R. Hugh Knyvett - Over There with the Australians

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Ever and anon we alarmed the Turk by nibbling a piece nearer to his
sacred city. Never did men live under worse conditions than in those
eight months of hell, yet never was an army so cheerful. "Bill-Jim,"
which is Australia's name for her soldier-boy, always makes the best of
things, and soon made himself at home on that inhospitable shore.

The first thing he decided needed alteration was his uniform. Breeches
and puttees were not only too hot but they closed in the leg and
afforded cover to the lively little fellow who lives indiscriminately
on the soldiers of both sides. As each soldier began to trim his
uniform to his own idea of comfort, it was soon, in very reality, a
"ragtime" army. Some felt that puttees were a nuisance--everybody
realized that the breeches were too long, but differed on the point as
to how much too long. Some would clip off six inches from the end,
others a foot, and others would have been as well covered without the
article at all. Almost everybody decided that a tunic was useless, but
some extremists threw away shirt and singlet as well. A Turkish army
order was captured which stated that the Australians were running short
of supplies, as they made one pair of trousers do for three men.
Evidently Johnny Turk could not understand the Australian disregard for
conventionality and his taking to nakedness when it meant comfort and
there were no women within hundreds of miles to make him conscious of
indecency. Clothes that couldn't be washed wouldn't keep one's body
clean and became the home of an army that had no interest in the fight
for democracy. The Australian showed his practical common sense in
discarding as much as possible--but, say, those boys would have caused
some amusement if drawn up for review!

Water was certainly the most precious thing. There never was enough to
drink, but even then there are always men who would rather wash than
drink, and to see these men having their bath in a jam-tin just showed
how habit is, in many of us, stronger than common sense, for there was
never water enough to more than spread out the dirt or liquefy it so
that it would fill up the pores. Others who must bathe adopted a more
effective but more dangerous proceeding. Of course, the sea was
there--surely plenty of water for washing! Just so, but this bath was
pretty unhealthy, for it was practically always whipped by shrapnel and
you went in at the risk of your life. Some of the best swimmers used
to say it was all right so long as you dived whenever you heard the
screech of a shell--that the shrapnel pellets did not penetrate the
water more than a few inches. Most men did without either of this
choice of baths, and used a scraper. It was evidenced on the Peninsula
that one of the greatest of civilizers is a razor. By necessity few
could shave, and you soon could not recognize the face of your best
chum as it hid itself beneath a growth of some reddish fungus. Really
handsome features were quite blotted out, and it is now evident to me
why, in civilized life, we all so gladly go through the conventional
daily torture of face-scraping.

_Thirst_ is not a thing to joke about, however, and there were times
when the allowance of water was not enough to wash down a half-dozen
bites, and the food would stick in one's throat.

There was generally enough food but mighty little variety except just
before the evacuation when stores had to be eaten to save them being
taken away or destroyed. It is all very well to say a man will eat
anything when he is hungry, but you can get so tired of bully-beef and
biscuits and marmalade-jam that your stomach simply will not digest it.
Machonochie's, which was a sort of canned Irish stew, wasn't bad, but
there wasn't always more than enough of that to supply the
quartermasters. Still there were some great chefs on the Peninsula,
men who had got their training as cooks in shearers' camps, where
anything badly cooked would be thrown at their heads. It was
marvellous how some of them could disguise a bully-beef stew, and I
have been told of men coming to blows over the merits of their
respective "company cooks."

There were more flies on the Peninsula than there was sand on the
shore, and they fought us persistently for every atom of food. Getting
a meal was a hard day's work, for all the time you had to fight away
the swarms, and no matter how quick you were with your fork, you rarely
got a mouthful that hadn't been well walked over, and it didn't do to
think where those flies might have been walking just previously. No
army ever had a better directed sanitary department, but, no matter how
clean we kept our trenches, the Turks just "loved" dirt and
"worshipped" flies, and their trenches were only ten yards away in one
place, and in no place were they far enough to make it a
record-breaking aerial flight for a fly. Perhaps it was because they
were all Turkish-bred that the flies did us so much harm, for they
certainly accounted for more deaths than the shells or bullets.
Dysentery was rife all the time and there were times when not one man
was well. If the doctors had known enough they would have put a
barrage of disinfectant in front of our trenches. We put up sandbags
to stop the bullets, but no one had devised a method to stop those
winged emissaries of death. Those who died from lead-poisoning were
but a score to the hundreds who died of fly-poisoning.

