Soldier Boy

by Anthony Hill

  ‘Pat Gorman of A Company … Dave Harris …’

  Men that Jim Martin had known and worked with. His stomach turned over. All the sensations of drowning – of spilling deeper and deeper into the darkness – swept over him once more.

  ‘Did you hear about the gold?’ another man was saying. ‘A bloke I know, one of the last off the Southland, told me about it …’

  ‘What gold?’

  ‘Thirty thousand pounds worth. Kept in two bullion boxes in the Paymaster’s cabin.’

  ‘Get away with you!’

  ‘Fair dinkum. Well, after the torpedo hit us, the Adjutant, Captain Wellington, put an armed guard on the cabin with orders to shoot. But in all the barney, one of the officers came back, talked his way past the guard, and went out with his two boxes of gold. He was just about to get into one of the boats, when Captain Wellington spotted him, pulled him back, and tore the living tripes out of him. Called him a effing English bastard and no gentleman neither, taking up precious boat space with gold instead of men …’

  ‘I dunno, Alf … He could have had your place next to me, with his gold. I wouldn’t have minded.’

  ‘You’d be no loss neither, digger …’

  They all laughed.

  ‘Thirty thousand quid, though … I s’pose he made them put it back …?’

  Later that night, one of the Neuralia’s lifeboats fell from the upper deck with an almighty crash!

  Nobody was hurt. But everyone woke up swearing and trembling. To a man, they were sure they’d been torpedoed again.

  Such was the state of their nerves.

  The havoc caused by the torpedo attack on the Southland delayed for some days the battalion’s departure to Gallipoli. Men left the ship with only the things they wore – which in some cases didn’t amount to much more than a vest and a pair of pants cut off at the knees. The army had to issue new clothing and equipment, and that took some organisation.

  The morning after their arrival at Mudros Bay, the survivors were transferred to the Transylvania. It was anchored alongside two of the world’s largest liners, the Aquitania and Mauritania, now being used as hospital ships. These liners were needed to help the military hospital on Lemnos cope with the legacy of wounded from the August fighting at Gallipoli, and the rapidly rising numbers of troops crippled by disease – by typhoid and dysentery – in the summer heat.

  Men of the 21st Battalion sorted themselves into their units, exchanging stories and listening with a proper sense of self-deprecation as the officers read a Special Order of the Day from the Anzac commander, General Birdwood, expressing admiration for their gallant behaviour.

  ‘All the troops of the Army Corps have heard with pride of the courage and discipline shown at the moment when the nerves of the bravest are liable to be so highly tried,’ the General said.

  Which was all very well. But fine words didn’t make up for the loss of so many individual treasures. Photos of wives and sweethearts, and farewell gifts. Letters from home (for those who, unlike Jim Martin, were lucky enough to get any). They didn’t make up for the fact that the army didn’t replace personal items like razors and combs, soap and pipes, and that the men – officers and other ranks alike – had to buy these things for themselves.

  Above all, nice compliments didn’t make up for the miserable food on the Transylvania. At Jim’s table, twenty-three men had to share eighteen sausages, each no more than two inches long.

  ‘I’d rather be back on the hospital ship,’ he said. Little knowing.

  On Sunday, at Church Parade, they held a service for Colonel Linton, buried now in Mudros Cemetery, and the thirty or so other personnel who had died or were missing, presumed drowned. The chaplain, Padre Stewart, received more private visits from the men in these past few days than hitherto. They were going shortly to Anzac. After the torpedo they knew they were brave and disciplined soldiers. But they also knew they were not immortal.

  Equipment salvaged from the Southland was brought aboard. It was remarkable just how much had been saved in their kit. Cec Hogan’s little book of Robbie Burns’s poems. Jim Martin’s paper streamer.

  ‘I thought you lost the picture of your missus, Alf.’

  ‘So did I, mate. But here she’s turned up … a bit water-damaged and frayed around the edges … but still, large as life …’

  ‘Ain’t you the lucky one!’

  And he was, too.

