Solomon's Song

by Bryce Courtenay

  If cleanliness is next to godliness then this was a most unholy place. There was no way we could keep utensils clean other than to lick the surfaces. But always the flies were so thick that to spread a bit of jam on a hard biscuit was to double the weight of the biscuit long before it reached your mouth. You would think there were enough corpses lying around to satisfy them, but still the flies came. We would speak with our hands clamped over our mouths and those who had colds and runny noses soon took the skin from their top lips in the constant attempt to brush away the flies.

  I saw one soldier driven to madness in just such a circumstance that he smashed his fist down upon his own nose, breaking it, and the instant flow of blood attracted a swarm of flies so thick that his head could scarcely be seen. I covered him with a bit of a flour bag and he wept uncontrollably for an hour before he could be attended to and we sent him to Lemnos for three days so that he could rest his nerves.

  The flies brought sickness which spread throughout the trenches. Our sanitation was not good, as it was never wise to walk to some quiet spot during the day and where there were latrines the queue was an hour long. The men suffered terribly from dysentery and other intestinal ailments and the trenches often went uncleaned with merely a shovelful of soil to cover what a man couldn’t help doing when he was down with the squirts.

  The rate of sickness, better contained in the cool weather, was far greater than the number of wounded and the men grew weaker each day while the tasks at hand, apart from the fighting, sapped our energy. As well as carrying water up the steep slopes, we made bombs from jam tins, as the bomb factory on the beach could not keep up with the need. We were in constant demand to provide burial parties and no day passed when we weren’t called upon to dig further trenches or to help the saps with the tunnelling towards the Turkish lines. We had no relief, no diversions, no back lines, no rest and we existed almost exclusively on iron rations. This frugal diet, intended as an emergency to take into battle, became our daily fare for all the months we were there, with only an occasional hot meal to break the monotony of hard biscuit, bullybeef, jam and a little tea. Tell Martha the fame of her billyjam tarts has spread far and wide.

  Fleas, lice and flies, dirt and sickness, monotony and always death were our only constants. Death was everywhere. The dead lay under every bush, piled up in rotting heaps, scattered over open ground, and there was a stench beyond any imagining. Turks and Australians rotted equally well under a blazing sun and while the Turks seldom gathered their dead for burial, many of our own could not be reached. They will lie where they have fallen until this terrible time has passed and we can return to bury their bones in quiet graves where the birdsong can be heard once more.

  6th January

  Yet throughout all this, only a few soldiers surrendered to their afflictions though there were some malingerers and some with self-inflicted wounds, but they were few and far between. Most carried on when they were too weak for any sustained attack. They still thought of victory and wanted to be with their mates. In my platoon not one man dishonoured his nation nor did anything to shame his family name.

  I do not say this with false pride, we are well past such shallow and empty sentiment. We were resigned to die and the reason I did not write was simply that I could not imagine what I could say to you. Like all the men who landed here during April I had shaken hands with the shadows and, in my own mind, was already dead. When Moggy Katz was taken off the peninsula with a Mauser bullet through his shoulder he screamed out, not in pain, but in fury that he was leaving and that he had a right to die with his mates. We all knew this feeling.

  And now I must tell you of the battles we fought and won and lost and then lost and won and lost again. Late in July we were alerted that we were to make another major assault. Those of us who had been on the peninsula from the beginning accepted the news philosophically. We had long since given up the idea that we could win with one decisive battle. The Turk was too well placed to be dislodged and too numerous to be defeated even if we could kill twice as many as our own dead. Besides, we were ourselves too weakened to sustain an all-out fight to the finish, except to be almost certainly defeated. For us there was only one of two possible endings, we would either be killed or, mercifully, wounded, and our wounds would take us from that dreadful place. Victory was no longer a likelihood in our minds. Yet those who had arrived later looked forward to the coming battle, as we had once done. We had all grown to manhood with tales of glory and honour on the battlefield and this was their turn to prove their courage. They thought us almost certain to win and were most eager for the fray.