This is but a little of what holding on meant to that little force.
The Turk was not only a brave, but a "wily" fighter--snipers were
always giving trouble, and one never knew from which direction the next
shot was coming. Men with "nerves" declared that our line must be full
of spies--sometimes a shot would come through the door of a dugout
facing out to sea. These snipers were certainly brave fellows--some
were found covered with leaves--one was found in a cleft in the rock
where he must have been lowered by his comrades and he could not get
out without their help. In the early days some of the Turkish officers
who could talk English even took the extreme risk of mixing among the
troops and passing false orders. One of these spies was only
discovered through misuse of a well-known Australian slang-word. No
one in the Australian army but knows the meaning of "dinkum." Its
meaning is something the same as the American "on the level!" and is
probably the commonest word in the Australian soldier's vocabulary. He
will ask: "Is that dinkum news?" State that, "He's a dinkum fellow!"
and so on. Well, one day a man in an Australian officer's uniform
spoke to some officers in a certain sector of trench, and said he
brought a message from headquarters. He was getting a lot of
information and seemed to know several officers' names, but he bungled
over one of them, and on the officer he was speaking to inquiring, "Is
that dinkum?" he answered: "Yes, _that's_ his name!" There was no
further investigation, he was shot dead on the spot. The officer who
did it may have been hasty, but there can be no doubt that justice was
done, for he must have been either a Turk or a German and had already
found out too much.

CHAPTER XV

THE EVACUATION

Without warning, winter came down upon us. No one guessed he was so
near. We were still in our summer lack of clothing, and were not
prepared for cold weather, when like a wolf on the fold the blizzard
came down upon us. This was the worst enemy those battered troops had
yet encountered. Hardly any of those boys had ever seen snow and now
they were naked in the bitterest cold. There were more cases of
frost-bite than there were of wounds in the whole campaign. More had
their toes and fingers eaten off by Jack Frost than shells had
amputated. In those open, unprotected trenches, in misery such as they
had never dreamed could be, the lads from sunny Australia stood to
their posts. When the snow melted the trenches fell in and Turk and
Anzac stood exposed to each other's fire, but both were fighting a
common enemy and so hard went this battle with them as to compel a
truce in the fight of man against man.

Soon it was evident that our final objective of capturing the Narrows
could not be accomplished with the forces we had. Directly the winter
gales would arrive and on those exposed beaches no stores could be
landed. We had to leave and leave quickly, or starve to death. So the
evacuation was planned.

No achievement in military history was better conceived or more
faithfully carried out. Here was scope for inventive genius and many
were the devices used to bluff the Turk. We schooled him in getting
used to long periods of silence. At first he was pretty jumpy and
could not understand the change, when the men who had always given him
two for one now received his fire without retaliating. After a while
he decided that as we were quite mad there was no accounting for our
behavior. Then we scared him some more by appearing to land fresh
troops. As a matter of fact, a thousand or so would leave the beach at
night and a few hundred return in the daylight under the eyes of the
Turkish aeroplanes, causing them to report concentration of more
troops. Stores were taken out to the ships by night, and the empty
boxes brought back and stacked on the beaches during the day. It must
have appeared as if we were laying in for the winter.

There were many inventive brains of high quality working at great
pressure during all the days of holding on, but one of the cleverest
ideas put into operation was the arrangement devised by an engineer
whereby rifles were firing automatically in the front-line trenches
after every man had left. There is no doubt the Turks were completely
bluffed. When the remaining stores were fired after being well soaked
with gasolene, the Turkish artillery evidently thought they had made a
lucky hit and they poured shells into the flames and completed for us
the work of destruction. I doubt if they even found the name of a
Chicago packing-house on a bully-beef case, when next day they wandered
curiously through the abandoned settlement that for many months had
been peopled by the bronzed giants from farthest south.

