There was a nascent mood among the public, that something big was missing, that time was being idled away before a big challenge, though what it was remained unclear. Then, quickly, events in Europe from July brought it into sharp focus.
As the European powers lurched towards war, the Australians were swept with elation at the chance to show the world what they were made of. Large crowds gathered outside newspaper buildings where the latest cables were pinned up inside glass-covered notice boards. Young men jostled at newly opened recruiting offices. It would just take one voice to sing a line from ‘Rule Britannia’ or ‘Soldiers of the King’ or ‘Australia Will Be There’, and hundreds more would join in.
Late in September the parade of the first batch of Victorian recruits marched up Collins Street. The morning was dark and cloudy but bands got the crowds cheering and waving their small Union Jack flags. The soldiers paraded past Parliament House where the Governor-General and the Governor of Victoria took the salute, before breaking ranks at Royal Park for a lunch of bread and jam. Unabashed at the irony, vendors sold them frankfurts.
Charles was envious and frustrated. The war had caused suspension of the recruitment of army instruction staff he had been aiming to join. Direct enlistment was the only pathway into the military. He fretted for 16 October when his two years residence would be up.
The first contingent of the Australian Imperial Force sailed off that month. He was proud to see the Japanese cruiser Ibuki shepherd the New Zealanders in their convoy over to join them and then help escort the combined force across the Indian Ocean. But he worried the war would be over before he could join in. As soon as his certificate of naturalisation was issued on 28 December, Charles immediately applied to enlist, putting down Mr Pointer of the Mission as his next of kin. But that wasn’t the end of his trial to become a British subject.
Early in the new year, he noticed a man in a well-worn suit and heavy shoes talking earnestly to Mr Pointer in his office. The two looked up as Charles passed down the corridor, and immediately looked away. Rees, the school-teacher, told him a few days later that a man of similar appearance had come out to the Albert Park school to interview him. Rees gathered that someone had informed the police that Charles was a secret agent of Japan, and had mysterious sources of money for a handyman on one pound a week. Melbourne at that time was gripped by spy scares, and enemy aliens were being interned.
A letter of reference from Sophus Warming the current manager at Bavier & Co. in Yokohama, sent to support Charles’ enlistment, may have only deepened the suspicion. Later, Major Reynolds said the military intelligence office had been visited too. The new director, Major Piesse, had told the policeman about his translation work, which must have satisfied the authorities about the extra income. But the investigation planted a suspicion about Charles in the system, and a dossier was started that would be opened again and again.
It was not until the middle of March that his call-up papers arrived. Charles joined a crowd of other volunteers on a train out to the Broadmeadows racetrack, where rows of white conical tents were laid out amid the sparse gum trees. There they were allotted to battalions and companies. Charles went into D Company of the 23rd Battalion, and the recruits paraded in blue dungarees pending arrival of proper uniforms and other kit. Their officers came from a wide range of civilian life, with a smattering of militia experience. The battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Morton, had worked for Ballarat council. His second-in-command was an orchardist. The D Company’s commander, Arthur Kennedy, was simply a ‘gentleman of Toorak’.
They drilled and drilled, until the camp turned into a quagmire under the heavy autumn rains. After a month, the companies were squared off against each other for turnout, drill, marching and steadiness. To Charles’ mortification, remembering his cadet drills at Yokohama, the D Company was at the bottom. But everyone was chided for poorness in the carriage of head and shoulders while marching, and an order went out to improve saluting.
The officers called for volunteers to apply for selection as non-commissioned officers. Charles passed the tests, and found himself a sergeant. The military life grew wearisome for many. They hopped on the train into Melbourne whenever the chance arose, to hang around outside pubs and theatres. But interest picked up when the battalion was sent down to Williamstown for live firing at the range there. Officers encouraged entertainments in the camp including concerts and boxing bouts, even one featuring the champion Les Darcy.
