The Anzac Book

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The Anzac Book

It is my privilege to have been asked to write an Introduction for The Anzac Book, and to convey the cordial thanks of all the inhabitants of our little township here to those who have so kindly given us the free use of their brains and hands in writing and illustrating this book in a way which does as much credit to them as the fighting here has done to the Force. We all hope that readers of our book will agree in this, while those who are more critical will perhaps remember the circumstances under which the contributions have been prepared, in small dug-outs, with shells and bullets frequently whistling overhead.

When I took over the command of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in Egypt a year ago, I was asked to select a telegraphic code address for my Army Corps, and then adopted the word “Anzac.” Later on, when we had effected our landing here in April last, I was asked by General Headquarters to suggest a name for the beach where we had made good our first precarious footing, and then asked that this might be recorded as “Anzac Cove”—a name which the bravery of our men has now made historical, while it will remain a geographical landmark for all time.

Our eight months at “Anzac” cannot help stamping on the memory of every one of us days of trial and anxiety, hopes, and perhaps occasional fears, rejoicings at success, and sorrow—very deep and sincere—for many a good comrade whom we can never see again.

I firmly believe, though, it has made better men of every one of us, for we have all had to look death straight in the face so often, that the greater realities of life must have been impressed on all of us in a way which has never before been possible. Bitter as has been my experience in losing many a good friend, I, personally, shall always look back on our days together at “Anzac” as a time never to be forgotten, for during it I hope I have made many fast friends in all ranks, whose friendship is all the more valuable because it has been acquired in circumstances of stress and often danger, when a man’s real self is shown.

In days to come I hope that this book will call to the minds of most of us incidents which, though they may then seem small, probably loomed very large before us at the time, and the thought of which will bring to mind many a good comrade—not only on land, but on the sea. From the day we were put ashore[Pg x] by Rear-Admiral Thursby’s squadron up till now we have had the vigilant ships of His Majesty’s Navy watching night and day, in all weathers, for any opportunity to help us. We will all of us look back in years to come on Queen Elizabeth, Prince of Wales, London, Triumph, Bacchante, Grafton, Endymion, as well as such sleuth-hounds of the ocean as Colne, Chelmer, Pincher, Rattlesnake, Mosquito, and many others, as our best of friends, and will think of them, their officers and ship’s company, as the truest of comrades, with whom it has been a privilege to serve, and as the best of representatives of the Great Fleet and Service which carries with honour and ensures respect for the British flag to the uttermost parts of the earth.

It may be that, in thinking of old “Anzac” days, the words of the Harrow school-song will spring to one’s mind:

But it has indeed helped us all to have been with strong men at “Anzac,” and whatever the future may have in store, I, personally, shall always regard the time I have been privileged to be a comrade of the brave and strong men from Australia and New Zealand, who have served alongside of me, as one of the greatest privileges that could be conferred on any man, and of which I shall be prouder to the end of my days than any honour which can be given me.

No words of mine could ever convey to readers at their firesides in Australia, New Zealand and the Old Country, one-half of what all their boys have been through, nor is my poor pen capable of telling them of the never-failing courage, determination and cheerfulness of those who have so willingly fought and given their lives for their King and country’s sake. Their deeds are known to the Empire, and can never be forgotten, while if any copy of this little book should happen to survive to fall into the hands of our children, or our children’s children, it will serve to show them to some extent what their fathers have done for the Empire, and indeed for civilisation, in days gone by.

I sincerely hope that every one of my old comrades may meet with all the good fortune his work here has deserved, and live to a ripe old age, with happiness, and be occasionally reminded of old times by a glance at The Anzac Book.

This book of Anzac was produced in the lines at Anzac on Gallipoli in the closing weeks of 1915. Practically every word in it was written and every line drawn beneath the shelter of a waterproof sheet or of a roof of sandbags—either in the trenches or, at most, well within the range of the oldest Turkish rifle, and under daily visitations from the smallest Turkish field-piece. Day and night, during the whole process of its composition, the crack of the Mauser bullets overhead never ceased. At least one good soldier that we know of, who was preparing a contribution for these pages, met his death while the work was still unfinished.

The Anzac Book was to have been a New Year Magazine to help this little British Australasian fraternity in Turkey to while away the long winter in the trenches. The idea originated with Major S. S. Butler, of the A.N.Z.A.C. Staff. On his initiative and that of Lieutenant H. E. Woods a small committee was formed to father the magazine. A notice was circulated on November 14th calling for contributions from the whole population of Anzac. Any profit was to go to patriotic funds for the benefit of the Army Corps.

Between November 15th and December 8th, when the time for the sending in of contributions closed, The Anzac Book was produced. As drawings and paintings began to come in, disclosing the whereabouts of some of the talent which existed in Anzac, a small staff of artists was collected in order to produce head- and tail-pieces and a few illustrations; and a dug-out overlooking Anzac Cove became the office of the only book ever likely to be produced in Gallipoli.

It was after the contributions had been finally sent in, and when the work of editing was in full swing, that there came upon most of us from the sky the news that Anzac was to be evacuated. Such finishing touches as remained to be added after December 19th were given to the work in Imbros. The date for the publication was necessarily delayed. And it was realised by everyone that this production, which was to have been a mere pastime, had now become a hundred times more precious as a souvenir. Certainly no book has ever been produced under these conditions before.

Except for this modification in the scheme of its production, The Anzac Book remains to-day exactly the same as when it was planned for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps still clinging to the familiar holly-clothed sides of Sari Bair.

The three weeks during which this book was being produced will be remembered by the men of Anzac as being the period during which we were visited by the two fiercest storms which descended upon the Peninsula. During the afternoon of November 17th the wind from the south-west gradually increased to more than half a gale, and brought with it, after dark, a most torrential thunderstorm. A day or two later this subsided, leaving a dishevelled Anzac. But the wind swung slowly round to the north, and by November 27th it was blowing a northerly blizzard; and the next day five out of every six Australians, for the first time in their lives, woke to find a white countryside and the snow falling. How deeply that snow impressed them can be seen in these pages—for dust, heat and flies were much more typical of Gallipoli.

The book was composed from first to last in the full prospect of Christmas at Anzac, and it remains a record, perhaps, all the more interesting on that account. The Printing Section of the Royal Engineers, especially Lieutenant Tuck and Corporal Ashwin, and Lieutenant G. L. Thomson, R.N.A.S., and certain Naval Officers helped us with some drawing-paper, ink and paints, and the Photographic Section with some excellent panoramas; but for the rest, the contributors had to work with such materials as Anzac contained: iodine brushes, red and blue pencils, and such approach to white paper as could be produced from each battalion’s stationery.

The response to the committee’s request for contributions was enormous, and in consequence the editors have been able to use only portions, even if they be a half or a quarter, of the longer articles and stories submitted to them—but they have done this without hesitation, rather than reject the articles altogether. The competitions for certain contributions resulted as follows: Cover—Private D. Barker, 5th Australian Field Ambulance; Drawing—Trooper W. O. Hewett, 9th Australian Light Horse; Drawing (Comic)—Private C. Leyshon-White, 6th Australian Field Ambulance; Prose Sketch—H. Dinning, 9th Co., Australian A.S.C.; Prose (Humorous)—Second-Lieutenant J. E. G. Stevenson, 2nd Field Co., Australian Engineers; Verses—Captain James Sprent, 3rd Australian Field Ambulance; Verses (Humorous)—T. H. Wilson, A Co., 16th Battalion A.I.F. The greater number of the contributors were private soldiers in the Army Corps. The sole “outside” contribution is Mr. Edgar Wallace’s poetic tribute to the Australian and New Zealand Force, which is included in these pages with the consent of the author.

The thanks of those particularly concerned in the production are especially due to General Birdwood, for his close and constant interest; to Brigadier-General C. B. B. White, who, though at the time burdened with most anxious duties, never failed to give some of his few spare moments to the solving of difficulties incidental to this publication; to the Commonwealth authorities and the Publicity Department in London; and particularly to Mr. H. C. Smart,[Pg xv] for his untiring assistance, invaluable advice, and for the help of his outstanding ingenuity in organisation, and of the splendid business system and abundant facilities which he has created in the Australian Military Office in London; to the War Office and the Admiralty, and the Central News for permission to use valuable photographs; and to many others, both in the A. and N.Z. Army Corps and outside it, who have given their best help to make this book a success. For the Staff—C. E. W. Bean, editor; Privates F. Crozier, T. Colles, D. Barker, W. O. Hewett, C. Leyshon-White, artists; A. W. Bazley, clerk—the work has been a labour of love for which only they realise how little thanks they deserve.

Come on, lads, have a good, hot supper—there’s business doing.” So spoke No. 10 Platoon Sergeant of the 10th Australian Battalion to his men, lying about in all sorts of odd corners aboard the battleship Prince of Wales, in the first hour of the morning of April 25th, 1915. The ship, or her company, had provided a hot stew of bully beef, and the lads set to and took what proved, alas to many, their last real meal together. They laugh and joke as though picnicking. Then a voice: “Fall in!” comes ringing down the ladderway from the deck above. The boys swing on their heavy equipment, grasp their rifles, silently make their way on deck, and stand in grim black masses. All lights are out, and only harsh, low commands break the silence. “This way No. 9—No. 10—C Company.” Almost blindly we grope our way to the ladder leading to the huge barge below, which is already half full of silent, grim men, who seem to realise that at last, after eight months of hard, solid training in Australia, Egypt and Lemnos Island, they are now to be called upon to carry out the object of it all.

“Cast off and drift astern,” says the ship’s officer in charge of the embarkation. Slowly we drift astern, until the boat stops with a jerk, and twang goes the hawser that couples the boats and barges together. Silently the boats are filled with men, and silently drop astern of the big ship, until, all being filled, the order is given to the small steamboats: “Full steam ahead.” Away we go, racing and bounding, dipping and rolling, now in a straight line, now in a half-circle, on through the night.

The moon has just about sunk below the horizon. Looking back, we can see the battleships coming on slowly in our rear, ready to cover our attack. All at once our pinnace gives a great start forward, and away we go for land just discernible one hundred yards away on our left.

Then—crack-crack! ping-ping! zip-zip! Trenches full of rifles upon the shore and surrounding hills open on us, and machine-guns, hidden in gullies or redoubts, increase the murderous hail. Oars are splintered, boats are perforated. A sharp moan, a low gurgling cry, tells of a comrade hit. Boats ground in four or five feet of water owing to the human weight contained in them. We scramble out, struggle to the shore, and, rushing across the beach, take cover under a low sandbank.

“Here, take off my pack, and I’ll take off yours.” We help one another to lift the heavy, water-soaked packs off. “Hurry up, there,” says our sergeant. “Fix bayonets.” Click! and the bayonets are fixed. “Forward!” And away we scramble up the hills in our front. Up, up we go, stumbling in holes and ruts. With a ringing cheer we charge the steep hill, pulling ourselves up by roots and branches of trees; at times digging our bayonets into the ground, and pushing ourselves up to a foothold, until, topping the hill, we found the enemy had made themselves very scarce. What had caused them to fly from a position from which they should have driven us back into the sea every time? A few scattered Turks showing in the distance we instantly fired on. Some fell to rise no more; others fell wounded and, crawling into the low bushes, sniped our lads as they went past. There were snipers in plenty, cunningly hidden in the hearts of low green shrubs. They accounted for a lot of our boys in the first few days, but gradually were rooted out. Over the hill we dashed, and down into what is now called “Shrapnel Gully,” and up the other hillside, until, on reaching the top, we found that some of the lads of the 3rd Brigade had commenced to dig in. We skirted round to the plateau at the head of the gully, and took up our line of defence.

As soon as it was light enough to see, the guns on Gaba Tepe, on our right, and two batteries away on our[Pg 3] left opened up a murderous hail of shrapnel on our landing parties. The battleships and cruisers were continuously covering the landing of troops, broadsides going into the batteries situated in tunnels in the distant hillside. All this while the seamen from the different ships were gallantly rowing and managing the boats carrying the landing parties. Not one man that is left of the original brigade will hear a word against our gallant seamen. England may well be proud of them, and all true Australians are proud to call them comrades.

Se-ee-e-e ... bang ... swish! The front firing line was now being baptised by its first shrapnel. Zir-zir ... zip-zip! Machine-guns, situated on each front, flank and centre, opened on our front line. Thousands of bullets began to fly round and over us, sometimes barely missing. Now and then one heard a low gurgling moan, and, turning, one saw near at hand some chum, who only a few seconds before had been laughing and joking, now lying gasping, with his life blood soaking down into the red clay and sand. “Five rounds rapid at the scrub in front,” comes the command of our subaltern. Then an order down the line: “Fix bayonets!” Fatal order—was it not, perhaps, some officer of the enemy who shouted it? (for they say such things were done). Out flash a thousand bayonets, scintillating in the sunlight like a thousand mirrors, signalling our position to the batteries away on our left and front. We put in another five rounds rapid at the scrub in front. Then, bang-swish! bang-swish! bang-swish! and over our line, and front, and rear, such a hellish fire of lyddite and shrapnel that one wonders how anyone could live amidst such a hail of death-dealing lead and shell. “Ah, got me!” says one lad on my left, and he shakes his arms. A bullet had passed through the biceps of his left arm, missed his chest by an inch, passed through the right forearm, and finally struck the lad between him and me a bruising blow on the wrist. The[Pg 4] man next him—a man from the 9th Battalion—started to bind up his wounds, as he was bleeding freely. All the time shrapnel was hailing down on us. “Oh-h!” comes from directly behind me, and, looking around, I see poor little Lieutenant B——, of C Company, has been badly wounded. From both hips to his ankles blood is oozing through pants and puttees, and he painfully drags himself to the rear. With every pull he moans cruelly. I raise him to his feet, and at a very slow pace start to help him to shelter. But, alas! I have only got him about fifty yards from the firing line when again, bang-swish! and we were both peppered by shrapnel and shell. My rifle-butt was broken off to the trigger-guard, and I received a smashing blow that laid my cheek on my shoulder. The last I remembered was poor Lieutenant B—— groaning again as we both sank to the ground.

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

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

The storm had ceased, the sea was calm, the wind a trifle raw,
And miles and miles of wreckage lay upon the sandy shore;
And every time the waves came up they brought a little more.

The Sergeant and the Junior Sub. in contemplation stood.
They wept like anything to see such quantities of wood—
And then they smiled a furtive smile which boded little good.

The wood lay round in lovely heaps and smiled invitingly.
“Do you suppose,” the Sergeant said, “that this is meant for me?”
“I doubt it,” said the Junior Sub. “Here comes the C.R.E.[1]

“If fifty kings and fifty queens and fifty C.-in-C.’s
Presented fifty indents and bowed low upon their knees,
I hardly think that they would get more than a few of these.”

The Sergeant and the Junior Sub. walked on a mile or so,
Until they found a shelving bank conveniently low;
And there they waited sadly for the C.R.E. to go.

“Oh, timbers,” quoth the Junior Sub., who spoke with honeyed speech,
“I hardly think it safe for you to lie upon the beach.”
And as he spoke he stroked the backs of those within his reach.

The timbers leapt beneath his touch and hurried plank by plank;
They crowded round to hear him speak, and lined up rank on rank—
But one old timber wagged his head and hid behind a bank.

“The time has come,” the Sergeant said, “to talk of many things—
Of bully beef and dug-outs, of Kaisers and of Kings,
And why the rain comes through the roof, and whether shrapnel stings.

“Some good stout planks,” the Sergeant cried, “are what we chiefly need,
And four by fours and spars besides are very good indeed—
So if you’re ready, sir, I think we may as well proceed.”

“Oh, C.R.E.!” remarked the Sub., “I deeply sympathise.”
With sobs and tears they sorted out those of the largest size,
While happy thoughts of days to come loomed large before their eyes.

Next morning came the C.R.E. to see what could be done;
But when he came to count the planks he found that there was none—
And this was hardly odd, because they’d collared every one.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] C.R.E.—Officer commanding Royal Engineers.

When you come to an old spotted gum right on the saddle of Sandstone Ridge, after an eighteen-mile ride from Timpanundi, you’re very close to Freddy Prince’s war selection. There’s a well-made gate in the road fence on your left, and it bears the legend, “Prince’s Jolly.” Through that the track will lead you gently uphill into a wide and gradually deepening sap, until you think you’ve made some mistake. Then look to your left, and behold the front entrance to Freddie’s dug-out.

An old shell-case hangs near by, and when you strike it you’ll hear an echo of children’s voices, and a small platoon of youngsters charge you at the double. First time I blew in it was just on teatime, and my first glance in at the well-lit gallery and the smell of the welcome food are worth the recollection. Fred came out and led my cuddy round to the stable sap, where he was given what had been on his mind for some hours past. I didn’t lose much time in settling down to tea—it was already too dark to look around outside. Besides, as Fred explained, there was nothing to see of the homestead bar the inside, and by the third year of excavation most of that had been dumped into the gully and pretty well all washed away.

The meal finished, we played games with the kids. Fred seldom read the papers—he said he didn’t want to strain the one eye that was left to him—so Mrs. Prince retired to absorb the news I had brought in their mail-bag, and to prepare herself to issue it to her husband later.

Long after the children went to burrow, he and I smoked and pitched away about the past. He told me how he and many others had come to adopt the underground home. It had been the case of making a penny do the work of a pound, and Fred himself had done the work of a company. It had been a hard struggle, but the missus was a treasure, and never growled except when things were going well—as some people will do. It was just a case of dig in, dig up, and dig down. Anything in the way of iron or steel was prohibitive. Timber was too expensive, and in any case the timber that stood on the selection he had been forced to sell in order to stock the farm. It had been a problem of years, but he had made a job of it; and when he showed me round the house I didn’t grudge him his little bit of pride.

The main gallery opened to the surface[Pg 10] at the front and back, and was about forty-five paces long. It was driven through hard ground, and was well arched so that it required no timber. On one side there was a branch to the pantries and the galley, and on the other side the dining-room and the bedrooms, which were really one big chamber with solid pillars of earth left at intervals, forming a group of rooms each with a dome roof and canvas partitions. A borehole had been put through to the surface at the centre of every room for ventilation and light, a device of reflectors enabling one to bring the sunlight in at all hours of the day.

Once, as we sat and smoked, a subdued chattering came from the adjoining room. I looked up and saw the top of a periscope over the partition. Instantly it disappeared with a noise like the scattering of furniture. Then a voice: “Oh, daddy, do you know what?”

“Oh, never mind, old girl,” said Fred; “it’s time they began to break up after fifteen years. Go to sleep, both of you.”

As I lay awake next morning I overheard some homely details. How the baldy steer had hopped over O’Dwyer’s parapet into his lucerne patch; and Jimmy ought to have widened the trench last week when he was told to; and the milking sap hadn’t been cleaned out the previous day because Georgie had forgotten he was pioneer; and Jerry O’Dwyer had shot two crows from the new sniper’s pozzy[2] down at the creek—and so on.

When we sat down to breakfast Mrs. Prince was primed with news. “I told Fred,” she said, “I didn’t believe we’d taken Lake Achi Baba; the latest cable says it’s still occupied by the German submarines.” Fred nodded as if he didn’t care much.

“Achi Baba used to be a hill once, wasn’t it, daddy?” chipped in one of the youngsters.

“Yes, it used to be one time,” replied his father, looking into the blue puffs that drifted away from his pipe and out past the waterproof sheet of the dug-out door. In those blue mists of the past what he saw was the bald pate of the great hill, with the howitzers tearing earth out of the crest of it by the hundredweight, while the Turkish miners ever heaped the outside of it with the spoil from their tunnels. “Yes, it was a hill once.”

Thus Freddy and his wife and family live their life as happily as if there were no war.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Pozzy or Possie—Australian warrior’s short for “position,” or lair.

It’s the monotony we revile, not—to a like degree—hard work or hard fare. To look out on the same stretch of beach or the same patch of trench wall and the same terraces of hostile black and grey sandbags day after day is to be wearied. There is the same sitting in the same trench, shelled by the same guns, manned, perhaps (though that we endeavour to avert), by the same Turks. Unhappily it is not the same men of ours that they maim and kill daily.

And if one’s dug-out lies on a seaward slope there is, every morning, the same stretch of the lovely Ægean, with the same two islands standing over in the west.

Yet neither the islands nor the sea are the same any two successive days. The temper of the Ægean at this time changes more suddenly and frequently than ever does that of the Pacific. Every morning the islands of the west take on fresh colour, and are trailed by fresh shapes of mist.

To-day Imbros stands right over against you; you see the detail of the fleet in the harbour, and the striated heights of rocky Samothrace reveal the small ravines. To-morrow, in the early morning light, Imbros lies mysteriously afar off like an Isle of the Blest, a delicate vapour-shape reposing on the placid sea.

Nor is there monotony in either weather or temperature. This is the late autumn. Yet it is a halting and irregular advance the late autumn is making. Fierce, biting, raw days alternate with the comfortableness of the mild late summer. This morning, to bathe is as much as your life is worth (shrapnel disregarded); to-morrow, in the gentle air, you may splash and gloat an hour and desire more. And you prolong the joy by washing many garments.

Here in Anzac we have suffered the tail-end of one or two autumn storms, and have had two fierce and downright gales blow up. The wind came in the night, with a suddenness that found us most unprepared. In half an hour many of us were homeless, crouching about with our bundled bedclothes, trespassing tyrannically upon the confined space of the stouter dug-outs of our friends—a sore tax upon true friendship. They lay on their backs and held down their roofs by mere weight of body until overpowered. Spectral figures in the driving atmosphere collided and wrangled and swore and blasphemed. The sea roared over the shingle with a violence that made even revilings inaudible.

The morning showed a sorry beach. There were—there had been—three piers. One stood intact; the landward half of the second was clean gone; of the third there was no trace, except in a few splintered spars ashore. A collective dogged grin overlooked the beach that morning at the time of rising. The remedying began forthwith; so did the bursting of shrapnel over the workmen. This stroke of Allah upon the unfaithful was not to go unassisted.

With misgiving we foresee the winter robbing us of the boon of daily bathing. This is a serious matter. The morning splash has come to be indispensable. Daily at six-thirty you have been used to see the head of General Birdwood bobbing beyond the sunken barge inshore; and a host of nudes lined the beach. The host is diminishing to a few isolated fellows, who either are fanatics or are come[Pg 18] down from the trenches and must clear up a vermin-and-dust-infested skin at all costs.

Not infrequently “Beachy Bill” catches a mid-morning bathing squad. There is ducking and splashing shorewards, and scurrying by men clad only in the garment Nature gave them. Shrapnel bursting above the water in which you are disporting raises chiefly the question: “Will it ever stop?” By this you mean: “Will the pellets ever cease to whip the water?” The interval between the murderous lightning flash aloft and the last pellet-swish seems, to the potential victim, everlasting.

