GLIMPSES OF ANZAC
I
It's the monotony that kills; not hard work, nor hard fare. We have
now been disembarked on the Peninsula rather longer than three months.
But there has been little change in our way of living. Every day there
is the same work on the same beach, shelled by the same guns, manned
by the same Turks--presumably the same; for we never seem to knock-out
those furtive and deadly batteries that enfilade the Cove Beach and
maim or kill--or both--almost daily. Every morning we look out on 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 the Pacific. That delicious Mediterranean
colour, of which we used to read sceptically, and which we half
disbelieved in J.M. Turner's pictures, changes in the quality of its
hue almost hourly. And every morning the islands of the west take on
fresh colour and are trailed by fresh shapes of mist. The atmosphere
deludes, in the matter of distance, as though pranking for the love of
deception. 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--but more often towards evening--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 October. Late October synchronises with late autumn. Yet it is a
halting and irregular advance the late autumn is making. Changes in
temperature are as incalculable as at Melbourne, in certain seasons.
Fierce, biting, raw days alternate with the comfortableness of the mild
late-summer. To-day 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.
The Ægean autumn has yet shown little bitterness. Here on 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 most unprepared. There was little rain;
insufficient to allay the maelstroms of choking dust that whirled over
our ploughed and powdered ridges. In half an hour many of us were
homeless, crouching about with our bundled bed-clothes, trespassing
tyrannically upon the confined space of the more stout dug-outs of
our friends: a sore tax upon true friendship. Men 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. It was a night for Lear to be out.
Men had, for weeks, in spare time, been formally preparing dug-outs
against the approach of winter, but they were unprepared for weather of
such violence. And if this is a taste of the quality of winter storms,
the warning comes timely.
For the morning showed a sorry beach. Barges had been torn adrift from
moorings and trawlers, and hurled ashore. Some were empty; some were
filled with supplies; all were battered; some disabled; some utterly
broken. One was filled with rum. Never before, on active service, had
such a chance of unlimited spirits offered. Many jars had been spirited
away when the time of unlading came. There were riotous faces and
super-merriment on the beach that morning; and by mid-day the "clink"
was overflowing. Far more serious was the state of the landing-piers.
There were--there had been--three. 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 grin overlooked
the beach that morning at the time of rising. The General grinned
too--a sort of dogged grin. The remedying began forthwith; so did the
bursting of shrapnel over the workmen. This stroke of Allah upon the
Unfaithful was not to go unsupplemented. But it was as with the unhappy
Armada: the winds of heaven wrought more havoc than the enemy guns. By
nightfall the abridged pier was re-united to the shore--and this in
spite of a sea that made it impossible for barges to come alongside.
For two days the after-wind of the gale kept bread and meat and mails
tossing on the face of the waters off Anzac; and we fed on bully-beef
and biscuit, and eyed wistfully the mail-trawler pitching there with
her precious burden.
The arrival of mails 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. Sometimes
they come twice in a week; for a fresh mail is despatched from the
base post-office in instalments which may spread over three or four
landings. The Army Corps Post Office never rests. Most mails are
landed between sunset and dawn--generally after midnight. Post-office
officials must be there to supervise and check. It's little sleep
they get on "mail nights." Incoming mails do not constitute all their
cares. Mails outgoing from the firing-line are heavy. And there are the
pathetic "returns" to be dealt with, the letters of men who will never
read them--letters written before the heavy news had got home. It is
a huge bulk of correspondence marked _Killed_ and re-addressed to the
place of origin of the fallen. Their comrades keep their newspapers.
Usually the parcels of comforts directed to them bring melancholy cheer
to their still fighting comrades in arms. What else is to be done with
them?
Of incoming mails letters stand inevitably first. They put a man at
home for a couple of hours. But so does his 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 to him by letters. Relatives at home, did they know this fully,
would despatch newspapers with a stricter regularity.
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 crowd smells 'em. D----d if there
ain't choclut! look 'ere! An' 'ere's some er the dinkum coc'nut ice the
tart uster make. Hullo! more socks! Never mind: winter's comin'.--'Ere!
