Gallipoli (29 page)

Not the staff of the AIF 1st Division, however. Late into the night, in the dim glow of a single light bulb, they wade through paperwork and put out embarkation orders.

GOOD FRIDAY, 2 APRIL 1915, CAIRO, A POX ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES

There is madness in the air.

A plague of locusts, of biblical proportions, descends on Cairo, sent by God for those who have sinned, are sinning, and will sin. Millions,
trillions
of them – huge yellow, brown and black locusts – enough to black out the sun, to blow the eardrums, to crawl over every single thing and devour every bit of green life from leaves to corn to grass. Enough to make a man think that hell has risen from the earth. They eat the trees, they swarm over the soldiers and the Gyppos alike, their wings like ‘whirring wheels',
¹⁷
bashing out their own mad frenzy. Oh yes, there is
madness
in the air, and it goes for hours. You see, when the locusts finally leave, the madness does not …

Beyond this visitation from the nether world, something is up in the soldiers' world. Practically all the troops at Mena Camp are having the day off, but by mid-afternoon the word spreads: everyone must begin to prepare. They are going to be on the move on the morrow, embarking for a place unknown …

Hopefully, to begin a battle! After all this training, all this hard slog, at last they are going to be able to test themselves. There is enormous excitement among all the men, but for those lucky ones who already have leave on this day and are already out on the town, it is doubly so. At bloody least they will have one last night to have a last drink before the stink and blow off some steam. Not for nothing do many start singing, ‘
There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night …'
¹⁸

Head back to camp and start getting ready? Not on your nelly, mate. We're already out, and we're not moving. For if we are at long last about to see action, what better thing to do right now than
stay
out on the town, do a bit of carry-on, and carry on? And, of course, what better place to paint the town red than the Wazza, ever and always a magnet for us men of restless disposition.

So it is that by 3 pm on that sultry afternoon, several thousand Australian and New Zealand soldiers are milling around the Wazza, a fair proportion of whom are already as full as two boots. How things go bad from there never becomes clear, though Charles Bean will at least record, ‘some New Zealanders who had picked up certain diseases in a particular street near Shepheard's Hotel seemed to have made up their mind to go and pay the house back for what they got there.'
¹⁹

What is certain is that many of the soldiers have anger in their bones – and sometimes on their penises – towards the whole area. Their problems with the place include having bought liquor that had been watered down, having been ‘mobbed & robbed',
²⁰
outrageous overcharging that would make a bushranger blush, and, most particularly, whores giving them VD.

Whether this anger is exacerbated by a group of the men discovering a pimp pissing in a vat of beer that they have been drinking from, no one is sure, though it is a story that will subsequently circulate. An even stronger story, though of equal uncertainty, is that one of the English soldiers has discovered his long-lost sister in one of the brothels and is now freeing her by force, assisted by the Australians and New Zealanders. Or maybe the initial anger comes from one of the women rejecting a Maori because his skin is too dark. Or a publican calling a Maori a ‘nigger'
²¹
… Perhaps it is just everything.

Whatever the catalyst, the result is a fighting force of drunken men, ready to leave for a battle that may take their lives in the near future, congregated in a spot where they have a grievance against many locals – and the brake in their brains that in normal circumstances might make them pull up this side of wild and dangerous is not working.

So why not rough up the pimps a little and destroy a few of the whorehouses?

You bloody reckon?

I bloody reckon,
yesh
, I do!

Just before 5 pm, those many people wending their way through the streets are suddenly stunned to see burning mattresses hurtling down from the upper floors of the whorehouse at Number 8, Darb al-Muballat. This is followed shortly by clothes and bedding fluttering through the windows, and heavy furniture, chairs and shutters shattering as they hit the pavement.

