THE BAND OF BROTHERS
An Australian officer had been telling me of the remarkable bravery of two men of his company, and I asked the natural question: "Did you report them for recognition?" "No," was the answer. "They did no more than their duty; no more than any other two of my men would have done in similar circumstances."
The feeling that underlay that reply cuts far deeper than the award of crosses and orders. It proclaims the Australasians for what they are, a band of devoted brothers, fighting for something far dearer to them than public recognition. I will allow the same officer to tell what kind of men they were, and to describe the mutual love and respect that animated them as a band in the worst of their days in Gallipoli. He said:—
"The Australian soldier is often said to be lacking in discipline. Well, it all depends what you call discipline. Let me give you an example. When we landed the men were ordered to advance with fixed bayonets and do the work with the cold steel. They were not to fire unless it was absolutely necessary. Days afterwards we found some of our men out in the bad country around Quinn's Post dead with their rifles beside them; the bayonets fixed and not a round fired. They had obeyed orders until the last, because they were good orders. They must have had innumerable temptations to loose off their rifles, but they died like soldiers with red-tipped bayonets and clean barrels. I call that discipline.
"On August 7 our fellows were relieved in the firing line by a draft of Kitchener's men. The scrub around was stiff with snipers, all eager to pick off an officer or two for choice. Yet here were these chaps saluting every officer who looked at them; saluting like clockwork. Our major is a peppery chap who rose from the ranks in the African war. 'What the blue fire do you mean by it?' he roared at one of the 'Kitchener's.' 'Do you want to have me killed?' They simply couldn't understand him. Now you may call that discipline, but I do not. I call it rank foolishness, and worse.
"The reputation of the major was that he never threw away a life and never risked his own unnecessarily. Yet he was always risking his own, and the men would follow him anywhere. He had only to speak to get the most implicit obedience. One day he said, 'Look here, men! Some English staff officers are coming to see you this afternoon. Shave yourselves and try to look smart if you can. And, for Heaven's sake, don't call me Alf.' My word, they did him proud that day.
"I see some of them now, with their hard faces shaded by their slouched hats, and I remember them a grousing, cursing crowd in the transport, and I think to myself, 'Can these be the uncomplaining, unselfish, God-fearing heroes I fought with at Courtney's Post?' I tell you that battle turned those fellows' best side outermost. Having seen their best side I can never pay any attention to the other side of them as long as I live. They made me proud to belong to the same race as they, and more than proud to be entrusted with the command of such splendid men.
"Their bravery had as many facets as a well-cut diamond. But the side I admired most was their sheer grit. The first five days in the firing line they had no sleep at all, and were fighting every minute of the time. They had no food except some dirty water and a few hard biscuits. On the evening of the fifth day the C.O. came into the trench and said, 'Boys, you've stuck it splendidly, and now you're going to be relieved. I've got you some hot tea that will come round in a minute or two, and shortly after you will be relieved.' And they answered, 'Only get us some tea, sir, and we'll stick it as long as you like.'
"Their hard, stern-lipped faces will never more blind me to the big, soft hearts they mask so effectually. One day I was resting in a bit of a dug-out, sopping wet, shaking with a feverish cold, no greatcoat or blanket or cover of any kind. I was not feeling very good. A great big fellow went toiling up the hill, pulling himself from one tree to the other by the branches, the only way to get up. He had got some way past me when he caught sight of me. I suppose I looked very wretched. Back he came with the good word, 'Feeling knocked out, matey?' asks he. 'Never mind, you buck up and —— Oh, I beg pardon, sir.' A day or two later he came up to me and again began to apologize. To apologize, when he had done me more good than I had imagined anything short of a quick and painless death could have done!
"We had a young subaltern from Duntroon College, as gallant a boy as ever looked death in the face, and that he did every hour of the day and night for weeks. He commanded men old enough to be his father, and he was the darling of their hearts. One day the inevitable happened and he went down (to the sea front) with a big hole in him. Some days afterwards his men were going back to rest camp and they came to me to inquire after him. I can see them now, half a score of as unsavoury-looking ruffians as ever could be seen. Their faces were shaggy with two weeks' beard and their eyes were red and bulging with unintermittent vigils. They had cheated death for yet another week. And the tears ran down their cheeks as they begged to know if 'there was any chance for the Boy.' Men like that stir your innermost fibre.
"I have seen those men shepherding that boy in the trenches in all sorts of ways. I have seen them standing between him and the place from where the rifle fire was coming and he did not know it. One man, to my certain knowledge, was hit that way. I charged him with it in the dug-out—he was not badly wounded—and he gave me the lie in the most emphatic Australian fashion. I don't know what discipline demanded of me, but I do know that I shook hands and whispered to him that I would never tell the boy. And he grinned and winked like the jolly old bushman he was.
"Some of them were pretty rough, but it is wonderful how they yield to the refining fire of battle. There was one trench where the language was pretty sulphurous. One day they lost their lieutenant, a great favourite, by a shell which wounded him mortally and kicked a lot of sandbags on top of him. The men set to work like maniacs, pulling away the sandbags and cursing horribly. He heard them and said, 'Don't swear, men; that does no good.' They were his last words. It is a fact that an oath in that trench was a worse crime than cowardice from that day forward.
"The best laugh we had for six weeks came out of the lurid language used by Tommy Cornstalk. Our post was at the head of a deep gully between two high hills and there were places in that gully where the weirdest echoes lived. A few words spoken at one of these spots would ring through the hills for a minute after and eventually die away in a ghostly whisper. After the great armistice near the end of May we had good reason to know that the enemy had been using their eyes to some purpose. They had new lines of fire, and places that were safe before the armistice were deadly dangerous afterwards. I suppose that is part of the game of war.