'ow er yer orf fer socks, cobber? Take these--bonzer 'and-knitted.
Sling them issue-things inter the sea.... I'm b----d!--soap fer the
voy'ge 'ome.... 'Angkerch'fs!--orl right when the ---- blizzerds
come, an' a chap's snifflin' fer a ----in' week on end.... Writin'
paper!--well, that's the straight ---- tip! The ----s 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!"
"Bonzer tarts" (and others) may infer that a parcel is as a gift from
the gods, and carries more than "its intrinsic worth." Such treasures
as the 'and-knitted socks and coc'nut ice bring home rather more near
than it ever comes to the man who has no part in the parcel mail.
Mails deserve all the organised care the War-Office can bestow; they
make for efficiency.
There is no morning delivery of the daily newspaper at Anzac. But we
get the news. At the foot of Headquarters gully is the notice-board.
The wireless messages are posted daily. At any hour men are elbowing
a way into the perusing circle. There is news of the operations along
our own Front and copious messages from the Eiffel Tower of the Russian
and Western Fronts. The Melbourne Cup finish was cabled through
immediately. The sports foregathered and collected or "shelled out";
there were few men indeed who did not handle their purses round the
board that evening. No war news, for months, had been so momentous as
this. The associations called up by the news from the Australian Mecca
at Flemington, whither the whole continent makes annual pilgrimage,
were strong, and homely as well as national. All the detail of the
little annual domestic sweeps at the breakfast-table came back with
a pathetic nearness. Men were recalled for a while from the land of
blood to the office, the bank, the warehouse, the country pub., the
shearing-shed, where the Cup bets were wont to be made. Squatters' sons
were back at the homestead making the sweeps. The myriad-sided sporting
spirit is perhaps stronger than any other Australian national trait.
The Defence-Department knew it when they made provision for a cabled
despatch of the running.
Three weeks ago began the flight of birds before the Russian winter.
They came over thick, in wedge formation, swallowing up, in their
hoarse cries, the crack of rifles over the ridges, from which,
otherwise, only the roar of a half-gale delivers us, day or night.
Over Anzac--which seemed to mark a definite stage in the journey--they
showed a curious indecision as to direction. Possibly they were
interested in the bird's-eye view of the disposal of forces. They
wheeled and re-formed into grotesque figures; men would stop in their
work and try to decipher the pattern. "That's a W."--"Yes; and what's
that?"--"Oh, that?" (after a crafty pause)--"that's one er them Turkish
figgers--'member them in Cairo?"
The flight of birds south is surely the most reliable of all forecasts
as to what we may expect in temperatures. Yet the official account,
published for the information of troops, of the traditional weather
between October and March shows we need expect nothing unreasonably
severe before the middle of January; but that then will come heavy
snow-storms and thoroughgoing blizzards. Furthermore, men are advised
to instruct their sisters to send Cardigans, sweets in plenty, and much
tobacco. _Amen_ to this; we shall instruct them faithfully.
Meanwhile the systematic fortification of dug-outs against damp and
cold goes on.
We foresee, unhappily, 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 6.30 you have been used to see the bald pate of
General Birdwood bobbing beyond the sunken barge in shore, and a host
of nudes lining the beach. The host is diminishing to a few isolated
fellows who either are fanatics or are come down from the trenches and
must clear up a vermin- and dust-infested skin at all costs. Naturally
we prefer to bathe at mid-day, rather than at 6.30, when the sun has
not got above the precipitous ridges of Sari Bair. But the early
morning dip is almost the only safe one. The beach is still enfiladed
by Turkish artillery from the right flank. But times are better;
formerly both flanks commanded us. The gun on the right continues to
harass. He is familiarly known as Beachy Bill. That on the left went by
a name intended for the ears of soldiers only. Beachy Bill is, in fact,
merely the collective name for a whole battery, capable of throwing
over five shell simultaneously. Not infrequently Beachy Bill catches a
mid-morning bathing squad. There is ducking and splashing shorewards,
and scurrying over the beach to cover by men clad only in the garments
Nature gave them. Shrapnel bursting above the water in which you are
disporting yourself raises chiefly the question: Will it ever stop?
