The Other Anzacs (24 page)

The starboard boat, laden with nurses and a few soldiers, became completely waterlogged and capsized, rolling over and over. Those aboard held on to the boat and succeeded several times in righting it. As exhaustion overtook them each time the boat rolled over, some of the survivors would disappear. Some succeeded in reaching floating wreckage and rafts, but others drowned. Swimmers who came from wreckage nearby and held on to the boat also frequently upset it. After three hours, those aboard found it possible to keep the boat upright in the water provided there were no more than fifteen people in it, ensuring that the gunwale stayed a few inches above the surface. ‘It thus acted as a support for the women and several men, while a few swimmers held onto the gunwale and so kept the boat steady.’
¹⁰

A month later, an unknown nurse gave an account to the
Auckland Weekly News
in which she described how the sea was full of soldiers struggling and clinging to pieces of rafts and other wreckage. The lifeboat in which she was a passenger had been holed.

We were swamped again and again until we were exhausted. It was pitiful to see the nurses and soldiers gradually becoming tired in their frantic struggles and finally releasing their grasp upon the gunwale, floating for a few seconds and then slowly sinking without a murmur. Dr Harrison was swimming near our boat, supporting a nursing sister whom he assisted onto the raft to which many others were clinging. I last saw that sister some time afterwards, floating near a raft, while I was almost dead beat holding on to an upturned boat. She was my greatest pal. She nodded feebly but I was powerless to help her. That was the last I saw of her, but I was told she had been assisted back to the raft and afterwards placed in a boat which, like ours, was constantly overturning. Like many others, she collapsed after a time and died of exhaustion.
¹¹

In a letter to relatives in New Zealand, Jeannie Sinclair recounted how the survivors floated with boards, lifebuoys and anything they could catch hold of in the frigid water.

When I was getting tired, [Seaman] Joseph sat on a board and rested me across his knees. Then he would put his arm across a board and let me rest my chin on his arm. He helped others in this way as well. It was dreadful to see some of the other men going whitey-yellow and then blue around the nose, mouth and eyes and, a little later, passing out. One man, who died early in the morning, floated with us all day. I only saw one sister in the water the whole time.
¹²

Poppy Popplewell had the fearful experience of what seemed to her like ‘touching the bottom of the sea’ before she found herself, her ‘little chum’ Lorna Rattray and a Tommy clinging to a bit of wreckage, near death from cold. They floated for a while with other survivors. Eventually they were separated from the others and joined by another sister, Mary Walker. ‘We four just managed to hold on by our hands to our life-saving board.’
¹³
Mary Grigor would later recall that although her arm had been crushed between a lifeboat and the
Marquette
and she was feeling sick and sore, she managed to swim for hours before a crew member saw her and came to her assistance.

I really did not much mind what happened to me. After I was able to take stock of what was going on, I saw some men hanging on to wreckage, and called to them to ask if I might also hang on, and they said it was no good—there were already too many there. Then one of the crew saw me and swam to me with a piece of board, to which I clung for some time.
¹⁴

Shortly after, they made for a submerged boat in the distance. There were several men already there.

We got into this and immediately turned turtle, and continued to do so every five minutes of the remaining number of hours we were in the water. My rescuer died soon after this from cramp and exhaustion. I was sorry I could do nothing for him. Sister Rae came up afterwards, hanging to the lifebuoy of one of our New Zealand boys. She asked me if she could come into the boat. I said, ‘Yes, sister, but you had better be hanging on to something else, as this boat keeps turning turtle, and it is such hard work clambering over and into it again.’ She held out for a while, but soon after showed signs of exhaustion and died. I wondered if I should be next. Men died on all sides. Some lost their reason and went away from us all.
¹⁵

On Mary Beswick’s raft three of the twelve men aboard decided to swim for another raft, making it slightly less crowded. But the raft was below the surface of the water, and the remaining passengers became cold and cramped. ‘I suggested paddling with our hands on both sides in order to give them something to do. After a few turns and twists, and nearly bobbing off the sides or back and front, we managed to adjust ourselves, and got on fairly well with our paddling, hoping to reach shore before night.’
¹⁶

By now it was around 2 p.m., and as the day wore on, more and more of the men and women succumbed to the cold, exhaustion and injuries. According to Fanny Abbott, several men ‘dropped off about an hour before help arrived’. An unnamed nurse, quoted in
Kai Tiaki
in January 1916, described how ‘it was dreadful to watch these strong men fall off and die, one after the other. Some of them went raving mad.’ Mary Christmas managed to get hold of the rudder and clung to it all day until she was rescued. Despite being injured in the failed attempt to launch the starboard lifeboat, Nona Hildyard did her best to keep spirits up, singing
Tipperary
, before she suffered heart failure and died in the water. Survival was made more difficult by the nurses’ uniform of pantaloons, two petticoats, starched grey dress, long sleeves and stiff collars and cuffs. Soon waterlogged, the clothes were a dead weight. Vic Nicholson and Mary Gould were together all afternoon in the water. Vic recalled how he took off his life jacket and put it under her ‘so she came up to the top of the water’. Thanks to this, Mary survived.

The last two boats to get away from the port side, heavily laden, found it necessary to keep their stern to the wind and sea to avoid being swamped. They reached the western shore of the Gulf of Salonika about 4 p.m. Leaving the majority behind, a party of about seventeen walked six kilometres to a railway station, where the authorities offered help. A small party, carrying stretchers for two injured men left on the beach, then returned with a guide and found that all but four had been picked up by boats from two French destroyers,
Tirailleur
and
Mortier.

