Bill the Bastard

by Roland Perry

  ‘This wee horse would outdo a camel.’

  ‘I doubt that.’ He stroked Bill’s neck. ‘Ugly beast . . .’

  ‘I think he’s beautiful.’

  ‘Hmm. Mixed breeds like this are never pretty.’

  Bickworth patted Bill on his left flank and neck, indicating he was going to mount him, which he did, easily and professionally. He waited. There was no reaction from Bill.

  ‘Can I say, Captain, go easy on him wi’ stirrup and whip.’

  ‘If I wished for a lecture on how to handle a horse from you,’ Bickworth snapped, ‘I would have asked.’

  ‘Of course, Captain,’ Sutherland replied, unfazed, and with his usual languid, careless smile added, ‘Good luck to you.’

  ‘Luck?’ Bickworth said with disdain as he manoeuvred Bill onto the path.

  ‘You’ll need a wee bit o’ that,’ Sutherland chuckled under his breath.

  Rider and horse began at a trot, Bickworth getting a feel for his mount and the path’s hold. Bill was compliant. No one had attempted to ride him since the unfortunate trooper Gerry Henderson half a year earlier. Perhaps it was the novelty, or maybe it was because Bill liked this particular track, which he had been on a hundred times since arriving, but he seemed oddly content with this high-in-the saddle rider who had made a name for himself in equestrian events at the Olympics.

  High above them in the hills, several Turks rushed to put down their late morning drinks or food or cigarettes and wriggle into position with their rifles. They adjusted their sights. The daily sporting shoot was about to commence.

  A few kilometres away, thousands of British soldiers and Anzacs began to pay attention. Godley, high in a sheltered position on Walker’s Ridge above Anzac Cove, lifted his binoculars. The only weapons fire now was that from the Turks aiming at Bickworth. All other guns were silent. The ‘race’ for Anzac Cove was on. Shanahan also used binoculars to watch. He well remembered big Bill for his courageous and goliath-like work in Monash Valley. Now there was another dimension to this horse beyond that of a pack animal, albeit the most powerful that he had ever seen.

  Bickworth felt a twinge of nerves because of his unfamiliarity with this horse. It was always a thrill for someone of his vast experience to be on such an animal, especially with its daunting reputation. Very soon, he realised his power. Bill built to a gallop. Bullets plopped into the sand beyond them, or pinged onto the rocks to their left as they rode. Bill swerved left, right, left, regardless of where the bullets hit. Bickworth objected, but realised he had no say in the matter. Bill’s head was down. Like a rampaging rhinoceros, he could not be stopped in his unpredictable, rhythmless zigzag, charging on as they reached another stretch of the track.

  Godley became animated. He was among a brace of British officers whose binoculars were raised. ‘I think this fellow will get away with it after all,’ Godley cried in excitement. ‘Christ, did you see him duck that time? Look! Look!’

  Bill careered on at a fast gallop. Bickworth wanted to rein him back but couldn’t. He reckoned the horse would have to slow up soon because it was an impossible run at a full gallop. No horse could ever go at such a pace for that long, he thought, but Bill barrelled on, although his zigzag movements became less frequent, even when snipers got very close. At about a quarter of the way there Bill flinched, slowed up and bucked. A surprised Bickworth fought to stay in the saddle, needing all his reserves of riding skills. At two kilometres another disparate volley of sniper-fire whistled close. Bickworth ducked once more, just when Bill flinched a second time and slowed again. This time he bucked with all his tremendous strength. Bickworth was in the act of ducking a third time as bullets flew and the combination of movements unbalanced him. He was thrown five metres over the horse, landing with a crunch on his shoulder and back. The impact caused his helmet to jerk free.

  ‘They’ve got him at last,’ Godley exclaimed, ‘by God they have! That was a bloody fine shot!’

  Godley was wrong. He had heard the echo of the shot and seen Bickworth catapult out of the saddle.

  Bill stopped about twenty metres further on. He was distressed and frothing at the mouth, but instead of circling back to Bickworth, who lay crumpled and unconscious, the horse moved off again, this time at a trot, still in the direction of the Anzac communications trenches. He knew the destination. The firing had stopped. Turkish bets, which centred on the first sniper to stop rider or horse, were already being settled.

