by Jim Haynes
Most mails are landed between sunset and dawn, mostly after midnight. Post Office officials must be there to check and supervise and they get little sleep on ‘mail nights’.
Incoming mails do not constitute all their work; outgoing mail from the firing line is heavy and they have other tasks to perform also.
There are the pathetic ‘returns’ to be dealt with, the letters to men who will never read them, written before the heavy news had reached home. A huge bulk of correspondence is marked ‘Killed’ and re-addressed to the place of origin of the fallen soldiers. Their comrades keep their newspapers and the parcels of comforts bring melancholy cheer to their fighting comrades-in-arms. What else is to be done with them?
Letters put a man at home for a couple of hours, and so does his local newspaper. Perusing the local paper takes him back to the old habit of picking at the news over his eggs and coffee or on the suburban business train. Intimate associations hang about the reading of the local newspaper, associations almost as powerful as are brought by letters. If relatives at home understood this they would despatch newspapers with stricter regularity.
And what can be said about parcels from home? No son away at boarding school ever pursued his voyage of discovery through tarts, cakes, sweets, pies and fruit with the intensity of gloating expectation that a man on Gallipoli displays as he discloses the contents of his ‘parcel’.
‘Strewth, Bill, look, a new pipe! And some of me favourite terbaccer. Blimey, cigars too! Have one before the crowd smells ’em. Hello, more socks! Oh well, winter’s comin’. ’Ere, ’ow are you orf for socks, cobber? Take these, bonzer hand-knitted, sling them army issue things into the sea . . . Gawd! ’ere’s a shaving stick, that’s handy . . . I clean run out of carbolic soap!’
Mail deserves all the organised care the War Office can bestow; mail makes for efficiency.
There may be no morning delivery of the daily newspaper on Anzac, but we get the news. At the foot of Headquarters Gully is the notice board and wireless messages are posted daily. At any hour men are elbowing their way into the perusing circle.
There is news of operations along our own front and copious messages from the Russian and Western fronts. The Melbourne Cup finish was cabled through immediately. There were few men who did not handle their purses around the board that evening, for no war news, for months, had been so momentous as this.
The associations called to mind by the news from Flemington were strong and homely, as well as national. Men were recalled for a while from the land of blood and death to the office, the bank, the warehouse, the country pub or the shearing shed where Cup bets were often placed and sweeps made. The sporting spirit is stronger than any other Australian national trait. The Defence Department knew what they were doing when they made provision for a cabled despatch of the running of the Cup to Gallipoli.
ON POST
‘TAMBOUR 8’
Peepin’ through a loophole during weary hours of night
Listenin’ till yer eardrums nearly crack.
Waitin’ for the Corporal to bring the new relief,
Bendin’ till the pains run down your back;
Starin’ till your eyeballs are just about to roll,
What a lovely life for men to lead;
Who would be on sentry post along the Anzac line,
With bully beef and biscuits for yer feed?
Standin’ up with leaden feet and toes that can’t be felt;
Boots wet through and stickin’ to the bank—
Nose tip like the apex of a blanky icicle,
Hair all wet and clingin’ thick and dank:
Teeth that chatter freely in the bitter bitin’ cold,
Jove! I used ter think that home was bad,
Now I’m doing sentry post along the Anzac line
Strewth! A bloomin’ bloke like me is mad.
When the flamin’ snow came down the other blanky night
I was draped in white from head to feet;
I musta been a picture to the officer of the watch,
When he came along to do his beat.
When I think of all me pals and cobbers stayin’ home
And all the things us blokes have given up;
How I’m freezing doing sentry post along the Anzac line
When I mighta been in Melbourne for The Cup.
But, what’s the good of grumblin’ at blokes that stayed at home?
When I think of mates like Jim and Ted,
Down in Shrapnel Gully with a little wooden cross,
It sorta makes me cooler in the head.
I’m still doing sentry post along the Anzac line,
But, maybe, when I’ve seen me last big ‘show’,
I’ll be down there in the gully somewhere near me two old pals,
And that’s the last ‘rest post’ to which I’ll go.
FROSTBITE
OLIVER HOGUE
Days dragged drearily on. Pessimism peeped into the trenches. Later, in the solitude of the dug-out, pessimism stayed an unwelcome guest, and would not be banished. All the glorious optimism of April, the confidence of May, June and July had gone, and the dogged determination of August, September and October was fast petering out. The Turks had fringed the dominating hills with barbed wire and bayonets, and in very surety Australia was ‘up against it’.
Not that anyone dared talk pessimism. The croakers would have been squelched instantly. But deep down there was a feeling that unless heavy reinforcements arrived we could never break through to Constantinople. But at Helles, Anzac and Suvla the British hung on, desperately, heroically.
September’s cold snap was forgotten in the unexpected warmth of October—just like an afterglow of summer. Then came the wintry winds of November—and the blizzard . . . Of course we have snow in Australia. Kosciusko is all the year round covered with a soft white mantle. Down on Monaro it can be bleak and wintry. And the old Blue Mountains now and then enjoy a spell of sleet and snow . . . But taking us by and large we are a warmblooded race, we Australians. That is why we viewed the approach of winter with some concern.
