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Title: Australasia Triumphant!: With the Australians and New Zealanders in the Great War on Land and Sea
Author: Adcock, Arthur St. John
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Australasia Triumphant!: With the Australians and New Zealanders in the Great War on Land and Sea" ***
Transcriber's Note:
Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Hyphenation has been
rationalised.
The flagship of the Expeditionary Forces, here identified as the Orverto,
is elsewhere identified as the Orvieto.
Small capitals have been replaced by full capitals. Italics are
indicated by _underscores_.
[_Frontispiece_: THE BATTERED "EMDEN" AFTER GOING ASHORE ON COCOS ISLAND.]
AUSTRALASIA TRIUMPHANT!
WITH THE AUSTRALIANS AND
NEW ZEALANDERS IN THE
GREAT WAR ON LAND AND SEA
BY
A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK
WITH 36 ILLUSTRATIONS
Strong Mother of a Lion line,
Be proud of these strong sons of thine.
TENNYSON
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON,
KENT & CO., LTD., 4 STATIONERS' HALL CT., E.C.
_Copyright_
_First published, January 1916_
AUTHOR'S NOTE
It is too soon to attempt the telling at large and in detail of all that
has been done by Australia and New Zealand in the Great War. There is
much that has, for military reasons, not yet been revealed; and what has
been told has come to us from various sources in more or less
fragmentary fashion, so that one must read several accounts of the same
event in order to get anything of an adequate idea of it. All I have
done here is to collate such documents as are available and gather
together a connected narrative, not only of the actual campaigning, but
of the spiritual and mental experiences the Australasians have passed
through since August 1914, the way they have faced this crisis in their
history, and the effect the war has had on their national life. I have
drawn on official documents, on the dispatches of Sir Ian Hamilton, the
reports of the various correspondents of our English and the chief
Australian and New Zealand newspapers, on the speeches of public men and
letters of private citizens, and on a few conversations I have had with
some of the wounded Anzacs whom I have met in these latter days about
London. In all which I have been little more than an enthusiastic and, I
hope, faithful compiler, endeavouring to set down as vividly as I could
the impressions I formed from my reading and hearing of these things,
and trying occasionally to guess, according to my lights, at the spirit
and inner significance of this wonderful uprising of our Australasian
kinsfolk–at the ideal for which they are fighting with such glorious
heroism and for which so many of them have ungrudgingly laid down their
lives. Some, who have had no hand in the fighting, have very confidently
criticised both the Commander-in-Chief who has led these gallant
soldiers in the sternest of their battles and the Government that has
been responsible for the campaigns they have undertaken; but I have not
ventured to compete with such critics, chiefly because I accept the
judgment of the sturdy New Zealander who said to me, discussing the
nagging diatribes of a certain newspaper: "It's all fluff. If these
fellows knew a little more they wouldn't have so much to say."
A. ST. J. A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
BRITONS ALL 1
CHAPTER
I. MAKING READY 3
II. PATROLLING THE PACIFIC 15
III. THE TRIUMPH OF THE "SYDNEY" 25
IV. EN ROUTE FOR EGYPT 33
V. CHRISTMAS AT THE PYRAMIDS 43
VI. THE FIGHT FOR THE SUEZ CANAL 51
VII. THE EPIC OF THE DARDANELLES BEGINS 59
VIII. THE DARE-DEVIL ANZACS 73
IX. THE AUSTRALASIAN IDEAL 91
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE BATTERED "EMDEN" AFTER GOING ASHORE ON COCOS ISLAND _Frontispiece_
_Facing page_
FRENCH MEN-OF-WAR AND AUSTRALIAN TROOPSHIPS IN SUEZ CANAL, PORT SAID 4
MEN OF THE AUSTRALIAN LIGHT HORSE IN CAIRO 5
NEAR THE PYRAMIDS: THE CAMP OF THE AUSTRALIANS, AGAINST WHOM NO
GERMAN-TRAINED TURKISH ARMY CAN BE SUCCESSFUL 12
"STRANGERS IN THE LAND OF EGYPT" 13
FOOTBALL IN CAMP AT ABASSIA 13
WITH OUR COLONIAL TROOPS IN EGYPT 16
AUSTRALIAN ARMY FIELD-KITCHENS MARCHING PAST AT A REVIEW OF TROOPS
IN EGYPT 17
A SMALL PORTION OF THE ARMY IN EGYPT 20
THE AUSTRALIAN TROOPS IN EGYPT 21
FROM DIFFERENT POINTS OF THE COMPASS 21
THE HORSE LINES AT ABASSIA, EGYPT 28
THE AUSTRALIAN REMOUNTS DEPOT AT ABASSIA 28
OUR TROOPS IN EGYPT 29
WITH OUR TROOPS IN EGYPT 32
AN AUSTRALIAN SCOUT IN THE EGYPTIAN DESERT 33
CAMP OF THE AUSTRALIANS AT MUDROS BAY 36
SULTAN OF EGYPT VISITS THE DARDANELLES WOUNDED 36
SECOND DIVISION LEAVING MUDROS BAY WITH AUSTRALIANS
ON THE FORE DECK 37
THE LAST SERVICE ON BOARD THE "LONDON" FOR THE AUSTRALIANS 44
THE DARDANELLES–AUSTRALIANS AND BLUEJACKETS ON A TRANSPORT 45
AN AUSTRALIAN LANDING PARTY FOR THE DARDANELLES 52
AUSTRALIANS PREPARING TO DISEMBARK AT THE DARDANELLES 53
AUSTRALIANS LANDING NORTH OF GABA TEPE 53
THE DARDANELLES–AUSTRALIAN TROOPS AT THE LANDING 60
AUSTRALIA'S SPLENDID CORPS OF MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN (1) 60
THE BRAVE AUSTRALIANS 61
AUSTRALIA'S MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN (2) 61
THE DARDANELLES–SOLDIERS TAKING THEIR HORSES FOR A BATHE 68
GENERAL BIRDWOOD, IN COMMAND OF THE AUSTRALIANS
AT THE DARDANELLES 69
AUSTRALIA'S MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN (3) 76
THE DARDANELLES–MEN BATHING AFTER RETURNING FROM AN ATTACK 77
HEROES FROM THE DARDANELLES 84
HEROES OF THE DARDANELLES 85
THE DARDANELLES OPERATIONS 92
THE DARDANELLES–AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND TROOPS IN A
RAVINE 93
_Britons All!_
_In times of peace, when every wind blows fortune to them still,
John Bull and all his kindred disagree, as families will:
With wrath and hate in wild debate they shout each other down,
And split up into parties for the People and the Crown;
But if a foe would part them, he is never long in doubt–
It's "Rule Britannia!" only, and they join to throw him out._
_When the struggle's once begun
And the flag aloft is run,
We're Britons then and brothers all until that fight is won._
_Beyond the Cheviots Sandy guards the Scotsman's separate fame:
He won't be called an Englishman–he scorns the very name!
And Pat across the Channel, in an island of his own,
And Taffy, who's a Welshman, would as nations walk alone;
Yet all the four shall stand four-square–one party and no more,
And that a family party, when a foe is at the door._
_Scot and Irish there is none,
Welsh and English count as one,
We're Britons then and brothers all when once the fight's begun._
_Let Britain in an hour of need her rallying bugle sound–
Her sons 'neath Australasian skies, on far Canadian ground,
By India's streams or Africa's, shall hear, where'er they roam,
And, drawn from all the ends of earth with kindling thoughts of home,
Shall arm and answer to the call and come where danger lours
To stand beside us in the name that's theirs as well as ours._
_Side by side shall sire and son
Hold the Empire they have won:
We're brothers now and Britons all until the fight is done._
1
MAKING READY
[Illustration: FRENCH MEN-OF-WAR AND AUSTRALIAN TROOPSHIPS IN SUEZ
CANAL, PORT SAID.]
[Illustration: MEN OF THE AUSTRALIAN LIGHT HORSE IN CAIRO.]
AUSTRALASIA TRIUMPHANT!
WITH THE AUSTRALIANS AND NEW ZEALANDERS IN THE GREAT WAR
CHAPTER I
MAKING READY
Lord, in this lull before the break
Of Thy wide tempest, let us make
Our ramparts round complete,
With noise of rivets, whirr of wheels,
And waters hissing 'neath the keels
Of our star-guerdoned fleet!
With workshops fashioning our might
With bugles singing through the night
In city and in farm;
The steady drill, the hammered din,
The quiet heart of discipline–
Grant us our hour–to arm!
ARTHUR H. ADAMS.
All things considered, you cannot help sympathising a little with
Germany's outcry against the deceptive character of the British Empire.
When an eminent physician has carefully diagnosed a patient's complaint
and pronounced, quite emphatically, that he cannot possibly survive for
more than a very brief period, it is up to that patient to fade away
within the time limit prescribed for him. Otherwise, he must not expect
his doctor to be pleased, or to express any but uncomplimentary opinions
concerning his behaviour and the general defects of his system. Well, as
everybody knows, Treitschke, Bernhardi, and other accomplished German
professors devoted many years of their valuable lives to feeling the
pulse of John Bull, and they found that, by all the known laws of
science, he was on his last legs. They assured the world at large, with
the portentous cocksureness so peculiarly German, that he was so far
gone that a properly administered shock was certain to bring about his
immediate dissolution. The shock was administered all right; Germany saw
to that; but instead of keeping to his part of the programme and dying,
John promptly woke up, got out of bed, developed a lot more legs than
anybody had credited him with, and has ever since been firmly standing
on them all.
And Germany is naturally indignant at this. What is the use of
scientific laws if they can thus be disregarded with impunity? Bernhardi
praised the British for some things, but he was sure he knew what he was
talking about, and most of the things they had done were much too
foolish to obtain his approbation. He explained how we had neglected to
train up our Colonies in the way they should go; we had never sternly
imposed our own _kultur_ on any of our "subject peoples"; we exercised
no control over Australasia, Canada, South Africa: we had failed to hold
them in subjection, and they were rapidly losing all trace of the
British spirit and would not remain permanently within the Empire.
Moreover, India and Egypt were seething with disaffection, he said, and
if a beneficent Germany only gave them half a chance they would break
into open revolt and throw off the hated British yoke. He had studied
the whole position most thoroughly and foresaw hopeful possibilities of
great Colonial rebellions–Australasia, Canada, South Africa would decide
before long to become independent States, and the old country would have
to go out and fight them in order to reduce them to submission, and then
would come Germany's golden opportunity. But it might not be necessary
to wait for those rebellions. If ever England were involved in a big war
nearer home, the shrewd Bernhardi was quite convinced that the
self-governing Colonies would naturally consult their own interests and
decline to take any part in it. He laid it down emphatically that, at
all events (to quote from Mr. Allen H. Powles's translation of his
"Germany and the Next War"), "the Colonies can be completely ignored so
far as concerns any European theatre of war."
All which indicates what a strange gulf there must be between the
fossilised Prussian mind and the mind of a modern civilisation. These
pretentious speculations looked so profound, and were actually so
shallow; yet, simply by taking themselves seriously, the German
professors and militarists bluffed most of the world into accepting them
as masterly students of psychology. There is something amusing in the
essentially Prussian idea that we were ignorant of the art of
Empire-building because we had not held our Colonies firmly in
subjection and forced our own _kultur_ upon our "subject peoples" and
thus have made them indissolubly one with us. We have not done so for
two reasons. For one, they would never have allowed us to do it; the men
of British blood are not so docile as that, thank heaven! And for
another, as a nation we have no such stupid, swaggering desire to lord
it over our fellows. We had once, but have outgrown it. As for sending
our armies out to make war on the great free Colonies if they resolved
to set up as independent States–they are independent already, and if
ever they decided to sever the formal, natural tie that links them
easily with ourselves in a federated Empire, no Government in Great
Britain would be so foolish as to do anything but reluctantly acquiesce
in their decision.
Britain fought her sons of yore–
Britain failed; and nevermore,
Careless of our growing kin,
Shall we sin our fathers' sin.
The fact is, and it is now revealing itself, Germany does not understand
what freedom means. She does not know the difference between slavery and
brotherhood, and, with all her owlish wisdom, has never realised that
love is a mightier bond than fear. She has learnt nothing from her
failures in Poland, in Alsace, in her own Colonies. So immature is her
conception of Empire that she took it as a sign of weakness in us when,
after spending blood and treasure in the South African War, we withdrew
and left the Boers and our own people living there to join hands and
make their own laws and govern themselves. "The low-Dutch are in the
ascendant in South Africa now," wrote the egregious Bernhardi, and he
pronounced that when Germany launched her legions against England the
South Africans would be quick to seize the occasion and rise and strike
for freedom.
But people do not strike to obtain what they possess. The
long-premeditated blow has fallen, and instead of shattering the British
Empire past repair has merely tightened any loose rivets in it and
welded it more firmly together than ever. German psychology has proved a
vain thing; not a single one of the solemn prophecies of her professors
has come true. South Africa has crushed the enemy at her gates, has
added German West Africa to the Empire, and is sending troops over to
fight in the British battle-line in France. The Princes of India have
rallied eagerly to the flag, and France and the Dardanelles have undying
stories to tell of the loyalty and courage of those sons of hers who
have fought and died for its honour. The moment the word of alarm
flashed over the seas, Canada, Australia, New Zealand leaped to arms and
were ready, and sent their thousands forth and are sending them still to
hold inviolate the Empire that is theirs no less than ours.
But this is to be the story of the boys from Down Under; the equally
glorious stories of Canada, South Africa, India I leave to other
tellers.
In those August days of 1914 when war and peace were still in the
balance, and we of the British Isles were waiting in tensest anxiety,
not fearing that war was to come, but dreading lest the diplomatists
should arrive at a compromise that would justify us in standing meanly
aside and leaving France to her fate; all through Australia and New
Zealand men waited as anxiously, torn with the self-same fear. And on
the morning of the 5th, when the cable told them that Great Britain had
declared war upon Germany they felt the same deep sense of relief that
the same news had brought to us at midnight on the 4th–relief, and even
thankfulness that, with Belgium's neutrality ruthlessly broken, the
Empire had done the only right and honourable thing. When the storm
burst, the Federal Parliament of Australia had been dissolved and
electioneering was in full swing. Nevertheless, in two days, with the
whole-hearted approval of all parties in the country, the Prime Minister
had offered to send 20,000 men to the front, as a first contingent, and
our Government had gladly accepted the offer. The Australian
Commissioner in London called at the War Office in connection with this
proposal, and wrote home to say that Lord Kitchener told him, "I know
the Australian soldier, and know he will give a good account of
himself"; and that his final words were, "Roll up! Roll up!"
And no sooner was the call made for volunteers for foreign service than
they did roll up–they went swarming in thousands to the recruiting
stations at Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart, Perth, and
other great centres, and in a very short time more than the required
number had been enrolled and were rapidly gathered into vast camps at
Broadmeadows, at Helena Vale, and elsewhere, and all the States of the
Commonwealth were humming with warlike preparations. The militia were
called out; Rifle Clubs were formed; the women organised for Red Cross
work and to look after the needs of the soldiers and their families;
troops slept by their guns in the forts round the coast, for German
cruisers were prowling then in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean and
there were possibilities of raids and bombardments. Negotiations were
opened with the Imperial Government, which readily granted a War Loan of
£18,000,000. There was prompt seizure of German and Austrian ships lying
in Australian ports; there was a drastic hunting down of German spies
and rounding up of alien enemies. Word that war had been declared was
received on the morning of the 5th August, and at noon of the same day
Australia's first shot was fired from the fort at Point Nepean, when a
German cargo steamer, the _Pfatz_, was held up and captured. The first
expeditionary force was raised within two or three days; and before the
end of August a second large contingent had been formed and had gone
into camp for training, this second contingent including a Light Horse
Brigade; and "the Australian Light Horse," as Lord Denman, sometime
Governor-General of the Commonwealth, has said, "is the finest Light
Horse in the world."
A goodly percentage of these volunteer armies–for the compulsory service
in Australia and New Zealand is for home defence only–were bushmen,
farm-hands, clerks, miners, many of whom had thrown up lucrative
appointments and journeyed long distances, hot-foot to be in time. A
writer in _The Melbourne Age_ spent an hour at one of the depots in
Melbourne and gave the following list of the recruits who presented
themselves whilst he was there: "jeweller–1; cricketer–1; actor–1;
collar-maker–1; musicians–3; hairdressers–3; cooks–7; journalists–5;
teachers–8; draper's assistant, 'private means,' hotel porter, military
officer, chemist, wool classer, tailor, axeman, rubber planter,
investor, insurance agent, signwriter, and student–1 each. There were
two or three storekeepers, ten motor mechanics, and half a dozen
travellers. This list," the reporter continues, "is a typical one,
though of course in some States particular occupations would be
differently represented. Generally speaking, it would be correct to say
that at least 80 per cent. of the men–eight in every ten–have in some
way earned their livings with their hands. The remaining 20 per cent.
would be made up of clerks, accountants, shopkeepers, professional men,
and others who were not manual labourers. In the great field entered for
the greatest of all races, 'private means' shows up rather badly."
But we must not forget that "private means" represents the smallest
section of the community. What is infinitely more significant is that
before the end of November 1914 more than the 20,000 men offered had
been raised, had finished their preliminary training and sailed for
Egypt; and a second force of 16,500 was then in training to follow them.
There was also a force of some 7,000 mobilised for home defence.
Something of what Australia was doing, of the ardour and spirit and
spontaneous patriotism that animated her people may be gathered from a
communication which Sir Charles Lucas made to _The Times_. Sir Charles,
who used to be head of the Dominions Department of the Colonial Office,
was on a visit to Australia in those early days of the war, and what
impressed him greatly was the prevailing common sense and patriotic
enthusiasm with which public bodies and private citizens worked, the
promptitude and swiftness with which they prepared themselves, as if the
war had been at their very doors instead of thousands of miles away. He
saw no violent anti-German outbreak; no bombast nor boastfulness;
nothing but a sober, willing, resolute desire to participate to the
utmost in the great fight for freedom that was not to be the
motherland's only, but the Empire's. "Political parties, the churches,
and all classes spoke with one voice," says Sir Charles. "War funds
seemed to be almost unduly multiplied; young men everywhere were eager
to go to the front, and all were making sacrifices in time, and money,
and work"; and he expresses the keenest admiration of the men he saw at
the military camps, and the zeal, cheerfulness, and efficiency with
which all ranks were fitting themselves for the task to which they had
put their hands. "Australia will support the cause of the Empire in this
war to the last man and the last shilling"–Mr. Fisher knew the hearts of
his people before he drew that limitless bill upon their loyalty, and
this is the glorious story of how they are meeting it.
