SAID AN AUSTRALIAN OFFICER

CHAPTER XVIII

SAID AN AUSTRALIAN OFFICER

"Fraternizing with the Indians!" chuckled the Australian officer, as he laid down a London evening paper which had been expressing satisfaction at the fact that Australasians and Indians were fighting side by side before Sari Bair. "The last fraternizing I saw was being done by a young officer of the A.S.C. He was brandishing something that looked like a pick handle (of course he never used it), and demanding a lost transport mule in a fervid mixture of Arabic, Turkish, and Never-Never talk from the Back of Nowhere.

"You see, these Indians are fatalists to a man; they think that if they are to be hit, they must be, and there's an end of it. The consequence is, they take no care of themselves; and that wouldn't matter so much, if they'd only take reasonable care of the mules. Mules are precious, but they take their mules anywhere, and lose them. Hence the fraternizing. 'Where's my mule, son of Belial?' this chap was shouting; and the other things he was saying made even a little middie look shocked.

"We never got tired of those middies. You'd see a pinnace coming up to the beach under shellfire, and a little chap of fourteen talking to the boat's crew like a Yanko bullock driver. The big sailor men were all grinning with sheer delight at the snap of the boys, who didn't seem to know what fear was. I tried some middy's talk on my men once, and startled them down to their bones. They thought about it for half a minute, and then one fellow asked me where I was hit.

"When we go back to Australia, the Australian language will be richer for a word or two of Arabic, that will go there to stay. We have made a regular battle cry of 'Imshi Yalla,' which means 'Get on with it' as far as we can make out. Then there's 'Mafish,' meaning 'Finished.' It was the last word on the lips of many a good man in those days at the end of last April. The ordinary camp greeting is 'Sayeeda'—'Good day,' or 'How d'ye do?' as I take it. There's a word or two more, but there is no need to translate them. They are useful words.

"The Turks are fine fellows. People ask me if they were not very cruel; and I hear all sorts of rumours about mutilations, and so on. There is not one word of truth in it. The story went round that one well-known Australian officer had been found hideously mutilated; and I happen to be in a position to contradict that story point-blank. When the armistice was declared at the end of the battle of Quinn's Post, it was my sorrowful duty to identify and bury the body of that officer. He had not a mark on him, except the honourable wound that caused his death. Dr. Springthorpe, who is the chief Australian medical officer in Egypt, has assured me that no case of mutilation has been treated in the hospitals there; which contradicts some very circumstantial stories that have found their way into print, both here and in Australia.

"That armistice was a funny business. Of course, the only people with any business between the lines were the Red Cross people, but no sooner had the armistice begun than a whole lot of German officers in Turkish uniforms stepped out, and began to make the best use of their opportunities for taking observations. The only counter for that was that we should go out too, and we did so. The Germans were as grumpy as pigs about it, but the Turkish officers turned out to be fine gentlemen. Soon I was swopping cigarettes with them, and we were carrying on a conversation in bad French, eked out with scraps of all other tongues. They were quite jolly fellows, and brave fighters into the bargain.

"It was during that armistice that I saw a German officer talking to some Turkish soldiers with a shovel. They did not move quickly enough to suit him, I suppose, and he laid into them with it. He was not particular whether the flat or the edge of it struck them, so long as he did not miss altogether. I said to my fellows, 'How should we get on, if I did that to you?' and they only scowled. Two of them went out a night or two afterwards, and came back with some buttons they said were his. I don't know.

"Yes, the Turks are brave men, and brave women, too. I saw with my own eyes one sniper brought in, all covered with twigs and painted green in the face. This sniper was smoking a cigarette presented by one of our fellows, and when a couple more added a pat on the back, and said 'Cheero,' the sniper burst into tears. It was a young Turkish girl. Upon my word, I saw the thing happen. She had provisions for three weeks and a thousand rounds, and as nice a little cubby-hole as you ever saw to hide in. I don't know what became of her, but I can vouch for what I am telling you being true.

"We will always remember the Turks kindly for one thing. We lost General Bridges, our chief; who fell to a sniper's bullet in Monash Gully (The Valley of Death), when on his round of inspection. He refused to be carried down to the sea-front, because of the danger his bearers would have to risk. Of course, no one would hear of such nonsense; and he was carried. He was taken slowly through all the most dangerous windings of the valley; yet not a single Turk fired a shot. That stands to their credit with every Australian on the peninsula.

"There are lots of funny things I could tell you, but you might think I was qualifying for the post of 'First Man.' The First Man? Oh, that's a title any fellow gets in the trenches who begins to tell tall yarns. You see, in the first days there was a lot of talk about who was the first man ashore. He turned up here, there, and everywhere; everybody knew him. I believe there were some fights about it. Then some fellows out at Courtney's had a big tin medal made, and whenever any one began boasting, he would be presented with this medal, inscribed, 'For the First Man Ashore.' Nearly every battalion has one of those medals now.

"There were three brothers in my company, all as brave as lions. Fred, the youngest of the three, was reckless with it; and his two brothers were always worrying about him. One day he was hit on the shoulder, and when they saw him go down one brother shouted to the other, 'Thank Heaven, young Fred's got it!' Of course, we all knew what he meant—he was pleased the boy had got off with a light wound—but it made the fellows laugh. After that, whenever one of them was hit, he'd shout, 'Thank Heaven, young Fred's got it!' and then lie down and curse.

"This brother was the coolest customer in the trench, and that was saying something. He was a crack shot, and a great hand at destroying Turkish periscopes. Smashing the business end of a periscope with a rifle bullet, even at short range, is not so easy as it sounds; for the observers keep them moving about erratically, so that it is something like a very small disappearing target. But Bill nailed one nearly every time he shot, and the Turks used to chatter with rage at each loss. I don't think they had too many of them.

