The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  The casualties became lessened on both sides and by mid November the killing had slowed almost to a stop. What was the point of killing without any gain? Both armies remained remarkably close to each other with a warren of trenches and communication tunnels carved into the landscape. It was in this deadly proximity that both Turks and Anzacs revealed the characteristics which would eventually lead to the mutual respect that persists today, Ali explains:

  The Turkish elderly local people recalled the Anzac battles as the ‘gentlemen’s war’ and they became gentlemen. In the early days of the conflict both Turks and Australians threw many grenades. But the detonation system of grenades was adjusted to not less than ten seconds – enough time for each side to become very proficient catchers who could lob back the bombs to the thrower. But who could be sure just when the grenade would go off? Too many brave men on each side were being blown apart or horribly mutilated.

  One day the Australians decreased their bombardment of grenades. The Turks got the message and reciprocated. Soon the Turks stopped throwing them at all. The Australians followed. The gentlemen’s agreement had broken out. It was a tacit agreement that spread to other areas.

  The Anzacs were rationed to 2 litres of fresh water a day for all their uses. Because of the paucity of fresh water, the Anzacs went down to the sea whenever possible to bathe and to wash their clothes, usually the only set they had, and for what they called ‘chatting’, or patiently crushing the mites that gathered in the seams of their uniforms and caused terrible itching and rashes. Ali says:

  The Turks could see them bathing from Baby 700, Hill 60 and Olive Grove [all hills] but they didn’t shoot at them because they were not carrying any weapons. Gentlemen’s agreement number one. The first time most of the Turks had tasted chocolate was when the Anzacs, near Quinn’s Post, tossed some of their rations instead of grenades. Turks retaliated with plenty of tomatoes and apples. One day a white handkerchief tied on a bayonet was shown in Turkish lines. A Turkish boy jumped out and ran to the Australian lines with some bags. He dropped them into the Anzac trenches and ran back. The Aussies opened the bags and found them full of tobacco – the Turks had plenty of fine-cut tobacco in their rations. But they had no papers to roll the tobacco. The message with the bags said: ‘I tobacco … you papier. Everyday. Everyday’.

  The Anzacs understood perfectly. They gathered all the paper they could find – rollies, newspapers, old letters – and over the following days the exchange continued. Virtually no firing, but huge puffs of smoke rising from both sides as they enjoyed their unofficial ceasefire.

  Captain Ali believes Lone Pine has a special symbolism for both sides in the conflict:

  In 1990, the 75th anniversary of the Anzac landings, I had the privilege and honour of guiding two original Australian Anzacs for the commemorations. Near the Lone Pine tree, one of the Anzacs said to me: ‘Ali?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘We believe we gained the true Australian spirit on Lone Pine.’

  I said: ‘Sir, you know we gained Ataturk on the same area.’

  And the second Anzac said: ‘So that is why the Lone Pine area is so important in the history of both Australia and Turkey.’

  The bald statistics eloquently spell out the futility of the Gallipoli campaign. The original plan was to take the peninsula in 11 days. It dragged out to 240 days of fighting and ended in stalemate. The Anzacs never penetrated more than 1.2 kilometres inland from their landings: Lone Pine marks the point of maximum advance. The British gained a maximum of 5.5 kilometres penetration at Cape Helles and 3.2 kilometres at Suvla Bay. The entire campaign captured less than 1 per cent of the peninsula. An additional 420,000 Allied troops joined the original invasion force of around 80,000 during the campaign. The Turkish defenders more than matched that number and, by the end, had 253,000 killed or wounded. The Allies’ casualty list totalled 251,000 killed or wounded – a daily average of almost 1000 from each side for the entire campaign. These young men had an average age of less than 23 years.

  The Allies’ withdrawal from the peninsula was perhaps the most efficiently organised operation of the entire campaign. It was achieved without a single casualty on the night of 19/20 December 1915 when the Anzacs were evacuated from North Beach, on the northern side of Anzac Cove, where they had landed 240 days earlier. Even here, Captain Ali challenges the traditional view that the Turks were hoodwinked into allowing the invaders to slip away:

  From the Turkish point of view, the withdrawal was exactly what they wanted. What was the point of shooting the retreating troops in the back as they left our shores? The Turkish survivors always claimed they realised the withdrawal was occurring but they were content to let it happen and stop the killing.

  They were soldiers, the Australians and the Turks. They had to do what they had been taught to do. And they tried their best. But it’s interesting that the result on the battleground was that neither side lost or gained even one metre, except at Lone Pine. At Lone Pine only, at the cost of 2200 Australians’ lives, they gained an area not bigger than two tennis courts.

  Why? Not only the Turks but also the Anzacs were country men. They were not soft city people, they were equal in strength. That’s the reason neither side gained the upper hand and that created a very important result: the Turks couldn’t defeat the Anzacs; the Anzacs couldn’t defeat the Turks. They were equal in their strength, their power and their courage.

