THE BAND OF BROTHERS
An Australian officer had been telling me of the remarkable bravery
of two men of his company, and I asked the natural question: "Did you
report them for recognition?" "No," was the answer. "They did no more
than their duty; no more than any other two of my men would have done
in similar circumstances."
The feeling that underlay that reply cuts far deeper than the award
of crosses and orders. It proclaims the Australasians for what they
are, a band of devoted brothers, fighting for something far dearer
to them than public recognition. I will allow the same officer to
tell what kind of men they were, and to describe the mutual love and
respect that animated them as a band in the worst of their days in
Gallipoli. He said:--
"The Australian soldier is often said to be lacking in discipline.
Well, it all depends what you call discipline. Let me give you an
example. When we landed the men were ordered to advance with fixed
bayonets and do the work with the cold steel. They were not to fire
unless it was absolutely necessary. Days afterwards we found some of
our men out in the bad country around Quinn's Post dead with their
rifles beside them; the bayonets fixed and not a round fired. They
had obeyed orders until the last, because they were good orders. They
must have had innumerable temptations to loose off their rifles, but
they died like soldiers with red-tipped bayonets and clean barrels. I
call that discipline.
"On August 7 our fellows were relieved in the firing line by a
draft of Kitchener's men. The scrub around was stiff with snipers,
all eager to pick off an officer or two for choice. Yet here were
these chaps saluting every officer who looked at them; saluting like
clockwork. Our major is a peppery chap who rose from the ranks in the
African war. 'What the blue fire do you mean by it?' he roared at one
of the 'Kitchener's.' 'Do you want to have me killed?' They simply
couldn't understand him. Now you may call that discipline, but I do
not. I call it rank foolishness, and worse.
"The reputation of the major was that he never threw away a life and
never risked his own unnecessarily. Yet he was always risking his
own, and the men would follow him anywhere. He had only to speak to
get the most implicit obedience. One day he said, 'Look here, men!
Some English staff officers are coming to see you this afternoon.
Shave yourselves and try to look smart if you can. And, for Heaven's
sake, don't call me Alf.' My word, they did him proud that day.
"I see some of them now, with their hard faces shaded by their
slouched hats, and I remember them a grousing, cursing crowd in the
transport, and I think to myself, 'Can these be the uncomplaining,
unselfish, God-fearing heroes I fought with at Courtney's Post?'
I tell you that battle turned those fellows' best side outermost.
Having seen their best side I can never pay any attention to the
other side of them as long as I live. They made me proud to belong to
the same race as they, and more than proud to be entrusted with the
command of such splendid men.
"Their bravery had as many facets as a well-cut diamond. But the
side I admired most was their sheer grit. The first five days in the
firing line they had no sleep at all, and were fighting every minute
of the time. They had no food except some dirty water and a few hard
biscuits. On the evening of the fifth day the C.O. came into the
trench and said, 'Boys, you've stuck it splendidly, and now you're
going to be relieved. I've got you some hot tea that will come round
in a minute or two, and shortly after you will be relieved.' And they
answered, 'Only get us some tea, sir, and we'll stick it as long as
you like.'
"Their hard, stern-lipped faces will never more blind me to the
big, soft hearts they mask so effectually. One day I was resting in
a bit of a dug-out, sopping wet, shaking with a feverish cold, no
greatcoat or blanket or cover of any kind. I was not feeling very
good. A great big fellow went toiling up the hill, pulling himself
from one tree to the other by the branches, the only way to get up.
He had got some way past me when he caught sight of me. I suppose
I looked very wretched. Back he came with the good word, 'Feeling
knocked out, matey?' asks he. 'Never mind, you buck up and ---- Oh, I
beg pardon, sir.' A day or two later he came up to me and again began
to apologize. To apologize, when he had done me more good than I had
imagined anything short of a quick and painless death could have done!
"We had a young subaltern from Duntroon College, as gallant a boy as
ever looked death in the face, and that he did every hour of the day
and night for weeks. He commanded men old enough to be his father,
and he was the darling of their hearts. One day the inevitable
happened and he went down (to the sea front) with a big hole in him.