As it was in Australia, so it was in New Zealand. There was the same
intense suspense in those first days of August 1914, the same nameless
fear lest the old country should be lulled into accepting German pledges
or otherwise induced to remain neutral and leave France to her fate, the
same fierce indignation against the unprovoked attack upon Belgium, and
the same immeasurable sense of relief and thankfulness when the word
came that Britain had declared war. There was, too, the same spontaneous
uprising, the same sinking of party differences, the same swift,
passionate gathering up of all the energies, all the resources of the
nation and placing them at the service of the Empire–not with any lust
for glory or conquest, but with a high realisation that in so doing New
Zealand was devoting herself also to the higher service of humanity.
For, as you may hear on all hands, it was the terrible story of
Belgium's martyrdom that stirred such a passion of sympathy and blazing
wrath throughout New Zealand as in Australia–the thought of that gallant
little people so brutally wronged and battling with such desperate
heroism to drive back the barbaric hordes of a mighty invader: it was
this that so tore at the hearts of people there that they rejoiced, as
at the best of good tidings, when Britain took up the cause of the weak
and the wronged and gave them the chance to fight, and if need be die
beside her in so just a cause. No tocsin sounded in any dark hour of
attack ever called forth such myriads and such more than willing myriads
of defenders as have rallied from all quarters of the earth to the cry
that went up from those violated homes of Belgium. Australia and New
Zealand in generous rivalry made haste to subscribe funds for the relief
of the Belgian refugees, and to send them shipments of food, blankets,
and clothing. Meanwhile, military preparations went forward in New
Zealand with amazing rapidity. An expeditionary force of 10,000 was
raised, and by the time they were ready to sail for Egypt a further
3,000 were training in camp at Wellington, recruits were offering
themselves in undiminishing numbers, and arrangements were made to send
out reinforcements of at least 3,000 every two months–a figure which has
since been largely increased. There was a demand that the age limit
should be raised to fifty, such multitudes of older men were keen to go
on active service; but as this was not done, they organised themselves,
as our older men have done in the homeland and in every one of the
British dominions, into Citizen Armies for home defence. In less than
three weeks Christchurch alone had enrolled an army of this sort 1,200
strong, made up, like the New Zealand army for the field, and like all
the new British armies, of men drawn from all classes of the community.
The Premier, and other leading men of the nation, declared in
unqualified terms that New Zealand was ready to give her all, and to
shrink from no sacrifice for the honour and the integrity of the Empire,
and she has ever since been fulfilling that pledge to the utmost.
One has read many such stories as that of the college professor who
threw up his appointment at Dunedin in order to enlist as a private; and
as that of the prosperous farmer miles away across the lonely plains of
South Island, who had heard nothing of any crisis until news burst upon
him that war had been declared two days ago, then, fearing he might be
too late, left his farm to the care of his wife and whoever could be got
to look after it, hurried by horse and rail to Canterbury, took a few
years off his age, and got into the first expeditionary force. And one
could tell numerous similar stories of the Australians. There is that
record of Cormick, the young Queensland grazier, who, immediately the
call reached him, rode 460 miles to the nearest station at Hergott
Springs, then travelled 450 miles by rail to Adelaide, only to find that
the Light Horse regiment there had made up its full number. He
telegraphed to Tasmania, but the Light Horse section there had no
opening for him. He had made up his mind to go, however, and, though he
must have spent more than a year's pay in journeying from place to place
on his quest, he succeeded at last and sailed with the first overseas
contingent.
But better than I can hope to express it you find the high, indomitable
soul of Australasia revealing itself in two letters from which I will
make some short extracts. One is written by Mr. Edward Grimwade, who
went out and settled in New Zealand some years ago, to his brother, Mr.
L. L. Grimwade, of Stoke-on-Trent, in England. "My boy, Len, went away
with his regiment yesterday," writes Mr. Grimwade. "All we can say is
'The Lord bless the lad.'... On this subject his mother is in
liquidation, and his dad not much better. None the less, if the
Motherland calls, Ted must go too.... I am prepared to give another son
(as I have given one) and I am prepared to get into the fighting line
myself. Further, I am prepared to suffer loss of fortune and see
starvation, rather than sacrifice the honour of our Empire."
[Illustration: NEAR THE PYRAMIDS: THE CAMP OF THE AUSTRALIANS, AGAINST
WHOM NO GERMAN-TRAINED TURKISH ARMY CAN BE SUCCESSFUL.]
[Illustration: "STRANGERS IN THE LAND OF EGYPT."
The Australian Remounts Depot at Abassia near Cairo.]
[Illustration: FOOTBALL IN CAMP AT ABASSIA.]
And here is a letter written in these later days which will serve to
show the splendid spirit that lives in Australia's volunteers. It was
written by Second Lieutenant Meager, of the 3rd Australian Infantry. He
took part in that daring and triumphant landing at Gallipoli, and was
promoted from the ranks for bravery. Later, he was killed in action,
leaving a widow and child in Australia, and this last letter from him
was received by his mother on the same day as the announcement of his
death reached her:
"During the next few days we shall be facing death every minute. If I am
taken off, do as the Roman matrons of old–keep your tears for privacy,
steel your heart, and get a dozen recruits to fill my place. Pray hard
for me, and if God wills it, I shall see it through. I shall go into
action with a clean heart, and if I emerge safely I hope I shall have
proved myself a man and a leader, and thereby have justified the
confidence of my commanders."
This is the stuff of which our Australasian brothers are made; these are
the men upon whose degeneracy or disloyalty Treitschke, Bernhardi, and
that pitiful brood of Prussian wiseacres relied. Never was any royal
utterance more profoundly significant or more simply true than the
message that King George sent to his Overseas Dominions at the end of
the first month of the war:
"During the past few weeks the peoples of my whole Empire at home and
overseas have moved with one mind and purpose to confront and overthrow
an unparalleled assault upon the continuity of civilisation and the
peace of mankind. The calamitous conflict is not of my seeking. My voice
has been cast throughout on the side of peace. My Ministers earnestly
strove to allay the causes of strife and appease differences with which
my Empire was not concerned. Had I stood aside when in defiance of
pledges to which my Kingdom was a party the soil of Belgium was violated
and her cities laid desolate, when the very life of the French nation
was threatened with extinction, I should have sacrificed my honour and
given to destruction the liberties of my Empire and of mankind. I
rejoice that every part of the Empire is with me in this decision.
"My peoples in the Self-Governing Dominions have shown beyond all doubt
that they whole-heartedly endorse the grave decision which it was
necessary to take. My personal knowledge of the loyalty and devotion of
my Oversea Dominions had led me to expect that they would cheerfully
make the great efforts and bear the great sacrifices which the present
conflict entails. The full measure in which they have placed their
services and resources at my disposal fills me with gratitude, and I am
proud to be able to show to the world that my people overseas are as
determined as the people of the United Kingdom to prosecute a just cause
to a successful end.
"The Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the Dominion
of New Zealand have placed at my disposal their naval forces, which have
already rendered good service to the Empire. Strong Expeditionary Forces
are being prepared in Canada, in Australia, and in New Zealand for
service at the front, and the Union of South Africa has released all
British troops and has undertaken important military responsibilities,
the discharge of which will be of the utmost value to the Empire.
Newfoundland has doubled the numbers of its branch of the Royal Naval
Reserve, and is sending a body of men to take part in the operations at
the front.... All parts of my Oversea Dominions have thus demonstrated
in the most unmistakable manner the fundamental unity of the Empire
amidst all its diversity of situation and circumstance."
2
PATROLLING THE PACIFIC
[Illustration: WITH OUR COLONIAL TROOPS IN EGYPT.]
[Illustration: AUSTRALIAN ARMY FIELD-KITCHENS MARCHING PAST AT A REVIEW
OF TROOPS IN EGYPT.]
CHAPTER II
PATROLLING THE PACIFIC
We can hold our own–
'Gainst us in vain all envious shafts are hurled
If still we be
The Sons of Freedom, 'neath one flag unfurled,
Co-heirs of Fame and Wardens of the Sea,
One tongue, one race, one heart before the world.
GEORGE ESSEX EVANS.
Whilst the new armies were still training, the fleet of Australia put to
sea, joined the New Zealand fleet, and together they proceeded to
co-operate with the British naval forces in sweeping the Pacific for
German merchantmen, and hunting down the few elusive German cruisers
that were prowling the seas thereabouts in search of prey. Three of
these cruisers in particular, the _Gneisenau_, the _Scharnhorst_, and
the _Emden_, were dodging all pursuit, successfully capturing and
sinking British and French trading and passenger ships, and bombarding
the coast towns of some of our South Sea Islands; and the _Emden_,
before it could be rounded up and destroyed, had gone as far afield as
India and shelled Madras. "The German cruisers are playing a game of
hide-and-seek on the broad expanse of the Pacific," an Australian naval
officer wrote home, "and are avoiding a trial of strength with the
vessels of the Australian fleet. We have been looking for them ever
since war was declared, and are more than anxious to have a go at them,
but they keep out of the way. The task of definitely locating them and
getting to grips is an enormous one. The Pacific is so wide, and there
are so many thousands of islets that we could pass within five minutes
of them and yet fail to be aware of their presence. Once they are
cornered, it will be a fine fight–a fight to a finish.... Once we
thought we had the German boats bottled up in Simpson Haven. Orders were
issued to the destroyers to ferret them out, and in the dead of night
the three little boats, with all lights out and crews at their stations,
crept into the harbour, which might have been mined. However, after
sweeping round the bay we found our quarry was not there. We landed a
small party which smashed up the telegraphic instruments, then dashed
out again."
So for some weeks the warships of Australia and New Zealand were alertly
at work, chasing the nimble Germans in and out among those thousand
islands of the South Seas. British and French and Japanese vessels took
up the difficult hunt with them, but in that vast wilderness of waters,
with such innumerable creeks and bays and obscure hiding-places to skulk
in, it was far easier to lose the wily enemy than to find him. In due
course, however, the _Gneisenau_ and the _Scharnhorst_ were cornered and
accounted for; but the _Emden_ remained at large and ran a long and
brilliantly triumphant career before it was trapped and beaten at last
in a desperate fight with the Australian battle cruiser, the _Sydney_.
Meanwhile, on the 30th August, 1914, the island of Samoa was captured
without opposition by the combined fleets of Australasia, Britain, and
France, under the command of Rear-Admiral Patey. When the fleets arrived
off the island, the Admiral sent an officer ashore with a letter to the
Acting Governor, Herr S. N. Rimburg, saying:
"I have the honour to inform you that I am off the port of Apia with an
overwhelming force, and in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, I will
not open fire if you surrender immediately. I therefore summon you to
surrender to me forthwith the town of Apia and the Imperial possessions
under your control. An answer must be delivered within half an hour to
the bearer."
To some of us now there seems a touch of unconscious humour in Herr
Rimburg's reply, when we remember how the ships of his own nation
bombarded unfortified English towns without giving them any preliminary
warning at all, for this is the letter that Admiral Patey's messenger
brought back:
"According to the principles of the rights of nations, especially of the
agreements of the second Hague Peace Conference, the bombardment of our
harbours and protectorates is forbidden, as is the threat to do so. I
therefore respectfully protest against your Excellency's proposal. But
to avoid the military measures you propose, I have given orders for the
wireless telegraph station to be demolished and that no resistance shall
be offered."
It always went against the grain with many Britishers that the last home
of Stevenson, the island that has his grave on one of its hill-tops,
should ever have been ceded to the Germans, and the news that it had
been recovered from them was an occasion for enthusiastic rejoicing on
that sentimental ground, as well as because it meant that a valuable
colony had been added to the Empire. One very pleasant circumstance in
connection with this bloodless victory was that the French and British
residents in the Samoan Islands bore testimony to the kindness with
which they had been treated by the German authorities and spontaneously
petitioned the conquerors to show special consideration to the German
ex-Governor and his officials, and the request was met at once in the
friendliest possible spirit. It almost seemed as if the gracious, humane
influence of Tusitala were still potent in the very atmosphere of the
place. Colonel Robert Logan, the new British Administrator of Samoa,
took up residence with his staff at Stevenson's own house "Vailima,"
which had been occupied by the German Governor, Dr. Schultz, and says in
his report:
"I conferred with the German heads of departments and their
subordinates, and, as they have given their parole to do nothing
inimical to British interests and to carry out their duties loyally, I
have retained them, with two exceptions, in their respective offices at
the same salaries as they were previously receiving."
Equally pleasant, too, in connection with the capture of Samoa, were
certain details mentioned concerning the appointment of Mr. Williams to
the post of Deputy-Administrator of the island of Savali. "Mr. Williams
has been in the islands for over forty years," wrote Colonel Logan, "and
from the inception of German rule in Samoa until the declaration of war
acted in the capacity of Deputy Administrator of Savali, under the
German Government. On the declaration of war he was given the option of
resigning his British citizenship or being relieved of his office, and
he chose the latter alternative, although this entailed the loss of his
pension."
The transfer of Samoa being arranged in this humane, reasonable fashion,
the allied fleets departed to continue their other business, leaving a
garrison of some 2,000 New Zealand troops at Apia in charge of the
islands. A fortnight later those roving ships of the German Pacific
squadron came round that way and shelled Apia, and were energetically
shelled in return; but the firing did not last long; there was no
attempt at a landing, very little damage was done, and ever since the
New Zealanders have remained in peaceable possession of their first
trophy.
In the interval, on the 11th September, at 7 in the morning, the
Australian squadron occupied Herbertshohe, the principal town in the
island of New Pomerania, which is the largest island of the Bismarck
Archipelago. It was discovered by Captain Cook, who named it New
Britain, but the British Government never formally took possession of
it, and in 1884 Germany seized and rechristened it, and at the same time
annexed half of the neighbouring island of New Guinea and changed its
name to Kaiser Wilhelmsland. The remainder of New Guinea had long been
shared betwixt the Dutch and the British, and there was profound
dissatisfaction in Australia when the Germans were thus allowed to steal
a march on us. There was already a feeling abroad that they were
hankering after world-dominion and were dangerous neighbours. This
uneasiness had been lulled by the passing of years, but the aggressive
boastfulness of Germany and the outbreak of the war had naturally
revived it and sharpened it to more than its first acuteness, and the
knowledge that this menace to her peace had been finally removed was
received throughout Australia with a lively satisfaction that was echoed
from every quarter of the Empire.
On that morning of the 11th September a party of fifty men of the
Australian Naval Reserve, under the command of Commander J. A. H.
Beresford, and accompanied by Lieutenant-Commander Elwell and Lieutenant
Bowen, landed at Herbertshohe. There was a small group of Germans
gathered on the wharf, and these, being hailed, replied that no
opposition would be offered. As soon as the landing party had fallen in
on the beach they set out to march through the forest to the wireless
station, which was about six miles inland, and luckily, in spite of the
Germans' assurance that they would meet with no resistance, Commander
Beresford was on the alert against treachery, had thrown out scouts, and
was prepared for any surprise attack that might be attempted. There was
no sign or sound of an enemy for a while, but when they had gone some
two miles into the forest the invaders suddenly realised that they had
walked into a trap. A volley fired from the bush and dense tropical
undergrowth which shut the road in on either side took them unawares. A
German force had entrenched themselves close ahead athwart the road, and
a number of blacks, hidden among the trees on both sides, started and
kept up a harassing enfilade. But the Australians took the half-expected
surprise with the most perfect sangfroid. They energetically returned
the enemy's fire with a raking volley or two, then hurled themselves on
the trenches, and, after a furious hand-to-hand struggle, carried them
at the point of the bayonet. They captured several prisoners, and
leaving these in a hut under a small guard the rest of the party pushed
on resolutely, taking what cover was possible by the way and maintaining
a continuous fight with snipers who kept pace with them, lurking in the
depths of the forest. The advance was necessarily slow, for, in addition
to the death that momentarily threatened them from among the trees, the
road was mined in many places, and nothing but the utmost caution and
coolness saved the indomitable little army from annihilation. As it was,
they suffered heavy losses.
[Illustration: A SMALL PORTION OF THE ARMY IN EGYPT.
A part of the camp at Menai.]
[Illustration: THE AUSTRALIAN TROOPS IN EGYPT.]
[Illustration: FROM DIFFERENT POINTS OF THE COMPASS.
A meeting of sons of the Empire. This picture was taken about a mile
from the Pyramids in Egypt. It illustrates how Britannia's sons from
various parts of the Empire have rallied to the Flag. These four men are
in the same Australian regiment, but (left to right) they were born in
Canada, Australia, Scotland, and England respectively.]
Within 500 yards of the wireless station they found themselves faced
with more entrenchments and came to a halt. A careful reconnaissance was
made, and the position discovered to be so powerfully fortified that a
dispatch-runner was sent back to ask for reinforcements from the fleet,
and as it was by now almost dark Commander Beresford decided to encamp
for the night. All night scouts were out keeping a close watch, and the
men slept beside their rifles, but nothing happened. Even the snipers
remained silent; many had been shot down, and the rest had either used
up their ammunition or withdrawn disheartened; and the entrenched
Germans lay low, apparently contented to wait till they were attacked.
Before dawn a great cheer rang from the awakening camp as the expected
reinforcements, a detachment of Australian sailors, were seen
approaching along the forest road. They brought several quickfirers and
some 12-pounders with them, but no sooner were the guns in position and
a storming party in readiness to advance than the enemy blew up the
station and fled. Shots were sent after them, but they escaped into the
bush, and the pursuit was not continued, since the object of the
Australian expedition had been to destroy the wireless equipment there,
and this had been accomplished.
Later in the day, however, the enemy reappeared behind the town and
indulged in some casual sniping, but a few well-placed shells from one
of the warships in the harbour discouraged them and drove them back into
the interior.
The fighting for the wireless station had occupied eighteen hours, and
it fell into the hands of the Australians at 1 o'clock in the morning on
the 12th September. Between twenty and thirty Germans were killed; there
were many wounded, and the Commandant and one other officer, fifteen
German non-commissioned officers, and fifty-six native police were taken
prisoners. The Australian losses were Lieutenant-Commander B. Elwell,
Captain B. A. Bockley, R.A.M.C., and four seamen killed, and Lieutenant
Rowland B. Bowen and three seamen wounded.
The Governor of New Pomerania (now restored to its earlier name of New
Britain) remained at large for a day or two, and then was captured with
his suite ten miles inland, and they were sent as prisoners to the port
of Rabaul.
The capture of this port of Rabaul was one of the most daring and
successful episodes in the campaign on New Pomerania. It was thought
possible that the German cruisers were somewhere in the vicinity, and
the Australian Commander had no knowledge of Rabaul Harbour, and knew
nothing of its fortifications; nevertheless, with all lights out he
raided the port at night, caught the Germans napping, and landed a naval
force without opposition. They had taken possession of the post and
telegraph stations and destroyed the plant before the inhabitants were
roused and came out to find it was too late for them to attempt to do
anything. Some of the German residents subsequently refused to take the
oath of neutrality, and these, with two German officers, were sent as
prisoners to Sydney. There was also some little trouble with the
natives, who resorted to a sort of guerilla warfare, but it was not long
before these were reduced to order, and the Australian garrison remained
in peaceable control of the island, which had been the centre of the
German government in the Bismarck Archipelago.
