The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  The two men on my left were ‘outed’ and the man on my right also went under. Someone on my right was also crying out – ‘For God’s sake finish me off. Shoot me someone’. Reinforcements were being mown down in trying to come to me. I seized a man’s rifle on my left and fired about twenty rounds, when I felt a sharp pain on my left leg between the knee and the instep. It was just like being hit with a brick, edge on, thrown with some force. I found it was no good lying there, and waited until another officer came up, and then tried to stand up, but over I went and my heel turned around and looked at me. I was pulled back by the right foot for about thirty yards into a trench on to a dead man.

  I could not have been there long when another man fell across me wounded. I was dragged back a little further and had my leg roughly dressed. One man from old G Company stayed with me until I was carried away on a stretcher. He was shot through the right shoulder. He was able to walk back to the Dressing Station, but I could not get rid of him.

  It was an often-repeated scene as officers and men stuck by each other. Lieutenant Tarrant’s comrade could have moved out of the danger zone to safety, but he stayed with him until they could both reach safety together. It was an unsaid connection, wordlessly appreciated by both parties. And, many of the Anzacs showed that, despite the horrors they were enduring, they still retained their essential humanity, like Lieutenant Roy Harrison, writing to his cousin Emily from Gallipoli:

  The first day we landed the smell of crushed wild thyme was beautiful and, strange to say, it made more impression on my mind than a lot of things that happened that day. We use the thyme for seasoning our stews, etc now. We had a little soup today.

  Roy Harrison was one of the lucky ones who survived the landing unscathed. (He would later die heroically during the Battle of Fromelles on 19 July 1916.) More than half of the first wave of Anzacs landing were either killed or wounded.

  The Anzacs soon established their beachhead around Anzac Cove. It extended along the shore for a little more than a kilometre and then, in a wedge pointing inland for a little more than a kilometre – a total area of about 160 hectares within a perimeter of about 2 kilometres. To see why they were held up in their advance, we have to look at what happened on the other side of the front line.

  The commander of the Turkish reserve division that happened to be positioned at Bigali, inland from Anzac Cove, was to change the whole outcome of the campaign with his actions early in the invasion. That man, Lieutenant Colonel Mustapha Kemal, would go on to become the first president and founder of modern Turkey and be later known as Ataturk, which literally means ‘Father of the Turks’. Kemal wasn’t even a full colonel, let alone a general, when the invasion occurred. But he was a man destined for greatness.

  About five minutes after the Australians landed at Anzac Cove, a salvo of massive British naval shells exploded on top of the first ridge above the beachhead. It was the first salvo of the land campaign. When Kemal heard it he immediately woke and called his commander for instructions. But the commander, General von Sanders, was out of his HQ at the isthmus, responding to the British feint there.

  Kemal the instinctive leader now emerged. He used his initiative and gambled. First, he gambled with his own life because he had no authority to deploy his troops. They were a critical reserve unit and had he failed he would almost certainly have been executed – this was the way in the Turkish Army. Then he gambled again. And it was to be a decision that changed the outcome of the entire campaign. Kemal sent his troops not to the actual landing area at Anzac Cove but straight to the high ground, about 3 kilometres inland from it. When siting defensive positions, good commanders first identify what they call ‘the ground of tactical importance’. They define that as the ground which, if held by the enemy, makes your position untenable. Kemal knew the high ground near Chunuk Bair was that ground: whoever held it held the key to the peninsula. Kemal ordered his famous 57th Regiment to move immediately there.

  When he gave the order, both the Turks and the Anzacs were about the same distance away from this key ground. But because the Anzacs had been landed at Anzac Cove and not at the intended Brighton Beach, they were forced to slog their way through a hailstorm of shrapnel up the steep gullies above Plugge’s Plateau as they headed for the high ground.

  The Turks had a much easier route. Kemal rushed a considerable distance ahead of his men to observe the landings. To get a better view, he had moved in front of the defensive lines at the high ground when a group of the first Turkish defenders went past him in full retreat. They told him they were out of ammunition. Suddenly, the leading group of Anzacs appeared behind them. Kemal was as close to the Aussies as he was to his own lines. He again acted instinctively. He ordered the wavering Turks to fix their bayonets, form a line and take cover. When the Anzacs saw the Turks taking cover, they followed suit. Kemal grabbed his chance. He rushed back and immediately ordered his men into their defensive positions on the high ground. They reached the ground of tactical importance just ten minutes ahead of the Anzacs.

  It was ten minutes that changed the campaign. You can even argue it was ten minutes that changed world history. If the Aussies had beaten Kemal’s men to the dominating heights at Chunuk Bair, it’s very unlikely the Turks could have sustained their remarkable defence of the peninsula. Had the Allies overrun them, there’s little doubt Constantinople would have fallen. Supplies would have been hurried to the faltering Russian Army and, once bolstered in materiel and morale, it may not have collapsed as it did in 1916, opening the way for the communist revolution the following year. Russia may have gained Turkey (as was the secret Allied plan), the Tsar may have had sufficient clout to stave off the communist risings and Ataturk would never have risen to power.

