WAITING FOR THE WAR TO CEASE
We were still in dugouts when Art Pratt woke me one morning with a
vicious kick, to show me my boots lying outside of the dugout, filled
with rain water. All the night before it had poured steadily, but now
it was clearing nicely. The Island of Imbros, fifteen miles away, that
seemed to draw a great deal nearer before every rainstorm, had
retreated to its normal position. The sky was still gray, but it was
the leaden gray of a Turkish autumn day. From Suvla Bay the wind blew
keen and piercing. I salved the boots from the rain puddle, emptied
them, dried them out as best I could with my puttees, and put them on.
Art, in his own inimitable way, said unprintable things about a rifle
that had been left outside, and that now necessitated laborious
cleaning, in time for rifle inspection. All through breakfast, Lew
O'Dea elaborated on the much-quoted remarks of the Governor of North
Carolina to the Governor of South Carolina. Rum had not been issued as
per schedule the evening before. Art began a maliciously fabricated
story of a conversation he had heard in which a senior officer had
stated that now that the cold weather had come, there would be no more
rum. Just then, some one shouted, to "Look up in the sky." From the
direction of the trenches a dark cloud was coming rapidly toward us.
(A few nights before, while we were in trenches, we had been ordered
to put on our gas masks; for, a little to the right of us, the Turks
had turned the poison gas on the Gurkhas.) At first, the dark mass in
the sky appeared to some to be poison gas. They immediately dived for
their gas masks. As it came nearer, however, we were able to
distinguish that it was not a cloud, but a huge flock of wild geese,
beginning their southern migration. O'Dea selected a rifle from his
collection, loaded it, and waited till the geese were almost directly
overhead; then, amid derisive cheering, he fired ten rounds at them.
They were much too high in air for a successful shot, even if he had
used gunshot; but even after they were almost over Imbros Island, Lew
continued firing. When an officer arrived, demanding sarcastically if
Lew O'Dea wouldn't sooner send some written invitations to the Turks
to shell us, he subsided, and began cleaning his artillery. Until
then, we had been wearing thin khaki duck uniforms with short pants
that made us look like boy scouts. We had found these rather cool at
night; but in the hot days we preferred them to the heavy khaki drill
uniforms that were kept in kit bags at the beach. I had landed without
a kit bag, and the change of uniform I kept in the pack I carried on
my back. A little while before, I had put on the heavy uniform and
thrown away the light weight one. On the Peninsula, when you have to
walk with all your possessions on your back, each additional ounce
counts for much. As soon as we found that it was impossible to get
water to wash or shave in, we threw away our towels and soap. A few
kept their razors. The only thing I hung on to was my tooth brush--not
for its legitimate purpose, but to clean the sand and grit out of my
rifle.
"Go over and ask Mr. Nunns," said Art to me, while we were cleaning
our rifles, "if he'll give us a pass to go down to the beach to find
my kit bag. I'll finish cleaning your rifle while you go over." I
handed the rifle to Art, and went over to look for Mr. Nunns. When I
found him he was censoring some letters.
"You'd better wait till this afternoon, before going," he said. "I
want you to take twenty men and carry up ten boxes of ammunition to
the firing line, where A Company are. They're coming out to-morrow
night and we're to relieve them." He gave me a pass, and I took it
over to Art.
"You can go down this morning if you like," I said, "or you can wait
till I get back from this ammunition detail."
"If you're not later than two o'clock," said Art, "I'll wait for you."
I found the detail of twenty men for ammunition-carrying waiting for
me near the field kitchen. We crawled cautiously along some open
ground, past the quarter-master's dugout and the dugouts that were
dignified by the name of orderly room, where the colonel and adjutant
conducted the clerical business of the battalion, issued daily orders,
and sentenced defaulters. "Napoleon knew what was what," said the man
near me, as he wriggled along, "when he said that an army fights on
its stomach. I've been on my stomach half the time since I've been in
Gallipoli." We straightened up when we came to the communication
trench that gave us cover from snipers. Ordinarily we walked upright
when we were behind the lines, but for a few days past enemy snipers
had been extraordinarily active. The Turkish snipers were the most
effective part of their organization. Each sniper was armed with a
rifle with telescopic sights. With a rifle so equipped, a good shot
can hit a man at seven hundred yards, just as easily as the ordinary
soldier can shoot at one hundred.
The ten boxes of ammunition were very heavy, and the heat of the day
necessitated a great many rests, before we reached the part of the
line held by A Company. A Company had been losing heavily for a day or
two because of snipers. A couple of the men were talking about it when
I came along.
"I don't see," one of them was saying, "how they can get us at night."
"It's this way," explained the other. "The cigarette makers send their
snipers out sometime at night. Instead of going back that night they
stay out for a week, or longer. All the ration Johnny Turk needs is a
swallow of water, some onions, or olives, and a biscuit or two."
"How is it," I asked, "we don't see them in the daytime?"
"It's this way," said the A Company man. "He paints himself, his
rifle, and his clothes green. Then he twists some twigs and branches
around him and kids you he's a tree."
