"FEENISH"
It must have been about the sixth week that I was in Egypt that one of
the Australians came over to my bed and told me that my name was on
the list of men to go to England by the next boat. I was allowed up
for two hours in the afternoon; and when I got up I looked at the
list, and found my name there. An orderly from the stores came in and
asked me for a list of clothing I needed. He came back in about an
hour with a complete uniform and kit. The sister told me that I was to
go to England the next morning. At ten o'clock the next day I was
taken out to the little clearing station in the square, and put in
with a lot of other men on stretchers. An officer came around and
inspected our kits. A little later a sergeant from the pay office gave
each man an advance of twelve shillings. After that the loading began.
A line of about twenty ambulances filed out of the yard and through
the malodorous byways of Alexandria to the waterfront. Here we were
put aboard the hospital ship _Rewa_, an old rocky tub that had been an
Indian troopship before the war. I learned this from an old English
regular in the stretcher next me. He had seen her often before, and
had made a trip from England to India in her once. The _Rewa_ was so
full of men that the latest arrivals had to go on deck in hammocks.
The thought of a trip across the Bay of Biscay as deck passenger on
the _Rewa_ was not very attractive, but our fears on this point were
soon allayed by one of the ship's officers. We were not going to
England on the _Rewa_, he said. We were going to Lemnos Island, and in
Mudros Bay we should transship into the _Aquitania_. When we had
cleared Alexandria Harbor, the wind had freshened considerably. All
that night and the next day we pitched and rolled heavily. The second
night, when we had expected to reach Mudros Bay, we were still
twenty-four hours away from it. Canvas sheets had to be rigged above
the bulwarks to prevent the spray from drenching the men in the
stretchers on deck. The next day a good many men were sea sick, and it
was not till the next evening that the storm abated. Even then it was
too rough to get close to the big ship. We did try to get near her
once, and succeeded in getting one hawser fast, but the wind and tide
drove us so hard against her, that the captain of the _Aquitania_
would take no more risks and ordered us off. We had to lay to all that
evening, and the next morning. At noon the wind died down enough to
begin the transshipment from the smaller ships. We waited while seven
other hospital ships transferred their human freight, and then moved
up near enough to put gangways between the two boats. The change was
effected very expeditiously. We were soon transferred, and settled in
our new quarters. I was in a ward with some Australian troops on the
top deck. Board petitions had been run up from it to the promenade
deck, making a long bright, well ventilated corridor. There was only
one drawback on the _Aquitania_. The sister in charge of our ward did
not like Colonials, and made it pretty plain. She was rather a
superior person who did not like to dress wounds. We were to make two
stops before we arrived in England, I was told; one at Salonica to
take on some sick, the other at Naples for coal. The Salonica stop
took place at night. We did not go into the harbor; probably it was
not deep enough for the _Aquitania_. The sick were taken aboard
outside. We came to Naples early one fine Sunday morning. As we went
into the harbor, I could see through the window Mt. Vesuvius, smoking
steadily. We were in Naples at the same time as the big _Olympic_, and
the _Mauretania_, the sister ship of the _Lusitania_. It was the time
that the Germans had protested that the British hospital ships carried
troops to the Dardanelles on the return trip. The neutral consuls in
Naples went aboard the _Olympic_ and _Mauretania_ that Sunday and
investigated. The charge, of course, was unfounded. An Italian general
and his staff came aboard our ship and were shown around the wards. He
was a dapper little man, who gesticulated vehemently and bowed to all
the sisters. The sister who did not like Colonials was speaking to him
when he came through our ward. She was trying to impress him with the
excellent treatment our wounded received. She pointed out each man to
him, in the same way a keeper does at the zoological gardens.
"They get this every evening," she said, indicating the supper we were
eating. "And what is this?" she said, looking at some apricot jam on
a saucer on my bed.
"Apricot jam, sister," I said, then added sweetly, in my best society
fashion, "We get it every evening." I might have told her that I had
had it not only every evening, but every noon and morning while I was
on the Peninsula.
"And what is this?" she said, pointing to the cup in my hand. "Is it
tea or cocoa?"
"It's tea," I said. "We get it every evening,--just as if we were
human beings, and not Colonials." After that I think she liked
Colonials even less.