The work of enemy shell behind the actual trenches is peculiarly horrible. Men are struck down suddenly and unmercifully where there is no heat of battle. A man dies more easily in the charge. Here he is wounded mortally unloading a cart, drawing water for his unit, directing a mule convoy. He may lose a limb or his life when off duty—merely returning from a bathe or washing a shirt.

One of our number is struck by shrapnel retiring to his dug-out to read his just delivered mail. He is off duty—is, in fact, far up on the ridges overlooking the sea. The wound gapes in his back. There is no staunching it. Every thump of the aorta pumps out his life. Practically he is a dead man when struck; he lives but a few minutes—with his pipe still steaming, clenched in his teeth. They lay him aside in the hospital.

That night we stand about the grave in which he lies beneath his groundsheet. Over that wind-swept headland the moon shines fitfully through driving cloud. A monitor bombards off[Pg 19] shore. Under her friendly screaming shell and the singing bullets of the Turks the worn, big-hearted padre intones the beautiful Catholic intercession for the soul of the dead in his cracked voice.

At the burial of Sir John Moore was heard the distant and random gun. Here the shells sometimes burst in the midst of the burial party. Bearers are laid low. A running for cover. The grave is hastily filled in by a couple of shovel-men; the service is over; and fresh graves are to be dug forthwith for stricken members of the party. To die violently and be laid in this shell-swept area is to die lonely indeed. The day is far off (but it will come) when splendid mausolea will be raised over these heroic dead. And one foresees the time when steamers will bear up the Ægean pilgrims come to do honour at the resting places of friends and kindred, and to move over the charred battlegrounds of Turkey.

Informal parades for Divine Service are held on Sabbath afternoons for such men as are off duty. Attendances are scanty. The late afternoons are becoming bleak; men relieved from labour seek the warmth of their dug-outs.

The chaplain stands where he can find a level area and awaits a congregation. When two or three are gathered together he announces a hymn. The voices go up in feeble unison, punctuated by the roar of artillery and the crackle of rifle fire. The prayers are offered. The address is short and shorn of cant. This is no place for canting formula. Reality is very grim all round. There is a furtive under-watchfulness against shrapnel. One almost has forgotten what it is to sit in security and listen placidly to a sermon at church.

The chaplains have come out to do their work simply and laboriously. They are direct-minded, purposeful men. One is a neighbour in a Light Horse regiment—a colonel. He flaunts it in no sandbagged palace. His dug-out is indistinguishable from those of the privates between whom he is sandwiched—mere waterproof sheet aloft and bed laid on the Turkish clay; a couple of biscuit boxes with his oddments—jam, and milk, and bread: writing materials and toilet requisites. A string line beneath the roof holds his towel and lately washed garments. He is a simple parson, hard-worked by day and night in and about the trenches, careful for such comforts as can be got for his men in this benighted land; lying down at nights listening to the forceful lingo of his neighbours, and confessedly admiring its graphic if well-garnished eloquence. He sees his duty with a direct gaze—a faithful Churchman at work in the throes of war.

In a land of necessarily hard fare a regimental canteen in Imbros does much to compensate. Unit representatives proceed thence weekly by trawler for stores. One feels almost in the land of the living when so near lie tinned fruit, butter, cocoa, coffee, sausages, sauces, chutneys, pipes, tobacco, and chocolate. Such a repertoire, combined with a monthly visit from the paymaster, removes one far from the commissariat hardships of the Crimea.

The visualising of unstinted civilian meals is a prevalent pastime. Men sit at the mouths of their dug-outs and relate the minutiæ of the first dinner at home. Some men excel in this. They do it with a carnal power of graphic description which makes one fairly pine. One has heard a colonel-chaplain talk for two hours of nothing but grub, and at the end convincingly exempt himself from any charge of carnal-mindedness. Truly we are a people whose god is their belly. But that we never admitted until this period of enforced deprivation.

Those comforts embraced by the use of good tobacco and deliverance from vermin at night are the most desired; both hard to procure. There is somehow a great gulf fixed between the civilian quality of any tobacco and the make-up of the same brand for the Army. Once in six months a friend in Australia dispatches a parcel of cigars. Therein lies the entrance to a fleeting paradise—fleeting indeed when one’s comrades have sniffed or ferreted out the key. After all, the pipe, given reasonably good tobacco, gives the entrée to the paradise farthest removed from that of the fool.

Of the plague of nocturnal vermin little need be said explicitly. The locomotion of the day almost dissipates the evil. But it makes night hideous.

The tendency is to retire late and thus abridge the period of persecution. One’s friends drop in for a yarn or a smoke after tea, and the dreaded hour of turning-in is postponed by reminiscent chit-chat and the late preparation of supper. One renews, here, a surprising bulk of old acquaintance. Old college chums are dug out, and one talks back and lives a couple of hours in the glory of days that have passed. Believe it not that there is no deliverance possible from the hardness of active service. The retrospect, and the prospect, and the ever-present faculty of visualisation are ministering angels sent to minister.

Mails, too, are an anodyne. Their arrival eclipses considerations of life and death—of fighting and the landing of rations. The mail-barge coming in somehow looms larger than a barge of supplies. Mails have been arriving weekly for six months, yet no one is callous to them.

Of incoming mail, letters stand inevitably first. They put a man at home for an hour.

But so does the local newspaper. Perusing that, he is back at the old matutinal habit of picking at the news over his eggs and coffee, racing against the suburban business train. Intimate associations hang about the reading of the local sheet—domestic and parochial associations almost as powerful as are brought by letters.

And what shall be said of parcels from home? The boarding-school home-hamper is at last superseded. No son, away at Grammar School, ever pursued his voyage of discovery through tarts, cakes and preserves, sweets, pies and fruit with the intensity of gloating expectation in which a man on Gallipoli discloses the contents of his “parcel.”

“’Struth! a noo pipe, Bill!—an’ some er the ole terbaccer. Blimey! Cigars, too!—’ave one, before the mob smells ’em.... D——d if there ain’t choclut! Look ’ere.... An’ ’ere’s some er the dinkum[3] coc’nut-ice the tart uster make.... Hallo! more socks! Nev’ mind: winter’s comin’. ’Ere, ’ow er yer orf fer socks, cobber?... Take these—bonzer ’and-knitted. Sling them issue-things inter the sea. [Pg 23]... I’m d——d!—soap for the voy’ge ’ome.... ’Angkerch’fs!—orl right w’en the —— blizzards come, an’ a chap’s snifflin’ fer a —— week on end.... Writin’ paper!—well, that’s the straight —— tip, and no errer! The beggars er bin puttin’ it in me letters lately too. Well, I’ll write ter-night on the stren’th of it. Gawd! ’ere’s a shavin’ stick!—’andy, that! I wuz clean run out—usin’ carbolic soap, —— it!... Aw, that’s a dinkum —— parcel, that is!”

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Dinkum—Australian for “true.”

I
FROM SHELL GREEN

From a Correspondent in Australian Field Artillery, “Sea View,” Boltons Knoll, near Shell Green.

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

II
THE TURK IN THE PERISCOPE

I am sure that wherever the old 5th Light Horsemen, who put in such a warm spell at “Chatham’s”[4] some time ago, congregate after this war the following incident will be told and retold:

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

Anyone who has used a periscope knows that unless the periscope is held well up before the eyes, instead of the landscape, one sees only one’s own visage reflected in the lower glass.

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

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Chatham’s Post at the southern end of the line was attacked by the Turks for several days in November.

One of the chief pastimes of the Turks who live behind the black and white sandbags opposite (writes an officer who knows them intimately) is that of listening to stories told by the storytellers in the cafés of the Asia Minor villages. The hero of these stories is very often a certain Nastradi Hodja (who really existed at one time, and made a reputation by his wit as well as through his stupidity). Here is an example of the sort of story about Nastradi which especially pleases the Turk:

Nastradi Hodja’s wife woke up one night through hearing a noise. She got up, and going out on to the landing on the upper floor, outside her bedroom, called out:

Nastradi’s voice came up from below. “Don’t pay any attention to it,” he said. “It was only my shirt that tumbled down the stairs.”

TO A LYRE-BIRD

It was a fine day, and they were standing by waiting for instructions from the warrant officer to commence unloading and loading; and in the general murmur of voices one noted the broad tones of the British Tommy and the harsher ones of Tommy Kangaroo, the latter less careful of his grammar than the other; also the loud-voiced directions of the Indian Tommy, or rather Johnny, who condescended now and then to break into pidgin-English (with a smile).

Presently from amongst a group sitting in the shelter of a stack of bully beef came the request: “Give us a light, mate,” in the blunt style which belongs to Tommy Kangaroo.

“Aw, yes,” replies Tommy Atkins, or “Kitch,” as he is beginning to be called. “Aw, yes.” And while the other is pulling at his fag: “Have you got any baadges, choom?”

“No, I gave mine to a little nipper who used to sing on the stage at the El Dorado in Cairo.”

“Did you now! She must have a fine stack of baadges now, that ’un. You’re about the fifteenth lad that I know has given his baadges to ’er. Aw, thanks”—taking back his cigarette. “I see you’re from Austra-alia. What State did you live in?”

“I wonder if you knew my brother? He went to Victoria a couple of years ago. Got a job on the ra-ailways, he did, and wanted me to come out too. I’ll go when this is over; but ’ee’s married now, ’e is, and got a couple of pet lambs that ’e said was given to ’im by a chap named Drover; ’is name is Dobbs.”

“Never met him, matey, but he is all right, you bet. A Pommy[5] can’t go wrong out there if he isn’t too lazy to work.”

“Ah, yes, he tells me they called ’im Pommy, but that they was good lads. I could not understand them slinging off at ’im and ’im thinking they were treatin’ ’im like as ’e was one of themselves.”

“Oh, well, yer see, mate, we don’t call the like of ’im ‘Pommies’ because we dislike ’em, but just as a matter of description. Of course, sometimes one of ’em gets ’is back up and calls us sons of convicts in return for us chuckin’ off at ’im, and then he’s told lots of things—sometimes true and very often untrue; but Australia’s all right, mate. You need not be ashamed to be called a ‘Pommy’ out there.”

“Blime, there’s old ‘Beachy’[6] at it again,” breaks in another. “’Ee’s a fair cow, ’e is. Made me spill two buckets er water this mornin’, and our flamin’ cook told me I was too lazy to go down for it. I’ll give ’im ‘Beachy’[Pg 32] after this job is over if ’e don’t look out. Hallo, Johnny, Beachy catch-em mule, eh?”

“Beachy no good—mule good,” replies the tall spare Indian, with a smile, as he tries to bring his pair of mules under the shelter of the stack. “Mule very good,” he says, as he squats in front of his pair.

“Nearly six munce now. Blime, I could do with a spell now, too. I’m beginnin’ to get a ’ump like a camel from carryin’ these flamin’ boxes.”

“Aw, yes, but it’s better than bein’ in the trenches, ain’t it?” asks Kitch.

“Blime, no,” is the reply. “A man’s got a chance to hit back there, but down ’ere it’s up to putty. It’s bad enough to be eatin’ bully beef, but carryin’ it as well is rotten. I couldn’t look a decent bullock in the face now for what I’ve said about ’im when ’e’s tinned.”

“Yes; some d——d gobblers thought they would catch our mob nappin’ but missed the bus, and some of ’em are still runnin’ yellin’ to Aller to stick to ’em. Blast ’em! I’ll give ’em Aller when I get a chance. Keepin’ a man stuck on ’ere when ’e might be havin’ a good time somewhere else. I’ll bet——”

“D—— ’im—see yer later, matey; and I’ll try to get a badge for yer.”

“Don’t forget, choom. Ah want it to send to my married sister’s little lass. She thinks youm lads be prime boys.”

“Prime boys,” mutters Bill, as he grabs his case of bully. “Yes, prime boys jugglin’ Best Prime Bully Beef.”

“D—— it—shut up, Bill,” says his mate. “You’re always growlin’—you’ll want flowers on your grave next.”

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Pommy—short for pomegranate, and used as a nickname for immigrants.

[6] “Beachy”—a battery of Turkish guns, well known on Anzac Beach.

[7] W.O.—Warrant Officer.

III

Outside was a cold, dark, windy and cheerless night, and the world seemed cowering under the black, threatening rain-pall above, which could be felt rather than seen. Inside my host’s diggings we were lounging back in the warmth and light, smoking and yarning of other times and places, while the partner of his home brewed the warm, fragrant, comforting decoction which seemed to contribute so much to the mood and proper appreciation of such friendly comfort in the midst of the audible turmoil of unfriendly outer circumstances.

Once again from outside there came a whir and rattle past the door, and I smiled significantly and glanced in that direction.

“Oh, don’t go until after the next one,” urged my host’s companion, seeing my attention diverted to things outside of our present cheery circle.

With this my friend seemed to concur, and drew himself closer to the fire. “Yes, there’s plenty of time yet,” he said. “There’ll be a lot more of ’em. So you might as well sit tight in, safely and comfy, and try another cup.”

I didn’t need much coaxing, and thrusting the thought of the long, unpleasant journey home out of my mind, I settled down to further cheery chat and the enjoyment of stimulating internal comforts.

The conversation seemed to have progressed but a little further when above the wind outside could be heard again the warning roar and rumble, fading away and terminating in a muffled clang and clatter in the distance. “That settles it, Billo, old chap,” I said, half rising. “Pass over my coat. If I hurry off now I’ll be just in time.”

But my friend didn’t move to oblige. “Now, what’s the use of hurrying?” he urged once more. “They’ll be passing every minute now for a long time yet. So why not settle down and enjoy yourself a bit longer? ’Taint very often you come this way.”

By the time I had finished my reply to his persuasions I found, again, that my chance had gone—and I would have to wait now, anyhow.

And so the time passed. We talked and talked, while a useful youth who lived near by, and had attached himself to my friend Billo, made three reappearances with hot water for the cups that cheered as the night went on.

“I wonder where ‘Razzy’ is?”[Pg 36] presently remarked my host; “the jug wants refilling.”

Just then the disturbing rumble passed the door again, and I rose to my feet. “Don’t bother to disturb him,” I said. “I suppose he’s retired to his digs. Besides, now’s my chance to scoot too; I’ve a long way to walk. Throw me that coat.”

Finding that all protestations were useless, my friends reluctantly allowed me to go, but not without wilily expressed forebodings as to what unpleasantness might await me outside now that I had refused to enjoy their society and comforts any longer.

They accompanied me to the door, and a cold blast of wind met us. There were ominous thunder rumbles in the murky distance.

“Yes,” grinned my friend, peering out into the darkness. “And they’re running to a peculiar sort of time-table to-night—passing about every seven minutes. You’d better get a wriggle on. There’s a short cut that way,” he added, pointing to the right, “just past the corner of the cemetery. That’s where they stop. So for God’s sake shake it up; if you don’t, they won’t see you home at all. It’s an unhealthy night to be out.”

I asked them to say good night to the youth “Razzy” for me, and to thank him for his comforting ministration, then bade them farewell and moved off.

I blundered along the sloppy, unpaved footway, peering tensely into the uncanny blackness about me, and hurried uneasily in the direction of a patch of faint pale blotches that I hoped and took to be the monuments in the little burying-ground down beyond. I found that my direction was right, and presently I was hurrying past it as fast as I could manage in the wind and darkness. From somewhere behind me—it sounded miles and miles away through the noise of the wind—a faint low moaning sound reached my ear. I stepped forward uneasily, but before I had advanced a yard it had become more prolonged, and growing ever louder and closer until I seemed to feel it coming—coming with tremendous and ever-increasing speed: a horrible, nerve-shattering, deafening, wailing shriek. I stood dazed and paralysed—rooted to the spot. With a scream of hellish intensity—it was all within a second, really—it was on me. There was a flash of blinding light, then everything ended so far as I was concerned.

My next interest in life was a feeling that I had just been hurled up at the moon, over it, and had descended slowly, ever so slowly, like a feather, to earth again. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure that I was not a feather; and I opened my eyes carefully and tried to feel myself. “’Ssh-sh-sh! Don’t disturb yourself—remain quiet and comfy,” said a persuasive voice beside me. I looked around as far as I could move, and knew that I was in a hospital, but where or of what kind I could not think for the moment. I lay awhile gazing blankly and unthinkingly at a low white ceiling above me. Presently I fell to wondering.

In what suburb, in what town (it seemed to have been hundreds of years ago that it had happened), and what part of Australasia could it be that a peaceful citizen, walking a darkened street, homeward bound, could be violently assailed, near the resting-place of its harmless sleeping dead, by an awful uncanny horror descending from the black unknown? Was I cursed, haunted, bewitched—or what? Then there came to me the vague memory of a friend, one whom I familiarly knew as “Billo,” and in some way associated with my terrible, mysterious experience. But somehow it didn’t seem to fit in with the slowly gathering evidence of my returning senses, for it seemed to me that “Billo” had long before quitted suburban civilisation for some great adventure—perhaps—yes, it was a war somewhere—in which I, too, had later resolved to follow his example and do my share. Then how came it that this terrible experience had befallen me in the midst of the enjoyment and comforts of civilisation?

I had a positive though hazy memory of a comfortable, warm room, pleasant drinks, cheery conversation; “Billo” and his companion, the latter a rough, kindly sort of being—no, it could not have been a woman; besides, “Billo” was a bachelor. I remembered that distinctly.

Suddenly it became clear to me, and I remembered a silent, rugged man facetiously dubbed “’Enery” by my friend—a kindly chap, of very few words, with whom I had not been long acquainted. Where had “Billo” picked him up? There also came before me the memory of a small, dilapidated man or youth, dark complexioned; somehow also attached to “Billo.” His name was—yes, that was it.... Who the deuce was “Razzy”? My mind here became dazed, and speculation drifted off into a confusion of reflections: that “Razzy” was a foreigner of some sort, living with us under the same conditions, yet in some way very different and in a degree inferior; that the hour at which I left my friend “Billo’s” home and his inexplicable associates was quite early in the night—perhaps only nine-thirty. This latter fact seemed to linger in my mind, for presently—with a hazy conviction that there were sure to be other pedestrians abroad on a suburban street at that hour—I heard my own voice asking no one in particular: “Was there anyone else there?”

“Only a Maltese—at least, we think he was. He was blown to smithereens. But don’t let ’em see you talking too much, mate.”

The room seemed to rock. I opened my eyes, and with difficulty caught sight of the speaker. He was in khaki and wore an A.M.C. badge on his arm. I was on a hospital ship.

“Then that must have been poor ‘Razzy,’” I muttered at last. Before my mind’s eye there seemed to unfold a dissolving scene. The cosy rooms of my friend “Billo” became a dug-out in a hillside, lit by a slush lamp made from bacon fat. “Billo” and his rugged, silent companion were wearing the familiar time-tattered uniform that I knew so well ages and ages ago (actually it was five days back); the door through which I had passed into the unpleasant night was an oilsheet tied down to keep the weather out; and the frequent rumbling roar was not that of a passing suburban train which I was timing myself to catch. On the[Pg 40] contrary, it was the intervals between that sound which interested me. For each of those rushes past the door of my friend’s dug-out was a hurtling Turkish shell, and I wanted to make my escape at a reasonably safe moment. Also, the place where “they” chiefly lobbed was the cemetery at the foot of the rugged track (I had dreamed of it as the unpaved footpath of a new suburb), where rest a score or more game Australian lads who had taken part in the landing on Gallipoli. The unfortunate “Razzy,” by the way, was but one of a gang of Maltese labourers brought by the authorities, at a later and safer period, to help in the landing of stores from the transports in the bay at Anzac. He had become friendly with my luxury-loving friend “Billo,” and, in gratitude for various kindly considerations, was willing to provide the hot water to make our hot-rum drinks on that memorable night at “Billo’s” station on our right wing. (I was quartered miles away on the extreme left.)

So it was near the cemetery that the unexpected shell got me; and apparently “Razzy” also, who was returning to his camp a hundred yards away. There seemed something so droll about the whole strange illusion that, although in a state of dazed depression, I might have laughed but for an indescribable pain in my left side. I saw that my left arm was supported on something and lay above the bedclothes and seemed very heavy.

I saw that he was right, and this new illusion struck me as being about the last straw.

With a dazed sort of conviction I muttered: “Well, it’s a rummy world”—and promptly lay back and drifted out of it for the time being.

Portrait of an
Australian
soldier returning
from the field of
glory at Helles.
May 11th 1915

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Bosker, boshter, bonzer—Australian slang for splendid.

I am sitting, at the moment of writing, in a dug-out, one of those dismal, dark, damp holes cut into the clay of the Dardanelles, serving us as a haven of refuge by day and by night from the ubiquitous Turkish bullet.

The proportions of this extemporised dwelling resemble those of an exceedingly small family tomb—one which might belong to a family too proud not to possess a family tomb at all, but too poor to possess one of adequate size and comfort (if one can speak of comfort in such a connection). Its dimensions should be about ten feet by four, but I am not enthusiastic enough at the moment to ascertain them precisely. Its three walls are of crumbling clay. Where the fourth wall strictly should be is an exit which lets in the draught. Over my head are stretched waterproof sheets which let in the water. On the floor, in fine weather, is an inch of dust, and in bad weather a proportionate amount of slimy mud. A few sandbags ranged round the parapet threaten to tumble in and annihilate my existence. I am sitting on a roll of bedding. My haversack, water-bottle, field-glasses, webbing, pistol, gas helmet, and india-rubber basin are arranged round my feet like so many pet dogs begging for biscuit; and in such an entourage I think of my room at home—and that is where this matter of contrast comes in.

It was the same at dinner. We—that is to say, my brother officers and I—sat in another variety of dug-out; this time an open one—open to all that blows and falls. Our repast consisted of an exceedingly stringy rabbit, extracted from a tin of an ominous purple hue—an evil-looking dish eked out with somebody or other’s baked beans, which are all very well in their way, but when used as an unvarying vegetable at all meals begin to pall; bread, with the crust like a cinder, to which fondly cling bits of sacking and mules’ whisker; the corpse of a cheese; and the whole washed down with tea made in the stew dixie, and tasting more of dixie and stew than of tea.

As I lean back against the clay wall of my dug-out, and innumerable particles of dust cascade down my neck, a soft reverie steals over my senses. It seems to me to be about six or seven o’clock on a murky November afternoon in London. I have splashed home from my work in the wind- and rain-swept streets—the motor-buses have covered me with black mud—my umbrella has afforded me the most inadequate shelter. But these things seem of little account to me here in Gallipoli. I see myself reaching my home in the best of spirits, entering[Pg 42] the hall, and shutting off the outer darkness. My sense of contrast gives me a lively notion of dry clothes, of a comfortable room, of a genial fire, and of an absorbing book. In future I shall be grateful for the rain and the mud and the murky streets for making these good things seem by contrast so much more valuable.

