Gallipoli (63 page)

For the Australians in nearby trenches and below in Monash Valley, the air is filled with the screams of their comrades in the darkness and a red glow coming from the direction of Quinn's Post. All they can do is push towards it in the darkness, dodging the body parts as best they can and hoping to stem the breach.

Meanwhile, the Turks are charging towards what used to be the Australian positions, throwing bombs ahead of them and using their bayonets to finish off dazed survivors.

‘The first thing that some of the stunned Australians on the flank of the explosion heard, on coming to themselves,' Charles Bean would recount, ‘was the sound of gruff voices close to them speaking in an unknown language.'
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Australian it ain't.

And those who try to go beyond it are soon cut down by the Anzac defence-in-depth, just as, once the confusion has lessened a little and the first streaks of dawn allow the Australians in adjoining trenches to see clearly, they are able to bring devastating fire on those Turks now trying to cross no-man's-land to support their pals.

Shortly after the explosion, the 15th Battalion prepare to counter-attack and retake Anzac's most precarious Post.

Meantime, Lieutenant Terence McSharry of Brisbane – who had been just back from Quinn's when it blew up – is taking action of his own. After racing to a dugout where he knows a supply of jam-tin bombs is kept, he grabs a dozen and lights a candle, which he places inside a tin to keep it from blowing out. As some of the survivors come staggering back, he calls, ‘Come on, Australia!'
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which rallies them. He sallies forth with two men to get into a position where he can throw the bombs at the advancing Turks. They get there just in time to see a Turkish officer heading down a trench to his right, leading a dozen soldiers.

‘The leader was advancing confidently,' Charles Bean would report, ‘but those behind him … seemed to be without enthusiasm, peering through the half-dark.'
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The instant the Turkish soldiers see the dim figures of McSharry and his men, they duck their heads, but their officer is made of sterner stuff and instantly brings his pistol to bear, firing off a shot before McSharry can duck and … blows his hat off.

And now it is the Australians' return of serve. McSharry and his men light their bombs and lob them over to where the Turkish heads have ducked down. Screams shatter the night. In all of the confusion, the Turks in the main trenches higher up the hill throw their own bombs in the same direction, not realising they are killing their own men. Just one of those Turkish soldiers makes it out alive.

It is the beginning of an intense battle that lives up to Quinn's Post's reputation as the most dangerous location at Anzac. The fight rages for five hours, and by the time Quinn's Post is finally retaken, 33 Australians have been killed.

Another day, another brutal fight where they have lost many good men and suffered many terrible casualties. And yet, and yet … on this day there is something both impressive and different under the sun.

The first thing Colonel John Monash notes is how well his men perform under the severe pressure of bombardment and a full-blown attack.

‘To a stranger,' he writes to a friend, ‘it would probably look like a disturbed ant-heap with everybody running a different way, but the thing is really a triumph of organization. There are orderlies carrying messages, staff officers with orders, lines of ammunition-carriers, water-carriers, bomb-carriers, stretcher-bearers, burial-parties, first-aid men, reserves, supports, signallers, telephonists, engineers, digging-parties, sandbag-parties, periscope-hands, pioneers, quartermaster's parties, and reinforcing troops, running about all over the place, apparently in confusion, but yet everything works as smoothly as on a peace parade, although the air is thick with clamour and bullets and bursting shells and bombs and flares.'
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What touches him amid it all is something he would later describe as being to ‘the eternal credit of Australian soldiers'.

For after they had retaken some temporarily lost trenches, it was only to find 17 Turks left behind. Under the circumstances – for the Australians had lost many of their own on this day to these men, and their blood is up – Monash would not have been surprised to see all the Turks killed on the spot. Instead, an interpreter was sent for and these enemy soldiers were persuaded to surrender.

Still, to the General's amazement, there is more.

No sooner had the Turks been disarmed than ‘our boys crowded around them with water bottles and biscuits which they devoured ravenously, and then gave them cigarettes, and all the while lines of stretcher-bearers were carrying past our dead and wounded. Gallantry can surely touch no higher pinnacle.'
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Yes, Gallipoli is an inhuman bastard of a place, but, despite it all, from both sides there are stunning moments of humanity that shine through … At least for the Turks and the Anzacs, as no such rapprochement occurs with the Germans. One is even heard to shout across the trenches in his thick accent, ‘Come on you – kangaroo-shooters!'
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Nor are German aviators seen to be any more likeable all of a sudden. While the Turkish artillery seems always to be mindful of hospital ships, one day a German plane flies right over a hospital ship and drops an enormous bomb that only misses by 50 yards or so. The medical officer of the 6th Light Horse Regiment is so outraged – he knows better than anyone just how many desperate cases there are aboard that ship – that he momentarily loses his equanimity. He hurls a brick at the enemy lines, just on principle, before explaining himself to the bemused soldiers: ‘I wear the Red Cross, so I cannot fire at them, and they are not supposed to fire on me.'
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How they long to kill Germans.

