by Roland Perry
The troopers were disappointed and confused. They were horsemen, not trained soldiers. Yes, they were mostly good shots, on average better than their infantry brethren, but the anticipated close combat trench warfare was not what any of them had envisaged or volunteered for. They had in mind open fields or plains. Troopers dreamt of the charge on horseback that had been romanticised and glorified in a thousand books, magazines and newspaper reports since Napoleon’s halcyon days a century earlier.
Before any severe disgruntlement could set in, Chauvel had his brigade and another from New Zealand do competitive manoeuvres in the desert, with their mounts. This was to take the troopers’ minds off the frustration, made worse by the added news that the infantry would soon (mid-April 1915) be en route to the battle destination. The troopers would come later, if needed. This was further disillusionment. They had always considered themselves superior to their foot-slogging mates. Now they had been relegated to support for them. This was a humiliation too great for some. Good-natured banter between the two groups turned into the odd booze-fuelled brawl in Cairo’s cafes and bars.
The fake stunts in the desert were not enough to satisfy the troopers. At night they filled in time with various activities in the city, much of it with Egyptian prostitutes. But that turned sour. About one in four contracted a venereal disease, some of them so badly that they had to be shipped back to Australia. This plus the frequent theft of watches, wallets and keepsakes while troopers were ‘horizontal dancing’ (as they termed it) with the locals built further tensions.
This came to a head on Good Friday, 2 April 1915, in the Cairo red-light district of Haret el Wassa when a group of diggers and troopers decided to cause havoc at a multi-storey brothel. The Anzacs grabbed the women and their Greek pimps and dragged, pushed and hurled them into the street. The brothel was ransacked. Pianos, beds and furniture were hauled from all four levels of the brothel. The Anzacs then piled up those items and others from the cafes where the pimps congregated, and set them on fire. The bonfire drew a crowd, including hundreds more Australians and New Zealanders who were in the area and joined in the bedlam.
The fire brigade arrived, but the revellers blocked their attempts to douse the flames. The Anzacs manhandled the Egyptian firemen, pushing and shoving them away from the conflagration. Fire hoses were cut. A full-scale riot developed with Anzacs, pimps and firemen brawling as the fire spread. Some Light Horsemen commandeered the fire engines and began driving them around the streets with alarms blaring. British military police (Provos) arrived on foot. The Anzacs formed a solid phalanx in front of the brothel, which had now caught fire. They also set fire to a tavern frequented by the brothel’s pimps. The Anzacs threw bottles and rocks at the police, who were outnumbered.
It was just after 11 pm when Shanahan and two friends and fellow troopers, the rangy 20-year-old Sergeant Henry ‘Chook’ Mulherin and barrel-chested 30-year-old Sergeant Barry ‘Bow’ Legg, walked out of a restaurant and saw the fire in the distance. They drove to Wassa and pushed through the crowd of onlookers to see about 500 Anzacs in the thick of the mayhem.
‘Jeez! What can we do?’ Legg asked.
They followed Shanahan, who shouldered his way to a police captain.
‘The only way to stop them is to get the Lancashire Territorials here fast,’ Shanahan told him.
‘Why them?’ the captain asked. ‘Your mates are out of control!’
‘Our blokes get on really well with them; they call them the “Chooms”,’ Shanahan said, ducking a bottle. ‘They won’t fight them.’
The captain hesitated.
‘Don’t think about it, do it!’ Shanahan yelled above the noise. ‘Unless you want the whole of Cairo destroyed.’
The police captain sent an SOS to the Territorials.
Shanahan then led the other two into the fray. They began pulling Anzacs out of the fighting, but they couldn’t stop the brawl, which was spreading like spot fires.
‘They’re all shickered!’ Mulherin yelled. ‘Nothing will stop ’em!’
About 200 Territorials arrived in trucks. Shanahan hurried to its bug-eyed, chinless commander, who was deploying his men. They had no impact on the brawling. Looting in the brothel and nearby houses and cafes intensified.
‘Threaten them,’ Shanahan said. ‘They won’t fight you. We’ll back you up.’
The commander shook his head. ‘That could take it to another level, Lieutenant . . .’ he said, hesitating.