  But Kemal’s inspired leadership ensured that the campaign would drag on. His historic orders to his men as they waited for the Anzacs’ assault set the tone for the campaign:

  I do not expect you to attack, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places.

  By 4 pm on the first day, the surviving Anzacs were ashore and had established their beachhead centred on Anzac Cove and extending about a kilometre along the beach and a similar distance inland from the landing site. The cost was enormous: about 2000 killed and at least 1700 wounded. Anzac Commander General Birdwood was so concerned at the situation that he sought permission to evacuate from General Hamilton. Hamilton replied that it would take at least two days to re-embark and told Birdwood to order his men to dig in and ‘stick it out’.

  Charles Bean landed with the second wave. They anticipated an immediate counterattack from the Turks, and when it didn’t eventuate they took advantage of the brief opportunity to dig in properly and continue to land men and supplies. The counterattack came later that morning but the Anzacs held their lines. The battle raged over the following days as the Turks threw wave after wave of men at the Anzacs and lashed the beach at Anzac Cove with artillery to try to stem the flow of reinforcements and supplies. The Anzacs hunkered down and held on grimly.

  As the days turned into weeks, the Anzacs settled into the daily grind of trench warfare while the beachhead grew into a pulsating shantytown crammed with food, water, ammunition and assorted gear.

  Elsewhere on the peninsula, the other elements of the invasion force met with varying levels of success. The Tommies of the British 29th Division lucky enough to land at Y Beach, near Krithia, met no opposition. Those at S and X Beaches secured their landings with minimal resistance. But the Lancashire Fusiliers at W Beach faced barbed wire obstacles and withering machine-gun fire and suffered 533 casualties out of 950 attackers in an hour, while winning six Victoria Crosses. Somehow they established a beachhead and, with naval gunnery support, gradually edged the defenders back.

  At V Beach, near the old fort at Seddulbahir, the Tommies were landed in an old converted collier, the River Clyde. The Turkish machine gunners waited patiently in their secure defence
s until the Tommies tried to disembark then cut them to ribbons. Inexplicably, the commander of the 29th, Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston (known to his men as Hunter-Bunter), watching from his ship off Cape Helles, decided to pour his reserves into the mincing machine at V Beach rather than direct them to the unopposed positions at Y Beach. It was a grievous error, as Britain’s official Gallipoli historian, Brigadier General Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, confirmed:

  It is as certain as anything can be in war that a bold advance from Y on morning of the twenty-fifth of April must have freed the southern beaches that morning and ensured a decisive victory for the 29th Division.

  Although the attackers didn’t know it, we now know that the first day of the invasion offered the greatest chances for success for the campaign. The attackers temporarily held the numerical advantage. The defenders were confused. But Hunter-Bunter dithered and squandered the opportunity.

  As the days passed, the casualties grew. Signaller Silas Ellis, a prominent artist, summed it up in his diary:

  … how heartbreaking it is – name after name is called; the reply a deep silence which can be felt, despite the noise of the incessant cracking of rifles and screaming of shrapnel …

  One of the first major tests faced by the Anzacs came on 19 May. The previous day, the gallant Australian General Sir William Throsby Bridges, commander of the 1st Australian Division and the father of Duntroon, had been killed by a sniper. On 19 May two events occurred that have gone into Australian folklore: first, the remarkable Private John Simpson, ‘the man with the donkey’, was killed by shrapnel in Monash Gully as he brought in yet another two wounded men on his donkey; and second, the Turks launched a massive counterattack, aimed at sweeping the Anzacs back into the sea.

  The Turkish commander, General Liman von Sanders, gathered four divisions, 42,000 troops, in the valleys behind the front lines facing the Anzac beachhead. It was more than twice the number of the Anzacs. Von Sanders gambled on an all-or-nothing surprise massed assault. But, warned by British naval reconnaissance aircraft, the Anzacs were ready. When the Turkish attack came, the Australian rifle and machine-gun fire was withering. The Turks fell in their hundreds. Entire companies were wiped out. When von Sanders called off the slaughter after eight hours, 10,000 Turks had fallen, 3000 of whom were killed. The Anzacs lost 160 killed and 468 wounded.

  The day after the 19 May counterattack, unofficial truces broke out along the front line as each side recovered the dead and wounded from no-man’s land. On 24 May the grisly task was completed under a formal armistice. These ceasefires gave the two sides their first opportunity to eyeball the men they were fighting. Tokens were exchanged – photos and smokes. This first tentative peaceful contact sowed the seeds of the respect with which each side would view the other after the campaign. The Anzacs began calling their enemy ‘Johnny Turk’, or ‘Jacko’ or ‘Abdul’, with the typical ambivalent Australian respect for an honourable foe. There would be no lessening of intent to defeat the Turk, but the Anzacs now knew they were fighting men who were, like them, doing their best for their country.

  By June and July the campaign had degenerated into static trench warfare – a constant round of sniping, grenade throwing, tunnelling and patrolling, along with the ever-present artillery bombardment. While the fighting may have ebbed somewhat and casualties eased, the toll taken on the Anzacs by their cramped, unsanitary environment was rising sharply. Incessant flies and the constant lice in their clothes added to the dysentery, enteric fever and diarrhoea that raged through the position. Morale weakened under the strain of constant combat and the enervating heat. As one Anzac famously said: ‘Of all the bastards of places this is the greatest bastard in the world.’