Whilst Rabaul was being raided, another Australian warship landed a
small squad of sailors under the command of Lieutenant-Commander
Bloomfield at Nauru, the capital of the Marshall Islands. With the party
were Lieutenant Cooper, Engineer-Lieutenant Creswell, and Staff-Surgeon
Brennard, to act as interpreter. The surf round the island is very
heavy, and there were difficulties in getting a boat through it, but
this once accomplished the rest was easy. There were no defences, and
the landing was unopposed. The Governor surrendered at discretion, and
the wireless station, one of the most powerful in the German Pacific
series, was demolished.
Shortly after the fall of Rabaul, the Australian fleet captured a German
steamer that was making for the harbour there, and learned from two
Englishmen who were aboard that the elusive German cruisers had recently
been sighted off Kaweing, New Hanover. But though a warship was
dispatched forthwith to that quarter and toured all about the islands,
searching diligently, no enemy vessels were anywhere discoverable. They
had been seen thereabouts a few days previously, but had mysteriously
vanished again.
The conquest of the German Pacific islands was completed on 24th
September, when Kaiser Wilhelmsland (German New Guinea) surrendered
without firing a shot, the British flag was hoisted at Friedrich Wilhelm
town, and a garrison established there. Most of the available German
soldiers had been sent thence a fortnight before to assist in the
defence of New Pomerania; but when they arrived it was already taken
over by the victorious Australians and they simply fell into their hands
as prisoners. The principal officials of Kaiser Wilhelmsland were also
absent; the four that remained, with some fourteen other Germans, took
the oath of neutrality. So, with every German wireless station in the
Pacific put out of action, and the British flag flying over all enemy
territory in those waters, the Australian fleet was free to render more
assistance to the New Zealand, the British, and French fleets in their
dogged hunt after the German commerce raiders, and presently added a new
glory to its name by overtaking, giving battle to, and sinking that most
dashing raider of them all, the _Emden_.
3
THE TRIUMPH OF THE _SYDNEY_
CHAPTER III
THE TRIUMPH OF THE _SYDNEY_
Nor wonder, nor fear,
When death stared us near,
Could you read in one face of all our crew,
Each to his post and orders true.
JOHN LE GAY BRERETON.
When we are all at peace again–when the Great War is a thing of
yesterday and tales of its thousand fights have passed into the history
and folk-lore of the nations that took part in it–then, I think, perhaps
Germany may be glad to forget about the hundreds of women and children
slaughtered by her runaway warships in bombarding defenceless English
coast towns without warning, by her midnight Zeppelins with bombs that
were dropped on peaceful villages and unfortified towns, by the
torpedoes fired by her dishonoured submarines into helpless passenger
steamers; but she will find consolation and some healing for her pride
in remembering the brilliant exploits of the _Emden_, and the splendid
chivalry and heroism of the _Emden's_ commander. She will talk of Karl
von Müller, and rightly, much as we talk of Drake and Hawkins, or as the
Americans talk of that daring privateer Paul Jones, and of Captain
Semmes and the _Alabama_. But his enemies were the first to pay tribute
to his gallantry and welcome him into the glorious company of their
traditional sea-heroes; for such courage as his naturalises an alien
even in the land of his enemy, and, for all the harm he did us, we have
nothing but the friendliest admiration of von Müller, because he harried
and fought us with clean hands and was always a gracious and honourable
as well as a fearless foe.
At the outbreak of the war, the German Admiral von Spee was at Kiao-Chau
with his China squadron of some half-dozen vessels. He lost no time in
putting to sea, bent on preying upon and, as far as might be, stopping
the ocean-trade of Britain and France and their Allies. Before long he
seems to have decided to set von Müller free to follow his own devices;
the _Emden_ parted company with the Admiral and thereafter, playing a
lone hand, proved a more resourceful and more dangerous marauder than
all the rest of von Spee's fleet put together. For three months it
cruised about the Pacific and the Indian Oceans and was the terror of
the seas. To-day it would be sighted off Borneo, and whilst the
Australian and New Zealand fleets, called by wireless, were scouring the
China Sea for it, it would unexpectedly appear off the Caroline Islands
or in the Bay of Bengal. It left its mark on the harbour works of
Madras, shelled the fort there and set the oil-tanks ablaze, and was
gone into the unknown again before any pursuer could be put on its
track. And all the while its gallant captain was making sudden dashes
into those ocean highways where the merchant traffic was thickest,
taking toll of our traders with the gayest good humour and always with
the strictest consideration for the lives of his victims.
Our experts assured us that this game could not last; sooner or later
von Müller would have to put into port somewhere for coal and stores,
news of his whereabouts would be flashed to the ships in chase of him
and they would be waiting in readiness for him when he came out, and
there would be an end of him. It sounded so simple and true, but von
Müller knew a trick worth two of that. His practice was to bear down
upon his quarry, make her heave to by sending a shot across her bows,
then board her and help himself to what he needed in the way of coal and
other stores, transfer the crew and passengers to the _Emden_, and sink
his abandoned prize with a bomb or with a well-aimed shell or two. After
he had repeated this proceeding so many times that he had more prisoners
aboard than he could comfortably accommodate, he dumped them all on the
next merchantman he overhauled and allowed it to go free with them. He
was so good a sailor, and knew the sea and the ways of the sea so well,
that, instead of making his captures one by one, he occasionally
contrived to round up four or five at a time, shepherded them into
suitable proximity, went through them in succession, helped himself
liberally from their cargoes, collected all the passengers and crews on
one of them, which he politely set at liberty, and swiftly sunk the
remainder and was off again about his business. He had a sense of
humour, and that invariably goes with humanity. One of the ships he
stopped was a small affair with no particularly valuable cargo, so he
relinquished it intact, jestingly making a present of it to the wife of
the captain, who was making the voyage with her husband. History does
not say whether the owners subsequently confirmed the gift. He
discovered that there were women among the passengers on another ship,
and, genially apologising for causing them any discomfort, withdrew and
let his catch go again. Many such stories were rumoured about him, and
even if some were legendary the fact that it occurred to his enemies to
tell them sufficiently indicates the character of the man. His luck and
his daring and his courtesy made a sort of popular hero of him even in
the British Isles and Australasia, but the damage he was doing to our
shipping was so serious that it became more and more imperative that his
career should be ended. By an ingenious ruse he sunk a French destroyer
and a Russian cruiser at Penang; and, to say nothing else of our Allies'
losses, he had destroyed over 74,000 tons of British shipping, the total
value of which has been estimated at upwards of £2,000,000, before he
was brought to bay, and put up a good fight, but was beaten.
[Illustration: THE HORSE LINES AT ABASSIA, EGYPT.]
[Illustration: THE AUSTRALIAN REMOUNTS DEPOT AT ABASSIA.
Over 1,000 horses are in lines here and about and also ready for
transport to any part of the world.]
[Illustration: OUR TROOPS IN EGYPT.
Cavalry galloping out into the desert.]
His little cruiser could make a speed of twenty-four knots, and so long
as he kept out at sea he was able to show his pursuers a clean pair of
heels. Possibly his three months of immunity had rendered him a little
over-confident; anyhow, it occurred to him that he might increase the
difficulties of the chase by destroying the wireless plant on Keeling
Cocos Island, and at 6 o'clock on the morning of the 9th November he
carried out his intention. He sent an armed launch ashore, towing two
boats containing forty men, three officers, and four maxims. They
effected a landing without trouble in a quarter of an hour; the officers
behaved with the correctest courtesy towards the officials and damaged
nothing but the wireless installation, which they very efficiently
reduced to ruins. But it happened that an hour earlier the approach of
the _Emden_ had been detected, and the wireless operator had immediately
flung a warning into the air and an urgent appeal to the _Sydney_, which
was believed to be somewhere in the vicinity. This belief was so well
founded that as the expeditionary force from the _Emden_ were returning
to their boats, after completing their mission, a dense smoke was seen
on the horizon, and breaking through it the _Sydney_, coming under full
steam, hove rapidly into sight.
Captain von Müller was as quick to observe it, recognised that there was
no escape, and instantly prepared for action. Leaving his landing party
to look after themselves, he steamed for the open sea, and his men on
shore with equal promptitude commandeered a schooner that lay at anchor
in the bay, hastily provisioned it, cut the cable, made a dash for
liberty and got away.
As soon as she was clear of the island the _Emden_ opened fire on the
_Sydney_ and at first made excellent practice, but the _Sydney_ answered
by pouring in such an accurate and deadly fire that the enemy's three
funnels were shot away, some of his guns silenced, and all the
speaking-tubes smashed, so that the captain had difficulties in
transmitting his orders, and his firing began to fall off considerably.
If there were pluck and determination enough on the _Emden_, there was
at least as much of both on her antagonist. For three months the
_Sydney_ had been kept waiting for this hour, with her crew spoiling for
a fight, and now they had got what they had been waiting for, and
officers and men alike were keen to render a good account of themselves.
Before the _Sydney_ left the harbour she was named after, three boys
came aboard from the training ship _Tingua_ and offered themselves as
volunteers for service in any capacity. The captain thought they were
too young and did not want to take them, but they were so desperately
bent on going that he yielded and let them have their way. Two of them
were now attached to the officers of the gun crew, and throughout the
action with the _Emden_ they were as eager and as perfectly cool as the
hardiest seaman of them all. One of these youngsters was told off to
help in carrying ammunition to the guns, and he went briskly, capably to
and fro on his job, with the enemy's shells bursting around and
overhead, and never even seemed to think of attempting to take cover.
The fearful joy of battle possessed him as it possessed the rest of the
crew. The cheerfulness and reckless ardour of them all were amazing;
nobody thought of danger; nobody thought of anything except that they
were at grips with the enemy at long last and did not mean to let him
go.
It was a short, sharp, heroic combat; there was no flinching on either
side; but the _Sydney's_ guns were the more powerful and her gunners the
better marksmen. She was very little damaged and her only loss was three
men killed and fifteen wounded; but the _Emden_ was so terribly punished
that her decks became a very shambles; there were over two hundred
killed and wounded, and the finish came when the whole after-part of the
vessel burst into flames. The _Sydney_ at once ceased firing, and von
Müller threw up the sponge and smartly beached his ship to save it from
sinking. The Britishers ashore and rescue parties in the _Sydney's_
boats assisted to get the wounded out of the blazing wreck, and,
accepting the inevitable with his customary good grace, the German
captain surrendered. But Captain Glossop, the _Sydney's_ commander, knew
how to respect a brave enemy and refused to deprive his beaten foe of
his sword. It was characteristic of von Müller that when one of his
officers, smarting under the sense of defeat, accused the _Sydney_ of
continuing to fire after the white flag had been shown, he called the
remnant of his forces together and repeated the charge to them, only to
repudiate it indignantly, saying that no white flag had ever been
hoisted on his vessel.
He and the Kaiser's kinsman, Prince Franz Joseph Hohenzollern, with the
rest of the captured German officers and men, were sent as prisoners of
war to Australia, and the most romantic and one of the most momentous
episodes in the war at sea came to a fitting conclusion when the vast
crowd which gathered at Sydney Harbour to welcome with storms of
cheering the triumphant Captain Glossop and his men, broke into a
generous ovation for the hero of the _Emden_ as his conquerors brought
him in.
The Indian and Pacific Oceans were now swept completely clear of all
enemies, except for the small German fleet that was still groping about
precariously off Chili, and on the 8th December a British squadron drew
this fleet into an engagement and totally destroyed it; but the
significance of the _Sydney's_ dashing victory was not merely that it
removed the last serious menace from the ocean trade routes of the
Empire–it created the profoundest impression throughout India, and did
more to restore confidence among our Indian fellow-subjects in the
eventual triumph of British arms than the hurling back of the German
hordes from before the walls of Paris or the greater successes of our
Navy in the North Sea.
[Illustration: WITH OUR TROOPS IN EGYPT.
The 6th Hamakai (New Zealand) Regiment entrenching at Ismalin on the
banks of the Suez Canal.]
[Illustration: AN AUSTRALIAN SCOUT IN THE EGYPTIAN DESERT.]
4
EN ROUTE FOR EGYPT
CHAPTER IV
EN ROUTE FOR EGYPT
We boast no more of our bloodless flag that rose from a nation's slime;
Better a shred of a deep-dyed rag from the storms of the olden time.
From grander clouds in our "peaceful skies" than ever were there before
I tell you the Star of the South shall rise–in the lurid clouds of war....
All creeds and trades will have soldiers there–give every class its due–
And there will be many a clerk to spare for the pride of the jackeroo....
But, oh! if the cavalry charge again as they did when the world was wide,
'Twill be grand in the ranks of a thousand men in that glorious race to ride
And strike for all that is true and strong, for all that is grand and brave,
And all that ever shall be, so long as man has a soul to save.
HENRY LAWSON.
With Australasia, as with the motherland, the first honours of war fell
to the fleet; and whilst the fleet was gathering them in, recruiting for
the armies continued briskly through August, September, October, with
intervals of suspension because the recruits kept offering themselves in
such numbers and so much faster than they could possibly be equipped. By
September the New Zealand Maoris refused to be left out of it any
longer, and applied for permission to raise and supply a separate corps
of volunteers for active service, and no sooner was the offer accepted
than the corps was ready, with a big overflow of applicants on a waiting
list, in case reinforcements were needed. At the same time the Urewara
Maoris, the tribe most recently in arms against the State, presented the
Government with 1,600 acres of land to be turned to account as a
contribution to the Empire Defence Fund.
All Australia and New Zealand were roused as nothing had ever roused
them before; and the glowing enthusiasm and determination of their
peoples, instead of wearying a little with the passing of the days, rose
and intensified. In the beginning the thousands of soldiers to be sent
to the front were fixed at definite totals; but before the end of
September, New Zealand had made it clear that the size of her contingent
would be limited by nothing but the number of her men who were fit to
handle a gun; and Mr. Fisher had said for Australia, at a meeting in
connection with the Australian Expeditionary Force, "Not 1 per cent. of
the people of the Commonwealth are unfavourable to sending as many
contingents as may be necessary to ensure victory over Germany and
settle this matter once for all. Many Australians would rather be dead
than in the grip of the dominion of another people. We mean to leave an
honourable name behind us, even if we must perish to maintain it." And
that these were no idle words Gallipoli has borne and is bearing
witness.
In that month of September, Melbourne and Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane,
all the great cities of the Commonwealth States, were filling their
streets to pay homage to the troops that marched through from the
training grounds in full war equipment, ready and eager for the order to
embark. To describe one such memorable spectacle is to describe them
all, for the same great spirit was abroad from end to end of the land.
"For the first time since the war broke out," says _The Melbourne Age_
for the 26th September, "Melbourne was afforded an opportunity of seeing
in force the troops who are to form Victoria's contingent at the front.
To the number of about 5,000 they marched through the city between 11
a.m. and 1 p.m." It was a day of rain and sleet, but the weather was of
little consequence either to the soldiers or the onlookers. "From the
north, by train and by road the troops poured into the city, and while
they were mustering on the northern boundaries the people were
assembling in tens of thousands along the principal streets. For this
was to be the city's farewell to these men who were going out to take
their place in the fight for the integrity of the Empire, and it was
clear from the start that it was going to be no half-hearted affair. For
weeks past soldiers had been passing through Melbourne, sometimes in
small parties, sometimes in large squads, while ever and anon there had
been lines of ambulance wagons going by, or the houses had shaken to the
rumbling of big guns. But yesterday all these units were gathered into
an Army to be reviewed by the Commander-in-Chief of the Commonwealth
forces." The Light Horse rode in from camp through a pelting rain; hardy
bushmen, most of them, drawn from the remote back-lands of the State.
They and their horses were drenched, but their cheerfulness was not even
damped. They rode in and halted along King Street, between Collins and
Bourke Streets, to await the arrival of the infantry. Wild squalls of
wind and sleet drove the crowd to scatter and find temporary shelter
where they could, but as soon as the clamant call of the bugle sounded
and the infantry divisions were seen marching sturdily up through the
rain from Spencer Street Station the waiting myriads forgot everything
else and raced back into their places, till the long streets were
narrowed to a living, cheering lane from start to finish of the line of
route.
[Illustration: CAMP OF THE AUSTRALIANS AT MUDROS BAY.]
[Illustration: SULTAN OF EGYPT VISITS THE DARDANELLES WOUNDED.]
[Illustration: SECOND DIVISION LEAVING MUDROS BAY WITH AUSTRALIANS
ON THE FORE DECK.]
It was not more than five or six weeks since most of the soldiers in
these disciplined, perfectly ordered ranks had gone out of the city,
pallid, weedy, slack, slouching, from sedentary, cramping shop or office
or factory life: now they came back into it, from the training grounds,
bronzed, hardened, alertly alive. They went out straggling regiments of
raw recruits, shouting to passers-by, singing and laughing carelessly as
they went: they came back silent, steady men-at-arms, erect, soldierly,
and with the look and bearing of men who had dedicated themselves to a
great purpose, and meant to fulfil it.
At the word of command, the Light Horse moved forward, and, preceded by
their field ambulances and service wagons, company after company of the
smartest, keenest infantry that ever stepped in khaki followed them.
At intervals the rain stopped, the clouds blew apart, and the sun shone,
and under sun or rain, with swords and bayonets gleaming and regimental
bands crashing out lively marching tunes, these warrior sons of
Australia advanced into the city whose streets and shops and houses were
all a-flutter with flags and handkerchiefs and endlessly a-roar with
friendly voices of welcome. It was a day of high and great emotions; a
day to be remembered by all who shared in its stirring pageantry until
their last of days; and if there were tears in the eyes of hundreds who
were cheering in the dense-packed throng that lined the way, they were
tears of pride in these sons and brothers and sweethearts who had given
themselves so wholly and so gallantly to the service of their country. I
spoke of them just now as raw recruits, and most of them were; but 700
of that 5,000 had war ribbons on their breasts, for they had fought in
the South African Campaign. One such was Colonel Elliott, who led the
7th Battalion; fifteen years before he had marched through these same
streets as a private in the contingent that was then leaving for South
Africa.