The Bay of Biscay was just a little rough when we went through it, but
it did not affect the _Aquitania_ very much.
When the word went around on the day that land had been sighted, every
man that could hobble went on deck to get a first glimpse of England.
We could not see very far because of the thick mist of an English
December. About ten o'clock we were at the entrance to Southampton,
but the tide was out, or the chief engineer was out, so we could not
go up until that evening. That last day was a tedious one. Every one
was eager to get ashore. To most of the men, England was home; and
after the trenches and the hospitals, home meant much.
As soon as we landed, a train took us to a place near London. It was
twenty-five miles from the hospital that was our destination. Here we
were met by automobiles that took us to the hospital for
Newfoundlanders at Wandsworth Common, London. There were only half a
dozen of us from Newfoundland. At first the doctor on the _Aquitania_
persisted in calling us Canadians, and wanted to send us to
Walton-on-Thames. It took us two hours to convince him that
Newfoundland had no connection with Canada. Two automobiles were
enough for our little party. The man who drove me in told me that he
had come a hundred miles to do it. All the automobiles that met the
hospital trains were loaned by people who wanted to do whatever they
could to help the cause. He was a dairy farmer, he said, and gave me
uninteresting statistical information about cows and the amount of
milk he sold in London each day. But apart from that, I enjoyed the
smooth drive over the faultless roads.
The Third London hospital at Wandsworth Common is a military hospital;
and although the discipline is strict, everything possible is done
for the comfort of the patients. Concerts are given every few
evenings; almost every afternoon people send around automobiles to
take the wounded men for a drive. Twice a week visitors come in for
three hours in the afternoon. At Wandsworth I stayed only a very few
days. Two days before Christmas I was sent to Esher to the
convalescent home run by the V.A.D. Sisters. Nobody at this hospital
received any remuneration. Esher is in Surrey, not many miles from
London. Even in the winter the weather was pleasant. Here we had a
great deal of liberty, being allowed out all day until six at night.
Only thirty men were in Esher at one time. The hospital contained a
piano, victrola, pool table, and materials for playing all sorts of
games. At Esher one felt like an individual, and not like a cog in a
machine. Paddy Walsh, the corporal, who had hesitated so long about
leaving me on the Peninsula, was at Esher when I arrived. He was
almost well now, he told me, and was looking forward to a furlough.
After his furlough he was going back, he said, in the first draft. "No
forming fours for me, around Scotland," said Walsh, "drilling a bunch
of rookies. I want to get back with the boys."
After two weeks, Esher closed for repairs. We all went back to the
hospital at Wandsworth. News had just come of the evacuation of the
Peninsula. In the ward I was sent to were half a dozen of our boys. I
asked them what was the trouble, and they told me frozen feet. "Frozen
feet," I said, "in Gallipoli? You're joking." They assured me that
they were not and referred me to their case sheets that hung beside
the beds. Shortly before the evacuation a storm had swept over the
Peninsula. First it had rained for two days, the third day it snowed,
and the next it froze. A torrent of water had poured down the mountain
side, flooding the trenches, and carrying with it blankets,
equipments, rifles, portions of the parapet, and the dead bodies of
men who had been drowned while they were sleeping. The men who were
left had to forsake their trenches and go above ground. Turks and
British alike suffered. The last day of the storm, while some of our
men were waiting on the beach to be taken to the hospital ship, they
told me they saw the bodies of at least two thousand men, frozen to
death. Our regiment stood it perhaps better than any of the others. It
was the sort of climate they were accustomed to. The Australasians
suffered tremendously. I met one man who had been on the Peninsula
during the evacuation. They had got away with the loss of two men
killed and one wounded for the entire British force. The papers that
day said that the Turks claimed to have driven the entire British army
into the sea, and to have gained an immense amount of booty. The booty
gained, our men said, was bully beef and biscuits. Far from being
driven into the sea, the British got off in two hours without the
Turks suspecting at all; and it was not till the second day after that
the Turks really found out. It had taken a great deal of ingenuity to
devise a scheme that would let the evacuation take place secretly. The
distance from the shore was about four miles. As soon as the troops
knew they were to leave, they ripped up the sand bags on the parapets,
and broke the glass in the periscopes, so they would be useless to the
enemy. Then they attached the broken periscopes to the parapets, so