By this you, of course, mean: Will the pellets ever cease to whip the
water? The interval between the murderous lightning-burst aloft and
the last pellet-swish seems, to the potential victim, everlasting. The
suspense always is trying.
The times and the seasons of Beachy Bill are inscrutable. Earlier on,
the six o'clock bather was not safe. Now he is almost prepared to bet
upon his chances. Possibly an enemy gun is by this time aware that
there goes on now less than heretofore of that stealthy night discharge
of lighters which used to persist beyond the dawn--until the job was
finished.
Wonderful is the march of organisation. It appreciably improves daily,
under your eyes--organisation in mule transport to the flanks, in the
landing of supplies, in the local distribution of rations; the last
phase perhaps most obvious, because it comes home close to the business
and bosoms of the troops. Where, a month ago, we languished on tinned
beef and biscuit, we now rejoice daily in fresh meat, bread, milk, and
(less frequently) fresh vegetables. It all becomes better than one
dared to expect: a beef-steak and toast for breakfast, soup for dinner,
boiled mutton for tea. This is all incredibly good. Yet the sickness
diminishes little. Colic, enteric, dysentery, jaundice, are still
painfully prevalent, and our sick are far-flung and thick over Lemnos,
Egypt, Malta, and England. So long as flies and the unburied persist,
we cannot well be delivered. But the wastage in sick men deported is
near to being alarming.
A regimental canteen on Imbros does much to compensate. Unit
representatives proceed thence weekly by trawler for stores. One feels
almost in the land of the living when, within fifteen miles, lie tinned
fruit, butter, coffee, cocoa, tinned sausages, sauces, chutneys, pipes,
"Craven" mixture and chocolate. Such a _répertoire_, 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
here. 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.
I have heard a Colonel-Chaplain talk for two hours of nothing but
grub, and at the end convincingly exempt himself from the charge of
carnal-mindedness. Truly we are a people whose god is their belly. One
never realised, until this period of enforced deprivation, the whole
meaning of the classical fable of the Belly and the Members.
Yet in the last analysis (all this talk is largely so much artistry)
one is amazingly free from the hankering after creature-comforts.
There is a sort of rough philosophy abroad to scorn delights and live
laborious days. Those delights embraced by the use of good tobacco
and deliverance from vermin at nights 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. (The Arcadia mixture is unvarying, but cannot always be
had.) This ought not to be. Once in six months a friend in Australia
despatches 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, with reasonably good tobacco, gives
the _entrée_ to the paradise farthest removed from that of the fool.
One harks back to the words of Lytton: "He who does not smoke tobacco
either has never known any great sorrow or has rejected the sweetest
consolation under heaven."
Of the plague of nocturnal vermin little needs be said explicitly.
The locomotion of the day almost dissipates the evil. It makes night
hideous. One needs but think of the ravages open to one boarding-house
imp amongst the sheets, to form some crude notion of what havoc may be
wrought at night by a vermin whose name is legion. Keating's powder is
_not_ "sold by all chemists and storekeepers" on the Peninsula. One
would give a week's pay for an effective dose of insectibane.
The tendency is to retire late, and thus abridge the period of
persecution. There is the balm of weariness, too, against which no
louse is altogether proof. One's friends "drop in" for a yarn and 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, and the changes are nightly
rung upon its personnel. All this makes against the plagues of vermin;
and against the monotony that kills, too. Old college chums are dug
out, and one talks back and lives a couple of hours in the glory of
days that have passed and in the brighter glory of a potential re-entry
to the old life. Believe it not that there is no deliverance possible
from the hardness of active service, even in its midst. The retrospect,
and the prospect, and the ever-present faculty of visualisation, are
ministering angels sent to minister.
Rude interruptions come in upon such attempts at self-deliverance.