31 MAY 1915, ANZAC COVE, A FATE THAT SPLITS THE DIFFERENCE

Despite this new-found warmth between the two sides, there is no relenting in the ongoing danger.

On this hot morning, Trooper Ernie Wiggins is in his dugout when two of his mates call for him to come outside and join them.

Ernie, an English-born Queenslander, ain't interested – okay, you coves? A more careful man than the other two, he just momentarily puts his head out and calls back, ‘Not yet, the shrapnel hasn't stopped.'
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At that very instant, a shell explodes and a piece of shrapnel screams precisely between the other two and neatly bisects Ernie's head. Kills poor ol' Ernie stone motherless dead, it does. Too right, it does.

Just another day in the life – and many deaths – of those making war at Gallipoli.

EARLY JUNE 1915, MERCURY RISING ON GALLIPOLI PENINSULA …

In western Turkey in summer, the sun does not shine so much as
beat.
The breeze falls away, the clouds disappear and, for those fighting in the trenches below, there is no respite. What little greenery on the hills that has survived the battle so far turns brown, and every exploding shell brings clouds of dust that linger and choke, as do the endless bullets. Dead bodies – and since the armistice hundreds more have by now gathered in no-man's-land – fester within hours, bringing a stench that overwhelms both armies. In the heat, they tend to bloat like whales, and soldiers from both sides fire at them to release the gases.

Those bodies and the open latrine trenches provide the perfect breeding ground for the flies that are already there in their billions, ‘from the size of a pin's head to great bluebottles that are so bloated they can't fly'.
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They get in your mouth, under your arms, into every open wound they can find, and, as one Digger sums it up in a letter home, ‘they are far worse than the Turks'.
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On the plus side, the flies do add a touch of much needed protein to the soldiers' diet, as god knows ‘you could not eat without eating flies'.
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Bully beef with a crunchy fly crust. Strawberry and fly jam on hard oatmeal biscuits. Salty fly-studded bacon, washed down with sweet fly-swilling tea. They are simply everywhere, in swarms.

