THE BIG FIGHT
[Illustration: Captain David Fallon, M.C.]
THE BIG FIGHT
(_Gallipoli to the Somme_)
BY
CAPT. DAVID FALLON, M.C.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1918, by
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FROM AUSTRALIA TO THE FRAY 1
II. FROM AUSTRALIA TO THE FRAY 15
III. GALLIPOLI 35
IV. THE GHASTLY LANDING 48
V. HOLDING ON 64
VI. GIVING UP GALLIPOLI 79
VII. COMPLIMENTS OF THE KING 97
VIII. AN INTERMISSION 106
IX. NO QUARTER 113
X. TRAPPING SAPPERS 126
XI. SPOTTING 143
XII. “RAZZLE DAZZLE” 157
XIII. MOQUET FARM 167
XIV. SPIES 185
XV. “WOODFIGHTING” 201
XVI. THE PLAY SIDE OF WAR 220
XVII. THE RAT IN THE NIGHT 233
XVIII. THE WORST ORDEAL 248
XIX. BLIGHTY 274
XX. HONORED BY THE KING 287
XXI. THE GRAY MOTHER 298
THE BIG FIGHT
CHAPTER I
FROM AUSTRALIA TO THE FRAY
When great historians with their learned pens shall come to set forth
the complete story of the most sweeping and horrible war the world
has ever known, I figure they may perhaps have need of such evidence,
information and material as a man like myself can give. I mean a man
who has been through the red hell of the vast conflict in places where
it has flamed most fiercely, a soldier who has been eye-witness of its
superb heroisms, its stupendous tragedies, scientific marvels, has
undergone its tense emotional and psychological experiences, bears
on his body its wounds, has seen at first hand with the amazement
all civilization has felt, the cowardice, bestiality, utter moral
abandonment to which a nation may fall in a mad dream of the conquest
of the world.
My name is David Fallon. I am of the County Mayo, Ireland. And I’d
ask your pardon for a word or two by way of boasting in stating that
my ancestors for a pretty-long journey back into history, have always
figured in the man-sized battles of their generations. My father, a
naturalist, rushed away from gentle scientific pursuits in 1870 to bear
arms for France against the Prussians. And it isn’t only because I’m
Irish that I fought to get into this present big fight--and I did fight
to get into it--but for the pertinent and additional reason that it was
in France father met Mlle. Sarah Voltaire who not very long thereafter
became Mrs. Fallon.
And small wonder, with my boy’s mind stirred so many an evening by the
exciting stories of the Franco-Prussian battles my father and mother
would tell us of in the glow of the old library fireplace, that I had
no trouble electing the course of my life. I left the University
of Dublin to enlist in the British army. I joined a Northumberland
regiment, Nov. 19, 1904, and the military examiners were not at first
quite so enthusiastic about the performance as I was for I offered
them no Hercules. I was then only eighteen years old, a little under
medium height and slim as a whalebone. A weighing machine as far as I
was concerned escaped with the small effort of marking one hundred and
ten pounds. But I was sound of eye, tooth, blood and heart and so they
cordially handed me my uniform--even if they did have to trim off the
sleeves of the tunic a bit.
It is only fair I should say for myself that I was a rather good
boy--that the temptations besetting youths in the army have never
left their marks on me. Not, believe me, that I was a sanctimonious
kid--a good many miles away from that. But I was lucky in having a
keen love of athletics and a pride of achievement in many branches of
sport. There’s nothing like such a disposition to keep a boy clean and
straight. Soccer, Rugby, swimming, wrestling, running--the opportunity
for such games and contests was constant in the army and made me
devoted to military life.
And boxing! Good heavens, the whalings I took! But by the same token,
the whalings I handed out! There is no use my telling myself that
just about here I should be content to hide my light under a bushel
somewhat. I’ll not do it. The fact is I rose to the dizzy splendor of
champion featherweight of the British Army in India.