The waiting mass of spectators ahead in Russell Street could look up the
long perspective of Collins Street and see the sinuous khaki line
flowing in from the hills beyond, between the dark banks of cheering
people, and they took up the cheering and passed it on to thousands
gathered farther in the city. As the troops came forward the multitude
closed in behind and followed, an ever-swelling, tumultuous, joyous sea
of humanity. Two flags marked the saluting base in front of the steps of
Parliament House, in Bourke Street, and in readiness on the steps were
the Prime Minister, Mr. Fisher, Senator Pearce, the Minister of Defence,
and Major-General Bridges, in command of the whole Australian
contingent, and they were presently joined by Colonel J. W. McCay, who
had led the march through the streets to this spot. Shortly before the
soldiers came in sight, the Governor-General and Lady Helen Ferguson
drove up; and standing at the foot of the steps under the united flags
of Great Britain and Australia the Governor took the salute as the long
procession of horse and foot went streaming past.
"The immensely significant and important thing about yesterday's
demonstration," continues the reporter, "was that every man who took
part in it was a volunteer. No military despotism had driven them to
war. From many parts of Victoria, from the public schools, and the State
schools, from the cities and the back blocks, from homes of comparative
luxury, and from homes of poverty these men had volunteered. In the
march past yesterday all social distinctions were blotted out. They were
all Australians–Britons by blood and descent, by temperament and
tradition–and yet essentially Australians–the biggest contingent for the
biggest war ever taken part in by Australia"–or, indeed, by any nation
on the face of the earth since the beginning of time.
Once well past the saluting point, the ceremonial march was practically
finished, and it came to an actual end at the top of Elizabeth Street.
Here, as everywhere, there were countless crowds to give the khakied
ranks a rousing reception; some swarmed after the cavalrymen, who rode
aside into the Hay Market and there dismounted to feed and water their
horses and take an interval of rest and refreshment. The infantry,
however, wheeled into Flemington Road and continued its march until it
arrived in Royal Park, where a halt was called, and directly the word to
"stand at ease" was given, arms were grounded, bayonets sheathed, the
ranks broke up, and the men drifted this way and that to find among the
thousands of civilians who were overflowing the Park the friends or
relatives who were there in search of them.
There was an hour of impromptu picnicking, soldiers and civilians
clustering in little groups; for the sky had cleared by now, and the wet
grass was a matter of no account on such a day as this; then the bugles
sounded the "fall in," and in a few minutes the men had lined up in
ranks again, and in a few more minutes, with mounted officers before and
beside them and to the music of drums and brasses, the four battalions
swept out into Royal Park Road at the quick march and set forth on the
return journey to their camp at Broadmeadows.
When the principal part of the town was left behind "march at ease" was
the order of the hour, and rifles were slung over shoulders, cigarettes
or pipes lighted, and presently the last of the following crowd, that
had thinned out and dropped away and was going back home, could scarcely
hear the playing of the band above the gay uproar of the hundreds of
voices singing "Who'll go a-fighting with the Kaiser and me?" and, when
they had had enough of that, joining as heartily in "It's a long way to
Tipperary"–the song that none of us can ever hear again unmoved, so many
thousands of our own people have gone singing it to death or glory on
the stricken fields of Flanders.
In this wise Melbourne welcomed and said good-bye to that 2nd Brigade of
hers; and in similar fashion Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane honoured their
soldier sons; then, for certain weeks they continued their preparations
and waited impatiently in their camps for the signal from oversea that
should summon them into the battle-line; and it was hailed everywhere
with exultant enthusiasm when it came at last and they could strike
their tents and go.
By this date, the third week in November of 1914, the effective Army of
Australia had grown to nearly 40,000 troops of all arms, and there were
not far short of 2,000 men in the Navy. In addition there was now a
Citizen Army of 56,298, fully armed and equipped; 51,153 members of
rifle clubs, and 67,153 reservists, making a grand total of 164,633. But
even these figures look small when compared with what they have risen to
in the year that has passed since then.
It was on the 18th November that the combined Australian and New Zealand
Expeditionary Forces set out from Albany, Western Australia, for the
front. They filled thirty-six transports that steamed out of King
George's Sound in four stately columns, with the _Orverto_ as flagship.
All on the wharves and round about them a dense, innumerable throng
stood to watch the departure–stood and watched it in a strangely
impressive silence. Not until the last ship had its living freight
aboard and the tug was towing it out to take its place in the great
armada did the crowd seem to catch its heart up suddenly and shatter the
almost unbearable stillness with volley after volley of thunderous
cheers. And the men on the ships, clustering along the sides, or
climbing the rails, waved their hands and hats and sent back an
answering salvo that only dwindled and altogether ceased when the shore
had receded so far that the crowds that were watching the ships till
they had passed from sight could barely be distinguished. But the
emotions such a parting stirred were too painful, too harrowing, and
"There should be no farewells like that," said one of the troopers when
it was over.
The destination of the troopships was unknown, except to the chief
officers; some had an idea that they were going to England, some that
they were making direct for France and the trenches in Flanders, but all
knew before the earlier half of their fortnight's voyage was done that
they were to land, in the first place, at Alexandria. None of them cared
particularly where it was, so long as they were brought, without too
much delay, within reach of the enemy.
The navies of the Empire made a safe pathway over the thousands of miles
of sea, and the journey was as uneventfully peaceful as if there had
been no war in progress. It might even have been a little monotonous if
the men had not been so high-spirited and so fertile in inventing
amusements when they were not kept well occupied with drilling and
physical exercises. At six in the morning réveillé was sounded, and by
the time the bugle pealed for "lights out," at nine at night, everybody
was comfortably tired and ready enough to sleep. During the day, between
intervals of drilling, signalling practice, and general exercise, there
were rifle practice, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, racing, jumping matches, to
improve the fitness of the troops in all directions; and from time to
time, in quiet corners about the deck, small groups would gather to
listen while an officer read descriptions of past battles and expounded
military tactics; and on the vessels that carried the cavalry there was
a good deal of extra work to do in exercising and looking after the
horses. Every evening the band played, and after it had finished the men
got up free-and-easy sing-songs among themselves. But before 10 o'clock
the ships were all in darkness and no sounds were to be heard except the
surge and splash of the waters and perhaps a busy rattle of typewriters
from the cabins of the headquarters staff. The genial spirit of
comradeship between officers and men helped to make the wheels of the
whole organisation run smoothly as well as effectively; the most perfect
discipline was maintained without anything of that Prussian arrogance in
the higher commands which passes for military capacity; for your
Australasian private is an especially free man, and is rightly conscious
of no inferiority to his officers, but has the good sense to recognise
that they are appointed to lead him and that as a matter of simplest
common sense he must render them a strict and willing obedience whilst
he is on duty. And the officers are as democratic as their men and wear
their dignity easily, and as an official not as a personal superiority.
All which naturally tends to promote general harmony and good feeling,
and they tell me that this was the prevailing atmosphere on every one of
the transports, this and an unquenchable gaiety and cheerfulness that
made the long voyage as jolly as if it had been a holiday outing instead
of the grim, determined business that it really was.
On the last day of November the transports entered the Red Sea and had
glimpses of Turkish territory on the starboard bow. They left the Gulf
of Suez behind, and as they were passing through the Canal had their
first welcome from some of the men who were to be their comrades in the
battles that lay before them. There was a camp of Indian troops a little
above Suez, and, says a _Melbourne Age_ correspondent who was on one of
the transports, "we saw a squad of them come running over the sand,
jumping over trenches, while others came pouring out from behind
fortifications down to the banks of the Canal, where they cheered in
answer to the cheers of the 5th Battalion on the flagship."
About here, or when they sighted Port Said, the Australasians carefully
oiled their boots, for the first time since they left Albany, and began
to make ready for the end of the journey and going ashore; and by the
3rd December they had emerged into the Mediterranean and landed with all
their stores and equipment at Alexandria.
5
CHRISTMAS AT THE PYRAMIDS
[Illustration: THE LAST SERVICE ON BOARD THE "LONDON" FOR THE AUSTRALIANS.]
[Illustration: THE DARDANELLES–AUSTRALIANS AND BLUEJACKETS ON A TRANSPORT.]
CHAPTER V
CHRISTMAS AT THE PYRAMIDS
"From faithful lass and loving wife
I bring a wish divine
For Christmas blessings on your head."
"I wish you well," the sentry said,
"But here, alas! you may not pass
Without the countersign."
He vanished–and the sentry's tramp
Re-echoed down the line.
It was not till the morning light
The soldiers knew that in the night
Old Santa Claus had come to camp
Without the countersign.
A. B. PATERSON.
But there were to be another two months of waiting yet–of waiting and
tireless preparation, before any fighting was to come their way. And
this delay had the best of good reasons behind it. For one thing it
would not have been wise to bring the fighting men of Australia and New
Zealand straight out of their own summer to face the rigours of a
northern winter in England, or in France; and for another, Lord
Kitchener has a habit–a very disconcerting habit for his enemies and
some of his self-important critics–of looking ahead and providing for
to-morrow; he foresaw that things might soon be happening in the sunny
land of the Pharaohs and knew that when they did happen it would be good
to have such a hefty band of warriors ready there and waiting for them.
"I am pleased to be able to announce," said Mr. Fisher in the Australian
House of Representatives on the 4th December, "that the Australian and
New Zealand contingents have safely arrived and have disembarked in
Egypt to assist in the defence of that country and to complete their
training there. They will go direct to the front to fight with other
British troops in Europe when their training is complete. Acting on the
strong recommendation and advice of Lord Kitchener, the Commonwealth
Government agreed to the Australian Imperial Force being landed in Egypt
for training instead of in England. It was pointed out that to house
Australians in tents in an English mid-winter after a long voyage in
troopships through the tropics and sub-tropics would be a very severe
trial and impose unnecessary hardships on our men. Lord Kitchener's
proposals were entirely due to his anxiety to secure the best possible
conditions for the success of our forces, in which he takes a very
special interest."
A similar announcement was made by New Zealand's Premier, who said that
his Government also had readily acquiesced in Lord Kitchener's
suggestions.
Some thousands of the troops went off almost at once to form part of the
Army of English Territorials and Egyptian regiments that were occupying
Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula; but the great majority of the
Australasians pitched their camps in the desert round about Cairo. The
Light Horse were at Maadi; the New Zealanders at Sertun, on the opposite
bank of the Nile; and the Australian infantry were at Menai, ten miles
outside Cairo at the foot of the hills, in the shadow of the Pyramids.
This which had been trackless waste before they came was transformed
within a fortnight after their arrival into a vast canvas city, with
long streets of white tents intersected here and there by wooden booths
that were used as shops and cafés. Men and stores were carried from
Alexandria by rail to the temporary station of Abu Ela, just beyond
Cairo, and thence by wagon, mule, camel, and afoot, or in the electric
trams that run from Cairo to the Pyramids. It was impossible by threats
or entreaties to hustle the leisurely natives who assisted in this
arduous transport work; nevertheless it was all accomplished, the camp
erected and organised, and by the middle of December the strangers from
oversea had made themselves comfortably at home in the desert. The
streets of white tents stretched for miles across the sands;
brown-visaged, white-robed natives would come and hover on the outskirts
of them hawking sweetmeats and fruit, or would squat patiently on the
alert to offer their services as guides to soldiers going off on leave,
or would gather in picturesque, chattering groups to gaze admiringly
whilst the troops went through their usual drill exercises or on some
days carried out more extensive military manœuvres.
Every day the big camp hummed with miscellaneous activities; and every
day there were regiments busy at bayonet practice, at heavy trench
digging, at long route marches under the blazing sun across the
apparently interminable flats of sand; but almost every day, too, there
were hundreds set free to crowd into and on the electric trams and
descend upon Cairo to lounge through the bazaars and to fraternise with
their English comrades in arms who were to be met with there and who
joyously did the honours of the city and took them round to see the
wonders of it. And almost every day there were parties of such
holiday-going fighting men captured by vociferous Arab guides, and
driven furiously off on sturdy little mules, with their drivers tearing
and panting after them, to make a nearer acquaintance with the Sphinx,
or to explore the dim, mysterious chambers of the Pyramids.
I like to think of those keen young Australians, men of the youngest of
nations, who have put their hands to the building of the happier world
of to-morrow which shall be a greater and more lasting monument to them
than any pyramid of brick and stone–I like to think of them, eager,
splendidly alive, on the threshold of a new day, turning aside to wander
in those dusty halls and passages haunted by ghosts of a wondrous
civilisation that has been dead these thousands of years. I like to
think, too, of those hoary pyramids, dark with long memories, towering
up into the bright sky on Sunday mornings when church service was being
held in the camp, and hearing the faint preludings of the military band
and then the swell of a myriad voices joining in some such nobly simple
hymn as "Rock of Ages"–an alien melody to them, but with all of home in
it for the singers. Strange hours they must have been when those voices
of the future broke the silence of the past.
Another circumstance that appeals to the imagination is that amongst
this continuous coming and going of troops, the stir and noise of
warlike preparations, there was a small prohibited area where Dr.
Reisler, the American Egyptologist, was all the while making excavations
and reverently unearthing the ancient tombs at the base of one of the
pyramids, serenely undisturbed. But though that area was officially
forbidden to the soldiers, Dr. Reisler made them heartily welcome when
any happened to stray into his neighbourhood. The _Age_ correspondent
asked him whether the proximity of the troops inconvenienced him and
"Why, surely," said he with a pleasantly strong American intonation, "I
don't mind the troops coming down here. I welcome all you Australians.
And, believe me, the natives have taken a great fancy to your men. They
are tickled to death with them."
There were two great days towards the end of December, when
Lieutenant-General Sir John Maxwell, Commander of the forces in Egypt,
rode into Menai camp, and, with General W. R. Birdwood, commanding the
Australian and New Zealand contingents, and Sir George Reid, the
Australian High Commissioner, held a review in which cavalry, infantry,
and all branches of the Australian service took part, one regiment, on
the second day, arriving back from a long desert march with their coats
off and shirt-sleeves turned up, hot and dusty, but in the highest
spirits, and falling into line immediately to parade past with the rest.
They say that the sight of these hardy fellows approaching in sensible
deshabille, but fresh as paint after miles of tramping under a broiling
sun, moved General Maxwell to ejaculate emphatically to the High
Commissioner, "This is a splendid sight, Sir George. They're a grand
lot!"
But I have a notion that the most memorable event of those two months
was the Christmas which they all spent in the desert. From 3 o'clock in
the afternoon of Christmas Eve parades were dispensed with, and for two
days the homely spirit of Yule triumphed over the spirit of Mars on the
banks of the Nile. Instead of small tourist parties, thousands went
pouring out on camels and donkeys to the Sphinx and the pyramids, and
thousands went to crowd and enliven the bright streets of Cairo and
chaffer at the booths for gifts to send to the folk down south. The
adjacent palm groves were laid under contribution and the tents lavishly
decorated within and without; and after dark, when the revellers were
back, every tent was brilliantly lighted up, and Chinese lanterns hung
glowing at the entrances to many of them. Sentries along the moonlit
road that led from Cairo tried to maintain the usual punctilious
military formalities, but as often as not the returning groups would
have none of their challenges, in such a time as that, and answered with
insubordinate flippancies. "You can see who goes here right enough,
Joe–it's me." "Look here," the outraged sentry would protest, "if you
don't halt when I tell you to I'll call the guard out and put you under
arrest." "No, don't do that, Joe, it's chilly, and the poor chaps will
catch cold. Merry Christmas, old boy." And the rebel passed on with his
friends, and the sentry, since after all it was Christmas, grinned and
let them go.
Though they returned to camp they were not going to bed; hardly anybody
thought of sleep until daybreak. Something after midnight a
cornet-player in one of the tents started a Christmas carol, and the
singing and laughter that had been coming from the other tents quieted
down; another cornet farther along the canvas street joined in; then
another farther off still, a street or two away. When they stopped, a
drum sounded and a string band somewhere took up the burden and filled
the blue dark with memories that did not belong to the desert. Towards 4
o'clock, when all the other music had dwindled into silence, the band of
the 4th Sydney Battalion began a series of such carols–the old, old
familiar tunes that catch at the heart-strings with dear and sacred
associations–and so played the last of the night away and the first of
the morning in. And with the morning came the Christmas mails, and there
was scarcely a tent in all those miles of them at which the postmen did
not call with letters from home.
Early in the day the camp kitchens were getting busy, but outside help
had been called in so as to give the regimental cooks a holiday. After
church parade the men laid themselves out to make the most of the day.
There were the wildest donkey races, and several attempts to organise a
camel race, but the camels could not be persuaded to run. Two scratch
teams were got together for a cricket match with make-shift bats and
wickets; and the New South Wales regiment carried through a successful
football tournament. Dinner was, of course, the crowning event of the
day. This was served in two miles of wooden huts, four of which were
allotted to each regiment. There was a turkey for every table, and a
supply of turkeys held in reserve in case any table demanded more than
one. There were Christmas puddings in plenty, and other seasonable fare,
and some of the tables had even succeeded in supplying themselves with
crackers. In spite of the time and the place, the old festival was
observed with all the good cheer and jollity that traditionally belong
to it; and not the least pleasant moment of the festivities came when
the Colonels of the different regiments looked in at hut after hut to
see that their men were well supplied and to wish them a Merry
Christmas; and you might track the way those Colonels went by the cheers
that followed them.
One of the Australian officers sent home the following as the menu of
his Christmas dinner in the desert:
BRIGADE HEADQUARTERS STAFF AND FIELD ARTILLERY BRIGADE
TABLE D'HÔTE
_Soup_:
Vegetable.
_Joints_:
Roast Sirloin of beef.
Boiled pork.
Ham.
Poultry.
Roast turkey and savoury sauce.
_Vegetables_:
Asparagus and butter sauce.
Baked and mashed potatoes.
Green peas.
_Sweets_:
Plum pudding and brandy sauce.
Port wine jelly.
Blanc mange and jam.
Fruit salad.
Almonds, mixed nuts, snapdragon, fruits in season.
Port wine, whisky, brandy.
Aerated waters. Tea, coffee, cocoa.
The festivities were continued to some extent through most of the
following day, then the suspended routine was resumed, the relaxed
discipline tightened up again; holiday-making was over, and officers and
men were presently heartened by a prospect of coming to grips with the
enemy at last.
6
THE FIGHT FOR THE SUEZ CANAL
[Illustration: AN AUSTRALIAN LANDING PARTY FOR THE DARDANELLES.]
[Illustration: AUSTRALIANS PREPARING TO DISEMBARK IN THE DARDANELLES.]
[Illustration: AUSTRALIANS LANDING NORTH OF GABA TEPE.]
CHAPTER VI
THE FIGHT FOR THE SUEZ CANAL
Then against the black of night
Rose a form, with visage white,
Clad in steel, and crowned with flame,
"Duty" was her awful name.
VICTOR J. DALEY.
