The Other Anzacs (22 page)
Ammunition, mules and nurses make a strange mix, yet in October 1915 they were among the cargo and passengers of the tramp steamer
Marquette
as it lay at anchor in Alexandria harbour. Launched at the end of the 19th century, the
Marquette
had been hurriedly converted into a troopship when the war broke out. Her year-old coat of military paint did not disguise the fact that she had no claim to luxury or even to much comfort.
Labourers had worked for days to load the
Marquette
, which carried No. 1 New Zealand Stationary Hospital and its staff of twelve officers, nine non-commissioned officers and seventy-seven orderlies of the New Zealand Medical Corps. With them were thirty-six nurses of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, some 500 officers and troops of the British 29th Divisional Ammunition Column, tons of munitions and equipment, and about 100 crewmen. The ship carried 741 people in all, along with 491 mules and fifty horses.
Most of the nurses came from the South Island and had left Wellington on 11 July aboard the
Maheno
. Thirty of them were attached to the stationary hospital; the other six had been called up from the 21st British General Hospital in Alexandria. They were under the leadership of Wagga Wagga-born Matron Marie Cameron, who had worked in New Zealand for several years. In the words of Edith ‘Poppy’ Popplewell, No. 1 Stationary was a ‘grand hospital’ that would leave Egypt ‘wonderfully equipped’ with ‘X Ray plants and dynamos for electric lighting the whole camp, and one hundred European pattern tents, etc’.
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Another sister from the hospital, Isabel Clark, could not have been happier when she was told in early October that she was to leave Port Said, where she had spent the previous three months. In a letter to one of her sisters back home, the thirty-year-old from Oamaru, near Dunedin, described Port Said as ‘the rottenest place on the face of the earth’.
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The nursing staff left Port Said on the moonlit night of 18 October, arriving at Alexandria about 3 a.m., when they were directed to their bunks on the
Marquette
. Ina Coster remembered that tea had been made for them. ‘So in the moonlight we climbed the steep, steep gangway to our new abode, the
Marquette
, ’ she wrote later.
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The unknown question was their destination. ‘We haven’t the least idea where we are going. Places have been mentioned from Jerusalem to Salonika—Imbros, Lemnos—Asia Minor, Persian Gulf etc. We think it might be Lemnos, ’ Isabel Clark wrote.
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With waterside workers on strike, New Zealand troops, including Private Vic Nicholson, ‘helped to dismantle the hospital, pack it up, and load it on ship’ for the voyage to No. 1 Stationary Hospital’s new destination.
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Among the equipment they loaded were eighteen-pound guns, which struck Nicholson as ‘a funny sort of business, because it’s only a short hop to Mudros’, where he and others believed the ship was most likely heading. He was not impressed with the 149-metre-long, and 7000-ton
Marquette
. ‘It was a dirty old tramper. That’s why they took it, for the accommodation for the horses.’
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Just a few hours before departure, Isabel Clark contemplated the adventure ahead. This was, after all, what she had longed for. Now that she was in a position to use her skill and experience in the theatre of war, she was not about to let any qualms about personal safety override her sense of duty.
We don’t know where we are going. Another transport is going out as well. Went ashore for a couple of hours this morning. Alex. is a much nicer place than Port Said . . . we are supposed to sail this evening. It will be rather exciting crossing the Mediterranean. I suppose we will run the risk of being torpedoed.
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The ship was under the command of Captain John Bell Findlay, a hardy Scots seafarer who had served on it for four years. As Vic Nicholson would recall, ‘the skipper opened his sealed orders eight hours out and found he was not going to Mudros, he was going to Salonika’. Bulgaria had entered the war on the side of Germany. It had pushed into neighbouring Serbia, cutting it off from the Allies and prompting Greece to break its treaty with Serbia. To prevent the northern Greek port of Salonika from falling into enemy hands, the Allied command decided to establish a stronghold there, with France and Britain agreeing to send a division each from the Dardanelles. Isabel Clark captured the prevailing thinking in a letter home. ‘We have just heard that Bulgaria has joined in against us. It is to be hoped that Greece won’t follow suit.’
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Ina Coster probably spoke for all the nurses when she said that No. 1 Stationary Hospital ‘very much felt the honour that had been conferred it by being sent to so important a field’.
If there was concern over the strategic situation, Edith Wilkin had a private worry about the ship.‘Such a beautiful big boat, Mother, ’ she wrote home later, ‘only its number was B.13 so of course it couldn’t be lucky.’
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As it pulled away from the dock, the nurses lined the deck rails, and sailors on nearby British and French warships broke into loud cheers and rounds of
La Marseillaise
and
God Save the King
. But the rousing send-off quickly gave way to trepidation. The ship was just about to clear the protective harbour boom when the steering failed. The
Marquette
swung around, narrowly missing the minefield at the entrance. An urgent investigation revealed a cotton rag twisted around a piston rod in one of the engines. Hilda Hooker, from Napier, later recalled: ‘We wondered if it was sabotage.’
After a two-hour delay, the
Marquette
had barely cleared the heads when Hilda and her colleagues again had cause for alarm. Someone on deck noticed smoke coming from a large case that had been carried on board at the last moment by men wearing Red Cross uniforms. Crew members quickly threw it overboard. ‘It was just fortunate that it had arrived too late to be placed in the hold—as all the hatches had been closed, it had been left on deck, ’ Hilda noted.