Think of it! To sink into a great arm-chair in front of my library fire, after a hard and anxious day’s work, and contemplate the near approach of an excellent evening meal. How comfortable and warm and hospitable my room appears as I lean back and listen to the rather depressing, smothered rumble of the traffic in the street below. Thick curtains hide away the melancholy November London atmosphere. Sweet-smelling logs crackle cheerily on the hearth; a reading-lamp by my side sheds subdued lustre on the immediate vicinity of my chair. My servant glides into the room noiselessly over the soft carpet, and places the evening paper by my side. I choose a cigar from my case, light it, and then I am perfectly content—and my contentment is due to contrast between my content with the existing situation and my past discontent with other situations at other times and in other places.

After a refreshing siesta I go upstairs, exchange my workaday clothes for a smoking-suit. Two or three bachelor friends are due to dine with me, and by the time I have dressed and descended again to the sitting-room they are there ready for my greeting.

And what a pleasant evening it is with their company. We talk of old times, old acquaintances, and old places. We talk of our big-game shoots, of our campaigns, and of our travels, the recollection of which seem so delightful now that distance lends enchantment to the view. Dinner is over; a glass of brandy and old port, some smokes, and we are just adjourning to the next room——

“Wake up, old chap—three o’clock. Your turn for the trenches. It is snowing hard and the Turks are very active.”

Regarding these two particular pests, my attitude in the past has been characterised by the utmost forbearance; I tolerated them and looked upon them as harmless and possibly of some usefulness to the community. The Gallipoli specimens, however, have changed my state of “benevolent neutrality” into one of most deadly warfare. No “Hymn of Hate” has yet been composed which would give expression to the hatred which has possessed me.

Do you but go into the trenches in the endeavour to perform your duty to your country, and the flies immediately try to dissuade you by getting into your eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Nothing will drive them away; they delight in this; they are entirely without pity. Retire to your dug-out in the hope of escaping their attentions, and they are sure to follow you. Smoke till you all but asphyxiate yourself, and you find them as active as ever. Nothing that human ingenuity can devise will cause them to retreat; they defy our puny efforts. You may imitate the Kaiser and “strafe” them for all you are worth, but it is only waste of breath; they glory in this and come back all the more.

What we frequently distrust in the way of tucker holds no terrors for the Gallipoli flies; they delight in taking risks if only to impress us with their fearlessness. Stepping boldly on the edge of a syrup-covered biscuit, they immediately get their feet entangled; but they will not retreat—that would be against all their traditions. Instead, they will struggle their way towards the centre, where they gladly give up the contest and die.

With the setting sun the flies retire, but operations are simply handed over to their allies, the fleas; and no worthier ally could be found than those pilgrims of the night. You may feel beat to the world, but there is no rest for you; as soon as you lie down to enjoy a well-earned rest the attack commences. Advancing in open or close formation, according to circumstances, the enemy attacks on every flank with fixed bayonets, in the handling of which his units are experts. If driven off, they come again in still greater numbers; they appear to have unlimited reserves of reinforcements which can be mobilised on the shortest notice. Their organisation is perfect. Counter-attacks in the dark are all in the favour of the enemy, and morning finds that they have withdrawn their forces to advantageous cover in the blankets, from which it is impossible to dislodge them. Keating’s Powder is of no avail against the Gallipoli fleas; it requires a still higher explosive to have any effect.

The honours have so far fallen to the enemy. Personally, I would be inclined to discuss terms of peace, but I doubt not he is too depraved to accept my advances.

1.—WALLABY JOE

His real name matters little; suffice it that he was known among his comrades as “Wallaby Joe.”

He came to Gallipoli via Egypt with the Light Horse. Incidentally, he had ridden nearly a thousand miles over sun-scorched, drought-stricken plains to join them.

Age about 38. In appearance the typical bushman. Tall and lean, but strong as a piece of hickory. A horseman from head to toe, and a dead shot. He possessed the usual bushy beard of the lonely prospector of the extreme backblocks. Out of deference to a delicate hint from his squadron commander he shaved it off, but resolved to let it grow again when the exigencies of active service should discount such finicking niceties.

His conversation was laconic in the extreme. When the occasion demanded it he could swear profusely, and in a most picturesque vein. When a bursting shell from a “75” on one occasion blew away a chunk of prime Berkshire which he was cooking for breakfast, his remarks were intensely original and illuminative.

He could also drink beer for indefinite periods, but seldom committed the vulgar error of becoming “tanked.” Not even that locality “east of Suez,” where, as the song tells us, “There ain’t no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst,” could make his steps erratic.

He was very shy in the presence of the softer sex. On one occasion his unwary footsteps caused him some embarrassment. Feeling thirsty he turned[Pg 46] into one of those establishments, fairly common in Cairo, where the southern proprietors try to hide the villainous quality of their beer by bribing sundry young ladies of various nationalities and colours to give more high-class vaudeville turns. The aforementioned young ladies are aided and abetted by a coloured orchestra, one member of which manipulates the bagpipes.

A portly damsel had just concluded, amidst uproarious applause, the haunting strains of “Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay.” She sidled up to Joe with a large-sized grin on her olive features.

Henceforth during his stay in Egypt he took his beer in a little Russian bar, the proprietor of which could speak English, and had been through the Russo-Japanese War.

When the Light Horse were ordered at last to the front, Joe took a sad farewell of his old bay mare. He was, as a rule, about as sentimental as a steamroller, but “leaving the old nag behind hurt some.”

On the Peninsula and under fire his sterling qualities were not long in coming to the surface. Living all his life in an environment in which the pick and shovel plays an important part he proved himself an adept at sapping and mining. At this game he was worth four ordinary men. No matter how circuitous the maze of trenches, he could find his way with ease. He could turn out all sorts of dishes from his daily rations of flour, bacon, jam, and of course the inevitable “bully” and biscuits. An endless amount of initiative showed itself in everything he did. His mates learned quite a lot of things just by watching him potter about the trenches and bivouacs. His training at the military camps of Australia and, later, in Egypt, combined with the knowledge he had been imbibing from Nature all his life, made him an ideal soldier.

He was used extensively by his officers as a scout. As the Turkish trenches were often not more than twenty yards from our own, needless to say the scouting was done at night, the Turks’ favourite time to attack being just before dawn. Often during these nocturnal excursions a slight rustle in the thick scrub would cause his mate to grasp his rifle with fixed bayonet and peer into the darkness, with strained eyes and ears and quickened pulse.

“A hare,” Joe would whisper, and probably advise him to take things easy while he himself watched.

This went on for some time until one night his mate came in alone, pale-faced and wild-eyed. Interrogated by the officer on duty, he informed him that Joe had been shot.

We brought the body in. He had been shot through the heart—a typical affair of outposts.

Tucked away in one of the innumerable gullies, a little grave, one among hundreds, contains the body of one of Nature’s grand men. On the wooden cross surmounting it is the following:

2.—THE DAG

Yes; ’Enessy was a dag if ever there was one! I remember the day ’e came into camp at Liverpool ’e was wearin’ ’is best Sunday grin, and when some bloke wot was in the mob yelled out “Marmalade,” ’e turns round and says to ’im: “Wot’s your complaint, mate?” The bloke ’e repeats “Marmalade.” And ’Enessy says: “Ah! That’s wot I thought it was. You’d better see a doctor, and ’ave it operated on right away, me man!”

’E could eat like a ’orse. Blime! The way ’e used ter stoke up on ther bread and jam was a treat for sore eyes. ’E always used ter ask to be put on the job of picket round the quartermaster’s store, and they never tumbled to ’is game for a long while. ’E used ter watch ’is chance, and every night would slip in and pinch a loaf of bread and a tin of jam, and as ’is job consisted of keeping the cook’s fire a-going all night, ’e always ’ad a cup of coffee ready when ’e wanted it. One night ’e nips into the store to git ’is usual bit of supper, and ’e bangs right into the bloke wot was just put in new at the Q.M. that day.

“Blime! I thought I ’ad a fair cop,” says ’Enessy, quick as lightning. “I ’eard someone moving about in ’ere, and thought it was a chap pinchin’ stuff.”

“Oh! Alright, picket,” replies the bloke. “I sleep in here, so you needn’t worry about the store while I’m here.”

“Alright, mate!” says ’Enessy. “Can yer give us a bit of grub? Fair dinkum, I’m ’ungry!”

So ’e gets ’is grub after all, but ’e couldn’t come the double no more after that.

When ’e came over the water and first sees the Turkish trenches, ’e says: “Strike me pink! But where’s them Turks they talk about?”

Says I: “They’re right there behind them sandbags, old cock! And don’t you forget it, neither!”

One mornin’ early while we was standin’ to arms ’e lights up a bumper, so I tells ’im not to let the officer cop ’im or there’d be trouble. Just then along comes the bloomin’ officer, so ’Enessy sticks ’is lighted bumper down south into ’is overcoat pocket, and ’olds it there out of sight. The officer sniffs about a bit, then ’e asks ’Enessy: “Are you smoking?”

“Well, I can smell smoke!” says the officer. Then ’e looks pretty ’ard at ’Enessy and says: “What’s your name?”

’Enessy looks, and hang me if that bloomin’ cigarette ’adn’t set fire to ’is coat pocket. But the officer only says: “Don’t do it again!” and whips off.

It was when we came out of the firin’-line for a week’s spell that ’Enessy met ’is Waterloo. ’E was detailed for guard down at the drinkin’ water, and ’e was to take all his nap and camp down there. The first night, when ’e was doin’ ’is shift ’e sees a dark shape movin’ along and challenged it three times, but never gets no answer. So ’e ups with ’is gun and lets fly. When the corporal rushes along to know what the blazes was the matter, ’Enessy ups and tells ’im, so they goes forward together pretty careful, and soon they sees a black heap lyin’ on the sand ahead of them. Gor blime! If ’Enessy ’adn’t gone and shot one of them poor little Indian donkeys which ’ad strayed along the beach. Well, ’e was chaffed pretty considerable by ’is cobbers,[9] and got fairly sick of hearin’ about it.

Next night when ’e was doin’ ’is shift again, ’e sees another black shape movin’ along the beach, so thinkin’ ’is cobbers were ’avin’ a joke with ’im, ’e picks up a big stick and goes forward with it. ’E ’ad gone about twenty yards, when suddenly there was a flash and a report, and ’Enessy drops down with a bullet through ’is chest. Strike me pink! A real Abdul ’ad come up this time, and it wasn’t no bloomin’ donkey, neither! ’Enessy was ’it pretty bad, but ’e grabs ’is rifle and lets fly, and one more bloomin’ Abdul ’ad gone to join ’is Prophet. Next day ’Enessy was taken away on a ’ospital ship, but that was near three months ago. I ’ear that the blighter is back on the beach now, and you will be able to see him yourself when ’e comes back to the squadron. But strike me! ’E’s a bloomin’ dag!

3.—BOBBIE OF THE NEW ARMY

Bobbie, the ever-smiling embodiment of breezy youth; the spirit of cheerfulness; the Beau Brummell of the trenches.

Bobbie landed with the regiment, and went through thick and thin with it. But always with a smile and never a scratch. Bullets flew off Bobbie at a tangent.

Of our officers, three only of the original arrivals were left when Bobbie went. He had watched the others go away one by one, some wounded, some sick, and some—well, just left,

Bobbie had grown quite proud of his staying powers, which carried him through three months of real hardship and trying work night and day. But for Bobbie’s smile in adversity and his way—for he has a way with him—many of his brave boys would have given up. But Bobbie’s bright example spurred them on and they “stuck it,” like their idol.

Bobbie’s only a youngster, but he is made of the real “stuff that’s bred in the army.” When he found himself exalted to the command of a company his head didn’t swell. The added responsibilities were not too heavy for Bobbie’s shoulders, which really were not broad relatively when compared with his broad smile. Bobbie acted like a tonic to a man run-down.

But, at last, Nature (in collusion with the M.O.) asserted her imperious will, and Bobbie just had to go to hospital. So Bobbie bowed to the inevitable, and, still smiling, went away.

Bobbie in hospital! What a picture! His bright smile, his rosy cheeks, and his immaculately parted hair, framed in snowy-white pillows. Bobbie—the irresistible!

Bobbie, we were loath to lose you; Bobbie, we miss you; but, Bobbie, won’t there be a weeping and a wailing when the nurses have to let you go?

Still, “it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.” Bobbie’s chocolate sweetened the bitterness of parting; Bobbie’s tinned fruit sustains us in his absence; Bobbie’s cigarettes sooth our sorrow.

My work in the A.S.C. has brought me very much in touch with the Indian Mule Corps; and I don’t think “The Anzac Book” would be complete without some mention of that admirable body of men.

What should we at Anzac have done without “Johnnie” and his sturdy little mules? Horse or motor transport could not have faced the difficulties of Anzac. The mules are sometimes stubborn and unmanageable, but we knew that before. And the drivers are—most of them—hard workers, intelligent and anxious to please. I often marvel on a rough day, when the loaded carts, nearly up to their axles in mud or sand, are beached on that wild seashore, on the watery edge of which they are kept during the day; and wonder still more when, after standing there for a few hours, the mules draw them out when the convoy leaves at night. For the mules do not like the sea, and when the weather is rough it is very difficult to get the little beasts anywhere near it.

One thing, however, really does hang up work for a time, and that is “Beachy Bill” in action. Even then some of the “Johnnies,” who are less fearsome than the rest, go on with their work, and have from time to time been hit.

For the delightful diversion which little Jenny, with her frolics and gambols, provided for the A.S.C.’s when they really had a moment to spare another medium will have to be sought. Though of short duration, her life appeared a charmed one whilst it lasted. Her freedom of action was the envy of every soldier along the beach. Her disregard for the enemy’s bullets and shells commanded our unbounded admiration. But whether her immunity for six months was due to the kindness of the Turks or their bad shooting, or her own good judgment, who can say?

Jenny’s origin is enveloped in some obscurity; but it is said that with her parents, Murphy of Red Cross fame and Jenny Senior, she toddled into our lines when quite a mite; and, once having crossed over the border into civilisation, the three emphatically refused to return whilst the objectionable Hun element obtained in their native country.[10]

Jenny the younger was no mere mystic mascot for the humouring of an especially created superstition. Her congenial company and high spirits, her affectionate ways and equable temperament, were the factors which gained for her the obvious rank of “Camp Pet.” Her friendly regular visits will be missed, and the picture of her patrician head and dark-brown shaggy winter’s coat. Her refined voice was music compared with the common “hee-haw” which characterises her kind, or the peremptory foghorn of the sergeant-major.

But now she is no more. Our sorrow is immeasurable. The mother never left the babe whilst it suffered excruciating agony through a deadly shrapnel pellet. Skilful, indefatigable attention, innumerable applications of the “invincible iodine,” proved futile. Jenny Senior is grief-stricken, and now lies upon the neat little grave in which her infant was placed by the big Australian playmates who now mourn their irreparable loss.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] This origin is a myth. The parents landed with the troops on April 25, 1915. Murphy, who bore a red cross between his two long ears, is said (in company with his master, Pte. Simpson, 3rd Australian Field Ambulance) to have carried 72 wounded men from the firing line through Shrapnel Gully, at the time when that valley thoroughly earned its name, before his master met his death on one of these errands of mercy. Murphy himself was subsequently hit by a shell, but happily survives, and was, we believe, brought safely away from Anzac.—Eds.

It was the colonel who propounded the theory first, on hearing some rumour more optimistic than reliable. “These furphies[11] are the very devil,” he said.

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

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

“Four Italian staff officers seen on the beach to-day,” he said breathlessly. “Two hundred thousand Italian troops being sent here.”

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

“Why, three hundred thousand Italians have landed at Helles, and Achi Baba is to be taken to-night.”

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

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

“Just a bloke,” was the answer. “’E ’ad two legs, two arms, and a[Pg 57] ’ead, two eyes——” Then he added in a puzzled fashion: “But, dammit, did ’e?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Furphy was the name of the contractor which was written large upon the rubbish carts that he supplied to the Melbourne camps. The name was transferred to a certain class of news item, very common since the war, which flourished greatly upon all the beaches.—Eds.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Cape Helles is about 12 miles south of Anzac, and the distant rumble of the guns there was constantly in the air at Anzac.—Eds.

In a shady spot beneath the scarlet-blossomed Judas trees, Abdul sat sipping his coffee, contemplating the busy scene in the small marketplace. There were happy fishermen hanging their nets to dry on the lime trees for which the village is famous, after their night’s toil in the Black Sea. Their catch was a good one, and was even now being put up for sale in the narrow alleys by the Jews. The village barber was a hard-worked man that day, for the Turk is vain and also dignified, and was it not the eve of the Bairam festival! Groups of gaily coloured villagers among the fruiterers’ baskets were busy haggling over their bargains. The word “Cauzaum” (my lamb) would often be flung by an infuriated vendor at stalwart Kurds, workers in the neighbouring quarry, who fingered his luscious grapes whilst cavilling at his prices. From a latticed window a veiled woman with a shrill voice called to a little red-fezzed boy escaping from his mother.

The Mouktar (mayor), with a jasper-handled stick, was pointing to the new fountain, its gilded inscription of extracts from the Koran shining in the sun. Had not the Mouktar sat day after day outside the door of the great Dahlié Naziri (Minister of Interior) waiting to obtain a credit for the construction of the fountain whose waters were from the Beicos bends?

“God is great, and Mahomet is His prophet,” murmured Abdul, as he slowly counted off another bead from his amber rosary. “I am a happy man,” he murmured to himself. “Was not my Kismet good; when lifting the veil of my wife at the marriage ceremony I found that she was beautiful? She is a good housekeeper; her coffee resembles that of the creamy Arabian coffee bean. Is not the gilled ram that I bought for to-morrow’s sacrifice worthy of her cooking?”

Abdul wandered along homewards to his cottage near the shore; for it was drawing close to the midday call to prayer, and his heart was full of thanksgiving to Allah.

Abdul is struggling along the main road leading to Stamboul with many others. He no longer hearkens to the beating of the tom-toms, and to the patriotic exhortations of a straggling mob following behind with green banners. “It is Kismet,” he murmurs, as he turns once more for a last look at the silvery winding thread below—the Bosphorus, on whose shores lies his home, his all. He has been told there is a war. He does not question; he knows[Pg 61] not the cause. It is fate. He trudges on.

The fighting has been fierce. He is hard pressed. Sweating with blood he draws back. His regiment is hard put to it, and, like sheep without a master, the men are preparing to disperse. Already German machine-guns from their rear are on to them. The road home means death. Like a man he faces the rush of his opponents.

He sees strange faces—the pain from his wounds is calmed. Once more there swim before his eyes his home, his wife, his plantation of maize so promising.

Biscuits! Army biscuits! What a volume of blessings and cursings have been uttered on the subject of biscuits—army biscuits!

What a part they take in our daily routine: the carrying of them, the eating of them, the cursing at them!

Could we find any substitute for biscuits? Surely not! It is easy to think of biscuits without an army, but of an army without biscuits—never.

Biscuits, like the poor, are always with us. Crawling from our earthly dens at the dim dawning of the day, we receive no portion of the dainties which once were ours in the long ago times of effete civilisation; but, instead, we devour with eagerness—biscuit porridge. We eat our meat, not with thankfulness, but with biscuits. We lengthen out the taste of jam—with biscuits. We pound them to powder. We boil them with bully. We stew them in stews. We fry them as fritters. We curse them with many and bitter cursings, and we bless them with few blessings.

Biscuits! Army biscuits! Consider the hardness of them. Remember the cracking of your plate, the breaking of this tooth, the splintering of that. Call to mind how your finest gold crown weakened, wobbled, and finally shrivelled under the terrific strain of masticating Puntley and Chalmer’s No. 5’s.

Think of the aching void where once grew a goodly tooth. Think of the struggle and strain, the crushing and crunching as two molars wrestled with some rocky fragment. Think of the momentary elation during the fleeting seconds when it seemed that the molars would triumphantly blast and scrunch through every stratum of the thrice-hardened rock. Call to mind the disappointment, the agony of mind and body, as the almost victorious grinder missed its footing, slipped, and snapped hard upon its mate, while the elusive biscuit rasped and scraped upon bruised and tender gums.

Biscuits! Army biscuits! Have you, reader, ever analysed with due carefulness the taste of army biscuits? Is it the delicious succulency of ground granite or the savoury toothsomeness of powdered marble? Do we perceive a delicate flavouring of ferro-concrete[Pg 62] with just a dash of scraped iron railings? Certainly, army biscuits, if they have a taste, have one which is peculiarly their own. The choicest dishes of civilised life, whether they be baked or boiled, stewed or steamed, fried, frizzled, roasted or toasted, whether they be composed of meat or fish, fruit or vegetable, have not (thank Heaven!) any like taste to that of army biscuits. Army biscuits taste like nothing else on the Gallipoli Peninsula. It is a debatable question indeed whether or not they have the quality of taste. If it be granted that they possess this faculty of stimulating the peripheral extremities of a soldier’s taste-buds, then it must also be conceded that the stimulation is on the whole of an unpleasant sort. In short, that the soldier’s feeling, apart from the joy, the pride, and the satisfaction at his completed achievement in transferring a whole biscuit from his outer to his inner man without undue accident or loss of teeth, is one of pain, unease, and dissatisfaction.

It may seem almost incredible, wholly unbelievable indeed, but armies have marched and fought, made sieges, retired according to plan, stormed impregnable cities, toiled in weariness and painfulness, kept lonely vigils, suffered the extremes of burning heat and of freezing cold, and have, in the last extremity, bled and died, laurel-crowned and greatly triumphant, the heroes of legend and of song, all without the moral or physical, or even spiritual aid of army biscuits.

Agamemnon and the Greeks camped for ten years on the windy plains of Troy without one box of army biscuits. When Xerxes threw his pontoon bridge across the Narrows and marched 1,000,000 men into Greece, his transport included none of Teak Green and Co.’s paving-stones for the hardening of his soldiers’ hearts and the stiffening of their backs. Cæsar subdued Britons, Gauls, and Germans. Before the lines of Dyrrhachium his legions lived many days on boiled grass and such-like delicacies, but they never exercised their jaws upon a rough, tough bit of—army biscuit.

Biscuits! Army biscuits! They are old friends now, and, like all old friends, they will stand much hard wear and tear. Well glazed, they would make excellent tiles or fine flagstones. After the war they will have great scarcity value as curios, as souvenirs which one can pass on from generation to generation, souvenirs which will endure while the Empire stands. If we cannot get physical strength from army biscuits, let us at least catch the great spiritual ideal of enduring hardness, which they are so magnificently fitted to proclaim.

The seasons change. Antwerp falls, Louvain is burned, the tide of battle surges back and forth; new reputations are made, the old ones pass away; Warsaw, Lemberg, Servia, the stern battle lines of Gallipoli, Hindenburg, Mackensen, each name catches our ear for brief moments of time, and then gives way to another crowding it out; but army biscuits are abiding facts, always with us, patient, appealing, enduring. We can move to other theatres, we can change our clothes, our arms, and our generals, but we must have our biscuits, army biscuits, else we are no longer an army.

