Banjo

by Paul Terry

  In desperation, Paterson once again tried to use his excellent connections to break the deadlock. He called on an acquaintance from Sydney, the New South Wales agent-general in London, Sir Timothy Coghlan. A veteran public servant, Coghlan could slice through red tape like a surgeon wielding a scalpel. Coghlan said he could get Paterson to France but warned ‘if you write one word for a newspaper, or if you tell anybody that you’ve ever been inside a newspaper office, you’ll deserve all that’s coming to you’. It was half of what Paterson wanted. If he could at least get to France then he would be in the box seat should reporters be allowed to the front. With Coghlan’s help, Paterson would get across the channel, and, in doing so, he would be reunited with another of his important connections.

  The formidable Lady Rachel Dudley, whom Paterson had met five years earlier, had done what the retired generals and generous civilians had failed to do and had made it to Paris, where she oversaw the opening of an Australian hospital. Wealthy Australians in London had flocked to her cause. Rich men had sent cheques and, in some cases, even their wives, to help establish the hospital. Lady Dudley was unfazed by dogged opposition to the hospital from the British army and even successfully insisted on choosing her own man to head it. Coghlan advised Paterson that a vacancy had arisen there for an ambulance driver—a perfect pretext to get the would-be correspondent closer to the fighting. Paterson jumped at the chance and requested a passport that afternoon.

  While he waited for the passport to be processed, he took a short trip to Ireland. He was impressed by the friendliness of the Irish and the beauty of their land. He noted that it was a land of trouble ‘yet the first thing that struck me was the politeness and good humour of the people’. The visit was a chance to indulge his love of horseracing and he stayed at a stud near Dublin, where he learned as much as he could about Ireland’s thoroughbreds. During his stay, he took part in an Irish hunt through a glistening landscape of dewdrops and mist. But the Irish interlude could only be a short one; the war continued and his passport was ready. On 23 December, he arrived in France, ready for his new job as an ambulance driver.

  The Australian hospital had been set up in two buildings—a chateau and a golf club in the town of Wimereux, north of Boulogne. Paterson was pleased to see familiar faces at the hospital, among them its new head, Colonel William Eames, whom Paterson had known in South Africa. Paterson also renewed an acquaintance with another Boer War medico, Dr Alexander MacCormick. Eames and MacCormick were among several medical professionals who had been studying in London when the war broke out. They seized the chance to work at an Australian war hospital, but so far it was a hospital without many patients. During this quiet time, the hospital staff honed their golfing skills on the links next door.

  Paterson spent Christmas Day dining with medical men, including some of Britain’s finest specialists, but was still no closer to the action. That soon came to him, however, when a flood of wounded British soldiers arrived from the Front. As an ambulance driver, it was Paterson’s responsibility to get the wounded men to hospital.

  Soon, all of the beds were full and grievously injured young men lay on stretchers in the hallway as the staff worked double-time to care for them. Paterson admired the stoic bravery of the young Britons. In Happy Dispatches, he remembered Lady Dudley’s privately run hospital could afford better food than military hospitals, and was therefore a favourite with the ‘Tommies’, even if it was something of an ordeal to get them there:

  We used to meet them at the railway station with the ambulances and drive them over those infernal cobbles, bumping and jolting their wounds and shattered bones; but there was never a whine out of the Tommies. If we apologised for the roughness of the trip they said, ‘It doesn’t matter, sir, so long as you get us there.’

  When the injured soldiers reached the hospital, they got the best care that Australian doctors and nurses could provide—although they did have to endure the ministrations of Lady Dudley, who defied the wishes of the matron and insisted on washing the faces of the dirtiest men. But Paterson could not help admiring the determination of Lady Dudley, whom he described as a wonderful woman. ‘She should have been a general,’ he wrote in Happy Dispatches, ‘for no doubts assailed her and no difficulties appalled her.’