The hotels and bazaars of Cairo buzzed through the last days of December
and the early half of January with portentous and growing rumours of a
powerful Turkish force that was making ready for an overwhelming attack
on Egypt. Men who went out on a day's leave from the camps at Maadi, at
Sertun, or Menai came back from the city and spread the glad tidings
that at last there was a possibility of their having something to do. It
was all the flying talk of more or less irresponsible gossipers, to
begin with, but before long definite statements were allowed to appear
in the local papers; official information was cautiously given out;
spies and scouts came flitting back from beyond the desert with detailed
news that was as momentous as it was welcome, and it was known that an
expedition of 20,000 Turks under German officers, and commanded by Major
von den Hagen, was being organised and elaborately equipped and was
coming to seize the Suez Canal–or to make an attempt to do so.
Cairo talked about it and was keenly interested, but quite unperturbed.
The men in the camps would have felt no anxiety only it was said that
there would be no need for most of them to be taken into action, and
every regiment was anxious not to be one of those that were left out of
it. They cheered the lucky battalions, told off for active service, that
went singing down the long white road to the railway station in Cairo,
whence they were to entrain for the fighting line; then they drifted
back to their tents to discuss the hopeful possibility that the Turkish
forces might prove larger than was anticipated and so make room on the
war-path for all the reserves.
The Canal forts bristled expectantly; English, Australian, New Zealand,
and Indian troops were entrenched all along the western bank; but the
slow days passed and the visitor still tarried, though they were willing
and eager to receive him and give him a warm reception. Every morning
when the darkness began to lift and the sentries could see across the
shining waterway, they peered expectantly into the dead sea of desert
that stretched for miles from the opposite side and, in the far
distance, billowed into rolling hills against the horizon–and there was
never an enemy in sight. Every day Australian scouts and scouting
parties of the camel corps were coming and going across that dreary,
sandy plain; and to watch their gradual disappearance among or over the
hills, or their gradual re-emergence from them, gave you a sense of
being asleep and looking at quietly moving figures in a dream. Aircraft
soared high into the dazzling blue and flew above the waste, and above
the hills, and vanished beyond them, but came back time after time only
to report that the Turks had not yet started from their base.
The long wait was getting tedious; except for the cutting down and
clearing away of bush and scrub on the eastern shore, and the emptying
and levelling of a village so as to leave the enemy as little cover over
there as possible, there was nothing to relieve the monotony of things
but the customary routine drills and military exercises and some little
occasional work in further strengthening the fortifications. So that
when at length an airman came racing back with tidings that the Ottoman
Army was on the move a thrill of excitement and grim joy ran like a fire
from trench to trench in the vast chain of them.
But the great hour was still some days away. The advance was slow and
methodical; it was encumbered with heavy rafts and steel or zinc
pontoons that were to be used in crossing the Canal, in addition to huge
stores of munitions and the enormous supplies of food that were needed
for a large army in a barren land where nobody lived. It was no easy
matter to drag baggage wagons and artillery through the shifting,
yielding sands, and in the teeth of intermittent whirling dust-storms;
and if the Turk had not been a doughty and doggedly determined foeman,
and one there was some credit in fighting and defeating, he never would
have held on and brought himself even within firing range of the goal he
was not destined to reach. Here and there he lingered for rest and
repairs; here and there he halted for a day by the wells to replenish
his stock of water; though he followed the charted caravan routes, he
was finding the desert as difficult to cross as Napoleon and his army
found it a hundred years ago. Presently our patrols were in touch with
him, sniping him from the hills and steadily retiring as he advanced.
But he plodded on, over the unstable flats, over line after line of
crumbling hills, until, with only one more series of hills to negotiate,
he set up his last camp at Katib-el-Kheil, some twelve miles from the
Canal.
In the night of the 1st February and throughout most of the next day the
Turks were busy there completing their arrangements for the attack.
There were frequent small skirmishes between their patrols and ours, who
were tenaciously hovering on their line, and it was not till evening was
sending its swift shadows before that the last of our scouts came
hastening in and crossed the water with word that the offensive had
commenced. At about 6 o'clock the Turkish legions could be seen
streaming down the hills at numerous points on a front that extended for
eighty along the Canal's hundred miles of length, but they showed no
hurry to get their guns speaking.
Most of these attacks seem to have been in the nature of feints to
discover whether there were any weak joints in the armour of the
defence, or to distract the attention of the defenders from the main
assault which was rapidly developing against the narrowest section of
the Canal, between Toussoum and Serapeum. Even here, however, the Canal
is over 200 ft. wide, and the problem for the invaders was how to span
that space, in face of gun and maxim and rifle fire, effect a landing on
the other side, dash up an embankment that rose to a height of 40 ft.,
and drive out of their trenches at the point of the bayonet thousands of
the hardiest and most coolly determined troops in the British Army. More
impossible-looking attempts have succeeded before now, but the Turks,
after sticking to it heroically for forty-eight hours, found that it
could not be done.
The nearest of the enemy forces were still several miles from the
farther shore of the Canal, and more and more of them could be seen
pouring over and down the hills in support of the advance-guard, when
the twilight gathered round them and then "at one stride came the dark,"
and unseen in the cloudy, almost moonless night they made their
dispositions, and before dawn the covering troops to be held in reserve
had dug themselves into the sand and were formidably entrenched. All
through the night teams of bullocks were dragging forward the steel
pontoons that were to bridge the Canal; gangs of toiling men carried the
pontoons on their shoulders through a gap in the bank down to the edge
of the water, where the engineers got to work with them, swung them
round into position one beyond the other, and by three in the morning
had pushed out nearly as far as mid-stream. The defenders might all have
been asleep for any sign of life that came from them; but keen eyes were
unceasingly searching the gloom and were quick to notice the growing
black line that was creeping stealthily out towards them on the dull
gleam of the water. They waited patiently and silently till they
considered it had been allowed to come far enough, then the word was
passed along the line, the company officers' whistles shrilled
startlingly, and the next moment a blaze of fire from machine guns and
rifles swept the doomed beginning of the pontoon bridge and left it
strewn with dead and wounded, and kept such a hail of lead pelting over
it as to render it untenantable.
Already the Turks had launched five boats and loaded them with picked
men, and as soon as they realised that they were discovered they flung
precautions to the wind, and made a rush across with these, purposing to
land and entrench them so as to establish a bridge-end in readiness for
the completed pontoon. Three of the boats were riddled and sunk, and of
the struggling, shouting mob that was flung into the water some swam
back and some swam pluckily on at the tail of the other two boats, which
dodged across desperately in the baffling darkness and were successfully
beached. As the first boat touched land, its occupants sprang out and
charged impetuously up the high embankment, but were shot down to a man
before they could reach the top. The second boatload, profiting by the
failure of their comrades, hastily dug themselves into the mud and sand
with hands and bayonets, and lay close in holes that sloped into the
ground and gave shelter against the relentless fire from the British
trenches. But the coming of daylight exposed their exact location and
made it so untenable that the few who had not been shot threw down their
arms and came out and were taken prisoners.
Though the Turks had thus failed at the first onset, they were a long
way from beaten–there was plenty of fight in them yet. Boat after boat
was launched in forlorn attempts to scutter over and land a small force
that should cover the landing of others, and the completion of the
bridge; but what had been impracticable in the dark was hopelessly
impossible after the sun was up. Every boat that put forth on this
mission was deluged with shot and shell and sent to the bottom. There
was a wild attempt made to manufacture and push across a bridge of
planks on empty kerosine tins, but this promptly went the same way of
destruction as soon as it began to get afloat.
All day the fighting continued along the whole front from Ismalia to
Suez. The Turks by now had brought their big guns into action and were
shelling the British posts and trenches; but one after the other these
guns were silenced by the accuracy of our gunfire, and when two or three
destroyers and a British cruiser steamed up the Canal from their
anchorage in Lake Timsah and, having casually shattered the remnants of
the pontoons, turned their guns on to the harassed lines of the enemy,
scattering and levelling the sandy hummocks and searching the holes and
trenches that were giving him shelter, he began to feel it was time to
go, and only waited for the dark to come and hide his doings before he
hastened to something of a rout the retreating movement he had
cautiously commenced by daylight.
Sniping was kept up all through the night of the 3rd February on both
sides, whilst this confused and headlong retirement was in progress; and
when the morning of the 4th dawned all the Turks had departed, except a
strong detaining force that was left behind in the trenches to cover the
retreat. A detachment of Britishers was dispatched across the Canal to
clear them out, and after a fierce resistance, surrounded and almost
annihilated them, the firing only ceasing when the exhausted survivors,
after futile attempts to make a run for it, dropped their rifles and
surrendered at discretion.
From the shore of the Canal to the distant hills, discarded stores and
baggage, broken carts and abandoned guns marked the tracks by which the
beaten army had fled. And all about the sands lay the Turkish dead. They
carried hundreds of wounded away with them, left hundreds of prisoners
in our hands, and had lost over a thousand slain, including their German
commander, Major von den Hagen.
The shipping on the Canal had not been delayed for much more than
twenty-four hours; in forty-eight from the firing of the first shot the
Turks were in flight, and by the morning of the 5th February there were
none of them, but the prisoners, within twenty miles of the British
chain of defences. The Australian Light Horse and the New Zealanders,
with English and Indian troops, crossed and went in pursuit, and there
were rear-guard actions fought around the sand-hills, and here and there
straggling parties of the enemy rounded up and captured. The elaborately
appointed, German-officered army of Turks that had marched out into the
desert prepared for a mighty struggle, but confident of victory, escaped
from its pursuers and got back with difficulty to Beersheba, a
disheartened and disorganised rabble.
For over a month they lay there inactive, and it was thought they had
abandoned their Egyptian enterprise for good; but about the 10th March a
flying column of 1,000 men made a twelve days' dash through the desert
again and put up a vigorous attempt to break the Canal defences at
Kubri. The bombardment of the Dardanelles had given rise to a notion
that troops had been sent from Egypt for the invasion of Gallipoli, and
that therefore the Canal defences had been weakened, but all the Turks
who were not shot or taken prisoners went back as hurriedly as they had
come, and must have been able to assure their German masters that the
Canal defences were as impregnable as ever. "Our officers told us," said
one of the prisoners (and their officers were mostly German), "that the
enemy here were not soldiers, but farmers and peace men from the British
Colonies, who had never been in battle and could not fight, but," he
looked his stalwart New Zealand interlocutor up and down, "they did not
know. Bismillah! if you are not fighting men, I do not want to meet the
others."
From that day to this, the Suez Canal has seen no more of war. The
warships swing watchfully at anchor in the bitter lakes through which it
flows, and the hundred miles of posts and trenches on the western bank
are still peopled with vigilant men in khaki who have held their own
there triumphantly and may be trusted to go on holding it till the
war-drums throb no longer and the German menace is a tale of yesterday.
In the first seven months of the war the sons of Australia and New
Zealand, fighting beside the soldiers of the homeland and of India, had
won a decisive victory and saved Egypt to the Empire; and before twelve
months were past they had crowned their names with a greater and more
terrible glory in the valleys of death and on the bloody heights of
Gallipoli.
7
THE EPIC OF THE DARDANELLES BEGINS
[Illustration: THE DARDANELLES–AUSTRALIAN TROOPS AT THE LANDING.]
[Illustration: AUSTRALIA'S SPLENDID CORPS OF MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN.
The Red Cross wagons have scarcely arrived, when the bearers are seen
approaching them with wounded in the emergency slings.]
[Illustration: THE BRAVE AUSTRALIANS.
The Australian troops have done magnificently in the land fighting in
the Dardanelles. Typical Australian members of the expedition.]
[Illustration: AUSTRALIA'S SPLENDID CORPS OF MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN.
Transferring the wounded to the wagons.]
CHAPTER VII
THE EPIC OF THE DARDANELLES BEGINS
Closer yet, until the tightening
Strain of rapt excitement heightening
Grows oppressive. Ha! like lightning
On his enemy he launches.
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.
With Death on the off-side lead,
And Duty stern at the limber,
The men of the British breed
Strain sinews, steel, and timber.
With jangling bar and trace,
And trail-eyes all a-rattle,
The guns rush thundering in the race,
Where "last gun in" is a sore disgrace:
For the drivers drive at a reckless pace
When the guns go into battle.
WILL LAWSON.
When the full story of the Great War comes, at last, to be written, no
part of it will thrill our children or our children's children more, or
make them prouder of their race, than the chapters which shall tell of
how men of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand,
and India fought stubbornly side by side, and side by side with our
gallant French allies, on those hills and plains of Gallipoli.
All the country thereabouts has been dedicated to war and romance from
time immemorial. At its entrance, between Kum Kale and Sedd-el-Bahr, the
Dardanelles is only two miles wide; it broadens to five miles as you go
in, and contracts, when you reach the narrows, to the width of a single
mile. Here it was, nearly five hundred years before Christ, that Xerxes
threw a bridge of boats across for his conquering army to pass over; and
here it was that Leander nightly swam the mile of water that separates
Abydos from Sestos, where Hero lived. On the eastern shore, near the
mouth of the Dardanelles, and within sight and sound of the thunderous
battles of to-day, is the site of that ancient Troy whose long siege
rages for ever in Homer's Iliad; but the Greek and Trojan heroes he has
immortalised knew no such terrific fighting, did no such deeds of mighty
valour as have fallen to the share of the incomparable heroes who are
fighting there now.
The powerful forts along either coast-line, the masked batteries among
the hills, the torpedo tubes cunningly concealed on the rocky beaches,
the sunken-mine fields that bar the channel, and the floating mines that
can be sent drifting down on the current to strike and blast an enemy's
ships to the bottom, make the forcing of the Dardanelles an infinitely
more difficult undertaking than it was when Admiral Duckworth made a
bold dash for it and got through with his fleet in 1807; and there are
not wanting amateur experts among our arm-chair critics who say
confidently that the dispatch of the British and French fleets to force
a passage there, last February, without the support of a military
expedition on shore, was a casual and wild blunder. It may have been;
but it were more rational not to pass judgment until we have all the
evidence before us. It was a sudden and vigorous attempt, and we should
have been loud in our praise of the daring initiative of whoever was
responsible for it if it had succeeded; but it failed, as even some of
our best-laid schemes are bound to do, for the age of miracles is past,
though the grumblers who expect us to win every time and the enemy to
lose every time do not appear to be aware of this.
The most we can safely say is that the February attack by the allied
fleets was an unfortunate adventure, for it not only failed, it put the
Turks on the alert and spurred them to strengthen their defences and
hurry reinforcements to the Peninsula until they had some 200,000 men
garrisoning the forts and ready in mile behind mile of trenches to meet
the British and French troops that were presently to be sent against
them.
On the 13th March General Sir Ian Hamilton left London with his staff to
take command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Army, and a day or two
later landed at Tenedos in the Ægean Sea, where, in the dim past, the
Greeks had landed when they marched to besiege Troy. After consultations
with Vice-Admiral de Robeck, commanding the British Eastern
Mediterranean Fleet, with General d'Amade, commander of the French Corps
Expéditionnaire, and Contre-Amiral Guepratte, who commanded the French
squadron, Sir Ian made careful reconnaissances up the Gulf of Saros
along the outer coast of Gallipoli, and rapidly matured his plan of
campaign, using Malta as a base of operations, bringing troops thence
and from Egypt and concentrating his vast fleet of loaded transports in
Mudros Bay, off the Island of Lemnos, which lies out in the Ægean, some
twenty miles before the gates of the Dardanelles. Here, with new
regiments from the British Isles, from India, and from France, were
Australians and New Zealanders who had received their baptism of fire in
the Suez Canal campaign; and whilst they lingered for the transport
arrangements to be completed they improved the shining hours, or, rather
the hours that had no shine in them, by practising every evening the
work of rapidly disembarking and making a landing on the shores of
Mudros Bay, their genial comrades, the bluejackets, helping them with
tips in the art of climbing rope-ladders, in steering a boat and using a
boathook.
"What can I say about the Army?" says Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, in his
"Dispatches from the Dardanelles." "It is no ordinary body of men. It is
essentially Imperial in its composition, and only the British Empire
could have brought together such a force from all corners of the earth.
Also the majority of the men are volunteers and Colonials. It is the
great counter-attack of Australia against the enemy in the east whilst
our regular armies are holding the line so gallantly in the west.... I
do not suppose that any country in its palmiest days ever sent forth to
the field of battle a finer body of men than these Australian, New
Zealand, and Tasmanian troops. Physically they are the finest lot of men
I have ever seen in any part of the world. In fact, I had no idea such a
race of giants existed in the twentieth century." Sir Ian Hamilton, too,
was full of praise for his troops from "down under," and considered them
"a magnificent lot of men, and as keen as mustard for the job."
In the afternoon of 23rd April an impressive battle service was held
aboard the crowded transports, and soldiers and sailors stood
bare-headed and listened reverently whilst the chaplain prayed for them,
and that, fighting a clean fight for the rights of humanity, they might
be strengthened to go on unflinchingly in the face of every difficulty
and danger till their arms were crowned with victory. It was the last
consecration of those brave men to the high and perilous duty to which
they had given themselves. In the evening of the same day transports
carrying the troops who were to make the first landing on Gallipoli, and
act as a covering force for the main army, moved out of Mudros Bay, with
their convoy of warships, and the rest of the expedition followed in
their track–a mighty fleet of nearly a hundred transports in all,
guarded on every side by a wonderful array of gunboats, destroyers,
swift armoured-cruisers, and stately dreadnoughts, including the mammoth
_Queen Elizabeth_.
On the morning of the 24th April the transports anchored off Tenedos.
The day was occupied in transferring the troops to a number of cutters
and smaller war vessels, and at midnight these were taken in tow by
certain of the larger ships, and, silently and without lights, moved
away through the darkness, stringing out into long, serpentine lines,
towards Gallipoli.
The expedition was divided into two landing parties. Whilst the French
created a diversion by bombarding Kum Kale, on the eastern coast, strong
forces of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh were to land at five
points, on the beach below Krithia, above Cape Tekeh, at Cape Helles, at
Sedd-el-Bahr, and near Totts Battery, on the extreme end of the
Peninsula; and after a fierce half-hour's shelling of the forts and
defences by the fleet this landing was carried out with the most
brilliant success. Simultaneously the Australians and New Zealanders,
who had left Tenedos in advance of the rest, were to penetrate the Gulf
of Saros and land above Gaba Tepe, where the Peninsula narrows to a sort
of bottle-neck, to keep the Turks fully engaged there and prevent them
from dispatching reinforcements to oppose the landing farther south. It
is a rugged and difficult part of the coast, this above Gaba Tepe, and
had been selected for that reason, because the enemy was less likely to
anticipate an attack there and would be less prepared for it.