that the Turks looking over would see the periscopes above the trench,
just as they would any ordinary day at the front. Only one problem
remained unsolved. As soon as the Turks heard the firing cease
entirely, they would think something was not as it should be. If they
began to investigate before the troops got away, it might mean
annihilation. At first it was planned to leave a small party scattered
through the trenches, but this meant that they would have to be
sacrificed in order to allow their comrades to escape. An Australian
devised a scheme. He took a number of rifles, placed them at different
points along the parapets, and lashed them to it. In each one he put a
cartridge. From the trigger he suspended a bully beef tin, weighted
with sand. This was not quite heavy enough to pull the trigger. On top
of the rifle he placed another tin, filled with water, and pierced a
small hole in the bottom of it. After a while the water, dripping
slowly from the top tin, made the lower one heavy enough to pull the
trigger. Some of the tins were heavier than the others, and the rifles
did not all go off at once. As soon as things were ready, the troops
moved off silently, "Just as if they were going into dugouts," Art
Pratt wrote me. They got aboard the warships waiting for them in the
bay, and went to Mudros and Imbros. The evacuation was facilitated by
the fact that the Salt Lake that had been dried up when I was there
was swollen high by the rain of the previous weeks. All that night the
firing continued at intervals, and kept up all through the next day.
The Turks, taking the usual cautious survey of the enemy trenches,
saw, as they did every other day, periscopes sticking up over the
parapets and heard the ordinary reports of rifle fire; to them it
looked like what the official reports call a "quiet day on the Eastern
front."
One other item of news I received that pleased me very greatly. Art
Pratt had taken my place as corporal of the section, and had sent me
word that he had got the sniper who shot me.
After I had been back in the Wandsworth Common hospital a few days, I
was "boarded." That is, I was sent up to be examined by a board of
doctors. They found me "unfit for further service," and I was sent to
my depot in Scotland for disposal. The next day I was given all my
back pay and took the train for Ayr, Scotland. There I was given my
discharge "in consequence of wounds received in action in Gallipoli."
Major Whitaker, the officer in charge, paused and looked at me, while
he was signing the discharge paper.
"I imagine," he said, "you feel rather sorry that you caught that
train, Corporal."
"What train is that, sir?" I said.
"The one at Aldershot," he answered, as he completed his signature. I
smiled noncommittally, but did not answer him.
Looking back now it seems to me that catching that train is one thing
I have never regretted. I was convinced of it that day in Ayr. For a
few weeks past convalescents of the First Battalion had been dribbling
into Ayr. You could tell them by their wan, fever-wasted faces, and by
the little ribbons of claret and white that they wore on the sleeves
of their coats, the claret and white that marked them as the "service
battalion." And there was in their faces, too, the calm, confident
look of men who had hobnobbed with death, and had come away unafraid.
Every one of them had the same tale. "We're tired of the depot
already. They're a new bunch here, and we want to get back with the
crowd we know." There was no talk of patriotism, or duty; all this had
given place to the pride of local achievement. To those men, my little
claret and white ribbon was all the introduction I needed. I was a
member of the First Battalion. As I hobbled along the main street of
Ayr, a crowd of them bore down on me. A heterogeneous bunch they were,
bored to death with the quietness of the Scottish town, shouting
boisterous greetings long before they reached me. The lot of us took
dinner together and afterwards went in a body to the theater. The
theater proprietor refused unconditionally to take any money from us.
We were "returned wounded," and the best seats in the house were ours.
Four or five of our party had just returned from Edinburgh, where they
had spent their furloughs. They had been received royally. The civic
authorities had made arrangements with the owners of the Royal Hotel
in Edinburgh to put the Newfoundlanders up free of cost during their
stay. The First Battalion had spent their money freely while they were
garrisoning Edinburgh Castle, and the authorities had not forgotten
it.
I hated to leave those men of the First Battalion, who welcomed me so
heartily. I was glad at the thought of getting back to the States
again; but it was strange to think that I was no longer a soldier,
that my days of fighting were over. An inexpressible sadness came over
me as I bade good-by to them. Some of their names I do not know, but
they were all my friends. There are others like them in various
hospitals in England and Egypt; and also in a shady, tree-dotted
ravine on the Peninsula of Gallipoli there is a row of graves, where
also are my friends of the First Newfoundland Regiment.