  He wasn’t far wrong. Charles Bean reported that life at Anzac ‘differed from experience on the main fronts in that the troops were nowhere away from shellfire and had practically no chance of rest in peaceful conditions’.

  Until late in the campaign, the Anzacs had no canteen or even Red Cross stores, and mail came fortnightly. Their food was poor and monotonous, they had no delousing apparatus for the fleas and lice infesting their trenches and their clothes, and they had no proper dental treatment. By the end of July, Bean noted that the Anzacs were losing around 200 men a day to hospital in Egypt because of sickness. The Regimental Medical Officer of the 15th Battalion AIF wrote:

  The condition of the men of the battalion was awful. Thin, haggard, as weak as kittens and covered in suppurating sores. The total strength of the battalion was two officers and 170 men. If we had been in France the men would have been sent to hospital.

  Charles Bean described the remarkable sight of Anzac Cove piled high with the detritus of war:

  Anzac Beach was a sight perhaps never before seen in modern war – a crowded, busy base within half a mile of the centre of the front line; and that strongly marked and definite entity, the Anzac tradition, had, from the first morning, been partly created there.

  From the moment of launching the campaign it was the resolve of those Australian soldiers who would usually be regarded as non-combatants to show themselves not a hairsbreadth behind the combatants in hardihood.

  Roy Harrison wrote to his cousin Emily on 24 July:

  The heat is great, consequently few of us feel inclined for meals when they are ready. Then again, the strain of 90 odd days on end in the trenches with shellings and blowings ups etc, long hours and interrupted rest, pulls one down. Personally, there is no feeling of illness, but I can’t bear half the fatigue I could three months ago, and most of the others feel the same way.

  It’s over three months since I slept with my boots off, and how I look forward to even one night in a bed with clean sheets and a real pillow, and by the way, something SOFT to sit on. The ammunition box for a seat is very uncompromising and though better than no seat at all, suffers when compared with the lounges of the old ‘Derfflinger’, which brought us from Alexandria.

  To break the deadlock, General Hamilton called for more troops. Kitchener sent five more British divisions (English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh troops). They were to be landed behind the salt lake at Suvla Bay, about 8 kilometres north of Anzac Cove. When they arrived their commander, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford, was over-cautious and wasted three days with his troops waiting on the beach for heavier artillery pieces to be sent from Egypt. In addition, the beachhead was chaotic, with the final two divisions landing on top of the three earlier divisions.

  Had he moved immediately, Stopford may have turned the tide. He could have advanced to join the Anzacs and overwhelmed the Turks facing them. At the time Stopford’s force landed on nearby Chocolate Hill, just 1500 Turkish defenders prepared to confront the 70,000 fresh British soldiers. But General Stopford waited offshore aboard the yacht Jonquil for his guns to arrive.

  His opponent, General von Sanders, did not hesitate. He rushed his two divisions from the isthmus to confront the British. Some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire campaign was about to erupt. Ironically, the attacks on both Lone Pine and The Nek, two of the most famous battles of the whole campaign, were designed as feints to try to divert Turkish defenders away from the planned British landings at Suvla.

  Today, after three days of squalling rain, Lone Pine is drying under a gentle winter sun. A wind softly ruffles the leaves of the solitary Aleppo pine tree which stands sentinel to the neat rows of gravestones. Like most battle sites, Lone Pine retains a special aura. You may visit it alone but you will feel the presence of other souls there. And that’s not surprising, for, in an area about the size of two tennis courts, more than 4000 Turkish soldiers and 2200 Anzacs fought and died for their countries.

  Today, they rest here – the vast majority together in a mass grave under an impressive stone memorial commemorating those with no known graves and, spread in front of the memorial, rows of individual headstones honouring those who died here and who were identifiable.

  Even today one is struck by the shocking cost of life for such a
tiny area of territory. The site is a flat, open space on the top of an exposed ridge with views back to the Aegean Sea and the Greek islands beyond. The battles here exemplified war reduced to its most primitive and most visceral: hand-to-hand combat to the death. Here brave men fought like gladiators, with bayonets, rifle butts, fists and boots, as the trenches filled with the lifeless bodies of the vanquished. Still they battled on, literally standing on the corpses of comrades and foes as the conflict raged for four days and four nights.

  On the very first day of the Anzac landings, around noon, some Victorians from the 6th Battalion made it up here to Lone Pine. The Anzacs originally named the spot Lonesome Pine after an American song, ‘On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine’, which was very popular around the start of the war. Over time it became known as Lone Pine. (The Lone Pine that thrives here today is a descendant of the original, which was destroyed during the fighting. After the Aussies captured the position, one of the Anzacs who lost a brother here picked up a cone from one of the dead tree’s branches and sent it home to his mother as a keepsake. She raised a tree from seed shed by the cone. She later presented that tree to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra where it still thrives, southwest of the main building. Seedlings from this tree have subsequently spread around Australia and one was returned to its original site, where it all started.)