Some days afterwards his men were going back to rest camp and they
came to me to inquire after him. I can see them now, half a score of
as unsavoury-looking ruffians as ever could be seen. Their faces were
shaggy with two weeks' beard and their eyes were red and bulging with
unintermittent vigils. They had cheated death for yet another week.
And the tears ran down their cheeks as they begged to know if 'there
was any chance for the Boy.' Men like that stir your innermost fibre.
"I have seen those men shepherding that boy in the trenches in all
sorts of ways. I have seen them standing between him and the place
from where the rifle fire was coming and he did not know it. One man,
to my certain knowledge, was hit that way. I charged him with it in
the dug-out--he was not badly wounded--and he gave me the lie in
the most emphatic Australian fashion. I don't know what discipline
demanded of me, but I do know that I shook hands and whispered to him
that I would never tell the boy. And he grinned and winked like the
jolly old bushman he was.
"Some of them were pretty rough, but it is wonderful how they yield
to the refining fire of battle. There was one trench where the
language was pretty sulphurous. One day they lost their lieutenant,
a great favourite, by a shell which wounded him mortally and kicked
a lot of sandbags on top of him. The men set to work like maniacs,
pulling away the sandbags and cursing horribly. He heard them and
said, 'Don't swear, men; that does no good.' They were his last
words. It is a fact that an oath in that trench was a worse crime
than cowardice from that day forward.
"The best laugh we had for six weeks came out of the lurid language
used by Tommy Cornstalk. Our post was at the head of a deep gully
between two high hills and there were places in that gully where the
weirdest echoes lived. A few words spoken at one of these spots would
ring through the hills for a minute after and eventually die away in
a ghostly whisper. After the great armistice near the end of May we
had good reason to know that the enemy had been using their eyes to
some purpose. They had new lines of fire, and places that were safe
before the armistice were deadly dangerous afterwards. I suppose that
is part of the game of war.
"While the armistice was on two platoons were down in the rest camp,
and when they came back none had told the men of the altered state of
affairs. Next morning two of these fellows were basking in the sun
on the hillside, drinking hot tea and smoking. As far as they knew
the place was quite safe. I was just going to call out to them, when
the first bullet arrived. It kicked up a great patch of dust between
them. Both men jumped down simultaneously, a drop of 20 feet, and as
they jumped both made the same emphatic remark. The echoes took it
up and passed it along in a sort of monotonous repetition. We stood
spellbound to hear the immortal hills of Gallipoli repeating to one
another the round oaths of the Australian backblocks in a shocked
whisper.
"When it was all over it was like the curtain going down on an
excruciatingly funny scene in a theatre. The men were all strung
very high by the events through which they had lived, and they gave
themselves up to laughter that was almost hysterical. In the middle
of it the Turks in the trench opposite began to blaze away as if
cartridges cost nothing, and that made us laugh harder than ever.
We held our sides and yelled. An hour afterwards you could see men
wiping the tears from their cheeks and thumping their mates on the
back, and telling them not to be blooming fools. Then they would all
start over again.
"We had a good many brothers in our battalion, and it was touching
to see the anxiety of the elders for their younger brothers. One
fellow was a signalman, and if I say that the casualty average among
signalmen was 100 per cent., I am guilty of only the slightest
exaggeration. His young brother was about the youngest man there,
and we had him in a place where he was as safe as possible, in such
circumstances. I used to hear this fellow come in at night from his
signalling work, where his life wasn't worth an hour's purchase, and
the first thing he would say was always: 'Is Hal all right?' I tell
you he would wring my heart. I used to lie in my dug-out waiting for
that question and fearing I would not hear it. For it was not Hal
that I was worrying about.
"I remember the last service the battalion had before we landed. We
were steaming past Cape Helles to Anzac, the untried soldiers of a
new country preparing for our first battle ordeal. The warships were
roaring together to cover the British landing at Cape Helles, and
the padre gathered the men together for a simple service and talk.