‘Commander, it is at another level already.’ Shanahan pointed to streets beyond the brothel where fires were taking hold and shop and house windows were being broken. More people were fighting, some tangling on the ground. ‘Look,’ he said calmly, ‘fire a volley of shots. That will get their attention. Then have your men fix bayonets and line up in front of the brothel. We’ll talk to the Australians. Got a loudhailer?’
The commander did as advised. His soldiers fired in unison into the air. Shanahan moved in front of the brothel as the Territorials marched into position. Shanahan used the hailer to call for calm, telling the Anzacs: ‘Okay, you blokes, you’ve had your fun, now quit it and go back to camp.’
There was a momentary lull in the brawling near him. ‘The Chooms are here. They have to do their job . . .’
Shanahan paused as the commander yelled, his face red and eyes now out on stalks: ‘Men, fix bayonets!’
‘C’mon, you blokes, break it up!’ Shanahan shouted. ‘You don’t want to fight the Chooms, do you? They’re our cobbers. The very best of the Poms. We want to fight with them, not against them!’
Despite the Anzacs’ alcoholic haze and adrenalin rush from fighting, taking on good friends under orders to use weapons seemed a folly too far. The fighting stopped in the vicinity of the brothel. Shanahan, Mulherin and Legg moved among the diggers and troopers, urging them firmly to leave the area. Locals who had been battling the Anzacs began to peel off and depart into narrow side streets. The Provos started to assert their authority.
Shanahan took the police captain aside. ‘Don’t make arrests, chief, unless you really must,’ he said. ‘Don’t push them around. It will only ignite things again. Our blokes have a one-in, all-in philosophy.’
The captain took the less confrontational cue from Shanahan. Only a few arrests were made. Soon the Anzacs were wandering away in all directions.
The war could not come quickly enough for all concerned. Commanders Chauvel and Monash wanted to avoid further disruption in Cairo. They were cognisant that all their men were volunteers, and there was only so much inaction they would take before desertion or even mutiny entered their minds. The men just wanted to get on with the action. The locals were also wishing for their departure, having had enough of their culture being disrupted by brawling foreign occupiers.
7
AT ANZAC COVE
‘Gallipoli.’
The troopers had never heard of it. Few could spell it and even fewer could pronounce it. But even before their transport boat approached the thin finger of Turkish land running into the Aegean, it was legend to the Australian and New Zealand brigades that made up the 2nd Division—the first ‘Anzacs’. The troopers would be joining them. ‘Anzac’ already had a mystical, proud ring to it, as did the land they would soon be invading.
By 12 May 1915 Gallipoli was ‘sacred’ ground after seventeen days of fighting the 40,000 Turks ensconced in the heights above the beach at Anzac Cove. The first landings had been made on 25 April. Since then hundreds of Anzacs had been killed in this the first action. British generals running the campaign had never expected the battle to go on this long, but the campaign—a harebrained, undermanned, underequipped, poorly planned, poorly financed fiasco—seemed doomed to be an inglorious ‘bog’. None of the Allied troops, French and British at the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Anzacs on its coast, had managed to scale the heights and take the high ground. Far from it. They were bound to the beaches where encampment tents—looking like giant mushrooms—had sprung up at th
e water’s edge.
The troopers were called ‘reinforcements’. In reality they were replacements, such was the attrition rate of Allied forces getting killed, wounded and fatigued in uncomfortable if not alarming numbers. Excitement interlaced with fear enveloped them as their boat steamed closer to the dark blobs of Gallipoli’s coast and Anzac Cove. They could hear the boom of the big guns before making out the imposing cliff-faces and hills behind them, hills that became shadows as evening set in. Soon they could be seen only when shells from British artillery hit them like exploding fireworks. The troopers watched, their eyes darting here and there as the shells made their marks in an asymmetrical pattern.
The ships timed their advance so they were under cover of darkness as they anchored off the coast. Artillery gave way to rifle fire drowned sporadically by the harsher, more concentrated spitting of machine-guns. Chauvel ordered his troops to wait until the morning before going ashore. They would be preceded by the small contingent of mules and horses, including Bill. For the moment, even he was going with the mob, the prodding, the instructions and the noise.
