A Fortunate Life

by A B Facey

  The next thing I knew, I was being shaken awake by a corporal. The ship was moving slowly, some lights were on, and everyone was busy packing up and getting into battle dress. I noticed that stripes and rank markings had been removed from uniforms. One of the sergeants said, ‘It’s not far now. All portholes are blacked out and no lights on deck.’

  The officers and sergeants were called to report to the Company Commander. Now excitement ran high. A few minutes later they returned and told us that we were to land on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey.

  When we were called to our sections our officer gave us a briefing on the proper instructions for landing. We were told that our ship would move as close as possible into shore but would keep out of range of the enemy’s shelling. He said, ‘They will throw everything they’ve got at us as soon as they wake up to what we’re doing. Now, when the ship stops you will be called to the side and lined up. On the side of the ship is a rope net already in place. A destroyer will come alongside and you will climb over the side and down the rope onto the deck of the destroyer when ordered. When the destroyer has enough men it will pull away and go towards where you are to land. Close to shore you will be met by a small motor boat towing rowing-boats. You will climb into the rowing-boats and the motor boats will take you as close to shore as possible. There will be sailors in the rowing-boats and they will take you into the beach. Now you are to get ashore as best you can and then line up on the beach and await further instructions.’

  This was it. We were scared stiff – I know I was – but keyed up and eager to be on our way. We thought we would tear right through the Turks and keep going to Constantinople.

  Troops were taken off both sides of the ship onto destroyers. My platoon and other ‘D’ Company men were on the same destroyer. All went well until we were making the change into rowing-boats.

  Suddenly all hell broke loose; heavy shelling and shrapnel fire commenced. The ships that were protecting our troops returned fire. Bullets were thumping into us in the rowing-boat. Men were being hit and killed all around me.

  When we were cut loose to make our way to the shore was the worst period. I was terribly frightened. The boat touched bottom some thirty yards from shore so we had to jump out and wade into the beach. The water in some places was up to my shoulders. The Turks had machine-guns sweeping the strip of beach where we landed – there were many dead already when we got there. Bodies of men who had reached the beach ahead of us were lying all along the beach and wounded men were screaming for help. We couldn’t stop for them – the Turkish fire was terrible and mowing into us. The order to line up on the beach was forgotten. We all ran for our lives over the strip of beach and got into the scrub and bush. Men were falling all around me. We were stumbling over bodies – running blind.

  The sight of the bodies on the beach was shocking. It worried me for days that I couldn’t stop to help the men calling out. (This was one of the hardest things of the war for me and I’m sure for many of the others. There were to be other times under fire when we couldn’t help those that were hit. I would think for days, ‘I should have helped that poor beggar.’)

  We used our trenching tools to dig mounds of earth and sheltered from the firing until daylight – the Turks never let up. Their machine-guns were sweeping the scrub. The slaughter was terrible.

  I am sure that there wouldn’t have been one of us left if we had obeyed that damn fool order to line up on the beach.

  53

  THE FIRST DAYS

  When daylight came we were all very confused. There was no set plan to follow so we formed ourselves into a kind of defensive line, keeping as much as possible under cover from shell-fire. The shelling was very severe and machine-gun fire was coming from all directions. Snipers were active too and were picking us off.

  By midday we had moved a distance forward by crawling along, and at times, running from covered positions to new shelters. We were moving forward in small groups, sending scouts ahead to find new positions, and then charging them or getting there as best we could. Often it was the men in the ranks with the Corporals and Sergeants making the plans. Many of the officers were dead – the snipers seemed to be picking them off in preference to the lower ranks.

  We met a lot of resistance that first day but I found out later that we had missed most of the Turkish counter-attack. The full blast of it was to the south of my group and the casualties there were even more shocking.

  By nightfall our small group had moved into a gully which later became known as Shrapnel Gully. This was one of the hottest spots that we had to face. On each side were very high hills and on the hills were the Turks, including many snipers. They had the advantage because they had a clear view of the whole valley. We used our trenching tools to dig mounds of earth to protect us from stray bullets during the night. We kept guard in turns all through the night. Nobody slept much – if at all.

  By this time we were short of ammunition and water. (We had strict orders not to drink any water we might find unless it had been tested for poison.) In the morning a group was sent back to the beach to get supplies and to report our progress and position. It seemed to me that we were only about a quarter of a mile from where Headquarters had been set up on the beach.

  When the men returned they had plenty of supplies and brought with them more troops and a lieutenant and sergeant. They reported that the Engineers were building a jetty so that small boats could come alongside with supplies, reinforcements and so on. The officer told us that our troops had moved inland for some distance and were to the left and right of the main landing spot so that our holding was a sort of half circle in from the beach. We were to try and make contact with troops on both sides of our group and hold that contact. If we were hard pressed we were to dig in and hold our position at all cost.

  We were a mixed group of troops from different states – Victorians, South Australians, New South Welshmen, Tasmanians and Western Australians. Most of us were young and in battle for the first time.