‘Maggots are falling into the trench now,' one Digger, Ion Idriess, would recount of his experiences. ‘They are not the squashy yellow ones; they are the big brown hairy ones. They tumble out of the sun-dried cracks in the possy walls … A lot of the flies flew into my mouth and beat about inside … I nearly howled with rage … Of all the bastards of places this is the greatest bastard in the world.' The horrors never stop: ‘A dead man's boot in the firing possy had been dripping grease on my overcoat, and the coat will stink forever.'
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Now installed on Imbros in the largest tent, General Hamilton has problems of his own with the flies, as he would soon record in his diary: ‘These Imbros flies actually drink my fountain pen dry!'
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Lice and fleas are also a scourge. The men call them ‘grey backs' and ‘moovies', and they infest their clothes and sheets. Just like the damn flies, they are ‘impossible to get rid of'.
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It is not uncommon to see men ‘sitting outside their dugouts with nothing on, hunting through their clothes for these and having “louse competitions” to see who can catch the most'.
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It is not just the Diggers on the Peninsula who are affected. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, taking a break from the front on the island of Lesbos, would complain that he had not slept a wink all night, for the fleas. Strange, replies Bean, he had not been troubled by them? ‘Ah, but you see, Bean,' replies the suave English journalist, ‘even a flea cannot bite a bone.'
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On the Gallipoli Peninsula, simple scratches don't heal, quickly turning into festering, suppurating ulcers that remind some of the Australian scourge known as Barcoo Rot. These ulcers, warm and wet, are the perfect place for flies to lay their eggs. Diarrhoea, caused by dysentery spread by the flies and fleas – known by the Diggers as the Gallipoli Gallop or Turkey Trot – runs rife. By the second week of June, with the mercury rising, it is so bad that, for the first time, more men a day are evacuated from Anzac Cove for sickness – around 80, to increase to 140 by the end of the month – than for battle wounds. As one man notes, ‘we let the louse do what the Turks could not'.
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The overflowing latrines? As ever, they are just shallow trenches, three feet by one foot, and two feet in depth, which the men straddle. According to one Digger, ‘The stench was indescribable and the flies … the toilets were just a trench dug in the ground with a piece of timber across it and two biscuit tins at the end.'
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The resultant scenes are appalling, with one Digger, Joe Murray, recounting in a letter, ‘My old pal, a couple of weeks ago he was as smart and upright as a guardsman. After about ten days to see him crawling about, his trousers round his feet, his backside hanging out, all soiled, his shirt – everything was soiled. He couldn't walk. My pal got a hold of him by one arm. I got a hold of him by the other. We lowered him down next to the latrine. I don't know what happened but he simply rolled into this foot-wide trench, half sideways, head first into the slime. We couldn't pull him out, we didn't have any strength and he couldn't help himself at all. We did eventually get him out but he was dead, he'd drowned in his own excrement.'
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Of course, dysentery's bedfellow is dehydration, and, under such conditions, plentiful water would have been most helpful, but there is little – the vast majority of it has to come in by ship from as far away as Egypt and Malta – and the Anzacs are limited to just half a gallon per man per day, a tenth of the natural need of a soldier in the field. What can you do with it? Most use it for drinking, for just staying alive, expending no more than a thimble's worth for anything else such as shaving and washing, let alone washing out the dixies (large, oval cooking pots) or one's mess tin, in which the disease-spreading flies feed and breed. As to washing their clothes, some men use a thimble of phenyl – usually used as a drain cleaner – while others ‘have systematic hunts for foreign bodies in clothing'.
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As summer starts to blister, water becomes an ever greater issue. At least the way the story would go, when one particular soldier is seen to be staring glumly at the water in the bottom of his pannikin just doled out by his Sergeant, the senior man growls at him, ‘Well, what the 'ell you looking at?'

‘Nothing,' replies the private, ‘just wishing I was a bloody canary.'
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(Back at Broadmeadows Camp in Melbourne, there had been a man named Furphy who emptied the sanitary cans and carted away the waste.
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According to one Anzac, Furphy ‘always had some rumour as to the date of the sailing or destination'. And Furphy was ‘always wrong',
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but his name lived on, as it had quickly become shorthand for the wild rumours that he started. Rumours and gossip were such a part of the Anzacs' daily life that there were even furphies about Furphy. One rumour was that the term originated at the Mena Camp in Egypt, where the most popular place in camp to meet and exchange news and gossip had always been around the water carts branded ‘J. Furphy and Sons'.)
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The men are exhausted. Exacerbating the exhaustion is the fact that every morning now, from 3 am till 5 am, every man has to stand to arms, ready for an attack, and even when they do sleep, it is with their clothes and boots on. In fact, active duty is welcomed by most, as once relieved from the frontlines the fatigue work begins: trudging water and other supplies up hills under the heat of the sun and the maelstrom of constant shelling. As one soldier writes in his diary, ‘I can tell you it's no joke climbing the hills with a load. It takes the stuffing out of one – but there is no stuffing to take out.'
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And another notes, ‘it's like stopping work to carry bricks'.
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By now, the days of having your puttees done up are long gone, and the soldiers are frequently shirtless, protected from the sun only by the shadow thrown by their slouch hats, while their once long pants have been cut down to shorts that are now little more than rags, all too often with holes in the back so the dysenteric discharge has somewhere to go.

In fact, men walking around in ‘shorts' – which are naturally to become an iconic Australian male fashion item – are displaying something of a cutting-edge invention, born to be worn in the trenches at Anzac. Colonel John Monash claims his own part in sparking the new vogue in a letter to his wife: ‘We allow the men great freedom in dress – I started it and the others followed. You know what “Shorts” are? They are Khaki overalls, cut down so as to finish four inches above the knee – like a Scotsman's trews. These worn with short underpants … look really well – the leg showing from two inches below to four inches above the knee, and soon getting as brown as the face and hands. I have dressed like that for some weeks, with khaki shirt and no collar or tie. Even Godley dresses the same now and all the other Brigadiers also. It is a very comfortable kit, especially for climbing hills. As to the men, well – they wear the same kit as the above, but no shirts, no puttees, and no socks, so you see there is nothing left but the boots and trews, and so they go about in the sun all day, and are already blacker in the skin than our Turks or Hindu muleteers.'
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Despite the heat, the flies, the sickness and the general exhaustion, there is more hard physical work being done at Anzac Cove than ever. For, in the immediate wake of the Turkish tunnelling beneath Quinn's Post to blow it up, of course General Birdwood has ordered the Anzacs to reply in kind. The call has gone out for soldiers and officers experienced in mining to come forward, and a posse of them is soon formed up into a special unit with the specific task of tunnelling towards the Turkish trenches. Most of the work is proceeding from Quinn's, Pope's and Courtney's – with 260 soldiers in all slaving like demented moles.