It seemed endless, but it was after only seven weeks of this basic training, at the end of April, that they got pre-embarkation leave, just as news of the landings in the Dardanelles came through to Melbourne. The battalion had a lot of stragglers overstaying their leave, but in the first week of May they were back in camp, checking equipment and having their vaccinations. On 8 May they were woken at 4am, given breakfast and marched to the railway station at Broadmeadows with the unit’s newly formed band playing ‘A Long Way to Tipperary’, ‘Just a Wee Deoch and Doris’ and ‘Australia Will Be There’.
They rode the train down to Port Melbourne, singing and getting cheers from people on platforms as they passed. At the Town Pier, a crowd of family members waved and cried, and the soldiers were ordered to go past onto the wide, planked jetty. After a wait of half an hour, they were ordered up the gangway onto the Euripides, a converted Aberdeen Line passenger ship of about 15,000 tons, one of the biggest on the Australian run. With the 23rd and 24th battalions aboard, about 2400 men in all, the ship set off late in the afternoon, nosing out into Bass Strait. The rough seas soon had many of them retching. The transit of the Great Australian Bight took five days until they reached Albany and calmer waters. With about 225 men in each of 11 mess decks sitting around long tables during the day, and sleeping in hammocks at night, it was a struggle for Charles to keep his platoon amused, in the absence of games or much reading matter. The soldiers had a parade for a couple of hours morning and afternoon, and marked time by the meals, otherwise most of them just watched the sea from the rails. The crossing of the Indian Ocean was calm and uneventful. With the German Pacific Squadron taken out of action, the two ships carrying the four battalions in the 6th Brigade travelled without escort.
Boredom simmered. A lot of the men played cards, and quite a few got into heavy gambling, despite efforts by the officers to divert the troops with singsongs and concerts. At Colombo, the men got angry when told the two battalions aboard the Euripides would not be allowed shore leave, except for the officers, while the two battalions on the other ship were allowed ashore.
A riot threatened. The men jostled and pushed at the gangway where guards were posted, issued with ten rounds of ammunition each and told to fix bayonets. A man dived overboard and tried to swim, before needing to be rescued by a launch. Clive Alcock, a private in the picket, was ordered to fire shots over the swarming local boats expecting to take the soldiers ashore. They backed off, and things settled down.
The armed picket, with bayonets lowered, held the soldiers back. Then the men rushed them. A melée of swinging fists and rifle butts followed before the soldiers retreated to the mess decks and railings to watch the skinny wretches aboard the coaling barges. Even so, they had four dead men when the ship sailed the next day, and nine men succumbed at sea to pneumonia. They went over the side in canvas shrouds. A ‘short arm’ inspection turned up 15 men with venereal diseases contracted while on leave from the Broadmeadows camp. They were confined to the ship’s hospital, with pay stopped.
The passage continued through to the Red Sea, and Colonel Morton suffered from the heat. The ships dropped anchor in the outer roadstead of Suez to wait their turn to transit through the canal. A French cruiser, the Montcalm, was anchored nearby and the Australian soldiers gave it a cheer.
The crew armed up the Euripides for the canal passage. They stacked the bridge with sandbags to protect the navigating officers from snipers. Two heavy guns mounted on the afterdeck were uncove
red and loaded, machine guns were set up along the sides, and 100 men with rifles were posted along the starboard side facing the burning sands of the Sinai. The ship passed groups of Indian soldiers, fine big men quite unlike the skinny coolies of Colombo, who came out of their tents in their khaki turbans to wave and shout greetings. At night, they heard shots from the British and Indian soldiers skirmishing way out in the desert with the Turks.
In Port Said, a liner passed the other way, heading out to the East or Australia. The girls on board stretched out their arms and blew kisses. About 20 of the men shinned down ropes on to the native feluccas crowding around the hull, and set off for shore. An armed party went out to round them up. Finally the convoy arrived in Alexandria on 11 June, and disembarked the troops on the sun-baked quay.
