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.
The firing ceased, and the Turks came out with all their stretcher-bearers, and our stretcher-bearers and diggers went out, too, and the burials went on – and not before they were necessary, for the stenches were awful.
This sad work was being done, when our artillery observers noticed that the Turks were bringing up guns and reinforcements from the gulley at the back of our chaps, and we were ordered to come in.
That ended the armistice for the time, and the Turks at the back were fired on and their little game stopped. Next morning there was another armistice, for it was absolutely necessary to get on with the burials. The atmosphere was almost unendurable, and, even on landing, the stench from dead mules and so on was so horrible that it nearly made me bilious.
On that second morning I was able to see that a lot of our chaps were lying between our parapet and the Turks’ parapet. We made an exchange of bodies, and having got our men’s identification discs, we buried them in the small trenches, so that the fighting-places became graves.
All these things that I have told about happened within thirty hours of our landing – and the fortune of war had sent some of the Anzacs to their last resting-place and put others, wounded, on the list for home. Men were sent off, their fighting careers ended, after having been in the enemy’s country for only a few hours.
We were pretty philosophical over the business. I remember one of the men in my squadron saying, “If your name’s on a bullet you’re going to stop it.” Soon afterwards a four-point-seven got him.
The Turks used to fire like mad. It was astonishing to see how many bullets they fired, but even at that early stage our men, when off duty, were asleep and taking no notice of them.
At this time we were opposite Lone Pine, attached to the 4th Australian Battalion as infantry. After the fighting we had exactly a month in the trenches, and then relieved some infantry who had had three weeks of solid fighting. We were relieved and went to a rest camp near Gaba Tepi. We had seven days there, with a good deal of excitement one way and another, and plenty of casualties, for we were being called out every day.
It was rumoured that Achi Baba was going to fall, and we were ordered into the firing-line as supports for the 5th Light Horse. The 5th were going out in front to draw the Turks’ fire and keep reinforcements from going down to Achi Baba. Some of the 6th and 7th Light Horse were to stand by and act as reinforcements. My troop was in the firing-line.
The 5th hopped out right on the beach, and ran for Gaba Tepi under cover of the ridges. The 7th got up on our left. We were in the middle. A squadron of the 7th ran along under cover of the ridge, in the same direction as the 5th. They went a good while without drawing the fire of the Turks, who did not seem to notice them; but fire was opened at last.
Still the advance continued, more cautiously now, our fellows crawling when they could, for shelter. The Turks got a few lucky shells in amongst the 5th, and the casualties began to come in.
There were some odd incidents.
Our sergeant was peering through a look-out with a pair of glasses, his right hand being round them. Another sergeant said, “Let’s have a peep.”
Our sergeant pulled his head back and straightened himself, but still held the glasses with his hand in front of the hole.
The other sergeant was just stepping up to take the glasses, when a bullet came through the hole and went clean through the hand that still held the glasses, putting our sergeant out of action. We took him to the dressing-station, and he was not long before he was back in the firing-line, which is more than would have happened if the sergeant had been still bending down and had got the bullet in his head. He was a nice chap – a station-manager from Queensland.
In about two hours volunteers were asked for to bring in wounded Colonials from the front. There were a good many casualties by this time, and plenty for the stretcher-bearers to do.
We got to two men who, we saw at once, were very badly wounded. They were pretty well sheltered, and it was thought better to leave them where they were for the present, and not try to move them. One man had his foot blown off by shrapnel, and he was otherwise very badly wounded. A stretcher-bearer had bound him up roughly and put a tourniquet on to stop the bleeding; and another chap had carried him on his back to shelter. Several of the stretcher-bearers were killed and wounded at this time, but I do not think that the firing on them was deliberate.