"The way they do in this part of the trench," said another man who had
been listening to the conversation, "is to work in pairs. They get a
dugout somewhere where they can get a pretty good view of our
trenches. They see where we move about most, and aim their machine gun
at the top of the parapet. Then they clamp it down. At night when the
sentries are posted, they simply press the trigger, and there are some
more casualties."
"You've got to hand it to Johnny Turk, just the same," said the first
man. "One of them will stand up in his dugout in broad daylight,
exposed from his waist up, and give you a chance to pot him, so that
his mate can get you. We used to lose men that way first. As soon as
we aimed, the second sniper turned his machine gun on us and got our
man. Now we've found a better way. We stick a helmet up on top of a
rifle just above the parapet, and fire from another part of the
trench."
"We've been having trouble with them down in dugouts," I said. "Some
of the fellows say it's stray bullets, but it seems to me that they're
going too fast to be spent. You can tell a bullet that's spent by the
sound."
One of the A Company sergeants who had been listening to the
discussion joined in. "It's snipers all right," he said. "It's easy
enough for a German officer to get into our trenches. Men are coming
in all the time from working parties, and night patrols, and the
engineers go back and forth every hour or so fixing up the barb wire.
Only a little while ago they found one fellow. He had stripped a
uniform from one of our dead, dressed himself in it, and walked up to
our parapet one night. The sentry didn't know the difference, because
the other fellow spoke good English, so he let him pass. All they have
to do is say 'What ho,' or, 'Where's the Dublin's section of trench?'
They can get by all right."
The officer to whom I had delivered the ammunition sent word that it
had been checked and that we could return to our company. We were
only a short distance down the communication trench when a party of
officers came along. We drew a little to one side, and stopped to let
them pass. Not one of them was under the rank of lieutenant-colonel,
and one of them was a general. He was a rather tall, spare man, with a
drooping brown mustache. He was most unlike the usual type of gruff,
surly general officers in charge. His eyes had a kindly,
friend-of-the-family sort of twinkle. His type was more like a
superintendent of construction, or a kindly old family physician.
"Look at the ribbons on the old boy's chest," said the man near me.
"He's got enough medals to make a keel for a battleship." In the
British army, those who have seen previous service wear on the breast
of their tunics the ribbons for each campaign. The general halted his
red-tabbed staff where we stood.
"Are you Newfoundlanders, Corporal?" he said to me.
"Yes, sir," I answered.
"They've made it pretty warm for you since you've been here," he
added, with a smile. "Your men are most efficient trench diggers. If I
had an army like them, we'd dig our way to Constantinople." With that
he passed on with a smile. A pompous-looking sergeant brought up
the rear of the general's escort.
[Illustration: Landing British troops from the transports at the
Dardanelles under the protection of the battleships]
"Who was that, that just spoke to us, Sergeant?" I asked.
The sergeant surveyed me contemptuously. "Is it possible that you don't
know 'im. 'E's General Sir Ian Hamilton, General Commander-in-Chief of
the Mediterranean Force, 'e is."
General Sir Ian Hamilton has won the unquestioned devotion of the
First Newfoundland Regiment. Many times after that, he visited the
front line trenches and stopped to exchange a few words with men here
and there. It is a curious thing that while the young subaltern
lieutenants held themselves very much aloof, the senior officers
chatted amiably with our men. The Newfoundlanders, democratic to the
core, hated anything that in the least savored of "side," and they
admired the courage of a general officer who took his chances in the
firing line.
Art was waiting for me when I reached the dugout after my ammunition
fatigue. I accompanied him down the mule path that led along the edge
of the Salt Lake to West Beach, where we had made our landing the
first night. The place looked very different now. Under the shelter
of the beetling cliffs, the engineers had constructed dugouts of all
sorts. The beach was piled high with boxes of beef, biscuits, jam,
lime juice, and rum. At the top of the hill, a temporary dressing
station for the wounded had been built; and nearer the beach was a
clearing station, from which the wounded were taken by motor ambulance
to the hospital ship. At different points along the beach, piers had
been built for the landing of supplies and troops, and for the loading
of wounded into lighters to be taken to the hospital ships waiting out
in deeper water. The Australians had put up a wire fence around a part
of beach and used it for a graveyard. We found the man in charge of
the kit bags of the Newfoundlanders, and after much search located
Art's bag, and took out the stuff we wanted. On the way back, in a
little ravine just on the edge of the Salt Lake, we came upon two
horsemen. They were General Hamilton and his aide. The general
returned our salute smilingly.
"Who is it?" said Art.
"It's Sir Ian Hamilton," I said. "Doesn't he look like the sort of
man it would be wise to confide in?"
"Yes, he does," said Art. "Evidently he has confidence in our troops'
ability to hold their own," added Art. "The Turks have four lines of
trenches to fall back on; we have only one firing line."
There was the same group around the field kitchen when we arrived back
at our lines. They were swapping yarns and telling stories with a
lurid intermixture of profanity and a liberal sprinkling of trench
slang. To me, one of the most interesting side lights of the war is
the slang that forms a great part of the vocabulary of the trenches.
