A rabbit moves fast, and relatively unpredictably, so if you can shoot rabbits you are a good shot. It is also more difficult to shoot a living target. (The ex-soldier who taught me to shoot the rabbits I swapped with a neighbour for chickens warned me of that – at first your hand instinctively moves away from taking life.) My grandfather, Colonel A.T. Edwards, who supervised Australian psychiatric services in World War 2, estimated that only one in four soldiers was capable of killing an enemy in battle, and that that one had probably been ‘blooded’ by shooting living targets like rabbits, wild pigs, or sheep before he went to war.
Preference was also given to single men, or married men who agreed to sign over two-thirds of their wages of six shillings a day (far higher than the English soldiers’ one shilling a day) to their families, with a shilling a day kept as deferred pay to be given as a lump sum at the end of the war.
When each man enlisted, little information was taken: their age, which they didn’t have to prove with a birth certificate; their height and chest measurements; medical fitness; name of mother and father; place of enlistment; and trade. We don’t even know how many had grown up in the bush as the records only give us where the men enlisted. Many came from rural areas to country towns or Melbourne to enlist, especially in the first wild enthusiasm.5
But back then many townsmen would spend weekends or holidays on a relative’s farm, or the farm of a mate’s relatives, taking the train out on Friday night and being picked up by horse and cart at the station. It is not unreasonable to expect that the majority of Anzacs were able to pot a running rabbit in the dusk at two hundred yards, spend three days and nights with no sleep fighting a bushfire or rescuing stock or neighbours from floods, and were used to hauling sacks of wheat or bales of hay or sugar cane. The bush was not ‘out there’ in 1914 and 1915. It was still very much part of our cities, and of the lives of all but inner-city slum dwellers who, due to poverty, disease, alcohol and deprivation, were unlikely to reach that five feet six inches in height or have a thirty-four-inch chest. Unlike a man from London, the Anzacs would have grown up on a meat and milk-rich diet, with plenty of sun-given vitamin D. They were strong, fit, and experienced in relying on each other rather than authority.
Tradesmen formed the largest proportion of those who enlisted (about 112,000 men), followed by labourers (99,000), ‘country callings’ (57,000), clerical (24,000), professional (15,000) and seafaring (6000).
Possibly a high proportion of those ‘labourers’ had come from country areas. In 1914 most of Australia was in the grip of a severe drought. Farm labourers – and younger sons – could easily have been spared when stock numbers were reduced, and there was less need to shepherd stock in areas which still were unlikely to be fenced; in droughts stock gather by waterholes at least twice a day, and usually camp there at night. This meant that in 1914 much bush labour was redundant, and many people were also short of cash.
There was also another form of tribalism that bound the battalions at Gallipoli together. Many of the Anzacs were from suburban Melbourne, and a common grounding in Australian Rules football helped shape their allegiances to each other – they came from the same suburbs and played for and supported the same footy teams. Even into the 1960s every suburb and country town had its own cricket team. While sports were a major part of British life, too, the portraits given of city and rural life in England in the 1900 to 1915 period do not show sport to be as ubiquitous as it was in Australia in the same period.
But if the men recruited had replied honestly when asked what their hobbies were they might also have added ‘having a stoush Friday and Saturday nights’. Boys fought in schoolyards, with lookouts to yell if a teacher approached, not just in anger or argument but serious competition; ‘pushes’, or gangs, fought on the street. C.J. Dennis’s verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, set in prewar Melbourne and published in 1915, deals with just such regular stoushes, and features Ginger Mick, stoush expert and AIF volunteer, and casualty.6 At the annual local agricultural shows – held in both cities and country towns – young lads would be called up to the boxing tent to see if they could beat the champion and win a purse. There was no shortage of volunteers.
From a land of extremes
Australian men were used to rough terrain. This meant little in the mud and slog of the Somme, but it mattered in the gullies and crags of Gallipoli. They also knew about working with only a nominal leader in bushfire brigades. And most importantly, perhaps, they were extremely familiar with climatic extremes.