  A rotund vet, known at the cove as Sir Cumference, was having trouble roping in a distressed Bill when Shanahan reached the beach. He helped the vet remove the saddlebags of mail.

  ‘He has a wound on his left flank,’ the vet said. ‘He is bleeding, not badly but it must be dressed.’ He pointed to a roped-off area on the beach fifty metres north. It was an animal sick bay. Shanahan held a metre-long pole with an Australian flag on it which he used for training horses. He touched Bill with it, trying to show that he wasn’t going to hurt him. Bill snorted. He seemed to be in pain. Shanahan could see a small rivulet of blood bubbling from the horse’s left flank. He managed to shepherd him slowly back to the makeshift hospital, talking to him all the way, gradually gaining some calm, which suggested he had gained a little respect from the horse. He tethered Bill, roping his legs so that he couldn’t kick. The vet came close with his satchel and examined the wound.

  ‘I can see the bullet’s tip,’ he said. ‘Have to get it out. Not a big problem.’

  The vet took out a bottle containing chloral hydrate. ‘Help me ease him down after I drench him. He’s a big fella, about three-quarters of a ton, I’d reckon. Will take a fair dose to knock him out but we’ve got to be careful, this stuff is used to kill them. Can you distract him for a moment?’

  Shanahan reached into his pocket and gave the horse a licorice sweet. Bill liked it. He nudged Shanahan on the arm, wanting another. Then he nibbled at his pocket. Shanahan gave him another sweet. The vet pushed the bottle into Bill’s mouth and half a minute later the drug took effect. Three assistants helped Shanahan ease Bill to the ground. The vet then went to work, using a long tweezers-like instrument to ease the bullet out. The wound was dressed.

  ‘Did you see the run?’ Shanahan asked. ‘There were two moments when he flinched. I think he was hit twice.’

  The vet raised his eyebrows and stroked his considerable second chin, then he waddled around Bill and examined every bit of his hide with a magnifying glass. He found another bullet hole high on his left rump.

  ‘Not much bleeding, just a little moist.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘The bullet is deep. Right through his thick hide. And I mean thick.’

  He dressed the second wound with a dexterity that belied his plump fingers, and then put his instruments back into his satchel and closed it. ‘Nothing to be done. I’ve seen plenty of those types of holes. Just about all the animals are walking around with them. Much like the men. Thousands of both have shrapnel shards and bits of bullets lodged in their bodies and the medicos can’t get ’em out. Most live with them. Some have pain occasionally; others irritation; others nothing.’

  Captain Bickworth was unconscious for an hour. He woke up in pain and diagnosed himself with a snapped collarbone. An ambulance crew crept close and hastened to stretcher him to safety. Meanwhile Swifty Thoms and a few mates collected on their bets. The mail did get through, although the rider did not. They had bet on Bill making it.

  Only about one-third of the horse and mule contingent had survived Gallipoli by early December 1915. Bill was among them. He recovered quickly from his wounds after his near-fatal mail run and he had made one new friend: Shanahan, who visited him in the sick bay and wherever he was after that. He never attempted to ride him but would often walk him along the beach or take him for a swim. There was also the odd licorice sweet. Shanahan would not claim a bond with the horse at Gallipoli, but the respect from Bill seemed to grow, if only slowly.

  ‘Do you know much about his background?’ Sh
anahan asked Sutherland.

  ‘No. Many of the Walers were running wild when we rounded them up for service.’

  ‘He’s about five years old, right?’

  ‘Hard to say. He is the fittest, strongest animal I have ever come across in the Scottish Highlands, here or in Australia.’

  ‘Say he is five. Think about his background. He probably was wild as a foal. He had no parenting. Then he comes into contact with humans and they try to dominate him; they treat him rough. But he refuses to buckle. His instinct and experience would tell him he is ten times their size and twenty times more powerful. In any test of strength, he wins, but he loses friends.’

  ‘Look, I don’t find him so bad. He bit me hard once, but I often wondered if he was just playing and didn’t know his own strength.’

  ‘I reckon he just needs a good cobber.’