I called to see our regimental poet last evening. He had previously told me that he intended to “write something” for “The Anzac Book.” Our poet is also Q.M. Sergeant, and when he is not writing requisitions or taking “baksheesh” out of our rations, and watering our rum, he writes poetry.

When I called on him he was in his dug-out, surrounded by bully-beef tins, empty cases, and his ill-gotten shares of our daily issues. He has many callers, and I am afraid their inquiries rather spoilt his verses. When I arrived the Q.M.S. was already in a poor humour for writing poetry. The O.C. had been worrying him about galvanised iron for cover for some dug-outs; three men had complained about the scantiness of their rum issue—which somehow always annoys the Q.M.S.; and he had received no letters in the day’s mail except a bill from a chap he had borrowed a pound from in Charleville two years ago. Still, our Q.M.S. is a sticker, and he read me the covering letter which he was sending to the Editor.

He said he thought it would be as well to get the letter off his mind first. That would make the writing of the verses necessary, and he would have to complete the job in order to keep faith.

He had just read this much out when the sergeant came in and reported that the C.O. insisted on the galvanised iron being procured to-morrow. Then a corporal called and wanted to know could six men in his section have new boots, and when would the rubber boots be ready for the coves in the trenches?

“How can a man write when he is interrupted like this?” asked our poet. “I had a lovely inspiration, too, about surf bathing. It ran like this——”

But again there was an interruption. The sergeant cook was the caller, and he was angry and hostile. “How the —— can[Pg 66] I cook seventy beef teas, forty puddings and two hundred milk diets with the bloomin’ quarter issue of water I get? Love me, when I was cooking for shearing sheds out on the Barcoo, where it never rained, I could get as much water as I wanted. If you want them bloomin’ milk diets you got to get me water—or cook them yourself.”

I don’t know whether our poet had a rod with which he taps the rock and brings forth water, but he mollified the sergeant cook by getting water from somewhere. It tasted well in the rum, too. I would have heard the first line of the poem if one of the sergeants in our hospital had not called down for three hot-water bottles, a tin of Bovril, and some brandy for a sick soldier. I wonder how sick you have to be before you get brandy? Before the sergeant had gone the orderly officer came in. He bullied the Q.M.S. about not getting some tents repaired.

“It’s hard work trying to write a poem here,” said the Q.M.S. sadly, when the orderly officer departed. “For two pins I’d chuck writin’, but that idea about the surf girls is too good to lose. I was going to start with this line——”

“Those patients up in Number Three Ward must have more blankets. And you will have to get another forty beds ready to-night,” yelled a voice at the door.

“Excuse me a bit,” said the poet. He was gone about an hour. When he returned there were five men waiting to interview him. The corporal wished that the Q.M.S. would explain how men were to keep their boots on without laces, and whether socks were supposed to be everlasting. The second caller came on a more peaceful mission. He simply wished to know if the Q.M.S. had heard anything about a consignment of Christmas billy-cans that good people in Australia are supposed to be sending us. I don’t know why, but this query made my friend very angry. “Do you think I’ve got your bloomin’ billy-cans?” he yelled. Why should a Q.M.S. say a thing like that? And he seemed so indignant about it, too. The third chap wanted some paper and an envelope to write to his girl; the fourth wanted an old blanket and some twine to make a shroud for a man who had died; and the fifth asked whether the Q.M.S. knew what was the latest war news. When he was told to go to a place warmer than Port Darwin, he asked quietly if either of us could tell him if sheep would do well around Adrianople after the war.

It was growing late, but I thought I would wait a bit and hear that first line about the surf bathers. Two men came in for soap; a doctor chap called to ask whether there was any fruit to make a fruit salad for a sick man; a lance-corporal said his boots hurt, and got a bigger pair; the cook came back and complained that somebody had pinched six tins of condensed milk; and an officer’s servant inquired whether his boss could have an old box and a ground-sheet to make a bath.

Then the Q.M.S. had another rum and took up his pencil again. He spread out a piece of paper and commenced to write. “I’ll get that first verse off and read it to you,” he said. He would have done it, too, but for the sergeant-major. Our sergeant-major is a—well, he is just a sergeant-major, and he does not write verse.

“What about those great-coats?” he roared. “Didn’t I tell you to get them to-day? And they are not here. Weeks ago I ordered you to get them. I don’t suppose you ever requisitioned for them. What’s that you’re writing now—requisitions?”

Then the ’major saw red. “What the blazes have I got here?” he yelled. “Men dying from cold because they’ve got no coats, and you writing poems. What the——”

He fainted away, and I was present when the doctors came out of the hospital tent to which they carried him. One of the doctors said the sergeant-major was a splendid soldier, but he had received a tremendous shock from some unknown cause, and they don’t think he can recover.

When the Q.M.S. heard that he became very despondent. “I won’t write that poem now,” he said; “but it would have been a splendid thing. All about a pretty girl in the surf who met a fellow from the bush....”

Deciphered—with much labour—by a bomb-thrower of the
New Zealand Infantry Brigade from a very old tablet
dug up in the trenches at Quinn’s Post

[Note.—The epic loses much of its beauty through a hurried translation from the Ancient Greek during a Turkish attack.]

The following extracts from the dispatches of Sir Ian Hamilton form a short official summary of the history of Anzac:

The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps sailed out of Mudros Bay on the afternoon of April 24, escorted by the 2nd Squadron of the Fleet, under Rear-Admiral Thursby. The rendezvous was reached just after half-past one in the morning of the 25th, and there the 1,500 men who had been placed on board H.M. ships before leaving Mudros were transferred to their boats. This operation was carried out with remarkable expedition and in absolute silence. Simultaneously the remaining 2,500 men of the covering force were transferred from their transports to six destroyers. At 2.30 A.M. H.M. ships, together with the tows and the destroyers, proceeded to within some four miles of the coast, H.M.S. Queen (flying Rear-Admiral Thursby’s flag) directing on a point about a mile north of Kaba Tepe. At 3.30 A.M. orders to go ahead and land were given to the tows, and at 4.10 A.M. the destroyers were ordered to follow.

All these arrangements worked without a hitch, and were carried out in complete orderliness and silence. No breath of wind ruffled the surface of the sea, and every condition was favourable save for the moon which, sinking behind the ships, may have silhouetted them against its orb, betraying them thus to watchers on the shore.

A rugged and difficult part of the coast had been selected for the landing, so difficult and rugged that I considered the Turks were not at all likely to anticipate such a descent. Indeed, owing to the tows having failed to maintain their exact direction, the actual point of disembarkation was rather more than a mile north of that which I had selected, and was more closely overhung by steeper cliffs. Although this accident increased the initial difficulty of driving the enemy off the heights inland, it has since proved itself to have been a blessing in disguise, inasmuch as the actual base of the force of occupation has been much better defiladed from shell fire.

The beach on which the landing was actually effected is a very narrow strip of sand, about 1,000 yards in length, bounded on the north and the south by two small promontories. At its southern extremity a deep ravine, with exceedingly steep, scrub-clad sides, runs inland in a north-easterly direction. Near the northern end of the beach a small but steep gully runs up into the hills at right angles to the shore. Between the ravine and the gully the whole of the beach is backed by the seaward face of the spur, which forms the north-western side of the ravine. From the top of the spur the ground falls almost sheer except near the southern limit of the beach, where gentler slopes give access to the mouth of the ravine behind. Further inland lie in a tangled knot the under-features of Sari Bair, separated by deep ravines, which take a most confusing diversity of direction. Sharp spurs, covered with dense scrub, and falling away in many places in precipitous sandy cliffs, radiate from the principal mass of the mountain, from which they run north-west, west, south-west, and south to the coast.

The boats approached the land in the silence[Pg 72] and the darkness, and they were close to the shore before the enemy stirred. Then about one battalion of Turks was seen running along the beach. At this critical moment the conduct of all ranks was most praiseworthy. Not a word was spoken—everyone remained perfectly orderly and quiet awaiting the enemy’s fire, which sure enough opened, causing many casualties. The moment the boats touched land the Australians’ turn had come. Like lightning they leapt ashore, and each man as he did so went straight as his bayonet at the enemy. So vigorous was the onslaught that the Turks made no attempt to withstand it and fled from ridge to ridge pursued by the Australian infantry.

This attack was carried out by the 3rd Australian Brigade, under Major (temporary Colonel) Sinclair Maclagan, D.S.O. The 1st and 2nd Brigades followed promptly, and were all disembarked by 2 P.M., by which time 12,000 men and two batteries of Indian Mountain Artillery had been landed. The disembarkation of further artillery was delayed owing to the fact that the enemy’s heavy guns opened on the anchorage and forced the transports, which had been subjected to continuous shelling from his field guns, to stand farther out to sea.

The broken ground, the thick scrub, the necessity for sending any formed detachments post haste as they landed to the critical point—all these led to confusion and mixing up of units. Eventually the mixed crowd of fighting men, some advancing from the beach, others falling back before the oncoming Turkish supports, solidified into a semi-circular position with its right about a mile north of Gaba Tepe and its left on the high ground over Fisherman’s Hut. During this period parties of the 9th and 10th Battalions charged and put out of action three of the enemy’s Krupp guns. During this period also the disembarkation of the Australian Division was being followed by that of the New Zealand and Australian Division (two brigades only).

From 11 A.M. to 3 P.M. the enemy, now reinforced to a strength of 20,000 men, attacked the whole line, making a specially strong effort against the 3rd Brigade and the left of the 2nd Brigade. This counter-attack was, however, handsomely repulsed with the help of the guns of H.M. ships. Between 5 and 6.30 P.M. a third most determined counter-attack was made against the 3rd Brigade, who held their ground with more than equivalent stubbornness. During the night again the Turks made constant attacks; but in spite of all the line held firm. The troops had had practically no rest on the night of the 24-25th; they had been fighting hard all day over most difficult country, and they had been subjected to heavy shrapnel fire in the open. Their casualties had been deplorably heavy. But, despite their losses and in spite of their fatigue, the morning of the 26th found them still in good heart and as full of fight as ever.

It is a consolation to know that the Turks suffered still more seriously. Several times our machine guns got on to them in close formation, and the whole surrounding country is still strewn with their dead of this date.

The reorganisation of units and formations was impossible during the 26th and 27th owing to persistent attacks. An advance was impossible until a reorganisation could be effected, and it only remained to entrench the position gained and to perfect the arrangements for bringing up ammunition, water and supplies to the ridges—in itself a most difficult undertaking. Four battalions of the Royal Naval Division were sent up to reinforce the Army Corps on April 28 and 29.

On the night of May 2, a bold effort was made to seize a commanding knoll in front of the centre of the line. The enemy’s enfilading machine guns were too scientifically posted, and 800 men were lost without advantage beyond the infliction of a corresponding loss to the enemy. On May 4, an attempt to seize Kaba Tepe was also unsuccessful, the barbed-wire here being something beyond belief. But a number of minor operations were carried out, such as the taking of a Turkish observing station, the strengthening of entrenchments, the reorganisation of units, and the perfecting of communication with the landing-place. Also a constant strain was placed upon some of the best troops[Pg 73] of the enemy, who, to the number of 24,000, were constantly kept fighting and being killed and wounded freely, as the Turkish sniper is no match for the Kangaroo shooter, even at his own game.

The many urgent calls for reinforcements made during the previous critical fighting had forced me to disorganise and mix together several of the formations in the southern group, to the extent even of the French on our right having a British battalion holding their own extremest right. For the purposes of the impending fight, it became therefore necessary to create temporarily a Composite Division, consisting of the 2nd Australian and New Zealand Infantry Brigades (withdrawn for the purpose from the northern section) together with a Naval Brigade formed of the Plymouth and Drake Battalions. The 29th Division was reconstituted into four brigades, i.e. the 88th and 87th Brigades, the Lancashire Fusilier Brigade (T.F.), and the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade. The French Corps Expéditionnaire was reinforced by the 2nd Naval Brigade, and the new Composite Division formed my General Reserve.

During the three days (May 6/8th) our troops were destined to be very severely tried. They were about to attack a series of positions scientifically selected in advance which, although not yet joined up into one line of entrenchment, were already strengthened by works on their more important tactical features.

[After recounting the heavy fighting by which the 29th Division made its advance on May 6 and 7, the dispatch continues:]

The troops were now worn out; the new lines needed consolidating, and it was certain that fresh reinforcements were reaching the Turks. Balancing the actual state of my own troops against the probable condition of the Turks, I decided to call upon the men to make one more push before the new enemy forces could get into touch with their surroundings.

Orders were therefore issued to dig in at sundown on the line gained, to maintain that line against counter-attack, and to prepare to advance again next morning. The Lancashire Fusilier Brigade was withdrawn into reserve, and its place on the left was taken by the Brigade of New Zealanders.

General Headquarters were shifted to an entrenchment on a hill in rear of the left of our line. Under my plan for the fresh attack, the New Zealand Brigade was to advance through the line held during the night by the 88th Brigade and press on towards Krithia. Simultaneously, the 87th Brigade was to threaten the works on the west of the ravine, whilst endeavouring, by means of parties of scouts and volunteers, to steal patches of ground from the areas dominated by the German machine-guns.

At 10.15 A.M. heavy fire from ships and batteries was opened on the whole front, and at 10.30 A.M. the New Zealand Brigade began to move, meeting with strenuous opposition from the enemy, who had received his reinforcements. Supported by the fire of the batteries and the machine-guns of the 88th Brigade, they pushed forward on the right and advanced their centre beyond the fir trees, but could make little further progress. By 1.30 P.M. about 200 yards had been gained beyond the previously most advanced trenches of the 88th Brigade.

At this hour the French Corps reported they could not advance up the crest of the spur west of Kereves Dere till further progress was made by the British.

At 4 P.M. I gave orders that the whole line, reinforced by the 2nd Australian Brigade, would fix bayonets, slope arms, and move on Krithia precisely at 5.30 P.M.

At 5.15 P.M. the ships’ guns and our heavy artillery bombarded the enemy’s position for a quarter of an hour, and at 5.30 P.M. the field guns opened a hot shrapnel fire to cover the infantry advance.

The co-operation of artillery and infantry in this attack was perfect, the timing of the movement being carried out with great precision. Some of the companies of the New Zealand regiments did not get their orders in time, but acting on their own initiative they pushed on as soon as the heavy howitzers ceased firing, thus making the whole advance simultaneous.

The steady advance of the British could be followed by the sparkle of their bayonets until the long lines entered the smoke clouds. The French at first made no move, then, their drums beating and bugles sounding the charge, they suddenly darted forward in a swarm of skirmishers, which seemed in one moment to cover the whole southern face of the ridge of the Kereves Dere. Against these the Turkish gunners now turned their heaviest pieces, and as the leading groups stormed the first Turkish redoubt the ink-black bursts of high-explosive shells blotted out both assailants and assailed. The trial was too severe for the Senegalese tirailleurs. They recoiled. They were rallied. Another rush forward, another repulse, and then a small supporting column of French soldiers was seen silhouetted against the sky as they charged upwards along the crest of the ridge of the Kereves Dere, whilst elsewhere it grew so dark that the whole of the battlefield became a blank.

Not until next morning did any reliable details come to hand of what had happened. The New Zealanders’ firing line had marched over the cunningly concealed enemy’s machine-guns without seeing them, and these, re-opening on our supports as they came up, caused them heavy losses. But the first line pressed on and arrived within a few yards of the Turkish trenches which had been holding up our advance beyond the fir wood. There they dug themselves in.

The Australian Brigade had advanced through the Composite Brigade, and, in spite of heavy losses from shrapnel, machine-gun, and rifle fire, had progressed from 300 to 400 yards.

The determined valour shown by these two brigades, the New Zealand Brigade, under Brigadier-General F. E. Johnston, and the 2nd Australian Infantry Brigade, under Brigadier-General the Hon. J. W. McCay, are worthy of particular praise. Their losses were correspondingly heavy, but in spite of fierce counter-attacks by numerous fresh troops they stuck to what they had won with admirable tenacity.

On the extreme left the 87th Brigade, under Major-General W. R. Marshall, made a final and especially gallant effort to advance across the smooth, bullet-swept area between the ravine and the sea, but once more the enemy machine-guns thinned the ranks of the leading companies of the South Wales Borderers, and again there was nothing for it but to give ground. But when night closed in, the men of the 87th Brigade of their own accord asked to be led forward, and achieved progress to the extent of just about 200 yards. During the darkness the British troops everywhere entrenched themselves on the line gained. On the right the French column, last seen as it grew dark, had stormed and still held the redoubt round which the fighting had centred.

[The 2nd Australian Infantry Brigade and New Zealand Infantry Brigade were for three days in the trenches they had dug, but on the completion of the push towards Krithia were retransferred to Anzac. The history of Anzac during the next three months is told in the following extracts:]

Turning now to where the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps were perched upon the cliffs of Sari Bair, I must begin by explaining that their rôle at this stage of the operations was—first, to keep open a door leading to the vitals of the Turkish position; secondly, to hold up as large a body as possible of the enemy in front of them, so as to lessen the strain at Cape Helles. Anzac, in fact, was cast to play second fiddle to Cape Helles, a part out of harmony with the daredevil spirit animating those warriors from the South, and so it has come about that, as your Lordship will now see, the defensive of the Australians and New Zealanders has always tended to take on the character of an attack.

The line held during the period under review by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps formed a rough semi-circle inland from the beach of Anzac Cove, with a diameter of about 1,100 yards. The firing line is everywhere close to the enemy’s trenches, and in all sections of the position sapping, counter-sapping, and bomb attacks have been incessant. The shelling both of the trenches and beaches has been impartial and liberal. As many as 1,400 shells have fallen on Anzac within the hour, and these of all calibres, from 11 inches to field shrapnel. Around Quinn’s Post, both above and below ground, the contest has been[Pg 75] particularly severe. This section of the line is situated on the circumference of the Anzac semi-circle at the farthest point from its diameter. Here our fire trenches are mere ledges on the brink of a sheer precipice falling 200 feet into the valley below. The enemy’s trenches are only a few feet distant.

On May 9 a night assault was delivered on the enemy’s trenches in front of Quinn’s Post. The trenches were carried at the point of the bayonet. At dawn on May 10 a strong counter-attack forced our troops to fall back on Quinn’s Post.

On the night of May 14-15 a sortie was made from Quinn’s Post with the object of filling in Turkish trenches in which bomb-throwers were active. The sortie, which cost us some 70 casualties, was not successful.

On May 14, Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood was slightly wounded, but I am glad to say he was not obliged to relinquish the command of his corps.

On May 15 I deeply regret to say Major-General W. T. Bridges, commanding the Australian Division, received a severe wound, which proved fatal a few days later. Sincere and single-minded in his devotion to Australia and to duty, his loss still stands out even amidst the hundreds of other brave officers who have gone.

[General Bridges was succeeded by Major-General H. B. Walker. The 1st Australian Division was also commanded by Major-General J. G. Legge, who afterwards organised and commanded the 2nd Australian Division.]

On May 18 Anzac was subjected to a heavy bombardment from large calibre guns and howitzers. At midnight of the 18th-19th the most violent rifle and machine-gun fire yet experienced broke out along the front. Slackening from 3 A.M. to 4 A.M. it then broke out again, and a heavy Turkish column assaulted the left of No. 2 section. This assault was beaten off with loss. Another attack was delivered before daylight on the centre of this section; it was repeated four times and repulsed each time with very serious losses to the enemy. Simultaneously a heavy attack was delivered on the north-east salient of No. 4 section, which was repulsed and followed up, but the pressing of the counter-attack was prevented by shrapnel. Attacks were also delivered on Quinn’s Post, Courtney’s Post, and along the front of our right section. At about 5 A.M. the battle was fairly joined, and a furious cannonade was begun by a large number of enemy guns, including 12-inch and 9.2-inch, and other artillery that had not till then opened. By 9.30 A.M. the Turks were pressing hard against the left of Courtney’s and the right of Quinn’s Post. At 10 A.M. this attack, unable to face fire from the right, swung round to the left, where it was severely handled by our guns and the machine-guns of our left section. By 11 A.M. the enemy, who were crowded together in the trenches beyond Quinn’s Post, were giving way under their heavy losses.

According to prisoners’ reports 30,000 troops, including five fresh regiments, were used against us. General Liman von Sanders was himself in command.

The enemy’s casualties were heavy, as may be judged from the fact that over 3,000 dead were lying in the open in view of our trenches. A large proportion of these losses were due to our artillery fire. Our casualties amounted to about 100 killed and 500 wounded, including nine officers wounded.

The next four days were chiefly remarkable for the carrying through of the negotiations for the suspension of arms, which actually took place on May 24. The negotiations resulted in a suspension of arms from 7.30 A.M. to 4.30 P.M. on May 24. The procedure laid down for this suspension of arms was, I am glad to inform your Lordship, correctly observed on both sides.

The burial of the dead was finished about 3 P.M. Some 3,000 Turkish dead were removed or buried in the area between the opposing lines. The whole of these were killed on or since May 18. Many bodies of men killed earlier were also buried.

From May 28 till June 5 the fighting seemed to concentrate itself around Quinn’s Post. Three enemy galleries had been detected[Pg 78] there, and work on them stopped by counter-mines, which killed twenty Turks and injured thirty. One gallery had however, been overlooked, and at 3.30 A.M. on May 29 a mine was sprung in or near the centre of Quinn’s Post. The explosion was followed by a very heavy bomb attack, before which our left centre subsection fell back, letting in a storming party of Turks. This isolated one subsection on the left from the two other subsections on the right.

At 5.30 A.M. our counter-attack was launched, and by 6 A.M. the position had been retaken with the bayonet by the 15th Australian Infantry Battalion, led by Major Quinn, who was unfortunately killed. All the enemy in the trench were killed or captured.

On May 30 preparations were made in Quinn’s Post to attack and destroy two enemy saps, the heads of which had reached within five yards of our fire trench. Two storming parties of thirty-five men went forward at 1 P.M., cleared the sap heads and penetrated into the trenches beyond, but they were gradually driven back by bombs, of which the enemy seemed to have an unlimited supply.

On June 1, an hour after dark, two sappers of the New Zealand Engineers courageously crept out and laid a charge of gun-cotton against a timber and sandbag bomb-proof. The structure was completely demolished.

On June 4 three separate enterprises were carried out by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. These were undertaken in compliance with an order which I had issued that the enemy’s attention should be distracted during an attack I was about to deliver in the southern zone.

First a demonstration in the direction of Kaba Tepe, the Navy co-operating by bombarding the Turkish trenches.

At Quinn’s Post an assault was delivered at 11 P.M. A party of sixty men, accompanied by a bomb-throwing party on either flank, stormed the enemy’s trench. In the assault many Turks were bayoneted and twenty-eight captured. At 6.30 A.M. the trench had to be abandoned.

On June 5 a sortie was made by two officers and 100 men of the 1st Australian Infantry, the objective being the destruction of a machine-gun in a trench (known as German Officer’s Trench). The darkness of the trench and its overhead cover prevented the use of the bayonet, but some damage was done by shooting down over the parapet. The aim of this gallant assault being attained, the party withdrew in good order with their wounded. Casualties in all were thirty-six.