  Our casualties were heavy. We lost many of our chaps to snipers and found that some of these had been shot from behind. This was puzzling so several of us went back to investigate, and what we found put us wise to one of the Turks’ tricks. They were sitting and standing in bushes dressed all in green – their hands, faces, boots, rifles and bayonets were all the same colour as the bushes and scrub. You could walk close to them and not know. We had to find a way to flush these snipers out. What we did was fire several shots into every clump of bush that was big enough to hold a man. Many times after we did this Turks jumped out and surrendered or fell out dead.

  All the second day we advanced slowly along the valley. We were joined by other troops and late in the afternoon plans were made to get snipers off the hills. As well as the ones hiding in bushes, we were being continually sniped at from above. These snipers were in fairly secure positions. They were concealed in shallow trenches and would take cover in these whenever the shelling was bad. When the shelling eased off they would bob up and start sniping us again.

  What we did to tackle this problem was form into three groups of about ten men. One group’s job was to observe the Turks’ positions and find out exactly where the shots were coming from by looking for the puffs of smoke that a rifle makes when discharged. To draw the fire they had four dummies made from tunics stuffed with scrub and with Australian hats on the top. They moved these around to make them look like the real thing. When the snipers’ fire was fixed the other two groups would move in from the sides and attack the Turks with bayonets. The first group would keep steady fire up at the snipers’ position to distract their attention while the other two groups were approaching. This was a very successful method of attack and we managed to clear a lot of snipers off the hills on both sides of Shrapnel Gully. Those Turks we didn’t kill or capture soon got out because they didn’t like the bayonet.

  It is a terrible thing, a bayonet charge. I was in several in the first few days, and about eleven altogether
. You would have to be in a charge to know how bad it is. You are expecting all the time to get hit and then there is the hand-to-hand fighting. The awful look on a man’s face after he has been bayoneted will, I am sure, haunt me for the rest of my life; I will never forget that dreadful look. I killed men too with rifle-fire – I was on a machine-gun at one time and must have killed hundreds – but that was nothing like the bayonet.

  People often ask me what it is like to be in war, especially hand-to-hand fighting. Well, I can tell you, I was scared stiff. You never knew when a bullet or worse was going to whack into you. A bullet is red hot when it hits you and burns like mad.

  Fear can do terrible things to a man. There were a lot of nerve cases that came from Gallipoli, and sometimes a man would pack up under fire. A frightened man is a strange thing – you could grab him and pull him up and say, ‘Come on, you’re all right. Come on, you can shoot, go on, shoot’, and he would turn right around and be all right (if he didn’t run like hell). I was so frightened myself one day I didn’t know I was injured. Several of us had been sneaking along one of the Turks’ narrow trenches to get into a position to charge a bunch of snipers. A machine-gun opened fire but seemed to be firing at random because we were not exposed – there was scrub on both sides of the trench. Suddenly the Corporal yelled, ‘Look out! Get down!’ They were cutting the scrub off with machine-gun fire. We all ducked down quickly into a crouching position and shuffled along on our haunches to safer ground. When I stood up one of my mates said, ‘Hey, what’s that!’ At that moment I could feel what was wrong. I always carried a knife and fork pushed down into my puttees and when I had squatted down the prongs of the fork had pierced my flesh to the depth of an inch or more. I had been moving along with a fork sticking out of my bottom and hadn’t known. I don’t think you can be more scared than that.

  Despite the fear the men mostly took everything that was thrown at them. I saw some very brave things at Gallipoli. One thing that made a big impression on us was the actions of a man we called ‘The Man with a Donkey’. He was a stretcher-bearer, or so we were told, and he used to carry the wounded men down to the clearing station on the beach. (They were then put onto motor boats and taken out to a hospital ship anchored a good way off shore.) This man, Simpson his name was, was exposed to enemy fire constantly all the days I was there, and when I left Shrapnel Gully he was still going strong. I considered, and so did my mates, that he should be given the Victoria Cross.

  By nightfall on the third day, we had established a temporary firing-line linking up from the sea and circling half a mile or more inland. Our bridge-head covered about a mile of seashore. For this piece of land the casualties had been shocking.

  We now had more officers and non-commissioned officers and our actions became more orderly. The first two days had been a shambles. It seemed that many small groups had gone off after the enemy and been cut off. Those that returned had lost more than half their troops.

  We continued moving up to the head of Shrapnel Gully and kept after the Turks on the hills. The Turks kept shelling us all day long. We had wonderful assistance from the British Navy which kept up a continual shelling, mostly shrapnel, mostly forward of our position. They read our signals well – on only a few occasions did we get shelled by our own.

  On the fifth day we dug ourselves in, making a temporary firing-line at the southern end of the Gully, where the ground rose sharply forming into a ridge. We were getting sniped at from this ridge and during the day we got continuous shelling. (That is one of the things I remember most clearly about the campaign – all the shelling. It seemed as if you could always hear it and weren’t far from it even if your own section wasn’t at that time under fire.) We built a sand-bag protection for extra cover.

