A Fortunate Life (Puffin story books)

by A B Facey

  The car stopped at a large tent and we were ordered to get out and stand at attention. There was a huge pyramid close by. I asked where we were and was told that this was the Mena Camp, the main base for the Australian Imperial Forces in Egypt. There were hundreds of Australian soldiers in the area surrounding the tent. One of the officers ordered us inside the tent, where sitting at a desk was an Australian colonel and two officers. The Colonel said, ‘Now, tell me exactly what happened from the time you reached Abbassia up to now.’

  I explained what had happened and when I had finished the Colonel said, ‘Thank you, boys. We will get on to this at once. Sorry you have been treated so badly; I assure you, you won’t be left like this again.’

  The officer who had driven us to the camp had been instructed to take us back to our unit. I sat in the front with him and he became very talkative. He told us that the Colonel would start things moving, and it wouldn’t be long before we were eating a good meal.

  Soon several donkey-carts and cars arrived with supplies and back at Abbassia we had our first meal: fried steak and eggs with plenty of bread and butter and tea.

  The next morning our own officers and sergeants came into camp. Our captain ordered all troops to fall in and addressed us through a microphone. He said, ‘I want to apologize about your being left here without food and command. I was called away to a conference in Cairo. Before I left you, the night we arrived here, I left an order with a sergeant to be given to an officer, authorizing him to supply your general requirements and take care of the camp until I arrived back. The sergeant got drunk and lost the order—he is being dealt with. I will be leaving you again now for a fortnight because my officers and I have to attend a briefing school, and while we are away you will be under English officers. I want you to co-operate with them; they will teach you all the latest about trench warfare.’

  The next day the English officers arrived. Their high-faluting way of speaking was something new to us, and we got into a lot of strife laughing at their commands. I feel sure they regarded us as inferior to Englishmen.

  From the end of February, when our own officers returned, we were put on very rough training. Three days each week we had to march out into the desert with an eighty-pound pack—full battle kit. We marched ten miles out, had about one hour’s rest, then marched back again. We also had to do drill and attend many lectures. This went on for almost a month. At weekends we were given leave passes to go into Cairo, then, near the end of March, we were ordered to move to Mena Camp and this is where we finished our training.

  At about eight p.m. on the eighteenth of April, an urgent message came through that men were required for replacements to the battalions. The officer in charge came in and rounded up twelve of us and one corporal. We were told to be ready for action with full marching dress in one hour. There wasn’t enough time to bring any of the men back from leave.

  We were taken to Cairo in army cars, put on a special train and travelled through the night to Alexandria where a ship was waiting for us. We had no idea where we were going. All we knew for sure was that we would be sailing into the submarine-infested Mediterranean Sea. The ship was large and the name had been painted over. On board were approximately three hundred and forty replacements for the Australian Forces, some New Zealanders and two companies of English troops—in all, some nine hundred men. The crew told us all about the submarine activities and the large number of ships that had been sunk. This didn’t make us feel too secure. The sea was very rough and the crew said we were less likely to be attacked by submarines in the conditions. So, although I was the worst sailor in the world, this was one time I didn’t mind how rough the sea was.

  After the best part of a week we arrived at Lemnos Island. As our ship sailed in we were all surprised at the size and beauty of the place. Some of the ships anchored there were enormous—there must have been at least sixty vessels: transport ships, battle-ships, cruisers and many smaller craft. My brigade—the Third—and other troops were already there in their ships. We got ready with our full kit, then climbed down into launches and were taken to one of the transports.

  An officer assigned us in small groups to the various companies of the Eleventh and we were taken to the sections in need of replacements. I was attached to No. 4 Platoon ‘D’ Company.

  The men in my section were from Western Australia, and quite a few came from Bunbury. They were all strangers to me and anxious to know how things at home were. Then a sergeant called my name, and took me to the top deck where all the replacements had assembled, and an officer lectured us on what was expected of us when we went into action. We were then examined by the battalion’s medical officer before returning to our units.

  Many of the men settled down to write letters while we were waiting in our troopship, but I had written already to the only two people I wrote to—Grandma and my sister Laura. Several of the French and British ships had brass bands aboard, and all the bands commenced to play Sons of the Sea, then followed this with some beautiful waltz tunes. This was a wonderful thrill.

  We left the harbour at Lemnos on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth of April. We were nervous and excited, knowing we were finally on our way into action. That night we turned in to sleep in hammocks. I was very tired and despite the excitement, went to sleep.

  The next thing I knew, I was being shaken awake by a corporal. Everyone was busy getting into battledress, and 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 there are no lights on deck.’

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

  Our ship moved as close as possible into shore, but out of range of the enemy’s shelling. Troops were taken off both sides of the ship on to destroyers, then into rowing boats to take them into shore. 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. The ships that were protecting our troops returned fire. Bullets were thumping into us in the rowing-boat, and men were being hit and killed. The worst period was when we were cut loose to make our way to the shore. I was terribly frightened as we jumped out and waded to the beach. The Turks had machine-guns sweeping the strip of beach where we landed and bodies of men 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. 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. We used our trenching tools to dig mounds of earth in the scrub and sheltered from the firing until daylight—the Turks never let up.

  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 do anything for those that were hit. I would think for days, ‘I should have helped that poor beggar.’

