Soldier Boy

by Anthony Hill

  The excitement and tension rose higher the closer they got. They were almost there! They were going to have their share of action and glory. If there was any doubt at what fate might decide, men hid it under wisecracks. They were mostly young, and all were invincible. Death, on a battlefield, comes for somebody else.

  It was a short trip of only three days. On the last morning, 2 September, Jim Martin came on deck early to join the troops already waiting and eager for parade at 1000. They were only a couple of hours out from Mudros Bay.

  Jim and his mate, Cec Hogan, stood by the Southland’s starboard rail, looking through the clear, blue morning at an island passing in the distance.

  ‘It’s Strati, I think,’ said Cec. ‘Not far to go now.’

  Behind them, they were aware of men talking to their mates; having a smoke; checking their gear. When suddenly there was a cry. Some of them on the port side saw the dark conning tower of a German submarine break the surface. They watched, horrified, as the sub fired – and the wake of a torpedo sped towards the ship.

  ‘Oh, Christ! We’re gunna be hit!’

  For all of them time seemed to hang, suspended, waiting for the inevitable.

  Moments later the Southland shuddered with the impact. There was a massive explosion forward of the bridge. A gaping hole opened in the hull, and a smaller one opposite as steel stanchions supporting the troop deck were blown out the other side, killing several men. A huge waterspout rose into the air. Captain Langley, all polished up for parade, was blown sky high and flung through a forward hatch into the bilges. Seawater poured in. The ship began to list and her bows sank into the waves.

  Bells rang and whistles blew.

  Men rushed shouting onto the deck. ‘What’s happening? Have we hit a mine? Was it a torpedo?’

  At the stern, the gunner opened fire. The submarine fired again, but too late. The second torpedo missed the ship’s stern by a few yards. Those watching saw the sub dive beneath the surface and disappear.

  On deck, there was initial confusion and uncertainty. Men were running everywhere. But when the siren blew to abandon ship, the troops knew exactly what to do. Jim and Cec and the others without their life jackets went below to get them. They returned quickly and stood with their platoons at their allocated lifeboat stations, almost as if they were doing a drill. There was a sense of discipline – even calm – that would remain long in the memories of those who survived.

  But panic broke out among certain of the Southland crew, especially the stokers. In his dreams, Jim Martin could see them still … tumbling onto the deck, yelling their heads off.

  We’re hit! We’re sinking! We’ll all be drowned!

  Some of them rushed the lifeboats, jerking and tugging at the cables, leaping in to save themselves without a thought for the soldiers waiting by the rails.

  ‘Come back or I’ll fire!’

  Captain Kelk appeared from the bridge, holding his revolver. Two of the crew had successfully launched a boat, and were rowing away.

  ‘I order you! Pull back!’

  Captain Kelk fired a warning shot above their heads – and then another.

  ‘Aye … sir …’

  Reluctantly the boat returned to the ship’s side and took off a group of waiting soldiers.

  Others weren’t so fortunate. Some lifeboats stuck to the paintwork and had to be prised away, such was their state of wartime readiness. Some cables jammed in the davits when they lowered the boats. Men had to lean out over the ship’s side to free them. But all at once the cables would run loose and the boats plunge to the water, overturning and spilling their occupants into the sea.

  Many drowned that way. There were two boys … Jim could see them still behind his closed eyes … two cabin boys, no more than twelve years old, who climbed out on the davits to free a boat. The ship suddenly lurched and heeled further to port. The boys were flung overboard screaming, and were dragged under the waves.

  The Southland settled deeper into the water. It seemed as if she were about to sink. But the engineers shut the bulkheads soon after the torpedo struck and surprisingly, despite the heavy list, she stayed afloat. There were a number of rafts and collapsible canvas boats on the rear deck. Some of the soldiers and remaining crew worked feverishly to get them launched. One by one, as their names were called, men moved forward and took their places. The boats were launched and they pulled away from the ship’s side.