The survivors still in the water continued to drift with the current, which seemed to be carrying them towards steamers in the distance. They could see ships passing, but evidently no one on board saw or heard them. Vic Peters thought they might deliberately not have stopped for fear of becoming a submarine target. Mary Beswick watched in frustration as smoke from four steamers appeared in the distance and then one by one the ships sailed away from the sloshing lifeboat in which she, five other nurses and twenty-one men huddled. In the same boat, Chief Officer Saunders described the heartbreak as one ship passed oblivious. ‘We did everything possible to attract her attention, waving handkerchiefs, shouting, whistling on mouth whistles, sticking up an oar.’ Mary Grigor shared the frustration. ‘[We] thought that because they were neutral they would let us die!’ she said later.
¹⁷
Finally, however, a ship took notice.

Late in the afternoon one stopped and seemed to look at us, turned back, and steamed away, then stopped again and lowered a boat, then picked it up and steamed away. Luckily for us our own English patrol boat saw her movements and became suspicious, journeyed over to see, and caught sight of one of our boats in the distance. She then informed two French destroyers, [and] all three came to our rescue.
¹⁸

These were hours that the survivors would never forget, bobbing in the chill waters of the Aegean, many hovering between life and death, just hoping and praying.

16
NO TIME FOR
MOCK MODESTY

The message was barely discernible. ‘S.O.S., S.S.S. off Salonika.’ When the
Marquette
was torpedoed just after 9 a.m., the chief wireless operator found that the main radio equipment had been damaged by the shock of the explosion. Resorting to the emergency set, he managed to transmit several weak signals that would alert rescuers to the ship’s distress. The second message was more urgent: ‘S.O.S., S.O.S, S.O.S., S.S.S., S.S.S., S.S.S., struck 36 miles south of Salonika.’ Shortly after, the operator corrected this to ‘struck 36 miles south of Dangerus Point’.
¹
Not only were the messages faint, but the interference was bad. The Court of Inquiry found that although the alarm was detected, no ship had heard the
Marquette
’s position.
²

The senior wireless operator on the hospital ship
Grantully Castle
, anchored in Salonika, picked up one of the poor signals. The command of the battleship
Albion
gave orders for the
Grantully Castle
to proceed from Salonika to search. But she was overtaken by British and French destroyers and ordered to return to port. The French destroyers
Tirailleur
and
Mortier
and the British destroyer
Lynn
began to sweep the Aegean at full speed in widening circles. Around 3:30 p.m. the
Tirailleur
, with HMS
Lynn
not far behind, reached the scene of the sinking. The two ships lowered all their lifeboats and picked up all the survivors, who were found in an area about five kilometres by one kilometre.
³

Alex Prentice would later assert that a lifeboat flare he held aloft was the sign that attracted the
Tirailleur
. The flare handle became a valued memento. The destroyer changed direction, the nearby
Mortier
and
Lynn
were informed, and the engines were rung down. Officers looking through their binoculars soon realised that what looked like bits of wreckage were human beings. ‘It was just getting dark when a French destroyer spotted us and pulled us with the steam winches and put us down into the engine room to thaw out, as we were all stiff with cold, ’ Len Wilson recalled.
⁴
The
Tirailleur
rescued 290 people in all, the
Lynn
170 and the
Mortier
ninety.

For many, the rescue vessels had arrived just in time. Along with other nurses, Hilda Hooker had floated for about seven hours in the intense cold, clinging onto buoys, boards or anything that could be grasped. Nearing the limit of her endurance, she had been pulled into a boat that an engineer managed to right. Later, she remembered saying, ‘I can’t keep going any longer . . . I was just going under when a boy . . . grabbed me feet first, and hauled me into the boat.’
⁵
Marie Cameron, the seriously injured matron, and Mabel Wright were also in the boat. The engineer asked for a handkerchief or rag to tie on to the end of an oar, but no one could help until Ina Coster, one of two sisters who had drifted alongside, produced a red handkerchief. Hilda Hooker believed this had saved their lives. Poppy Popplewell fought hard to survive and to help Lorna Rattray. The pair had become close friends on the voyage over on the
Maheno
. After the
Marquette
went down, they were together in the Aegean.

We kept together the day of our disaster and hung on to the same piece of wreckage, but Lorna was not as strong as I am and simply couldn’t do it. I held her on for a long long time and then she died of utter exhaustion not long before we were picked up—it was so dreadful. I was just able to hold up her face while she died and then so soon I had to let her go I couldn’t hold her any longer but it was the most awful thing having to let her go and seeing her little grey body float right away from me—another Sister and I then climbed up on the boards we had and lay front down and didn’t care a bit what the sea did to us. However it carried us up to a lifeboat sent off from a British mine sweeper—and so we were alright [
sic
].
⁶

On the
Tirailleur
, Vic Nicholson watched as the French slashed bootlaces and uniforms from men and women alike.

It didn’t matter whether that was nurse or soldier or who it was, that was the way it went. Half a pannikin of hot wine poured over you and a couple of rough towels and away you went, wrapped in a hot blanket heated on the engine room vents. Wrapped in a blanket and onto a table which ran down into a boardroom and then up and heaved into a hammock. Whether you landed right way up or not, that’s where you stayed the night.
⁷