Sing’s number of ‘kills’ was followed closely by the other troops. Every morning before dawn, Sing and his spotter would move into a hidden position, scanning the opposing enemy trenches through a telescope. Any Turk who lingered at a loophole, or took careless peeps over the trench, became a target for Sing’s deadly aim.
On one occasion Sing shot a Turk when General Birdwood was acting as his spotter. Sing told Birdwood that the kill could not be added to his score as he had been aiming at a different Turk.
Sing received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for conspicuous gallantry at Anzac. He served in France with the 31st Battalion, and died alone in Brisbane in 1943.
Until now, the Anzacs had believed that the Turks mutilated the Australian dead. Yet with Turks dead and moaning only a few metres away, the Australians saw up close that the ‘mutilations’ of their mates had been caused by machine-gun fire. Flesh was pulped. Limbs dangled by threads. Bean saw Turkish bodies with head wounds big enough to fit a hand through. Flies swarmed over piles of bodies as the sun burned down. The bodies had to be buried before disease broke out. That’s why a truce was called.
24 May, Truce
Turks and Anzacs covered their noses, shook hands and exchanged cigarettes in no-man’s-land. Up to 4000 bloated and black bodies lay around them, many of them face down. For nine hours no guns rattled and no shells whined. Turks and Anzacs rolled up their shirtsleeves and dug graves for the dead.
Drizzle fell and men swooned. A British officer, Compton Mackenzie, a famous novelist, wondered why he was offered a cigar when he climbed up to Quinn’s Post. The smell of death wafted down, so pungent he felt he could almost see it. Then he understood why he needed the cigar.
Arranging a truce was a delicate matter. Both sides feared appearing weak. A few days earlier, without warning, a few Turks had raised a white flag and begun to clear the dead and wounded in front of their trenches. General Harold Walker joined then in no-man’s-land. He told them to send an officer under a white flag to arrange a formal truce so both sides could bury their dead.
The officer shared cigarettes with Australian officers when he arrived on horseback the next morning. He was blindfolded and carried to headquarters. During negotiations an Anzac cook was said to have poked his head into the tent and asked: ‘Heh! Have any of you muckers pinched my kettle?’
Lines of enemy sentries faced each other for the truce. White flags were pegged at intervals. The clusters of officers reminded Mackenzie of officials at a sports day. An Australian suggested Mackenzie move his foot. ‘Looking down I saw squelching up from the ground on either side of my boot like a rotten mangold the deliquescent green and black flesh of a Turk’s head,’ he wrote. ‘. . . I cannot recall a single incident on the way back down the valley.’
The bodies reminded one corporal of mowed hay. An Australian private grabbed a corpse by the arm and the arm came off in his hand. A Turkish-speaking British officer, Aubrey Herbert, was in charge of the operation. He held antiseptic wool, heavy with scent, to his face. He looked down on entire companies that had been slaughtered, ‘not wounded but killed, their heads doubled under them with the impetus of their rush and both hands clasping their bayonets’. Herbert stood with a Turkish captain. ‘At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep,’ the Turk said.
Both sides broke the strict conditions of the armistice. Australians took photos, even though cameras were banned. They buried men in the craters and gullies used as cover by Turkish snipers and bombers. Both sides surveyed each other’s trenches. It was suspected that the Turks studied the weaknesses of Quinn’s Post, and that this prompted a Turkish battalion to attack the position five days later. They nearly got it, too.
At 4 pm, the Turks came to Herbert for orders. He retired both Turkish and Anzac troops. He joked with the Turks that they would shoot him the next day. ‘God forbid,’ they said. The Australians shook hands with the Turks and said: ‘Goodbye, old chap. Good luck.’
A Turk responded: ‘Smiling may you go and smiling come again.’
Neither side fired for twenty-five minutes. The Turks and Anzacs had discovered that they liked each other. They would still fire at anything that moved in the enemy trenches, of course. And no one forgot the need to kill the enemy before he killed you. But from then on, few Anzacs described the Turks as savages any more. In their diaries, they began calling Johnny Turk brave and fearless.
Both sides still threw bombs into the other’s trenches. But they began throwing cigarettes too, and milk and jam, although the Turks returned the tins of bully beef. An unusual camaraderie grew. It was as though the Anzacs and Turks felt that they should suffer the hardships of war together.
