Gallipoli (98 page)

John Monash, of course, went on to cover himself in glory at the Western Front. He didn't just bend the German line, he broke it. He was of the new scientific breed of generals, and his battles were regarded as models of innovative tactics. He held the view that warfare was essentially a problem in engineering, of mobilising resources, like the conduct of a large industrial undertaking.

So successful was Monash that he was installed as Commander-in-Chief of all 150,000 Australians serving on the Western Front and was described by no less than Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery as ‘the best general on the western front in Europe …'
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Returning to Australia after the war, he became one of the most prominent and important leaders in the country, though likely not to the extent he should have been because of a certain anti-Semitism.

From 1925, he led Melbourne's Anzac Day march, while the cause closest to his heart was the Shrine of Remembrance, for which he was the prime mover.

So beloved a figure was he that not only did he do much to quell the anti-Semites but also, when he died in 1931, his soldiers and their families, and the Australian people, turned out in droves, a quarter of a million strong, as his flag-laden coffin was pulled on a gun-carriage through the streets of Melbourne.

Nor did Cyril Brudenell White ever quite receive the credit he deserved for the genius of his evacuation plan – though Charles Bean once described him as ‘the greatest man it has been my fortune to intimately know'.
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He remained, nevertheless, a respected figure for the rest of his life. Returning to Australia in June 1919, not long after being knighted, Sir Cyril became Chief of the General Staff. His first peacetime task was sitting on a committee that considered the future organisation of the Australian Military Forces, before he retired four years later to chair a variety of prestigious public and private institutions, while also engaging his passion for farming. He returned to the fray in 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War, to again become Chief of the General Staff, in March 1940.
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At the age of 63, this man who had saved countless lives through the brilliance of his evacuation plan and the energy which he put into its execution, died tragically in a plane crash near Canberra in August 1940, which also saw the death of three Federal Cabinet Ministers. Sir Robert Menzies would later note, ‘Of all the men who have served Australia in the military sphere, he is the one to whom my memory will turn in my last days as the very model of everything that an Australian should be.'
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Amen.

After Colonel Ewen MacLagan's service in Gallipoli – he had been evacuated sick in August – he went on to serve in France, most notably commanding the Australian 4th Division with great success at the Battle of Hamel in 1918. MacLagan retired from the military in 1925 and lived quietly thereafter, passing away at his daughter's home in Scotland on 24 November 1948. His finest epitaph is Sir John Monash's description: ‘In appearance and in temperament he is every inch a soldier … Although not Australian born he was whole-heartedly Australian … He never failed in performance and invariably contrived to do what he had urged could not be done …'
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As recounted by Peter Burness in his book
The Nek: A Gallipoli Tragedy
, Colonel Noel Brazier ‘lived out his life on his property in Kirup, in the south-west of Western Australia, part of which was broken up for soldier-settlement'.
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He never overcame his bitterness towards the Bullant and to General Hughes for what had happened at the Nek, and was likely still mourning his lost men on the day he died, aged 80, in 1947.

The Bullant, Brigade-Major Jack Antill, went to his own grave in 1937 at the age of 71, denying any responsibility, to the end, for the death of so many on what Throssell called that ‘fool charge'
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at the Nek.

Of the men of the lower ranks who fought on the frontlines, the fate of Hugo Throssell is the one that moves me most. After being taken to an English hospital to recover from his wounds, he was awarded the Victoria Cross, the only Light Horseman to be so honoured. He then returned to his regiment in Egypt, where he was promoted to Captain and, in April 1917, during the 2nd Battle of Gaza, again displayed his extraordinary fearlessness, even after being wounded. Alas, when the survivors of the 10th Light Horse formed up for the inevitable roll call, it was found that Hugo's brother Ric – who, as ever, had been fighting side by side with him – was missing. As detailed in John Hamilton's great book,
The Price of Valour
, even though under enemy fire, Hugo moved out onto the battlefield among the devastation, whistling the very tune they had most loved when growing up together, the one taught them by their father. If only Ric is still alive, he will surely hear it during the rare lulls in the roar, and wave a hand, so Hugo can find him …

…?