  The following morning, orders came that they were to pack up again, ready for the short trip to Gallipoli. Three days’ dry rations were issued. They were also given their allocation of live ammunition – ball ammunition. After months of exercising with blanks, using live bullets only at the practice range, the extra weight in their webbing pouches was surprisingly heavy. It wasn’t just the bullets themselves, but the implications of all that they carried.

  ‘It’s the real thing now, Jimmy boy,’ said his mate, Cec Hogan. ‘Unless they drown us first.’

  Images of the Southland still haunted the dark corners of their minds. Indeed, when the 7th Brigade arrived in harbour the next day, and the battalion was transferred to the transport Abassieh, life jackets had to be worn at all times.

  They left Mudros Bay late that afternoon, 7 September. As they were passing the Southland, still beached like a whale, the old ship saluted them with blasts on her siren – and kept it up until they were well through the heads.

  11: GALLIPOLI

  Dusk was falling as they rounded the northern cape of Lemnos and steered for Imbros, the small island only ten miles off Anzac. Someone started to sing – a good old sing-song was becoming part of their tradition. ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ and ‘Daisy,’ and a chorus of the battalion song …

  Yes, thrust for the old Twenty-first,

  Yes, thrust for the bold Twenty-first,

  With rifle and bayonet always ready

  We stand as the proud Twenty-first.

  Though with the gathering darkness they realised that, when next the sun rose, Turkish rifles and bayonets would also be ready to thrust against them. The singing began to peter out. Through the silence came the deep, regular boom of heavy guns.

  ‘Battleships,’ said Sergeant Trevascus, who had been in the Boer War. ‘Giving old Abdul a bit of a pounding.’

  ‘Not far then, Sarge,’ said Jim, as the dark shape of Imbros slipped by on the port side. His voice trembled a little: but it was night now, and the breeze was cold off the sea.

  ‘Not far, son,’ said Bill Trevascus. He was to rise to the rank of Lieutenant and return home from France, when the war was over, with a Distinguished Conduct Medal and Bar.

  All ship lights except the masthead light were doused. Closer they moved into the waters off Anzac, every eye straining and every ear alert. From time to time came the roar and flash of artillery, lighting the landmass rising before them. A destroyer near by trained its searchlight on a headland, shelling a Turkish position. A white flare exploded on the horizon and they saw, in silhouette, the cliffs and ridges of Gallipoli against the night sky.

  The anchor chain ran out with a clatter. The battalion waited for the boats to take them ashore. Nobody was speaking very much. Men were smoking, alone with their own thoughts, watching and listening for this first time to the sounds of war.

  From the solid darkness flashed small lights.

  ‘They’re winking just like the stars,’ murmured Cec Hogan.

  Moments later came a distant report!

  ‘More like penny bungers let off at Glenferrie oval on Empire night,’ replied Jim, remembering.

  But then they felt movement in the air, and heard things plopping into the sea.

  ‘What’s that, Sarge?’ asked Bill Hine, of A Company.

  ‘Bullets,’ replied Sergeant Trevascus, thinking of those nights on the South African veldt. ‘Spent bullets from the Turkish trenches, fired over the top of our blokes and dropping down here. Watch it, though, boys. They can still do damage.’

  A steam launch drew a
longside. The battalion began to disembark, one unit at a time ferried ashore. It took some hours to complete. Jim’s platoon was among the last to leave the Abassieh. It was after 0200 before they landed at the jetty – Watson’s Pier – at Anzac Cove, and formed up in silence on the beach.

  A guide led them past crates of ammunition and supplies, past stacks of fodder for the horses and mules, over a rise and into Shrapnel Gully leading to the ridges above. It was hard enough going in the unfamiliar darkness, without carrying the extra weight of full packs. Up and up. Shrapnel Gully became Monash Valley, named after Colonel John Monash, commanding the 4th Brigade.

  Still they climbed. Until, at last, they turned into a side gully and were told they could take off their packs and rest until sun up.

  Some rest! They’d hardly unrolled their blankets when along came Major Harris and said they’d all have to move again.

  ‘Our position is rather exposed, I’m afraid. We’re right in the line of fire of a Turkish machine gun.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  So they all moved back a hundred yards, but there was little sleep. It was all so new. So dangerous. So exhilarating. Flashes of artillery and the scream of shells bursting. Constant rifle fire, echoing so loudly down the gullies they seemed to be next to you.