On the night of June 29-30 the Turks, acting, as we afterwards ascertained, under the direct personal order of Enver Pasha to drive us all into the sea, made a big attack on the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, principally on that portion of the line which was under the command of Major-General Sir A. J. Godley. From midnight till 1.30 A.M. a fire of musketry and guns of greatest intensity was poured upon our trenches. A heavy column then advanced to the assault, and was completely crumpled up by the musketry and machine-guns of the 7th and 8th Light Horse. An hour later another grand attack took place against our left and left centre, and was equally cut to pieces by our artillery and rifle fire. The enemy’s casualties may be judged by the fact that in areas directly exposed to view between 400 and 500 were actually seen to fall.

From the very first I had hoped that by landing a force under the heights of Sari Bair we should be able to strangle the Turkish communications to the southwards, whether by land or sea, and so clear the Narrows for the Fleet. Owing to the enemy’s superiority, both in numbers and in position; owing to under-estimates of the strength of the original entrenchments prepared and sited under German direction; owing to the constant dwindling of the units of my force through wastage; owing also to the intricacy and difficulty of the terrain, these hopes had not[Pg 79] hitherto borne fruit. But they were well founded. So much at least had clearly enough been demonstrated by the desperate and costly nature of the Turkish attacks. The Australians and New Zealanders had rooted themselves in very near to the vitals of the enemy. By their tenacity and courage they still held open the doorway from which one strong thrust forward might give us command of the Narrows.

Before a man of the reinforcements had arrived my mind was made up as to their employment, and by means of a vigorous offensive from Anzac, combined with a surprise landing to the north of it, I meant to try and win through to Maidos, leaving behind me a well-protected line of communications starting from the bay of Suvla.

On the nights of August 4, 5, and 6, the reinforcing troops were shipped into Anzac very silently at the darkest hours. Then, still silently, they were tucked away from enemy aeroplanes or observatories in their prepared hiding-places. The whole sea route lay open to the view of the Turks upon Achi Baba’s summit and Battleship Hill. Aeroplanes could count every tent and every ship at Mudros or at Imbros. Within rifle fire of Anzac’s open beach hostile riflemen were looking out across the Ægean no more than twenty feet from our opposing lines. Every modern appliance of telescope, telegraph, wireless was at the disposal of the enemy. Yet the instructions worked out at General Headquarters in the minutest detail (the result of conferences with the Royal Navy, which were attended by Brigadier-General Skeen, of General Birdwood’s staff) were such that the scheme was carried through without a hitch.

The troops now at the disposal of General Birdwood amounted in round numbers to 37,000 rifles and seventy-two guns, with naval support from two cruisers, four monitors, and two destroyers. Under the scheme these troops were to be divided into two main portions. The task of holding the existing Anzac position, and of making frontal assaults therefrom, was assigned to the Australian Division (plus the 1st and 3rd Light Horse Brigades and two battalions of the 40th Brigade); that of assaulting the Chunuk Bair ridge was entrusted to the New Zealand and Australian Division (less the 1st and 3rd Light Horse Brigades), to the 13th Division (less five battalions), and to the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade and to the Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade. The 29th Brigade of the 10th Division (less one battalion) and the 38th Brigade were held in reserve.

During August 4, 5, and 6, the works on the enemy’s left and centre were subjected to a slow bombardment, and on the afternoon of August 6 an assault was made upon the formidable Lone Pine entrenchment. The work consisted of a strong point d’appui on the south-western end of a plateau, where it confronted, at distances varying from 60 to 120 yards, the salient in the line of our trenches named by us the Pimple. The entrenchment was evidently very strong; it was entangled with wire, and provided with overhead cover.

The detailed scheme of attack was worked out with care and forethought by Major-General H. B. Walker, commanding 1st Australian Division, and his thoroughness contributed, I consider, largely to the success of the enterprise.

The action commenced at 4.30 P.M. with a continuous and heavy bombardment of the Lone Pine and adjacent trenches, H.M.S. Bacchante assisting by searching the valleys to the north-east and east, and the monitors by shelling the enemy’s batteries south of Gaba Tepe. The assault had been entrusted to the 1st Australian Brigade (Brigadier-General N. M. Smyth), and punctually at 5.30 P.M. it was carried out by the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Australian Battalions, the 1st Battalion forming the brigade reserve.

Two lines left their trenches simultaneously, and were closely followed up by a third. The rush across the open was a regular race against death, which came in the shape of a hail of shell and rifle bullets from front and from either flank. But the Australians had firmly resolved to reach the enemy’s trenches, and in this determination they became for the moment invincible. The barbed wire entanglement was reached and was surmounted. Then came a[Pg 82] terrible moment, when it seemed as though it would be physically impossible to penetrate into the trenches. The overhead cover of stout pine beams resisted all individual efforts to move it, and the loopholes continued to spit fire. Groups of our men then bodily lifted up the beams and individual soldiers leaped down into the semi-darkened galleries amongst the Turks. By 5.47 P.M. the 3rd and 4th Battalions were well into the enemy’s vitals, and a few minutes later the reserves of the 2nd Battalion advanced over their parados, and driving out, killing, or capturing the occupants, made good the whole of the trenches. The reserve companies of the 3rd and 4th Battalions followed, and at 6.20 P.M. the 1st Battalion (in reserve) was launched to consolidate the position.

At once the Turks made it plain, as they have never ceased to do since, that they had no intention of acquiescing in the capture of this capital work. At 7.0 P.M. a determined and violent counter-attack began.

For seven hours these counter-attacks continued. All this time consolidation was being attempted, although the presence of so many Turkish prisoners hampered movement and constituted an actual danger. In beating off these desperate counter-attacks very heavy casualties were suffered by the Australians. Part of the 12th Battalion, the reserve of the 3rd Brigade, had therefore to be thrown into the mêlée.

Twelve hours later, on the 7th, another effort was made by the enemy, being resumed at midnight and proceeding intermittently till dawn. At an early period of this last counter-attack the 4th Battalion were forced by bombs to relinquish a portion of a trench, but later on, led by their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel McNaghten, they killed every Turk who had got in.

At 5 A.M. on August 9, the enemy made a sudden attempt to storm from the east and south-east after a feint of fire attack from the north. The 7th Battalion bore the brunt of the shock, and handled the attack so vigorously that by 7.45 A.M. there were clear signs of demoralisation in the enemy’s ranks. But although this marked the end of counter-attacks on the large scale, the bombing and sniping continued, though in less volume, throughout this day and night, and lasted till August 12, when it at last became manifest that we had gained complete ascendancy.

Thus was Lone Pine taken and held. The Turks were in great force and very full of fight, yet one weak Australian brigade, numbering at the outset but 2,000 rifles, and supported only by two weak battalions, carried the work under the eyes of a whole enemy division. The irresistible dash and daring of officers and men in the initial charge were a glory to Australia. In one corner eight Turks and six Australians were found lying as they had bayoneted one another. To make room for the fighting men, the dead were ranged in rows on either side of the gangway. After the first violence of the counter-attacks had abated, 1,000 corpses—our own and Turkish—were dragged out from the trenches.

The Lone Pine attack drew all the local enemy reserves towards it, and may be held, more than any other cause, to have been the reason that the Suvla Bay landing was so lightly opposed. Our captures in this feat of arms amounted to 134 prisoners, seven machine-guns, and a large quantity of ammunition and equipment.

Other frontal attacks from the existing Anzac positions were not so fortunate. They included an attack upon the work known as German Officer’s Trench, on the extreme right of our line, at midnight on August 6-7, also assaults on the Nek and Baby 700 trenches opposite the centre of our line, delivered at 4.30 A.M. on the 7th. The 2nd Australian Brigade did all that men could do; the Light Horse only accepted their repulse after losing three-fourths of that devoted band who so bravely sallied forth. All that day, as the result of these most gallant attacks, Turkish reserves on Battleship Hill were being held back to meet any dangerous development along the front of the old Anzac line,[Pg 83] and so were not available to meet our main enterprise, which I will now endeavour to describe.

The first step in the real push—the step which above all others was to count—was the night attack on the summits of the Sari Bair ridge.

It was our object to effect a lodgment along the crest of the high main ridge with two columns of troops, but, seeing the nature of the ground and the dispositions of the enemy, the effort had to be made by stages. We were bound, in fact, to undertake a double subsidiary operation before we could hope to launch these attacks with any real prospect of success. The two assaulting columns, which were to work up three ravines to the storm of the high ridge, were to be preceded by two covering columns. One of these was to capture the enemy’s positions commanding the foothills, first to open the mouths of the ravines, secondly to cover the right flank of another covering force whilst it marched along the beach. The other covering column was to strike far out to the north until, from a hill called Damakjelik Bair, it could at the same time facilitate the landing of the 9th Corps at Nibrunesi Point, and guard the left flank of the column assaulting Sari Bair from any forces of the enemy which might be assembled in the Anafarta valley.

The whole of this big attack was placed under the command of Major-General Sir A. J. Godley, General Officer Commanding New Zealand and Australian Division. The two covering and the two assaulting columns were organised as follows:

Right Covering Column, under Brigadier-General A. H. Russell.—New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, the Otago Mounted Rifles Regiment, the Maori Contingent and New Zealand Field Troop.

Right Assaulting Column, under Brigadier-General F. E. Johnston.—New Zealand Infantry Brigade, Indian Mountain Battery (less one section), one Company New Zealand Engineers.

Left Covering Column, under Brigadier-General J. H. Travers.—Headquarters 40th Brigade, half the 72nd Field Company, 4th Battalion South Wales Borderers, and 5th Battalion Wiltshire Regiment.

Left Assaulting Column, under Brigadier-General (now Major-General) H. V. Cox.—29th Indian Infantry Brigade, 4th Australian Infantry Brigade, Indian Mountain Battery (less one section), one Company New Zealand Engineers.

Divisional Reserve.—6th Battalion South Lancashire Regiment and 8th Battalion Welsh Regiment (Pioneers) at Chailak Dere, and the 39th Infantry Brigade and half 72nd Field Company at Aghyl Dere.

The right covering column had to clear the Turks off from their right flank positions upon Old No. 3 Post and Table Top.

Old No. 3 Post connected with Table Top by a razor back. Working parties had done their best with unstinted material to convert this commanding point into an impregnable redoubt. Two lines of fire trench, very heavily entangled, protected its southern face.

Table Top is a steep-sided, flat-topped hill, close on 400 feet above sea level. The sides of the hill are mostly sheer and quite impracticable.

Amongst other stratagems the Anzac troops, assisted by H.M.S. Colne, had long and carefully been educating the Turks how they should lose Old No. 3 Post, which could hardly have been rushed by simple force of arms. Every night, exactly at 9 P.M., H.M.S. Colne threw the beams of her searchlight on to the redoubt, and opened fire upon it for exactly ten minutes. Then, after a ten minutes’ interval, came a second illumination and bombardment, commencing always at 9.20 and ending precisely at 9.30 P.M.

The idea was that, after successive nights of such practice, the enemy would get into the habit of taking the searchlight as a hint to clear out until the shelling was at an end. But on the eventful night of the 6th, the sound of their footsteps drowned by the loud cannonade, unseen as they crept along in that darkest shadow which fringes a searchlight’s beam—came the right covering column. At 9.30 the light switched off, and instantly our men poured[Pg 84] out of the scrub jungle and into the redoubt. By 11 P.M. the whole series of surrounding entrenchments were ours!

The remainder of the right covering column carried on with their attack upon Bauchop’s Hill and the Chailak Dere. By 10 P.M. the northernmost point, with its machine-gun, was captured, and by 1 o’clock in the morning the whole of Bauchop’s Hill, a maze of ridge and ravine, everywhere entrenched, was fairly in our hands.

The attack along the Chailak Dere was not so cleanly carried out—made, indeed, just about as ugly a start as any enemy could wish. Pressing eagerly forward through the night, the little column of stormers found themselves held up by a barbed-wire erection of unexampled height, depth, and solidity, which completely closed the only practicable entrance to the ravine. Here that splendid body of men, the Otago Mounted Rifles, lost some of their bravest and their best, but in the end, when things were beginning to seem desperate, a passage was forced through the stubborn obstacle with most conspicuous and cool courage by Captain Shera and a party of New Zealand Engineers, supported by the Maoris, who showed themselves worthy descendants of the warriors of the Gate Pah. Thus was the mouth of the Chailak Dere opened in time to admit of the unopposed entry of the right assaulting column.

Simultaneously the attack on Table Top had been launched under cover of a heavy bombardment from H.M.S. Colne. No general on peace manœuvres would ask troops to attempt so breakneck an enterprise. The angle of Table Top’s ascent is recognised in our regulations as “impracticable for infantry.” But neither Turks nor angles of ascent were destined to stop Russell or his New Zealanders that night. The scarped heights were scaled, the plateau was carried by midnight. With this brilliant feat the task of the right covering force was at an end. Its attacks had been made with the bayonet and bomb only; magazines were empty by order; hardly a rifle shot had been fired. Some 150 prisoners were captured as well as many rifles and much equipment, ammunition and stores. No words can do justice to the achievement of Brigadier-General Russell and his men. There are exploits which must be seen to be realised.

The right assaulting column had entered the two southerly ravines—Sazli Beit Dere and Chailak Dere—by midnight. At 1.30 A.M. began a hotly-contested fight for the trenches on the lower part of Rhododendron Spur, whilst the Chailak Dere column pressed steadily up the valley against the enemy.

The left covering column, under Brigadier-General Travers, after marching along the beach to No. 3 Outpost, resumed its northerly advance as soon as the attack on Bauchop’s Hill had developed. Every trench encountered was instantly rushed by the Borderers, until, having reached the predetermined spot, the whole column was unhesitatingly launched at Damakjelik Bair. By 1.30 A.M. the whole of the hill was occupied, thus safeguarding the left rear of the whole of the Anzac attack.

The left assaulting column crossed the Chailak Dere at 12.30 A.M., and entered the Aghyl Dere at the heels of the left covering column. The surprise, on this side, was complete. Two Turkish officers were caught in their pyjamas; enemy arms and ammunition were scattered in every direction.

The grand attack was now in full swing, but the country gave new sensations in cliff climbing even to officers and men who had graduated over the goat tracks of Anzac. The darkness of the night, the density of the scrub, hands and knees progress up the spurs, sheer physical fatigue, exhaustion of the spirit caused by repeated hairbreadth escapes from the hail of random bullets—all these combined to take the edge off the energies of our troops. At last, after advancing some distance up the Aghyl Dere, the column split up into two parts. The 4th Australian Brigade struggled, fighting hard as they went, up to the north of the northern fork of the Aghyl Dere, making for Hill 305 (Koja Chemen Tepe). The 29th Indian Infantry Brigade scrambled up the southern fork of the Aghyl Dere and the spurs north of it to the attack of a portion of the Sari Bair ridge known as Hill Q.

This photograph shows the spurs of the main range into which the Anzac attack was pushed on the night of August 6

This photograph shows the head of Shrapnel Gully (Monarch Valley). All the trenches on the distant ridge are Turkish

Dawn broke and the crest line was not yet in our hands, although, considering all things, the left assaulting column had made a marvellous advance. The 4th Australian Infantry Brigade was on the line of the Asma Dere (the next ravine north of the Aghyl Dere) and the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade held the ridge west of the Farm below Chunuk Bair and along the spurs to the north-east. The enemy had been flung back from ridge to ridge; an excellent line for the renewal of the attack had been secured, and (except for the exhaustion of the troops) the auspices were propitious.

Turning to the right assaulting column, one battalion, the Canterbury Infantry Battalion, clambered slowly up the Sazli Beit Dere. The remainder of the force, led by the Otago Battalion, wound their way amongst the pitfalls and forced their passage through the scrub of the Chailak Dere, where fierce opposition forced them ere long to deploy. Here, too, the hopeless country was the main hindrance, and it was not until 5.45 A.M. that the bulk of the column joined the Canterbury Battalion on the lower slopes of Rhododendron Spur. Eventually they entrenched on the top of Rhododendron Spur, a quarter of a mile short of Chunuk Bair—i.e. of victory.

At 9.30 A.M. the two assaulting columns pressed forward whilst our guns pounded the enemy moving along the Battleship Hill spurs. But in spite of all their efforts their increasing exhaustion as opposed to the gathering strength of the enemy’s fresh troops began to tell—they had shot their bolt. So all day they clung to what they had captured and strove to make ready for the night. All had suffered heavily and all were very tired.

So ended the first phase of the fighting for the Chunuk Bair ridge. Our aims had not fully been attained, and the help we had hoped for from Suvla had not been forthcoming. Yet I fully endorse the words of General Birdwood when he says: “The troops had performed a feat which is without parallel.”

Great kudos is due to Major-Generals Godley and Shaw for their arrangements; to Generals Russell, Johnston, Cox, and Travers for their leading; but most of all, as every one of these officers will gladly admit, to the rank and file for their fighting. Nor may I omit to add that the true destroyer spirit with which H.M.S. Colne (Commander Claude Seymour, R.N.) and H.M.S. Chelmer (Commander Hugh T. England, R.N.) backed us up will live in the grateful memories of the Army.

In the course of this afternoon (August 7th) reconnaissances of Sari Bair were carried out and the troops were got into shape for a fresh advance in three columns, to take place in the early morning.

Right Column, Brigadier-General F. E. Johnston.—26th Indian Mountain Battery (less one section), Auckland Mounted Rifles, New Zealand Infantry Brigade, two battalions 13th Division, and the Maori Contingent.

Centre and Left Columns, Major-General H. V. Cox.—21st Indian Mountain Battery (less one section), 4th Australian Brigade, 39th Infantry Brigade (less one battalion), with 6th Battalion South Lancashire Regiment attached, and the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade.

The right column was to climb up the Chunuk Bair ridge; the left column was to make for the prolongation of the ridge north-east to Koja Chemen Tepe, the topmost peak of the range.

The attack was timed for 4.15 A.M. At the first faint glimmer of dawn observers saw figures moving against the sky-line of Chunuk Bair. Were they our own men, or were they the Turks? Telescopes were anxiously adjusted; the light grew stronger; men were seen climbing up from our side of the ridge; they were our own fellows—the topmost summit was ours!

On the right, General Johnston’s column, headed by the Wellington Battalion and supported by the 7th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment, the Auckland Mounted Rifles Regiment, the 8th Welsh Pioneers, and the Maori Contingent, the whole most gallantly led by Lieutenant-Colonel W. G. Malone, had raced one another up the steep. Nothing could check them. On they went, until, with a last determined[Pg 88] rush, they fixed themselves firmly on the south-western slopes and crest of the main knoll known as the height of Chunuk Bair. With deep regret I have to add that the brave Lieutenant-Colonel Malone fell mortally wounded as he was marking out the line to be held.

In the centre the 39th Infantry Brigade and the 29th Indian Brigade moved along the gullies leading up to the Sari Bair ridge. So murderous was the enemy’s fire that little progress could be made, though some ground was gained on the spurs to the north-east of the Farm.

On the left the 4th Australian Brigade advanced from the Asmak Dere against the lower slopes of Abdul Rahman Bair (a spur running due north from Koja Chemen Tepe) with the intention of wheeling to its right and advancing up the spur. Cunningly placed Turkish machine-guns and a strong entrenched body of infantry were ready for this move, and the brigade were unable to get on. At last, on the approach of heavy columns of the enemy, the Australians, virtually surrounded, and having already suffered losses of over 1,000, were withdrawn to their original position.

In the afternoon the battle slackened, excepting always at Lone Pine, where the enemy were still coming on in mass, and being mown down by our fire. Elsewhere the troops were busy digging and getting up water and food, no child’s play, with their wretched lines of communication running within musketry range of the enemy.

At 4.30 A.M. on August 9th, the Chunuk Bair ridge and Hill Q were heavily shelled. At 5.16 A.M. this tremendous bombardment was to be switched off on to the flanks and reverse slopes of the heights.

No. 1 Column, Brigadier-General F. E. Johnston.—26th Indian Mountain Battery (less one section), the Auckland and Wellington Mounted Rifles Regiments, the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, and two battalions of the 13th Division.

No. 2 Column, Major-General H. V. Cox.—21st Indian Mountain Battery (less one section), 4th Australian Brigade, 39th Brigade (less the 7th Gloucesters, relieved), with the 6th Battalion South Lancashire Regiment attached, and the Indian Infantry Brigade.

No. 3 Column, Brigadier-General A. H. Baldwin, commanding 38th Infantry Brigade.—Two battalions each from the 38th and 29th Brigades and one from the 40th Brigade.

General Baldwin’s column had assembled in the Chailak Dere, and was moving up towards General Johnston’s headquarters. But in spite of all precautions, the darkness, the rough scrub-covered country, its sheer steepness, so delayed the column that Baldwin, owing to the darkness and the awful country, lost his way—through no fault of his own.

And now, under that fine leader, Major C. G. L. Allanson, the 6th Gurkhas of the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade pressed up the slopes of Sari Bair, crowned the heights of the col between Chunuk Bair and Hill Q, viewed far beneath them the waters of the Hellespont, viewed the Asiatic shores along which motor transport was bringing supplies to the lighters. But the fortune of war was against us. At this supreme moment Baldwin’s column was still a long way from our trenches on the crest. And instead of Baldwin’s support came suddenly a salvo of heavy shells.

The Turkish commander saw his chance; and the South Lancashires and Gurkhas, who had seen the promised land, were forced backwards over the crest.

That evening from Chunuk Bair the line ran down to the Farm and almost due north to the Asma Dere southern watershed, whence it continued westward to the sea near Asmak Kuyu. On the right the Australian Division was still holding its line and Lone Pine was still being furiously attacked. The 1st Australian Brigade was now reduced from 2,900 to 1,000, and the total casualties up to 8 P.M. on the 9th amounted to about 8,500. But the troops were still in extraordinarily good heart.

During the night of the 9th-10th the New Zealand and New Army troops on Chunuk Bair were relieved. For three days and three nights they had been ceaselessly fighting. They were half dead with fatigue. Their lines[Pg 89] of communication, started from sea level, ran across trackless ridges and ravines to an altitude of 800 ft., and were exposed all the way to snipers’ fire and artillery bombardment. It had become imperative, therefore, to get them enough food, water, and rest; and for this purpose it was imperative also to withdraw them. Chunuk Bair, which they had so magnificently held, was now handed over to two battalions of the 13th Division.

At daybreak on Tuesday, August 10, the Turks delivered a grand attack from the line Chunuk Bair—Hill Q against these two battalions, already weakened in numbers, though not in spirit, by previous fighting. First our men were shelled by every enemy gun, and then, at 5.30 A.M., were assaulted by a huge column, consisting of no less than a full division plus a regiment of three battalions. The North Lancashire men were simply overwhelmed in their shallow trenches by sheer weight of numbers, whilst the Wilts, who were caught out in the open, were literally almost annihilated. The ponderous mass of the enemy swept over the crest.