…?

But there was nothing. Just so many groaning, dying men, so much blood and gore, so many entrails uselessly spilling out into the desert sands and men crying out for their mothers, their wives, their God, for release from this agony.

Hugo Throssell never did find him. What could he do but keep doing what he had been doing all along? He buried his grief and kept fighting. Upon his return to Perth in December 1918, Hugo was feted as a glorious Western Australian soldier who had won the Victoria Cross, but by now he wanted no part of it.

Eager for a new life, only three months after the Armistice he married a wonderful woman he had met in London, Katharine Susannah Prichard, a noted Australian author. They settled on a 40-acre mixed farm at Greenmount, 14 miles east of Perth, and in 1922 had one son, whom they named Ric.

It was not long before Hugo became involved in politics. Katharine was already a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia, while, despite his own blue-blood background, Hugo was soon speaking out against war, and up for the rights of workers and returned soldiers. He refused to attend Anzac Day on the grounds that it glorified war. Beyond his farming, he also did some work as a real-estate agent, as well as for Western Australia's Department of Agriculture. After a foray into gold prospecting in the early 1930s proved fruitless, the full weight of the Depression came down upon both Australia and Hugo, and while Katharine was on a six-month trip to Russia doing research for her soon-to-be-published polemical pamphlet ‘The Real Russia', Hugo made a bad business decision that lost him money he did not quite have.

By 19 November 1933, it had all come to a head. Hugo Throssell, war hero, peace activist, husband, father, son, put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger – choosing to share the fate of so many of his comrades at Gallipoli two decades earlier.

At the back of the will he had written the day before was a note:

He was buried with full military honours in Karrakatta Cemetery, Perth. (Mercifully, his wife and child did get the pension.)

Vale, Hugo. What a man you were. I weep.

His Victoria Cross, so hard won at Hill 60, was donated in 1983 by his son, Ric – also a peace activist – to the People for Nuclear Disarmament, who in turn sold it to the RSL, who presented it to the Australian War Memorial.

The other most notable of the nine Australian Victoria Cross recipients at Gallipoli was the then Private Albert Jacka, who left the Peninsula as Company Sergeant-Major. His fame grew exponentially from the moment that he earned a Military Cross on 7 August 1916 for his actions at Pozières. He went on to be awarded a bar for his Military Cross on 8 April 1917 thanks to his service at Bullecourt – freeing some Australians taken prisoner and, together with them, forcing 50 Germans to surrender. This was described by Charles Bean as ‘the most dramatic and effective act of individual audacity in the history of the A.I.F.'
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and by now his entire 14th Battalion were proud to call themselves ‘Jacka's Mob'. His Commanding Officer, Brigadier-General Charles Brand, would later say of him that ‘Captain Jacka was a super-soldier, a born leader, with an instinct to do the right thing in a critical situation. A company under his leadership was as good as an additional battalion.'
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In Australia, the face of Jacka featured large on recruitment posters beckoning Australian men to come to war.

Though his war finished when he was gassed near Villers-Bretonneux, Jacka returned to Australia as a hero and loved every moment of it, attending every Anzac Day march, front and centre, and being very active in returned soldiers' matters besides. Throughout the 1920s, he worked in a business importing electrical goods with two former brothers-in-arms and married before becoming the Mayor of St Kilda in 1930. Alas, the effects of being gassed never quite left him, and, together with the effects of kidney disease, he died in January 1932. Such was his enduring fame that he was given a state funeral, with 6000 people filing past his coffin – subsequently borne by eight fellow Victoria Cross winners before he was laid beneath the sod at St Kilda Cemetery, with full military honours.