  We now know that while we thought this a major battle for supremacy of the heights above Anzac Beach, it was only intended as a feint. We were to draw the Turkish reserves from the planned landing at Suvla Bay, the flat ground a mile to the north of our beach, for the twenty-five thousand British New Army troops.

  We were to attack the Turks at Lone Pine where they occupied some of the very trenches I had occupied with my platoon on the first day. Now four months later we would try again to take what had been ours within hours of landing. At two-thirty in the afternoon of August 6th we filed into a secret underground trench dug by the sappers for the attack. Three companies, each from a different battalion, formed the front line just sixty yards from the Turkish trenches, though the flat ground between ourselves and the enemy was covered with barbed wire. Another thirty yards in the rear were two companies which would immediately follow us.

  Though young men’s heads are filled with the derring-do of a bayonet charge, rushing up to an enemy who is dug in and firing from the safety of a parapet at a mass of men who must cover sixty yards before they can become combative is sheer foolishness. I am convinced that my own platoon alone, facing two hundred men rushing at them from this distance, would have eliminated them by means of rifle fire before they ever reached the point of hand-to-hand combat. Add a single machine gun to such a mix and it is lambs to the slaughter.

  7th January

  At about four o’clock our artillery began to pound their trenches and almost immediately the Turks replied with a bombardment of their own. In the artillery department they always had the better of us and soon shells were raining down, their Howitzers causing great craters in and around us, shrapnel pellets thick in the air so that men waiting to attack and those in the supporting trenches were dropping everywhere. There was nothing quite as frustrating when, with bayonet fixed, you were waiting for the whistle to take you over the top and then were taken out of the play before you could get out of your trench.

  My platoon was waiting with me, the miracle was that we still had twenty-six of the original complement with us, these old hands mixed with the new chums to keep them steady, though the new recruits seemed to need no encouragement and were calm enough. In the front, the first over with Wordy Smith and myself were Crow Rigby, Numbers Cooligan, Woggy Mustafa, Library Spencer, Muddy Parthe, Hornbill and Brokenose Brodie, who, by the way, could read at quite a pace and was always to be seen with a tattered copy of the Bulletin in his back trouser pocket. He would pat the magazine at every opportunity to confirm his status as a man of letters.

  How these stout fellows had managed to come through everything with hardly a scratch was beyond me, they never ceased to chaff each other and were always first into everything going. Though I was proud of my platoon and especially their ability behind a rifle, these seven had become a fine fighting unit with a reputation for the firepower they could put down together with a Lee-Enfield. All the practice at Broadmeadows and on the Orvieto and subsequently here had paid off handsomely. There had even been some suggestion, Captain Daly and Major Sayers I think the instigators, that if we had come out of this the six lads, with Crow Rigby as their corporal, would have been taken back to Egypt to show the new brigades what it meant to use a Lee-Enfield correctly.

  It is best, I’ve found, not to speculate about these things and to take each day as it comes. Though, I confess, if I ha
d been in charge I would have culled men such as these from the bayonet charges where they could be mowed down from the parapets without firing a single shot. They were too valuable behind a rifle. Though, of course, we are all cattle in this abattoir we called Gallipoli.

  We were to go over together when the whistle went at five-thirty. Waiting was always the worst time, to be sitting ducks while the shrapnel burst overhead, a veritable cloudburst of deadly pellets, and at any moment you imagined that you would take a direct hit. We had stacked our packs behind the lines so that we could run with all our might, water bottle and ammunition pouches and iron rations all that we carried. We expected to fight well into the night and sewed white calico patches to our sleeves and backs so that we could be seen in the dark by our own men. Of course, this proved just as handy to the Turk who could now distinguish us from his own.