We knew the Turks could never, never, never break through our lines, and drive us—as Liman von Sanders had boasted—into the sea. But we were beginning to fear that we were a long, long way from Constantinople.
The blizzard swooped down on Anzac. Just like a shroud the white visitation settled on Gallipoli. It was cold as a Monaro gale. Soldiers crowded round the fires, and at night in the trenches it was terribly hard to keep awake.
The cold was something to remember. We could keep our hands a bit warm by giving ‘five rounds rapid’ and hugging the rifle barrel. Talk about cold feet; we had heard of ‘cold feet’ when we were in Egypt, but this was the real thing.
How we invoked rich blessings on the heads of the Australian girls who had knitted us those warm socks! How we cursed the thieves along the lines of communication who pillaged and pilfered, while the men in the firing line went begging! But through it all the indomitable cheerfulness of the Australian soldier would not be crushed. They laughed and joked when their teeth chattered, so that clear articulation was impossible.
To preserve some circulation they stamped their feet till exhaustion bade them cease. But the blizzard was inexorable. The cold permeated everywhere. We got just a glimpse of what the British Army suffered in the Crimea.
Frostbite was something to fear and dread. It was agonising. Hundreds of men were carried down to the field hospitals and sent across to Lemnos. There were scores of amputations daily . . . We had cursed the heat of July and the plague of flies, but now we prayed for summer again.
SONG OF A SOCK
ANONYMOUS
It was forbidden for women knitting articles for Red Cross parcels to include any identification or messages. This poem is based on one that was found in a pair of socks.
***
Knitted in the tram-car,
Knitted in the street,
Knitted by the fireside,
&nb
sp; Knitted in the heat;
Knitted in Australia
Where the gum tree grows,
Sent to you at Anzac,
Just to warm your toes.
Knitted here and knitted there
With this soft refrain,
‘May the one who wears them
Come back to us again’.
Knitted by the seaside,
Knitted in the train,
Knitted in the sunshine,
Knitted in the rain.
Knitted in Springtime
Where the wattle grows,
Sent to some brave soldier,
Out at Anzac Cove.
Knitted here and knitted there
With this soft refrain,
‘May the one who wears them
Come back to us again’.
THE GREATEST PRIVILEGE
JIM HAYNES
Much of the myth-building about Gallipoli comes from an 8000-word letter written by twenty-nine-year-old journalist Keith Murdoch in September 1915.
Murdoch was born in Melbourne on 12 August 1885 and became a journalist with the Age. In 1911 he was promoted and became Commonwealth parliamentary reporter and was a founding member of the Australian Journalists Association, established in 1910.
When the First World War began Murdoch narrowly lost the ballot for the coveted position of official correspondent to the AIF (which went to Charles Bean) and he went to London to become Managing Editor of the United Cable Service, which serviced all Australian newspapers.
Murdoch was at the Dardanelles for less than a week, just after the August fighting, and he then spent time with the war correspondents an Imbros, where the British journalist Ellis Ashmead Bartlett asked him to take a letter to the British prime minister without passing the censor.
Murdoch was arrested when the letter, scathingly critical of the Gallipoli campaign, was intercepted and confiscated at Marseilles, but he wrote an 8000-word letter of his own and sent it to Andrew Fisher, the Australian prime minister. The letter is credited with contributing to the decision to evacuate and the recall of General Sir Ian Hamilton, the campaign’s commander.
Murdoch called the campaign ‘undoubtedly one of the most terrible chapters in our history’. He claimed that officers and men had ‘nothing but contempt’ for Hamilton and the general staff and stated:
Undoubtedly the essential and first step to restore the morale of the shaken forces is to recall [Hamilton] and his Chief of Staff [Lieutenant General Sir W.P. Braithwaite], a man more cordially detested in our forces than Enver Pasha [the Turkish war minister] . . . It is not for me to judge Hamilton, but it is plain that when an Army has completely lost faith in its General, and he has on numerous occasions proved his weaknesses, only one thing can be done.
Commenting on the failure of the forces at Suvla to advance, he declared: ‘The spirit at Suvla is simply deplorable. You would refuse to believe that these are really British soldiers.’
The letter went on to claim that the forces at Suvla were ‘simply a lot of child-like youths’ who showed ‘an atrophy of mind and body that is appalling’.
On the other hand, Murdoch was convinced that the Turk was ‘a brave and generous foe’.
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, who opposed the Gallipoli campaign, read the letter and immediately urged that Murdoch send a copy to the British prime minister, Asquith.
Without checking the allegations or asking Hamilton for his comments, Asquith had the letter printed as a state paper and circulated to the members of the Dardanelles Committee, which was in charge of the campaign. Hamilton was recalled and the new commander, General Charles Monro, suggested evacuation, which began on 12 December 1915.
A Royal Commission, at which Murdoch and Ashmead-Bartlett both gave evidence, began sitting in August 1916 and found that the campaign had been a mistake.
