AN ANZAC’S ADVENTURES
[ “When the German blood-stained Eagle and its vulture-hearted Chief
Made war on little Belgium, they held the fond belief
The British Lion had grown too tame and dared not interfere;
But when old England called the roll, Australia answered, ‘Here!’”
That is part of one of the marching songs of the Anzacs, and it will go
down to history as surely as “John Brown’s Body” has descended to our
own generation. It was written for a particular Australian battalion,
but it applies to all the glorious regiments that have won immortality
in Gallipoli. This Anzac’s story shows how the sons of the Empire
rallied to the call of the Motherland, and helped so much to carry out
that unexampled undertaking in the Dardanelles of which our descendants
alone can be the fairest judges. The narrator is Trooper Rupert
Henderson, of the 6th Australian Light Horse.]
I was a sheep overseer when I joined the Australian Light Horse. Before
that I was a jackaroo on a twenty-thousand acre station. What is a
jackaroo? Well, a cross between a kangaroo and a wallaroo, and applied
to a man, it means that he does anything that comes along. My boss’s
station was twenty-five miles from the nearest town; but that’s nothing
of a distance in Australia, and we used to have some merry parties when
we had a day off, and drove or rode to the town for a change. And it
was to the town that we swarmed just after the war broke out--bosses
and men, rich and poor. A fine young fellow, a squatter’s son, Mr.
David McCulloch, wrote and asked me to join the Light Horse, and I
gladly did. He tried hard to come, too, but the doctor would not pass
him, and to his intense disappointment he was rejected. He came to
see me twice while I was training, and both times he tried to pass;
but could not get through. That was the spirit which was shown when
the call came out to us to go and fight the Germans and the Turks, or
anybody else that British troops were up against.
[Illustration:
_To face p. 62._
ANZACS AT SUVLA BAY.]
We went into camp at Rosebery Park, Sydney, which is a racecourse. The
1st Light Horse had to sleep in the stables; but we were comfortably
camped. The hard floors of the stables were very different from the
comfortable beds which had been left; but the fellows were mostly
horsemen from the country and didn’t mind, because they were used to
roughing it.
Horses, saddles, equipment and uniforms were issued to us, and we were
soon doing horse and foot drill. After six weeks of this training we
went to Holdsworthy, on the George’s River, in the bush country. Snakes
of all sorts swarm there--tiger snakes, black snakes, copperheads and
deaf adders, all poisonous, as well as the carpet snakes, which are
sometimes twenty feet long. They are gorgeous things, and look like
bright-coloured carpets. They are non-poisonous, and our chaps let
them coil round their necks and do all sorts of things. At this place
there was the German internment camp, and already there were plenty of
both military and civilian prisoners. The camp was not cleared--it was
just barbed wire for a guard camp--but the country round it was being
cleared.
We were very lucky in our training, and afterwards, too, because we
were under Colonel Cox--“Fighting Charlie,” we called him--who had seen
service in South Africa, and was a fine soldier.
It was midsummer and harvest-time when, on December 17th, we left
Holdsworthy for Sydney, and we had the remarkable experience of going
through three summers in one year. We started with our own, which we
left in the tropics, when we got to Egypt it was the Egyptian summer,
and when we landed at the Dardanelles it was the Gallipoli summer.
In Australia, of course, everything had given place to the war, and
army lorries and so on had cut the roads up frightfully. They were full
of ruts and holes and deep in dust; but luckily a storm came on, and
the rain made it possible for us to travel in comfort.
I shall never forget that march to the transport to embark. We marched
in the night-time, but all along the route the people were waiting for
us. Nobody seemed to have gone to bed, and as we marched along they
cheered us and wished us luck. The people gave us drinks, and fruit,
and handkerchiefs, and other souvenirs. It was a wonderful and moving
sight, and the people kept it up right away to the Woolloomooloo Wharf
at Sydney, where we embarked on board the White Star liner _Suevic_.