  8th January

  The whistle went and we were over, it was too late to be afraid now. The new chums were shouting out, ‘Here come the Australians!’ Some were even singing and all rushed forward as though it was a race at a Sunday school picnic. To use an expression coined here at Gallipoli ‘all hell broke loose’, it was not yet dark enough to conceal us and a fire started by shrapnel on the Daisy Patch lit us up clearly enough for the waiting Turkish machine guns. Sixty yards at a Sunday school picnic is not much but now it seemed a mile or more. Machine-gun fire, artillery shells, lyddite, hand-thrown bombs and a wall of rifle fire rained down on us. Men fell on either side of us, some sprawled over the barbed wire so that others coming from behind simply used them as mats. I glanced to either side of me and to the back to check my platoon. The ground all the way back from the trenches where we’d started was littered with the bodies of our men, some of whom had taken no more than a single step forward before dying.

  We had already decided to go for the trenches we’d occupied as we knew the layout with the covered section at the southern end. We’d make for this part so that we couldn’t be fired directly upon and then we’d come down from the roof of what we’d previously called the shed and jump into the trench. We’d rehearsed this carefully and I’d drawn a map of the dugouts, communication trenches and saps with each man allocated a place to enter and fight. Even the new recruits knew the layout of this particular section and where they should go. Wordy Smith with his long legs was the first over and onto the roof, closely followed by Crow Rigby. The roof was almost safe as the Turks were firing forward and would have had to turn halfway around to fire directly at us. In the confusion they seemed not even to see us about to descend from the roof of the trench down into them. It was exactly how Jack Tau Paranihi had described the way the New Zealanders had taken the trench on the early morning of the day of the landing.

  I looked back over the ground we’d just covered to see if there were any stragglers from our platoon, a quick look seemed to indicate that we’d lost a few in the charge and I could only hope that they were wounded and not killed. But what I saw about thirty yards from the trench was Woggy Mustafa trying to come forward, his chest a splash of crimson. He would rise to his feet, take a few steps towards us, then fall and rise again.

  Suddenly I heard a cry of anguish from Numbers Cooligan, ‘Woggy! The bastards! The f . . . ing bastards!’ Whereupon he dropped his rifle on the roof of the Turkish trench and ran straight back into the melee, pushing some of our own troops aside as he ran against the tide of oncoming men and flashing bayonets. He reached Woggy who had risen again and now fell into Cooligan’s arms. Cooligan was one of the smallest men in our platoon and Mustafa one of the biggest, but the little man hefted him across his shoulder and, turning, ran towards us. He was no more than five yards away from where we stood when a Turkish machine gun turned on him and cut them both to pieces at the foot of the parapet.

  I am not sure what happened next. I know we were down into the trench from the roof. I was not conscious of dropping my rifle nor that I had unslung my fighting axe from the holster at my back. All I can remember was seeing the machine-gunner deliberately turn his gun on little Cooligan and the next thing I knew was that eight Turks lay dead between me and the machine-gunner. And then, apparently he saw me and turned the machine gun into the trench but before he had the barrel around in an arc sufficient to aim at us the axe had left my hand and split his head open, cleaving his skull in half from the brow down to his mouth.

  Later Wordy Smith told me that I had pushed them all aside as we’d jumped into the trench and my axe had taken the throats of eight terrified Turks standing between me and the Turk who had killed Numbers Cooligan, my eyes never leaving the machine-gunner. The remaining Turks, about twenty in all, seeing me coming at them with the axe, could quite simply have shot me. Instead they turned and fled for their lives. We’d won our section of the trench and the men moved on to clean up the Turks who’d hidden from the artillery bombardment in several small tunnels, communication trenches, the shed and the saps, killing another seventeen of the enemy.

  For my part, I can claim no heroics, I was not conscious of what I was doing, my fury overriding any caution or commonsense. In truth, I showed poor leadership. I only tell you this so you will know the power of shock and grief and the disregard one has for one’s own life in such circumstances.