One thing he told them that sank in. The band, who were also the
stretcher-bearers, had come in for a lot of chaff, as non-combatants.
'And the time is at hand,' says the padre, 'when you'll want to
bite off your tongues for every idle word you've said to the band.'
If ever words of man came true those words did. Ask any Australian
who were the bravest men at Anzac, and you are sure to get the
unhesitating answer, 'The stretcher-bearers.'
"I have seen them carrying wounded men down those hills up which we
pulled ourselves by ropes passed from tree to tree. The bullets were
spitting all around them, and they were checking and going slow,
their only concern being not to shake the tortured man they were
carrying. I know an officer whom they carried down through shell
fire, and every time they heard a shell coming these two men put
down the stretcher and threw themselves across his body to protect
him from the shrapnel. The proportion of their dead and wounded in
the casualty lists shows how these non-combatants did their work.
Jokes about the band are not popular any longer; they never were very
funny."
Perhaps the most famous of all the stretcher-bearers at Anzac was
the ubiquitous hero known to every Australasian there as the Man
with the Donkey. They were a quaint couple. The man was a 6 ft.
Australian, hard-bitten and active. His gaunt profile spoke of wide
experience of hard struggles in rough places. The donkey was a little
mouse-coloured animal, no taller than a Newfoundland dog. His master
called him Abdul. The man seemed to know by intuition every twist
and slope of the tortuous valleys of Sari Bair. The donkey was a
patient, sure-footed ally, with a capacity for bearing loads out of
all proportion to his size.
Some days they would bring in as many as twelve or fifteen men,
gathered at infinite risk in the dangerous broken country around
far-out Quinn's Post. Every trip saw them face the terrors of the
Valley of Death; here all day and all night the air sang with the
bullets from the Turkish snipers hidden on Dead Man's Ridge. Their
partnership began on the second day of occupation of the Anzac zone
of Gallipoli. The man had carried two heavy men in succession down
the awful slopes of Shrapnel Gully and through the Valley of Death.
His eye lit on the donkey. "I'll take this chap with me next trip,"
he said, and from that time the pair were inseparable.
When the enfilading fire down the valley was at its worst and orders
were posted that the ambulance men must not go out, the Man and the
Donkey continued placidly at their work. At times they held trenches
of hundreds of men spellbound, just to see them at their work. Their
quarry lay motionless in an open patch, in easy range of a dozen
Turkish rifles. Patiently the little donkey waited under cover, while
the man crawled through the thick scrub until he got within striking
distance. Then a lightning dash, and he had the wounded man on his
back and was making for cover again. In those fierce seconds he
always seemed to bear a charmed life.
Once in cover he tended his charge with quick, skilful movements. "He
had hands like a woman's," said one who thinks he owes his life to
the man and the donkey. Then the limp form was balanced across the
back of the patient animal, and, with a slap on its back and the Arab
donkey-boy's cry of "Gee," the man started off for the beach, the
donkey trotting unruffled by his side.
For a month and more they continued their work. No one kept count of
the number of wounded men they brought back from the firing line.
One morning the dressers at the station near the dangerous turn in
the valley called "The Pump" saw them go past, and shouted a warning
to the man. The Turks up on Dead Man's Ridge were very busy that
day; moreover, a machine-gun was turned on a dangerous part of the
valley path. The man replied to the warning with a wave of his hand.
Later he was seen returning, the donkey laden with one wounded man
and the man carrying another. As they reached the dangerous turn the
machine-gun rattled out, and the man fell with a bullet through his
heart. The donkey walked unscathed into safety.
There was a hush through the Australian trenches that night, when the
news went round that the Man with the Donkey had "got it."
His grave bears the rough inscription:--
"Sacred to the memory of Private W. Simpson, of the Third Field
Ambulance, West Australia."
But if you wish an Australian to tell you his story, you must ask for
the Man with the Donkey.
A TRIBUTE TO THE TURK