  Today the sacred sands of Anzac Cove attract Australians in ever-growing numbers. These Aussies, young and old, are drawn by the spirit of Anzac. They are trying to understand its origins and the impact it’s had on their nation. They are looking for their roots while paying homage to the men of Anzac who shed their blood in helping to establish our national identity.

  Walking along the beach, you can still see the concrete remains of Watson’s Pier, named after Lieutenant Watson, the engineer responsible for building four piers on the beach to receive supplies. You can see where the Anzacs came to swim off the beach – during their brief respites from the tensions of the front lines, a time for washing and relaxation. Even then, they faced the constant danger of shelling from the Turkish artillery raining death on them from their hidden emplacements behind the high ground. The road that runs above the beach was also built by the Anzacs and is still used today, although it has been recently upgraded because of the consistently growing numbers of visitors. On the northern headland of the beach, Ari Burnu cemetery holds the remains of some of the first casualties of the campaign, and includes some of men of the 8th and 10th Light Horse Regiments, the heroes of The Nek, who fell in that futile action.

  It is here you will find a remarkable memorial – a rarity in the history of warfare – where one country has honoured the soldiers of another country that came to invade it. In 1985 the Turkish government unveiled a monument to the Anzacs and officially named the place Anzac Koyu, or Anzac Cove. The monument immortalises the words that Mustapha Kemal, by then the president of his nation and known as Kemal Ataturk, spoke to the first Australians, New Zealanders and British to visit the battlefields after the war in 1934:

  Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace, there is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now living in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

  Ari Burnu cemetery was where the Anzac Day dawn services were held until the 85th anniversary of the landings in 2000, when the service was moved to the specially built Anzac Commemorative Site at North Beach because of the vast increase in numbers of people attending. Now the service is conducted on a beautiful, open grassed area in front of the landmark the Anzacs nicknamed The Sphinx (after the real one they’d seen during their training in Egypt). The Gallipo
li Sphinx stares impassively down as you look up from the beach, just as it did when those young soldiers first looked up at it, their eyes filled with a mixture of fear, hope and awe as they realised the massive task before them. The sloping face of Plugge’s Plateau, once full of dugouts, used as casualty clearing stations, dressing stations, depots and headquarters, is now shrouded by a cloak of hardy bushes, which hug it tightly as they shelter from the powerful sea winds.

  All around, the ghosts of the men who died here are present. In the stillness of the crisp winter morning at Anzac Cove, in the ravines of Shrapnel Gully, in the hallowed battlegrounds of Lone Pine and The Nek, their spirits remain. They seem to call on those who visit here to remember their sacrifices and make sure they were not in vain.

  Charles Bean, who saw it first-hand, reflected on the special meaning of Gallipoli to the Anzacs and their fledgling nations. It was not simply the sacrifice of the 8141 Australians and 2500 New Zealanders who perished there or the 18,000 Aussies and 5000 Kiwis wounded …

  But the standard set by the first companies at the first call – by the stretcher bearers, the medical officers, the staffs, the company leaders, the privates, the defaulters on the water barges, the Light Horse at The Nek – this was already part of the tradition not only of Anzac but of the Australian and New Zealand peoples.

  By dawn on 20 December Anzac had faded into a dim blue line lost amid other hills on the horizon as the ships took their human freight to Imbros, Lemnos and Egypt. But Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat.

  CHAPTER 6

  Shelled to Hell

  After Gallipoli it was clear the Australian Army had a character and a style of its own. Although many Diggers were of British origin (almost 30 per cent were actually born in Britain), it was evident after Gallipoli that our Army was quite different from the British Army. Notwithstanding the fact that the campaign had been lost, it was also clear that the Australians had developed an immense pride in their performance at Gallipoli.

  Our national characteristics were clearly identifiable in the Diggers – mateship, endurance, ingenuity, teamwork, courage, resilience and the like. Clearly these didn’t emerge overnight. They were honed by the challenges our forebears faced in surviving in our remarkable country, with its vast distances, harsh terrain and unpredictable climate.

  Australians in almost every sector, overcoming obstacles to build our nation – from pioneering in the outback to getting a telegraph line to Darwin, creating the School of the Air, the Flying Doctor Service, mapping and building roads, national education and health services – all required a practical, pragmatic approach built up over long periods of hardship. The spirit needed to survive and grow was constantly tested by droughts, bushfires and floods. It produced generations of Australians capable of heroic struggles in their daily lives.

  Gallipoli provided a focal point for our Diggers to show that spirit. In some ways it served as our symbolic rite of passage to nationhood. We didn’t have to fight a civil war or a war of independence to become a nation. That was a miracle of compromise. We marched to nationhood at Gallipoli just 14 years after our independence and the Diggers paid for our right to that independence with their blood.

  It was evident to Charles Bean and other observers that the Australians and New Zealanders who returned to Egypt from Gallipoli were an entirely different body of men from those who had landed at Anzac Cove eight months earlier:

  They were a military force with strongly established, definite traditions. Not for anything, if he could avoid it, would an Australian now change his loose, faded tunic or battered hat for the smartest cloth or headgear of any other army. Men clung to their Australian uniforms till they were tattered to the limit of decency.