  ‘Nah, I think he’s too mature for that now. He hates riders and that’s that.’

  Shanahan illuminated to a near-smile, indicating he didn’t agree.

  In mid-December 1915, some 30,000 Anzacs began beating a silent retreat from Gallipoli, leaving 8000 dead. Shanahan and many other troopers took a moment to visit the rough graves dotted around Anzac Cove before departing. Shanahan was among those who wanted to stay and see the fight through, but he had to accept the proposition that it was better to wait to engage the Turks on another day, on another battlefield. It hurt him deeply, especially leaving so many troopers from country Queensland, most of whom he had known over the journey of the last thirty years in various Light Horse formations. He, like all the other members of the Light Horse, had felt disadvantaged without his mount. They all longed to be reunited with them near Cairo, where they would also be joined by a batch of fresh and eager trooper recruits from Australia.

  The thrusting, powerfully built Victoria Cross winner, Lieutenant-Colonel L C ‘Elsie’ Maygar, forty-four, was chosen for the last defence act at Gallipoli. He selected forty volunteers from among the troopers he knew would fight to the death in defence of the evacuation. They would be stationed at Russell’s Top, the scene of so much Light Horse destruction four months earlier.

  Maygar asked for only two medicos and met Sutherland just before he closed the depot at Suvla Bay and was about to send his surviving mules and horses onto barges bound for the island of Mudros.

  ‘I want two pack . . .’ he began as he looked around. ‘Ah yes, that’s one of them.’ He pointed to Bill. ‘That huge bugger . . .’

  ‘Can’t have him, I’m afraid, he’s a wee bit lame,’ Sutherland lied, ‘but we have two lovely wee donkeys here . . .’

  10

  BANJO REMOUNTS

  Banjo Paterson learned on his return to Sydney that the army was recruiting Light Horsemen and acquiring tens of thousands more horses as quickly as possible. This meant that after the belting at Gallipoli, the Anzacs would be fighting the Turks on a bigger scale in Egypt, Palestine and perhaps further into Arabia as well. Paterson was fifty-one. He had to put his age down to forty-nine to apply for ‘remount service’. The next hurdle was a medical examination. Paterson distracted the doctor looking at his deformed arm by saying he was worried he might have a hernia. The doctor examined his groin and found no problem.

  ‘Except for a bout of hypochondria,’ Paterson remarked dryly.

  ‘Perhaps it was phantom pain,’ the doctor said with a shrug, and passed him fit for service.

  Paterson recalled Harry Chauvel’s offer and obtained a letter of recommendation from him. It led to Paterson being made a lieutenant in one of the remount divisions being hastily assembled. He was soon promoted to captain and took a transport ship back to the Middle East. Chauvel was pleased with his return. He promoted Paterson to major and put him in charge of the huge, main remount division based at Moascar near the Suez, not far from Port Said. It was about 220 kilometres north-east of Cairo and Paterson at first recoiled from the relative isolation. He liked to socialise and Cairo was good for that. He could fraternise with many women working for the British. He could drink in the clubs and hotels with the generals and others who would give him stories. Moascar would deny him all that except for leave time. He was not going to be a war correspondent but, as Chauvel pointed out, he would have a far greater impact on any conflict in this new role. The breaking, training and preparation of tens of thousands of horses and mules would be one of the most vital roles of the war in the Middle East. ‘If we are going to beat the Turks,’ he told Paterson, ‘fit horses are essential.’

  Paterson wrote of his responsibilities as outlined by Chauvel: ‘To take over the rough, uncivilised horses from all over the world by the army buyers; to quieten them and condition them and get them ready for being heel-roped; and finally to issue them in such a state of efficiency that a heavily accoutred trooper can get on and off under fire if need be.’

  Breaking the horses in and perfecting their patience under stress would be the difference between life and death for every trooper at least once in battle and, in some cases, often. Paterson soon had 800 rider/trainers under his command, along with 45 vets and assistants. Many buck riders, who roamed Australia in the rodeo shows, had joined the mounted infantry after the outbreak of war had put an end to their performance work.