Beyond that, there is a continuous program of trench improvement, as the Anzacs continue to dig as if their lives depend upon it … because they do.

The sun beats down, the bullets fly, the shells burst, the boats filled with sick and wounded soldiers continue to head away … and the Diggers dig. For it remains a triumph of the human spirit that, no matter how agonising the circumstance, how hell-like one's place on earth, an ability to adapt can still manifest itself. So it is with many of the soldiers at Gallipoli at this time, who, unaccustomed as they were, are now world authorities in things they never previously imagined. Most have developed the golden ear of an orchestra conductor, as one Digger writes with wonder to a friend: ‘The different sounds of bullets, shells, etc., we are now experts in.' He advises, ‘There is the sharp crack of the bullet overhead, with a “ping” when it hits anything. There is the nasty, unfriendly swish of one that passes close to your ear. Then there is the “crackle” of a machine-gun, changing to a mournful disappointed “whisp whisp” when the bullets get closer. Lastly, there is the cheerful whistle of the shrapnel shell well overhead, and at which we all used to duck (we don't now, we know they're safe). It's the vicious brute that is just past you as you hear it that makes you take cover in case there's another following it.'
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Oh, and that ‘whiz bang'? That, my friend, is the shellfire from a Krupps field gun. There, can you hear it?
Whizzzz
… BANG! It sounds just like that.

Only a short time after landing, the men had even been able to recognise the individual booms of the major Turkish cannons and given them names. ‘Beachy Bill' comes from somewhere up on Gaba Tepe, and it focuses its fragments mostly on the landing beaches, while the roar of ‘Farting Annie' and ‘High Velocity Archibald' rolls to them from the Suvla plain a couple of miles to the north, and ‘Lonely Liz' appears to be coming from a gully to the south. Playing havoc with the men at Helles, from across the way near Kum Kale, is ‘Asiatic Annie'. And then there's a ‘most vicious little gun called “Pip Squeaker”'.
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(This is one of the many disadvantages of the Anzacs. All their land artillery fire comes from very clearly defined places, easily visible to observers, whereas the Turks can with impunity position their own artillery anywhere within range and usually on the lee side of the hills facing the Allies, making them nigh impossible to hit.)

Under such circumstances, it is never difficult to tell who the new blokes are – the reinforcements who intermittently arrive from Cairo – as, apart from having recognisable uniforms and even some flesh on their bones, they tend to throw themselves to the ground at the first sound of attack, to the roars of laughter from the others.

And there is also the matter of the local lingo and their lack of comprehension. For even though the veterans have only been here a short time, already their experience has been so intense, and unique, that new words have appeared in their vocabulary that nigh on everyone understands. See, the Turkish enemy is not just that, he is more colloquially known as ‘Abdul', ‘Jacko' and ‘Johnny Turk'.
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The highly ranked officers who sometimes – but not often – visit from Imbros are ‘base wallahs'. Of these, none are worse than the ‘brass hats', so highly ranked they have red tags on their lapel and around their caps, and they are ever and always impeccably turned out and accompanied by their ‘bum-brushers', otherwise known as batmen. The Diggers, meanwhile, must hold up their trousers with an ‘ANZAC button', otherwise known as a nail, while most men enjoy the distraction of ‘coffin nails', otherwise known as ciggies. They all hate ‘ANZAC soup', which is a massive hole formed by the explosion of a shell now polluted by a corpse, but they'll take a ‘Tin of Dog' – that's bully beef – if you've got one. Those who have been merely wounded sometimes get an ‘Aussie', an injury bad enough to be sent back to Australia, and a ‘Blighty' if you're packed off back to a hospital in the Old Dart.

(The truth? In the horror of it all, such a wound is so coveted by some men suffering the trauma of war that they do it to themselves, ‘generally gunshot wounds to the left hand'.
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The penalty for being found to have done this is to be court-martialled and sentenced to several months' imprisonment, usually on hard labour.)