  Daylight came. 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 shellfire and snipers. 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 getting there as best we could. Often the men in the ranks made the plans, since many of the officers were dead—the snipers seemed to be picking them off in preference to the lower ranks. I found out later that we had missed most of the Turkish counterattack. The full blast of it was to the south of my g
roup and the casualties there were even more shocking.

  By nightfall our small group had moved into what later became known as Shrapnel Gully, one of the hottest spots we had to face. On each side were very high hills on which were many snipers. 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, and kept guard all through the night.

  By this time we were short of ammunition and water. In the morning a group was sent back to the beach to get supplies and report our position. 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 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 to make contact with troops on both sides of our group. If we were hard pressed we were to dig in and hold our position at all cost.

  Most of us were young and in battle for the first time, and our casualties were heavy. We lost many of our chaps to snipers until we were put wise to one of the Turks’ tricks. They were sitting 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 big enough to hold a man. Many times Turks jumped out and surrendered or fell out dead.

  All the second day we advanced slowly along the valley. Late in the afternoon plans were made to get snipers higher up the hills. We tackled this problem by forming 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 we 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 first group would keep steady fire up at the snipers’ position to distract their attention while the other two groups would move in from the sides and attack the Turks with bayonets. We managed to clear a lot of snipers off the hills on both sides of Shrapnel Gully this way.

  It is a terrible thing, a bayonet charge. 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. People often ask 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. I was expecting to get hit all the time. A bullet is red hot when it hits you and burns like mad.

  Fear can do terrible things to a man, 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 fine. Come on, you can 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 up to a bunch of snipers. A machine-gun opened fire and suddenly the corporal yelled, ‘Look out! Get down!’

  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?’ 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.

  We continued moving up to the head of Shrapnel Gully, and 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. The Turks kept shelling us all day long. We had wonderful assistance from the British Navy which kept up a continual shelling of 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 into a ridge. We were getting sniped at from this ridge and during the day we got continuous shelling. We built a sandbag protection for extra cover.

  Eventually word came 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 to the side of us, making a more or less continuous front. 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.

  The Turks established a trench firing-line in front of ours—in some places they wouldn’t have been more than twenty yards from our line. We had been told always to be ready for a counter-attack. During the first weeks of May, the Turks made no move in force to drive us out but 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. Living almost underground and being lousy all the time really got us down. All we had to eat was salty tinned meat and dry biscuits, so hard that we had to soak them for a few hours to be able to scrape off the outside. Oh, what we would have done for a good meal.

  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. The only break we got was when it was our turn to go to beach Headquarters and guard a donkey train of supplies up to our unit. On one of these trips I managed to secure a tin of cheese, about eighteen inches across and four to five inches thick.

  The supply trains travelled only in darkness because of shelling during the day, so it was next morning before my section divided the food. 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 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. But although we were starving for a change of food I dug a hole and buried that cheese about three feet underground.

  Water was another problem in the trenches. We had to carry all our water up from the beach near Headquarters, and each day four men were detailed for water-carrying duty. 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 have both punctured by shrapnel. That meant a return trip to start all over again. That is, if we were lucky enough not to have been hit ourselves.

  I saw some very brave things at Gallipoli. A stretcher-bearer we called ‘The Man with a Donkey’ made a big impression on us. He used to carry the wounded men to the clearing station on the beach. They were then 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.

  On about the seventeenth of May we noticed the Turks becoming very active at night. There seemed to be Turkish troops massing in and along our front; during the daytime through field-glasses and telescopes, we could see quite large numbers of troops moving about. We received a message to the effect that a mass attack was expected at any time and every man was required to stand by.

  On the evening of the eighteenth of May, the Turks bombarded us heavily for a time. Then in the early hours of the morning, before daylight, the attack came. The Turk
s had to come over a small rise so that when they appeared they showed clearly. They were running but we were able to shoot them down as fast as they came—not one Turk got in our trench. Finally the Turks called it a day and word came through to the effect that we had defeated them all along the line. When daylight came there were hundreds of dead and wounded lying in No-Man’s Land, some only a few yards in front of our firing-line.

  Attempts were made to remove these bodies for burial but enemy fire made this impossible. Many of our men were hit trying to bring in the bodies. The weather was very hot and before long the corpses began to rot. The smell from this became almost unbearable.

  Some time later we had a distinguished visitor—a high-ranking British officer. He came along our main frontline trench with several of our staff officers and commanding officers. He got a whiff of the smell coming from No-Man’s Land and asked the Australian officers, ‘Why don’t you bury the bodies?’ Our Commanding Officer explained that the Turks opened fire every time this was attempted and we had lost men trying. The Officer’s reply to this shocked all of us who heard him. He said, ‘What are a few men?’ We referred to him as ‘Lord Kitchener’ from then on. Later the Turks sent an officer under a white flag—he was blindfolded and on horseback. He was taken back from our lines to Headquarters to see our Command. Later, we received word that an armistice had been arranged for the twenty-fourth of May to enable both sides to bury the dead.

  I will never forget that day. Those of us assigned to pick up the bodies had to pair up and bring them on stretchers to where the graves were being dug. First we had to cut the cord of the identification discs and record the details on a sheet of paper. Some of the bodies were so rotted there were only bones and part of the uniform left. Most of us had to work in short spells as we felt very ill. We found a few of our men who had been killed in the first days of the landing.