"They broke a good many of our periscopes in the same fashion; and the broken glass used to fly about in a very nasty way. I had five men cut about the face and head on one day, through their periscopes being broken at observation work. Then we improvised a sort of safety helmet out of half a kerosene tin, and put an end to that trouble. We tried the new steel embrasures at Quinn's Post, but I consider them sheer death traps, where the trenches are so close to those of the enemy as twenty yards. The fellows who used them at a distance of 150 or 200 yards spoke most highly of them; but where I was, a gap in the sandbags served much better.

"The Turk is a punctual beast. We used to time our watches every evening by the first shell of the evening bombardment, which invariably came along at ten minutes past six. On the night of May 18, that first shell was followed by 170 others before it had gone seven o'clock, which was pretty good going. The armistice of the 20th May was supposed to end at four o'clock in the afternoon, and at one minute past, along came the first shell, just to show us that our friend Abdul had his eye on the clock.

"It came from an entirely new direction, too, which showed that the opportunity for observation afforded by the armistice had not been wasted. But I think we were able to show that we had not shut our eyes to things that were easily noticeable. They certainly did not gain much in the exchanges over that armistice. It's all in the game, after all. There has been little said about the work of the Australasian artillery, and for the very best of reasons. But the gunners, and especially the New Zealanders, will get their due later on.

"There is one New Zealander who is a perfect marvel with a machine-gun—Captain Wallingford, a champion shot. He got the Military Cross for his great work on the opening days, so one can speak about him. A machine-gun soon draws fire, and it was no uncommon thing for the whole of a section to go down soon after a machine-gun opened fire. The way he shifted his gun about in unfamiliar, broken country, through thick scrub and in the dark, was something to dream about. He had a sharpshooting section, too, that was death on snipers, and cleared a whole section of the front in very quick time.

"Colonel Owen's men (the 3rd Battalion) always call him 'Old Never-Retire.' I asked one of them the reason, and he said that on the morning of the first landing the Colonel had to take his fellows up a very steep bit of cliff, almost inaccessible. His position worried the Admiral so much that he signalled that he had better retire, and try farther to the right. The Colonel turned on the chap who brought the message and said, 'My compliments to the Admiral, and tell him I'll see him damned first.' I don't know whether that is true, for I never had the chance of testing it. But his men swear to it.

"The loudest cheer I heard from the trenches was given to a sergeant[1] whose name I never found out; but I heard he was a Western Australian. Two sharpshooters had crawled out about thirty yards for a better shot, and had gone down together; one with a broken arm, and the other with a shot through the thigh. They lay there, with bullets kicking up the dust around them, when this sergeant went out with a rope. He tied it round the waist of the man with the broken arm, who was dragged to the trench, yelling with pain. Then he picked the other fellow up on his back, and brought him in through a perfect rain of bullets. He never had a scratch. It was away to the left of me, and below me, and I saw it all through my glasses, and heard the cheers, as if I were sitting in the circle at a theatre. We found by signal he was unhurt, but could not get his name.

"There were two platoons away on the right who distinguished themselves by getting farther inland than any one else. Not many of them returned to tell the tale, but it was a queer story. They lost all their officers and most of the non-coms. quite early on. The rest only knew they were there to take a hill, and so they took one. Then, for fear that might be the wrong hill, they took another. That set them off taking all the hills in sight, a pretty tall order. They only stopped when they blundered on to the Turkish camp; the wonder is that any of them ever got back.

"I wish the Turks were as cleanly as they are brave and punctual. They keep their trenches in a filthy condition. I know, because I occupied one for half a day. We were told to take it; and that was all right, with the help of the bayonet. We stayed there half a day, and were quite glad when we were ordered back again. It was dangerous enough there; but, for the moment, the danger was nothing compared to the stench and vermin. We lost a lot of men getting out; but were told the tactical purpose had been achieved. So that was all right.

"Shortage of water was one of the chief hardships of the place. If one wanted a wash, he had to go down and wash in the sea; and that was only safe at night time, up to the time I left. I got my bullet down on the beach; it had come from Dead Man's Ridge, right at the top of the Valley of Death—or Monash Gully, as it is now called. I understand the Turks have been cleared from that ridge now, and that a trip down the valley is safe enough. But for two months after the landing it was asking for death to walk down it in the daylight. The water? Oh, the allowance is a quart a day to each man for drinking, and as much for cooking; and all fare alike. We saved for three days for a comfortable shave, and had to go short of a drink to do it.

"The grimmest experience I encountered was in the early days, when I had to decide in a second to order my men to shoot on unarmed Turks. They came forward with their hands up, and I fancied I saw the flash of a bayonet or two in the scrub behind. So I gave the order to shoot; and five seconds later I knew I was right, for we were busy repelling the determined attack of a considerable force. If we had tried to make prisoners of their pioneers, we would have been in a nice fix. Incidents like that explain why the number of prisoners taken is not large; there is so much cover there that it is a risky game making prisoners.

"There are plenty of Germans there; the artillery officers and the whole of the machine-gun sections are Germans. They wear Turkish uniforms, and are what we call 'Pointers' in Australia. During the armistice, they were trying very hard to get their rifles away with bolts and all, back to the Turkish lines. They were supposed to take the rifle and leave the bolt, thus making the weapon useless. I had to stop quite a number who were sneaking off with complete rifles; there was a bit of a row about one man, because I happened to hit him with my fist. I could not make him understand what I wanted by any other means. But there are fewer Germans now than when we first landed."