  The crucial attribute of the AIF was its discipline – or, perhaps, the compatibility of its discipline with the initiative and readiness to take risks that marked its men. As in every army, its discipline, to be effective, had to be based on the conditions and outlook of the nation.

  In their way, the critics from the colonial days were right: a people with Australian outlook and standards could not have produced an efficient army of the kind those critics envisaged – that is, one imbued with the automatism of the old-time grenadier. But the Australian commanders and the troops themselves, from highest to lowest, as a result of their outlook and of the natural relations between them, developed a system of discipline which, though outwardly that of the British Army, was in spirit more akin to that of the French. It aimed at the best and most reasonable use of the national material for the purpose in view. It succeeded because the troops wanted the object, and understood the methods, almost as thoroughly as their leaders.

  Our Diggers’ reputation, earned at Gallipoli, was consolidated by their subsequent actions on the Western Front in France after they were moved there in March 1916. The trench warfare in France was conflict at its most diabolical. Nothing, not even the worst privations of Gallipoli, could have prepared the Diggers for what lay ahead.

  In the aftermath of Gallipoli, the Anzac troops were reinforced and divided into two Army corps: One Anzac Corps, under the command of General Birdwood, comprised the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions and the NZ Divisions; and Two Anzac Corps, commanded by General Godley, was made up of the 4th and 5th Australian Divisions. Both Anzac corps were initially held by Kitchener in Egypt because he feared that the Turks, now freed from their defence of the Dardanelles, would turn their attention to the Suez. However, the Turks were distracted by the Russian invasion of Armenia, and a far more immediate threat emerged for Kitchener.

  The Germans had their best chance of victory in the early months of the war at the Battle of the Marne. In a preview of Dunkirk, the British escaped the trap, in the Miracle of the Marne, and the Germans dug in. The war then degenerated into a deadly arm wrestle until, on 21 February 1916, the Germans set the Western Front alight when they launched a massive attack on Verdun, a strategically important French bastion on the Meuse River. The Germans had a brutally simple aim: bleed the French white! They regarded Britain as their greatest threat and they decided that the best way to defeat Britain was to knock her greatest ally, France, out of the war. They reasoned that if they could concentrate a massive assault on the heart of the French Army, they could knock the French out of the war. The Germans chose Verdun as their primary target. They correctly assumed that France would throw everything they could at the defence of Verdun, as its loss would see Paris fall and it would leave the British with the virtually impossible task of countering the enormous German Army on its own. For their part the French resisted mightily, under the battle cry of their commander, General Robert Niville: ‘Ils ne passeront pas!’ (‘They shall not pass!’). Kitchener realised he had to act to ease the load borne by the French. Just eight days after the Verdun assaults began, he ordered General Birdwood to bring One Anzac Corps to France as soon as possible and General Godley to follow with Two Anzac Corps as soon as it had completed its building of its artillery units.

  The Anzacs would reinforce the British Expeditionary Force, which had more than trebled in size since the start of the war to now have 49 divisions in France. The British forces there, including those of the supporting Commonwealth countries, now totalled 1.2 million men, of which almost 100,000 were Australians. Another 90,000 Aussies waited in England and a further 25,000 were deployed in the Middle East. The French could call on 111 divisions, giving the Allies a grand total of 160 divisions to defend against the 120 German divisions facing them.

  To counter the German offensive against Verdun, the British decided on the biggest throw of the dice of the war: a massed attack around the Somme River, aimed at simultaneously punching a hole through the German line, while releasing the pressure on the French at Verdun.

  This was the situation into which the Diggers made their way from the port of Marseilles to the northeast of Fra
nce. The Anzacs were greatly disappointed when their troop trains bypassed Paris on the way to the front. Once at the front they were first sent, in April 1916, to a generally quiet sector where the British allowed new arrivals to acclimatise, known as ‘The Nursery’, near Fromelles, a tiny village, about 9 kilometres south of Armentières and 12 kilometres west of Lille. On 20 May One Anzac Corps took over a position from the British and held a sector of the line from Fromelles village northwards for about 14.5 kilometres to the south bank of the River Lys, just to the east of Armentières.

  The fighting on the Western Front, by this stage, had degenerated into a massive siege, with both sides suffering unheard-of casualties in the previous clashes as waves of men were decimated by artillery and massed heavy machine-gun fire. Each side was now hunkered down in an intricate web of defensive trenches as they daily pounded each other’s lines with an ever-increasing storm of artillery bombardment. The opposing front lines stretched like an ugly scar across Western Europe, 760 kilometres through Belgium and France, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps. The two armies’ front lines were separated by a killing field known as no-man’s land. Attempts by both sides to break the deadlock by driving a wedge through their opponent’s defensive line had proven disastrous.