  The troops’ behaviour was remarkable. It was only four months since the liner, Lusitania, had been sunk by a German submarine with the loss of 1200 lives. And everybody remembered the sinking of Titanic in 1912. So far as they knew, the men on the Southland would soon join them. But still they patiently waited in turn for their allotted boats.

  ‘What was the name of that island?’ muttered Jim. ‘I’m scared stiff I’ll never see land again.’

  ‘Me too, mate,’ replied Cec Hogan under his breath.

  But who would be the first to admit it out loud, or betray that sense of collective steadiness?

  A few, in the platoons behind Jim, played cards. Captain Langley, who’d been blown into the bilges, returned exhausted to his place on deck. Somebody started to sing ‘Australia Will Be There’. Somebody else called out ‘Are we afraid to die?’ and they all bellowed in reply, ‘NO!’

  ‘Are we downhearted?’

  ‘NO!’

  There were even a few jokes.

  ‘I can’t swim, Sarge,’ said one bloke to his NCO. ‘But this is the best bloody chance I ever had of learning.’

  By 1015 – half an hour after the torpedo struck – two thirds of those on board had got away. The problem was with the boats on the starboard side of the ship. They were hard to launch because of the list, and the soldiers were inexperienced in handling them.

  ‘Next!’

  Men of the 4th Platoon of A Company, Privates Martin and Hogan among them, moved forward and took their places in the boat.

  ‘Lower away.’

  The boat swung out. It jerked and shuddered, dropping down on the stiff cables. It banged heavily against the side of the listing ship. Someone leaned over to try to push the boat away, and was lucky not to be crushed.

  Bit by bit they descended towards the water. Over halfway there! When suddenly the cable holding the stern of the lifeboat jammed. But the fall at the prow, taking up the slack, ran loose. The boat pitched forward. And the men were hurtled into the sea.

  Down. Down. Down.

  Jim felt the water closing about him, cold and all-consuming. Dragging him down to the darkness in his shirt and breeches. He’d taken off his tunic and slung his boots around his neck. But they were gone, and even now were following him to the bottom.

  Deeper and deeper. Until his breath could hold no longer. Frantically, Jim began to push with his arms and legs. Pushing upwards through the water to reverse the fall … upwards through the streaming bubbles to the light and air of the surface …

  He broke through and gasped. Jim filled his lungs with oxygen, but got a mouthful of seawater as well. Coughing. Half choking. Sinking briefly beneath the water again, but supported by the cork blocks in his life jacket.

  Jim thrashed his arms and for a moment began to panic. He saw other men floundering in the water. He called and tried to reach them, but he was carried away by the fast-flowing current. Panic rose in him again and he shouted.

  ‘Help! Help me!’

  Still was he swept further away from the others, until he seemed to be alone in the wide, glittering sea. He struggled and cried. But finding that the cork supported him and that his head stayed above water, Jim’s inner voice told him, ‘Keep calm.’ To save his strength, if he was to have any chance.

  He took a deep breath. Then another. And slowly began to dog-paddle. Nothing too hard or tiring, but enough to keep him moving. His limbs seemed to be working. No bones were broken that he could feel, except his ribs ached where he’d struck the side of the boat in the tumble. Thank God the sea was smooth, though the c
urrent was sweeping him rapidly away.

  Wreckage floated near by. Oars and a life belt. A corpse – one of the stewards in his white jacket, the blood seeping from a head wound – lolled helplessly past. The first dead body Jim had seen.

  ‘Jesus!’

  Part of an up-ended boat came towards him. Jim struck out and clung tight as it bobbed and eddied in the water.

  He looked around. He was a long way from the Southland where men, like ants, were clearing the last of the rafts. On the horizon, Jim saw the first faint plumes of smoke from the ships that had picked up the radio SOS and were steaming to the rescue.

  Jim still couldn’t see any of his own companions. He waved and yelled again.

  ‘Cec …! Sergeant Coates …!’

  But he heard only the sound of his own voice and the wind whipping across the surface. Were they drowned already?

  Jim called again. For anyone.

  Nothing.