In 1921 Murdoch became chief editor of the Melbourne evening Herald and, in 1929, he acquired the Adelaide Advertiser and established the Murdoch media dynasty.
Murdoch’s praise of the Australian troops became the catalyst for much of the almost-sacred high regard Australians quickly developed for our men at Gallipoli. He talked of ‘the grandeur of our Australian army and the wonderful affection of these fine young soldiers for each other and their homeland’ and told Prime Minister Fisher that, if he could tell him how they behaved, his ‘Australianism would become a more powerful sentiment than before’.
‘Oh, if you could picture Anzac as I have seen it,’ he told Andrew Fisher, ‘you would find that to be an Australian is the greatest privilege the world has to offer.’
THE AUSTRALIAN, ‘THE BRAVEST THING GOD EVER MADE!’
WILL OGILVIE
A British Officer’s Opinion of the Australians at Gallipoli
The skies that arched his land were blue,
His bush-born winds were warm and sweet,
And yet from earliest hours he knew
The tides of victory and defeat:
From fierce floods thundering at his birth,
From red droughts ravening while he played,
He learned to fear no foes on earth—
The bravest thing God ever made!
The bugles of the Motherland
Rang ceaselessly across the sea,
To call him and his lean brown band
To shape Imperial destiny.
He went by youth’s grave purpose willed,
The goal unknown, the cost unweighed,
The promise of his blood fulfilled—
The bravest thing God ever made!
We know—it is our deathless pride!
The splendour of his first fierce blow;
How, reckless, glorious, undenied,
He stormed those steel-lined cliffs we know!
And none who saw him scale the height
Behind his reeking bayonet blade
Would rob him of his title right—
The bravest thing God ever made!
Bravest, where half a world of men
Are brave beyond all earth’s rewards,
So stoutly none shall charge again
Till the last breaking of the swords;
Wounded or hale, won home from war,
Or yonder by the Lone Pine laid,
Give him his due for evermore—
The bravest thing God ever made!
EVACUATION
OLIVER HOGUE
Now and then the English home papers blew in and we eagerly scanned the pages of the dailies for news of the war. We were astounded at the tone of the criticism hurled at the Government. So much of it was Party criticism, captious criticism. So little of it was helpful constructive criticism.
In Parliament and in the Press the critics were ‘agin the Gov’ment’ rather than against the Hun. We felt wonderfully proud of the commendable restraint of our politicians. Not one word of captious criticism had there come from responsible Australian papers and people.
We knew that mistakes had been made. We knew that it was a big gamble sending the fleet to hammer their way through without the aid of an army. But we did not slang-wang the Government. In the dark hour when everybody was blaming everybody there was only one message from Australia. Press and politicians struck the same note. It was merely a reiteration of the Prime Minister’s message that the last man and the last shilling in Australia were now and always at the disposal of the Empire.
Then came talk of evacuation. It staggered us. In the House of Commons and in the Press columns were devoted to discussing the Dardanelles question and evacuation was freely recommended. The Australians rose in wrath and exclaimed, ‘We’re d****d if we’ll evacuate. We are going to see this game through.’ It was unthinkable that, having put our hands to the plough, we could turn back.
The Turks and their German masters were kept well informed of the discussions at home and it made them tremendously cocky. England had practically admitted failure. The great Dardanelles expedition—the greatest crusade in t
he world—was an admitted fiasco. Then the Turks reasoned together. And they agreed that even ‘the fool English’ would never talk so much about evacuation if it were even remotely likely. But it was worth an army corps to Abdul, and it did not make General Birdwood’s task any easier.
Then Kitchener came. Many of us had seen him in Australia and South Africa. We had confidence that he would see the thing through. He landed on the beach and soon the word buzzed through the dug-outs, up the gully, and along the firing line. ‘K of K’ was on Anzac and the boys off duty congregated to give him a rousing welcome. He went round the Anzac defences with General Birdwood, saw everything and then started in to weigh the pros and cons of a knotty problem.
Ever since the day of landing, we had discussed in an offhand way the possibility of ‘getting out’. Not that we had ever considered it remotely possible that we should ever turn back. But just as a strategical and tactical exercise, we had figured out how it might be done. And it seemed that the job of getting out was fraught with more potentialities of disaster than the job of getting in.
The landing on 25 April was responsible for some slaughter. The evacuation, we reckoned, would be carnage. At a most moderate computation twenty-five per cent of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps would have to be sacrificed to ensure the safe withdrawal of the remainder. But of course this was only a theoretical exercise. It was really outside the sphere of practical politics.
WHEN WE RETURN
E.P. McCARTHY
What hand could write the gladness that waits us on the day?
We say farewell to Anzac and steam across her bay.
When all the fighting’s over in this long cruel war
And we are rocking southward, beyond the Grecian shore.
When Imbros lies behind us and Lemnos fades from view,
When Suvla Bay’s forgotten, and Achi Baba too.
When Lone Pine is a mem’ry that’s fading from us fast,
And Khalid Bahr’s becoming a nightmare of the past.
When we have left the trenches and dugouts on the hill,