The Best Gallipoli Yarns and Forgotten Stories Read online

The first day of fighting saw the Anzacs attack the heights in small disjointed groups, due to confusion caused by the landings not occurring where planned and the troops becoming separated from their officers and battalions. They had been landed in a hilly, scrubby tangle of ravines and steep sandy gullies. Yet, amid the confusion and lack of artillery support and leadership, groups of Anzacs attacked and briefly captured key points on the peaks of the range that commands the centre of the narrow peninsula.

  By the afternoon of the first day, however, with no supply lines opened and insufficient organised reinforcements, the Anzacs were unable to hold the positions they had gained.

  No covering artillery had been available as the British warships were busy supporting the other landings. Few field guns were landed to give artillery support, as it was feared they would be lost as the forces retreated. So the Anzacs were driven back and forced to dig in.

  Over the following days they gained some territory and advanced into the gullies and hills adjacent to the beach where they gained a foothold along a line that would become the firing line they would hold and defend, with little change, for the duration of the campaign.

  MAKING HEADWAY

  JOSEPH BEESTON

  The wounded now began to come back, and the hospital ships there were filled in a very short time. Every available transport was then utilised for the reception of casualties, and as each was filled she steamed off to the base at Alexandria.

  As night came on we appeared to have a good hold of the place, and orders came for our stretcher-bearer division to land. They took with them three days’ ‘iron’ rations, which consisted of a tin of bully beef, a bag of small biscuits, and some tea and sugar, dixies, a tent, medical comforts, and (for firewood) all the empty cases we could scrape up in the ship.

  Each squad had a set of splints, and every man carried a tourniquet and two roller bandages in his pouch. Orders were issued that the men were to make the contents of their water-bottles last three days, as no water was available on shore.

  The following evening the remainder of the Ambulance, less the transport, was ordered ashore. We embarked in a trawler, and steamed towards the shore in the growing dusk as far as the depth of water would allow. The night was bitterly cold, it was raining, and all felt this was real soldiering.

  None of us could understand what occasioned the noise we heard at times, of something hitting the iron deck houses behind us; at last one of the men exclaimed, ‘Those are bullets, sir,’ so that we were having our baptism of fire. It was marvellous that no one was hit, for they were fairly frequent, and we all stood closely packed.

  Finally the skipper of the trawler, Captain Hubbard, told me he did not think we could be taken off that night, and therefore intended to drop anchor. He invited Major Meikle and myself to the cabin, where the cook served out hot tea to all hands. I have drunk a considerable number of cups of tea in my time, but that mug was very, very nice.

  At daylight a barge was towed out and, after placing all our equipment on board, we started for the beach. As soon as the barge grounded, we jumped out into the water (which was about waist deep) and got to dry land.

  Colonel Manders was there, and directed us up a gully where we were to stay in reserve for the time being, meantime to take on looking after lightly wounded cases. One tent was pitched and dug-outs made for both men and patients, the Turks supplying shrapnel pretty freely.

  Our position happened to be in the rear of a mountain battery, whose guns the Turks appeared very anxious to silence, and any shells the battery did not want came over to us. As soon as we were settled down I had time to look round. Down on the beach the 1st Casualty Clearing Station and the Ambulance of the Royal Marine Light Infantry were at work.

  There were scores of casualties awaiting treatment, some of them horribly knocked about. It was my first experience of such a number of cases. In civil practice, if an accident took place in which three or four men were injured, the occurrence would be deemed out of the ordinary; but here there were almost as many hundreds, and all the flower of Australia.

  It made one feel really that, in the words of General Sherman, ‘War is hell’, and it seemed damnable that it should be in the power of one man, even if he be the German Emperor, to decree that all these men should be mutilated or killed. The great majority were just coming into manhood with all their life before them.

  The stoicism and fortitude with which they bore their pain was truly remarkable. Every one of them was cheery and optimistic; there was not a murmur; the only requests were for a cigarette or a drink of water.

  One felt very proud of these Australians, each waiting his turn to be dressed without complaining. It really quite unnerved me for a time. However, it was no time to allow the sentimental side of one’s nature to come uppermost.

  I watched the pinnaces towing the barges in. Each pinnace belonged to a warship and was in charge of a midshipman. These boys, of all ages from fourteen to sixteen, were steering their pinnaces with supreme indifference to the shrapnel falling about, disdaining any cover and as cool as if there was no such thing as war.

  I spoke to one, remarking that they were having a great time. He was a bright, chubby, sunny-faced little chap, and with a smile said: ‘Isn’t it beautiful, sir? When we started there were sixteen of us, and now there are only six!’ This is the class of man they make officers out of in Britain’s navy, and while this is so there need be no fear of the result of any encounter with the Germans.

  Another boy, bringing a barge full of men ashore, directed them to lie down and take all the cover they could, he meanwhile steering the pinnace and standing quite unconcernedly with one foot on the boat’s rail.

  A NURSE’S STORY

  Based on various accounts, letters and diaries

  The wounded who could walk or be carried were taken out to the hospital ships lying off Anzac Cove. There were fifteen hospital ships operating at Gallipoli.

