In the Line of Battle

We had gone up into the trenches and nothing much happened while we were there. After our spell in the trenches we were taken up into a gulley for twenty-four hours’ rest and sleep. We were in high spirits at the prospect of such a change, and we took our equipment off and made a few dug-outs and got into them and settled down, and very comfortable and contented we were. But our rest and peace were smashed at dawn on the following morning, when we were thrown into confusion by a heavy Turkish attack. The Turks had advanced into the firing-line on the opposite side of the hill. There were plenty of them and they had machine-guns, while we were quite helpless, having no rifles nor equipment – indeed, many of us had not even our jackets on, as we were taking it easy.

There was quite a stampede for the time being, and some one passed the order, “Every man for himself!” It was a mistake, I am certain, but it added immensely to the confusion. That awful alarm caused some of our unarmed chaps to make a bolt for it, the result of temporary panic; and now came one of those splendid bits of work which are the pride of every regiment, and which no one can do better than British soldiers.

The adjutant, Captain Belcher, rallied about seventy of the men. He pulled them together, put heart of grace into them, and shouted to them to get their rifles and bayonets and follow him. There is nothing like an heroic example at such a time. The little band rallied round the adjutant, and with wild cheers and a gallant rush they hurled themselves upon the Turks, and such was the suddenness and fury of their attack that the Turks bolted like children – and big hefty chaps they were – with our fellows, some of them almost as small as dwarfs, tearing after them with the bayonet. In this furious affair one of our men got wounded and could not walk. The adjutant picked him up and began to carry him away. As he did so the Turks opened fire on him with a machine-gun, and he must have been riddled – I never saw anything more of him. At the same time Lieutenant Ratcliffe, who had been wounded, was being carried off on a stretcher. He seemed to think that the chance of escape was hopeless, and so he said to his bearers, “Put me down and look after yourselves, boys. I shall be all right.” It was a hard thing to do, but the men obeyed, and all of us who could do so got away from that fatal spot, which we were far too weak to hold, in spite of the success of the adjutant’s rally, and at last we got back to the beach.

It was then that we compared notes and heard of what had happened in various places, and the roll having been called we supposed that every man who could escape had reached the beach. But two nights afterwards we formed a search party, and went back up the hill and were lucky enough to find and bring back with us about a dozen poor fellows who had been lying all that time on the battlefield. From this rescue we supposed that there must be other men alive at the top of the hill; but there was no chance of reaching them in the daytime, and we could not go at night, for the searchlights from our own warships swept the hillside and lit it up so brilliantly that any search party would have been shown up to the snipers. So we did no more, and soon we were forgetting; for we were hard at work on fatigue, helping the Engineers to build a new firing-line, a trench about 1400 yards long. Then happened a thing so strange that it seemed beyond belief, like men rising from the dead. Fifteen days had passed since the fight, and no one dreamed that there could possibly be survivors, yet there appeared at the beach headquarters two terribly worn and haggard men, Lance-Corporal A. G. Scott of my company, and Private R. Humphries, another of our chaps. We were amazed to see them, and far more amazed to hear their story, which was that they and Private W. J. Head had been up in the hill for fifteen days and nights, unable to get away, and living on the biscuits and water that they had taken from the haversacks and bottles of dead men. The Turks, they said, used to pass them and shake hands with them, but would never give them any food or water. The three used to grope about in the daytime to get food and drink, and the Turks sniped at them whenever they got the chance. Head was quite unable to escape, having had two bad wounds. Scott and Humphries, desperate at last, crawled away and managed to reach our regimental headquarters and tell their wonderful story, and it was no sooner heard than a search party was organised, and, with Scott and Humphries as guides, went back to the old fighting-place – a slow and dangerous job. On the first night they found nothing, but on the next night the relieving party came across three fellows and brought them down. Head was amongst them – he had been out getting more biscuits and water, and while doing so his right arm was smashed by a machine-gun which was trained on him. The body of the poor lieutenant was found, with several bayonet wounds, and he, like all the other officers who fell, had been completely stripped by plunderers. The bodies had not a thing on them.

The survivors of those awful days and nights on the hillside – from August 10th to August 26th – had such a welcome as can be given only to those who return when they have been given up as lost, and Scott and Head and Humphries have been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. There have been some extraordinary incidents in this war, but not many are stranger than this adventure of this little band of men for what must have seemed an endless fortnight, and none that will stand out more finely in the annals of the Wiltshires.