Just a few words more in order to place myself at the time when the
vast war began. I saw brief, uneventful service in China, then spent
years in India, took part in many of the “hills scraps,” sporadic
uprisings of the mountain tribes, dangerous and exciting enough
encounters we regarded them then, petty memories now; stood before
Lord Minto, then Viceroy, in Calcutta, 1908, and received from him the
Indian Frontier medal, was promoted to sergeant-major and with the rank
of staff sergeant major was detailed to the Royal Military Academy
at Dunstroon, New South Wales, as instructor in athletics, general
physical exercises, deportment and bayonet drill. This was my station
when Germany began its brutal attack upon its neighbors.
And let me say right here that while in any event Australia would have
made a sturdy response to Britain’s call, what Germany can put into its
long-stemmed, china-bowled pipe and “smoke it,” is that were it not
for the appalling, cowardly, barbarous crimes committed against the
defenseless--the women and children of Belgium, there would never have
been, as there has been, such tremendous outpouring of fighting men
from splendid Australia; 400,000 of them out of a population of men,
women and children numbering 5,000,000! All volunteers, you understand?
It is the volunteer record of the war--not forgetting Canada’s mighty
showing of 550,000 out of a population of 7,000,000!
It was not until Germany gave atrocious evidences of her disregard
of humanity, not until its army had stalked in its giant size, a
red-stained, moral idiot, through little Belgium, crucifying old men
and women and children to the doors of their homes, ravishing girls
and women, murdering the parents who tried to protect them; not until
this enormity of degeneracy had passed into the history of mankind, did
Australia take fire.
I know because at the very beginning of the war I was sent out to
Sydney and Melbourne as a whip for enlistment--made scores of speeches
daily in halls, parks, street corners and other public places. My
hearers were many and they were earnest and thoughtful but deliberate
as well. Enlistments came and numerously but not with anything
approaching a rush. Your prospective soldier debated a good deal with
his own personal interests, before he signed up.
But after Belgium! The crowds I addressed took the arguments for
enlistment away from me--made the talk themselves, swarmed to join.
Social ranks broke completely and almost instantaneously. Everybody
flocked to the army--artists, actors, lawyers, merchants, clerks,
larrikins, miners and the men from the vast, open places of Australia.
[Illustration: “British blood is calling British blood”]
Brothers are these last in every degree of character to the American
and Canadian miners, ranchers, trappers, cowboys; they are big, lean,
brave, boyishly chivalrous men, shy of women but adoring them, willing
to play romping dog any old time to win the smile of a child or the pat
of its little hand.
It must stand as one of the most picturesque features of the war--the
great distances these men traveled to the centers of population to
offer their services to avenge the slaughter of the helpless in Belgium
and to fight for the honor, prestige and life of the Gray Mother of the
Empire.
Take for instance, John Wilson, gold prospector. He came out of the
wilderness, fifteen hundred miles to Sydney, to join the colors; four
hundred of it on horseback, one hundred of it literally hacking his way
through a dense, trackless forest of giant gum and eucalyptus trees
until he got to Bourke, whence, once a fortnight, a train leaves for
Sydney. Thousands and thousands of John Wilsons made their way to the
cities.
And from the distant islands of the Archipelago--Samoa, Fiji, Cocos,
Madras, when the news of Germany’s infamy seeped into the men far in
the interiors--the traders and planters in oils and nuts, the hunters
of birds of paradise--they came out through the swamps, paddled their
way on jungle rivers laboriously but tirelessly, determinedly to the
coast and put themselves aboard the first ships obtainable. There
occurred at this time a great shortage in crews for these ships, so
that some were threatened with being held up for days or weeks for lack
of men. Many well-to-do patriots, amply supplied with funds to meet
the expense of a trip in the first cabin, signed up as stokers, seamen
or deck-hands in order to expedite the journeys from the islands to
Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne or other coast communities where they might
join the army.
And the larrikins, the hooligans, “hard guys” of the cities,
gangsters, youths and men of lives abandoned to drink, drugs and other
vices--Germany’s unspeakable cruelty in Belgium even stung such as
these out of their indifference. In the early days of enlistment we
had managed to win precious few of this class to the service. The
majority of them had been sullen and derisive to our appeals to join
the colors.
“Wot’s all this flaming war about, anywye? Blast the blooming war, I
ain’t got nothin’ to fight about.”
That had been the characteristic response.