Down below, other Australian and New Zealand soldiers join in the fun and soon throw the smashed furniture and all the rest onto the burning mattresses to get a proper bonfire going. Now angry Egyptian men are shouting – not all of them pimps bleeding from the nose and mouth – bints are screaming, and many, many soldiers are laughing, enjoying the high hilarity of it all. Look, this destruction is not worth having got the pox for, but it is something all right, and also great relief from the sheer tedium of the last few months.

And look at how all the greasy Gyppos run at this first sign of trouble. One smack in the mouth and all the fight goes out of them. If the Australians and New Zealanders are heading for the Dardanelles – as has been rumoured of late – the Turks will likely be just the same.

So too, with the first of the Egyptian police who arrive on the double.

‘Finish the bastards off!'
²²
the soldiers cry as they round on them, only to see the Gyppo police run, too.

Not so the men on the town ‘picket' – an officer, a corporal and a dozen soldiers assigned to enforce army discipline in situations exactly like this – who suddenly arrive to try to get these rioting soldiers out of the whorehouses, where they continue to raise hell and lower the boom.

The picket, comprising South Australian and Victorian soldiers from the Australian 9th Light Horse Regiment, must dodge the falling debris, rush up the stairs and grab every soldier they can get their hands on to bring them down to the street.

No fewer than five of the rioters are formally arrested, and would have been dragged away to the ‘Calaboose' had the mob of soldiers not become an angry beast with a mood all its own. They storm the picket, grab their weapons and throw them on the fire. Four of those who are arrested are freed, and the picket has no choice but to beat a retreat and call for help, most particularly when, as later recounted by Charles Bean, ‘the officer of the picket was hit heavily on the hand by a big New Zealander who was holding a staircase'.
²³

In short order, 30 British Military Police – the much hated ‘red caps', who, in the words of Bean, are ‘always a red rag to the Australian soldier'
²⁴
– arrive on horseback, brandishing loaded pistols. Ah, but if the authorities now have their reinforcements, so too do the Australians have ‘reinstoushments',
²⁵
as they call them, and more of their own arrive from all corners as the word spreads. The red caps are confronted by a mob, now some 3000 strong, who only take one look at them before throwing a deluge of bottles and stones – whatever comes to hand – as the fires continue to rage, the women keep screaming and the filthy pimps who have not yet escaped keep getting belted for their trouble and …

And WATCH OUT!

A
piano
comes crashing down onto the street from the roof – the soldiers couldn't fit it through the window.

In the growing emergency, the Captain of the Military Police orders his men to draw their pistols from their holsters.

‘If you don't disperse,' he calls to the rioters, ‘I will order them to fire!'
²⁶

Do your worst, Sonny Jim.

As the mob still doesn't disperse, finally the British officer gives the command – ‘Fire!' – and his men do just that, albeit over the heads of the mob, as he has also quietly commanded.

When the rioters still don't disperse, he orders his men to fire
into
the mob at leg-level, and four or five men fall down wounded, enraging the mob further and causing the Military Police to withdraw … just in time for the Egyptian fire brigade to arrive and turn their hoses on the flames and the mob itself … only to have their hoses cut, their faces belted and their fire truck pushed into the flames. Oh, and the rioters find the heavy nozzles of the hoses useful as battering rams to break down doors and smash ever more windows, while a mob of Maori do a full-blown
haka
in front of the roaring flames.

There is madness in the air tonight and Trooper Bluegum, for one, is enjoying it hugely, knowing it to be fully justified. After all, the publican called the Maoris ‘niggers'!

‘Well,' he would explain, ‘who can blame the New Zealanders for resenting it, and who can blame the Australians for siding with the New Zealanders? Who touches them touches us.'
²⁷

Now looting breaks out, and more armed troops are called for, while the mob sets fire to a Greek tavern that has also been guilty of overcharging and now must pay the price. The flames roar, the smoke billows, the mob is triumphant. And yes, the vast majority are spectators only, with only a handful of soldiers doing the damage, but no matter. It is such fun!