Now it was our turn. The warships and the New Zealand and Australian Artillery, the Indian Mounted Artillery Brigade, and the 69th Brigade Royal Field Artillery were getting the chance of a lifetime. As the successive solid lines of Turks topped the crest of the ridge gaps were torn through their formation. They became exposed not only to the full blast of the guns, but also to a battery of ten machine-guns belonging to the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, which played upon their serried ranks at close range until the barrels were red-hot. Enormous losses were inflicted, especially by these ten machine-guns; and of the swarms which had once fairly crossed the crest line only the merest handful ever straggled back to their own side of Chunuk Bair.

At this same time strong forces of the enemy were hurled against the Farm, where there arose a conflict so deadly that it may be considered as the climax of the four days’ fighting for the ridge. Portions of our line were pierced and the troops driven clean down the hill. At the foot of the hill the men were rallied by Staff Captain Street, who was there supervising the transport of food and water. Without a word, unhesitatingly, they followed him back to the Farm, where they plunged again into the midst of that series of struggles in which generals fought in the ranks and men dropped their scientific weapons and caught one another by the throat.

By 10 A.M. the effort of the enemy was spent. Soon their shattered remnants began to trickle back, and by night, except prisoners or wounded, no live Turk was left upon our side of the slope.

By evening the total casualties of General Birdwood’s force had reached 12,000, and included a very large proportion of officers. The 13th Division of the New Army, under Major-General Shaw, had alone lost 6,000 out of a grand total of 10,500. Baldwin was gone, and all his staff. Ten commanding officers out of thirteen had disappeared from the fighting effectives. The Warwicks and the Worcesters had lost literally every single officer.

But physically, though Birdwood’s forces were prepared to hold all they had got, they were now too exhausted to attack—at least until they had rested and reorganised.

The enemy’s positions were now being rapidly entrenched, and, as I could not depend on receiving reinforcing drafts, I was faced with the danger that if I could not drive the Turks back I might lose so many men that I would find myself unable to hold the very extensive new area of ground which had been gained. I therefore decided to mass every available man against Ismail Oglu Tepe, a sine qua non to my plans whether as a first step towards clearing the valley, or, if this proved impossible, towards securing Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove from shell fire.

The same day, a force consisting of two battalions of New Zealand Mounted Rifles, two battalions of the 29th Irish Brigade, the 4th South Wales Borderers, and 29th Indian Infantry Brigade, the whole under the command of Major-General H. V. Cox, was working independently to support the main attack.

General Cox divided his force into three sections; the left section to press forward and establish a permanent hold on the existing lightly-held outpost line covering the junction of the 11th Division with the Anzac front; the centre section to seize the well at Kabak Kuyu, an asset of utmost value, whether to ourselves or the enemy; the right section to attack and capture the Turkish trenches on the north-east side of the Kaiajik Aghala.

The advance of the left section was a success; after a brisk engagement the well at Kabak Kuyu was seized by the Indian Brigade, and, by 4.30, the right column, under Brigadier-General Russell, under heavy fire, effected a lodgment on the Kaiajik Aghala, where our men entrenched and began to dig communications across the Kaiajik Dere towards the lines of the 4th Australian Brigade south of the Dere. A pretty stiff bomb fight ensued, in which General Russell’s troops held their own through the night against superior force. At 6 A.M. on the morning of August 22, General Russell, reinforced by the newly-arrived 18th Australian Battalion, attacked the summit of the Kaiajik Aghala. The Australians carried 150 yards of the trenches, losing heavily in so doing, and were then forced to fall back again owing to enfilade fire, though in the meantime the New Zealand Mounted Rifles managed, in spite of constant counter-attacks, to make good another 80 yards.

A counter-attack in strength launched by the Turks at 10 A.M. was repulsed; the new line from the Kaiajik Aghala to Susuk Kuyu was gradually strengthened, and eventually joined on to the right of the 9th Army Corps, thereby materially improving the whole situation. During this action the 4th Australian Brigade, which remained facing the Turks on the upper part of the Kaiajik Aghala, was able to inflict several hundred casualties on the enemy as they retreated or endeavoured to reinforce.

The last days of the month were illumined by a brilliant affair carried through by the troops under General Birdwood’s command. Our object was to complete the capture of Hill 60 north of the Kaiajik Aghala, commenced by Major-General Cox on August 21. Hill 60[Pg 92] overlooked the Biyuk Anafarta valley, and was therefore tactically a very important feature.

The conduct of the attack was again entrusted to Major-General Cox, at whose disposal were placed detachments from the 4th and 5th Australian Brigades, the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, and the 5th Connaught Rangers. The advance was timed to take place at 5 P.M. on August 27, after the heaviest artillery bombardment we could afford. This bombardment seemed effective; but the moment the assailants broke cover they were greeted by an exceedingly hot fire from the enemy field guns, rifles and machine-guns, followed after a brief interval by a shower of heavy shell, some of which, most happily, pitched into the trenches of the Turks. On the right the detachment from the 4th and 5th Australian Brigades could make no headway against a battery of machine-guns which confronted them. In the centre the New Zealanders made a most determined onslaught, and carried one side of the topmost knoll. Hand-to-hand fighting continued here till 9.30 P.M., when it was reported that nine-tenths of the summit had been gained.

On the left the 250 men of the 5th Connaught Rangers excited the admiration of all beholders by the swiftness and cohesion of their charge. In five minutes they had carried their objective, the northern Turkish communications, when they at once set to and began a lively bomb fight along the trenches against strong parties which came hurrying up from the enemy supports and afterwards from their reserves. At midnight fresh troops were to have strengthened our grip upon the hill, but before that hour the Irishmen had been out-bombed, and the 9th Australian Light Horse, who had made a most plucky attempt to recapture the lost communication trench, had been repulsed. Luckily, the New Zealand Mounted Rifles refused to recognise that they were worsted. Nothing would shift them. All that night and all next day, through bombing, bayonet charges, musketry, shrapnel, and heavy shell, they hung on to their 150 yards of trench. At 1 A.M. on August 29, the 10th Light Horse made another attack on the lost communication trenches to the left, carried them, and finally[Pg 93] held them. This gave us complete command of the underfeature, an outlook over the Anafarta Sagir valley, and safer lateral communications between Anzac and Suvla Bay.

Three Turkish machine-guns and forty-six prisoners were taken, as well as three trench mortars, 300 Turkish rifles, 60,000 rounds of ammunition, and 500 bombs. Four hundred acres were added to the territories of Anzac.

And now, before affixing to this dispatch my final signature as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, let me first pay tribute to the everlasting memory of my dear comrades who will return no more. Next, let me thank each and all, Generals, Staff, Regimental Leaders, and rank and file, for their wonderful loyalty, patience, and self-sacrifice.

So I bid them all farewell with a special God-speed to the campaigners who have served with me right through from the terrible yet most glorious earlier days—the incomparable 29th Division; the young veterans of the Naval Division; the ever-victorious Australians and New Zealanders; the stout East Lancs, and my own brave fellow-countrymen of the Lowland Division of Scotland.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Cobber is Australian for a tried and trusted friend.

[14] Skiting—Australian for “swanking” in speech. “Skite”—blatherskite.

[15] Fray Bentos is a brand of tinned meat.

[16] Bonzer—Australian for “excellent.”

Nobody seemed to know much about him except that he was generally considered by all those who knew of him in the squadron to be a “cold-foot,” and his nickname was appropriately “Icy.” Not that the others had any particular cause to call him that, but whenever “Beachy Bill” came screeching overhead he would involuntarily duck and then smile in that peculiar manner of his as much as to say, “I can’t help it!” Beachy wasn’t his worst enemy, though, for if there was anything that he dreaded it was those Turkish “75’s.”[17] It used to make us feel as if we could shake him when we saw how he would double himself up. And yet one never liked to attempt anything of the kind whenever he used that smile. Moreover, as he was over six feet in height and correspondingly strong, it would not have been politic. His was a baffling smile, recalling the peculiar smile of the “Monna Lisa,” and, like it, unfathomable. He was a very quiet kind of chap, and when it was his turn to do fatigues, he would go and perform whatever was required of him without ever grumbling. His mates used to take a mean advantage of his good nature, and would shunt all the work, such as sweeping out the “possie,” or trenches, on to him.

About the time of which I am writing we had noticed that Abdul was sapping somewhere down the gully. Sometimes we could distinguish dark shapes moving about, and no amount of sniping on our part would stop them. They worked only during the night, and each morning we found that the pile of new earth down the gully had grown higher. At last we understood his plan—and it came to our turn to make a counter move.

One evening I was told off among others to go out and dig a new trench in front of Abdul’s new sap. We had to block him from getting to a certain place on the little ridge which hitherto had been in “No-Man’s Land.” I noticed that Icy had also been told off, but he was to be one of the covering party. All that night we worked hard, digging ourselves in and filling sandbags which we threw up in front of us. At first we were undisturbed, but suddenly the bullets began to ping-ping over our heads, and we knew that Abdul had tumbled. Still, as he was himself intent on digging he did not come out at us, but contented himself by sniping, thinking to drive us off in that way. However, it was a bit late in the day for that; since by the time he found us out we had already several good sandbags filled, and these protected us as long as we kept well down.

Several of our chaps were winged, but as none of the wounds was very serious we didn’t mind that. When it had struck five in the morning we[Pg 103] knocked off and retired to sleep away the day. Half a dozen bomb-throwers who had volunteered for the job then took our places, bringing with them a few bombs, their rifles, ammunition, water bottles, and a supply of bully beef and biscuits. There they spent the whole day, lying low under cover of the sandbags. But Abdul troubled them not! Next night we went out again to resume work, and then it was that certain things happened which made us look upon Icy in a different light.

We had no sooner started work than ra-ta-ta-ta-ta went a machine-gun somewhere out to the left, and the bullets came pinging round hot and close, winging three and killing two on the first discharge.

John Turk had stolen a march on us by placing a machine-gun away out on his extreme flank where he could to a certain extent enfilade us. That sort of thing could not be allowed to last, as we had to bury our noses in the ground each time the confounded gun opened up. Our covering party, being out ahead of us, escaped the hail of bullets better than we did. The place was now becoming too hot to stay in, so the order came along to retire independently to our trenches, until something could be done to stop the machine-gun.

When we mustered again in the trenches, we found that one man of the covering party was missing. The man was Icy. As we were talking about him—wondering who should go back to look for him—there came the noise of a commotion from the direction of the Turkish machine-gun. Bang! bang! went a couple of bombs, followed by cries and shouts from Abdul, and above it all we were certain we heard fragments of language, of the category known in Australia as “bullocky.”[18] What could it mean? By this time the alarm had spread along the whole of Abdul’s front trenches, which belched forth liquid fire. In our own trenches everyone had mechanically sprung to arms; and we stood there wondering while for fifteen minutes the Turks fired without ceasing. Gradually the noise subsided—and we noticed that for some reason the machine-gun away on the left was strangely quiet.

An hour later we were stealing out again to have another attempt at completing our new trenches when I stumbled over the form of a man lying prone. Bending over to see him, I found it was Icy. His clothes were wet and sticky with blood, and half underneath his body there showed the muzzle of a machine-gun. As we lifted him up, we saw that the gun was there complete, tripod and all.

We took him into the lines and handed him over to the dressing-station; and just before we came away he opened his eyes and told enough for us to realise that Icy had sneaked over and stolen that Turkish gun. To this day we don’t quite know how he did it, as he never will talk about it; but before they took him on to the hospital ship next day—with his sixteen bullet wounds and scratches all told—there went down to see him a crowd in which I was amongst the foremost, which apologised to Icy very humbly.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] The Turks had a battery of French “75’s” at Anzac, seized as the guns were coming from France during the blockade of Servia in the Balkan War.

[18] Bullocky—stands both for the bullock driver and for his chief gift.

As I look westward towards the grey Ægean Sea, generally peaceful, deep blue and ofttimes appearing golden-hued by the mystic hand of sunset, but now flecked with ripples of white like a distant hill-side strewn with new-shorn lambs, and hurried on by the murmurings of the grey sea’s bride, the grey cloud-bearing Mother Wind, as she splashes the foreshore of this grey land with fleecy fringes of her mate, and makes her way over the grey hills, through rugged landslip or tangled, stunted, unfriendly evergreens, grey phantoms flit to and fro, passing with a careless nod, as it were, the little grey homes of those whose thoughts so seldom had time to feast on aught but the bright days before the Peril came; but who now, with a foretaste of hell in their souls, need only such a day as this to make them feel the presence of the grey world’s messenger whose name is Loneliness. Loneliness garbed in a mantle of merging grey sea and grey sky, trimmed with the spires and turrets of grey and seemingly unsouled ships, whose presence in the blue and gold days was as that of old friends well met, but which now seem to be ragged rents in the solemn dress of Loneliness, reminding one of a derelict’s slovenly covering held together over a hopeless breast by an old gold brooch—perhaps the gift of a mother or handed down from bygone ages. Loneliness comes not to all of us garbed in this fashion. To others, who look eastward, she comes dressed in the sombre clothes of the grey hill-side, and with yearning eyes beckons them on to the chances of the blue and gold life in Constantinople; or, perchance, if their luck is that of many another good soldier, to that other grey life forever with the grey seas, grey skies and grey forgetfulness on these ghostly, forsaken grey shores of Gallipoli.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] The roof of a dug-out, as usually designed, is a device for keeping the shrapnel out and letting the water in.

A private sat under a tree. It was not the Lone Pine, but the other one. Winter had stripped it of foliage, and all around was bleak and uninviting.

In his bronzed fist, which had carried buckets and biscuits since April 25th, he held a letter, highly perfumed, from his “young lady”—she whom he had escorted on so many occasions to Sydney’s social events in the piping days of peace.

He had not heard from home since embarkation, and had often wondered, as he bathed in just enough water to temper a whisky and shaved by means of a lethal instrument better fitted for cutting a hedge than a beard, whether they really cared. A fit of hesitancy now seized him, and he hardly liked to read the letter. By means of the top of a tin of sardines which he had bought cheap—two bob he had paid for it on the beach—he saw his unshaven face, the neck of his soiled shirt, and his crop of unkempt hair. He was interrupted in this by the attentions a “little friend” was paying him. This he located. He then lighted the end of a cigarette (which he had kept stowed away in the top of his puttees) before risking another glance at himself in the top of the two-bob tin of sardines.

“What a guy,” he murmured. “If Jessie could see me now, would she turn me down for some cold-footed, well-groomed fellow? I don’t think. She’s all right, and would understand it’s no gipsy tea we’re at.”

However, it was with some slight nervousness that he opened the letter. Following the customary greetings, Jessie wrote:

This was more than flesh and blood could stand. “Am I having my leg pulled?” he asked. He looked at the envelope, and found it had been posted in Sydney thirteen months ago. He swore roundly at the expense of the postal people, and as all the rest of the letter was hopelessly out of date, he turned his attention to the next item of his very belated mail. It was another letter from Jessie. She again rambled on about Egypt, its climatic horrors and the dangers of Cairo’s attractions.

He bit his lip and smiled sourly when he came across a passage which related to the dancing deeds of a male acquaintance of his.

Hughie knew that the man referred to was big enough to push all the Turks off the Peninsula; and Jessie proved a Job’s comforter when, later on, she told him that Frank only attended dances given for patriotic purposes.

The next item was a parcel containing hair-oil, twenty-five costly cigars, a cigar-holder, a suit of pyjamas, and a booklet given away by a firm of tobacconists, explaining to would-be-recruits that “Henry Clays” would be forwarded to any part of the Australasian front free of carriage. The parcel was addressed to Gallipoli.

Hughie, a gay dog in the good old ante-bellum days, who occupied a cosy job and circulated his sovereigns, tramped back to his dug-out through the saps, revolving wicked thoughts about Frank. Always a philosopher, he cleaned his rifle with the hair-oil, cut up the pyjamas to make pull-throughs, and to newly arrived reinforcements distributed the cigars. He and the old hands had lost any appetite they ever had for such comforts.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] It may be necessary to explain that every man in the Gallipoli Peninsula was within easy range of the Turkish artillery. For anything except a hospital to use a tent would have been to give an open invitation to shrapnel. “The nearest shops” were about three miles behind the Turkish lines.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] Number 9—a particularly effective and universal remedy in the field service panier in the form of a pill.

Note.—This illustration has had
to be postponed pending a
final statement by Mr. Hilaire
Belloc as to the date of the
certain exhaustion of German
resources.

Boom-boom! Boom-boom! Boom-boom! All the afternoon the warships on our right had been engaged in the playful work of tearing pieces from the hillsides of Achi Baba, eight miles to the south of us, ruining the trenches of our friend the enemy, blowing up a supply base, a mule train, dropping shells on the forts, or indulging in some of the many small acts of friendliness to which Jack Tar is prone. As the evening wore on we could see the flash from both shell and gun.

About the time we finished our frugal evening meal lightning began to play in intermittent flashes, like a heavenly searchlight, from far across the hidden Narrows and Asia Minor, and put to shame the puny bursts of light from the handiwork of man. The boats were still at it, but their dull booming was now intermixed with the rumble of distant thunder.

The lightning becomes more vivid. There is a rattling, crashing roar from the artillery of the skies that can never be equalled by any earthly batteries. Surely the Creator is in angry mood to-night, as comes a deafening peal, followed by vivid flashes of forked lightning in fantastic shapes. One seems a long arm with hooked fingers, as though the Most High would grasp one or both of the contending armies and hurl them into the seas. The lightning plays around the steel points of the bayonets of the motionless sentries, standing ever ready under the parapets, and keeping a ceaseless watch the night through on the enemy trenches.

Trench and traverse, hill and valley, are revealed by a brighter light than that of day. The rude wooden crosses, marking the places where, alas! too many of Australasia’s best have fallen, are brought out in bold relief against the dark background of holly scrub, and the narrow strips of winding roadway on the long hillsides from the beach—the work of months—up which perspiring fatigue parties toil with rations, water, ammunition and other necessary stores the day long, are laid out as a relief map by Heaven’s electricity.

A rattling, crashing roar, such as I have never heard in any Australian thunderstorm, is followed by a deafening clap, and a huge ball of fire falls earthward at terrific speed in the direction of Constantinople, followed by a sound as of a shattering explosion, which causes the very hillsides to quake, traverse and parapet to tremble, and the roofs of dug-outs to send down a shower of stones.

The ships have long given up the unequal struggle to make their voices heard against those of the elements, and as the storm passes over, and the rumblings of the thunder become more and more distant and the lightning less vivid, the veil is drawn from the face of the moon, and the White Lady sails out into her own once more.

The storm has had its effect on those manning the trenches. The bubbling rattle of the machine-gun, the sharp crack of Turkish rifles, and the heavier report of our own arms, which usually punctuate the night, are noticeable by their absence. The turmoil of an hour ago has turned to unbelievable quiet.

But was that really he? That stylish pair of khaki-coloured overall trousers surmounted by a serviceable-looking British warm patrol tunic of the same excellent material? At first glance it was hard to distinguish him from the dapper-looking foot-gunner, with whom he was engaged in lively conversation. Their words were inaudible to us onlookers, but from what one could gather the foot-gunner was making some interesting comments on the system of naval pinnaces.

And was this all of the representative of the greatest naval power that ever placed foot upon the land? But as the observer drew nearer, the flash of illumination came. For there, poised elegantly on the bows of the natty blue trench sou’wester was the emblem of Britain’s naval supremacy, the silver anchor in a golden hoop.

“Shiver my corrugated iron!” he was saying—using a phrase I remembered having heard so often as a young sub-midshipman (or “spotty,” as they are affectionately known by their seniors) on the old Bellicasus—when, noting the presence of company, he turned with a polite smile to the intruders and waved his apologies. It was then that one noted the true stamp of the man. He was a sailor every inch of him, from the drop of salt spray that dangled lazily from the tip of his nose to the purple-tinted seaweed that clung affectionately to the soles of his boots; and his speech was laden with that peculiar crispness and alertness which we associate with sailors; they imbibe it from the salt atmosphere of the gun-room and the ward-room. But what struck one most about him was his youthful appearance. “What’s What” would probably give his age as 29[Pg 125] (though he did not look a day more than 28½), and yet from the three bands on his cuff it was obvious to one of the writer’s experience in naval matters that he must be a subaltern-commander.

“Is it much like what you thought it would be after all your training?” I asked.

“Yes, pretty much,” was the reply, with an oddly reminiscent smile. “Iron is heavier than water, and a pinnace afloat is worth six aground.”

Here, I realised, was a man of perception—one who was fitted to guide the destinies of a great nation.

“And the landing of all these vast quantities of stores,” I urged; “is not that a great task?”

“We do not land them,” he said impressively and decisively, with the air of one closing an argument. “We unship them.”

“That, sir,” said the C.O., “is Australian for recess, either firing or sleeping. It’s a contraction of ‘position.’”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong,” said the Chief Staff Officer, in a tone which admitted no argument. “Posse!—p-o- double s-e. Posse—a small force. Your firing recess is manned by a small force—what?”

1. MAHOMED—AND AUSTRALIA

Mahomed was Mahomed. He was also a guide. The combination meant that he knew everything, and what he didn’t know he made up, and what he made up he told so often that at last he believed it.

We were on the usual Nile excursion—made by nearly the whole Australasian force at one time or another—to Memphis and Sakkara.

A boat had been arranged, and Mahomed tried to entertain us on the boat. He did. Knowing our absence from home and wives, he gave us a full account of his three wives; also some obscure, but not uninteresting, details of their feelings towards each other. Each was “a pearl,” and he didn’t know which was the pearliest. The idyllic peace of Mrs. Mahomed in triplicate was enough to make one a follower of the Prophet.

His next dissertation was on the Koran. But theology doesn’t appeal much to soldiers. Padres have reduced their services to a maximum of twenty minutes. Before long our astute guide recognised a necessity of a change of subject. He gave us riddles—the riddle of the Sphinx: How one could divide equally between two men a ten-gallon flask of water with only three- and seven-gallon flasks to do it with. The best of us took nine moves to do it in; Mahomed did it in five—and looked humble. Then he gave us another: Four men and their wives are on one side of the Nile, and have to pass over to the other; but their jealousy will not allow any man to be alone with a lady not his wife. Mahomed threw this problem at us with an air of triumph. There was the boat, there were the four men, there were the four wives, there was the Nile.

The Nile was certainly there, and our puffing, stodgy steamer had gone two or three miles before we gave it up. We did give it up. Mahomed manipulated[Pg 128] the ladies and their spouses with ease, landed each on the other side, all conventions being strictly observed.

Then the Pyramids came into view. We were rather tired of the Pyramids. But the guide wasn’t. What would a guide be without Pyramids—or the Pyramids without guides? So we heard again all their history. Each new Mahomed throws in a thousand years or two more or less. But what is a thousand years in Egypt?