But the piteous images of children with bleeding, severed throats, of
tiny human bodies dismembered, of decent girls and women subject to the
foulest acts of vicious cowardice, sent the larrikins to us seething
with rage and resolved, as it was especially hard for men of this sort
to resolve, to accept the strict discipline of army life for the chance
to spill the blood of the horror-makers of Europe.
As to these same larrikins, if you please, I would like to set down
some more. Scrubby they came to us, most of them, pallid, undersized,
some of them wretchedly nervous from drinks, drugs, under-feeding, bad
teeth, all manner of irregularities of life due to poverty, due to
vice.
But, “by the living God that made” them, once you’d repaired
them--fixed their teeth, fed them, exercised them, made bathing instead
of a drunk a daily habit with them, once, in short, that you’d properly
set them up and, excuse the emphasis, but they made the damnedest best
soldiers of the lot.
Not that the professional men, business men, open-air men who went
into the ranks were not as heroic. A hundred incidents of the splendor
of bravery that men of all classes displayed crowd my memory to take
swift, sharp issue with the idea. But you see the larrikin--the
designation used to be one of contempt with me but is something pretty
close to affection now and I should say with several other thousands
of officers as well--comes to you with the devil’s own experience of
hard-knocks. He knows hunger, thirst, the misery of cold, of pains and
aches he has no doctor to allay. And I would point out that one of
these boys who has survived such conditions with a physique left good
enough to get him into the army, must have started life with the flesh
and blood make-up akin to the steel armor-plates and entrails of a
dreadnaught. So when you take him and give him only half a brushing-up,
the readiness of his response would (may I borrow the expression of an
Ally?) certainly jar you. His face gets pink, his chest sticks out, the
sneer he wore becomes a smile, the contemptible trickery he used to
work turns to good-natured, practical jokes. He is childishly amazed to
find that his comrades--the man who was a lawyer at home, or the other
who was a tradesman or the very wonderful person who was a well-known
feature in vaudeville and even--Gawd blime me! his captain likes him.
And once he believes that--knows it and feels it then (another draft
on an Ally) you’ve “got something!” The very gang training he has had
when he banded with his pals to fight and cheat the law, that gang
spirit with all its blind devotion is at the nod of his officer. He’ll
go to hell for you even when he knows there is not much or any chance
of coming back, and if all of his kind, whether out of Whitechapel, the
purlieus of Canadian cities or the slums of Australia who have done
that very thing of going into hell and not come back, might be called
on parade it would be a big procession. Yet not of grief-stricken or
agonized men but they who walk with fine, clear, steady eyes, and
countenances wonderfully cleansed.
To move a little ahead of that day in a then fast-approaching October
when the first twenty-thousand of us sailed away to get into the big
muss, I’d like to tell a little story of the only larrikin I know of
who fell flatly down on his job.
They had made him, to his fierce disgust, the Lord high keeper of a
carrier pigeon. He was a person who wanted to get into the fight--Anzac
for Boche, yes, two Boches or three. But here he had been made
custodian of the carrier pigeon. He had never had a chance at a Boche.
He must trail his officer at the rear of charging men. He must have the
pigeon in its little box ready, so that should the officer command, the
pigeon could have a neat little message as to reinforcements or success
tied to his little leg, be released from the box when he would shoot
up straight as an arrow above the roar and smoke of battle and home
his way to the rear, dropping into a box at the commandant’s trench
or dug-out station and when he dropped into the box causing a very
sharp toned little bell to ring--a tone so sharp as to cut through the
thunder of guns.
Well, one night on such a charge the officer missed his larrikin and
not long afterward the pigeon for whom the larrikin had so long been
valet, plopped into his little box at the commandant’s dug-out, making
the sharp gong clang incisively. The battle was roaring fearfully, but
the commandant got the ring, retrieved the pigeon, slipped the little
message roll off its slender leg, spread the message, swore first and
then laughed.
“What is it?” his aide asked eagerly.
“I should,” said the commandant, “have him arrested and shot, but I
don’t think I will.”
“Who?”
“Capt. ----’s larrikin.”
“Why?”
“Look at the message he’s sent by the pigeon.”
The aide read a message written in the heat of the engagement, but with
the stencil-neatness that larrikins acquire in the military schools:
“I am tired of carrying this dam bird and have gone into the fite.”
No signature.