  He drifted in the vast emptiness. He was alone. Even the sense of time passing seemed to have abandoned him.

  ‘Help me!’

  Jim heard a voice calling faintly across the water. Straining his eyes in the silver glare, he saw – or thought he saw – an arm waving from a figure some way off.

  ‘Help me!’

  ‘Hang on, mate! I’m coming!’

  He began to paddle and kick, trying to swim on the upturned wreck to the drowning man. But the swell came up, and the current ran, and the more Jim tried the further away he was carried.

  ‘Help me!’

  Until the cries faded on the wind.

  Jim Martin clung on for his own life. The sun beat down. On and on he went, heaving with the sea and feeling the cold seep into the marrow of his bones. He was afraid he’d pass out, that he’d slip off the wreckage and become one of the drowned himself. Salt cracked his mouth, and his throat was raw with thirst …

  ‘Help me!’

  Sobs were gathering in his guts.

  ‘Help me …’

  ‘Hold on there, old chap!’

  A voice sounded close by. Hands reached out to grab him.

  Jim turned. A lifeboat full of men was beside him, easing their oars. The hands seized him and helped him to the side of the boat.

  ‘Easy there … Can you lift yourself up?’

  Jim used the last of his strength to scramble aboard.

  ‘No, no. We’ve got too many already. He’ll tip the boat …’

  He opened his eyes and saw an older man – one of the crew, a stoker by the look of him – shouting from the stern.

  ‘Throw him back …’

  ‘Shut up, you!’ came several voices in reply. ‘Any more lip like that, and we’ll throw you back instead.’

  The man was silent.

  ‘You okay?’ asked the man in charge, a corporal from one of the other companies.

  Jim nodded. He coughed and spewed seawater. A couple of blokes from his own platoon had also been dragged aboard. He saw Cec Hogan over there …

  ‘I’m a bit buggered though,’ Jim said.

  And he fainted face up in the bilge water.

  10: MUDROS BAY

  Jim didn’t know how long he lay there. It might have been minutes. It seemed like hours. When he opened his eyes every bone in his body ached and his mind was numb with shock. He lay very still, watching the clouds roll across the sky, as the lifeboat rose and fell on the Aegean Sea.

  He was roused by his mate’s voice.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  Cec had swapped places with a bloke on the seat near Jim.

  Private Martin grunted.

  ‘I’ll live.’

  ‘Good-oh.’

  They said nothing further for the moment. They didn’t need to. Their gratitude that the other was safe lay in the intimacy of silence between friends. Until it was broken by the voices of men talking excitedly.

  ‘Look Corp! Look over there! The old Southland ain’t done for yet. She’s getting up a head of steam!’

  Jim raised himself on an elbow.

  ‘Wakey, wakey, sunshine,’ said the corporal. ‘Welcome back!’

  The others laughed.

  Cec helped Jim haul himself onto the seat. He looked out to sea. Black smoke was rising from the funnels of the Southland. She was a long way off but the ship, imperceptibly, seemed to be moving.

  ‘She’s still afloat,’ he croaked. ‘She’s under way again.’

  Indeed she was, heaving and wallowing through the water like a fat old girl well down in the bows. But still … moving.

  They found out later that Captain Kelk, going below to the engine room, thought the Southland might stay afloat long enough for him to make a run for Lemnos and beach her at Mudros Bay.

  ‘Is it good enough?’ someone asked the chief engineer.

  ‘I don’t give it much of a chance,’ he replied. ‘But I’ve got a wife and kids, and it’s good enough for me.’

  As most of his crew had gone, Captain Kelk called for volunteers. Eighteen diggers – each one of whom could swim – came forward to act as stokers down in the boiler room. With the help of others who came aboard when the destroyer Racoon pulled alongside, the ship slowly got under way, and headed towards Lemnos, forty miles distant.

  The Racoon wasn’t the only rescue ship. An hour or so after the SOS went out, several naval vessels and the hospital ship, Neuralia, were in the area picking up survivors. Jim watched them draw nearer. He could make out their markings. The red cross painted over white on the Neuralia’s hull. The sleek low lines and twin funnels of a French torpedo boat coming closer; a rope ladder down the side, and a voice calling through a megaphone:

  ‘Nous arrivons, mes amis! We’re coming, friends!’