Enemy aircraft make nocturnal bomb-dropping raids and rudely dissipate
prospect and retrospect. One harbours a sneaking regard for the
pluckily low elevation at which these night flights are made. Happily,
they have yet made few casualties.... On a ridge above us stands a
factory for the manufacture of bombs and hand grenades. Every night
mules are laden there for the trenches. One evening a restive mule,
ramping about, thrust his heel through a case of bombs adjacent. They
responded with a roar that shook the hill-side. Three other cases
were set going. At once the slopes and gullies were peopled by thinly
clad figures from the dug-outs rushing to and fro in astonishment. The
immediate inference was of enemy missiles: no one suspected our own
bomb factory. The most curious conjectures were abroad. One fellow
bawled that the Turks had broken our line and were bombing us from the
ridge above; another shouted that Zeppelins had crept over; one man
cried that the cruiser, at that moment working under her searchlight
on enemy positions, had "messed up" the angle of elevation and was
pouring high-explosive into us. Shouting and lanterns and the call for
stretcher-bearers about the bomb factory soon disclosed the truth.
The festive mule, with three companions, had been literally blown to
pieces; next morning chunks of mule were lying about our depôt. The
worst was that our own men were killed and shattered. This was ghastly.
Is it not enough to be laid low by enemy shell?
Yet the work of enemy shell on this beach 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 barge, mending a pier, drawing water for his
unit, directing a mule-convoy. He may even lose a limb or his life off
duty--merely returning from a bathe or washing a shirt on the shingle.
One of our men was struck by shrapnel pellet retiring to his dug-out
to read his just-delivered mail. He was off duty--was, in fact, far up
the ridge above the beach. The wound gaped in his back. There was no
stanching it. Every thump of the aorta pumped out his life. Practically
he was a dead man when struck; he lived but a few minutes, with his
pipe, still steaming, clenched in his teeth. They laid him aside in
the hospital. That night we stood about the grave in which he lay
beneath his ground-sheet. Over that wind-swept headland the moon shone
fitfully through driving cloud. A monitor bombarded offshore. Under
her friendly-screaming shell and the singing bullets of the Turk the
worn, big-hearted Padré intoned 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 shell do sometimes
burst in the midst of the burial-party. Bearers are laid low. There is
indecent running for cover. The grave is hastily filled in by a couple
of shovelmen; the hideous desecration is over; and fresh graves are to
be dug immediately 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 battle-grounds of
Turkey.
There is more than shrapnel to be contended with on the beach, though
shrapnel takes far the heaviest toll. Taube flights over the position
are frequent by day, and bombs are dropped. The intermittent sobbing
shriek of a descending bomb is unmistakable and heart-shaking. You know
the direction of shrapnel; you know in which direction the hellish
shower will spread; there is time for lightning calculation and action.
But a bomb gives little indication of its degree of proximity, and with
it there is no "direction" of burst; a circle of death hurtles forth
from the missile. No calculation is possible as to a way of escape.
Taube bombs and machine-gun bullets are not the only missiles from
above of which it behoves Anzac denizens to beware. Men are struck by
pellets and shell-case from the shrapnel discharged at our 'planes from
Turkish anti-aircraft guns. Our aircraft is fired at very consistently.
There is a temptation to stand gaping there, face to the sky, watching
their fortunes. Such temptation comes from below, and should not be
yielded to--unless our 'planes are vertically overhead or on our
west. If they are circling over the Turkish position, take cover; for
"what goes up must come down," according to the formula accompanying
a schoolboy trick; and shrapnel discharged at 'planes on your eastern
elevation may as well come down on your altruistically-inquisitive head
as bury in the earth beside you.
To all such onslaughts from aloft and around most men show an
indifference that is fairly consistent. The impression is left with
you that there is quite a large number of them who have "come to terms
with themselves" on the subject of an eventuality of whatever nature,
and this is abundantly clear when you see them after their tragedy
has eventuated. There is little visible panic in the victims in any
dressing station, little evidence of astonishment, little restlessness.
Men lie there quiet under the thrusts and turns of the sword of pain,
steadfast in the attitude of no-compromise with suffering. To this
exceptions will be found; all men have not reckoned up squarely and
accurately beforehand the cost of all emergencies that are possible.
But most of them have.