By 7 pm, a second fire truck has arrived, this one with an armed cavalry escort, and at least a little headway is made in having the fires put out, if not the fire in the mob.

Finally, a whole battalion of Lancashire Territorials arrive with
rifles
and bayonets fixed. Their officer gives the order, and in an instant his men form up the same way they had against the whirling dervishes in the Sudan.

The back row stands, the middle row kneels, and the front row lies down – all with their rifles aimed.

Again, the officer gives the mob fair warning and … this time …
this time
… it works.

(After all, who really can argue the toss when staring at an entire wall of muzzles pointed straight at you? They are
not
suicidal.)

By 10 pm, a rough semblance of order is restored. But what a night they have had! Yes, four rioters have been wounded and 50 arrested, but so what?

They have proved they are fighters and have shown one thing for sure – they care as little for authority they don't respect as they do care for each other as cobbers. Even cobbers they haven't actually met yet. And while they had all arrived in Egypt as Victorians and Queenslanders and Tasmanians and Aucklanders and Wellingtonians, all of that has now been lost. Now, they're far more Australians and New Zealanders – if not quite yet one united body of
Anzacs
. Most of them have come to fight for the King and the British Empire, but this has nothing to do with that.

The attitude is all in the image of what happens when, in another event much later, one rioter is told to keep the peace in the name of the King and replies, ‘Oh fuck the bloody King; don't stop my men, let them pass.'
²⁸

And yes, there will be some outcry in Australia when details of the riot become known, but, mercifully, some hugely reputable newspapers, such as Melbourne's
Truth
– which had previously been so hard on the soldiers for what had happened at the Broadmeadows Camp with that 16-year-old girl – are now honest enough to point out where the blame truly lies: with the prostitutes.

‘Certain happenings in Egypt,' the paper delicately raises the subject, ‘have lately tended to give more prominence to [those arrested for riot] but it is only fair to point out that in many of those cases the fault did not lie on the side of the victim. The immorality of Cairo is noted from one end of the world to the other, and “soliciting” is reduced to a fine art among the lewd women of that city, so that resistance to their nefarious methods is a difficult problem, even with men whose morality would be absolutely unimpeachable under fair conditions. The women of Cairo specialise in the manufacture and sale of cigarettes, into certain of which a substance known as embrogras is mixed. It is also induced into drinks of any kind, and the result of its consumption is an uncontrollable desire, to which the Cairo women readily lend themselves … Brothels are in abundance, and the harlots are in no wise wanting in enterprise, but try to force poor, innocent Australian boys into their houses of ill fame. Shame.'
²⁹

So they had it coming!

One of many who does not think like that, however, is the 1st Battalion's Captain Gordon Carter, who is appalled. He had known the Wazza to be an ‘awful hole' from the first and only time he had visited it, and had certainly not wanted to spend his last evening there. (Rather, he'd gone to see his sister, Fuff, and Nurse King. And then, being an educated, sensitive soul, he'd retired to read his volume of Shakespeare comedies. ‘It's wonderful,' he writes to his parents, ‘the enjoyment you can get from reading the old chap over and over again.'
³⁰
Nurse King describes him in her diary as ‘a very nice boy really'.)
³¹

Another who feels much the same about what has happened at the Wazza is Ellis Silas, who personally is nothing less than ‘ashamed' of the rioters after he hears what has happened.
³²
But at least there are plenty of things to keep both men, and all of the Australian soldiers, busy in the aftermath.

They must pack up, strike their tents, stow their kits, pack their wagons – take their surviving pet kangaroos to the Cairo Zoological Garden – and start marching. They leave something else behind of significance. Not long after their arrival at Mena, the officers had banned the troops from climbing the Sphinx and one of the more unstable pyramids after one man had been killed in a fall. Nevertheless, as a young private records in his diary just before marching out, ‘one daring individual' had managed to climb up the pyramid and plant ‘a small Australian flag on top where it still fluttered when we moved away'.
³³