  Paterson had now done his own small bit for the war effort but, as 1915 dawned, he realised that he had little or no chance of getting to the front as a reporter. His dream of reprising his career as a war correspondent was dashed, and in January he reluctantly decided to sail home to Australia.

  15

  ‘METHUSALIER’

  Early hopes that the war would soon be over were proved horribly wrong, as British and German forces became deadlocked in a series of costly battles that claimed small tracts of French or Belgian land at a terrible cost. The armies faced off in lines of trenches. Artillery barrages cut men on both sides to shreds and countless more died in pointless infantry advances across ‘no man’s land’, as generals used to the glorious cavalry charges of the past ordered men to advance into the teeth of machine-gun and rifle fire.

  As the stalemate continued, Paterson’s frustration grew at his inability to bring the story of history’s greatest-ever human conflict to Australian newspaper readers. But not everyone shared his vision of himself as a war correspondent. As he was sailing home from France, an anonymous letter writer to The Bulletin vented bitter spleen at the poet and would-be war reporter:

  So ‘Banjo’ Paterson is on his way back to Australia, his job as war correspondent over. The mystery was that any newspaper employed him at work so manifestly out of his line. The ideal correspondent—Henry Lawson—is still hanging about Sydney. Henry has his known defects. There is little of the ascetic about him. But, under the stern discipline of military life, his consumption of cakes and ale could be limited, if not shut off altogether. What priceless pictures he could then provide of Tommy Cornstalk’s habits, whims, prejudices, failings and virtues!

  Lawson, however, was too busy fighting his own war with a beer glass to entertain thoughts of visiting the front. He had bought a room at Mrs Byers’ Coffee Palace in North Sydney, where he lived in between spells in prison or hospital. The patient Mrs Byers would become his dedicated housekeeper and friend for the rest of his life. Although he continued to write, his best work was behind him, and his prose and poetry became even more haunted and melancholy. He shuffled through the streets of Sydney, begging for handouts and drinking himself slowly to death.

  The year of 1914 started well enough for Lawson, when Angus & Robertson re-published four of his works, including While the Billy Boils and Joe Wilson and His Mates. The newspapers applauded this news in January but, in April, Henry was in trouble again when he faced court on charges of being drunk and disorderly and using foul language in front of two ladies. He admitted to being drunk, but denied insulting the women. The court convicted him of both charges and fined him a total of fifteen shillings. When the guns began to fire in France, Lawson both opposed the war and supported it but had no intention of becoming part of it.

  What neither Paterson nor Lawson knew in that Australian autumn was that Paterson’s former war correspondent colleague, Winston Churchill, would soon turn his formidable mind towards a military engagement that would become part of Australian folklore. The determined Churchill had achieved the first stage of his political ambitions by becoming the First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. In February 1915, he oversaw an ambitious plan to forge a sea route from the Aegean Sea to Russia by a naval attack on the Dardanelles Strait in Turkey. When the navy was repelled, Churchill came up with the idea of opening the strait through a land invasion to capture Turkish forts that lined the narrow waterway. The site for the invasion was a place that few Australians had heard of—a dry and scrubby peninsula known as Gallipoli.

  *

  Joseph Stratford was a big man, his upper body toned and hardened by the demands of his job as farm labourer and canecutter in northern New South Wales. At thirty-
four, he was older than most of the men around him, but he was well liked for his loyalty and bravery. When the burly Stratford leaped from a landing craft early on the morning of 25 April 1915, he was weighed down by a heavy pack and rifle and he quickly sank into the choppy water lapping the edge of an obscure beach, some 20,000 kilometres from his home. He shrugged off his pack and struggled to shore. As he found his footing on the rough beach, Joe Stratford became one of the first Australians—if not the very first—to land at Gallipoli on the Turkish coast.