  Numbers Cooligan showed the real courage. By going out to bring his mate back in he had no earthly chance of surviving. Our little Gob Sergeant had thought only to bring Woggy back in, to allow him to die with his mates. We pulled them both back into the trench and cleaned them up the best we could and put them in the shed so when the sun rose in the morning they would be in the shade and hopefully away from the worst of the flies. I will see that they get proper graves. I emptied their pockets so that I could remove the letter they’d been instructed to write home. Woggy had left his envelope open and attached a scrap of paper to it asking for his crucifix to be taken from his neck and included in his letter addressed to his mother. To my surprise Numbers Cooligan’s letter was addressed to me. I opened it to find twenty pounds and the following note:

  Sergeant Ben Teekleman.

  Dear Ben,

  I don’t have no parents as I was an orphan boy. The bloke at Flemmo racecourse was not my uncle and a real bastard. But I have you and Wordy Smith and seven other brothers now – so will you use this money what’s my ill-gotten gains and when it’s all over have a beer or ten on me. Tell the lads no bloke ever had a better bunch of brothers and I loves you all.

  Also, tell Woggy I’m sorry for the hard time I gave him, he is the best Christian I have ever known, bar none, I swear it on my granma’s grave (whoever she was!).

  It’s been a real pleasure, mate.

  Wayne Numbers Cooligan

  Gob Sergeant, No. 2 Platoon, B Company, 5th Battalion,

  1st Division A.I.F. Gallipoli, 1915.

  9th January

  If we had hoped for a respite after taking the trench we were to be disappointed. We’d clearly driven the enemy from Lone Pine but at a terrible cost, Woggy Mustafa and Numbers Cooligan were but two of thousands who eventually died, a thousand men or more on the first day. The order was to hold on and to expect a counterattack and, indeed, we were not let down in this regard.

  They came at us from the start and what followed were three days, wave after wave, of the fiercest possible fighting, a great deal of it at close quarters and with a bayonet, the cruellest of all the weapons and the only one where we touched the man we killed. Often we could feel his hot breath on our faces, and as he died clutching his stomach, the Turkish lad would cry out for his mama, as our own had. I confess with a degree of shame that I found the fighting axe to be a much more efficient weapon than the awkward rifle with its clumsy knife attached to the end of its barrel. Grandfather Tommo’s skill with the axe, passed somehow on to me, has, I believe, saved my life on several occasions and, of more importance, has helped to save others. It must have proved a very effective weapon in the Maori wars.

  We learned from the enemy the nastiness of
hand-thrown bombs. They have a small bomb about the size and shape of a cricket ball which they throw into our trenches. It has a nasty explosion which can kill but will mostly blow off a foot or blind you. At first we found these very awkward to handle and used to drop a sandbag over them to prevent any damage. But then we discovered that the fuses were fairly long and that we could pick them up and throw them back at the enemy. They soon enough cottoned onto this and made the fuses shorter so that we had to either catch them in mid-air or move very fast to throw them back for they would take anything from one to five seconds to explode. The men became quite expert at it but, alas, losing a hand was a common enough occurrence.

  We have our own version of this little weapon, empty jam tins packed with explosives and any pieces of metal found lying about. These are manufactured at the bomb factory on the beach or by the men in the dugouts and they are just as effective. The men call these bombs ‘the hissing death’, for the hiss and splutter of the lighted fuse.

  For three days and nights we stood face to face hurling these bombs at each other or charging with fixed bayonets. All the while both sides were sending down a veritable hailstorm of rifle and machine-gun fire. Furthermore, when the enemy were not attacking they bombarded us with a constant barrage of artillery shells. There was not even five seconds of continuous silence in the three days of fighting and we were exhausted to the point of collapse, the men taking turns to sleep although the fighting was raging around them.

  Even this had its problems, the dead were everywhere, the Turks’ and our own. We had no time to remove them from the trenches and no possibility of burying them, they were piled four or five deep in our own trench and even higher in others. Throwing them over the side meant we were unsighted, unable to look over them from the rifle platforms as they piled up in front of the trenches.