  Yes, and something else. Drifting on the night wind from the heights above, they smelt for the first time the stench of death. So many unburied corpses of men and animals from the August fighting lay up there, rotting in the summer heat, that the air itself was putrid. Reconnaissance pilots could smell Gallipoli from their little aeroplanes high above. Eventually, men on the ground got used to it. Or at any rate learned to live with it. But that first time, the fetid smell seeped into the very pores of their skin.

  There’s Death in the cup – so beware!

  So sang Robert Burns in Cec Hogan’s little book.

  ‘How long before morning, Sarge, and we can have a go at those bastards?’

  The same question was on the lips of every man there.

  Morning came soon enough. In the grey light everyone was at Stand To, fully armed and ready for any attack that might come. It was part of the ritual of their lives, every dawn and dusk.

  ‘Stand easy.’

  The light grew stronger. Around them the rough, precipitous landscape of Anzac emerged. The steep climb up to the ochre-coloured ridges, the waterless hillsides stripped of scrubby vegetation for cooking fires. Amazing that men could fight and live there. Yet they did! Facing the sea were dugouts and pozzies scratched into the soil. They were no more than holes in the ground covered with canvas and blankets, where men cleaned and rested themselves as best they could away from the firing line.

  ‘Home Sweet Home!’

  ‘Welcome to Gallipoli, mate.’

  The newly arrived battalions in Rest Gully had a decent enough breakfast of bacon, biscuits and tea. Then, at 0900, they marched to the tanks along the valley, filled their water-bottles, and began the hard climb upwards to their positions.

  The 21st Battalion was to hold the section of the ridge from Courtney’s Post on the left, occupied by D Company, Steele’s Post, the lines opposite German Officers’ Trench, through to A Company on the right at Wire Gully. It was a vital position protecting the head of Monash Valley. If the Turks broke through there, the main Anzac supply lines could be overrun and the whole army swept into the sea. Thus it was fiercely defended. Opposing trenches were rarely more than thirty yards apart and sometimes less than ten.

  The sound of sniper fire and explosions was continuous. Every so often a shell whistled overhead to burst in a cloud of dust and shrapnel, and a man counted himself lucky his name was not on it. Soldiers lay down with their rifles. But their rest was fitful, for only the dead slept well.

  The 21st was relieving the 8th Battalion, also from Victoria, which had been on Gallipoli from the beginning. As Jim’s platoon was taken into the firing line above Wire Gully, they were met by a party of hardened, grimy diggers.

  ‘What took you so long, boys? We’ve been waiting.’

  ‘Waiting four friggin’ months.’

  ‘Look at youse! Smart as a regiment on King’s Birthday.’

  ‘Soon fix that.’

  And indeed the soldiers were clad in very little except pants cut short at the knee, torn singlets and a wonderful variety of headgear against the sun. One bloke was even wearing a turban fashioned from his shirt. The Sar’ Major at Broadmeadows would have had a fit! Only their boots were good. A man can fight naked if he has to, so long as he has a decent pair of boots.

  It wasn’t the diggers’ clothes but their bodies that so shocked Jim Martin and his mates. Almost to a man these Anzacs were thin – shrunken, almost – as if they’d been worn down to their essential selves by months of fighting and surviving at Gallipoli. These were the same proud, young giants Jim and his dad had watched marching down Spring Street last September, reduced now by toil and battle and hard, hard rations.

  And by disease. Coming up the slopes, they’d seen shadows of men, like husks, wasted with dysentery and dragging themselves between their shelters and the open latrines dug into the hillside. Men wracked with stomach pain and foul with their own ordure. Yet so tenacious in their possession of the bit of ground they’d fought for and won, they often refused to go to the medics in case they were evacuated away from their mates to the hospital ships and Heliopolis.

  Liberty’s in every blow

  Let us do or die!

  Was this what they meant by the ‘Anzac spirit’ that Jim so resolved to emulate? Whatever else might be said of these men, he couldn’t get over his sheer admiration for what they’d achieved.