The other man was a trumpeter. He was a little chap, and we called him “Scottie,” because he had gone out to Australia from Scotland. He was wounded in the abdomen, and was in agony, but we managed to relieve his suffering with half a grain of morphia. The flies were swarming and were terribly troublesome. I tried to keep them off with a wet towel – I had to wet it in salt water – so that they should not annoy him. I noticed that his boots were torn, and I took them off. I then saw that his legs had not been dressed – and he had been lying there for some time. I put iodine on the wounds.
Scottie was rather cheery, and when the padre came up and said, “Well, how are you?” he answered, “I’m feeling pretty good now.”
When the colonel went up to him, Scottie said, “I’m going to die!”
“Oh no, you’re not,” said the colonel. “You’ll get all right again. Don’t let that worry you. You’ll soon be playing Christmas Calls for us.”
To that Scottie made a reply which I shall never forget. “Yes,” he said. “I shall die! I can smell ut!” That was his real expression, and I suppose he meant that he could smell death.
Scottie wanted the colonel to take charge of some little trinkets and things: his pay-book, and a photograph of two children. “Give these to the wife,” he said. Then he broke into “Annie Laurie,” and sang a verse of it. He sang the song fairly well. It was a good attempt for a man in the straits that he was in.
At six o’clock he died, and was buried the same night, after sundown, at the place where we were, and that was a big cutting called Chatham’s Post, named after one of the officers. It was a deep cutting in the side of the hill. These two chaps were lying there on stretchers, and it was very hard for a bullet to hit them. Scottie was just taken to the back of the parade at the back of Chatham’s Post, a place called Shrapnel Green. It was a green field when we first went, but it was soon trodden down and made bare by gun and rifle fire. And there Scottie was laid to rest.
From the burial we went back to the dressing-station and carried the wounded trooper – Lane, they called him – down to the beach. The padre asked Lane if he would like a “wad,” that is a pannikin, of tea, and Lane said he would. I helped him to sit up, and I held the “wad” for him. He drank the tea cheerfully, though he must have been in awful agony. They took him along the beach. He did not say much, but never complained. When he did speak it was to ask, “Who’s that lying there?” or “How is he getting on?” He was the best I saw the whole time I was there.
On the way to the beach there were wire entanglements, to stop the Turkish patrols. The stretcher-bearers fell into the entanglements and dropped Lane; but he never thought about himself. What he said was, “Are you hurt?” I am glad to say that he is here in England, like me, and has pretty well got over it, though he has lost his foot. Seventeen men were hit by the shell that knocked Lane out.
We settled down again to the fighting game with the Turks, who kept us very lively, especially with a gun that we called “Beachy Bill.” This gun played on the beach whenever there was a sign of our movements, and it became a common thing to say, “Beachy Bill’s got somebody again.” That Turkish gun caused more casualties than all the rest put together. The monitors used to go for it, and I believe they bombarded it out of existence more than once. A new gun was soon at work again, but to us it was always “Beachy Bill.” When we first got to Gallipoli we did not know the tricks of the trade, but everybody soon got fly, and that helped us a lot in tackling “Beachy Bill” and lessening his bag.
There’s a lot more to say, but I will only tell you about one more thing, and that is the blowing up of some Turks. Our trenches and those of the Turks almost met in places, and bombs were thrown from one to the other. That was a lively exchange of greetings, but it didn’t lead to much. Something more definite was wanted, and so our people began to dig a tunnel at a very narrow junction, so as to blow up the Turkish trenches, and make our own trench-line straight, instead of being, as it was, twisting and zigzag.
It was a real Turk hunt, and just the sort of work that our chaps revelled in.
This affair, like most of our scraps, was done in the darkness, which made it all the more thrilling. Well, we dug and sapped and tunnelled towards the Turks, and when everything had been got ready, powder was packed in sandbags and fuses were put to them. The deeper the sandbags the worse the explosion.
All was ready at last. The powder-bags were packed, the fuses were lit, and then the 11th and 12th Battalions began to finish the work which the artillery had begun. The guns had started at five o’clock, they went on booming till nine, then there was a fearful sound which was louder than the loudest thunder I ever heard, accompanied by an immense mass of red fire in the blackness of the night. I was two hundred yards away, but the very earth on which I stood shook and shivered with the upheaval.