A Turkish Letter
The following letter was found on the body of a dead Turkish soldier. An Anzac soldier, Lieutenant H. R. McLarty, recorded it in a letter home, in July 1915.
To my dear husband,
Hussein Aga, I humbly beg to inquire after your blessed health. Your daughter sends her special salaams, and kisses your hand. Since you left I have seen no one. Since your departure I have had no peace. Your mother has not ceased to weep since you left. We are all in a bad way. Your wife says to herself, ‘While my husband was here we had some means, since your departure we have received nothing at all’. Please write quickly and send what money you can . . . May God keep you and save us from the disasters of this war.
Your wife
Fatima
CHAPTER NINE
Flies and Bully Beef
June and July
Colonel William Malone, the strong-willed New Zealander, took over command at Quinn’s Post on 9 June. Bodies lay broken and pulped in front of the sandbags. To try to remove them was to risk joining them. One corpse rotted so badly that a soldier set fire to it. The Anzacs on the escarpment lived, ate and slept with the smell of roasted flesh for days. The Turks probably smelt it, too. After all, they were so close that the Anzacs could hear them cough. The Turks dug tunnels and tried to blow up the Anzac trenches from below. They threw bombs, yelled and fired at anything that moved. The Anzacs did the same back.
General Hamilton watched a silent stream of men, all bandages and blood, wander down from Quinn’s in late May. They were victims of Turkish bombs. Troops below looked up at the outpost as they might a haunted house. ‘Men lived through more in five minutes on that crest than they do in five years of Ballarat or Bendigo,’ Hamilton wrote.
The Australians seldom wore shirts off-duty. They looked ‘Turkish’, as one journalist put it, with their thick stubble and dark tans. Malone was different. He rationed his water so that he bathed half his body a day, the other half the next. He washed his socks in the water left over. He ordered his men to be like cats and clean up after themselves. For every Turkish bomb thrown, two were to be thrown back.
Malone gave Phillip Schuler, a young journalist from the Age, a tour of Quinn’s. It was as though Malone was showing off home renovations. Schuler marvelled that the maze of trenches, burrows, secret tunnels and deep shafts had not crumbled away. The neighbouring posts were just as shaky. Pope’s Hill had to be pasted back together with sandbags after each night’s shelling.
Malone replaced the haphazard dugouts on the slopes behind Quinn’s with covered terraces. He put up wire netting to catch the ‘cricket ball’ bombs the Turks rolled down the slope. Malone guided Schuler through zig-zagging front trenches where the pair were exposed to enemy fire. ‘Now we have given them a sporting chance to snipe us, let us retire,’ Malone said. ‘I always give a visitor that thrill.’
Malone was the fussiest housekeeper at Anzac. Who else would have thought about planting roses? Other commanders tried to improve their sections of the line. Smart soldiers scrounged what they could. Corrugated iron for shelter. Greatcoats to sleep under. Biscuits boxes for tables. They were preparing for the long stay ahead. Everyone accepted that this triangle of miserable dirt was now their home.
Swimming
Swimming in the sea was popular with the men at Anzac, particularly as their daily water allowance left little for washing either themselves or their clothes. As the weather turned hot, the beach sometimes looked like a holiday resort. The Turks began lobbing shells into the sea amongst the bathers, but the men continued to swim there.
General Birdwood enjoyed a swim when possible. In the water, naked like everyone else, he was sometimes mistaken for a lowly private. Journalist Phillip Schuler wrote that one day a canvas pipe from a water-barge fell into the sea. The barge-man, not recognising the general, yelled at him: ‘Well lend a fellow a ------ hand to get the ------ thing up.’ Birdwood did not punish the barge-man for his rudeness. Rather, he helped out and later delighted in re-telling the story.
Occasional skirmishes broke out, including a suicidal Turkish charge at the Nek on 30 June. But June and July were relatively quiet months at Gallipoli. Both sides had suffered severe losses in frontal charges. Anzac artillery gunners couldn’t do much – they were rationed to firing two shells a day. The Turks, too, lacked ammunition. After June 30, they didn’t launch another major frontal attack at Anzac.