We lay in harbour from Sunday morning till Monday afternoon. I was on
guard all the time. We had plenty of visitors, some of them trying to
get chaps out for a last spell ashore; but that had to be stopped, of
course, and the officers sent the men down to stables. The horses of my
squadron, C, were below; but the other squadrons had their horses on
deck.
I am not going to dwell on the last parting and send-off. We steamed
away, and on Christmas Day we were six days out and two days’ sail from
Albany, Western Australia. When we got there we picked up a magnificent
fleet of sixteen transports and the Australian submarine AE2, which
was afterwards lost. Then the war seemed to be really with us, the
Anzacs, the famous word which is formed of the initials of the words
“Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.”
We came through Suez and Port Said, and did not go off the boats till
we got to Alexandria. We stayed a night at Ismailia, and there, as
the beginning of our fighting with the Turks, we came under their
fire, or rather, we heard it. This made us feel that we were getting
into things, and we listened with immense interest to the boom of the
guns. At the same time we piled up our ship with bales of hay, as a
protection, and mounted machine-guns, and fervently hoped that the
Turks would come on and give us a chance against them; but we were not
molested. They did not interfere with us then, but we soon had plenty
to do with them.
It was March 31st when C Squadron disembarked at Alexandria and got
into the train, with Major White in charge. We went to Cairo, and
then unloaded our horses and took them, walking, to a place ten miles
outside the city; and there, practically in the desert, we camped, and
for three months we had steady mounted drill, which made us as fit as
fiddles. We had real dry heat, and no rain, all the time; but this did
not trouble us, being Australians, and used to droughts. But we were
glad when, at the end of the three months, the order came for us to
pack up our kits and leave for the Dardanelles. We had the infantry
kit served out to us, and in the middle of May we were back in Cairo,
where we saw a lot of our chaps who had come back wounded from the
Dardanelles. We found ourselves once more at Alexandria; and then, in
two days we were at the Dardanelles, of which we had heard and talked
so much, and where we had been so eager to go.
We had left Egypt on a peaceful Sunday afternoon; now we were in the
very thick of a wonderful and exciting war, for we were being towed
ashore in pinnaces, each holding about 250 men--half the regiment--and
were under heavy fire. Gunboats were booming away, shells were
bursting, and aeroplanes were sweeping about the sky. All these things
gave us a good idea of what was going on.
How did we take it, not being used to the business? Well, the chaps
sat in the pinnaces and looked at one another, to see how they stood
it. We were landing in broad daylight, the boats were packed, bullets
were dropping all around us, sending nasty little spits of water up;
and bullets from rifles and machine-guns were whizzing over our heads.
I was watching the impression it was having on the others. Some of our
chaps were wearing war medals, and I made up my mind to carry on as
they were doing. If they took it all right, so would I.
They _did_ take it all right.
As the bullets dropped round us I heard such remarks as, “By Jove! If
that hit a fellow it would hurt him!” Then men would laugh.
Our colonel--I was sitting near him in the pinnace--looked stern and
calm. He knew better than most of us what it meant.
We were lucky in our landing, for we had no casualties; but a lot of
the other troops who were landing at the same time and in the same way
were picked off. We lay off till one of the naval boats got alongside.
We all tumbled into her and were taken to the beach for landing.
The Turks saw us landing and gave us five shells, but these did not
hurt anybody. We were told to hurry up; but we didn’t need telling to
do that, and as soon as the boat was at the shore we hopped on to a
little wharf and found ourselves in the thick of some Indians who were
unloading sheep. So little did we need telling to hurry up, that I well
remember how we rushed through the sheep in our eagerness to get to
shelter.
We were in fine spirits and made the best of it; but as soon as we
landed we realised what we were in for. A shell came and burst amongst
a fatigue party, knocking the men about badly and wounding half a
dozen, but luckily not killing anybody. This showed us how necessary
it was to take cover, and when we had got some distance up the heights
and were ordered to dig in, we set to work with a will, and we readily
obeyed the order to keep our heads well down, as the shrapnel was
bursting over the top of us.