The men our regiment lost, although they gladly fought a hopeless
fight, have not died in vain. Constantinople has not been taken, and
the Gallipoli campaign is fast becoming a memory, but things our men
did there will not soon be forgotten. The foremost advance on the
Suvla Bay front is Donnelly's Post on Caribou Ridge, made by the
Newfoundlanders. It is called Donnelly's Post because it is here that
Lieutenant Donnelly won his Military Cross. The hitherto unknown ridge
from which the Turkish machine guns poured their concentrated death
into our trenches stands as a monument to the initiative of the
Newfoundlanders. It is now Caribou Ridge as a recognition of the men
who wear the deer's head badge. From Caribou Ridge the Turks could
enfilade parts of our firing line. For weeks they had continued to
pick off our men one by one. You could almost tell when your turn was
coming. I know, because from Caribou Ridge came the bullet that sent
me off the Peninsula. The machine guns on Caribou Ridge not only swept
part of our trench, but commanded all of the intervening ground. This
ground was almost absolutely devoid of cover. Several attempts had
been made to rush those guns. All these attacks had failed, held up by
the murderous machine-gun fire. Whole companies had essayed the task,
but all had been repulsed, and almost annihilated. It remained for
Lieutenant Donnelly to essay the impossible. Under cover of darkness,
Lieutenant Donnelly, with only eight men, surprised the Turks in the
post that now bears his name. The captured machine gun he turned on
the Turks to repulse constantly launched bomb and rifle attacks. Just
at dusk one evening Donnelly stole out to Caribou Ridge and took the
Turks by storm. They had been accustomed before that to see large
bodies of men swarm over the parapet in broad daylight, and had been
able to wipe them out with machine-gun fire. All that night the Turks
strove to recover their lost ground. The darkness that confused the
enemy was the Newfoundlanders' ally. One of Donnelly's men, Jack
Hynes, crawled away from his companions to a point about two hundred
yards to the left. All through the night he poured a rapid stream of
fire into the flank of the enemy's attacking party. So steadily did he
keep it up that the Turks were deluded into thinking we had men there
in force. When reinforcements arrived, Donnelly's eight men were
reduced to two. Dawn showed the havoc wrought by the gallant little
group. The ground in front of the post was a shambles of piled up
Turkish corpses. But daylight showed something more to the credit of
the Newfoundlanders than the mere taking of the ridge. It showed Jack
Hynes purposely falling back over exposed ground to draw the enemy's
attention from Sergeant Greene, who was coolly making trip after trip
between the ridge and our lines, carrying a wounded man in his arms
every time until all our wounded were in safety. Hynes and Greene were
each given a Distinguished Conduct Medal. None was ever more nobly
earned.
The night the First Newfoundland Regiment landed in Suvla Bay there
were about eleven hundred of us. In December when the British forces
evacuated Gallipoli, to our regiment fell the honor of being nominated
to fight the rearguard action. This is the highest recognition a
regiment can receive; for the duty of a rear guard in a retreat is to
keep the enemy from reaching the main body of troops, even if this
means annihilation for itself. At Lemnos Island the next day when the
roll was called, of the eleven hundred men who landed when I did, only
one hundred and seventy-one answered "Here."
After the First Newfoundland Regiment left the Peninsula, they went to
Egypt to guard the Suez Canal from the long-expected attack of the
Turks. After they had been rested a little while, they were recruited
up to full fighting strength, again, and were sent to France. In the
recent drive of the Allies against the German positions on the Somme,
the regiment has won for itself fresh laurels. The "Times"
correspondent at British headquarters in France sent the following on
July 13th:
"The Newfoundlanders were the only overseas troops engaged in these
operations. The story of their heroic part cannot yet be told in full,
but when it is it will make Newfoundland very proud. The battalion was
pushed up as what may be called the third wave in the attack on
probably the most formidable section of the whole German front through
an almost overwhelming artillery fire and a cross-ground swept by an
enfilading machine-gun fire from hidden positions. The men behaved
with completely noble steadiness and courage."
THE END
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| Page 115: nothng replaced with nothing |
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End of Project Gutenberg's Trenching at Gallipoli, by John Gallishaw