Early morning tea, when we got it, was "gun-fire." A Turk was never a
Turk. He was a Turkey, Abdul Pasha, or a cigarette maker. A regiment
is a "mob." A psychologist would have been interested to see that
nobody ever spoke of a comrade as having died or been killed, but had
"gone west." All the time I was at the front, I never heard one of our
men say that another had been killed. A man who was killed in our
regiment had "lost his can," although this referred most particularly
to men shot through the head. Ordinarily a dead man was called a
"washout"; or it was said that he had "copped it." The caution to keep
your head down always came, "Keep your napper down low." To get
wounded with one of our own bullets was to get a "dose of
three-o-three." The bullet has a diameter of three-hundred-and-three
thousandths of an inch.
Mr. Nunns came toward the group, looking for Stenlake. It was Sunday
afternoon, and he thought it would be well to have a service. Stenlake
was found, and a crowd trailed after him to an empty dugout, where he
gathered them about him and began. It was a simple, sincere service.
Out there in that barren country, it seemed a strange thing to see
those rough men gathered about Stenlake while he read a passage or led
a hymn. But it was most impressive. The service was almost over, and
Stenlake was offering a final prayer, when the Turkish batteries
opened fire. Ordinarily at the first sound of a shell, men dived for
shelter; but gathered around that dugout, where a single shell could
have wrought awful havoc, not a man stirred. They stayed motionless,
heads bowed reverently, until Stenlake had finished. Then quietly
they dispersed. As a lesson in faith it was most illuminating.
It was strange to see week by week the psychological change that had
come over the men. Most of all I noticed it in the songs they sang. At
first the songs had been of a boisterous character, that foretold
direful things that would happen to the Kaiser and his family "As we
go marching through Germany." These had all given place to songs that
voiced to some extent the longing for home that possessed these
voluntary exiles. "I want to go back to Michigan" was a favorite.
Perhaps even more so was "The little gray home in the West."
"Tipperary" was still in demand, not because of the lilt of a march
that it held, but for the pathetic little touch of "my heart's right
there," and perhaps for the reference to "the sweetest girl I know."
Perhaps it may have been the effect of Stenlake's service, or it may
have been the news that we were to go into the firing line the next
day, that made the men seek their dugouts early that Sunday evening.
But there was something heavy in the air that night. For almost a week
we had been comparatively safe in dugouts. Tomorrow we were again to
go into the firing line and wait impotently while our number was
reduced gradually but pitilessly. The hopelessness of the thing seemed
clearer that evening than any other time we had been there. Simpson,
"the Man with the Donkeys," had been killed that day. After a whole
summer in which he seemed to be impervious to bullets, a stray bullet
had caught him in the heart on his way down Shrapnel Valley with a
consignment of wounded. Simpson had been so much a part of the
Peninsular life that it was hard to realize that he had gone to swell
the list of heroes that Australia has so much cause to be proud of. A
Company had suffered heavily in the front line trenches that day. A
number of stretchers had passed down the road that ran in front of our
dugouts, with A Company men for the dressing station on the beach.
Snipers had been busy. From the A Company stretcher-bearers came news
that others had been killed. One piece of news filtered slowly down to
us that evening, that had an unaccountably strange effect on the men
of B Company. Sam Lodge had been killed. Sam Lodge was perhaps the
most widely known man in the whole regiment. There were very few
Newfoundlanders who did not think kindly of the big, quiet, reliable
looking college man. He had enlisted at the very first call for
volunteers. Other men had been killed that day; and since the regiment
had been at Gallipoli, men had stood by while their dugout mates were
torn by shrapnel or sank down moaning, with a sniper's bullet in the
brain; but nothing had ever had the same effect, at any rate on the
men of our company, as the news that Sam Lodge had been killed that
day. Perhaps it was that everybody knew him. Other nights men had
crowded around the fire, telling stories, exchanging gossip, or
singing. To-night all was quiet; there was not even the sound of men
creeping about from dugout to dugout, visiting chums. Suddenly, from
away up on the extreme right end of the line of dugouts, came the
sound of a clear tenor voice, singing, "Tenting To-night on the Old
Camp Ground." Never have I heard anything so mournful. It is
impossible to describe the penetrating pathos of the old Civil War
song. Slowly the singer continued, amidst a profound hush. His voice
sank, until one could scarcely catch the words when he sang, "Waiting
for the war to cease." At last he finished. There was scarcely a
stir, as the men dropped off to sleep.
It was a quiet, sober lot of men who filed into a shady, tree-dotted
ravine the next day behind the stretcher that bore the remains of
Private Sam Lodge. Stenlake read the burial service. Everybody who
could turned out to pay their last respects to the best liked man in
the regiment. After the brief service, Colonel Burton, the commanding
officer, Captain Carty, Lodge's company commander, a group of senior
and junior officers, and a number of profoundly affected soldiers
gathered about the grave while the body was lowered into it. In the
shade of a spreading tree, within sound of the mournful wash of the
tide in Suvla Bay, lies poor Sam Lodge, a good, cheerful soldier,
uncomplaining always, a man whose last thought was for others. "Don't
bother to lift me down off the parapet, boys," he had said when he was
hit; "I'm finished."