"While the armistice was on two platoons were down in the rest camp, and when they came back none had told the men of the altered state of affairs. Next morning two of these fellows were basking in the sun on the hillside, drinking hot tea and smoking. As far as they knew the place was quite safe. I was just going to call out to them, when the first bullet arrived. It kicked up a great patch of dust between them. Both men jumped down simultaneously, a drop of 20 feet, and as they jumped both made the same emphatic remark. The echoes took it up and passed it along in a sort of monotonous repetition. We stood spellbound to hear the immortal hills of Gallipoli repeating to one another the round oaths of the Australian backblocks in a shocked whisper.
"When it was all over it was like the curtain going down on an excruciatingly funny scene in a theatre. The men were all strung very high by the events through which they had lived, and they gave themselves up to laughter that was almost hysterical. In the middle of it the Turks in the trench opposite began to blaze away as if cartridges cost nothing, and that made us laugh harder than ever. We held our sides and yelled. An hour afterwards you could see men wiping the tears from their cheeks and thumping their mates on the back, and telling them not to be blooming fools. Then they would all start over again.
"We had a good many brothers in our battalion, and it was touching to see the anxiety of the elders for their younger brothers. One fellow was a signalman, and if I say that the casualty average among signalmen was 100 per cent., I am guilty of only the slightest exaggeration. His young brother was about the youngest man there, and we had him in a place where he was as safe as possible, in such circumstances. I used to hear this fellow come in at night from his signalling work, where his life wasn't worth an hour's purchase, and the first thing he would say was always: 'Is Hal all right?' I tell you he would wring my heart. I used to lie in my dug-out waiting for that question and fearing I would not hear it. For it was not Hal that I was worrying about.
"I remember the last service the battalion had before we landed. We were steaming past Cape Helles to Anzac, the untried soldiers of a new country preparing for our first battle ordeal. The warships were roaring together to cover the British landing at Cape Helles, and the padre gathered the men together for a simple service and talk. One thing he told them that sank in. The band, who were also the stretcher-bearers, had come in for a lot of chaff, as non-combatants. 'And the time is at hand,' says the padre, 'when you'll want to bite off your tongues for every idle word you've said to the band.' If ever words of man came true those words did. Ask any Australian who were the bravest men at Anzac, and you are sure to get the unhesitating answer, 'The stretcher-bearers.'
"I have seen them carrying wounded men down those hills up which we pulled ourselves by ropes passed from tree to tree. The bullets were spitting all around them, and they were checking and going slow, their only concern being not to shake the tortured man they were carrying. I know an officer whom they carried down through shell fire, and every time they heard a shell coming these two men put down the stretcher and threw themselves across his body to protect him from the shrapnel. The proportion of their dead and wounded in the casualty lists shows how these non-combatants did their work. Jokes about the band are not popular any longer; they never were very funny."
Perhaps the most famous of all the stretcher-bearers at Anzac was the ubiquitous hero known to every Australasian there as the Man with the Donkey. They were a quaint couple. The man was a 6 ft. Australian, hard-bitten and active. His gaunt profile spoke of wide experience of hard struggles in rough places. The donkey was a little mouse-coloured animal, no taller than a Newfoundland dog. His master called him Abdul. The man seemed to know by intuition every twist and slope of the tortuous valleys of Sari Bair. The donkey was a patient, sure-footed ally, with a capacity for bearing loads out of all proportion to his size.
Some days they would bring in as many as twelve or fifteen men, gathered at infinite risk in the dangerous broken country around far-out Quinn's Post. Every trip saw them face the terrors of the Valley of Death; here all day and all night the air sang with the bullets from the Turkish snipers hidden on Dead Man's Ridge. Their partnership began on the second day of occupation of the Anzac zone of Gallipoli. The man had carried two heavy men in succession down the awful slopes of Shrapnel Gully and through the Valley of Death. His eye lit on the donkey. "I'll take this chap with me next trip," he said, and from that time the pair were inseparable.
When the enfilading fire down the valley was at its worst and orders were posted that the ambulance men must not go out, the Man and the Donkey continued placidly at their work. At times they held trenches of hundreds of men spellbound, just to see them at their work. Their quarry lay motionless in an open patch, in easy range of a dozen Turkish rifles. Patiently the little donkey waited under cover, while the man crawled through the thick scrub until he got within striking distance. Then a lightning dash, and he had the wounded man on his back and was making for cover again. In those fierce seconds he always seemed to bear a charmed life.
Once in cover he tended his charge with quick, skilful movements. "He had hands like a woman's," said one who thinks he owes his life to the man and the donkey. Then the limp form was balanced across the back of the patient animal, and, with a slap on its back and the Arab donkey-boy's cry of "Gee," the man started off for the beach, the donkey trotting unruffled by his side.
For a month and more they continued their work. No one kept count of the number of wounded men they brought back from the firing line. One morning the dressers at the station near the dangerous turn in the valley called "The Pump" saw them go past, and shouted a warning to the man. The Turks up on Dead Man's Ridge were very busy that day; moreover, a machine-gun was turned on a dangerous part of the valley path. The man replied to the warning with a wave of his hand. Later he was seen returning, the donkey laden with one wounded man and the man carrying another. As they reached the dangerous turn the machine-gun rattled out, and the man fell with a bullet through his heart. The donkey walked unscathed into safety.
There was a hush through the Australian trenches that night, when the news went round that the Man with the Donkey had "got it."
His grave bears the rough inscription:—
"Sacred to the memory of Private W. Simpson, of the Third Field Ambulance, West Australia."
But if you wish an Australian to tell you his story, you must ask for the Man with the Donkey.