The invasion at Gallipoli started in the relatively mild weather of spring. It would continue through a hell of a summer, and then the frost of winter. It has often been said that the Anzacs had the advantage of long experience of fierce heat at Gallipoli but were at a disadvantage in winter. But in most of Australia except the far north, the winters are bloody cold, especially in those southern states where the majority of early recruits came from. (Even those from Western Australia mostly came from the southeast of that state.)7 My father once showed me how to make ‘Anzac trousers’ – you line your trousers and shirt with newspaper. ‘We all did that,’ said Dad. ‘Doing sentry duty, sleeping on a train platform in mid-winter. It’ll keep you warm even if it’s snowing.’ Years later, stuck on an icy mountain while backpacking, I did what Dad suggested. It worked.
* * *
Pa Jack
Often we think of soldiers as either heroes or cowards. Usually they are neither.
‘Pa Jack’ (John) Sullivan was number 1338 of those who had enlisted at Brighton in Victoria to fight overseas in the AIF. He was twenty-three when he reached Gallipoli (most of the Anzacs at Gallipoli were in their twenties), a mechanical fitter. He was my father-in-law, but I never met him. Pa Jack was a city boy, but his sister, listed as next of kin, was a nurse at Sunbury, then rural. He could pot a rabbit, fight a bushfire, and help find a kid who had wandered off into the bush.
He could also lead men - on his return he’d be a foreman at Cockatoo Island dockyard in Sydney - but his records show that when he was promoted to lance corporal he insisted on returning to the rank of private. Like others of the time, he couldn’t bring himself to be the one to enforce what seemed ludicrous and heartless orders coming from England. Between 1915 and March 1918 his pay was docked twice for refusing to carry out orders. In August 1915 he was evacuated to the Greek island of Lemnos from Gallipoli with shell shock. He was hospitalised again a year later, once more with shell shock from the trenches of France. By March 1918 doctors were no longer allowed to diagnose ‘shell shock’ in case of future invalid pension claims. A compassionate doctor instead diagnosed ‘high blood pressure’ - which Pa Jack never suffered from - and sent him home after three years of almost continuous service.
Postwar he became a functioning alcoholic, able to carry out his work admirably as dockyard foreman and generous to his mates, helping them build their caravans or children’s swings or scooters. At home he was bitter, violent and drunk. He married late in life but was most at home, perhaps, in the comradeship of the Anzac Memorial Club. It was seventy years after Gallipoli that his son learned what his father had faced: airless trenches, sometimes with blackened, rotting bodies piled three deep about him, guts spilling out of wounds, flies and maggots crawling everywhere, the smell of death, the smoke from explosions, the roar of mortar fire and the screams of the dying.
Pa Jack’s military career is probably as typical of the Australians at Gallipoli as is his background, a tradesman in his twenties. He was neither especially heroic nor a coward, not mentioned in dispatches at any point except when he was made lance corporal after the death of the man who’d held that position. He volunteered, did his best, and stuck it out. Unlike one in three of his comrades, he managed to survive.
* * *
Australia is a land of climatic extremes: heat, freezing, flooding and drought. The soldiers at Gallipoli would experience all four. Unlike the English, French, Indians and Newfoundlanders, the Australians
were used to them all. And perhaps the worst was lack of water.
The Gallipoli peninsula had no steams or springs of fresh water, merely gullies that might run briefly after rain. The army would sink a few wells, but they quickly ran dry. It was rock, brush, pine trees, and Mediterranean wildflowers that bloomed in spring after rain: anemones, ranunculi, oregano, poppies.
A sedentary man needs about eight litres of water a day, although much of this can be taken in food like fruit or vegetables. The men were rationed to one quart of water (just over a litre) a day. They mostly drank this as tea, even sometimes shaving in the leftovers. The troops up on the Gallipoli heights ate army biscuit, dry and hard, and tinned bully beef, heated into stews to soften the biscuit in if they were lucky.