As soon as the crash came our chaps hopped up and rushed the shattered trenches. They found that a big crater had been made by the explosion, and that most of the Turks had been stiffened. Those who were left were either bayoneted or bombed. The Turks did not counter-attack that day. They had had enough of it. We had a good few casualties, but it was an effort that was worth while, because it showed that if we wanted a place we could take it, and at any time we liked. I saw all this very clearly, for I was going backward and forward all the time as a stretcher-bearer.
The Turks gave us no chance and we gave them none; but at the same time they did not do anything that I would call really dirty or out of the way. A lot of them were fine fellows physically. Some of the Turkish diggers we got as prisoners had no fighting gear on them at all. They were just peasants who had been brought up to do the work.
At last I fell ill with dysentery and gastritis, and came home on a huge hospital ship, with four thousand more sick and wounded soldiers. We had a six days’ run to Southampton, and had just under sixty deaths on board. They were buried at sea in batches, the biggest being eleven – and very solemn it all was.
Now I have done; but I want to tell of just one more little thing that happened here in England, where I have been in hospital, and where people have been so good to us.
It was Christmas-time, and we were having a Sunday evening service in hospital. We were asked what hymns we would like, and a chap spoke out and said, “Let’s have
‘We plough the fields and scatter
The good seed on the land.’”
The parson was puzzled. He hardly thought we could, because it was Christmas-time and this was a harvest hymn.
“And it’s harvest-time now at home in Australia,” the chap said.
So we had the good old hymn, and it took us back to home twelve thousand miles away.
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I think the Anzacs did what they set out to do.
CHAPTER VI
“IMPERISHABLE GLORY” FOR THE KENSINGTONS
[”By your splendid attack and dogged endurance on May 9th, you and your fallen comrades won imperishable glory for the 13th London Battalion. It was a feat of arms surpassed by no battalion in this great war.” This was the fine tribute paid to the 13th (Kensington) Battalion of the London Regiment by General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding the 4th Army Corps, after the Kensingtons had taken part in the British advance in May between Bois Grenier and Festubert. The battalion had already greatly distinguished itself in the Neuve Chapelle operations and elsewhere. This story of some of the doings of the corps at the front is told by a member of the Kensingtons, who wishes to remain anonymous.]
The main body of the Kensingtons had gone out in October, and I left England with a draft in January, the dead of winter. We marched up to billets in Laventi, three miles from the firing-line. The place was being heavily shelled by the Germans, and amongst other buildings the church was smashed up; but the men were lucky, and I don’t think that any soldiers were hit there. I shall always particularly remember that place, because it was there that I saw for the first time a man who had been killed by the enemy.
I was going along a street near an old ruined house which was being used as a soldiers’ club, when I heard the noise of an exploding shell. The crash was very near, and soldiers rushed out from the ruined house to see what had happened. They told me that the shell had burst farther down the street, and that a civilian had been killed. Without any loss of time they took a door down, and using this as a stretcher they carried the dead man away, and as I watched them I realised that we were fairly in it, and I am bound to say that I was very strangely moved and deeply impressed by this little tragedy.
We realised even more fully what it all meant when for the first time at the front we put five rounds of ball ammunition in the magazines and marched off for our first spell in the trenches, between our billets and the firing-line. We started at dusk, so that we should reach the trenches just when it became dark.
There was something very solemn in going away like that towards the enemy; yet there was, of course, intense excitement and curiosity. It was not a very exhilarating start, because the country was in a very bad state, owing to the heavy January rains. There was plenty of water in the trenches when we reached them, and it was bitterly cold. We were only one night in them that time, but it was a useful breaking-in experience, and hardened us a bit for the much longer spells, during which the cold was so intense that the rifles were frozen as they lay on the parapets, if care had not been taken to keep them well oiled after firing.