Even in death, the VC winner was so beloved by Jacka's Mob that, on the anniversary of his death, survivors would gather at his grave to pay homage, tell yarns, drink and carry on in a manner that would have pleased him. In 1941, the ‘pilgrimage was led by 100 former members of the 14th Battalion'.
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The rather more humble Trooper Bluegum never did make it back to Jean – or, as far as I know, the woman he met in Cairo, the ‘queen' who ‘moved amongst the revellers'.
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Though he survived all of Gallipoli, Sinai and Palestine, Oliver Hogue died of influenza in London on 3 March 1919. I dips me lid, again, Bluegum. Great book.

Ellis Silas was far more longer lived than most of his comrades. After continuing his convalescence in England, he was discharged from the AIF as medically unfit in October 1916, shortly before publishing his diary and sketchbook,
Crusading at Anzac
. After returning to Australia in 1921, he based himself in Sydney and continued his career as an artist, before returning to England in 1925 and marrying two years later. The rest of his life was filled with sketching, painting and writing, and he died in London on 2 May 1972, close to 60 years after he had felt every day was likely to be his last, at Gallipoli.

Despite the message in the bottle to indicate he had been taken prisoner and was alive, Private Edgar Adams was never heard from again. An enquiry to the Turkish equivalent of the Red Cross produced no information, and though it appears the Turks tried to help, they claimed to have no record of him as a POW. In the course of writing this book, I heard one story from an Australian who had worked as a contractor in the Dardanelles in the 1960s, who claimed he had heard stories of old Australian soldiers still living among the locals, and I couldn't help but wonder … and yet, of course, we'll never know.

Major Gordon Carter and Nurse Lydia King? I do know. After Gordon's successful evacuation, they finally met up again for just a few minutes on 2 January 1916 at Tel-el-Kebir Railway Station in Egypt, as Gordon was still stationed there, and Lydia was on her way back to Australia with a tragic shipload of wounded soldiers. They next met on 12 May 1916 in Cairo when she got back, and had a long lunch with a bottle of bubbly. He proposed less than a month later, on 11 June 1916, and they married on 31 January 1917 in Southall, England, just before Gordon headed for the Western Front.

Their first son, Edward Carter, was born nine months after Armistice Day 11 November 1918 and is my ‘Uncle Ted', of Tamworth. Still alive and going strong, he is one of the last Rats of Tobruk left standing! Gordon went on to a successful engineering career, which included involvement in building the Sydney Harbour Bridge. When my parents bought their farm at Peats Ridge in 1948, it was Gordon who visited and advised my father how to properly build the irrigation dam. Together, he and Lydia raised five children, of whom one died in her infancy, and another, John, disappeared while flying for the RAF over the English Channel on 1 April 1944. Gordon died on 11 July 1963; Lydia a decade later, on 18 September 1972.

Trooper Paul ‘Ginty' McGinness – one of those men of the 8th Light Horse Regiment who was saved,
in extremis
– became of major Australian significance when he and fellow Gallipoli veteran Hudson Fysh went on to establish Qantas. Through much of 1920s Australia, the aviation world was filled with Gallipoli veterans, and their numbers included none other than Charles Kingsford Smith.

From the moment the
AE1
was last sighted – south-west of Duke of York Island off New Britain at 3.20 on the afternoon of 14 September 1914 – to the present day, there has not been the slightest sign of it. Not a bubble to the surface, not the tiniest skerrick of debris washed up on the shore – though as this book goes to press in mid-September 2014, the most serious and sophisticated search yet is about to be undertaken.

AE2
lies, of course, where it sank on 30 April 1915, on the floor of the Sea of Marmara, though it was not until 1998 that a Turkish marine engineer, Selçuk Kolay, at last located it, lying in mud at a depth of 72 metres, after a search lasting just under four years. Since that time, there have been grand plans to bring it to the surface again, but the technical, financial and political difficulties are many.

Dacre Stoker, on the other hand, proved nigh on unsinkable. He was released from his time as a POW in December 1918, but he received a great shock upon his return to England, when he found that the wife he had been pining for while imprisoned, the one he thought would be waiting for him, had in fact had a child to another man while he had been away. They were divorced within months.