Who orders an army to fight on slopes that don’t have water? Someone who assumes that their army will succeed, and advance quickly enough to either reach a water source or establish enough of a hold for water to be transferred safely to the men on high ground.
This never happened. For the entire Gallipoli campaign water had either to be carried from the big ships by barge or boat to the shore, then carried by man, mule or, for short distances, water tankers, up a gully where the enemy occupied the high ground. The early morning was the most dangerous time as the Turks could stand with the sun at their backs, the Anzacs below virtually blinded if they tried to spot the enemy.
The Turks had the easiest access to supplies, including water. As they held the high ground and the land behind the Gallipoli peninsula, their supplies could be brought in relatively easily. If the Anzacs did achieve more than their English and French counterparts, perhaps one of the reasons was their ability to survive – and fight – on little water. It is also possible that they suffered more from dysentry because they were far more likely to bathe in the heavily polluted sea; the ‘Poms’, the Aussies said, ‘kept their towels dry’. Australia’s dry and dust led to a nation that would be among the first in the world to popularise showers from the 1890s onwards.
The best and the bravest?
Endurance, fitness, strength and tenacity do not necessarily add up to a superb soldier. The landing at Anzac Cove demonstrates courage. It was also, strategically, a mess, as the men on the ground fought what were almost their own private battles instead of creating a defendable line.
Nor was the Gallipoli campaign a victory for Australia and Great Britain – it was a defeat. But the campaign was also made up of a series of battles, and some of those would be won. The two greatest, the only ones that did capture high ground, were won by the Australians at Lone Pine and the New Zealanders at Chunuk Bair, showing extraordinary tenacity. Lone Pine was meant to be a diversion for an attack elsewhere, but the Australians just kept going till they’d achieved their aim.
Anecdotally, Australians seem to have believed they could outshoot the English troops but not necessarily the Turks. It’s hard to think what data could substantiate or disprove the claim of ‘best and bravest’, but it probably didn’t involve showing unearned respect to their British ‘betters’. The mateship and mutual reliance needed to fight a bushfire does not necessarily translate into a soldier who will do exactly what he is told no matter how ill-conceived the order. And this was what was expected in World War 1. Australians would be repeatedly lauded for their courage, endurance and ingenuity at Gallipoli. It may speak of their unwillingness to bow to authority that they weren’t referred to as the best soldiers of the Empire.
But were the tributes to their bravery simply the propaganda of the time?
‘The Bravest of the Brave’ was the (translated) name given by Sikh soldiers to Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the ‘man with the donkey’ who was an Anzac stretcher-bearer.8 Kirkpatrick was an Englishman who had jumped ship in Australia and enlisted there under his mother’s maiden name in case his desertion caught up with him. In the last letter Kirkpatrick’s mother wrote to him – tragically, not knowing he had died – she referred to the newspapers lauding the bravery of the Australians, and her pride that her son was serving with them. Was she a victim of propaganda?
There is an obvious reason why that heroism should be exaggerated, or even fabricated at the time. The war that was expected to be over by Christmas 1914 was obviously going to last for years. Warfare in 1915 depended upon having large numbers of troops. Firepower – like the few machine guns on the peninsula and the naval ‘big guns’ – made a vital difference, but manpower was literally the foundation on which tactics were built. Further – and larger – enlistments were vital. Talk up the heroism and more men would enlist in Australia; families that had been reluctant to lose a breadwinner would urge husbands and sons to glory.