The Anzacs grew weary of fatigue duties. The sun burnt hotter and a plague of flies arrived. The troops lugged water and supplies up and down the hills and gullies. When they weren’t lugging, they dug trenches or graves or tunnels. Trenches grew longer and deeper on either side of no-man’s-land. Piles of yellow and orange clay mounted. No-man’s-land was mostly bare, the scrub all shot away. Here and there lay the corpses of Turks and Anzacs who had been shot since the truce.
On the beach, men filled jam tins with nails, stones and barbed wire. These bombs were unpredictable, but better than nothing. Other work parties built periscope rifles. Devised by Lance Corporal W. C. B. Beech, the contraption allowed men to fire without exposing themselves. Framed in wood, a mirror was propped over the lip of the trench. The rifleman then lined up the rifle sights with another angled mirror that he peered at below.
The Anzac trenches were dug to a depth of about 2.5 metres. They were built dog-legged, so that Turks could not shoot right along the line if they seized a section. Communications trenches joined front and rear trenches, and steps were built into the walls of the front trench for firing over the parapet. Both Turks and Anzacs dug saps – trenches running longways to the front-line – that reached out into no-man’s-land. At night they tried to join the saps to form a new front-line.
FOUR LINES OF TRENCHES AT LONE PINE, AS DRAWN BY SERGEANT CYRIL LAWRENCE. THE THIN LINES ARE COMMUNICATION TRENCHES. MARKED NEAR THE TOP IS THE LINE OF AUSTRALIAN OUTPOSTS AFTER THE ATTACK. A, B, C AND D REPRESENT THE ANZACS’ LINES OF DEFENCE.
Both sides dug tunnels to blow up enemy positions from below. The tunnellers led dangerous lives. When they overheard enemy tunnellers tapping a few metres away, they raced to blow up the Turks before the Turks blew up them. Sergeant Cyril Lawrence led a small team that helped dig 2.4 kilometres of tunnels that extended in front of the most important post on 400 Plateau, Lone Pine. His men unearthed pottery from an ancient city. They dug around bodies or removed them. ‘They have a peculiar smell of oily fat flesh,’ Lawrence wrote.
Infantry troops generally worked 24-hour shifts in the front-line, twenty-four hours on fatigue duties and twenty-four hours in support trenches. They slept wherever they could, usually in dugouts knocked into the trench walls. They had to cook their own rations and collect their own firewood. Water was always scarce at the front. It had to be delivered from ships and carried from the beach. Wells were dug and tanks set up in outlying areas. Carriers had some of the most dangerous work of all.
Up to 600 shells a day fell out of the sky, when ammunition was in supply. The Turks always fired at dinnertime, when the Anzacs brewed their billies over small fires. Lawrence was once digging 50 metres inside a tunnel when a shell exploded at the tunnel mouth. He clambered out to discover that the Anzac guarding the tunnel had been decapitated. The poor man still had his hands in his pockets. ‘Good God, I never want to see such a sight again,’ Lawrence wrote.
Troops hunkered in caves dug into the sides of Monash Valley and Shrapnel Gully when shrapnel storms hit. Handmade signs directed visitors to stay to the left or right, to avoid snipers’ bullets. Lonely wooden crosses marked solitary graves. A Light Horseman, Ion Idriess, was walking to the beach for water one day when a young man with snowy hair stepped out in front of him. ‘Just as we were crossing Shrapnel Gully he suddenly flung up his water bottles, wheeled around and stared for one startled second, even as he crumpled to my feet,’ Idriess wrote. ‘In seconds his hair was scarlet, his clean white singlet all crimson.’ Idriess would go on to become one of Australia’s best-loved writers in the middle decades of the century.
Once, a shell exploded over a latrine where a line of men sat ‘like a lot of sparrows on a perch’. The men scampered, their pants still around their ankles. ‘The roar of laughter that went up could have been heard for miles,’ wrote Lawrence. ‘It’s only these little humorous happenings that keep things going here.’
Funeral services were mostly conducted at night, for safety. One day a chaplain was mid-way through a burial when a nearby shell threw dirt on the party. ‘Oh, Hell!’ said the chaplain. ‘This is too ho-at for me! I’m aff [sic].’
Death became a way of life. Troops could never escape its sights and smells. Many struggled with the nervous strain. Some became convinced that the next shell would kill them. Private Jack Gammage, a country kid from New South Wales, lost his nerve in June. He felt like every day was his last. By July, he didn’t care whether he lived or not. Gammage endured to fight bravely two weeks later in the most terrible battle of Gallipoli, and he lived.