  Some horses in the continual intakes were rougher than Bill the Bastard, who was sent to Moascar to join the mobs arriving from everywhere. But Bill, he believed, would never be fully broken in whereas he was confident he could prepare almost all the others coming under his control. Paterson noticed him wandering the depot grounds. He, like Shanahan, had a soft spot for this big chestnut with the independent mind, idiosyncratic ways and capacity for heavy lifting. He was by no means the most difficult animal at the depot: ‘I think everybody [horse sellers in several countries] that had an incorrigible brute in his possession must have sold it to the army.’ He drew the line at some of what he termed the ‘cheaper’ variety, noting, with his sardonic juices runing:

  Thousands of these Argentinians were sent over. They were an interesting study to the student of horseflesh. They were squat, short legged cobs with big hips and bad shoulders. Their heads were like the painting of Bucephalus, ridden by Alexander the Great. They were probably bred from Bucephalus, as one fails to guess by which intermixture of strains of blood the type was arrived at. It is certainly a fixed type now. They resemble each other so closely that if one lost an Argentinian pony, there was little chance of identifying it among his comrades.

  They are worthless, cow-hearted brutes. No-one who used them ever had a good word for them. They have been good horses in the Argentine but none of them were going to the war.

  Paterson believed there was no comparison with his light, wiry Walers and he himself rode the best of them. ‘I usually only ride horses intended for generals and thus I got the pick of the mounts,’ Paterson wrote.

  There was another side to this. If he did not like the general from a particular country, or if the man concerned was rude to him, Paterson was not above delivering him a difficult horse. The animal would not be utterly raw. That would have been too obvious and got Paterson into trouble. Instead he would give the offending general a horse that was temperamental or unpredictable. Then if the general concerned was given trouble by the mount, even bucked off, Paterson could always suggest the rider was a poor horseman. Bill was the perfect horse for this kind of subterfuge. He might let a rider on, as he did Captain Bickworth, and give him a false sense of security for even a few kilometres’ ride, but then he would live up to his name and send the man flying. Paterson was unlikely to hand Bill over to anyone for battle purposes, though. He could buck harder than any other horse he had ever encountered and this might kill a man. Yet he planned to put him on display at a big show created to make his remount division ‘justly celebrated’.

  Just before dawn on the morning of Paterson’s remount event, Shanahan arrived at the depot to meet Sutherland, who would take him to see Bill. They met at the front entrance where there was a chan
ge of a guard of a dozen soldiers. Two machine-guns were being set up. The light of a full moon was giving way to a wide yellow splash on the horizon and the perpetual promise of scorching heat. The depot was alive with hundreds of trainers crisscrossing the fields to various buildings and tents. Kerosene lamps lit the way to a stable past a corral where buckets were carried and troughs filled. Horses that would be performing were being saddled for a run to open up their lungs. Trick ponies were being loosened up and whispered to by their masters, who would already be feeling nervous.

  As they entered the stable, a truck was backing up near them to drop straw bales, which fell with a dull thud on the soft sand. The smell inside was familiar to Shanahan, who had been near or in stables for a fair part of his life: a mixed, musty fragrance of urine, horsehair and sweat on horse blankets, along with oats, hay and grain, which emitted their own sweeter aromas.

  ‘We have a better stable for the special neddies,’ Sutherland said. ‘I call it the Cup Hotel: home for all the Melbourne Cup candidates and other worthies, including your wee cobber.’

  They walked past twenty stalls. A thin young Aboriginal trainer was hosing down the horses.

  ‘That’s Khartoum,’ Sutherland said, pointing to a big black stallion that looked down an imperious extra-long nose at the intruders. ‘He’s Banjo’s favourite. Says he wants to take him back at the end of all this and have him trained for racing. He only lets the “jockeys”—the smaller blokes who have raced in Australia—on him.’

  Sutherland took him over to Khartoum.

  ‘Have a look at his forehead,’ Sutherland said, pointing out an ugly scar.

  ‘Your pal Bill did that. Khartoum was apparently flirting with Bill’s girlfriend Penny. Bill flew at him and bit him hard. Khartoum bled a fair amount. Vets had to work overtime. He had about 100 stitches. Khartoum is a wee bit frightened of your pal now.’ He waved at two other horses, Tut 1 and Tut 2.