  The graves at Shrapnel Gully mounted. We buried most of our dead in this valley near the sea, and as things became more organised, a wooden cross was placed at the head of each grave and on each cross was printed the soldier’s name and regimental number.

  Eventually word came along to the effect that each brigade had been allotted a section of the main firing-line. The Third Brigade’s section was from a point at the head of a gully (near a place later to be known and remembered as Lone Pine) curving back towards the sea at what was called Brighton Beach. The other brigades were to take up positions in turn to the side of us, making a more or less continuous front. All personnel were to make their way to their designated areas.

  At these positions over the next few days, we managed to get what was left of us into our units and build a proper trenchline. From this time on the fighting changed. It was now trench warfare. We were told that we had to hold our present line at all costs.

  54

  IN THE TRENCHES

  Digging a trench with a pick and shovel was hard work. The main trench had to be from seven to eight feet deep and made in a way that it would protect us from shrapnel and rifle-fire. Every few yards a parapet was constructed so that we could get into a high position for keeping an eye on the enemy. Sand-bags were arranged to protect us while we were in the parapets on look-out duty. These bags were built up at least eighteen inches higher than a man standing, and had spaces left between, about five inches wide and six inches high. These holes were used for observation and for sniping through.

  The Turks established a trench firing-line in front of ours – in some places they wouldn’t have been more than twenty or so yards from our line. We had been told to always be ready for a counter-attack. During the first weeks of May, the Turks made no move in force to drive us out but subjected us to terrific shell-fire.

  An invasion that did occur at about this time was body-lice – millions of them – and didn’t they give us hell. Some of them were as big as a grain of wheat and they seemed to just come up out of the ground. The nuisance was made worse because we were compelled to wear cholera bands covering our kidneys and the lower parts of our body. These bands were made of a flannel material and had a strong smelling medicinal treatment in them to help combat the cholera disease. The lice didn’t mind the smell at all, and used to get under the bands and give us hell until we could get off duty from the firing line. Then we would strip everything off and crack all the lice and eggs between our nails to give ourselves some relief.

  The food that we were given wasn’t very good. All we had to eat was tinned meat and dry hard biscuits. The meat was very salty and the biscuits were so hard that we had to soak them for a few hours to be able to scrape the outside off. We would eat this and then soak them again. These biscuits were about five inches square with holes through them about an inch apart. Oh, what we would have done for a good meal.

  Enemy submarines were operating against our ships in the Mediterranean Sea and the Aegean with some success, so supplies were hard to get through to us. This may have had something to do with the kind of food we were getting.

  The isolation in the trenches, and being confined to one area, was hard to take. It wasn’t so bad when there was action, but living day in and day out almost underground and being lousy all the time got us down.

  Our daily duty was two hours on in the frontline trenches, then two hours in the first line reserves, two hours in a dugout and then back to trench duty again. That was our routine – the only break we got was when it was our turn to go to the beach Headquarters and guard a donkey train of supplies up to our unit. Each company had to send its own guards for its supplies. (The donkey trains were worked by Indians who had been sent to Gallipoli with their donkeys especially for this purpose.)

  It was while I was doing guard duty on one of these trips that our section was treated to a change of menu. I managed to secure a fourteen pound tin of butter and a kind of cheese. The cheese was round like a grindstone, and about eighteen inches across and four to five inches thick. Both the cheese and the butter looked very appetizing to me. I hunted around and found a bag to put them in, then slung the bag over one of the donkeys, telling the boss Indian that it was for me.

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p; The supply trains travelled only in darkness because of shelling during the day, so it was next morning before my section divided the food. The butter was beautiful. We were now getting a few loaves of bread – one a week – so we had something to spread on it. After dividing the butter we set about cutting the cheese into fourteen pieces, a piece for each man. When I drove my bayonet through the middle of it, the stink that came out of that cheese would have to be smelled to be believed. I was advised by my mates to throw the cheese into No-Man’s Land as they felt sure it would stink the Turks out of their trenches. So, although we were starving for a change of food, we weren’t able to touch that cheese. I dug a hole and buried it about three feet underground.

  Water was another problem for us in the trenches. We had to carry all our water up from the beach near Headquarters and each section had to carry its own. Each day four men were detailed for water-carrying duty – we all took turns at this. Each man would carry two two-gallon cans which meant that we had no hands for our rifles. It was a common thing for us to be walking along with a can of water in each hand and our rifles slung over our shoulders, and have one can or both punctured by shrapnel. That meant a return trip to the beach to start all over again. That is, if we were lucky enough not to have been hit ourselves. None of us liked water-carrying; it was a very dangerous job.

  On about the seventeenth of May we noticed the Turks becoming very active at night. We could hear their carts rattling down the roads, travelling towards the British positions to our right. There also seemed to be Turkish troops massing in and along our front, and during the daytime we could see, by looking through field-glasses and telescopes, quite large numbers of troops moving about. After this we received a message to the effect that a mass attack was expected at any time and every man was required to stand by.