The soldiers filed onto a troop train for the 300 kilometre journey down to Cairo. The men were fascinated by the green-squared farmland of cotton and wheat and the neat villages of square houses under their palms and date trees, but repelled by the squalor at the stations as they drew close to the great city. They broke out in song, and cheered the Tommies they passed. When they sighted Egyptian soldiers and officials in their red fezzes, there was heckling from the jokers among the troops, and some discussion whether these individuals could be classed as ‘niggers’ or not.
In Cairo the elation soon faded. Loaded with rifle, kitbag, waterproof sheet and other equipment, they formed up at a siding and were marched six kilometres out to the Aerodrome Camp near the chic suburb of Heliopolis. The idle time on the ship had softened them and they hadn’t stood on firm ground for more than four weeks since leaving Melbourne. As the heat built up in the morning, the march became a struggle. They flopped exhausted in the suffocating semi-shade of their tents and were allowed to rest for that day and the next.
Then their routine started in earnest, with a reveille bugle call at 4.45am, and issue of coffee and dog biscuits in the mess halls. The men drilled from 5.30am until 9am, as the sun came over the wide expanses of sand and scrub and gathered in intensity. They took a break for breakfast, then went under shade for lectures until dinner at midday. At 4.30pm when the 48 degree heat began to subside, they resumed more hours of drill into the evening.
The men marched, in platoons, in companies, in battalions and sometimes in brigades (when a general arrived to inspect). They cleaned their rifles and sharpened and fixed their bayonets, and learnt when to salute and when to present arms. A cheerful young British army officer came out to show them how to use the bayonet.
‘Stick it in and twist,’ he said. ‘If you can, try to use the enemy’s momentum to throw his body over your shoulder.’
At the rifle range at Heliopolis they blazed away at targets, becoming deft at fitting freshly filled magazines of five rounds into their Lee-Enfield rifles, and steadily raising their rate of fire. The news from the Dardanelles made them impatient to become real soldiers and help reinforce those now desperately trying to hold their ground. A steady flow of wounded and sick arrived at the hospitals around Cairo, which now included the converted Palace Hotel in Heliopolis.
The men had plenty of opportunity to explore the ancient city on their Sundays off, the more curious taking trips out to the pyramids at Mena where other Australians were camped, or sightseeing around the ancient tombs or city zoo. Cairo was a city that in those summer months seemed deserted during the daytime. It came alive at about seven in the evening and its streets were busy until two or three in the morning. After the evening final drill and tea it was easy to pack into a tram from Heliopolis into the centre for a tiny fare.
Although the men did not warm to Charles, a few of the other sergeants invited him along on their expeditions into town, and they usually went to the same few places. If it was a Sunday or other holiday, they’d sit out the heat in the Ezbekiah Gardens and have tea in the Soldiers’ Recreation Club run by volunteers, or go to the American Mission.
There was an Italian café called Groppi’s where they’d order ice creams and cold drinks, and the Petrograd, a restaurant run by a veteran of the Russo-Japanese war where they got a set meal for 12 piastres, or about three or four pence. Later in the evening, they’d go round to the Kursaal, the only respectable music hall in Cairo, or sit in one of the hotels to watch a moving picture show.
There was an exuberance about the Australians that easily turned to arrogance. On six shillings a day, they were paid four times as much as the British army’s Tommies, who resented that and tended to keep their distance. This relative wealth made them attractive potential customers for the boot-shiners, sellers of postcards and souvenirs, and touts for amusements who wheedled and importuned. ‘The only way to get rid of the niggers is a smack on the head,’ the soldiers would say – an approach that led to frequent scuffles and brawls in the streets.
The first contingent, by then at Gallipoli, had had its element of miscreants, mostly older men who’d looked on the expeditionary force as a paid holiday to what they had hoped would be Europe, and who were constantly absconding into Cairo to carouse in low bars. About 300 of them had been sent home in disgrace a few weeks after landing, along with a similar number of men with veneral disease.