At sun-up, a tiny beach could be seen. It was much smaller than Bondi in Sydney, St Kilda in Melbourne or Cottesloe in Perth. This sandy, pebbled strip, already the subject of a thousand amateur poems and a hundred artists’ paintings, was unprepossessing and made uninviting by the intermittent clouds of shrapnel hovering over it. Cliffs that seemed to merge with steep peaks and ridges on dark, scrubby hills hung over the beach.
The horses and mules were roped in barges, which wobbled their way to shore. They became the day’s first target for Turkish snipers, who had barely had their first nip of black coffee before taking up positions. They had been ordered to fire at the soldiers, not waste their bullets on quadrupeds. But the targets were much bigger and more than tempting. Tucked in crevasses out of sight of their officers, the odd Turk disobeyed instructions and took a pot shot at the animal barges. Bill was the biggest horse on board, but there were two other sizeable packhorses, who were both shot in the head. They crumpled in the boat, disturbing the others. Turkish officers with binoculars noticed the ‘wasted’ hits and used megaphones to bark orders to the snipers: Anyone caught doing that again will be shot. The threat by officers to waste bullets even more extravagantly on their own snipers caused the hidden hill assassins to wait for the troopers’ barges.
The troopers, led by Harry Chauvel and including Lieutenant Shanahan, slipped into landing barges. All the men were ordered to keep low. Bullets pinged into the water, some striking the barges as they meandered past massive battleships to the shore. Light showers of shrapnel rained down. The small beach was shelled from the right flank. Rifle fire was coming from everywhere, creating a chaotic atmosphere under the face of the steep cliffs. Tents, stacks of ammunition boxes, stores and equipment of all kinds took up much space, with soldiers and animals accounting for the rest. The gangly, tall and strict British Major-General Godley directed Chauvel and his regiments to take over from Monash and his decimated brigade. It had taken the brunt of the fighting and had held the line since the day after the diggers arrived. Godley told Chauvel he would be in Monash Valley. His troopers would man the trenches in this vital defence post. If it were penetrated by the Turks, they would haemorrhage down to the beach. Left unsaid was the certain massacre of Anzacs that would follow. The Turks were unlikely to bother about taking prisoners from among the invaders of their land.
Chauvel left the beach with an armed guard of troopers, including Shanahan. They were followed up the scrubby valley by a single file of horses and mules packed with regimental gear. Bill was the lead animal. His reputation for remaining steadfast in all circumstances except when attempts were made to ride him, saw him given this dubious honour. Monash’s engineers had buttressed the valley track with sandbags two metres thick. They were placed intermittently along the twisting path on the left and also on the right at points exposed to sniper fire. Screens of brushwood to hide approaching Anzacs had been mounted on wires. Evidence of Turkish ‘successes’— hits on mules and horses—lay rotting in the spring sun. Some of the animals in the train seemed agitated by the noise of shells exploding overhead or hitting the valley walls, but Bill trudged on, his head unusually low as he hauled his 400-kilogram load up the gradient towards Monash Valley, an 800-metre narrow cleft. Its high walls were baked yellow and free of vegetation. Coming the other way past them was a steady trickle of mules carrying dead and wounded soldiers. The path up curved around hills to the most treacherous part of the valley, which was more vulnerable to snipers than any other point along it. This perpetually dangerous valley would be the troopers’ ‘home’ for now.
Michael Shanahan was one of the officers assigned to command Queensland troopers up to the worst possible post at Monash Valley. It was known as Quinn’s, after the major in charge. This was the eastern-most post in the valley and had been held ever since the landing on 25 April. Quinn’s lay lower than the ridges on either side of it, which made it suicidal for a trooper to raise his head to the level of the trench’s parapets either to fire or observe. Worse still, the Turks above them to the left and right could elevate themselves with far less fear of being hit. This gave the enemy fire superiority. Quinn’s also had more enemy bombs hurled at it than any other Anzac position. It became the centre of most of the fighting. Other soldiers looked up at it as they would a haunted house. The Turks knew that if they could take Quinn’s, they could crash down the valley to Anzac Cove.