There was so much to be seen and done in the three months I spent in the Near East that it is not easy to describe everything, and I must now mention only one or two things more. Very clearly in my mind stands out our attack on Chocolate Hill, after the warships had bombarded it for three days. We watched the naval guns at work, and saw the terrible havoc they caused – many a Turk we saw flying up in the air when the shells burst. When we advanced over Salt Lake we had to cross a hayfield, under a very heavy fire. The bursting shrapnel knocked many a fellow down, and we could not stop to help them or pick them up – and that was terribly hard on us, for the hayfield had taken fire and it meant that a lot of helpless men were burned alive. I saw one poor chap, a Yeoman, struck by shrapnel. This made him completely helpless for the time, and the fire got at him and burnt half his left leg off; but I am thankful to say that he managed, by a truly desperate effort, to crawl away, and he got out of it at the finish. We were in the advance, and as the field was catching fire just as we got out of it, we escaped the worst, which was to be caught in the middle, so that even those who were fit and could make a rush were badly burned and suffering intensely before they could get clear of the horrible ring of fire.

I can tell you of an extraordinary incident that happened in the Chocolate Hill attack to a man of the South Wales Borderers. In the second bayonet charge he drove his steel into a Turk – and it broke. Off he dashed without his bayonet, and rushed with his chums to the next trench, where he plumped into a Turk who was crawling through a hole. Knowing that his broken bayonet was useless, he clubbed his rifle and let the Turk have the butt. The blow smashed the butt clean off, and the Borderer tumbled down. The Turk, who was not much hurt, sprang back from his hole, and jumped to his feet with the Englishman fairly at his mercy. Luckily for the Borderer a pal rushed up and saved him by settling the Turk. It was an extraordinary thing that the Borderer first broke his bayonet and then bashed his butt, which came off as clean as a whistle.

Another thing that happened was this: An officer was wounded and fell. One of the men of his regiment heard the report that the officer was missing. “I’ll go and find him,” he said, and off he went. After an hour’s search he found the officer and asked him if he could walk. “No,” the officer told him, so the man picked him up and started to carry him – a hard and dangerous job. While the officer was being carried he was wounded again, a bullet striking him. “Put me down,” he ordered, “and look after yourself.” “No, sir,” said the man; “if you’re game, I am.” And game he was, too, for he got him safely away, and the officer, to show his gratitude, made the man a present of his revolver and a silver flask. When the soldier rejoined his regiment they took the revolver away; but he kept the flask as a memento, carefully wrapped up in all sorts of things, very proud of the gift from the officer, who had said, “I shall never forget you!” The officer was mortally wounded, and died before they could get him into the hospital ship.

It was round Chocolate Hill that we made our queerest find of all – women snipers. There was a kind of blockhouse which had been a farmhouse, and it had a very fine well, which had some very fine water – a precious thing. There was a big run on the well, and a lot of fellows were shot by snipers who could not be traced, till a fellow in a Welsh regiment swore that he could see some one moving in some trees not very far away. A machine-gun was brought up, and fifty rounds or so were fired into the trees, which dropped some very rare fruit – four men Turks and one woman Turk, all snipers. When we went up we found that they were almost naked, and had their faces and hands and bodies and rifles painted green to match the trees. And there they roosted, like evil birds, potting at our chaps whenever they got the chance, which was pretty often. This was such a good haul that firing was directed on all the trees, and more snipers were brought down, including several women. Some of the women wore trousers, like the men, and some had a kind of full grey-coloured skirt. They were as thin as rats, and looked as if they had had nothing to eat for months. I think there were six or seven women snipers caught in the trees, and it is said that the Turks have women in the trenches; but I don’t know if that is true. I saw one woman sniper who had been caught by the New Zealanders. I don’t know what was done with her; but as the men came back they told us they had bagged her in a dug-out, where she had a machine-gun and a rifle, and that she seemed to have been doing a very good business in sniping.

Dysentery knocked me out in the end, and after spending a fortnight in hospital at Malta I had “H.S.B.” – hospital-ship berth – put opposite to my name. I came home in a hospital ship, a foreigner, which made me thankful when I landed at Southampton and entered a good old English hospital train bound for Manchester.

CHAPTER V

AN ANZAC’S ADVENTURES

[“When the German blood-stained Eagle and its vulture-hearted Chief
Made war on little Belgium, they held the fond belief
The British Lion had grown too tame and dared not interfere;
But when old England called the roll, Australia answered, ‘Here!’”

That is part of one of the marching songs of the Anzacs, and it will go down to history as surely as “John Brown’s Body” has descended to our own generation. It was written for a particular Australian battalion, but it applies to all the glorious regiments that have won immortality in Gallipoli. This Anzac’s story shows how the sons of the Empire rallied to the call of the Motherland, and helped so much to carry out that unexampled undertaking in the Dardanelles of which our descendants alone can be the fairest judges. The narrator is Trooper Rupert Henderson, of the 6th Australian Light Horse.]

I was a sheep overseer when I joined the Australian Light Horse. Before that I was a jackaroo on a twenty-thousand acre station. What is a jackaroo? Well, a cross between a kangaroo and a wallaroo, and applied to a man, it means that he does anything that comes along. My boss’s station was twenty-five miles from the nearest town; but that’s nothing of a distance in Australia, and we used to have some merry parties when we had a day off, and drove or rode to the town for a change. And it was to the town that we swarmed just after the war broke out – bosses and men, rich and poor. A fine young fellow, a squatter’s son, Mr. David McCulloch, wrote and asked me to join the Light Horse, and I gladly did. He tried hard to come, too, but the doctor would not pass him, and to his intense disappointment he was rejected. He came to see me twice while I was training, and both times he tried to pass; but could not get through. That was the spirit which was shown when the call came out to us to go and fight the Germans and the Turks, or anybody else that British troops were up against.

We went into camp at Rosebery Park, Sydney, which is a racecourse. The 1st Light Horse had to sleep in the stables; but we were comfortably camped. The hard floors of the stables were very different from the comfortable beds which had been left; but the fellows were mostly horsemen from the country and didn’t mind, because they were used to roughing it.

Horses, saddles, equipment and uniforms were issued to us, and we were soon doing horse and foot drill. After six weeks of this training we went to Holdsworthy, on the George’s River, in the bush country. Snakes of all sorts swarm there – tiger snakes, black snakes, copperheads and deaf adders, all poisonous, as well as the carpet snakes, which are sometimes twenty feet long. They are gorgeous things, and look like bright-coloured carpets. They are non-poisonous, and our chaps let them coil round their necks and do all sorts of things. At this place there was the German internment camp, and already there were plenty of both military and civilian prisoners. The camp was not cleared – it was just barbed wire for a guard camp – but the country round it was being cleared.

We were very lucky in our training, and afterwards, too, because we were under Colonel Cox – “Fighting Charlie,” we called him – who had seen service in South Africa, and was a fine soldier.

It was midsummer and harvest-time when, on December 17th, we left Holdsworthy for Sydney, and we had the remarkable experience of going through three summers in one year. We started with our own, which we left in the tropics, when we got to Egypt it was the Egyptian summer, and when we landed at the Dardanelles it was the Gallipoli summer.

In Australia, of course, everything had given place to the war, and army lorries and so on had cut the roads up frightfully. They were full of ruts and holes and deep in dust; but luckily a storm came on, and the rain made it possible for us to travel in comfort.

I shall never forget that march to the transport to embark. We marched in the night-time, but all along the route the people were waiting for us. Nobody seemed to have gone to bed, and as we marched along they cheered us and wished us luck. The people gave us drinks, and fruit, and handkerchiefs, and other souvenirs. It was a wonderful and moving sight, and the people kept it up right away to the Woolloomooloo Wharf at Sydney, where we embarked on board the White Star liner Suevic. We lay in harbour from Sunday morning till Monday afternoon. I was on guard all the time. We had plenty of visitors, some of them trying to get chaps out for a last spell ashore; but that had to be stopped, of course, and the officers sent the men down to stables. The horses of my squadron, C, were below; but the other squadrons had their horses on deck.

I am not going to dwell on the last parting and send-off. We steamed away, and on Christmas Day we were six days out and two days’ sail from Albany, Western Australia. When we got there we picked up a magnificent fleet of sixteen transports and the Australian submarine AE2, which was afterwards lost. Then the war seemed to be really with us, the Anzacs, the famous word which is formed of the initials of the words “Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.”

We came through Suez and Port Said, and did not go off the boats till we got to Alexandria. We stayed a night at Ismailia, and there, as the beginning of our fighting with the Turks, we came under their fire, or rather, we heard it. This made us feel that we were getting into things, and we listened with immense interest to the boom of the guns. At the same time we piled up our ship with bales of hay, as a protection, and mounted machine-guns, and fervently hoped that the Turks would come on and give us a chance against them; but we were not molested. They did not interfere with us then, but we soon had plenty to do with them.

It was March 31st when C Squadron disembarked at Alexandria and got into the train, with Major White in charge. We went to Cairo, and then unloaded our horses and took them, walking, to a place ten miles outside the city; and there, practically in the desert, we camped, and for three months we had steady mounted drill, which made us as fit as fiddles. We had real dry heat, and no rain, all the time; but this did not trouble us, being Australians, and used to droughts. But we were glad when, at the end of the three months, the order came for us to pack up our kits and leave for the Dardanelles. We had the infantry kit served out to us, and in the middle of May we were back in Cairo, where we saw a lot of our chaps who had come back wounded from the Dardanelles. We found ourselves once more at Alexandria; and then, in two days we were at the Dardanelles, of which we had heard and talked so much, and where we had been so eager to go.

We had left Egypt on a peaceful Sunday afternoon; now we were in the very thick of a wonderful and exciting war, for we were being towed ashore in pinnaces, each holding about 250 men – half the regiment – and were under heavy fire. Gunboats were booming away, shells were bursting, and aeroplanes were sweeping about the sky. All these things gave us a good idea of what was going on.

How did we take it, not being used to the business? Well, the chaps sat in the pinnaces and looked at one another, to see how they stood it. We were landing in broad daylight, the boats were packed, bullets were dropping all around us, sending nasty little spits of water up; and bullets from rifles and machine-guns were whizzing over our heads. I was watching the impression it was having on the others. Some of our chaps were wearing war medals, and I made up my mind to carry on as they were doing. If they took it all right, so would I.

They did take it all right.

As the bullets dropped round us I heard such remarks as, “By Jove! If that hit a fellow it would hurt him!” Then men would laugh.

Our colonel – I was sitting near him in the pinnace – looked stern and calm. He knew better than most of us what it meant.

We were lucky in our landing, for we had no casualties; but a lot of the other troops who were landing at the same time and in the same way were picked off. We lay off till one of the naval boats got alongside. We all tumbled into her and were taken to the beach for landing.

The Turks saw us landing and gave us five shells, but these did not hurt anybody. We were told to hurry up; but we didn’t need telling to do that, and as soon as the boat was at the shore we hopped on to a little wharf and found ourselves in the thick of some Indians who were unloading sheep. So little did we need telling to hurry up, that I well remember how we rushed through the sheep in our eagerness to get to shelter.

We were in fine spirits and made the best of it; but as soon as we landed we realised what we were in for. A shell came and burst amongst a fatigue party, knocking the men about badly and wounding half a dozen, but luckily not killing anybody. This showed us how necessary it was to take cover, and when we had got some distance up the heights and were ordered to dig in, we set to work with a will, and we readily obeyed the order to keep our heads well down, as the shrapnel was bursting over the top of us.

Our regiment was keeping well together. The colonel was in a gulley just below me when a shell burst over us. It seemed to be high, and we did not realise the danger of such explosions. This shell seemed to be harmless; but I soon discovered that a fragment or bullet of it had struck the colonel in the leg. As this was the headquarters the doctor was handy, and he attended to the colonel straight away, and sent him to the beach on a stretcher. Two minutes afterwards, one of the squadron clerks got shot with a shrapnel bullet. This also happened near me, and I saw what happened to him. The bullet struck him just by the right temple – he had the closest possible shave of instant death – and carried the eye away. This chap was put out of action at once, and was sent on to Malta. About ten days later he wrote to us saying what rotten luck he had had. But he was a cheerful soul and made the best of things, though he said, very truly, “I have only had a one-eyed view of Malta!”

We got dug in. There were holes in front of us, about four feet deep, with head covering, about two feet of earth, on top of us; but these did not give much protection from shells that burst just overhead. Some of the men filled empty biscuit-tins with earth and put them alongside to protect their legs from stray and spent bullets, and these proved very useful. When we had dug in we were ordered to eat our iron-rations for tea; then, about eight o’clock, they called the regiment to fall in, as the Turks were going to attack us. We stood up as reinforcements at a place called Shrapnel Gulley – and well it deserved its name, as we soon learned, for there were a terrible lot of casualties there, especially amongst the fatigue parties which had to go to the beach for water.

You will see that we were initiated straight away. We did not know the danger of it at the time, and never thought that we should be so soon put through it after landing. But it was astonishing to see how well the chaps settled down to the business. We had been landed only a few hours, and yet we were standing to arms, waiting for the Turks to come on. We expected them with a rush, for we had been told that Enver Bey, the Minister of War, had ordered that the Anzacs were to be thrown into the sea. Well, we didn’t mean to be thrown.

We were standing on open ground. There were two very high hills, and we were in the gulley at the bottom. Some of our troops were dug in on the top of the hills, and the Turks were dug in in front of us, some of them being not more than fifty yards away.

It was a pitch-dark night, and a nerve-racking job waiting for the promised onslaught. Time passed and it seemed as if the Turks would never come; but at three in the morning they let themselves loose.

The word was passed along – “The enemy is advancing in front!” and we were all ordered to stand fast till two blasts of the whistle had been sounded.

It was hard to make out anything in that inky blackness, even with the eyes of bushmen; but we knew that the Turks had crawled out of their trenches and that they were going to throw themselves upon us. Then two shrill blasts struck the still night, and instantly there was a fearful commotion, for the Turks hopped up from the ground and charged, yelling and firing, and making all sorts of deafening noises, amongst which we noticed a trumpeter doing his best to blow our own call of the “Officers’ Mess.” They seemed to blow anything that came along, so as to confuse us in the pitch darkness. And a startling business it was, too, to peer into the blackness and see the figures of the Turks by the light of the bursting shells and crackling rifles.

Never while I live shall I forget that fight in the first night we were ashore in Gallipoli. We did our best to see what was going on by looking through the pot-holes in the sandbags of the trenches, though at night you could look over the tops of the parapets; but it was little enough that we could make out in the darkness.

We had our magazines loaded and our bayonets fixed. The infantry alongside were in “possies,” as we called them, holes dug in the trenches to keep a man from being exposed. Two men were in each “possy,” one firing and the other loading for him, so that a constant fire was kept up. One of our fellows, terribly excited, had crawled up on to the sandbags, and there he stood, just seen in the darkness by the flashes of fire, for about ten minutes, when he was ordered down.

At this time I was a non-combatant, one of the stretcher-bearers, and I was just standing, waiting for somebody to get hit; so I could see everything that was going on. The shells were flying round all the time, making a fearful noise, and an Indian battery above us was doing good work. In a “possy” high above us were the machine-guns, and we could see even in the darkness what havoc they were causing amongst the enemy.

In the loud cries that arose I heard a Scotchman of our regiment shout, “Here comes a big Turk with a brick in his hand!”

We peered into the blackness and saw a big fine Turk crawling on the ground about five yards away, holding in his hand something that looked like a brick. The machine-guns got him just as he jumped up. The bullets fairly smothered him, and he dropped like a thousand of bricks. Later on I had a good look at him, and found that the thing he carried was not a brick but a bomb. He had no boots on, but his feet were wrapped in cloth, so that he made no sound. He had managed to get within ten paces of us.

The din quietened down as daylight came, which was about five o’clock. We looked eagerly around us to see what had been done, and noticed the dead Turks everywhere, many of them in clusters of half a dozen, just as they had been mown down by our machine-guns. Later on we learned that the number of the Turkish dead was 2000, so that the ground was fairly strewn with bodies.

We were ordered back to our trenches, where we had breakfast and a bit of rest; but at ten o’clock we were told to fall in again, as the Turks were making another charge. The enemy did come on, but rather half-heartedly, and they were repulsed without our aid. They had made a fine and brave dash in the night, as we saw. They never got into our trenches, but we were told that they had rushed in farther round, where the New Zealanders were; but they had been bayoneted straight away.

In the afternoon the Turks put up a white flag and asked for an armistice, to bury the dead.

A big old Turk walked towards us, and he was met by Captain R. J. A. Massie, a famous Australian amateur champion, an all-round athlete of splendid physique. The Turk was blindfolded and brought into our trenches and then taken to headquarters, and after he had been questioned an armistice was granted.