Our regiment was keeping well together. The colonel was in a gulley
just below me when a shell burst over us. It seemed to be high, and
we did not realise the danger of such explosions. This shell seemed
to be harmless; but I soon discovered that a fragment or bullet of
it had struck the colonel in the leg. As this was the headquarters
the doctor was handy, and he attended to the colonel straight away,
and sent him to the beach on a stretcher. Two minutes afterwards, one
of the squadron clerks got shot with a shrapnel bullet. This also
happened near me, and I saw what happened to him. The bullet struck him
just by the right temple--he had the closest possible shave of instant
death--and carried the eye away. This chap was put out of action at
once, and was sent on to Malta. About ten days later he wrote to us
saying what rotten luck he had had. But he was a cheerful soul and made
the best of things, though he said, very truly, “I have only had a
one-eyed view of Malta!”
We got dug in. There were holes in front of us, about four feet deep,
with head covering, about two feet of earth, on top of us; but these
did not give much protection from shells that burst just overhead. Some
of the men filled empty biscuit-tins with earth and put them alongside
to protect their legs from stray and spent bullets, and these proved
very useful. When we had dug in we were ordered to eat our iron-rations
for tea; then, about eight o’clock, they called the regiment to fall
in, as the Turks were going to attack us. We stood up as reinforcements
at a place called Shrapnel Gulley--and well it deserved its name, as
we soon learned, for there were a terrible lot of casualties there,
especially amongst the fatigue parties which had to go to the beach for
water.
You will see that we were initiated straight away. We did not know the
danger of it at the time, and never thought that we should be so soon
put through it after landing. But it was astonishing to see how well
the chaps settled down to the business. We had been landed only a few
hours, and yet we were standing to arms, waiting for the Turks to come
on. We expected them with a rush, for we had been told that Enver Bey,
the Minister of War, had ordered that the Anzacs were to be thrown
into the sea. Well, we didn’t mean to be thrown.
We were standing on open ground. There were two very high hills, and
we were in the gulley at the bottom. Some of our troops were dug in on
the top of the hills, and the Turks were dug in in front of us, some of
them being not more than fifty yards away.
It was a pitch-dark night, and a nerve-racking job waiting for the
promised onslaught. Time passed and it seemed as if the Turks would
never come; but at three in the morning they let themselves loose.
The word was passed along--“The enemy is advancing in front!” and we
were all ordered to stand fast till two blasts of the whistle had been
sounded.
It was hard to make out anything in that inky blackness, even with the
eyes of bushmen; but we knew that the Turks had crawled out of their
trenches and that they were going to throw themselves upon us. Then
two shrill blasts struck the still night, and instantly there was a
fearful commotion, for the Turks hopped up from the ground and charged,
yelling and firing, and making all sorts of deafening noises, amongst
which we noticed a trumpeter doing his best to blow our own call of the
“Officers’ Mess.” They seemed to blow anything that came along, so as
to confuse us in the pitch darkness. And a startling business it was,
too, to peer into the blackness and see the figures of the Turks by the
light of the bursting shells and crackling rifles.
Never while I live shall I forget that fight in the first night we
were ashore in Gallipoli. We did our best to see what was going on by
looking through the pot-holes in the sandbags of the trenches, though
at night you could look over the tops of the parapets; but it was
little enough that we could make out in the darkness.
We had our magazines loaded and our bayonets fixed. The infantry
alongside were in “possies,” as we called them, holes dug in the
trenches to keep a man from being exposed. Two men were in each
“possy,” one firing and the other loading for him, so that a constant
fire was kept up. One of our fellows, terribly excited, had crawled up
on to the sandbags, and there he stood, just seen in the darkness by
the flashes of fire, for about ten minutes, when he was ordered down.
At this time I was a non-combatant, one of the stretcher-bearers, and
I was just standing, waiting for somebody to get hit; so I could see
everything that was going on. The shells were flying round all the
time, making a fearful noise, and an Indian battery above us was doing
good work. In a “possy” high above us were the machine-guns, and we
could see even in the darkness what havoc they were causing amongst the
enemy.
In the loud cries that arose I heard a Scotchman of our regiment shout,
“Here comes a big Turk with a brick in his hand!”
We peered into the blackness and saw a big fine Turk crawling on the
ground about five yards away, holding in his hand something that
looked like a brick. The machine-guns got him just as he jumped up.
The bullets fairly smothered him, and he dropped like a thousand of
bricks. Later on I had a good look at him, and found that the thing he
carried was not a brick but a bomb. He had no boots on, but his feet
were wrapped in cloth, so that he made no sound. He had managed to get
within ten paces of us.
The din quietened down as daylight came, which was about five o’clock.
We looked eagerly around us to see what had been done, and noticed the
dead Turks everywhere, many of them in clusters of half a dozen, just
as they had been mown down by our machine-guns. Later on we learned
that the number of the Turkish dead was 2000, so that the ground was
fairly strewn with bodies.
We were ordered back to our trenches, where we had breakfast and a
bit of rest; but at ten o’clock we were told to fall in again, as the
Turks were making another charge. The enemy did come on, but rather
half-heartedly, and they were repulsed without our aid. They had made
a fine and brave dash in the night, as we saw. They never got into our
trenches, but we were told that they had rushed in farther round, where
the New Zealanders were; but they had been bayoneted straight away.
In the afternoon the Turks put up a white flag and asked for an
armistice, to bury the dead.
A big old Turk walked towards us, and he was met by Captain R. J. A.
Massie, a famous Australian amateur champion, an all-round athlete
of splendid physique. The Turk was blindfolded and brought into
our trenches and then taken to headquarters, and after he had been
questioned an armistice was granted.
The firing ceased, and the Turks came out with all their
stretcher-bearers, and our stretcher-bearers and diggers went out, too,
and the burials went on--and not before they were necessary, for the
stenches were awful.
This sad work was being done, when our artillery observers noticed that
the Turks were bringing up guns and reinforcements from the gulley at
the back of our chaps, and we were ordered to come in.
That ended the armistice for the time, and the Turks at the back were
fired on and their little game stopped. Next morning there was another
armistice, for it was absolutely necessary to get on with the burials.
The atmosphere was almost unendurable, and, even on landing, the stench
from dead mules and so on was so horrible that it nearly made me
bilious.
On that second morning I was able to see that a lot of our chaps were
lying between our parapet and the Turks’ parapet. We made an exchange
of bodies, and having got our men’s identification discs, we buried
them in the small trenches, so that the fighting-places became graves.
All these things that I have told about happened within thirty hours
of our landing--and the fortune of war had sent some of the Anzacs to
their last resting-place and put others, wounded, on the list for home.
Men were sent off, their fighting careers ended, after having been in
the enemy’s country for only a few hours.
We were pretty philosophical over the business. I remember one of the
men in my squadron saying, “If your name’s on a bullet you’re going to
stop it.” Soon afterwards a four-point-seven got him.
The Turks used to fire like mad. It was astonishing to see how many
bullets they fired, but even at that early stage our men, when off
duty, were asleep and taking no notice of them.
At this time we were opposite Lone Pine, attached to the 4th Australian
Battalion as infantry. After the fighting we had exactly a month in
the trenches, and then relieved some infantry who had had three weeks
of solid fighting. We were relieved and went to a rest camp near Gaba
Tepi. We had seven days there, with a good deal of excitement one way
and another, and plenty of casualties, for we were being called out
every day.
It was rumoured that Achi Baba was going to fall, and we were ordered
into the firing-line as supports for the 5th Light Horse. The 5th were
going out in front to draw the Turks’ fire and keep reinforcements from
going down to Achi Baba. Some of the 6th and 7th Light Horse were to
stand by and act as reinforcements. My troop was in the firing-line.
The 5th hopped out right on the beach, and ran for Gaba Tepi under
cover of the ridges. The 7th got up on our left. We were in the middle.
A squadron of the 7th ran along under cover of the ridge, in the same
direction as the 5th. They went a good while without drawing the fire
of the Turks, who did not seem to notice them; but fire was opened at
last.
Still the advance continued, more cautiously now, our fellows crawling
when they could, for shelter. The Turks got a few lucky shells in
amongst the 5th, and the casualties began to come in.
There were some odd incidents.
Our sergeant was peering through a look-out with a pair of glasses, his
right hand being round them. Another sergeant said, “Let’s have a peep.”
Our sergeant pulled his head back and straightened himself, but still
held the glasses with his hand in front of the hole.
The other sergeant was just stepping up to take the glasses, when a
bullet came through the hole and went clean through the hand that
still held the glasses, putting our sergeant out of action. We took him
to the dressing-station, and he was not long before he was back in the
firing-line, which is more than would have happened if the sergeant had
been still bending down and had got the bullet in his head. He was a
nice chap--a station-manager from Queensland.
In about two hours volunteers were asked for to bring in wounded
Colonials from the front. There were a good many casualties by this
time, and plenty for the stretcher-bearers to do.
We got to two men who, we saw at once, were very badly wounded.
They were pretty well sheltered, and it was thought better to leave
them where they were for the present, and not try to move them. One
man had his foot blown off by shrapnel, and he was otherwise very
badly wounded. A stretcher-bearer had bound him up roughly and put a
tourniquet on to stop the bleeding; and another chap had carried him on
his back to shelter. Several of the stretcher-bearers were killed and
wounded at this time, but I do not think that the firing on them was
deliberate.
The other man was a trumpeter. He was a little chap, and we called him
“Scottie,” because he had gone out to Australia from Scotland. He was
wounded in the abdomen, and was in agony, but we managed to relieve his
suffering with half a grain of morphia. The flies were swarming and
were terribly troublesome. I tried to keep them off with a wet towel--I
had to wet it in salt water--so that they should not annoy him. I
noticed that his boots were torn, and I took them off. I then saw that
his legs had not been dressed--and he had been lying there for some
time. I put iodine on the wounds.
[Illustration:
_To face p. 74._
THE DARDANELLES: CARRYING WOUNDED TO A HOSPITAL SHIP.]
Scottie was rather cheery, and when the padre came up and said, “Well,
how are you?” he answered, “I’m feeling pretty good now.”
When the colonel went up to him, Scottie said, “I’m going to die!”
“Oh no, you’re not,” said the colonel. “You’ll get all right again.
Don’t let that worry you. You’ll soon be playing Christmas Calls for
us.”
To that Scottie made a reply which I shall never forget. “Yes,” he
said. “I _shall_ die! _I can smell ut!_” That was his real expression,
and I suppose he meant that he could smell death.
Scottie wanted the colonel to take charge of some little trinkets and
things: his pay-book, and a photograph of two children. “Give these to
the wife,” he said. Then he broke into “Annie Laurie,” and sang a verse
of it. He sang the song fairly well. It was a good attempt for a man in
the straits that he was in.
At six o’clock he died, and was buried the same night, after sundown,
at the place where we were, and that was a big cutting called Chatham’s
Post, named after one of the officers. It was a deep cutting in the
side of the hill. These two chaps were lying there on stretchers, and
it was very hard for a bullet to hit them. Scottie was just taken to
the back of the parade at the back of Chatham’s Post, a place called
Shrapnel Green. It was a green field when we first went, but it was
soon trodden down and made bare by gun and rifle fire. And there
Scottie was laid to rest.
From the burial we went back to the dressing-station and carried the
wounded trooper--Lane, they called him--down to the beach. The padre
asked Lane if he would like a “wad,” that is a pannikin, of tea, and
Lane said he would. I helped him to sit up, and I held the “wad” for
him. He drank the tea cheerfully, though he must have been in awful
agony. They took him along the beach. He did not say much, but never
complained. When he did speak it was to ask, “Who’s that lying there?”
or “How is he getting on?” He was the best I saw the whole time I was
there.
On the way to the beach there were wire entanglements, to stop the
Turkish patrols. The stretcher-bearers fell into the entanglements and
dropped Lane; but he never thought about himself. What he said was,
“Are _you_ hurt?” I am glad to say that he is here in England, like me,
and has pretty well got over it, though he has lost his foot. Seventeen
men were hit by the shell that knocked Lane out.
We settled down again to the fighting game with the Turks, who kept us
very lively, especially with a gun that we called “Beachy Bill.” This
gun played on the beach whenever there was a sign of our movements, and
it became a common thing to say, “Beachy Bill’s got somebody again.”
That Turkish gun caused more casualties than all the rest put together.
The monitors used to go for it, and I believe they bombarded it out
of existence more than once. A new gun was soon at work again, but to
us it was always “Beachy Bill.” When we first got to Gallipoli we did
not know the tricks of the trade, but everybody soon got fly, and that
helped us a lot in tackling “Beachy Bill” and lessening his bag.
There’s a lot more to say, but I will only tell you about one more
thing, and that is the blowing up of some Turks. Our trenches and those
of the Turks almost met in places, and bombs were thrown from one to
the other. That was a lively exchange of greetings, but it didn’t lead
to much. Something more definite was wanted, and so our people began to
dig a tunnel at a very narrow junction, so as to blow up the Turkish
trenches, and make our own trench-line straight, instead of being, as
it was, twisting and zigzag.
It was a real Turk hunt, and just the sort of work that our chaps
revelled in.
This affair, like most of our scraps, was done in the darkness, which
made it all the more thrilling. Well, we dug and sapped and tunnelled
towards the Turks, and when everything had been got ready, powder was
packed in sandbags and fuses were put to them. The deeper the sandbags
the worse the explosion.
All was ready at last. The powder-bags were packed, the fuses were lit,
and then the 11th and 12th Battalions began to finish the work which
the artillery had begun. The guns had started at five o’clock, they
went on booming till nine, then there was a fearful sound which was
louder than the loudest thunder I ever heard, accompanied by an immense
mass of red fire in the blackness of the night. I was two hundred yards
away, but the very earth on which I stood shook and shivered with the
upheaval.
As soon as the crash came our chaps hopped up and rushed the shattered
trenches. They found that a big crater had been made by the explosion,
and that most of the Turks had been stiffened. Those who were left were
either bayoneted or bombed. The Turks did not counter-attack that day.
They had had enough of it. We had a good few casualties, but it was
an effort that was worth while, because it showed that if we wanted
a place we could take it, and at any time we liked. I saw all this
very clearly, for I was going backward and forward all the time as a
stretcher-bearer.
The Turks gave us no chance and we gave them none; but at the same time
they did not do anything that I would call really dirty or out of the
way. A lot of them were fine fellows physically. Some of the Turkish
diggers we got as prisoners had no fighting gear on them at all. They
were just peasants who had been brought up to do the work.
At last I fell ill with dysentery and gastritis, and came home on a
huge hospital ship, with four thousand more sick and wounded soldiers.
We had a six days’ run to Southampton, and had just under sixty deaths
on board. They were buried at sea in batches, the biggest being
eleven--and very solemn it all was.
Now I have done; but I want to tell of just one more little thing that
happened here in England, where I have been in hospital, and where
people have been so good to us.
It was Christmas-time, and we were having a Sunday evening service in
hospital. We were asked what hymns we would like, and a chap spoke out
and said, “Let’s have
‘We plough the fields and scatter
The good seed on the land.’”
The parson was puzzled. He hardly thought we could, because it was
Christmas-time and this was a harvest hymn.
“And it’s harvest-time now at home in Australia,” the chap said.
So we had the good old hymn, and it took us back to home twelve
thousand miles away.
* * * * *
I think the Anzacs did what they set out to do.