  Over the next nine months one ship, the Gascon, took over 8000 sick and wounded men from the Gallipoli Peninsula to the hospitals on Imbros, Lemnos and Malta, or to Alexandria or England.

  It was a few hours before the men wounded in the initial dawn assault started to make their way back to the hospital ships. The boats and barges that had been used to take them ashore were not available to bring them back until all the troops had been landed.

  The ship’s wards were soon full and wounded men lined the decks. The average time taken to put a man on board the ship after being wounded at Gallipoli was between nine and ten hours.

  Most of the wounded had just simple field dressings, which were soaked through with blood, or none at all. Each of us had an orderly whose job was simply to cut off the field dressings and the patient’s clothes so that we could start with new dressings. Each nurse had 70 to 100 patients to care for and that first day I worked from 9 a.m. till 2 a.m. the next morning.

  There is certainly no honour or glory in this war as far as I can see. By the end of the first week I was in charge of five wards when on duty and had over 250 men to care for—and one orderly to help.

  Every night there were two or three deaths, sometimes five or six.

  There was a feeling of hopelessness on night duty. I tried to comfort men in the dim flickering lights and shut out the moans of the seriously wounded and dying. There was a real dread of what the dawn would bring and what each morning’s death toll would be. Most men died from fractured skulls due to shrapnel wounds or abdominal wounds and loss of blood. It is best to not even attempt to describe the wounds caused by bullets and shrapnel—they are beyond imagining.

  THE RED CROSS NURSE

  TOM SKEYHILL

  When you’re lying in your bed, with a buzzing in your head,

  And a pain across your chest that’s far from nice,

  She moves about the place, with a sweet angelic grace,

  That makes you think the dingy ward is paradise.

  She’s dressed in red and grey, and she doesn’t get
much pay,

  Yet she never seems to worry or complain.

  She’s Australian through and through, with a heart that’s big and true,

  And when she’s near, the deepest wound forgets to pain.

  With her hand upon your head, she remains beside your bed,

  Until your worries and your pains begin to go,

  Then with fingers true and light, she will bind your wounds up tight,

  And when she leaves you’re sleeping fast and breathing low.

  When the ward is sleeping sound, she begins her nightly round,

  With eyes that share your sorrows and your joys.

  With a heart so full of love, she beseeches Him above

  To watch and care for all her darling soldier boys.

  There is something in her face, that can hold your tongue in place,

  When you’d curse because your wounds refuse to heal.

  But if once you get her cross, you will find out to your loss,

  The velvet scabbard holds the tempered sword of steel.

  When you’re once again yourself, and they pull you off the shelf,

  And send you back again to do the fighting trick,

  You’ll just grip her by the hand, with a look she’ll understand.

  Outside you stand and curse your wound for healing quick.

  Though she hasn’t got a gun and she hasn’t killed a Hun,

  Still she fights as hard as veterans at the front.

  When the Allies start to drive and the wounded boys arrive,

  It’s always she who has to bear the battle’s brunt.

  She’s a queen without a throne, and her sceptre is her own

  True woman’s smile and sympathy so sweet.

  So when guns no longer shoot, I’ll spring to the salute

  Every time I pass a sister in the street.

  THE ANZAC WOUNDED

  ANONYMOUS

  This article appeared in the Egyptian Times, an English language newspaper, on 29 May 1915. It was written by an unknown British female correspondent, most likely a serving British officer’s wife who wrote occasional articles for the ex-patriot British community.

  ***

  When, under the auspices of the Red Cross, I was admitted to the list of hospital visitors I must admit that my craven heart fairly failed me.

  I had visions of myself attempting the role of ministering angel to most unresponsive patients, forcing my conversation upon those whose only desire was to be left to themselves. I imagined myself arousing suspicion as to the real reasons for my visits, seeing sights and maybe hearing things that would be inexpressibly painful to a susceptible nature such as I was certain of possessing.

  My first visit, undertaken with many tremors, was, however, an agreeable surprise. Since then I have become so thoroughly interested in the cases all round me that I have extended my visits to various other hospitals in Cairo. Practically every afternoon in the week is occupied in one direction or other, while the hours devoted to such visits have become protracted till long after dark.

  Numerically, in most of the hospitals thus visited, the Australasian patients exceed the Britishers almost in the proportion of three to one, and therein is conversation made easy; for besides being splendidly plucky, these magnificent Colonials are born talkers. They are never so happy as when exploiting the country of their birth, even at the expense of the ‘old country’ to whose defence they are sacrificing their lives and fortunes.

  At times they do ‘flap their wings’ somewhat (and who indeed can blame them), but they are the most sociable, friendly souls imaginable, and their sociability and friendliness is combined with so much proven pluck and endurance that one does not know which to appreciate the most.

  Life in these hospitals is necessarily deprived of luxury. The food is not over plentiful and, in many cases, is not particularly palatable. Yet it is rarely one hears a grumble, unless on the score of flies or the heat, and then it is more as an excuse for a joke. Murmurs over the pain these men are enduring are practically non-existent.