But to achieve that you needed to publish only rousing stories of heroism in the Australian papers. Praising another country’s troops – even when they were also fighting for the motherland, as England was known – would be counterproductive. Yet the same stories of extraordinary courage were in English newspapers. The Australians’ extreme determination and bravery was mentioned in the British parliament. Some stories of heroism certainly were concocted for the public back home. But I can’t see eyewitness war correspondent and military historian Charles Bean constructing falsehoods, or even embellishing reality, though he presumably chose not to mention incidents of cowardice or confusion, as well as the large medical list of syphilis and gonorrhoea cases too, contracted perhaps from visiting Egyptian brothels. Nor did Bean dwell on the fact that three out of four men hospitalised at Gallipoli were treated not for wounds sustained in battle but for the Gallipoli trots, a form of acute dysentery spread by flies, rats and infected drinking water and probably from bathing in a sea full of blood and faeces. Bean was a man of dedication and integrity who undoubtedly chose which parts of the story he wanted to tell. But the bits he did put in his reports or histories, by all accounts, would be true.
Time and again, Bean recounts incidents where he claims the Anzacs in particular showed exceptional gallantry, as with his description of the stretcher-bearers. According to Bean, it was an unvarying point of honour with the Australian stretcher-bearers to always answer the call for assistance if a man was wounded. As Bean stated, the spot where a man had just been wounded by an exploding shell was the most dangerous position of all to go to as a second shell would usually follow within seconds before the gun was moved again. But Bean reported that the call was always immediately answered by two men.
The statistics perhaps best support the claims of courage.9 World War 1 cost Australia more men than any other war. There were fewer than five million people in Australia at the declaration of war but 416,809 Australians enlisted for service, representing 38.7 per cent of the total male population aged between eighteen and forty-four.10
Sixty thousand Australian men were killed, 150,000 to 200,000 more were wounded, gassed or suffered ‘shell shock’ and other mental problems. At almost sixty-five per cent, the Australian casualty rate (proportionate to total embarkations) was the highest of any nation involved in the war.
Diaries, too, rarely lie. For decades most of what we knew about Gallipoli came from war historians like Bean and propagandists like E.C. Buley, who did indeed pick and mix his accounts to produce something less than the truth. Even the officers’ accounts were often written weeks or months later as the men lay wounded in England, with women volunteers taking down their words so a picture of the campaign could be strung together. For security reasons it was illegal to keep a diary, and letters were censored.
Yet some men did keep diaries on thin paper hidden in their boots or folded into pockets. Now these extraordinary stories are being published or made available to researchers by their descendants, so that for the first time we can hear the whispers of the past from the men who were there.
They were not written for propaganda or publication purposes. They show that the essentials of the Gallipoli Anzac legend are true: the extraordinary courage that led to headlines across the world wondering at the Anzac bravery; the
lack of respect for officers and their often stupid orders; the comradeship, the compassion and, especially, the jokes in the face of death.
Stop laughing, this is serious
It is a defining Australian characteristic, and one admired in our culture: when things are bad, we laugh about it. The worse they are, the better the joke. It is perhaps a product of a land where unexpected disasters happen often and, in 1915, where your friends and community rather than government or religious authority help out. In a disaster it helps to be respectful to the government or other authority who might assist you. If you only have your mates, it helps much more to laugh. A classic 1933 Australian cartoon by Stan Cross shows two men dangling from a tall building site, about to fall; one is clinging to the other’s trousers, which are falling off. The other says: ‘For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!’11
Black humour and lack of reverence for officers is part of the Anzac legend. It is likely accurate. Written evidence both of the gallows humour and irreverence comes from the various trench newspapers produced by the men in the Gallipoli campaign. The Bran Mash of the 4th Light Horse had only one issue handwritten in pencil and copied on two sheets of typing paper using carbon paper, but it included such gems as a piece of art captioned ‘A black oblong titled “Night” by O’Keapit-Darke’, and the poem ‘The Trooper’s Lament’. This is the first verse. You need to add the word ‘bloody’ into the gaps to make sense of it, and even then you may find the vernacular hard to understand. It’s about a bloke who takes his horse to war, but is only paid half of what it’s worth, and just as he is about to go off and get drunk with the money, his commanding officer puts him in detention.
Let the Land Speak Page 34