The last men to leave the actual trenches were the remnant of the
heroic band that were the first to land. They requested the honor of
this post of danger _and it could not be refused them_. They must have
expected that their small company would be still further thinned; but
this place of miracles still had another in store, as the evacuation
was accomplished from Anzac itself without a casualty.

The last party to leave the beach was a hospital unit--chaplain,
doctors, and orderlies. It was intended that they should remain to
care for the wounded, though they would necessarily fall into the hands
of the Turks. It was not feared that they would be ill-treated, for
all the reports we had of prisoners in the hands of the Turks went to
show that they were well cared for. In this as in other respects the
Turk showed himself to be much more civilized than the German. It was
a pleasant surprise to be able to greet again these comrades, who but a
few minutes before we had commiserated on their hard luck; for they
came off in the last boats, there being no wounded to require their
services. The padre, who was a Roman Catholic priest, said that he
missed the chance of a lifetime and would now probably never know what
the inside of a harem was like!

They were sad hearts that looked back to those fading shores. It
almost seemed as if we were giving up a bit of Australia to the enemy.
Those acres had been taken possession of by Australian courage,
baptized with the best of the country's blood, and now held the sacred
dust of the greatest of our citizens, whose title to suffrage had been
purchased by the last supreme sacrifice. Never were men asked to do a
harder thing than this--to leave the bones of their comrades to fall
into alien hands. These were men white of face and with clenched fists
that filed past those wooden crosses and few who did not feel shame at
the desertion. Some there were who whispered to the spirits hovering
near an appeal for understanding and forgiveness. They wondered how
the worshippers of the Crescent would treat the dead resting beneath
the symbols that to them represented an accursed infidel faith. There
are cravens in Australia who suggest that she has done more than her
share in this struggle, but while one foot of soil that has been
hallowed by Australian blood remains in the hands of the enemy the man
who would withhold one man or one shilling is not only no true
Australian but no true man--a dastard and a traitor.

When peace shall dawn and the Turk shall heed the voice of United
Democracy as it proclaims with force, "Thou shall not oppress, nor
shalt thou close the gates of these straits again!" then shall visitors
from many lands wander through these trenches and marvel what kind of
men were they that held them for so long against such odds, and gaze at
the honeycombed cliff where twentieth-century men lived like
cave-dwellers, and sang and joked more than the abiders in halls of
luxury.

To-day the name Anzac is the envy of all other soldiers, and while none
would want to live that life again, every man who was there rejoices in
the memory of the association and comradeship of those days. Read the
"Anzac Book" and you will see that there was much talent and many a
spark of genius in that army. But only those who were there know of
the many busy brains that worked overtime devising improvements in the
weapons that were available, and ever seeking to invent contrivances
that added to comfort. Many of the inventions are forgotten, but some
are in use in France to-day, notably the "periscope rifle" or
"sniperscope" and the "thumb periscope" which is no thicker than a
man's finger. It was found that our box-periscopes were always being
smashed by the Turkish snipers; so one ingenious brain collared an
officer's cane and scooped, out the centre. With tiny mirrors top and
bottom, it was a very effective periscope, and soon most officers were
minus their canes. Some very good bombs were made from jam-tins with a
wad of guncotton, and filled up with all manner of missiles. These
improvised bombs were risky to handle, and some men lost their lives
through carelessness, though probably there were nearly as many
accidents through overcaution. They would generally be provided with a
five-second fuse, and you were supposed to swing three times before
throwing. Some men who had not much faith in the time-fuse threw the
bombs as soon as the spark struck, which gave the Turks time to return
them. Both sides played this game of catch, but I think we were the
better at it. The way of lighting the fuse was to hold the head of a
match on the powder stream, drawing the friction-paper across it. This
generally caught immediately, but after a while some one introduced the
idea of having burning sticks in the trench, and a "torchman" would
pass down the trench lighting each fuse. One man was not sure that the
spark had caught and began blowing on it and was surprised when it blew
his hand off. We would drop on top of the Turks' bombs a coat or
sand-bag, and it was surprising how little damage was done. If you put
a sheet of iron on top of one, or a sand-bag full of earth, it would
make the explosion very much worse, but loose cloth would spread out
and make a spring-cushion by compression of the air above.