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Rumour spread that the case had almost certainly contained a time bomb.
That night Commander General for Egypt Sir John Maxwell cabled the War Office in London that the
Marquette
had sailed for Salonika. In the document, marked ‘secret’, he noted that the 29th Divisional Ammunition Column and the New Zealand Stationary Hospital were on board.
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The presence of the ammunition column would make the
Marquette
an attractive target.
With all portholes closed and in complete blackout, the
Marquette
sailed into the night. A destroyer escort joined her, and they began to zigzag through an area infested with mines. Submarines were also now a constant threat. Despite the ominous departure and the treacherous seas, Hilda Hooker remembered that the ‘atmosphere was free and easy, we had no thought of mines or submarines’. Ballarat-trained Poppy Popplewell, who had worked in New Zealand for some years, also recalled no great sense of apprehension. Though she was still grieving the death of her brother, Private Cecil Popplewell, at Lone Pine, she thought the next three days were among the ‘happiest and most peaceful’ she had ever known at sea.
It was calm and sunny and everyone was so well. No one even tried to be seasick. The Imperial officers were so good to us. It was all very nice and very comfortable. There were rumours of torpedoes, of course, and we had lifebelt drills for two days, but we really hardly took it seriously I am afraid.
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During the day they played the usual deck games, wrote letters and read. Sailing into the Aegean Sea, they passed a series of Greek islands. On the fourth evening the escort, the French destroyer
Tirailleur
, obeying instructions, left the convoy. The instructions later proved to be false, the enemy apparently having ‘discovered the code’.
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At breakfast the next morning, 23 October, with the
Marquette
now in the Gulf of Salonika, it was announced that the ship would enter the port by midday. Danger, it seemed, had passed. The weather, though, had abruptly turned cold and grey, in sharp contrast to the heat and flies of Egypt. Several nurses went for a stroll on the promenade deck, chatting among themselves and searching in the mist for glimpses of the coastline.
The Medical Corps quartermaster, Captain Dave Isaacs, was on the top deck with two or three nurses when, at 9:15 a.m., he suddenly said, ‘I wonder what that is coming towards us?’ What he saw was a ‘straight thin green line about 50 yards away streaking through the water towards the ship’, with a periscope cutting the surface. Jeannie Sinclair was on the upper deck when she also saw ‘a green line coming through the water’. Mary Grigor remarked, ‘I wonder if it’s a torpedo?’
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The Officer of the Watch saw the torpedo about fifteen metres from the ship, ‘and at first took it to be a fish’.
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Its ominous swishing sound could be heard distinctly as they watched, mesmerised. Seconds later, the missile struck the forward starboard side. Some on board recalled ‘a dull thud, which shook the whole ship’.
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The German submarine U-35, the most successful U-boat of the Great War, had doomed the
Marquette
.
Mary Beswick was walking around the deck with another nurse when the torpedo hit. ‘Away we flew for our lifebelts, and to the places we had been told to go if anything happened, ’ she wrote later.
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In the smoking room, Edith Wilkin and Susan Nicoll ‘felt a jar’ and instinctively knew what had happened. ‘The steamer quivered and then started to list, ’ Edith recalled.
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In the mess room, in the bow of the ship, Vic Nicholson had just sat down to a plate of steak, onions and fried potatoes. ‘I picked up the knife and fork and bang! The torpedo hit on the starboard quarter of the ship, right on number 2 hold, and it threw all the whole company in the air, ’ he recalled.
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The hatch on No. 1 hold blew up instantly, sending a column of water spurting high in the air.
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Several of the crew, of whom at least seven were standing round No. 1 hatch at the time, were probably killed or injured. All available deck hands had just been sent down into No. 2 hold to get some rope. There was soon doubt about how many of them escaped.
The torpedo ripped through the hull and smashed a second gaping hole in the port side. As water rushed into the ship, it listed to port, then righted itself and began to sink by the bow. The siren and bugle giving the alarm sounded almost simultaneously, but the ship’s death throes made it difficult to put on the cork life jackets and make for the lifeboats. The companionway leading down to the mess room had been blown away and the men were forming a human ladder. A rope was found for the last man up. By then the men had been ordered to remove their heavy boots, and with the ship so far down in the water it was possible to swim off from the deck.
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Victor Peters, of Christchurch, and another member of the medical unit were seen throwing rafts overboard, helping the wounded and concussed. They helped several men into life jackets before getting them overboard and then jumping from the deck themselves.
Trying to swim away from the suction was hard going. It was pathetic to see scores of men, mostly from the 29th Divisional British Ammunition Column, who had crowded to the stern. The stern looked so high from the water. Some of the men jumped and struck the rudder or the propeller. This deterred others, who appeared to go under with the ship. It was not a pleasant sight. As the propeller came out of the water I was quite close to four men on a raft who were sucked into the propeller. The raft was smashed to matchwood but by a miracle the men were not killed. I saw one man’s hair literally stand up on end; he had red hair. I don’t think I imagined seeing this. Until then I had thought that such an event was only an old wives’ tale.
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