suvla” and “Anzac” without loss of troops or guns. Please convey to General Birdwood and those under his command my congratulations upon the able manner in which they have carried out so difficult an operation.

George, R. I.

And the reply was:

December 21st, 1915.

To His Majesty the King:

I have communicated your Majesty’s gracious message to General Birdwood and the Dardanelles Army. In their behalf and my own I beg to give expression to the deep gratification felt by all ranks at your Majesty’s encouraging words of congratulation. The troops are only inspired by a desire to be employed as soon as possible wherever their services may be used to best advantage against your Majesty’s enemies.

Sir Charles Monro,
Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.

And on the same date was received from the Secretary of State for War by Sir Charles Monro and duly posted:

December 21st, 1915.

His Majesty’s Government received your news with the greatest pleasure and wishes immediately to express to you and all under your command their high appreciation of the excellence of the arrangements for the withdrawal from “Anzac” and “Suvla,” and their warm admiration for the conduct of the troops in carrying out the most difficult operation of the war. They appreciate as fully the effective help which Admiral Wemyss and the navy as well as General Birdwood and the Corps and other commanders afforded you. The thanks of the government for this fine achievement are due to you and to all concerned, and I wish also to congratulate you personally.

To these documents may be added not inappropriately perhaps the tribute of Edgar Wallace, an English poet, to the Anzacs. It reads:

ANZACS.

The Children unborn shall acclaim
The standard the Anzacs unfurled,
When they made Australasia’s fame
The wonder and pride of the world.

Some of you got a V. C.,
Some “the Gallipoli trot,”
And all of you got it damned hot,
And I see you go limping through town,
In the faded old hospital blue,
And driving abroad—lying down,
And Lord! but I wish I were you!

I envy you beggars I meet,
From the dirty old hats on your head
To the rusty old boots on your feet—
I envy you living or dead.
A knighthood is fine in its way,
A peerage gives splendor and fame,
But I’d rather have tacked any day
That word to the end of my name.

I’d count it the greatest reward
That ever a man could attain;
I’d sooner be “Anzac” than “lord,”
I’d rather be “Anzac” than “thane.”
Here’s a bar to the medal you’ll wear,
There’s a word that will glitter and glow,
And an honor a king cannot share,
When you’re back in the cities you know.

The children unborn shall acclaim
The standard the Anzacs unfurled
When they made Australasia’s fame
The wonder and pride of the world.

Edgar Wallace.

CHAPTER VIII
An Intermission

In the evacuation of “Anzac,” I had the honor, reserved for the men who had first landed, of being with those who left the tragic strip of territory the last. I was not a passenger on the very last barge, but if I recall correctly, about the third from the last. We went aboard the transport, Andrines.

I still had sixty men in my charge, but as I looked over them as they filed up the gangplank into the Andrines, the thought suddenly came to me—it really had not occurred to me before—that of all the men in my command there was not one of the original sixty who had left the Euripides with me for the landing at Gallipoli. Only twelve of the original sixty that I was ever again able to hear from had survived the blowing up of the barge and the barbed-wire obstacles. Of the twelve who had made my little company in the “sangar” we erected on the first ridge of X. Y. Z. beach, there was not one left. Four had been killed, the others so badly injured that they had to be taken to “Restville,” the hospital that had been organized in one of the dug-outs blasted in the stone ridges just above the sands.