There was another use made of empty jam-tins: they were tied to our
barbed wire so that if any Turk tried to get through he would make a
noise like the cowbells at milking-time. Talking about barbed wire,
Johnny Turk played a huge joke on us on one occasion. As the staking
down of wire was too risky, we prepared some "knife-rests" (hedges of
wire shaped like a knife rest) and rolled them over our parapet, but
opened our eyes in amazement to find in the morning that they had only
stopped a few feet from the Turkish trenches. The Turks had sneaked
out and tied ropes to them and hauled them over to protect themselves.
Thereafter we took care to let Abdul do his own wiring.

CHAPTER XVI

"SHIPS THAT PASS . . ."

Although we did not capture the Narrows (that narrow stream of water
through which a current runs so swiftly that floating mines are carried
down into it faster than the mine-sweepers could gather them up), this
did not prevent at least one representative of the navy from passing
that barrier. This was the Australian submarine, A2. It may not be
generally known that Australia had two submarines at the outbreak of
war. These would appear antediluvian alongside the latest underwater
monster, but, nevertheless, one of these accomplished a feat such as no
German submarine has ever approached. The first of our submarines met
an unknown fate as it disappeared somewhere near New Guinea. There has
been much speculation as to what happened to it, but its size can be
guessed at when I mention that a naval officer told me he thought it
probable that a shark had eaten it. As was the same type, but it
achieved lasting fame in that it passed under the mine-field, through
the Narrows, across the Sea of Marmora, and into the port of
Constantinople. Right between the teeth of the Turkish forts and fleet
it sank seven Turkish troop-ships and returned safely. A certain town
in Australia that was called "Germanton" has been rechristened
"Holbrook" in honor of the commander of this gallant little craft.

* * * * * *

Every one has heard the story of the destruction of the _Emden_ by the
Australian cruiser _Sydney_, but it is worth bringing to notice that
the captain of the _Emden_ was of a different type from the pirates who
have made the German sailor the most loathed creature that breathes.
It is hard to believe that he was a German, for it seems incredible
that a German sailor would refrain from sinking a ship because there
was a woman on board. One can imagine that he would be ostracized by
his brother officers of the wardroom, for he actually had accompanying
him a spare ship on which to put the crews of the ships he sank. One
can hardly imagine him sitting at mess with the much-decorated murderer
of the women and children on the _Lusitania_, and it is the latter who
is the popular hero in Germany. There are none more ready than the
Australian soldiers to show chivalry to an honorable foe, and when the
_Sydney_ brought Captain Mueller and the crew of the _Emden_ among the
troop-ships these prisoners were cheered again and again. They could
not understand their reception, but the lads from Australia admired
these brave men for their plucky fight and clever exploits. Would
they, had they not been captured early in the war, have changed and
become like the vile, cowardly sharks that infest the seas in U-boats?

* * * * * *

The Great War is writing history on such a large scale that the old
classic stories of heroism and devotion to duty will be forgotten by
the next generation. The story of the _Birkenhead_ has always been
considered the highest illustration of discipline and steadiness in the
face of death evinced by any troops, but the citizen-soldiers from the
young Australian democracy have in this war given on two occasions
proof that they possessed the same qualities. The _Southland_ has been
written in letters of gold on the pages of Australia's history. When
the sneaking U-boat delivered its deadly blow in the entrails of this
crowded troop-ship, there was no more excitement than if the
alarm-bugles had summoned them to an ordinary parade. Some of the boys
fell in on deck without their life-belts, but were sent below to get
them. They had to go, many of them, to the fourth deck, but they
scorned to show anxiety by proceeding at any other pace than a walk.
It was soon evident that there were not enough boats left to take all
off and so none would enter them and leave their comrades to go down
with the ship. They began to sing "Australia Will Be There"--

"Rally round the banner of your country,
Take the field with brothers o'er the foam,
On land or sea, wherever you be,
Keep your eye on Germany.
For England home and beauty
Have no cause to fear--
Should old acquaintance be forgot--
No--no--no, no, no--
Australia will be the-re-re-re!
Australia _will_ be there!"