  ‘Put your backs into it boys,’ said the corporal to the oarsmen. ‘Give us every pound of strength you’ve got left.’

  Jim felt the lifeboat buck and kick as the rowers ploughed through the waves towards the ship. He thought of the Greek hero, Achilles – of whom Mr Hyland had told at school – steering through the same wine-dark seas to war against Troy, on the other side of the Dardanelles. Jim thought. And then passed on. He’d ask Cec about it one day. These modern warriors had their own struggles of survival.

  Willing hands and boathooks reached out to help them as they came alongside the torpedo boat. They climbed up the rope ladder, like Jacob’s Dream, and onto the deck. Some men fell from exhaustion just where they were. Others wandered in a daze, taking off their life jackets and trying to recover their wits.

  French sailors – the matelots – bustled about with dry blankets, and mugs of coffee and hot wine.

  ‘Allons mes amis! Du café! Du vin chaud!’

  Jim and Cec Hogan found a place in the shade on the after deck of the torpedo boat. A French Tricolour fluttered from the stern. They sat against the ship’s rail, drying out from their exposure to the sea. They were still in a state of shock, though gradually they found words to say what had happened. Bit by bit. Cec, it seemed, had been picked up not long before the lifeboat found Jim.

  They were young, and a sense of normality slowly returned.

  A matelot came up to them with more coffee and a plate of fresh bread and cold beef.

  ‘Mangez, mes amis! Eat, my friends!’

  The two soldier boys thought they were not hungry. But as soon as they ate the first mouthful, they realised they were ravenous. The sailor sat with them, laughing and talking away in French and broken English, as they demolished the whole plate of food. Amelia’s home cooking never tasted better.

  ‘Fumez-vous? You smoke? Cigarettes?’

  Cec did. But his tobacco pouch was sodden and the weed useless. The matelot produced a whole packet of gauloises and matches, and joined Cec as he lit up. The lad coughed and half-choked as the strong tobacco smoke went down his throat, still rasped from sea water. But he grinned and said it did him the world of good!

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Merci.’ Cec knew a little French.

  ‘Bien.’r />
  Cec tried to give the cigarettes back, but the sailor wouldn’t take them.

  ‘Pour vous!… for you. Un cadeau… a present.’

  Cec hadn’t anything much to give him in exchange except a copper penny, with the King’s head and the legend ‘Commonwealth of Australia’, that he found in his pouch. It was the only thing not waterlogged.

  The sailor looked at the penny and laughed. ‘Australien!’ At once he removed the band from his cap and gave it to Cec. It was a black band with the name Torpilleurs de Toulon – Torpedo Boats of Toulon – in gold letters, with a couple of anchors. Cec kept that sailor’s cap band among his souvenirs all his life.

  The rescue ships stayed in the area for some time, picking up survivors, before making for Lemnos. The torpedo boat was already anchored when, later that afternoon, the Southland limped into Mudros Bay. Every boat in the harbour blew welcoming sirens and men lined the decks, cheering and waving, as Captain Kelk safely beached his ship.

  The men rescued by the naval vessels were transferred to the hospital ship, Neuralia, when it reached Mudros. They were given an issue of dry clothes and a good dinner (‘the best feed I ever had,’ said Jim), though space was limited and they had to sleep on deck. But it was a hot night and, besides, they were so wound up nobody wanted much kip. Men lay under the rocking stars, exchanging bits of gossip. Who lived. And who died.

  ‘Colonel Linton copped it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The CO, dummy, of the whole brigade. Tipped out of his boat while it was being lowered, just like us. Boat fell on top of him. The poor old coot, floundering around in the water … They got him aboard one of the destroyers, but he died not long after …’

  ‘Many others?’

  ‘Dunno for sure. More than thirty they say … fourteen of our battalion.’

  ‘Any we know …?’