The post’s precariousness was driven home to the British generals on the beach at the cove on 14 May when General Birdwood, the chirpy, well-respected British commander of both Australian divisions at Gallipoli, was accompanied by Monash and Chauvel up to Quinn’s for the first time to have a look at the Turkish positions. Chauvel introduced the general to Shanahan, who briefed him on what he could or could not do in the trench.
‘You will have heard of Major Irvine here seventeen days ago, General?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Birdwood replied briskly, ‘he was arguing with some diggers who told him not to stand. He was hit by a sniper. I won’t be doing that, Lieutenant, I assure you.’
Diggers and now troopers had asked for periscopes attached to rifles to avoid the fate of Irvine and others. They could aim and shoot without raising their heads above the parapet.
Shanahan handed Birdwood a periscope and showed him how to use it. ‘Still keep your head well down, General,’ he warned.
Birdwood was using a periscope when a sniper fired and hit the mirror. A bullet fragment struck the top of his head. Birdwood slumped back, bleeding from the scalp. He was helped down into the valley and stretchered off, a piece of lead lodged in his head.
The cutting down of the commander of the two divisions at Anzac Cove was the lowest point in the siege up until that time. Much to the relief of the Anzac force, Birdwood was up and about the next day with just a headache. But it had an impact on General Godley, who wanted ‘swift revenge’ on the nearest Turkish trenches. On Saturday 15 May, he ordered Chauvel to make countermoves, whatever the cost. Just as this overreaction was being conveyed to Shanahan and the others at Quinn’s, Major-General William Bridges, the Australian commander of the 1st Division, and two senior staffers (Captain Dick Casey and Colonel Cyril White) were three-quarters of the way up Monash Valley. Bridges wanted to stop and a have a cigarette at the sandbag barrier protecting a dressing station just below Steele’s Post on the front line west of Chauvel/ Monash HQ. After the Birdwood incident, Bridges was on his way to see the notorious Quinn’s for himself. He lit up and moved from behind a barrier back to the path to smoke. He was a tall man, and therefore an easier target for snipers on Dead Man’s Ridge, high above him. He had a reputation for being foolhardy and often unnerved his staff by his reckless behaviour, especially the risks he took moving near the trench posts. He chided White and Casey for their caution. Bridges was warned by them to be careful and advised firmly to come back behind the barrier. He ignored them
. Seconds later, a bullet struck him in the thigh, splitting open his femoral artery and vein. He was carried behind the sandbags. Stretcher bearers hurried him down to the beach and he was ferried to a hospital ship in a very bad way.
Bridges died three days later. It was another needless waste of a commander when they were in short supply. His body and his big charger, ‘Sandy’, were shipped back to Australia for a state funeral. Sandy, saddled and stirrups reversed in honour of a fallen division commander, led a parade down Melbourne’s Collins Street. Bridges’ high profile as Australia’s most senior soldier drew a huge crowd. The solemn and dramatic event with Sandy on show provided a sobering contrast to otherwise sanitised reporting on the Gallipoli conflict.
Following the wounding of General Birdwood, Chauvel had no choice but to carry out Godley’s impetuous order to retaliate from Quinn’s. The troopers were well aware that the nearest Turkish trenches were doing the most damage by fire and bombs on Quinn’s and other posts. The no-man’s land between the opposing entrenched forces was no more than twenty metres. Any Anzac counterattack would have to negotiate that hemmed-in stretch. Troopers would risk heavy casualties if detected.
‘I think this is a harebrained idea,’ Major Quinn told his officers when they met at a hut fifteen metres from rope ladders leading up to the treacherous post, ‘but Godley wants it done. He is pushing Chauvel. But we just don’t know what awaits us. Godley says there are no machine-guns in the nearest trench, but he lied to Brigadier Monash a few weeks back—he told him the Turks had mostly gone down to help their mates at Cape Helles, but they hadn’t. They were above Anzac Cove in big numbers and Monash’s men were cut down.’ Quinn looked into the faces of all his officers. ‘I really don’t want to command anyone to attempt to run the gauntlet.’
He looked for input from his commanders.