  Stratford charged up the beach as machine-gun bullets began to cut the men around him down. With bayonet fixed, he ran at a Turkish machine-gun nest, defying the hail of lead that spat from the muzzle. Some accounts of Stratford’s landing suggest he bayoneted two Turks before falling to the ground, his muscular body shredded by bullets. His remains were never found. Another 2000 Australians would fall dead or wounded at Gallipoli that day. Joe Stratford never knew it, but his death would make him part of a legend that inspires and saddens Australians a century later.

  Stratford and his fellow soldiers landed north of Gaba Tepe, in an area later known as Anzac Cove. Many believe the troops had landed in the wrong place. Instead of storming a beach at the foot of a relatively accessible slope, they had landed beneath a series of steep and rugged ridges. To fulfil their mission, they would have to fight their way up these lightly defended but formidable peaks. It was a deadly challenge.

  The Gallipoli invasion was supposed to be a fast raid that would open the way to knock Turkey out of the war but it took eight months of brutal fighting, costing more than 110,000 lives, before ending in defeat for the invaders. Some of those who survived were sent to an even greater field of industrialised slaughter, the Western Front in France and Belgium.

  Back in Australia, Paterson was doing his bit in support of the war effort. While the fighting raged at Gallipoli, he penned an open letter to the troops in the form of a poem that was distributed to the soldiers on a printed card. ‘We’re All Australians Now’ told of the country’s pride in the young men from around the country who had put down their tools and swags and picked up a gun to fight for their homeland.

  The poem correctly observed that ‘We have, through what you boys have done/A history of our own’ but rather optimistically stated that old rivalries between the states and even older conflicts between the English, Irish and Scots were consigned to history by the bravery of the men at Gallipoli. In true Paterson fashion, however, the final stanza neatly summed up the country’s growing sense of nationhood:

  And with Australia’s flag shall fly

  A spray of wattle bough,

  To symbolise our unity,

  We’re all Australians now.

  Paterson’s pen was at least as mighty as a gun when it came to supporting the war, but he yearned to be part of the action and he became increasingly interested in plans to form a Remount Unit to manage the horses sent to the Light Horse troops on the peninsula. Based at Maribyrnong in Victoria, the unit was formed in September 1915, and the army began to look for volunteers. Experts in horsemanship were needed—vets, blacksmiths and farriers were in demand, and men who knew horses and could lead other men were especially sought after. Paterson knew more about horses than most and he was by birth and inclination officer material. He was a perfect fit for the job.

  The army felt the work would be fairly easy in a physical sense and set an age limit of fifty for the unit’s recruits. Paterson had turned fifty-one in February, but like so many other Great War volunteers he got around that problem simply by lying about his age. He gave his date of birth as 17 February 1866—two years after his real birth—and listed his address as care of the Australian Club in Sydney.

  Still physically fit—his army records listed his height at 5 feet 10 inches (1.8 metres), his weight at 11 stone 10 pound (74.4 kilograms) and his eyesight as ‘good’—he was accepted as an officer and given the rank of lieutenant. He was soon transferred to Maribyrnong to join his unit and was promoted to captain. On 12 November, he sailed on the Orsova, bound for Egypt and another adventure.

  The Remounts were, by Paterson’s admission, an unlikely military unit. Few of them knew anything about army drills. Those young enough to fight had hesitated to enlist because they felt they could not handle drilling and ‘the rest did not even know a sergeant-major from any other major’. Most of the officers were over-age and the younger men were ‘roughriders’—jackaroos, bushmen, former jockeys and buckjumpers who rode outlaw horses at country shows. The late Breaker Morant would have been a perfect fit for this rough-and-ready bunch.

  As military men they were, Paterson said, ‘about Australia’s last hope’. But as masters of horses they were second to none and they needed every ounce of their skills to tame animals that would have been more at home on the rodeo circuit than fighting a war. Paterson’s crew was known to the army as the Sixth Squadron of the Second Australian Remount Unit. With typical Australian humour, the men preferred to call themselves the ‘Horse-dung Hussars’ or, more fit for polite ears, the ‘Horsehold Cavalry’. The aggregate age of these roughriders and their well-seasoned officers spawned a third and enduring nickname, ‘The Methusaliers’. Whatever they were called, this motley bunch was expected to turn an equally motley collection of horses into combat steeds for the real cavalry.