Even so, their escapades in Cairo had passed into dubious folklore, particularly what was called the ‘Battle of the Wozzer’, as the precinct of cafés and brothels behind the fashionable Shepheard’s Hotel was called by the Australians, from its proper name Harret-el-Wasser. On Good Friday that year there’d been a rumour that a Maori soldier had been knifed. A group of drunken Australians and New Zealanders went in to ransack and set fire to some of the brothels. A large crowd of their colleagues gathered, hindering the Egyptian firemen. British military police rode up on their horses and fired pistols to disperse the rioters. A line of Tommies with fixed bayonets guarded Shepheard’s where officers anxiously peered from the windows and balconies.
The Australian officers and men frequently professed visceral disgust at the filth and desperation in which the Egyptians, seemingly oblivious, lived. ‘The openness of the vice and the rottenness of the whole thing,’ Charles had heard one officer declare on the tram. ‘Sodom and Gomorrah must have been quite decent by comparison!’
But there were plenty who succumbed. The 23rd Battalion boys engaged in the ‘Second Battle of the Wozzer’ on the final Saturday night in July, over what pretext or cause no one is certain – perhaps a vengeful attack by a brothel client who’d caught a disease, which was a regular occurrence. A hardcore element set fire to four buildings, which were burnt to the ground, the women inside narrowly escaping. Crowds of soldiers blocked the streets, impervious to orders from Charles and other NCOs to return to barracks. Some knocked the Egyptian firemen about, cut their hoses and took their hatchets to smash windows and shops.
Punishment duly came: Cairo was put out of bounds for the entire second division. Then some soldiers went on a rampage in Heliopolis, smashing up hotels. They were confined to camp, including all officers, with the perimeter guard trebled. Within a few days it was relaxed for Heliopolis. By August the mood in the camp became more serious with news of the massive casualties in the attacks across open ground at Lone Pine and other places as ANZAC forces tried to break out of their footholds on Gallipoli. More ambulance caravans arrived in Heliopolis, full of soldiers with limbs and facial features blown away or emaciated with dysentery. The training became more complex, involving long marches and night bivouacs across the sands beyond Mena, as well as practice skirmishes in large formations, live firing and trench-digging.
Over the month, new embarkation plans firmed up. An advance party left for Alexandria on 27 August, and the battalion started packing up camp. At a final church parade two days later, a Colonel Spencer came and told them he knew they ‘would keep the flag flying to the last man’. That evening they marched down to the station and boarded a night train for Alexandria. At 5am they filed out of the carriages and boarded the Haverford, a large
r passenger ship of the White Star Line, with B Company put on board a smaller merchant ship, the Southland.
At 4pm they sailed out of Alexandria, relishing the cooling air as they headed away from the hot sands of Egypt and the sickly intensity of Cairo. A sense of destiny grabbed them all. The late afternoon sun caught the faces of the men, tanned and almost gaunt from their months in the desert, in heroic side-light. Although Charles knew they didn’t take to him – he heard the occasional remark about a ‘secret Prussian’ in the ranks and many jokes about his Swiss-Japanese background – he felt a swelling of pride at being their leader. Poor fellows, he was to think in later years. They were badly cut up later in Gallipoli when the Turks put down a ferocious barrage of shells on their trenches. Less than half were still active when they were pulled out of Gallipoli. Then they were sent on to Pozières and all those ghastly battles. Only one in ten of those who sailed out on the Euripides made it back to Australia physically unscathed.
They sailed on northwards, checking and rechecking their equipment, and lining up for cholera injections. Lights were turned off early in the evening. The men slept with boots on but laces untied, life-belts beside them. The lifeboats were swung out on their davits and lowered level with the side-rails.
On the third morning they heard a distant explosion and crowded on deck. Ahead the sea was filled with small boats and rafts. Then the Southland came into view, settling down in the water at the bow, its two black funnels tilting. Soldiers could be seen wearing life-belts, climbing into the boats hanging over the sides. A French torpedo-boat and a British destroyer bustled around. The bigger ship put down its boats to pick up the men on the rafts, including the B Company soldiers wearing just their trousers and shirts. They were singing ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Here we are, here we are, here we are again’.
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