Some one called out, "Where?" and the answer came from many
throats--"In hell, in five minutes!" and it looked like it. But
nothing in a future life could hold any terrors for the man who had
campaigned during a summer in Egypt. In the end volunteers were taken
into the stokehole and the _Southland_ was beached. The colonel was
drowned and there were a few other casualties, but most escaped without
a wetting, so what looked like an adventure turned out to be a pretty
tame affair after all. But Australia will ever remember how those boys
stood fast with the dark waters of death washing their feet and, like
Stoics, waited calmly for whatever Fate would send them. This epic of
Australian fortitude was written in September, 1915, and is part of the
Dardanelles story.

But the latest troops from Australia are of the same heroic stuff as
those who wrote the name "Anzac" with their blood on the Gallipoli
beach. For the _Southland_ incident was duplicated in almost every
particular on the _Ballarat_ in April, 1917. This story was enacted in
the waters of the English Channel, and there were no casualties, for
the work of rescue by torpedo-boats was made easy as each man calmly
waited his turn and enlivened the monotony meanwhile with ragtime, and
again and again did the strains of "Australia Will Be There!" ring out
over the waters. As they sang "So Long, Letty," many substituted other
Christian names, and it looked as if it might be "so long" in reality.
But they knew that to an Australian girl there would be no "sadness of
farewell" when she realized that her lover had been carried heavenward
by the guardian angel that waits to bear upward the soul of a hero.

* * * * * *

"Big Lizzie" (the _Queen Elizabeth_) was for many months queen of the
waters round Gallipoli. Her tongue boomed louder than any other, and
it was always known when she spoke. She was the latest thing in
dreadnoughts then, just commissioned, and the largest ship afloat.
Though since that time the British navy has added several giants that
dwarf even her immense proportions. The boys in the trenches and on
the beach at Anzac never failed to thrill with pride as they heard her
baying forth her iron hate against the oppressor. We knew that
wherever her ton-weight shells fell there would be much weeping and
gnashing of teeth among the enemy. We readily believed all the stories
told of her prowess, no matter how impossible they seemed. No one
doubted even when we heard that she had sunk a boat in the Sea of
Marmora twenty-seven miles away, firing right over a mountain. She was
there before our eyes an epitome of the might and power of the British
navy that had policed the seas of the world, sweeping them clear of the
surface pirate and also confining the depredations of the underwater
assassin, so that all nations except the robber ones, might trade in
safety. How true it is that the British navy has been the guarantor of
the freedom of the seas, so that even in British ports over the whole
wide world all nations should have equality of trade! Never has this
power been used selfishly: take for instance, the British dominions of
the South Seas, where American goods can be sold cheaper than those of
Britain, for the shorter distance more than compensates for the small
preference in tariff. The almost unprotected coast of the American
continent has been kept free of invaders; its large helpless cities are
unshelled, because "out there" in the North Sea the British navy
maintains an eternal vigilance.

After some valuable battleships were sent to the bottom by the German
submarines it was realized that "Big Lizzie" was too vulnerable and
valuable to be kept in these waters; so in the later months her place
was taken by some weird craft that excited great curiosity among the
sailormen. These were the "monitors" which were just floating
platforms for big guns. They were built originally for the rivers of
South America, but it was discovered that their shallow draft made them
impervious to torpedo attack; and as they were able to get close in
shore, their big guns made havoc of the Turkish defenses. They do not
travel at high speed and appear to waddle a good deal, but they have
been most invaluable right along, and were of great assistance lately
to the Italians in holding up the German drive. They have been used
also around Ostend and are of prime importance wherever the flank of an
army rests on the sea. I have picked up portions of their shells and
seen the shrapnel lying like hail on sand-hills in Arabia (more than
twenty miles from the Suez Canal, which was the nearest waterway).

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