Private Victor Nicholson was under Malone’s command at Quinn’s. He saw a friend shot through the eye. Nicholson wanted to cry but feared he would never stop. ‘There were friends going every day and sometimes every hour of the day, wonderful friends,’ he wrote. ‘I grieved inwardly. That was all you could do. As a war went on you could forget the death of a very fine friend in five minutes.’
A young West Australian bushman, Private Albert Facey, was more honest than most. In his autobiography, A Fortunate Life, he recalled charging in bayonet attacks at Gallipoli and expecting to die in all of them. ‘The awful look on a man’s face after he has been bayoneted will, I am sure, haunt me for the rest of my life,’ he wrote. ‘I will never forget that dreadful look. I killed men too with rifle fire – I was on a machine gun at one time and must have killed hundreds – but that was nothing like the bayonet.’
After a fearful shelling, a doctor prised shrapnel from Facey’s jaw – after much pulling – and suggested further treatment on a hospital ship. Instead, Facey had teeth pulled on the beach, without anaesthetic. Why did he stay? To be with his mates. ‘A sort of love and trust in one another developed in the trenches,’ he wrote. ‘It made us all very loyal to each other.’
Facey was one of three brothers who landed at Gallipoli. Facey’s eldest brother, Joseph, died defending an outpost. Another brother Roy, was killed by a shell the day before he was to transfer into Facey’s unit. Facey helped bury him. ‘Roy was in pieces when they found him,’ he wrote. ‘We put him together as best we could – I can remember carrying a leg – it was terrible.’
Lice, Letters and the Gallipoli Trots
Lice as big as grains of wheat burrowed under clothes. Men tried burning and drowning them but the lice appeared to be both water- and fire-proof. ‘The isolation in the trenches, and being confined to one area, was hard to take,’ Facey wrote. ‘It wasn’t so bad when there was action, but living day in and day out almost underground and being lousy all the time got us down.’
Temperatures soared into the thirties. Flies buzzed on every corpse and every piece of food. They became more frustrating than the Turks. When a jam tin was opened, the jam became a ‘blue-black mixture of sticky, sickly flies’.
‘The flies are simply unbearable,’ wrote P
rivate Cecil McAnulty. ‘They are here in millions, from the size of a pin’s head to great bluebottles that bloated they can’t fly. Other vermin irritate us very much at night & it is very troubled and restless sleep we get, when we get any at all.’
The food was awful and unvaried. Occasionally the men received a strip of fatty bacon or a serve of mushy vegetables. Condensed milk was a special treat. The beef was salty and made the men even more thirsty. Biscuits had to be soaked for hours to be softened. The outside would be scraped off, then the biscuit returned for more soaking. Many broke teeth on these biscuits.
The Anzacs received as little as one pint – about half a litre – of water a day, for drinking and bathing. Most drank the water and risked death from shellfire while bathing in the sea.
Lieutenant General Birdwood tried to take a dip each night, and he got around to see Australian troops every day. He struggled to grasp their dark wit but did nothing when they forgot to salute him. Birdwood’s mingling reminded the soldiers that Anzac was miserable for generals as well as privates.
A delivery of mail was one of the few pleasures available, along with a swim in the sea, to the men on Gallipoli. Isolated from family and friends, and from news of the outside world, men read and re-read their letters, or shared the contents with their mates who had missed out.
Newspapers, often months old, were hungrily scanned for items of interest. Lieutenant H. R. McLarty hadn’t washed for a week or taken his boots off for two when he received two newspapers and seven letters in one delivery. He felt like the ‘the happiest man alive’. Soldiers’ diaries show that a letter from home could lift the spirits of the most despondent of men.
The first mail arrived at Anzac a week after the landing and was then delivered about once a fortnight. Sometimes more than 1300 bags of mail would arrive. Inevitable delays occurred, particularly with parcels, or when a soldier was taken to hospital, or when soldiers had the same name. Later, newspapers were held for distribution to hospitals, which meant the troops missed out. General headquarters published a regular news-sheet, The Peninsula Press, to keep the men informed of events and to quell the many rumours that circulated.
The Gallipoli Story Page 6