"The beach on which the landing was actually effected," writes Sir Ian
Hamilton, in his vivid report, "is a very narrow strip of sand, about a
thousand yards in length, bounded on the north and south by two small
promontories. At its southern extremity a deep ravine, with exceedingly
steep, scrub-clad sides, runs inland in a north-easterly direction. Near
the northern end of the beach a small but steep gully runs up into the
hills at right angles to the shore. Between the ravine and the gully the
whole of the beach is backed by the seaward face of the spur which forms
the north-western side of the ravine. From the top of the spur the
ground falls almost sheer, except near the southern limit of the beach,
where gentler slopes give access to the mouth of the ravine behind.
Further inland lie in a tangled knot the under-features of Saribair,
separated by deep ravines which take a most confusing diversity of
direction. Sharp spurs, covered with dense scrub and falling away in
many places in precipitous sandy cliffs, radiate from the principal mass
of the mountain, from which they run north-west, south-west, and south
to the coast."
Another description says that the strip of beach with the cliffs sloping
steeply up from it has resemblances to Folkestone; another compares it
with its wild hinterland to the grimness and barrenness of Dartmoor; and
yet another pictures the whole Peninsula as like a sea petrified in the
height of a storm, heaving to gaunt ridges and falling away into deep
troughs and hollows, to sweep up and over again in a wave-like
succession of tumultuous hills.
This was the terribly inhospitable country that the Australasians
approached warily in the smallest dark hours of the morning. The land
lay almost invisible in the black depths of the night; no sound came out
to them, and no light glimmered anywhere. Silently and shrouded in the
shadows the warships took up their appointed positions in readiness, at
the right moment, to cover the landing with a hail of shell-fire; the
steam pinnaces, with their strings of boats loaded to the gunwale with
eager troops, glided past them towards the coast; and after a brief
interval a flotilla of destroyers crept on their track, packed with more
men to be rushed ashore as soon as the covering parties had obtained a
footing.
At this stage happened one of the most daring of the many instances of
individual heroism with which the progress of the Gallipoli campaign has
been marked; a deed that was fittingly rewarded with the D.S.O. It had
been suggested that three boatloads of men should be sent ahead of the
rest to land and light a series of flares along the beach with the
two-fold object of enabling the invaders to get a glimpse of where they
were going, and of drawing the enemy's fire and so disclosing his
whereabouts for the benefit of the ships' gunners who were waiting to
begin the bombardment. Major Freyberg, a born New Zealander and in
command of the landing party at this point, had suggested to
Major-General Paris, his chief, that the men who went on such a
desperate mission would certainly be annihilated, and had offered to
swim ashore and light the flares himself; and Mr. Malcom Ross, who
accompanied the New Zealand forces as official war-correspondent, has
related the story of this plucky adventure in _The New Zealand Herald_.
A destroyer was to have dropped the major into the sea within half a
mile of the beach, but the distance was misjudged in the darkness, and
he found he had to do a swim of nearer two miles, "with three oil flares
and two Holmes lights which he carried in a waterproof bag, with
sufficient air to support the weight in the water. He also carried,
attached to a belt round his waist, a small revolver and a sheath
knife." He calculated that he was swimming for an hour and a half before
the sea shallowed and he could feel the earth under his feet, and as the
usual landing-place was powerfully protected with barbed-wire
entanglements, he had to grope his way along till he found an accessible
spot where he could emerge from the sea. He was threatened with cramp,
for the water was bitterly cold, but without loss of time he cautiously
made his way inland to a place where on the previous day, when he had
reconnoitred the coast in a destroyer, he had seen what he had taken to
be a line of trenches. When he arrived at them, a quarter of a mile from
the sea, he discovered that they were dummies, intended for the ships to
waste their shells on, "and he could hear the Turks talking and see them
striking matches to light their cigarettes in the lines higher up."
Crawling back to the beach, he lit his first flare, dived, and swam for
his life. Firing commenced immediately from the Turkish trenches, but
the major landed again safely farther along the beach, lit his second
flare, dived, and got away, and still farther along landed once more and
set his third blazing; then took to the water and was swimming for an
hour before the destroyer could find him and pick him up.
Meanwhile the destroyer, guided by the Turkish fire, had opened on the
enemy's trenches with her guns and maxims, and the warships farther out
were not slow to take a hand in the proceedings.
It was now towards five in the morning, and already the dawn was showing
a pale glimmer above the crests of the hills. The boats with their loads
of troops were nearing the shore, and squads of Turks could be dimly
seen scattering about the beach to intercept them. Their firing from
below and the fire of rifles and machine guns from the heights was
terribly effective, but, with their comrades falling dead or wounded
beside them, the men in the boats remained grimly, resolutely silent,
their coolness and steady discipline never for an instant shaken.
"The moment the boats touched land the Australians' turn had come," in
Sir Ian Hamilton's glowing words. "Like lightning they leaped ashore,
and each man as he did so went straight as his bayonet at the enemy. So
vigorous was the onslaught that the Turks made no attempt to withstand
it and fled from ridge to ridge, pursued by the Australian infantry.
"The attack was carried out by the 3rd Australian Brigade under Major
(temporary Colonel) Sinclair Maclagan, D.S.O. The 1st and 2nd Brigades
followed promptly, and were all disembarked by 2 p.m., by which time
12,000 men and two batteries of Indian Mountain Artillery had been
landed. The disembarkation of further artillery was delayed owing to the
fact that the enemy's heavy guns opened on the anchorage, and forced the
transports, which had been subjected to continuous shelling from the
field guns, to stand further out to sea."
All day the fighting continued with unflagging determination and
ferocity on both sides. The Turks had been cleared out of their first
trench in a flash, and the Australians and New Zealanders went swarming
up the steep, scrub-covered cliff to the trench that was devastating
them from above; they wasted no time in firing back, and troubled little
about taking cover; they just swung and scrambled up as swiftly and
straightly as was practicable, hurled themselves into that second
trench, and brawny giants among them were literally pitching the Turks
out on the points of their bayonets before the enemy had fully realised
what was happening to him and made haste to climb out unassisted and
bolt headlong up the cliff and over the ridge with the Australasians in
hot pursuit. Officers and men were mixed indiscriminately. Here would be
a small group, unofficered, holding an advanced ridge and triumphantly
hurling back the desperate counter-attack of a force of thrice their
numbers; here and there a solitary sniper, snugly ensconced behind a
boulder, putting in some useful work entirely on his own; and here again
would be a detachment of Australians, New Zealanders and Maoris,
flitting nimbly from cover to cover through the brushwood to dash
suddenly into the open with fearsome war-cries and drive the Turks from
some post where they had rallied farther inland.
To maintain anything like order in such an attack, over ground so broken
into hills and gullies, and so obscured with brushwood that you could
seldom see many yards before you, was impossible. Scattered groups, as
Sir Ian says, went on with such headlong valour that they pushed farther
across the Peninsula than had been intended, and, being unsupported,
were presently compelled to retire before the onrush of Turkish
reinforcements. But they fell back steadily; order was gradually evolved
out of the inevitable confusion; special detachments were sent to hold
critical stations, and soon the invaders were "solidified into a
semicircular position, with its right about a mile north of Gaba Tepe
and its left on the high ground over Fisherman's Hut."
All that day and all the next night the fighting continued with little
intermission. The Turks brought up reinforcements and, before our
positions could be strengthened, made a furious drive along the whole
line with 20,000 men. This lasted from eleven in the morning to three in
the afternoon, but was crushingly repulsed, the ships out in the Gulf
helping vigorously with their guns. It was succeeded by a second attack,
and, between five and six-thirty in the afternoon, by a third, both of
which failed completely and left the victors in full possession of all
the ground they had taken. In the night the Turks attacked again and
again with increasing fury, the Australian 3rd Battalion at one point
heroically repelling a deadly bayonet charge; but the morning of the
26th found our line everywhere unbroken. Our casualties had been very
heavy, but the enemy had suffered far more. They had punished us with
shrapnel, but many times when they had come surging forward in close
formation our machine guns had decimated their ranks, and in the light
of morning all the surrounding country was seen to be strewn with their
dead.
Throughout the 26th and 27th April the struggle was resumed
intermittently, day and night, but the enemy only shattered themselves
against the Australasian front as the sea shatters itself on a rock. By
now, our line had been securely entrenched, and arrangements completed
for systematically bringing ammunition, water, and supplies up the
difficult ground to the ridges; and on 28th-29th April the Australian
and New Zealand Army Corps was reinforced with four battalions of the
Royal Naval Division.
Gaba Tepe itself proved to be so strongly fortified and so amazingly
well protected with barbed-wire entanglements that the notion of
carrying it by storm had to be abandoned, but divers dominating posts
and observation stations were wrested from the Turks and added to our
possessions, and by degrees the warfare settled down to occasional
attacks by one side or the other and everlasting sniping. No longer
daring to press an attack home, the Turks devoted much of their energy
to persistent firing from caves and sheltering holes on the hill-sides,
to crawling out into the scrub and, lying low in the plentiful cover of
that uneven country, sniping the Australians and New Zealanders in their
shelter trenches. The New Zealanders, at one section of the line,
stalked a party of this kind very neatly, were on them before they could
escape and gave them a lesson with the bayonet that the few survivors
were not likely to forget in a hurry. When this lesson had been several
times repeated, at various points, the Turks took it generally to heart,
and did their sniping from a more respectful distance, or more
cunningly.
[Illustration: THE DARDANELLES–SOLDIERS TAKING THEIR HORSES FOR A BATHE.]
[Illustration: GENERAL BIRDWOOD, IN COMMAND OF THE AUSTRALIANS AT THE
DARDANELLES.]
One ingenious way of theirs was for a man to strip naked, paint himself
green and sit up in a convenient tree with a stock of provisions; and as
it was impossible to detect him among the leaves, and he only fired when
an incautious head appeared above the trenches, he would often have a
run of two or three days and do considerable damage before he could be
located and disposed of. Or he would tie umbrageous branches all about
his person and lie near-by in the open, looking like an innocent patch
of scrub, till somebody caught the flash of his gunfire or an incautious
movement betrayed him. The Australasians filled in a little time by
snaking forth to hunt for these pests, and frequently caught them
red-handed and shot them down, or caught them alive and brought them in
with all their greenery attached to them. More than once the snipers
proved to be women, who were more vicious and implacable even than the
men. All the while, on the other hand, the Australasians were doing a
great deal of thoroughly efficient sniping on their own account, for, as
Sir Ian bears witness, "the Turkish sniper is no match for the kangaroo
shooter, even at his own game."
This was the state of affairs on the 5th May, by which date the homeland
troops and the French, with a Naval Brigade formed of the Plymouth and
Deake battalions, and a Composite Division of the 2nd Australian and New
Zealand Infantry Brigades withdrawn from the section up north, above
Gaba Tepe, had established themselves impregnably right across the
southern point of the Peninsula to a depth of 5,000 yards from their
landing-places. There was sterner and more terrible work ahead of them,
down south as well as in the north. So far they had triumphed gloriously
over what seemed almost insuperable difficulties; they had won a footing
on the shores of Gallipoli at two places, and had made that footing
sure. There was still before them the more tremendous task of advancing
on those valleys and ridges of death and attacking the powerful network
of trenches that stretched in bewildering involutions from end to end of
the fifty miles of the Peninsula.
I am conscious that I have not done full justice to the unprecedented
story of this heroic landing; but nobody yet can describe it adequately,
for no one eye-witness can tell you more than of the events that
happened on the mile or so of ground where he was himself engaged, and
it is still too soon to gather all these stories into a clear and
detailed impression of the whole great event. Many who were in the thick
of it were too keenly absorbed in their own share of the action to take
notice of the doings of the men who were fighting around them. I met one
such, a wounded Australian, a few weeks ago, and tried to get from him
some account of what he had gone through, and here is as much as he
seemed to remember:
"Oh, I dunno," he said–a big, genial, reticent giant, with a bandage on
his right hand. "It was just hell, but I tell you I am glad I was there.
I wouldn't have missed it for a good deal. I was along with the covering
force in the first boats, and though there was hardly any light I reckon
there was enough for the Turks to see whereabouts we were. They kept
quiet till we were pretty well in, then they let us have it. Some of our
boys were hit, and it was too hot. So we dropped overboard and started
wading ashore. Then we found ourselves tripping into barbed wire which
they'd fixed under the water for us. We got it bad there. But we worried
through or round it somehow; I scarcely know how we managed it, but we
did. Not all of us. A lot of good chaps went under there, and it was
nasty to hear the shots plunking into the water close around you. As
soon as any of us got on to the beach we made for cover. There wasn't
too much of it. I went hands and knees over a span of open, and got
behind a jagged little line of rock. Several of our fellows were there
already, firing up at the beggars in their trenches on the side of the
hill, or the cliff, if you like to call it that. Away along the beach
there was some sharp firing; other boats had landed and there was a bit
of a scrap on, and we guessed by the cheering that our chaps were doing
all right. But directly I crawled in among the boys behind those rocks
and went to start firing, I found I couldn't use my hand. I hadn't felt
anything. I'd been carrying my gun in my left hand, and when I passed it
to the other it just slipped through as if the hand was numbed. Then I
found it was all wet and in a mess. I'd had a shot through it. I was
done. One of the others helped me to bandage it up and I lay down out of
the way. It began to be painful, and I believe I must have fainted a
bit. Things got muddled and there was a queer singing in my head, and I
woke up, so to speak, to find the R.A.M.C. boys taking care of me, and
my company was gone from behind the rocks and tearing away up the cliff
at the Turkeys' trenches. It was hard luck on me, but plenty of others
lying around had got it worse. They took me with a boatload of wounded
out to the hospital ship. They'd chipped a bit out of my leg here, too.
I didn't know that till afterwards–never felt it at the time. That's all
better again; and the hand's pretty well right now. They had to amputate
the little finger, but the rest's nearly all healed up and I reckon I
shall be able to go back to the front in another few weeks. Do I want to
go? I do that! I've still got plenty of hand to manage a gun, and I want
to pay some of them for that finger. I only saw the landing, and only a
little bit of that, but it beat everything in the fighting way that I
have ever read about. These people at home who are grousing now and
saying the job ought never to have been started, and that we ought to
slope out and leave it alone–what do they know about it? Most of them
have never seen the place, I guess, and none of them saw that fight. If
they had they might know that the boys who could do that landing can put
the whole thing bang through, if they'll shut up and back them up
properly with all the ammunition and reinforcements they will need."
A faith which is amply justified by Admiral de Robeck's reference to the
landing in his report on the operations. "At Gaba Tepe," he writes, "the
landing and the dash of the Australian Brigade for the cliffs was
magnificent; nothing could stop such men. The Australian and New Zealand
Army Corps in this, their first battle, set a standard as high as that
of any army in history, and one of which their countrymen have every
reason to be proud."
8
THE DARE-DEVIL ANZACS
CHAPTER VIII
THE DARE-DEVIL ANZACS
By the trouble that never will tame you,
By the toil that will never withhold,
Whatever the dull world name you,
I know you for Hearts of Gold.
WILL OGILVIE.
Here is no dread and no grieving;
Over us hurtles the fray:
Is yours a Heaven worth achieving,
If it be stormed in a day?
ARTHUR H. ADAMS.
On that narrow strip of ground above Gaba Tepe, the Australians and New
Zealanders have been living, at this writing, for a full six months.
They have burrowed the rugged hill-sides into human warrens, and when
they are not on duty in the trenches return to a manner of life that was
natural to the ancient cave-dwellers before the dawn of civilisation.
Here and there, between the hills, great pits that have been excavated
by bursting shells are transformed into convenient bathing-places; but
it has been a common thing to see parties of men come joyously down,
released from the firing line, to wash the feel of dust and grime from
them in the cool waters of the adjacent sea; and they have grown so
accustomed to their environment that even if the enemy breaks into
sudden activity they go on enjoying themselves there, indifferent to the
splash of bullets round about them and the occasional whine and shriek
of a shell that bursts overhead and scatters a rain of shrapnel that
does not always fall harmlessly. From the tents and huts on the beach,
where the stores are kept, they have made good roads up the cliffs to
facilitate the labour of transport. Behind their first line of trenches
they have turned the bit of territory they have won and hold so
tenaciously into a queer little town of snug caverns and bomb-proof
shelters, and have made all the place so peculiarly their own that
somebody has been happily inspired to christen the district Anzac, a
name formed from the initials of the force, the Australian and New
Zealand Army Corps; and by that name it has become officially and
generally known.
The marvel is that after living and fighting in such a dreary spot for
six months the men are still as high-spirited and as fertile in
contriving ways to amuse their leisure as if they had never known
anything better or fuller than the precarious, perilous existence on
this barren patch of land. They are not only indomitably cheerful, but
full of fight and enterprise, and indomitably determined to see this
terrible job right through, if only the homeland will back them as
efficiently as it ought to.
The foe they are holding up outnumbers them by two or three to one; and
they were never sent there with any notion that they could do more than
they have accomplished. They were sent there to keep as many of the
Turks as possible thoroughly occupied whilst the larger part of the
expeditionary force landed at Cape Hellas and fought its way up the
Peninsula to join hands with them; and they have achieved this
successfully, and more than this. "Anzac, in fact," as Sir Ian Hamilton
has told us, "was cast to play second fiddle to Cape Hellas, a part out
of harmony with the dare-devil spirit animating these warriors from the
south. So it has come about that the defensive of the Australians and
New Zealanders has always tended to take on the character of an attack."
Since the 28th April the French and British troops pushing in from
Hellas have hurled themselves again and again against the hills and
defences before the grim mountain of Achi Baba, whose great spurs,
stretching from Saros Gulf across to the Dardanelles, command the whole
southern section of the Peninsula; and again and again, after performing
prodigies of valour, strewing the soil with the enemy's dead and
capturing trenches over wide stretches of hard-fought ground, they have
been forced by the avalanche of shell and machine gun fire from the
mountain heights and the furious counter-attacks of irresistible numbers
to relinquish their winnings and fall back stubbornly to their own
positions.
[Illustration: AUSTRALIA'S SPLENDID CORPS OF MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN.
A wounded man about to be transferred from an emergency blanket sling to
the regulation stretcher.]
[Illustration: THE DARDANELLES–MEN BATHING AFTER RETURNING FROM AN ATTACK.]
Between the 6th and 12th May a series of desperate attacks on the
powerful, scientifically prepared fortifications before Achi Baba were
repelled, but certain strategical points and some hundreds of yards of
front were taken and successfully held. One such attack, which saw some
of the most Homeric fighting that has been done even on this terrible
peninsula, lasted almost continuously for three days ending on 8th May.
The French and British forces all took part in it, and among the latter
were the 2nd Australian and the New Zealand Infantry Brigades. These
were at first kept in reserve, but on the evening of the 6th the
Lancashire Fusiliers, who had been trapped in a wood on the left wing of
the advance and suffered heavy losses from concealed machine guns, were
transferred to the base, and the New Zealand Brigade was sent to replace
them, with orders to go forward in the morning through the line held
during the night by the 88th Brigade, and develop the attack towards
Krithia.