We were tiring of the Pyramids. Mahomed started on the other bank—Napoleon, Napoleon’s towers, Napoleon’s granaries, Napoleon’s fortifications.

Now there is a limit to all things. We could stand Moses Island; we could listen to the accounts of Pharaohs, Pyramids, Sphinxes, and Mrs. Sphinxes. But Napoleon! Napoleon hadn’t even known Australia.

However, Mahomed was wound up. He was inspired. He was even intrepid. What if the infidel dogs did cut down his baksheesh; they should have the whole story. So the British (and the Australasians) in Egypt went to the wall. Napoleon reigned. He got it all.

It was then that our youngest subaltern put in an easy under-arm, and Mahomed hit out!

“Yes, we know all that about Napoleon,” said the sub., “but what about Sir George Reid?”

“Oh,” said Mahomed, “I know all about Saint George Reid. He a great man. There is his mound over there.”

“Ah!” we exclaimed. And then, with happy inspiration, someone asked, “Is he dead?”

“Oh, yes; dead a hundred years. Saint George Reid, a very good and great man. He has a fine tomb. If a sick man goes there, he gets cured quickly.”

2. ANZAC IN ALEX

I hardly think old Benci’s little wineshop in Alexandria will be known to many of the A.N.Z.A.C., or to many Alexandrians for that matter. But in case any of you find yourselves ever in Alexandria again, this is how you will discover it:

Standing at the head of the Rue Cherif Pacha—everyone in Alexandria knows the Rue Cherif Pacha who knows anything at all about the place—with the Kodak Company’s fine shop on your right hand and His Britannic Majesty’s fine Caracol on your left, you could reach it in three bomb-throws, if the last of the three happened to be a “googly” and swerved in from the off, just round the corner into the Rue Attarine. So, you see, it is right opposite the Attarine Mosque; and as you sit of an evening at Benci’s doorway, smoking his cigarettes, with his wine at your elbow, and watch the motley, polyglot crowd ceaselessly passing, you have your eyes always coming back to[Pg 129] the carved and inlaid door of the old temple, and up the graceful minaret into the great lift of a night sky glorious with such liquid gold of stars that memory of herself will take you back to many a mellow night when stars of even more melting loveliness bent above you in your own homeland down South.

But you never saw such a restless crowd in an Australian or New Zealand street as this double line of dapper Europeans and of sallow Egyptians, Syrians, Armenians and hungry-looking Greeks, threading the low swirl of khaki tunics and Arab rags. And ever and anon the stream ebbs before your “garry-driver’s” long-drawn “Haa-sib” (mind out), to let pass some official dignitary or some riotous party of Kangaroos, or some handsome, red-tabbed officer of the regular staff, or maybe ’tis an even more handsome and stalwart private of the ranks, beside some dear, dainty, winsome thing under one of those little fly-away hats, with that dark kiss-curl clinging close to her cheek—you know exactly the kind of maid and the kind of curl I mean.

And still the tall, quiet minaret and the broad, quiet heaven seem to lean together; and one grows pensive sitting at Benci’s narrow door of a summer evening.

Old Benci himself is a brisk little Italian, doubtless of middle age. I think it must have been as a mark of affection that we called him “Old Benci,” for his hair still keeps something of its youthful brown. He has not a word of English and about two of French, but you know at once from his open, sunny face that, like most of his compatriots, he has a heart of gold; and, at a price to fit a ranker’s pocket, he keeps a Chianti that is first-rate.

It was Tillett who found him for us. Tillett is a New Zealand Medical Corps man, grey-headed, full of years and the experience they have brought him; equally at ease in French, Italian and Spanish from his early life on the Continent, and a dabbler in Greek and German by way of diversion; but so quiet and unassuming withal, and so rarely confidential about himself and his affairs, that we knew little of him beyond that he was at that time doing odd jobs of healing for the drivers of a New Zealand battery withdrawn from the Peninsula. For us he was a most likeable chap, an excellent interpreter when our mediocre French failed, and—his chief merit—the discoverer of Benci and his tavern. With a palate tormented by stewed tea and the heavy canteen beer beloved of the yokels of Old England, he had traversed wellnigh every quarter of Alexandria in vain quest of the cheap and honest draught wine that he knew must be there somewhere, and yet must be neither that so very “ordinaire” red wine of France, nor yet the wretched “health wines” of Greece, that carry in their tang memories of the physician and the sick-bed of our pre-war days. And between him and Old Benci there had grown up quite a sincere affection, apart altogether from Chianti at P.T. 1 per glass.

It was delightful, the pantomime that went on whenever any of us arrived without Tillett. With a countenance full of anxious solicitude, Benci would point vaguely out into the night, carry his forefinger to his own grey head, and then up would go his[Pg 130] eyebrows in interrogation. This we knew to mean, “Where is our friend of the grey hair that you are here to-night without him?” And one of us would answer by laying his face to the table and snoring heavily or in mimic sentry-go along the passage. Oh, but it was good to see the smile that broke and beamed across his honest face, with his pleasure at finding himself intelligible to his country’s allies.

The rest of these allies, so far as our coterie was concerned, were a sergeant of the Ceylon Tea-planters, back from Gallipoli in charge of his company’s horses, and a Maori of that gallant, reckless band whose “Komaté! Komaté!” rang along those hills in August—well-born and well-educated, in physique strong and solid, but with movements as quick and sure as a cat’s. In this tanned army only the full lips and the slightly flattened nose betrayed his origin.

He and I had been friends at the same New Zealand ’varsity, but, like so many of the best of his race, he was no “sticker,” and in the third year of his medical course he had side-tracked himself on troubled studies of mind and consciousness and refused to carry on with his dull public health and medical jurisprudence. Since leaving ’varsity he had been living on his means, he told me, spending most of his time in wandering. Napier, the tea-planter of Ceylon, was your well-bred, clean-limbed, rather aggressively healthy-minded young Englishman.

These three, at any rate, were the centre of that bright little knot of friends that, in a three months’ stay in Alexandria, had drifted and stuck together in a community of tastes and ideas and downright liking for one another. And though one or other of us might be held by night pickets, or C.B., or on visits to our hospitable French and Italian friends, yet on any night of the week, from seven till midnight, you would find two or three of us forgathered at the back of the little shop in the shadow of the great black casks and behind the wooden grille that, while allowing us from the dim interior a clear view of the street, yet shut us off effectively from the eyes of the night patrol. For it was before Sir John Maxwell’s “Iron Law of closing time” that we held our revelry chez Benci, and it was safe to wager that something was amiss if we went home by any but the 1.10 A.M. tram for Ramleh, or by carriage even later.

But those were our palmy days in Alexandria—the days before the swarm of Tommies came, and our pockets began to empty, and an officious picket in the fullness of its own importance went farther afield than Sisters Street and patrolled the whole town in its lumbering motor-wagons....

1. THE FLOOD

And it came to pass that King Hun called together his mighty men and said unto them:

2. “Behold I have dreamed a dream, and the Gott of Boasts hath appeared unto me and said:

3. “‘Bring together all your ships of the sea, your wealth of the land, and your mighty men of valour, including your first-born.

5. “‘Ye shall go forth to battle against the kingdoms of the earth to wage war against all who do not bow down to thee and call thee “The One.”

6. “‘For I have decreed that thou shalt rule the earth to the uttermost corners of it.

7. “‘Let thou and thy son take but six days’ rations in your haversacks, for on the seventh day thou shalt dine at the Palace of the Buckinghamites with the King of the Allyites as thy mess orderly.

8. “‘Forget not thy pomade nor thy tooth-brush, neither shalt thou leave behind thy gases nor thine iron rations, for thou mayest have need of them.

9. “‘And go ye forth to kill and plunder; spare none, but put all to the sword; and put your trust in yourself alone—and—er, myself, if it so please thee.

11. And all his mighty men bowed down to him and said: “O King, live for ever; verily thou hast truly said, and thy kingdom shall extend to the ends of the earth and the heavens and to the depths of the sea.”

12. So King Hun blew his bags out, smote him on the chest, and called aloud, saying, “I am IT.”

13. And the same day he brought together all his legions of men and his ships of the sea and all the wealth of the land: for they were all ready.

14. And they counted and found umpteen million men of valour, two ships, seventeen anchors, fourteen shillings and fivepence in gold, umpteen billion rolls of paper money and ennygottsquantitee gas.

18. Now, it came to pass that the Huns ran amok both East and West, North and South, and their cry was “Strafe!” and “Ber-lud!” and they got both in abundance.

19. For they threw themselves on the neighbouring villages, breaking through the back gate without warning, and slaying the watchdog and the pig, the husbandman and his wife, the baby and the nurse, the cat and the canary.

20. Nor even did the Boy-about-the-place have time to reach his air-gun from off the shelf; for the Mad Mass tarried not to wipe its sword, but only to quench its blood-lust and its thirst.

22. But it came to pass that by this time the cries of murder and children in torment had reached far and wide, and before another sun had set two men met the horde of Huns.

23. And the Huns lifted up their bleary eyes and asked, “Gott strafe, but who vas dis dat do dry stob our leedle game?”

24. And the Man-from-the-west with the strong arm and the iron jaw proclaimed to the multitude,

26. And the Butchers all lifted up their voices with one accord, saying, “Gott sh-sh-traf,” and “Hic, Ber-lud.”

28. And so it came to pass that the King of the Huns dined not at the Palace of the Buckinghamites with the King of the Allyites as his mess orderly—neither on the sixth day nor in the sixth year.

30. And the flood was over the face of the earth for many days and many nights till the Mighty Winds arose and drove it back.

31. And behold, the King of the Huns said unto himself, “Verily, it was a dream, and instead of ‘The Day’ is now nothing but ‘The Night.’”

2. THE BOOK OF JOBS

And it came to pass that on the seventh day of the week of the fourth month of the year, being the twenty-fifth Sunday after the Melbourne Cup, there journeyed forth from the land of the Greeks, yclept Lemnos, a mighty host.

2. And “Birdy” commanded them, saying, “Take from the Turks the land of Gallipoli, that we may occupy it. Possess yourselves also of the command of the Narrows, that all who are free may enter.”

3. Therefore, the Colonels, Majors and Captains took heed, and after much lengthy pow-wowing issued to their men this edict: “Hear ye, men of Australia and New Zealand, what the[Pg 137] ‘Boss’ hath commanded. Ye shall girdle yourselves about with ammunition, and, after landing as seems meetest, make assault upon the hills and valleys of Gallipoli, which the sons of Abdul do hold to our detriment.”

4. To the Ninth, and the Tenth, and the Eleventh, and the Twelfth Battalions of foot soldiers this follower of Medon addressed himself thus: “Prepare ye the track that the First, Second and other Brigades, even your comrades, may make peaceful footing. And each man take with him a first field-dressing and two days’ rations, for we know not what difficulties we might encounter.”

5. And to the Army Medical Corps likewise he addressed himself, commanding them to attend to the weak, the injured and the weary, and lo! his words were not in vain, for the land was treacherous and harboured many pitfalls.

6. And it came further to pass that the enemy proved themselves “hard-doers”; yea, verily, they were a stubborn folk, for they had builded unto themselves dug-outs and trenches on the land of their forefathers, and were aware of the coming of the invader.

7. But “Birdie’s” host were of the hills and dales; men of much cunning and resourcefulness.

8. Therefore, without the flourish of trumpets, they sallied forth to the right, and to the left, and the centre.

9. And they did that which was right in the sight of the “Boss,” for they used their “Blocks” and held the ground, which seemed impossible to those not possessed of faith in his judgment.

10. And on the day of the twenty-sixth, and of the twenty-seventh, and on succeeding days, they did also build trenches, and burrow holes into the earth like unto the rabbit, that they might abide safely, for it was further commanded that this should be done.

11. Now it came to the ears of the Chief, and it was a true saying, that the Valley of Shrapnel was even as Gehenna, fraught with many dangers to the unwary. Therefore it was commanded that the pioneers should prepare a track crooked, making it thereby difficult, yea, insurmountable.

12. And when this and sundry tasks were completed, the First, the Second, the Third and the other Brigades of human pack-horses, so that the good work might be continued, were reinforced by a multitude of those who are known as the Lost Horse Regiments.

13. And lo! the host of Birdwood flourished amazingly, even to the extent of rum and porridge.

14. By this time, being the twelfth month of the same year, it waxed “plurry” cold, even unto a fall of snow, and the erstwhile Land of Jacko did breed much “flue” and “pneu,” and it did seem as though the plagues of the ancient Gyppos had descended upon them.

15. But the Iodine Infantry were magnanimous with their potions; thus in our generation the sick were cured of their suffering, and the balm of Gilead descended upon them.

16. At the time of the eleventh month of the same year as this is written a Chief of the Rulers journeyed from afar to take counsel with his chiefs, and, by his guiding, smooth out and make plain the difficulties which had beset their paths.

17. This accomplished, it was given unto “Birdie” that he should command all, excepting only the good ship Argon, which contains such a heterogeneous mass as that good ship of Noah’s did contain.

18. Now, the rest of the Acts of Kitchener, and all that he did and said, have they not been written in the Peninsula Press and other vaporous rags, erstwhile our “filthy contemporaries”?

19. Heed ye all of this, ye who dwell in the Antipodes, for the time is nigh when the clouds of war shall lift and we may abide in halcyon peace; for this is the Dinkum Book of Jobs, as will be written in the Book of Revelations.

3. THE PERFECTLY TRUE PARABLE OF THE SEVEN EGYPTIANS

Now a multitude of Egyptians journeyed unto Anzac, even nigh unto the seats of the mighty. And when they had come unto the place whereon it was written they should rest, they took counsel one with the other, saying, “Lo, behold, we have no light.”

2. Then one, more bold than the rest, journeyed forth to gather fuel that peradventure had been washed to the beach and had escaped the claws of Apollyon, the Camp Commandant. And after he had searched a while he raised his eyes and praised Allah. For near to the waters he found a tin can having a wick, like unto the lamps of his forefathers, even from the days of the Prophet. And straightway he returneth to his companions, saying: “Rejoice with me, for Allah has been bountiful and I have had good fortune.” Thus saying, he kindled the lamp, but it would not burn. And he kindled it a second time, but still the lamp refused to give her light. Then they cast it into the fire, and they all gathered round to enjoy the light and warmth thereof.

3. And it came to pass that while they yet warmed their hands there was heard a mighty crash, and of the “Gyppies” that remained were picked up seven stretchers full.

4. Verily it is not meet at Anzac to put to “base” uses such jam-tin bombs and other trifles as Apollyon abandoneth, even when you find them kicking about on the seashore.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] Imshee is the Arabic for “go away.” The Australasian Corps, which had so far employed it only to street hawkers in Cairo, used this war cry on April 25.—Eds.

England has been conquered by Julius Cæsar, William of Normandy, nearly (but not quite) by William of Germany, and, lastly, by plain Bill of Australia. And of the three it is clear that the conquest of Australian Bill was the most successful of all, when it is remembered that at the time of his triumphant entry into London he was not the man he is; he was sick and wounded. He did not invade the city with his shield in front of him. He was carried on it; he came a conqueror on crutches.

Private Bill Kangaroo was a lanky, sawny bushman who, when a certain foreign militarism went mad and the band began to play the concert of Europe, read between the lines of his newspaper, thought a bit, saddled his brumby, and rode for the nearest town that ran a railway, staying there just long enough for a final shout. He passed the doctor easily, took a quite insanguinary oath (for once) to do his job as a soldier, and went into camp.

How Private Bill made his kangaroo-like leap up the ridges of Gallipoli has been told by a war correspondent to a public which had, up till then, been vaguely aware of his existence as a poor relation from a South Sea Island. It is fairly certain that future historians will teach that Australia was discovered not by Captain Cook, explorer, but by Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, war correspondent. Anyhow, the finding and exploration of the territory is not in the same continent as the discovery and exploration of its people, and Bill has seen the correspondent in the trenches, and regards him with much more curiosity than ever he regarded the quondam explorer. But he was unconcerned with these things, and was acting co-respondent in the case of Crescent v. Southern Cross when a[Pg 144] sniper’s bullet hit him in the neck and put him out of court. A hospital ship brought him to the City of London.

London first came to know him through the medium of its most useful person, the policeman. Bill had no love for a policeman as a reader of Riot Acts, but he developed quite an affection for him as a Pointer of the Way. “I’m bushed” became a familiar greeting between them, and the Kangaroo was never disappointed when he strolled across the street to ask P.C. 49 the way he should go. A London motor-bus might have done what a Turkish bullet failed to do if the man in blue had not stopped the traffic and played the part of pilot to him. The raised hand that held up the stream only for royal persons was lifted for the strolling soldier from the South, and the busmen laughed at the bushman. To be “bushed” in the heart of London became a common experience with him, and one had a suspicion that nefarious taxicab drivers often took advantage of his innocence of locality to drive him in circles before dropping him at his destination, perhaps five minutes from the starting place. It was the shortness of city distances that puzzled him, and he was amazed to find names that were historical and household words 12,000 miles away borne by quite unpretentious streets and lanes. When English people learned that he had travelled 1,000 miles to pass a doctor and join the Army, they gasped and said he must be joking.

What a class war failed to do, a race war has done. The poor and their patrons, noblemen gentle and simple, vied with each other in dealing hospitably by the private soldier who had climbed the heights that commanded a view of the Past and the Future. In the stately homes of England, Bill (in the servant’s phrase) met the “big guns” as “one of themselves,” and was astonished at the surprise thus caused. But he was amazed, in turn, when the servants told him they had been in the house ten years. With many embellishments, he assured them that a girl in service in Sydney would think she owned the house if she stopped so long in one place.

To Bill, going into the Carlton or the Hotel Cecil wasn’t sitting in the seats of the mighty, but just the same as entering the pub at Yungaburrah, and he wandered in these places without any desire to “cut a dash.” He approved of the costly surroundings, but when he saw the smallness of the glasses put before him, Bill sat in the seats of the scornful. He really enjoyed himself better in that inn where he found a group of Cockney cronies. The landlord had to respond repeatedly to his “Fill ’em up again,” and Bill afterwards declared it to be the cheapest night’s fun in the town.

Parsimonious people would say that Bill Kangaroo didn’t know the value of money, for it took him some time to appreciate the small coins of the realm at their face value. He thought it looked mean to keep on asking, “How much?” and when seeing the sights of the city he always pulled out silver more than sufficient to cover expenses. The pennies he received in change soon filled his pocket, and at first he gave them away; but as he saw that he would soon be penniless, he would go into one of those places described as being “strictly within the meaning of the Act,” and surreptitiously ask the[Pg 145] barman if he could do with change. His dislike of the base metal and a habit of tipping in silver bade fair to earn for him the nickname of the “Silver King.” Tipping he reckoned a curse, but, knowing that many men lived by tips alone, he passed the coin quite as cordially as he disliked the practice. Bill never bought in the cheapest market to sell in the dearest; he didn’t think it “on the square.”

His greatest adventure was the Zeppelins. Seated in a theatre one evening, he heard a woof! And just after that a second one, closer a third, a fourth, and then a fifth just outside. Woof! Crash! Men and women began to rush for the doors, until the man who rose to the occasion on that memorable 25th rose to this one, and shouted above the tumult of falling glass and tramping feet that it was safer in than out, and that if they kept their seats all would be well. The actresses on the stage, though quaking with fright, stuck pluckily to their parts until the final act. Bill himself wanted dearly to go out and see the infernal machines and their effect, but, for example’s sake, he stayed till order was restored, when he slipped out of the building.

What he saw outside filled him with thankfulness that he was a soldier, helping to smash the raiders and their kind. Wandering down the street, past great gaping holes in the roadway, an overturned motor-bus and some wrecked buildings, he found himself on the Embankment, and then on the bridge, where he saw a damaged arch of masonry. He sat down to think, little dreaming that he was fulfilling Macaulay’s prophecy concerning the man from “down under” sitting on the ruins of London Bridge.

Bill’s furlough was finished shortly after this; his raid terminated with that of the Zeppelins. He was glad to return to the front; and he knows now that, in assisting in the pruning of Prussia, he is fighting for more things than ever he thought of when he took the oath of allegiance.

But he swears that when the job is done he will again visit the land of his father’s fathers, and toast it in a big, big toast.

Trooper Sing, of the 2nd Light Horse Brigade, on the right, was said to have sniped his two hundredth Turk.

But his name and fame had not spread all around the lines, for a Staff Officer, in visiting the snipers of Quinn’s Post, came upon a Light Horseman who, very justifiably, was priding himself upon having definitely hit twelve of the enemy.

“Did you hear that fellow Sing on the right of the line——” began the Staff Officer.

“Well, sir, they don’t sing in front of me,” put in the Quinn’s Post man promptly. “They’re too b—— well frightened!”

A was the Anguish that spread o’er my face
When I saw the remarkable look of the place.

B’s “Beachy Bill,” who fired at my ship—
Punctured the funnel and gave me the “pip.”

C was the “Crump” that went by with a screech
As I jumped from a lighter and fell on the beach.

D was the Daring I failed to display
When fragments of shrapnel came whizzing my way.

E was Earth which I found in my hair
As I woke in the morning and crawled from my lair.

F were the Fleas, and also the Flies,
Who feed on a fellow wherever he lies.

G were the Gripes that gripped me within—
The result of commodities packed in a tin.

H was the Hole that a howitzer made;
It would take me an hour to fill in with a spade.

I was the Idiot who stuck up my head
Before I was taught to take cover instead.

J was the Jam with our rations and rum—
We found it was almost invariably “Plum.”

K was the Knowledge I quickly acquired
[Pg 147]Of hiding whenever the enemy fired.

L was the Louse that lurked in my vest,
Reconnoitred my person, and tickled my chest.

M was the Monitor, firing at night,
Which kept me awake when “above” didn’t bite.

N was the “Night stunt,” with trembling heart,
Expecting each moment the Maxims would start.

O’s the O.O.[24]; let’s give him a cheer—
It isn’t his fault that nothing comes here.

P are the Piers—see them shiver and shake
Whenever a launch makes a wash with her wake.

Q stands for “Quick,” to the tunnel we dash
When a horrible missile explodes with a crash.

R are the Rumours we hear every day
That the Turkish moral has quite faded away.

T is the Taube that drones in the sky
(Thank goodness, I haven’t been ordered to fly!)

U is the Underground sap we expand—
There’s a twopenny tube to the Narrows in hand.

W the Wire we put round our works—
We generally find that it’s pinched by the Turks.

X the “X-periments” made with a bomb—
A neat little cross on a nice little tomb.

Y in the world have I ever been placed
In a trench of cold water right up to my waist?

Z is the mule corps recruited from Zion,
Bearers of water and rations of iron.

Sergeant (during wet weather): “Hallo, my lad, have you got nails in your boots?”

Slowly Freezing Australasian: “Well, I’m that —— cold I hardly know if I’ve got nails in my feet.”

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Cobber—Australian for a well tried and tested pal.