  Like Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, they treat life mostly as one great joke—we know one bed over which hangs the inscription ‘The naughty boy of the family’.

  It is only when one gets talking confidentially that one hears of the little details of home life, their concerns as to the fate of brothers and pals, the frightful tales of all they have seen and undergone, the horrors of war. Very little of their talk is of the actual pain they are so heroically undergoing.

  ‘I’m all right, Miss, doing fine,’ is their almost invariable reply to questions about their own condition.

  ‘Yes, I’m going out in a few days, in a fortnight I hope to be at the front again, and getting a bit of my own back . . .’

  ‘You see, it was like this . . .’

  ‘How you would have laughed to hear us yell “Yalla imshi” as we rushed that hill.’

  ‘Of course it was Hell, but you must remember we had been on that transport more or less for weeks; we were ripe for any sort of action. We would have been painting Cairo pink if we had been there, so we painted Gallipoli scarlet instead . . .’

  ‘What, the bayonet charge? My, but it was fine, real bonza . . .’

  ‘Lady, I want to write to Mother, but I can’t let her know I am wounded and in hospital, so what had I better do?’ (And then one suggests that the Alexandria postmark might sound more healthy and that a covering letter to the port might save the situation.)

  ‘Cards? Yes, thank you ever so much; I am practically alone, and many an afternoon I’ve spent sitting on a log playing patience—never got it out for days on end sometimes . . .’

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked one badly wounded man as, from beneath a pillow, I saw sticking out a corner of a little testament.

  ‘Not mine,’ was the disclaimer, ‘for I don’t seem to have much use for these things, but I picked it up on the beach, and it has the name and address of some poor English lad inside, so I am keeping it till I can get outside to send back to his family.’ (The thought seemed to me to have a virtue high above any protestation I could offer.)

  ‘Socks, Miss, why I can knit them myself a fair treat. Three purl, one plain, decrease down the back seam, etc. I got a first prize at the Arts and Craft Exhibition in India for knitting a lady’s petticoat.’ (And after the tedium of lying idle in bed he fell to work on a chance ball of wool as eagerly as a dog given an unexpected bone.)

  Oh, they are a very cheery human crowd, these wounded men. They are extraordinarily thoughtful to their fellows, though they will scrap like fury sometimes, extraordinarily appreciative of their nursing sisters and visitors and extraordinarily content with their surroundings, even though they lack much in the way of creature comforts.

  One watches the distribution of enormous hunks of bread and butter smeared with jam for tea, served on the pillow or little table or any other old place, where they are hurriedly covered over with a fragment of mosquito netting or none-too-clean towel. But few complaints are ever heard as to the quality of the fare. Frequently the hospital diet will be reinforced by dainties handed round by generous visitors and often the passage through the wards by a popular figure or a pretty child will take on the nature of a triumphal procession and be followed by a thousand words of interest and approval.

  In spite of the rough association and upbringing of a number of these wounded, and the tedium and boredom of their life in hospital, their politeness and courtesy to their visitors is quite extraordinary. They will talk freely, though never rudely, and never forget to voice their thanks, and hope that the visit may be repeated. Quite a number of them are really musical, and, oh, the pleasure that is afforded them by an unexpected concert would soften the heart of many an amateur musician if he or she would only realise it.

  The beds are frequently being emptied and re-occupied, for numbers of patients are being turned out day by day, to take their place in convalescent homes or to become the guests of private hospitality. Fat
al cases have been, thank goodness, comparatively few in number as far as the Cairo hospitals are concerned. Many have been serious cases, but maybe seventy per cent are on the high road to recovery, and will doubtless face the music again with their hardihood undiminished.

  One fears, though, that their future actions in the front line will never quite have the same spontaneity of ignorance, which served them so magnificently in their earlier exploits at Gallipoli. Those landing operations and their aftermath will live for countless generations among the thrilling incidents of the war. They formed an epic, one of the most heroic in history; please God that the troops engaged therein will never have to face their like again.

  THE BEST TRIBUTE

  JIM HAYNES

  Perhaps the most poignant tribute to the Anzacs is the following poem, written by English popular author Edgar Wallace. He wrote it in response to reading accounts of the landings and then, a little later, seeing the wounded Anzacs being shown all the sights around London.

  Wallace was the illegitimate son of an actress. He was born in 1875, adopted by a Billingsgate fish-porter and grew up in the poorer streets of London. He went on to write more than 170 books, mostly thrillers, and also many plays and countless newspaper articles.

  In the late 1890s he served in the Royal West Kent Regiment and the Medical Staff Corps and, as a war correspondent in South Africa for the Daily Mail, sent back such negative reports of the war that General Kitchener banned him as a correspondent until World War I.

  Wallace’s novels featured sinister criminals and shadowy killers with numerous plot twists and secret passageways. More of his books have been made into films than any other twentieth-century writer.

  At his peak he was selling five million books a year. This brought him a vast fortune, which he lost due to his extravagant lifestyle and obsessive gambling. When he died, in 1932, he was on his way to Hollywood to work on the screenplay of King Kong.

  To my mind his tribute to the Anzacs is the best poetic tribute of them all.