  ‘The guts of it!’ he said to Cec Hogan. They were squatting down in the firing trench as an 8th Battalion man explained the drill to their platoon commander.

  ‘I mean, look at the slopes they rushed that first morning. Like cliffs. Turks behind every bush. Sniping. Shelling. Throwing everything at them. Yet getting to the top here. Hanging on. Beating the buggers back every time. I don’t know how they did it.’

  PING!

  POW!

  A Turkish rifle fired and a bullet skimmed the sandbag parapet of the trench.

  ‘Christ! What was that?’

  ‘We did it,’ said the veteran to the new arrivals, ‘by keeping our friggin’ heads down, using them, and doing what we’re told.’

  Some idiot down the line had stuck his head over the parapet – ‘just to have a look, Corp, honest,’ – and nearly had it shot off.

  ‘You’re lucky Abdul’s sniper over there must be green as you lot,’ said the digger. ‘They’re pretty good. Don’t usually miss.’

  There were better ways of keeping watch than standing on the trench step and poking your nose over the top. Periscopes. Almost from the beginning, the tall metal tubes with mirrors top and bottom had been used for observation in the Gallipoli trenches. Then in May a Sydney digger, Lance-Corporal Bill Beech, invented the periscope rifle. It saved countless lives.

  ‘Come here, son,’ said the 8th Battalion man to young Jim Martin. ‘See how it works.’

  Jim held the weapon. It was secured to a triangular wooden frame. A periscope was fixed behind the gun stock, the upper mirror raised above the level of the sandbags. Standing behind the parapet, Jim had only to look in the lower mirror to see what was happening at the Turkish trenches opposite. He steadied the rifle with his body and left hand. In his right, he held a wire attached to the trigger.

  Reflected in the mirror Jim saw the broken line of country, a mere few dozen yards, between himself and the enemy’s trenches. Beyond, the land fell away into the gully, before rising to the grey-green slope of the third ridge.

  The rifle took some getting used to. It wasn’t like peering down the sights at target practice. The weapon wavered, and it was hard at first to make sense of the reflections.

  Even when he managed to hold the gun still, Jim saw no sign of activity in the Turkish trenches. Lit
tle indication that anyone was there. They might almost have strolled across and hiked up to the third ridge as if it were a Seymour route march.

  There was something!

  The faint movement of a khaki cap passed briefly along the trench opposite. Jim held his breath. The whole world seemed to enclose itself upon him as, for the first time in his life, he took aim at another human. He heard nothing else. Saw nothing else except the top of this head bobbing before him.

  His finger tightened on the trigger wire.

  Fire!

  The rifle went off.

  But Jim wasn’t ready for the heavy recoil. He was unskilled in this kind of shooting and the shot went wide. At once, though, came a round of Turkish rifle fire in response, the bullets thudding into the sandbags, or sending up small spurts of dust where they hit the ground above the Anzac trenches.

  ‘Hang on, Abdul!’ a pained voice shouted behind them. ‘The flies are still enjoying my lunch!’

  ‘Well done, lad,’ said the digger. ‘You’ve drawn some of the bugger’s fire. You’ll get a lot better at it in a day or two.’

  Jim’s platoon stayed in the firing line for some hours, learning the lie of the land, before they were replaced and went back to get something to eat. There was a whole network – a maze – of trenches opening to the rear. Communication trenches and support trenches, only a yard wide, where men worked when they weren’t on duty in the firing line. They were full of twists and turns: protection for others if a shell should hit, and better defence if the Turks should attack them.

  Scraped into the earthen sides were ledges where you could rest up and eat. Like rabbits in a warren. Here they stopped that first afternoon, and opened their rations. A swig of water. A tin of bully beef, all salt and grease. And a smear of jam on biscuit.

  But no sooner was food produced than swarms of flies descended upon it. Big, black flies. Hungry and dirty as sin. Millions of them. Crawling over the meat. Blowing into men’s mouths as soon as they tried to eat.

  ‘Every friggin’ fly in the world has come to Gallipoli,’ said the digger, spitting out half a dozen. ‘Something else for youse to get acquainted with.’