On the 7th, Sir Ian Hamilton reports, "at 10.15 a.m. heavy fire from
ships and batteries was opened on the whole front, and at 10.30 a.m. the
New Zealand Brigade began to move, meeting with strenuous opposition
from the enemy, who had received his reinforcements." They advanced
beyond the wood, or clump of fir trees, in which the Lancashires had
suffered so badly, and by 1.30 had gained about 200 yards beyond the
most advanced trenches that had been occupied by the 88th Brigade. Then
the French reported that they could not advance up the spur they were to
storm on the right till the British had made further progress. So at 4
p.m. Sir Ian gave orders that "the whole line, reinforced by the 2nd
Australian Brigade, would fix bayonets, slope arms, and move on Krithia
precisely at 5.30." After a quarter of an hour of effective bombardment
by the heavy artillery and the guns of the ships, the movement was
promptly and vigorously carried out. It was characteristic of the alert,
self-reliant spirit of all the Australasians that "some of the companies
of the New Zealand regiments did not get their orders in time, but,
acting on their own initiative, they pushed on as soon as the heavy
howitzers ceased firing, thus making the whole advance simultaneous."
Then the French swept forward and stormed the first Turkish redoubt on
the ridge that faced them with a wonderful élan that was not to be
baulked of its object. Decimated by shrapnel and machine guns, they were
driven back, but rallied and returned to the charge with redoubled fury,
were beaten back, and re-formed and dashed ahead once more, and as the
darkness fell "a small supporting column of French soldiers was seen
silhouetted against the sky as they charged upwards along the crest of
the ridge of the Kereves Dere." Then the night closed down, and all the
battlefield and whatever was doing on it were hidden in blackest
darkness.
"Not until next morning did any reliable detail come to hand of what had
happened. The New Zealanders' firing line had marched over the cunningly
concealed enemy's machine guns without seeing them, and these, reopening
on our supports as they came up, caused them heavy losses. But the first
line pressed on and arrived within a few yards of the Turkish trenches
which had been holding up our advance beyond the fir wood. There they
dug themselves in. The Australian Brigade had advanced through the
Composite Brigade and, in spite of heavy losses from shrapnel, machine
gun, and rifle fire, had progressed from 300 to 400 yards."
The result of those three days of stubborn fighting was a net gain of
600 yards on the British right, and 400 on the left and centre; and the
French had captured the redoubt they had fought for so heroically as
well as a considerable area of ground. In the next two days the Turks
made repeated and costly efforts, harried on by their German leaders, to
regain their losses; but their prodigal cannonading and reckless
hand-to-hand combats were unavailing and they were everywhere repulsed.
The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps "strengthened their grip on
Turkish soil," and on the whole, says Sir Ian, "now for the first time I
felt that we had planted a fairly firm foothold upon the point of the
Gallipoli Peninsula.
"The determined valour shown by these two brigades," he notes in
concluding this phase of his dispatch, "the New Zealand Brigade under
Brigadier-General F. E. Johnston, and the 2nd Australian Infantry
Brigade under Brigadier-General the Hon. J. W. McCay, are worthy of
particular praise. Their losses were correspondingly heavy, but, in
spite of fierce counter-attacks by numerous fresh troops, they stuck to
what they had won with admirable tenacity."
All along the line they had dug themselves in securely, and remained
immovable. The Turks threw away thousands of men in fruitless assaults
on the new positions; occasionally the British or the French by sudden
rushes captured here and there an enemy trench and scored small local
successes, but more and more the fighting became a matter of
reconnaissance, of sapping and mining, till by the first week of June
both sides had settled down to the dogged conditions of siege warfare.
During these same weeks the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at
Anzac, between Gaba Tepe and Saribair, had held their little half-moon
of conquered land with its 1,100 yards of diameter, and were not to be
ousted from any part of it by intrepid massed attacks or by a constant
shelling of their trenches and the beach beyond, often with as many as
over 1,000 shells in an hour. How many bayonet charges succeeded these
merciless bombardments, how many fierce night-attacks boiled over from
the enemy trenches, which were everywhere within twenty and thirty yards
of the Anzac front, to be unfailingly dammed all along the line and
hurled back broken, decimated, defeated, I have given up trying to
count. Over and over again, when the Anzacs hurled the Turks back in
this fashion they swarmed out of their defences, chased the flying foe,
leaped after him into his own trenches, drove him out of them and kept
him out till he brought up a continuous stream of reinforcements and by
sheer weight of numbers forced the Australians and New Zealanders to
give up their new possessions and withdraw once more to their old ones.
The fiercest, most sanguinary fighting went on round about such advanced
positions as Pope's, Courtney's, and Quinn's Posts–especially about the
last, which was won and lost and went on changing hands at frequent
intervals until it was finally taken by the Anzacs, and strengthened and
strongly garrisoned and permanently retained. On 9th May the Turkish
trenches in front of Quinn's were carried at the point of the bayonet,
but at dawn next morning the enemy came hurtling back in such multitudes
that the Anzacs had to retire to the Post, and stubbornly repel a hot
attack upon that. Day after day the same sort of thing continued with
little cessation, here and at all sections of the line. Between the
attacks there were endless bomb-throwing, tempests of shells from big
guns and howitzers, sniping, withering outbursts of machine gun fire,
subtle sapping and mining, in which now one side, then the other
successfully blew up trenches, and, dashing for the breach, made grim
onslaughts that had to be held off and beaten and cleared out of the way
before the shattered defences could be repaired. In our second and third
and fourth line trenches the men might sit in dug-outs and bomb-proof
shelters and yarn and play cards or write letters or sleep as
comfortable under the roaring, whistling hail of shells and bullets and
almost as safe as if they were at home; but some of the foremost
trenches were little more than giant gullies on the verge of steep
precipices, and if they more or less commanded the enemy's positions in
the valley, they were in turn commanded more or less by the enemy's guns
and trenches on higher ridges farther in-shore.
The stories of individual heroism and self-sacrifice–of the carrying of
wounded comrades in under fire, of scouts crawling out on exposed
heights and calmly completing their observations after they had been
discovered and become targets for hundreds of rifles, of the bringing of
supplies of food and ammunition to the firing line over hills and bare
plateaus that were swept by the enemy's guns–these are numberless. There
were bombing parties who went out unobtrusively at twilight or at dawn
to raid an apparently inaccessible trench on the opposite hill-side and
silence a troublesome gun, and as often as not they succeeded, though
few of them returned to tell the tale; there was a doughty little
remnant of Anzac heroes who fought and slew terribly and had to be shot
or bayoneted to the last man before the Turks could get back into a
trench that had been newly wrested from them. And there is a story of an
unnamed New Zealander that stands out even amidst the splendour of the
rest. This man, during an attack in force, found himself isolated and
cut off from his friends. He was on a high, bald promontory, and the
Turks were swarming on all sides of him. Escape was impossible; he had
been wounded and left behind, overlooked by his comrades when they were
compelled to retire; and there seemed nothing for it but surrender. The
full strength of the reinforced Turks was unknown to our commanders, but
from his lofty eminence the New Zealander could see the oncoming hordes
flooding the lower levels, and proceeded to take careful observations.
And a chief scout of the New Zealanders who, from the distance, had
detected the solitary figure aloft there was suddenly amazed to see the
man begin signalling with his arms; he was signalling information as to
the position and numbers of the Turks. How many shots reached their mark
in him nobody will know; twice he fell, but each time he regained his
feet to semaphore with his arms and continue his message. "The last shot
disabled one arm," says the scout, "yet the dying man raised himself and
completed the message before he dropped dead." If one started to repeat
such stories one would never know where to end, and there is the less
need for me to make the attempt since I hear that the best of them are
now being gathered into a book of their own by another hand.
Through all that thunderous storm of conflict, the incessant attacking
and counter-attacking, our losses were appallingly heavy, but those of
the Turks exceeded them enormously. A diary found on a dead Turkish
officer showed that in the stern engagement on the 10th May alone, two
Ottoman regiments lost 3,000 in killed and wounded. They had been mown
down and bayoneted in tens of thousands round Anzac and in the titanic
struggle at the southern end of the Peninsula, but they had been so
reinforced that their power had increased rather than diminished; and so
by degrees at both places the opposing forces fought each other to
something of a standstill. All the Turkish boasts that they would fling
the invaders into the sea proved futile; all our attempts to advance
beyond the territory on which we were immovably established proved
equally unavailing; and by degrees things at Anzac as well as between
Cape Hellas and Achi Baba settled down to that condition of siege
warfare.
It was not a condition that suited the temperaments of these active,
energetic fellows; they were not the sort to find much satisfaction in
systematically peppering the other side with lead and wearing them down
from behind the safe shelter of barricades; but they were practical
enough to see that for the time there was no other effective course open
to them, and, with occasional sudden sallies into the midst of the
enemy, when they killed a few and captured a few and gathered in some
guns, they grimly suited themselves to a state of things that did not
suit them, and made the best of it.
The Turks knew enough of them by now to have a wholesome respect for
their fighting qualities, and seemed contented to shell them
occasionally from a distance or let them alone, so long as they did not
come out and make trouble. And the fact that this was the hottest period
of the year may have helped to reconcile the Anzacs to the necessity of
going slow for a while. The blazing heat, indeed, was more intolerable
than the fire of the Turks, and to cope with it they discarded one
garment after another until, at length, they were to be seen on duty or
amusing themselves, when they were not lying cool in holes and shelters,
dressed in nothing but a pair of breeches cut down to "shorts" which did
not nearly reach to their knees. Some, with a lingering sense of
propriety, or tender feet, retained their boots and socks, but others
abandoned even these. Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, who saw them, says, "I
suppose that since the dervishes made their last charge at Omdurman no
such naked army has ever been seen in the field."
It must have puzzled the Turks considerably to find themselves
confronted by trenches filled with apparently naked warriors, and to
ascertain, when they came to the test, that these naked warriors were as
tough and as full of ginger as the men in khaki who had mysteriously
vanished. Possibly they suspected this was a new wild race of secretly
landed reinforcements from some remote end of the British Empire,
especially after a few weeks, when the skins of the Anzacs had become so
tanned and burnt by the sun that they were as dark as the Maoris. And of
the Maoris the Turks had all along had suspicions, even when that
contingent was clothed in full khaki. For they have weird war-cries and
a weird dance of their own, and to hear and see these mysteries in
operation is calculated to disquiet those who are not accustomed to
them. On special occasions, after the General had been addressing them
and complimenting them on their fighting ability, or when they had
caught a rumour of the joyous possibility that they would quit the
monotonous trenches and move out against the enemy to-morrow, they liked
to indulge in this dance by way of expressing the intensity of their
satisfaction. An officer of the New Zealand contingent described the
dance in _The Times_ in the following terms:
"The Maoris, officers and privates, lined up. With protruding tongues
and a rhythmic slapping of hands on thighs and chests, with a deep
concerted 'a-a-ah,' ending abruptly, they began the Maori haka–the war
dance. Shrill and high the leader intoned the solo parts, and the chorus
crashed out. As the dancers became more animated the beat of their feet
echoed through the gullies of Gallipoli. The leader now declaimed
fiercely, now his voice sank to an eerie whisper, still perfectly
audible, and as he crouched low to the ground so the men behind him
posed. Suddenly, after a concerted crash of voices, the chant ended with
a sibilant hiss, a stamp of the right foot, and the detonation of palms
slapping the high ground."
From their trenches, less than a hundred yards away, the Turks could not
see the dancers, for the dancers knew better than to show themselves,
but they must have heard the strange, rhythmic stamping of their feet
and their startling outcries, and you get a notion of what they must
have thought of them from a passage which the same New Zealand officer
quotes from a Constantinople newspaper of about that date in which the
Ottoman journalist remarks that he is still without information as to
the composition of the enemy's forces, but has reason to believe that
they consist of black men from Africa and Australia, and "thus the
Straits for the first time in history have had to endure attacks by
cannibals." So it is worth adding that though the Maoris delight, as
they should, in keeping up the old customs of their race, theirs is a
contingent of as gallant and chivalrous men as any in the British
millions, and the leader in that particular war dance was a highly
educated gentleman who has the distinction of being an M.A. and an LL.D.
The state of siege lasted for some two months, and I have not spoken to
any man who endured it and was prepared to say that he wished it had
been longer.
"I was fed up with it," said a bronzed giant, convalescing from his
wounds in London, with whom I foregathered by chance in a railway
carriage. "We were sick of sitting in our holes potting an odd Turk when
he bobbed his head up. We wanted to be getting ahead. The boys down by
Hellas had got a tough job, too, but we just prayed that they might make
a big push up and we might be ordered to go out and cut a way through to
meet them. It was no fun, living like rabbits and doing nothing, or next
to nothing, and when I was hit by accident while I was fooling around,
having a dip at Hell Spit, I wasn't sorry to get out of it for a change.
I should have been, though, if I'd known we were in for a real, good
scrap a few days later."
That was a pretty general feeling, he said; the inactivity, the sameness
of the trench fighting, the sense of being cooped up within narrow
limits and not given a chance to do anything, was infinitely boring.
Everybody was impatient to be moving, and would sooner have gone on at
all risks than have stopped there strategically marking time. Moreover,
there was a shortage of tobacco and of the smaller luxuries of
civilisation that might have helped to make that dull period of waiting
endurable. You get a vivid glimpse of this in the report of Mr. W.
Jessop, who went out in charge of a mission from the Y.M.C.A., which has
done such magnificent service in looking after the welfare of the troops
in all the fighting areas, with comforts for the men at the Dardanelles.
"It was pathetic," he says, "to see the eagerness with which the men
viewed our preparations and the way they came about the tent.... I
looked up two batteries of artillery I had been told about, and took
with me several pounds of Havelock tobacco and some pipes. To the first
of these men I came across I held up a tin of the tobacco and asked him
if it was a friend of his (Havelock is Australian tobacco, and very
popular in the Colonies). His eyes glistened, and then he said, 'It's
all I have' (holding up a sovereign), 'but if you will give me a pipe
with it I shall be glad to exchange, as I have not had a smoke for three
weeks.' When I told him the pipe and tobacco were his for nothing, he
was greatly touched. I went round to about fifty of these men and made
similar gifts."
But such minor inconveniences would not have worried them if it had not
been for the wearisome waiting for something to happen; and when the
word went round that a new British force was to make a surprise landing
higher up the gulf at Suvla Bay, and that the Anzacs were to create a
diversion and keep the Turks fully occupied whilst it was done, there
was no more grousing; it was exactly what they wanted.
The unquenchable ardour of the men was of a piece with the splendid
spirit of brotherhood and good comradeship that prevailed among all
ranks. It could not well have been otherwise, led by such officers as
they had and under a commander so gallant and so genially considerate of
them as General Birdwood, who from the outset, as Sir Ian Hamilton
testifies, "has been the soul of Anzac. Not for one single day has he
ever quitted his post. Cheery and full of human sympathy, he has spent
many hours of each twenty-four inspiring the defenders of the front
trenches, and if he does not know every soldier in his force, at least
every soldier believes he is known to his chief." He was invariably
under fire with his troops, and wounded in one engagement had his wound
dressed on the field and refused to retire. No wonder his men are
devoted to him, and that when you mention his name to any among those
who are here, invalided home, they answer you with the warmest
enthusiasm.
In preparation for the new movement fresh British and Indian troops had
been landed at Anzac under cover of darkness two nights in succession.
The Turks were aware of this; they had shelled the transports and the
beach unstintedly, but so deftly were the landing parties handled by the
naval service that the landings were successfully carried out with only
two casualties. On the 6th August the British at Cape Helles commenced a
heavy and continuous bombardment of the Turkish positions round Krithia,
below the Achi Baba heights; at the same time the Anzacs got busy with
guns and howitzers along the whole of their front to discourage the
enemy from dispatching reinforcements in any direction.
[Illustration: HEROES FROM THE DARDANELLES.
Wounded from the Dardanelles, leaving the hospital train in Egypt.]
[Illustration: HEROES OF THE DARDANELLES.]
During the night of the 6th a vast array of transports, accompanied by
warships, destroyers, and smaller craft, passed quietly up the Gulf of
Saros and glided into Suvla Bay, six or seven miles north of Anzac Cove.
All along the other side of the Dardanelles, from Kum Kale to Chanak,
and at Anzac and in the southern extremity of Gallipoli, the Turks were
either under attack or on the alert and expecting it. But here, at Suvla
Bay, they were anticipating no danger, and hundreds of small boats had
rushed the invading force safely ashore before they were aware of their
coming. An observation post was taken by surprise; its garrison of fifty
surrendered, and the British had marched six miles inland and it was
getting on towards evening before an enemy force came into view
hastening forward to oppose the advance. The Turks had been warned of
what had happened, and before next morning had swiftly concentrated as
many as 70,000 men to bar the way. All night there were numerous
spasmodic and furious local fights for points of vantage, and all night
the two forces were rapidly throwing out barbed-wire entanglements and
digging themselves in, and as soon as the day came the battle developed
in deadliest earnest.
Both sides were well supplied with artillery, and all day the merciless
struggle raged with growing fury; in repeated attacks and
counter-attacks first the Turkish, then the British lines swayed this
way and that, but always straightened out again and could at no point be
broken through. A dozen times the Turks flung themselves forward in
dense masses, and when they shattered and came thundering in over and
past the wire entanglements, the British leaped from their trenches to
meet them and fell upon them with spades and bayonets till they fled
panic-stricken, leaving their dead and wounded heaped about the ground.
The enemy had the advantage in position; they were on the higher levels,
and they were superior in numbers; but when night fell again over the
field of carnage, if the British had made no further advance they still
held every inch of their line, and they passed the night in entrenching
it more firmly.
The plan of campaign was for one section of the force to push on
straight across the Peninsula whilst another section moved to the
south-east towards Anzac, whence the Australians and New Zealanders were
to fight a way up and join them.
The Anzacs carried out their part of this arrangement with a dash and
daring that were irresistible. They had been reinforced by a brigade of
Gurkhas and by regiments of our new armies, and it was resolved to make
a beginning by sending the First Australian Infantry Brigade to attack
the Lone Pine plateau. "The Third Brigade," writes Captain C. E. W.
Bean, the Official Press Representative with the Australian forces
there, "had immortalised itself on the day of the landing–they were the
miners' brigade from Broken Hill and the gold-fields and Queensland and
Tasmania. The Second Brigade–the Victorians–had made their wonderful
charge at Helles, when for a quarter of an hour they went straight as a
die for 1,000 yards across country as bare as the palm of your hand, in
the face of shrapnel and withering rifle fire. Now, at last, it was the
chance of the First Brigade–the men from New South Wales."