We got some fine experience and first-rate preparation as a nerve-steadier in carrying out the duties of “listening patrol.” When night came we went out of our trenches and made our way to the front of the parapet, working in pairs. This work was both dangerous and ticklish, for we had orders not to fire under any circumstances, as that would have brought the German machine-guns on us; but to use only the bayonet in case we came across parties of the enemy.
The object of the “listening patrols” was to find out, if we could, the German working parties putting up barbed wire entanglements and doing other things for their own protection. One of the pair of men would lie down on the ground and listen, and the other would be on the alert, ready to report instantly any suspicious noise that was noticed. If the Germans were putting up barbed wire, it meant that they were quite exposed and good execution could be done amongst them by our machine-guns; on the other hand, if the enemy heard our “listening patrols” they would instantly open fire with machine-guns and rifles and anything that came handy.
Patrol work was very trying, especially on the intensely cold nights, when it was a hard matter to keep awake, and the man who was lying on the ground was almost frozen stiff.
This sort of work went on for several weeks – until about March, slushing about in the trenches, and often enough, when we went out of them at night we would fall, in the darkness, into trenches that were full of water. Sometimes men were in it up to the neck, and the only way to get your clothes dry was to let the heat of the body do it – a long business at times, when the body had very little heat to spare. There was no help for it, because the men who came to grief like that could not change at all.
Early in March we were digging trenches on La Bassée Road. This work occupied us for several nights, and though we did not at the time fully understand its meaning, we knew afterwards that the trenches were meant for the massing of our men for the battle of Neuve Chapelle. These were reserve trenches, and in the open; the consequence being that they were exposed to the German fire, and the digging was very dangerous work. We used to get as many as a dozen casualties in a company while digging, and one spot became known as “Suicide Corner,” because of the heavy losses there. Of course, the digging was always done at night; but digging means making a noise, and whenever the enemy heard a noise they went for the place it came from.
It was at “Suicide Corner” that I made my first real acquaintance with the horrors of war. As usual we had gone out to dig. We had been taken to our allotted place by the Engineers, every other man carrying a spade, and our rear being brought up by four or five stretcher-bearers. It was obviously to our interest to dig as hard as we could, to get shelter, and we went at it with a will, being pretty well massed.
There was a man quite close to me, digging for all he was worth. Suddenly he went down, and I felt sure that he must have been shot, because the Germans, doubtless hearing our digging, had opened rapid fire on us. I soon found that the poor chap had been shot through the chest, and I went to fetch up our stretcher-bearers. They came, and a doctor came, and the man was carried to the shelter of a neighbouring hedge, where the doctor and the stretcher-bearers did everything they could for him, by the light of an officer’s electric pocket-torch; but he had been mortally wounded in the chest, and he died at the hedge side, in the darkness which was lit only by the light of the torch and the flashes of machine-guns and rifles. The poor fellow was covered up and put on a stretcher and carried back to the billet.
This was the first man I had seen killed in action, and it made a very deep impression on me, especially as it happened at night. That picture of the dying soldier under the hedge, with the doctor and the ambulance men striving by the light of the little torch to save him, will, I think, remain in my memory when many of the bigger happenings of the war have faded and are almost forgotten. It is an early and a very sorrowful impression of the days that came just before the beginning of the furious battle of Neuve Chapelle.
No one who was in those Neuve Chapelle operations will ever forget the massing of the British forces for the fight. The whole countryside was alive with troops of every sort, and there was the incessant rumble of gun-carriages, ammunition-wagons and heavy motor-lorries, and the tramp of hosts of men on the march. There was a great deal of inevitable noise, but at the same time a sinister and impressive quietness. There was the feeling in the air that something very big was going to happen, and everybody felt on the “edge.”
The Kensingtons went on in the night until we got into some reserve trenches, which there had not been time to finish properly. They were simply scoopings in the ground, with the earth thrown up on each side, a rough-and-ready sort of arrangement, affording very little cover and with not enough room for us to lie down – indeed, so shallow were they that when the bombardment began in the morning we were actually lying one on top of the other.
The bombardment which opened the battle of Neuve Chapelle began fairly early, and it is no exaggeration to say that when the immense number of guns began crashing it was hell let loose. The very earth shook, and no part of the country where we were seemed to escape from the shattering effects of the shells of every sort which were bursting all around us, a great many of them in the air. Some shells fell into the reserve trenches, and many of our fellows were hit.
The trenches in front of us were manned by two fine Line regiments, and these troops were ordered to advance towards the Germans and dig them out of their trenches. The Linesmen had a heavy task before them, but they began to carry it out most gallantly, and while they did so we came in for a very furious attack from the enemy’s batteries, because, although they could not get at the advancing Regulars, we were well in the zone of their fire. We suffered severely during this bombardment, and were glad when the order came to rush to the trenches that the Linesmen had left and take their places.
To get to the trenches we had to rush over some fields, and as we dashed along we were under a heavy fire, which caused us serious losses, and those of us who reached the comparative shelter of the trenches were thankful when we were able to drop into them and so escape from the open ground. The thing to do was simplicity itself, and that was to get across the open space from one lot of trenches to another. There was no question of doing anything except look after yourself and carry out your orders; there was no chance of helping any one who fell – it was forward all the time, and those who went down had to be left where they fell.
Shells were bursting everywhere and the fragments were scattered all around the battlefield, and men were going down, killed or wounded, on every hand. It was through this real hail of fire that we reached the trenches which had been occupied by the two Line battalions, and then we saw a sight that I, at any rate, shall never forget – a spectacle, too, which proved how terrible the struggle was and how greatly the Regulars had suffered.
I talk of trenches, but no such things were left – the German gunners had smashed them out of all resemblance to ordinary trenches – and owing to one of those inevitable happenings of warfare some of our own British shells also had helped to complete the work of destruction.
The trenches had been blown in on all sides, and the barbed wire entanglements near them had been utterly destroyed, so that what we saw was a confused heap of ruins, or rather an area of shattered ground in which men had been killed and buried at the same time. The real horror of this part of the affair was to see the brave fellows who had done their best, and were now lying dead and shattered in the debris.
I soon had a very bad experience in the trenches that we had taken over, so to speak.
I and another Kensington had been allotted a firing position, and we were doing our best with our rifles when I suddenly became aware that my companion had come to grief. I looked round and saw that he was lying at the bottom of the trench – and I made the terrible discovery that his head had been blown completely off. I would not mention this circumstance except by way of trying to show what the whole of the trench warfare meant. This incident occurred in the open trenches; but a lot of the dug-outs were blown in with the men inside, which meant burial alive, and I know of one case in which seven men, so killed, were lying together, and that is only one instance of many of the same sort in this tremendous war.
When we got into the trenches that had been occupied by the two Line regiments we were ordered to take up a firing position, and the first thing we did was to try and restore the parapet and to make the trench serviceable, in case the Linesmen were driven back. At this particular time everything gave way to the chief business in hand, which was to fight, and only the stretcher-bearers were allowed to do anything for the men who fell. Here, again, every other man carried a spade, and those who had them had to set to work at once to put the trenches to rights again, as far as it was possible to do so. This work was being done very vigorously when it had to be dropped suddenly, because the order came that we were to advance right up into the village of Neuve Chapelle; and so it happened that we were rushed up just behind the spot where the Regulars had dug themselves in. We rushed up into the village and lay in the open, behind some ruined buildings.
The Germans had arranged a counter attack, and if this had come to anything we should have made a dash for the trenches, which were just in front of the village; but as it was we made for the village itself, or what was left of the place, for by this time there was nothing left but the ruins, and the whole region was an absolute shambles.
Before we made this rush the men of the Line regiments began to bring in German prisoners. These came in batches of fifteen or twenty, disarmed, of course, so that one or two British soldiers were enough for a batch. These prisoners looked as if they had had a terrible time, and, indeed, they said they had been through some dreadful experiences owing to our artillery, and that our guns had given them a shell for each yard of ground they held.
The German attack not having materialised, we were able to retire to the trenches and make them habitable. Before this could be done we had to get the wounded out and bury the dead. As a rule, we had dug a grave for each man, but now there were so many of the killed that we had to put the bodies side by side in long trenches, which we made just behind the line. Quite a cemetery came into existence there, and we did our best to make it nice and worthy to be the resting-place of those who had given their lives for their country.
There is one feature of this great war which has been lost sight of to some extent, and that is the tremendous call which has been made on the physical endurance of the men, quite apart from the ceaseless and excessive strain on the nerves and mind. I will give one illustration on this point.
On the night of March 10th, during the battle of Neuve Chapelle, the front line ran short of ammunition and the Kensingtons were ordered to take up a supply. First of all we had to load up with our little lot, and, as it was impossible to carry the ammunition in the cases, each man got a score of canvas bandoliers across his shoulders, in addition to his own kit and rifle, and he had to stagger along with this tremendous weight, the filled bandoliers alone representing about eighty pounds; so that with the rifle and standing kit each man carried a burden of considerably more than a hundredweight. That was bad enough, but matters were made infinitely worse by the fact that we had to go along a newly-made road, or rather track. This road had been constructed by the Gurkhas, by the simple plan of putting bricks down almost anyhow – there were plenty of bricks handy from the ruined buildings all around us; so that the road we had to take was rather like the huge teeth of an enormous saw, for there was no steam roller to flatten down the surface.
In the darkness, under constant fire, we staggered and stumbled along with our ammunition; but even the biggest and strongest amongst us could not do more than cover about a hundred yards at a time. If a man did that he was proud and thankful, and having got a bit of rest as best he could – and that was by hunking up and resting on the rifle, for if a man had really got on to the ground he would have been hard put to it to rise again – we forged slowly ahead.
We had been ordered to take the ammunition into a house that was battered, but was more whole than the rest – it was really only a skeleton of a building – and having reached the house we very gladly dumped our bandoliers down in the garden. To reach the garden was quite a simple matter – all we had to do was to dash through a big hole in the side of the house, made by artillery fire, and I give you my word that we lost no time in shedding our burden of bandoliers.
It was a most exciting little performance from start to finish, yet it put a terrific strain on every man who took part in it – load yourself up with more than a hundredweight of stuff and see what it feels like; then you will partly realise what we had to go through – and the excitement was by no means ended when we reached the garden in the darkness, because just as we were getting rid of the bandoliers a shell crashed into the house next to us and smashed it to smithereens, a lot of our chaps being fairly smothered in the flying bricks and rubbish.
That was a night, and one that I shall never forget.
There seemed every prospect that we should be fairly mopped up, and when the order came for the N.C.O.’s to take back the men in parties we lost no time in returning, as best we could, to the trenches. Shelling was going on all the time, and just by way of giving a finish to the performance something like thirty star-shells burst together, making the dark night as light as day and giving the Germans a chance to plump more shells into us as we got back. This hurrying up with ammunition to the firing-line is only one of many such things that have been done as part of the day’s work by British soldiers at the front.
About two nights afterwards these two Line battalions of which I speak were relieved, and we took over their trenches. There were no dug-outs, or any such protections; the trenches were simply breastworks, and we had a very bad time when the wet weather set in, as it did.
When we took the trenches over they were in an unfinished state, and we set to work at once to complete them. One night, or rather about two o’clock in the morning, I was working on the top of the back parapet, with my head and shoulders showing, and half asleep, for I was dead tired. Suddenly the Germans sent up about fifty star-shells, which burst in the sky and made the darkness as light as day and showed us up as clearly as possible. Instantly the enemy opened rapid fire on our trenches and swept us with machine-guns, the bullets whistling over the parapets.