The following are some of the “special orders” issued on notable occasions to the officers and men of the A. & N. Z. Army Corps.

I. THE LANDING

Officers and Men,—In conjunction with the Navy, we are about to undertake one of the most difficult tasks any soldier can be called on 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 to 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 these 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 our 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 endeavour 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 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 the 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,

II. THE BATTLES OF AUGUST

By General Sir Ian Hamilton, G.C.B., D.S.O., A.D.C.
Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.

The Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, desires formally to record the fine feat of arms achieved by the troops under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood during the battle of Sari Bair.

The fervent desire of all ranks to close with the enemy, the impetuosity of their onset and the steadfast valour with which they maintained the long struggle, these will surely[Pg 153] make appeal to their fellow-countrymen all over the world.

The gallant capture of the almost impregnable Lone Pine trenches by the Australian Division, and the equally gallant defence of the position against repeated counter-attacks are exploits which will live in history. The determined assaults carried out from other parts of the Australian Division’s line were also of inestimable service to the whole force, preventing as they did the movement of large bodies of reinforcements to the northern flank.

The troops under the command of Major-General Sir A. J. Godley, and particularly the New Zealand and Australian Division, were called upon to carry out one of the most difficult military operations that has ever been attempted—a night march and assault by several columns in intricate mountainous country, strongly entrenched, and held by a numerous and determined enemy. Their brilliant conduct during this operation and the success they achieved have won for them a reputation as soldiers of whom any country must be proud.

To the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, therefore, and to those who were associated with that famous Corps in the battle of Sari Bair—the Maoris, Sikhs, Gurkhas, and the new troops of the 10th and 13th Divisions from the Old Country—Sir Ian Hamilton tenders his appreciation of their efforts, his admiration of their gallantry, and his thanks for their achievements. It is an honour to command a force which numbers such men as these in its ranks, and it is the Commander-in-Chief’s high privilege to acknowledge that honour.

III. ARRIVAL OF 2nd AUSTRALIAN DIVISION, AND SINKING OF THE SOUTHLAND

In welcoming the 2nd Australian Division to join the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the General Officer Commanding, on behalf of all their comrades now serving on the Peninsula, wishes to convey to them our general feeling of admiration for the gallant behaviour of all ranks on board the transport Southland, when that vessel was torpedoed on the 2nd inst.

All the troops of the Empire now serving with the Army Corps have heard with pride of the courage and discipline shown at a moment when the nerves of the bravest were liable to be so highly tried. Not only was there not the slightest confusion on the part of the troops, who quietly fell in prepared to meet whatever fate might be in store for them, but later on when there was a prospect of the Southland being able to make her way under her own steam, and volunteer stokers were called for, men at once came forward for this duty and successfully helped in getting the Southland into Mudros.

The 2nd Australian Division knows well the high reputation it has to live up to, to carry on the brave deeds done by those who have been here earlier in the campaign, but with men like those on the Southland we are fully assured that our new comrades are going to prove themselves equal in all ways to the old hands who have fought so well.

C. M. Wagstaff, Major,
for Brigadier-General, General Staff,
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

IV. LORD KITCHENER’S MESSAGE

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[Pg 154] fighting which has been as hard as 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 fully to realise 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 to find all in such good heart, and so confidently imbued with that 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 messages, and it is up to all of us to live up to them and prove their truth.

V. GENERAL BIRDWOOD RELINQUISHES COMMAND OF A. & N. Z. ARMY CORPS

Boys,—I cannot tell you how really sorry I am to be leaving “Anzac,” as I have to do on shifting over to Army Headquarters.

I have not, however, any intention of saying “Good-bye” to anyone, for I trust it is by no means “Good-bye,” as I still hope and intend to see as much of all my old friends in the Army Corps as I possibly can do.

Nor am I going to express my thanks to officers and men, even if I could find words to do so. I feel it would only be presumption on my part, for it is for the British Empire to do that; and I well know it will do so.

My one wish is to be able to finish this war alongside of all my old comrades of “Anzac”; having begun it together close on a year ago now in Egypt, I sincerely trust that many of us may be spared to see it through together, when the time comes to make an end of our German enemies, though that day may be yet far distant.

W. R. Birdwood, Lieutenant-General,
Commanding Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

VI. THE EVACUATION OF ANZAC

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 the “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 Dardanelles Army, and the General Officers Commanding the Australian and New Zealand and 9th Army Corps, may pride themselves on an achievement without parallel in the annals of war. The Army and Corps Staffs, Divisional and subordinate Commanders and their Staffs, and the Naval and Military Beach Staffs, proved themselves more than equal to the most difficult task which 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[Pg 155] 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 disengage and to 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 realise 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 only one 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.

VII.
THE FOLLOWING TELEGRAMS ARE PUBLISHED FOR INFORMATION:

Dear Mr. Editor,—Thinking that perhaps a little news about a hitherto unheard of department of the army (i.e. a Field Ambulance) might interest you, I have set down (having previously obtained the kind permission of the great-grandchildren of the justly celebrated Mr. Euclid, late of these parts, deceased) such axioms as will be of use and guidance to those requiring to know the habits of a Field Ambulance.

Dear Abdul,—I’m scribbling this letter in the trench with my back to the wall, and I’ve heaps of good news that I’d better get down while I think of it all. You’ve been so abnormally quiet—say, Abdul, has something gone wrong? Not a charge or a sign of a riot, not for ever and ever so long. They tell me you’re sick of campaigning, that you’d aim in your kit if you could; that your courage and patience are waning, and the prospects ain’t looking too good. Are you counting your hopes of returning to that little home there in the wood, where there’s peace, and a good fire burning, and the rations are plenty and good?

It’s near Christmas, you know—that’s the reason we’ve buried our growls for a while; for you couldn’t be sad in the season when everyone’s wearing a smile. But, of course, I forgot you’re not sharing the joy that we Christians know, and I guess you’re not giving or caring a damn for the whole bally show.

I’ll chance that it gives you the “willies”—if you’ve heard, it won’t hurt to repeat—that the cards and the boys’ Christmas billies[26] are here, and no kid, they’re a treat. Plum duff for the boys who’ve been fighting on the biscuit and beef (army store); I tell you we don’t need inviting to back in our carts for some more. Gee, the chocolate and cake are delicious, and there’s sweets and smokes in my pail, and a card with the sender’s best wishes—I’m sending my thanks per this mail. Folks who reckon that loving is living, whose hearts are as big as their land, whose happiness centres in giving—that’s our folks and their old-fashioned stand.

Well, Abdul, I’ll finish this trifle, for my thoughts are beginning to drift, and the sergeant has passed me my rifle, and it’s time I took over my shift. I’m concluding this note with a moral—take a tip from a bloke in the know—pick your men when you’re picking a quarrel.
—Yours truly,

P.S.—By the way, they’ve been stating that you’re scared to come out any more; don’t forget there’s a welcome here waiting, a warm one, you bet; au revoir.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] The “billy” is a tin can something like what is known in England as a milk can, in which the Australian of the bush boils his water and makes his tea. A billy packed with various good things was being sent to each Australian soldier for Christmas.

Snidger.—We quite agree with you that this is a soldiers’ journal rather than a Sunday School prize book. Nevertheless, the chaplain-editor feels we must decline the limerick series you submitted us. Our head printer is a married man with a growing family, and sternly refuses to handle your matter. So that settles it.

Anxious.—Your cold feet complaint must not necessarily be a chronic affliction. Many chaps have been permanently cured by a little vigorous pedestrian exercise: such as vaulting the parapet and bogging into a dinkum bayonet charge. So cheer up! It will go away of its own accord once you get “warmed up to it.”

Comic-Cuts.—Sorry all the generals you have so far seen do not come up to your humorous expectations. When you do meet the general of whom you approve, we should advise you just to drop him a line and let him know. It will warm the poor old fellow up.

Hungry Always.—Yes, soft—or light—diet is absolutely necessary in treatment for dysentery or gastritis. If you think you know better than the doctor, experiment with green quinces and lemonade.... Let’s know how you get on.

Chaplain of the —th.—Dear kind-hearted old chap! Haven’t you quite enough to do here without worrying your head over the progress of war-relief funds in Australia? Anyhow, it may please you to know that it is proposed to impose a special fine for every time the word “blanky” is used by men or officers; the proceeds to go to the various funds. So you need have no fear of the said funds not reaching the million £ mark in quite a short time now.

Seedee Bot.—You can’t expect us to diagnose your complaint if you don’t make your symptoms clear. But if you feel that a torchlight procession is going on in your interior, you have probably exposed yourself too suddenly to an attack of Cambridge sausages and tinned peaches. Try a change of diet, say, whisky and Schweppes with steak and kidney pudding.

Undignified.—We sympathise with you deeply in your suffering from the effects of a shrapnel pellet. Naturally, every man on returning to his country would be proud to display to his admiring relatives and friends those honourable scars received on active service. You had bad luck, but at the same time you should not have tried the ostrich act when the shell burst.

Parcel Post.—You say you wouldn’t mind an occasional case of eat-and-drinkables in the parcel as well as the socks and shirts and box of liquorice powders. They will all be useful, but anyway, think of your poor flurried aunts and sisters at home, fighting their way with knitting-needles—wild-eyed and tousle-haired—through a deadly maze of skein-wool entanglements! It’s horrible! We’re better off where we are.

Adjutant.—Yes, it’s a pity that one of your men—such a seasoned veteran and a capable and obedient soldier, too—should have such kleptomaniacal tendencies. But we wouldn’t advise you to have him sent back. Make him your batman, instead.... Why, the man was born for the position!

Fuzzy.—Your suggestions will be handed on to the proper quarters. The only objection to the suggested cinema show at Reserve Gully might be that the boys in the firing trenches would make it too hot “sneakin’ off to the pitchers” every night.... Afraid you’ve no hope of seeing a pub built over the road, opposite William’s Pier.... Yes, it’s possible that our motor wagons might run penny section moonlight trips to Salt Lake and back to Anzac. But we fear that there is no hope of a palais-de-danse there.

NOTICE.—The Turkish artillery is requested to refrain from wasting ammunition whilst our meals are being served.

PUBLIC NOTICE.—The Electric Elevator will not be working up the gullies for a while. Some cook stole the current to make a pudding.

KABA TEPE MUSEUM.—Come and see! A piece of long extinct Australian butter now being exhibited.

BENEVOLENT HOME.—The Editor has established a home for lost newspapers and books. Any books or papers may be left there and no questions asked.

MEDICAL.—Men suffering from a feeling of fullness after eating, are requested to state where they got the extra rations from.

WARNING.—Men are advised to keep their eyes open for an individual wearing pink pyjamas, green glasses, straw hat and khaki mackintosh. It is thought that this is a spy in disguise.

LAST seen two months ago in Scotland, at the Duke of Buckington’s grouse shoot. Pte. Bert Backblocks. Left Gallipoli with serious wound in fingernail early in May. Any information as to present whereabouts of above will be gratefully received by Adjutant, 101st Battn.

CHARLIE.—Come back, dearest. A warm welcome is prepared for you. Loving arms will enfold you.—Serg.-Maj. Bawler.

MISSING FRIENDS, ETC.—Will the girl who smiled at William Tomkins last Boxing Day please write to him at once?

LOST BY A POOR PERSON.—A strong pipe, last smelt in someone’s pocket up Monash Gully.

LOST.—Pair of field glasses. Finder please return same to our Champion Optimist.

WANTED.—The address of a good barber. One able to cut hair and shave preferred. Apply any platoon.

WANTED.—Section commander requires pair of good field glasses to find his men when there is shrapnel about.

EXCHANGE.—Corporal would exchange a wristlet watch (not going) for a spring mattress or a tin of MacConochie’s Rations.

WANTED.—Fifty thousand Turkish prisoners for wharf-lumping, road-making, and building officers’ dug-outs. Plenty of permanent work for men of right stamp. Apply any beach fatigue party—Australian N. Z. Army Corps.

FULL private wishes to buy guide book to London. Places safe from Zeppelin to be marked with a cross.

MAN with good memory would like the job of taking messages from the troops to friends in Cairo.

WANTED TO BUY.—The 2nd Brigade will buy large or small quantities of old beer. Fresh beer not objected to.

BUSINESS FOR SALE.—Mess orderly will sell goodwill of a flourishing business for a box of fags.

COMPLETE SPY OUTFIT FOR SALE.—Including pair of blucher boots, sombrero hat, two cutlasses and a yashmak. Owner having failed to be discovered for two days is going out of business.

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		PAGE
INTRODUCTION. By Lieut.-Gen. Sir W. R. Birdwood		ix
EDITOR’S NOTE		xiii
THE LANDING. By A Man of the Tenth (A. R. Perry, 10th Batt. A.I.F.)		1
THE REMINISCENCE OF A WRECK. By Lieut. A. L. Pemberton (R.G.A.)		7
AN AUSTRALIAN HOME IN 1930. By “Soldieroo” (2nd Field Co., Aust. Engrs.)		9
NON NOBIS. By C. E. W. B.		11
THE ÆGEAN WIND. By H. B. K.		14
OUR FATHERS. By Capt. James Sprent, A.M.C. (3rd Field Amb.)		14
GLIMPSES OF ANZAC. By Hector Dinning (Aust. A.S.C.)		17
PARABLES OF ANZAC.		23
THE YARNS THAT ABDUL TELLS. By A. P. M.		24
THE GRAVES OF GALLIPOLI. By L. L.		25
TO A LYRE-BIRD. By H. J. A. (8th Batt. 2nd Infantry Brigade)		26
THE NEVER-ENDING CHASE. By Am. Park		30
ANZAC DIALOGUES. By N. Ash		31
FROM QUINN’S POST. By Pte. V. N. Hopkins, A.M.C.		32
THE HAPPY WARRIOR. By M. R.		33
HOW I SHALL DIE. By Pte. Charles Lowry (9th Aust. Batt.)		34
BEACHY. By Ted Colles (3rd L.H. Field Amb.)		35
THE ANZAC HOME—AND A CONTRAST. By E. Cadogan (1/1 Suffolk Yeomanry)		41
FLIES AND FLEAS. By A. Carruthers (3rd Aust. Field Amb.)		44
ANZAC TYPES:—
	1. Wallaby Joe. By W. R. C. (8th Aust. L.H.)	45
	2. The Dag. By E. A. M. W.	47
	3. Bobbie of the New Army. By “Tentmate” (11th London Regt.)	49
THE INDIAN MULE CORPS. By B. R.		50
HILL 60. By C. J. N.		50
JENNY. By Lance-Corp. F. C. Dunstan (B Depot, 6th A.A.S.C.)		53
MARCHING SONG. By C. J. N.		54[Pg vi]
FURPHY. By Q. E. D.		56
FROM MY TRENCH. By Corp. Comus (2nd Batt. A.I.F.)		57
ABDUL. By C. E. W. B.		58
A CONFESSION OF FAITH. By Capt. James Sprent (A.M.C.)		59
OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY. By H. E. W.		60
ARMY BISCUITS. By O. E. Burton, N.Z.M.C.		61
THE LOST POEM. By R. A. L. (1st Aust. Stat. Hosp.)		65
A LITTLE SPRIG OF WATTLE. By A. H. Scott (4th Battery, A.F.A.)		67
THE TRUE STORY OF SAPPHO’S DEATH. By M. R.		68
THE EVERLASTING ARGUMENT. By C. D. Mc., R.S.D. (11th Aust. A.S.C.).		68
THE UNBURIED. By M. R. (N.Z. Headquarters)		69
THE STORY OF ANZAC. (Sir Ian Hamilton’s Dispatches)		71
ANZACS. By Edgar Wallace		95
TO MY BATH. By H. H. U. (Northamptonshire Regt.)		96
ANZAC LIMERICKS. By C. D. Mc.		96
HOW I WON THE V.C. By “Crosscut” (16th Batt. A.I.F.)		98
ICY. By E. A. M. W.		102
THE TROJAN WAR, 1915. By J. Wareham (1st Aust. Field Amb.)		104
THE PRICE. By Corp. Comus (2nd Batt. A.I.F.)		104
KILLED IN ACTION. By Harry McCann (Headquarters, 4th Aust. Light Horse)		105
A GREY DAY IN GALLIPOLI. By N. Ash (11th A.A.S.C.)		106
MY ANZAC HOME. By Corp. George L. Smith (24th Sanitary Sect., R.A.M.C.T.)		107
WHAT FRANK THOUGHT. By A. J. Boyd (A.N.Z.A.C.)		108
ARCADIA. By Bombardier H. E. Shell (7th Battery, A.F.A.)		110
THE CAVEMAN. By J. M. Collins (9th Batt.)		113
AN ANZAC ALPHABET. By J. W. S. Henderson (R.G.A.)		115
THE KAISER TO HIS SECRETARY. By H. B. C.		119
THE ANZAC THUNDERSTORM—FROM THE TRENCHES. By I. A. Saxon (21st Aust. Batt.)		122
SENSE OR ——? By C. D. Mc. (Sergt.)		123
OUR SAILORS—THE AMPHIBIOUS MAN. By Lieut. A. L. Pemberton		124
POSSIES. By “Ben Telbow”		125
MR. AEROPLANE. By H. G. Garland (16th Aust. Batt.)		126
ANZAC IN EGYPT:—
	1. Mahomed—and Australia. By C.	127
	2. Anzac in Alex. By L. J. Ivory (4th Howitzer Battery, N.Z.F.A.)	128[Pg vii]
GREY SMOKE. By R. G. N. (11th Aust. A.S.C.)		131
A WAIL FROM ORDNANCE. By Lieut. Kininmonth (A.O.C.)		132
“DINKUM OIL”		134
THE BOOK OF ANZAC CHRONICLES:—
	1. The Flood. By “Genesis Gallipoli”	135
	2. The Book of Jobs. By W. R. Wishart (No. 1 Aust. Stat. Hosp., Anzac)	136
	3. The Perfectly True Parable of the Seven Egyptians. By Capt. A. Alcorn (No. 1 Aust. Stat. Hosp.)	138
THE SILENCE. By Pte. R. J. Godfrey (7th Aust. Field Amb.)		141
THE GROWL. By E. M. Smith (27th Batt.)		142
MY LADY NICOTINE. By H. G. Garland		142
THE RAID ON LONDON. By “Private Pat Riot”		143
SING!		145
ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT AN ANZAC ALPHABET. By “Ubique” (21st Indian Mtn. Battery)		146
TO SARI BAIR. By “Ben Telbow” (10th Aust. Batt.)		148
ON WATER FATIGUE. By Trooper George H. Smith (7th Light Horse)		148
WHEN IT’S ALL OVER.... By Harry McCann (4th A.L.H)		151
SPECIAL A. & N. Z. A. C. ORDERS:—
	1. The Landing	152
	2. The Battles of August	152
	3. Arrival of 2nd Australian Division, and Sinking of the “Southland”	153
	4. Lord Kitchener’s Message	153
	5. Gen. Birdwood Relinquishes Command of A. & N.Z. Army Corps	154
	6. The Evacuation of Anzac	154
	7. Telegrams	156
FOUR DESIGNS FOR “THE ANZAC MAGAZINE” COVER		159
CORRESPONDENCE		161
ANZAC FASHIONS: SUMMER		162
” ” WINTER		163
ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS		164
ADVERTISEMENTS		165

A.N.Z.A.C. By W. Otho Hewett. (Colour)	Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
LIEUT.-GEN. SIR W. R. BIRDWOOD	x
“AT THE LANDING AND HERE EVER SINCE.” By David Barker. (Colour)	22
“KITCH.” By C. Leyshon-White. (Colour)	32
ABDUL. By Ted Colles. (Colour)	58
ANZAC SKETCHES. By David Barker. (Colour)	66
SOMETHING TO REMEMBER US BY. By Ted Colles. (Colour)	70
MAP OF ANZAC. Drawn by Private R. T. Goulding (N.Z. Inf.)	90
THE NEW STAR. By Ted Colles, after F. J. Leigh. (Colour)	96
THE SILVER LINING. By C. E. W. Bean. (Colour)	122
OUR REPTILE CONTEMPORARY. By David Barker. (Colour)	134
“APRICOT AGAIN!” By David Barker. (Colour)	142
EACH ONE DOING HIS BIT. By W. Otho Hewett. (Colour)	164

☞	N.B.—The Anzac Artillery guarantees that this is	☜
☞	positively the last appearance of the above artists.	☜

No. 008 Trooper J. Redgum,
	20th Australian Light Horse.
		Killed in Action.

LITERARY CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES

INTRODUCTION By SIR W. R. BIRDWOOD

EDITOR’S NOTE

THE LANDING By a Man of the Tenth

THE REMINISCENCE OF A WRECK

FOOTNOTES:

AN AUSTRALIAN HOME IN 1930

FOOTNOTES:

NON NOBIS

THE “RIC”

THE ÆGEAN WIND

GLIMPSES OF ANZAC

FOOTNOTES:

PARABLES OF ANZAC

I FROM SHELL GREEN

II THE TURK IN THE PERISCOPE

FOOTNOTES:

THE YARNS THAT ABDUL TELLS

THE GRAVES OF GALLIPOLI

TO A LYRE-BIRD

GRAVES AT ANZAC

THE HOPELESS DAWN

THE NEVER-ENDING CHASE

ANZAC DIALOGUES

FOOTNOTES:

FROM QUINN’S POST

The Happy Warrior

I

II

III

HOW I SHALL DIE

BEACHY

FOOTNOTES:

THE ANZAC HOME—AND A CONTRAST

FLIES AND FLEAS

ANZAC TYPES

1.—WALLABY JOE

2.—THE DAG

3.—BOBBIE OF THE NEW ARMY

FOOTNOTES:

THE INDIAN MULE CORPS

HILL 60

JENNY

FOOTNOTES:

MARCHING SONG

FURPHY

FOOTNOTES:

FROM MY TRENCH

FOOTNOTES:

ABDUL

A CONFESSION OF FAITH

OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY

ARMY BISCUITS

A PRESENT FROM HOME

THE LOST POEM

A LITTLE SPRIG OF WATTLE

THE TRUE STORY OF SAPPHO’S DEATH

THE EVERLASTING ARGUMENT

THE STORY OF ANZAC

ANZACS

TO MY BATH

ANZAC LIMERICKS

FOOTNOTES:

ICY

FOOTNOTES:

THE TROJAN WAR, 1915

THE PRICE

KILLED IN ACTION

A GREY DAY IN GALLIPOLI

MY ANZAC HOME

FOOTNOTES:

WHAT FRANK THOUGHT

FOOTNOTES:

ARCADIA

FOOTNOTES:

THE CAVEMAN

AN ANZAC ALPHABET

THE KAISER TO HIS SECRETARY

INTRODUCTION
By SIR W. R. BIRDWOOD

THE LANDING
By a Man of the Tenth

I
FROM SHELL GREEN

II
THE TURK IN THE PERISCOPE

VII.
THE FOLLOWING TELEGRAMS ARE PUBLISHED FOR INFORMATION: