No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  In the trenches men lived like rabbits, the mud walls pitted with the little holes where they slept – or tried to sleep. These provided earthen benches, not long enough for a grown man to lie down, but of a size sufficient for him to cram his body into shelter. At night the trenches, from above, would have presented a strange sight, like a grotto illumined by thousands of pale glow-worms. The men improvised candles, half-filling kerosene-tin lids with fat and dirt, and in the middle fashioning wicks of twisted rag soaked in grease. These fluttering little candles, evil-smelling and burning with a spluttering bluish flame, were the only trench lights after dark on Gallipoli.

  In the morning the troops were issued a dixie of water to each man – about two-and-a-half cups – from which they could shave, wash, and make themselves a cup of tea. A grimy towel served months long for wiping faces and bodies. It was hot on Gallipoli.

  ‘Aw, hell!’ said Fleshy superbly. ‘It’s only dirty chaps that bloody well need to wash.’And he tilted the dixie to his lips.

  ‘And it’s only scrubs go shaving themselves,’ added Starkie.

  Thereafter, Disraeli’s maxim that water is good only for washing with was disregarded in the trenches. The men drank their water issue and let hygiene go where it belongs in wartime. Not that you could call the water drinkable. There were two wells between the trenches and the beach, but both were reputed to be poisoned by the Turks – which left the New Zealand trenches with the chlorinated beach water-tanks to draw upon. The water was carted up in benzine tins, and the men drank shandies of chlorinated lime, benzine, and water. For the rest, they were issued biscuit, bully beef, cheese – they didn’t know where the cheese came from, but some of them had a pretty fair idea; jam – instantly covered with swarms of black flies; blocks of black seaweed-like pipe-tobacco known as “;Arf a Mo”, and an amplitude of cigarettes – Red Hussars, Beeswing, Havelock, Gold Flake, Auros, and Woodbines. The boys used to get a real smoke by tying five Woodbines together and puffing them in a bundle.

  There were – besides the voices of the guns – two inevitable sounds in the trenches: the yells of the muleteers, driving their stubborn little grey mokes up Mule Gully under cover of darkness; and the long-drawn-out floating cry from the Turkish trenches: ‘Allah, Allah, il Allah’. The Turks – all furnished with fine leather equipment from German stores, muffled up in balaclavas, scarves, and mittens pulled over grey uniforms – came over the top with that great cry of ‘Allah!’When, after dark, their wounded and dying lay out on the Gallipoli hills, all night long the same cry would rattle up to the British trenches – groans of ‘Allah’, from lips that would never taste the cup of life again.

  On the second morning the survivors from the Redwing were taken out into No Man’s Land as a burying-party. For this they were stripped of their uniforms, donned khaki shorts and singlets, and went armed with oiled sheets. The purpose of this they saw when they got to No Man’s Land, each party breaking off under charge of an officer.

  A few men found on No Man’s Land were still alive. They were not always lucky. Some were stone blind and crazy with gun-flashes, others crawled near, leg or flesh wounds rotting after a night’s exposure.

  But the dead who waited in No Man’s Land didn’t look like dead, as the men who came to them now had thought of death. From a distance of a few yards, the bodies, lying in queer huddled attitudes, appeared to have something monstrously amiss with them. Then the burying-party, white-faced, realized that twenty-four hours of the Gallipoli sun had caused each body to swell enormously – until the great threatening carcases were three times the size of a man, and their skins had the bursting blackness of grapes. It was impossible to recognize features or expression in that hideously puffed and contorted blackness.

  And how they had died! – some ripped to pieces by shrapnel – some of them in fragments; others having crept from the place of death to the hollow of some stunted green shrub, their arms crooked round the searching brown roots as though in a passionate, useless plea for the earth’s protection against their enemies. Here and there one had found shade enough to escape some part of the disfigurement caused by the pitiless sun; and on these faces such a story was written as nobody on earth will ever dare to tell until the graves give up their dead. The Tommies from the next hill had been over in attack, and some of them lay here like the bodies of dead children, their pinched, sharp-featured little London faces white and beautifully calm. Sometimes the dead man bore only the blue seal of the bullet wound on head or breast, and the boys called that ‘the mercy death’. Sometimes a man’s tunic was torn open where he had clutched at it with striving hands, and revealed along his swollen body a line like a row of nails driven into his flesh – the mark of the machine-gun’s killing.

  The burying-party, in squads of four and five, unrolled their oiled sheets and spread them on the ground. Then they lifted or rolled on the sheets the bodies of the slain. Dissolution had overtaken many of them; and as they were lifted their heads fell back in the sunlight, showing blackened mouth and throat, gaping nostrils, as caves for the little crawling life-in-death of ants and maggots. When they were rolled on the sheets the foul air which had gathered in their grotesquely gigantic bodies came out of their throats in one appalling groan, as though in that protest the dead soldier had told all the agony and outrage of his taking-off. The stench of that deathly gas struck into the senses of the burying-party.

  Some of the living and moving men – mere boys of sixteen and seventeen – sweated like horses, and tears ran down their white cheeks.

  Starkie heard Paddy Bridgeman groan, ‘Ah, blessed Mother of God – fine big men the one day, the next fly-blown and rotten!’

  Holes were pitted in the Gallipoli hills, dug with the men’s pickaxes. Then the dead were rolled in from the oil-sheets, ten or twelve men to a grave, the faces of some lying against the boots of others in a confusion of death. The living men who dug those common graves stood retching with sickness as they shovelled earth, brown and merciful, over the faces of the dead.

  The burying-party were marched back to their trenches and crawled into the dug-outs. An old hand tapped Starkie on the shoulder.

  ‘Cup of tea, mate?’

  Starkie looked at the man for a moment. Then he poured the tea into the mud of the trench. He was sick throughout the night.

  In less than a month the men thought nothing of the burying-parties, and so little of the corpses on No Man’s Land that money-belts were unbuckled as the rotting corpses were rolled into the pits of death.

  It was only afterwards – after the War; after that outrageous libel on the normality of the human mind had been, for the time, dragged away – that every twisted limb, every blackened face waiting in those gullies, came back into memory once again, and for ever repeated the protest the tortured body uttered after its death.

  In the trenches everyone was dirty and lousy – ‘five hundred’ and louse-catching were the major sports of Gallipoli – but the lice were objected to considerably less than the swarming black flies. Sometimes the fighting between Turk and British trenches was like a dramatic, enthralling, and hideous scene shown in a great green-and-chocolatecoloured amphitheatre. From the apex of their trenches the Otago men saw a party of Turks blown sixty or seventy feet into the air above their fortified hill, grotesque little marionette figures violently jerked skyward by the unseen hands of death.

  The Turkish trenches curved in circular formation around their hill. Their aerial torpedoes came flaring over the British lines, looking like big tin canisters with six-foot tails. Little flanges kept these missiles straight, and when they struck earth there was an enormous concussion. The English lyddite shells made more row than any of the other fireworks, and Otago was supplied with Japanese lyddite shells – deadly little blackberries to be fired from the trench-mortars. But the British artillery was a very poor second compared with Johnny Turk’s, and barrage was left for the most part to the ghostly grey shapes of the men-of-war riding at anchor along the
coast.

  They witnessed from their trenches the attack on Suvla Bay, about five miles off, across flat land broken by the cone of Chocolate Hill – a patch of brown in a green land. The Tommies attacked three times, barrage whining and splintering from both sides. The advance and retreat of the little figures was a scene in a melodrama. At the second attack, the Turks, reinforced, chased the Tommies back down the Gully. The third assault drove the Turks out of their position. The attack in all took about twenty-five minutes, and an advance of thirty yards was made by the English troops. When it was over, hundreds of corpses and wounded men – limbless, gashed and slashed and blown to pieces – lay where they had fallen. The blue flashes of the shellfire continued for a while after the main attack. The concussion rang all night long in the soldiers’ ears. In the morning they helped to bury the Tommies. It didn’t greatly distress them any more.

  Men in the British lines were going down with dysentery; but for the most part it was only known as dysentery in the case of the officers, just as nervous breakdowns were unheard of in the ranks. The ranker got two little white number nines from King, the doctor’s assistant. Number nines were used to cure the troops of headache, heartache, stomachache, malingering, laziness, cuts, scabies, shell-shock, and dysentery, and on the whole acted fairly well. But the bad cases hadn’t a chance, the disease worked in them too quickly. If you were dying of dysentery, you were pulled out after medical parade and got your chance in the Lemnos Hospital. If you weren’t dying, it was a long time before the next parade came round. The men crept away into their dug-outs and bled to death. Their mates, coming round with a drop of soup for them, found them stiffened up in the rabbit-holes, just as they had stretched themselves on the cramped earthen benches.

  Night-patrol was a queer and furtive prowling in the pit of No Man’s Land. Starkie made one of a patrol a little after the Tommies drove back the Turks. With ten others he was taken to a hole in the trench and down into No Man’s Land. There was very little barbed wire on Gallipoli. Down in the throttle of the valley lay hundreds of Turks, many of them wounded men who had died after twenty-four hours’ exposure – the burning heat of the day, and at night the chill hand of the frosts. Every face on which a light flashed bore the blackness of death upon it. There were bodies piled up in heaps, like logs brought down the waters of a mill-race to lock in some nightmare dam. The ghastliness of this place and its unburied dead became a legend in the lines. The men christened it ‘Death Gully’.

  By and by there were rumours of an Australian officer lying out in No Man’s Land with a whole battalion’s money on his back, and so dead that he certainly couldn’t use it. Next morning Starkie took up Jack Frew’s bet, and crept out from the lines to have a go for it. He had almost reached the little figure pointed out as the late Australian Croesus when the Turk sniper spotted him. Then began a game of cat and mouse, with Starkie for mouse. His lucky star had landed him in a fold of ground behind a rock hummock. Move backwards or forwards, and the sniper splashed dirt into his face. The sniper played marbles round his head, the little jets of soil and pebbles hitting him every now and again just to remind him that he hadn’t been forgotten. The men in his own trench watched him through periscopes and yelled encouragement to him; but nobody formed a rescue-party, and Starkie didn’t blame them. He lay where he was, stiff as a ramrod, from ten in the morning until after dusk. Then he crawled back to the trenches on his stomach, the vision of the gilded corpse very dim indeed. ‘Money-belt? I think the Turks got it, eh?’

  Rifles were wrapped in blankets in the front line and inspected every little while by querulous officers who didn’t like anything about the troops’ kit and appearance. Captain Smythe, after one glance at Starkie’s rifle, told him he was a disgrace to Otago, no soldier, and a bloody pest. On this occasion he spoke truer than he knew. Starkie, injured, prepared to clean his rifle. Ten rounds were allowed for, and by mischance eleven had been thrust into the breech.

  ‘Never mind, Starkie; maybe he’s missed his bottle from the store-ship,’ murmured Paddy encouragingly.

  Starkie worked his rifle-lever, chucked out ten cartridges, shut the breech and, thinking it was empty, pulled the trigger to pull the block out. The rifle banged.

  Captain Smythe, his face beautifully patterned with gravel-rash, turned again and leapt at the horrified Starkie. ‘Did you try to do that? Did you try to do that?’

  Starkie swore by all a soldier’s gods that he hadn’t done it on purpose, and Captain Smythe called him a liar. In this particular instance he was wrong. But to the end of the War, Captain Smythe maintained that Starkie had tried to shoot him.

  Men from the Otago lines moved out on burial-party under Captain Hewitt, a tall and rangy disciplinarian who stood no nonsense. Some worked at gathering the dead, some at tipping the contents of the oiled sheets into the open graves. One corpse crumbled in Starkie’s arms. Round the decaying body was a money-belt, and in it twenty sovereigns and a half-sovereign, in English gold. Starkie shouted his discovery to Fleshy McLeod. Something cold and round touched him behind the ear. He turned, to find Captain Hewitt’s revolver nuzzling against his head.

  ‘Don’t you know that I could shoot you for looting?’ asked the grim voice of the Captain.

  Starkie after that followed instructions. He put the gold back into the money-belt. He got down into the grave, lifted out three of the blackened corpses, laid the soldier with the money-belt face down in the reeking, seeping soil. Then on the four bodies he piled nine more. As the last one rolled over from the oiled sheet into his arms it broke in two. For one hideous second he saw the grave, the dead men, his own body trapped in that cavern of putrefaction, just as they really were. Then Captain Hewitt saved him, shouting to him to tumble out and thank his stars he wasn’t in the Imperial Army, where corpse-robbers were shot on sight.

  It was tremendously important, on the way back to the trenches, that he should think of the gold in the money-belt and not of the corpses piled up above it. If you start thinking of the expression on a dead man’s swollen face, you being stowed away in a rabbit-hole where the next whirling, twisting fire-cracker coming down from heaven may be your own packet, what’s going to happen to you? Back in the Otago lines he told the story of the money-belt with a swagger.

  ‘Where’s he buried?’ demanded Paddy.

  ‘Hi, anyone know where a trumpet is?’ Fleshy McLeod chipped in.

  ‘What for a trumpet?’

  ‘I want to play the Angel Gabriel and make him hop up again.’

  ‘That one’ll do no more getting up in the morning. Christ, if you’d seen the face –’

  ‘Chuck it, Starkie! One face is the same as all the rest. What’s the use of a pile of gold to him? And half of us broke…’

  The last was truth. In their rabbit-warren they had nothing to do with their spare time but gamble. The slick hands gathered in every penny that came to the green-horns, and then the soldiers who had made a hit with Gippo girls were left with their last stakes – gold bangles filched from the ladies’ arms as ‘keepsakes’.

  In the evening Fleshy McLeod tapped Starkie on the shoulder.

  ‘Come on. I’ve got a new game.’

  ‘What’s its name?’

  ‘We call it raising the dead,’ said Fleshy grimly, and slid out of his corner in the trench. After a moment, Starkie passed a hand across a face dripping with sweat, and crept after him. They raised the dead.

  Wherever they put the gold from the dead man’s money-belt, on cards, or dice, it couldn’t go wrong. Even when chance gave them an hour or two to fleece the Australians, who as gamblers made the New Zealanders look like babes in swaddling-clothes, the twenty sovereigns and the half-sovereign came home bringing little friends with them. One day a Digger asked them where they got the gold, and they were injudicious enough to blab. After that their sovereigns were ruled out of the trench gambling-schools, the boys swearing that it was haunted gold. The Fourth Brigade of Australians barred their gold as well,
and from lording it over the rest with their clink of sovereigns they were driven back to the same old sixpenny throws. Between them they had chalked up a profit score of sixty pounds.

  The men still used periscopes in the trenches, and it was squinting through the tube one day that Starkie spotted the Turk sniper camouflaged by the scrub in No Man’s Land. None of the New Zealanders loved a sniper; and Starkie, remembering Goliath and a few more – also the way the Turk had dusted the seat of his own pants the day he went hunting the Australian gold-mine – liked him a lot less than most. The Turk sniper had made a mistake this time. He was within easy range of the Otago trench.

  Starkie was cat now, and he enjoyed it. His first bullet just clipped the grass in front of the sniper’s head; but the second one, before the Turk had time to break for cover, got him in the leg. The man tried to crawl away. Starkie sent little jets of soil up around him. He remembered a story which his father had told to frighten him a long time ago. A story of the Delaware way of killing a man with a small fire. This fire doesn’t have to be more than six inches high, just twigs and grasses, but you light it over very close to one side of a man’s head. Then you build the pile on the other side. Then lower down…

  A man in the trenches cried, ‘Stop it, you dirty Hun!’ Other voices began to protest. Then a voice Starkie knew said from behind him, ‘Give me that gun.’ He slewed round to see Captain Dombey, and Captain Dombey wouldn’t take no for an answer. He got the gun and stepped up on the parapet to finish off the wounded Turk sniper. Everyone knew he was one of the best rifle-shots in New Zealand.