  The voyage of the Orsova was uneventful. As well as the Remounts, she carried some members of the Artillery and Army Service Corps as well as a large number of female nurses. The NCOs and men underwent training every day and the officers attended lectures. The Orsova made a brief stop at Aden to stock up on coal, and then, with smoke belching from her stacks, she continued her voyage to Egypt. She arrived on 7 December and the men disembarked the next day. They travelled by train to Zeitoun and a few days later they marched the 16 miles (26 kilometres) to Maadi in Cairo where they were to form a depot. Despite the advanced age of some of the men, the march was made in good time and only six dropped out.

  When they reached Maadi, the men learned the evacuation of Gallipoli had begun and the unit’s purpose—to supply horses to the soldiers in Turkey—was redundant. The roughriders dreaded being returned home, but any fears they held were groundless. The British army decided to merge the two Australian remount units into one and bring them under the command of a brigadier-general. The horses they trained would be sent not to Gallipoli but to the killing fields of the Western Front.

  In March 1916, the Remounts formed a new base at Heliopolis. Captain Paterson was sent to Moascar near Ismalia on the western bank of the Suez Canal. There he oversaw the management of about 50,000 horses and 10,000 mules, which came through the depot in lots of about 2000 a time. The horses had to be subdued and conditioned for combat, as well as being fed and watered twice a day, seven days a week. The manure had to be carted away and burnt and the animals thoroughly groomed. The Methusaliers, said Paterson, were in a state of perpetual motion. In May, he wrote to his niece, Doris Kennedy (née Lumsdaine), who lived in Ireland. Paterson and Doris shared a love of horses and he wrote to her of the animals that were under his control: ‘I think everybody who had an incorrigible [horse] . . . in his possession sold it to the army,’ but, ‘I only ride horses intended for generals and thus I get the pick of the mounts.’

  At around this time, Paterson’s wife Alice arrived in Ismalia to work as a volunteer aide at a British military hospital. It is likely that the children, Grace and Hugh, were left in the care of Barty’s sister, Grace Taylor, at her home at Sydney’s Darling Point. Alice worked for nine months at the hospital’s Red Cross store and later operated a canteen at the Moascar camp. Barty and Alice were rarely apart during their long marriage and Alice’s proximity meant they could spend time together. It was a blessing in a place where the reminders of war were rarely far away.

  In May, Paterson noted in a letter to his niece that he had hoped to get to France, but had now accepted it would not happen. In Egypt, he said, the weather was ‘deadly hot’ and
his time in camp was monotonous. In June, he wrote again to Doris, expressing concern about the condition of the horses under his charge. He was more impressed by the mules, which fattened up nicely and did not kick viciously unless mistreated. As for his own wellbeing, he was at that time ‘messing in my own tent on the men’s grub and doing very well out of it, my outback experiences have made me very easy to please in the food line’.

  The depot was situated near a railway station. To the west lay the desert and, on the horizon, the great pyramids jutted into a hazy blue sky. These ancient monuments were intriguing to the Australians, whose oldest surviving buildings had stood for only a little over a century. The pyramids had seen the victories and defeats of some of history’s great generals and now they stood as silent witness to the flying steel and burning oil of modern warfare.

  Aircraft were becoming an increasingly useful weapon of war and the skies over the desert reverberated with the roar of engines, as young men from a nearby British flying school risked their lives in fragile contraptions of canvas and timber. All too often, as Barty recalled later, Alice Paterson and her compatriots had to sew funeral shrouds for these young pilots who ‘perhaps make one little mistake in the first solo flight’ and never saw their green and pleasant homeland again.