The officers' whistles shrilled the signal, and in a moment the First
Brigade was out and making a bee line for the low, scrub-covered hill on
which the Turks were entrenched; but when they came to the trenches they
found them stoutly roofed with logs and timbers, and spread out
scattered along them looking for a way in, fired at through loopholes
and by machine guns, and pelted with shrapnel from a battery in the
rear. But they were not there to be beaten. Here and there along the
roof man-holes had been left; some of the Anzacs dropped recklessly down
these small openings ("like burglars through a sky-light," says Mr.
Bean) on to the Turks below; others by sheer force of muscle tore up
logs or planks to make an entry and flung themselves in and clubbed
their rifles or got to work with their bayonets, and after a short,
sharp fight the enemy either lay dead in their burrow or were in full
flight up their communication trenches. Other of the Australians had run
right on over the roof of logs and as swiftly captured the second trench
and thence poured on into the communication trenches to stop the fleeing
Turks or give chase and shoot them as they fled.
In other parts of the field the battle was spreading mightily and the
Australians and New Zealanders, with the Gurkhas and their new comrades
from the homeland, were carrying all before them. The Maoris and New
Zealand Mounted Rifles, fighting afoot, cleared the foot-hills with the
bayonet, and soon over all the lower hills, in the rugged gullies and
ravines and up the sides of the Anafarta height, the fighting became
general, gathering tempestuously in sound and fury.
For four days and nights it continued with little intermission–desperate
and bloody fighting, much of it, with bayonets and clubbed rifles; and
steadily the combined force of Anzacs, English, and Indians forced their
way up the steep slopes towards the ridge that was pouring a blasting
hail of lead and fire down upon them perpetually. Trench after trench on
the savagely contested ascent was taken and left behind, choked with
Turkish dead. Generals and colonels, armed with rifles, fought shoulder
to shoulder with their men, and many of them, including General Baldwin,
who through the nightmare of those four days of carnage fought
heroically beside his men, were killed; but by the evening of the 10th
August, though the formidable heights of Anafarta, which had been
stormed with almost incredible heroism by the Australians, the New
Zealanders, and some English regiments, for lack of support, could not
be held, all the lower ground on the western side was in our possession,
and the army from Anzac Cove had triumphantly linked up with the troops
that had landed at Suvla Bay.
Here they dug themselves in; a lull of exhaustion fell over the
contending armies, and the British profited by the interval to
consolidate their greatly extended lines and secure their
communications.
The original purpose of the Suvla Bay landing had been to strike right
across the Peninsula at that point, cut the Turks off from their
supplies, so that they would be compelled to abandon or weaken the
defences of Achi Baba and thus make it possible for the British and
French at Helles to drive a path over that impregnable mountain and
sweep up the length of Gallipoli and crush the enemy between our
northern and southern forces. The scheme is said to have failed through
the blundering of one officer at Suvla, who should have rushed his corps
promptly and straightway through and seized certain dominating heights
before the Turks were aware of the surprise attack and could rally to
make any effective resistance.
We are still very much in the dark about the details of this enterprise.
All we know is that whatever blundering there may have been in the
higher command, the men of all ranks and all regiments met every demand
that was made upon them with the most unflinching steadiness and
acquitted themselves with a valour and efficiency that no troops in the
world could excel. "The Anzac Corps fought like lions," says Mr. Ashmead
Bartlett, "and accomplished a feat of arms, in climbing those heights,
almost without a parallel.... It was a combat of giants in a giant
country, and if one point stands out more than another it is the
marvellous hardihood, tenacity, and reckless courage shown by the
Australians and New Zealanders."
This magnificent tribute is amply confirmed by the special order that
was issued by Sir Ian Hamilton whilst the great battle was still
unfinished:
"The Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, desires
formally to record the fine feat of arms achieved by the troops under
the command of Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood during the battle
of Sari Bair. The fervent desire of all ranks to close with the enemy,
the impetuosity of their onset, and the steadfast valour with which they
maintained the long struggle, these will surely make appeal to their
fellow-countrymen all over the world. The gallant capture of the almost
impregnable Lone Pine trenches by the Australian Division, and the
equally gallant defence of the position against repeated
counter-attacks, are exploits which will live in history. The determined
assaults carried out from other parts of the Australian Division's line
were also of inestimable service to the whole force, preventing as they
did the movement of large bodies of reinforcements to the northern
flank.
"The troops under the command of Major-General Sir A. J. Godley, and
particularly the New Zealand and Australian Division, were called upon
to carry out one of the most difficult military operations that have
ever been attempted–a night march and assault by several columns in
intricate mountainous country, strongly entrenched, and held by a
numerous and determined enemy. Their brilliant conduct during this
operation and the success they achieved have won for them a reputation
as soldiers of whom any country must be proud. To the Australian and New
Zealand Army Corps, therefore, and to those who were associated with
that famous corps in the battle of Sari Bair–the Maoris, Sikhs, Gurkhas,
and the new troops of the Divisions from the Old Country–Sir Ian
Hamilton tenders his appreciation of their efforts, his admiration of
their gallantry, and his thanks for their achievements. It is an honour
to command a force which numbers such men as these in its ranks, and it
is the Commander-in-Chief's high privilege to acknowledge that honour."
There was memorable fighting again above Helles on the 21st August, when
a Yeomanry corps, in action for the first time, delivered a determined
assault on the hill known as Hill 70, charging right up to the summit
without a halt, and chasing the Turks down the other side. But the enemy
clung on to one strongly fortified knoll, and in the night enfiladed the
victors with such a deadly fire from artillery and machine guns that
they were forced to abandon their hard-won position, and by daylight had
withdrawn to their own lines.
Since then, there, as on the seven-mile front from Anzac to Suvla Bay,
the war has resolved itself again into steady trench fighting and a
state of siege. Since then, too, there has been a change in the command,
and General Sir C. C. Monro has succeeded Sir Ian Hamilton, who has
returned home, honoured with the goodwill and admiration of troops whose
confidence in him is unshakable; and in these latter days of October the
next step in the Dardanelles expedition is still a matter of rumour and
conjecture.
9
THE AUSTRALASIAN IDEAL
[Illustration: THE DARDANELLES OPERATIONS.
Ambulance wagons passing through gully.]
[Illustration: THE DARDANELLES–AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND TROOPS
IN A RAVINE.]
CHAPTER IX
THE AUSTRALASIAN IDEAL
Knights-errant of the human race,
The Quixotes of to-day,
For man as man they claim a place,
Prepare the tedious way.
BERNARD O'DOWD.
Strong to defend our right,
Proud in all nations' sight,
Lowly in Thine–
One in all noble fame,
Still be our path the same:
Onward in Freedom's name,
Upward in Thine.
BRUNTON STEPHENS.
It is so easy to be wise after the event that I don't suppose many of us
are much impressed by the aggressive wisdom of those critics in our
midst who are still noisily telling us of the naval and military
blunders made in the inception and development of the Dardanelles
campaign and with what beautiful simplicity they might all have been
avoided. One has no patience with such chatter and no use for such cheap
sagacity. You cannot remedy any errors by wasting time in learned talk
about them; there is only one way of atonement, and that is to put them
at once behind you and go resolutely on, seeing to it that they are not
committed again. Even Napoleon made his mistakes, for the ablest
commander is not infallible. And it is the most youthful folly to
belittle our own leaders and urge them to take lessons from the perfect
organisation and supreme military tactics of our enemy when we know that
Belgium, Calais, Paris, Riga, and a score of other places stand witness
to that enemy's crude blunderings and the failure of his arms. I
remember how in the early days of the war certain of our very clamorous
newspapers were filled with joy over the complete breakdown of German
diplomacy: German diplomacy, they said, had not had the skill to detach
Russia from France, so that they might have made easy war on France
alone; they had failed to keep Britain out of it; they had failed to
keep Italy out of it; they had failed to capture the sympathies of
America; and those journals poured scorn on the German diplomatic
service as a pompous and unintelligent futility. Yet when Turkey sided
with the Huns, when Bulgaria joined them, and when Greece insisted on
remaining neutral, these same sapient papers cried out lustily that
British diplomacy was fumbling and worthless, and broke into pious
wishes that we had diplomats as clever and triumphant as the Germans.
Which means, of course, that their failure with three of the smaller
Powers makes our diplomats inferior to those who failed with four of the
greatest.
Let us have done with such pitiful nonsense, and get on with the work we
mean to do. Let us make up our minds that the Germans will have their
full share of incidental victories; no sensible person ever dreamt that
they would not. It is the big, inexperienced schoolboy idea, this, that
your side is losing if it is not winning all the time. The adult mind
knows that the way of conquest is never so smoothly paved; that the best
and bravest, coping with a powerful and subtle enemy, must needs be
often baffled, but what matters is that he is only baffled to fight
better, knowing that if he does so no check is a defeat, for in the long
run it is only the final victory that counts.
There have been rumours that, because the Suvla Bay attempt did not
achieve its objective and, for the moment, a condition of stalemate
prevails there, the Dardanelles campaign is to be abandoned, but they
find no favour in Australia or New Zealand. There were indignant
protests against such a course in the Australasian press, protests that
the gallant fellows who had laid down their lives on that battle-torn
peninsula should not be allowed so to have died in vain; that the work
to which they and their dauntless comrades had set their hands should be
carried through determinedly and their high self-sacrifice justified.
Yet, they added, it was a question for the military authorities, and, at
the worst, they would loyally accept their decision. You may take it
that Mr. Hughes, the new Australian Premier, replying to questions in
the House of Representatives at the end of October, spoke for all
Australasia when he said, amidst tumultuous cheering, "Our business is
to carry out the instructions of the Imperial Government, and to give
the Government the enthusiastic support we owe it as a duty. We must
refrain from criticising the actions of men placed in a position of
frightful responsibility, and also from listening to the
thousand-and-one critics who have not the slightest authority to speak."
Obviously, if those critics are as expert as they would have us believe
they should be wearing khaki and utilising their transcendent ability in
doing things better, instead of dissipating it in unhelpful words.
The fact that Canada has just completed arrangements to bring her forces
in the field up to a total of 250,000, and that Australia and New
Zealand are recruiting and training and enlarging their armies so
rapidly that they will soon have reached the same total, and do not mean
to stop there, is sufficient indication of the stern spirit of resolve
in which the Britains oversea are facing this great issue which no
half-measures can decide. And we of the homeland, who do not take our
opinions or all our information from our newspapers, know that the soul
of the old country marches with them, and will march with them
dauntlessly step by step to the end, however far off it may be.
If it were otherwise–if we were the cravens that a few of our noisy,
irresponsible journalists would make us out to be–do you imagine that
the manhood of those new countries, sons of the great men who were our
fathers also, would have risen so spontaneously to save from destruction
the Empire of a generation so unworthy of their past, and the
civilisation for which we and our Allies stand? They are not out for
territory, they are not out for conquest; they are the vanguard of the
new democracy, and they are out in the place that is theirs, in the
forefront of the battle, fighting and dying for the highest ideals of
the human race, for the freedom and natural rights of our common
humanity. The German junkerdom, the Prussian militarism and out-of-date
war-lust that is abhorrent to us, is ten times more abhorrent to them,
for in their ideas of freedom and equal human brotherhood they have
outstripped us. They are less shackled than we are by old use and wont,
by conventions and precedents that hamper our onward movement; but they
know their ideal is ours, for they lit their torch at our fire, and they
are breasting the onslaught beside us at this hour because they know it,
and could by no means stand aside and see that fire trampled out under
the hoofs of a race in whom the brute savagery and primitive ideals of
war and domination are so damnably renascent.
All the blasphemous and discredited formulas and political doctrines
that oppressed our peoples in a past whose ancient tyrannies and
legalised inhumanities we have long repented, still survive with more
degenerate and diabolical manifestations in twentieth century Germany.
The gospel of the divine right of kings flourishes there, and the whole
nation would seem to have been so dehumanised in their training that, in
the main, they have accepted the dicta of their most modern professors
that the State is above morality and can do no wrong; that war is a
beautiful and a glorious thing; that a country clothes itself in dignity
and honour by crushing and pillaging its neighbours and reducing them to
subjection, and to that god-like end is justified in violating treaties,
and outraging and massacring the innocent and the helpless. They are so
incapable of realising the shame of these things that the horror of the
civilised world at the Belgian martyrdoms, the sinking of unprotected
passenger ships laden with civilian men and women, the wanton slaughter
by bombs and shells of non-combatants in unfortified towns, and the
callous assassination of Edith Cavell, genuinely surprises them: they
are so wholly brutalised that they are not even sensible of their
brutality. The growing demand among the humaner races which are perforce
in arms against them that, before peace is made, strict justice should
be done upon the barbarous breakers of international law, as it is done
on those minor criminals that break national laws, strikes them as
purely fantastic. They would sanctify murder when a king or his
ministers commit it, and make it accursed only when it is done by lesser
men. They have not yet advanced far enough in the path of reason to have
a glimmering suspicion that the man, crowned or uncrowned, who
deliberately plans a war of aggression for the aggrandisement of his own
State and, after years of cunning and dastardly preparation, falls with
fire and slaughter on his victim, is an outlaw and a criminal against
the common laws of decent nations. We realise, in these days, that,
except when it is in self-defence and for the freedom not of one race
but of all, war is plain murder, and the wholesale murderer should and
must be amenable on that count at the bar of civilisation. The surest
way to end war is to strip it of its glamour, treat it as the
blackguardly crime it is, and punish the criminals. The German savages
have not even stopped short at murder on the field of battle, and I for
one shall lose some faith in the democracies of the world if, in due
season, von Bissing does not take his stand in the dock of an
international police-court and undergo his trial and sentence for the
assassination of Edith Cavell, as any common butcher would for any
common murder; and there are those as high and higher than von Bissing
who must, unless we would make the name of justice a byword, take their
turn in the same dock and answer in the same fashion for the hundreds of
unarmed men and blameless women and children who have been
systematically done to death in cold blood away from the fighting line.
It is our duty to make it clear, in this enlightened age, that no State
is above morality; that there are natural, human laws which cannot be
broken with impunity, and are not to be set aside by any the most
self-important State that ever reared itself under heaven. This feeling
is growing in intensity in the hearts and minds of Britain and her
Allies, and nowhere is it held with a more passionate conviction than
among the great democratic peoples of Canada, New Zealand, and
Australia.
"I am one of those," said Mr. W. A. Holman, the Premier of New South
Wales, speaking the other day at Sydney, "who hope that when victory is
achieved there will be no weakness on the part of the Allied
Governments. I hope, when we have gained peace, the Allied Governments,
acting in the interests of civilisation, will avail themselves of so
unprecedented an opportunity to declare that the public law of Europe is
no longer a law without sanction and without punishment, but that those
who break the public law of Europe are to be treated like criminals who
break any other law. I hope we shall have the pleasure of seeing some of
the members of the German Ministry placed upon their trial for wilful
murder and brought to account for the various acts committed at their
instigation. I am as confident about the ultimate result of this
struggle as is any one here. I have no fear and no doubt. I have never
wavered. But if there are those who doubt, let me say this: it is better
that we should perish in the trenches than contemplate the possibility
of succumbing in the struggle that is now before us."
That is the authentic voice of Australia–of all the young democracies
who are joint heirs and will more than ever in the future be joint
sharers with us of the destinies of the British Empire. They have some
sentimental regard for the old country, but they are not drawn to us in
this business merely by that; their motives are higher, their ideals
rooted in a deeper emotion. They have turned their backs on the night
and set their faces towards the morning, and they are not fighting so
much to save the British Empire as the hopes of human progress that
would go down with it if it fell. Germany, who is leprous with iniquity,
declares herself pure and noble in God's sight. Great Britain is faulty
enough, as all human institutions are; she has done many grievous wrongs
in the past, has been unjust to smaller nations and tyrannous to the
weak, but she has become conscious of this, has the grace to acknowledge
it, and has endeavoured and is endeavouring to atone for some of her
unrighteousness. In this frank self-knowledge lies her hope of
salvation. We no longer live for the crude aims and glories that
inspired us three or four centuries ago; we have, as a nation, grown
beyond them a little, have climbed by painful degrees a little higher
out of the primal slime. We have blundered into dirty ways, but have not
been contented to wallow in them. Through all our divagations we have,
in some short-sighted fashion, followed the gleam; we are still far from
arriving at a realisation of the later ideal that has subdued us, but we
are still moving towards it, and the chief reason why our great
self-governing Colonies are with us in this crisis is that they are
travelling the same road, towards the same goal.
But I despair of saying clearly in words of my own just what it is that
has secured to us the glorious loyalty of our kindred of Greater
Britain. Members of the same family, they are under no illusions about
us; they are familiar with our weaknesses, our hypocrisies, our
injustices; but it is our pride that knowing the worst as well as the
best of us, as those of a family circle must, they still have faith in
our ultimate right-mindedness, and can give reason for their faith.
There are hints of that reason scattered about their literature, but I
don't think it has ever been more fearlessly, more fully, or more
poignantly revealed than it is by John Farrel in his "Australia to
England"–one of the greatest things in Australian poetry:
... By lust of flesh and lust of gold,
And depth of loins and hairy breadth
Of breast, and hands to take and hold,
And boastful scorn of pain and death,
And something more of manliness
Than tamer men, and growing shame
Of shameful things, and something less
Of final faith in sword and flame;
By many a battle fought for wrong,
And many a battle fought for right,
So have you grown august and strong,
Magnificent in all men's sight–
A voice for which the kings have ears,
A face the craftiest statesmen scan,
A mind to mould the after years,
And mint the destinies of man.
Red sins were yours: the avid greed
Of pirate fathers, smocked as Grace,
Sent Judas missionaries to read
Christ's word to many a feebler race–
False priests of Truth who made their tryst
At Mammon's shrine and reft and slew–
Some hands you taught to pray to Christ
Have prayed His curse to rest on you....
But praise to you, and more than praise
And thankfulness, for some things done,
And blessedness and length of days
As long as earth shall last, or sun!
You first among the peoples spoke
Sharp words and angry questionings
Which burst the bonds and shed the yoke
That made your men the slaves of kings!
You set and showed the whole world's school
The lesson it will surely read,
That each one ruled has right to rule–
The alphabet of Freedom's creed
Which slowly wins its proselytes
And makes uneasier many a throne;
You taught them all to prate of Rights
In language growing like your own.
And now your holiest and best
And wisest dream of such a tie
As, holding hearts from East to West,
Shall strengthen while the years go by;
And of a time when every man
For every fellow-man will do
His kindliest, working by the plan
God set him. May the dream come true!
And greater dreams! O Englishmen,
Be sure the safest time of all
For even the mightiest State is when
Not even the least desires its fall!
Make England stand supreme for aye
Because supreme for peace and good,
Warned well by wrecks of yesterday
That strongest feet may slip in blood!
_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
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