GLIMPSES OF ANZAC

It’s the monotony we revile, not—to a like degree—hard work or hard fare. To look out on the same stretch of beach or the same patch of trench wall and the same terraces of hostile black and grey sandbags day after day is to be wearied. There is the same sitting in the same trench, shelled by the same guns, manned, perhaps (though that we endeavour to avert), by the same Turks. Unhappily it is not the same men of ours that they maim and kill daily.

And if one’s dug-out lies on a seaward slope there is, every morning, the same stretch of the lovely Ægean, with the same two islands standing over in the west.

Yet neither the islands nor the sea are the same any two successive days. The temper of the Ægean at this time changes more suddenly and frequently than ever does that of the Pacific. Every morning the islands of the west take on fresh colour, and are trailed by fresh shapes of mist.

To-day Imbros stands right over against you; you see the detail of the fleet in the harbour, and the striated heights of rocky Samothrace reveal the small ravines. To-morrow, in the early morning light, Imbros lies mysteriously afar off like an Isle of the Blest, a delicate vapour-shape reposing on the placid sea.

Nor is there monotony in either weather or temperature. This is the late autumn. Yet it is a halting and irregular advance the late autumn is making. Fierce, biting, raw days alternate with the comfortableness of the mild late summer. This morning, to bathe is as much as your life is worth (shrapnel disregarded); to-morrow, in the gentle air, you may splash and gloat an hour and desire more. And you prolong the joy by washing many garments.

Here in Anzac we have suffered the tail-end of one or two autumn storms, and have had two fierce and downright gales blow up. The wind came in the night, with a suddenness that found us most unprepared. In half an hour many of us were homeless, crouching about with our bundled bedclothes, trespassing tyrannically upon the confined space of the stouter dug-outs of our friends—a sore tax upon true friendship. They lay on their backs and held down their roofs by mere weight of body until overpowered. Spectral figures in the driving atmosphere collided and wrangled and swore and blasphemed. The sea roared over the shingle with a violence that made even revilings inaudible.

The morning showed a sorry beach. There were—there had been—three piers. One stood intact; the landward half of the second was clean gone; of the third there was no trace, except in a few splintered spars ashore. A collective dogged grin overlooked the beach that morning at the time of rising. The remedying began forthwith; so did the bursting of shrapnel over the workmen. This stroke of Allah upon the unfaithful was not to go unassisted.

With misgiving we foresee the winter robbing us of the boon of daily bathing. This is a serious matter. The morning splash has come to be indispensable. Daily at six-thirty you have been used to see the head of General Birdwood bobbing beyond the sunken barge inshore; and a host of nudes lined the beach. The host is diminishing to a few isolated fellows, who either are fanatics or are comedown from the trenches and must clear up a vermin-and-dust-infested skin at all costs.

Not infrequently “Beachy Bill” catches a mid-morning bathing squad. There is ducking and splashing shorewards, and scurrying by men clad only in the garment Nature gave them. Shrapnel bursting above the water in which you are disporting raises chiefly the question: “Will it ever stop?” By this you mean: “Will the pellets ever cease to whip the water?” The interval between the murderous lightning flash aloft and the last pellet-swish seems, to the potential victim, everlasting.

The work of enemy shell behind the actual trenches is peculiarly horrible. Men are struck down suddenly and unmercifully where there is no heat of battle. A man dies more easily in the charge. Here he is wounded mortally unloading a cart, drawing water for his unit, directing a mule convoy. He may lose a limb or his life when off duty—merely returning from a bathe or washing a shirt.

One of our number is struck by shrapnel retiring to his dug-out to read his just delivered mail. He is off duty—is, in fact, far up on the ridges overlooking the sea. The wound gapes in his back. There is no staunching it. Every thump of the aorta pumps out his life. Practically he is a dead man when struck; he lives but a few minutes—with his pipe still steaming, clenched in his teeth. They lay him aside in the hospital.

That night we stand about the grave in which he lies beneath his groundsheet. Over that wind-swept headland the moon shines fitfully through driving cloud. A monitor bombards offshore. Under her friendly screaming shell and the singing bullets of the Turks the worn, big-hearted padre intones the beautiful Catholic intercession for the soul of the dead in his cracked voice.

THE STORMS OF NOVEMBER

Transport in Trouble, November 17

After the Blizzard of November 29

Anzac Pier in the Storm of November 17

Photographs by C. E. W. BEAN

Photograph by Central NewsGeneral Birdwood taking a Dip

Photograph by Central News

General Birdwood taking a Dip

Photograph by C. E. W. BEANShrapnel over Anzac BeachThe shrapnel cloud can be seen, and also the water off the beach whipped up by the pellets from the shells

Photograph by C. E. W. BEAN

Shrapnel over Anzac Beach

The shrapnel cloud can be seen, and also the water off the beach whipped up by the pellets from the shells

At the burial of Sir John Moore was heard the distant and random gun. Here the shells sometimes burst in the midst of the burial party. Bearers are laid low. A running for cover. The grave is hastily filled in by a couple of shovel-men; the service is over; and fresh graves are to be dug forthwith for stricken members of the party. To die violently and be laid in this shell-swept area is to die lonely indeed. The day is far off (but it will come) when splendid mausolea will be raised over these heroic dead. And one foresees the time when steamers will bear up the Ægean pilgrims come to do honour at the resting places of friends and kindred, and to move over the charred battlegrounds of Turkey.

Informal parades for Divine Service are held on Sabbath afternoons for such men as are off duty. Attendances are scanty. The late afternoons are becoming bleak; men relieved from labour seek the warmth of their dug-outs.

The chaplain stands where he can find a level area and awaits a congregation. When two or three are gathered together he announces a hymn. The voices go up in feeble unison, punctuated by the roar of artillery and the crackle of rifle fire. The prayers are offered. The address is short and shorn of cant. This is no place for canting formula. Reality is very grim all round. There is a furtive under-watchfulness against shrapnel. One almost has forgotten what it is to sit in security and listen placidly to a sermon at church.

The chaplains have come out to do their work simply and laboriously. They are direct-minded, purposeful men. One is a neighbour in a Light Horse regiment—a colonel. He flaunts it in no sandbagged palace. His dug-out is indistinguishable from those of the privates between whom he is sandwiched—mere waterproof sheet aloft and bed laid on the Turkish clay; a couple of biscuit boxes with his oddments—jam, and milk, and bread: writing materials and toilet requisites. A string line beneath the roof holds his towel and lately washed garments. He is a simple parson, hard-worked by day and night in and about the trenches, careful for such comforts as can be got for his men in this benighted land; lying down at nights listening to the forceful lingo of his neighbours, and confessedly admiring its graphic if well-garnished eloquence. He sees his duty with a direct gaze—a faithful Churchman at work in the throes of war.

In a land of necessarily hard fare a regimental canteen in Imbros does much to compensate. Unit representatives proceed thence weekly by trawler for stores. One feels almost in the land of the living when so near lie tinned fruit, butter, cocoa, coffee, sausages, sauces, chutneys, pipes, tobacco, and chocolate. Such a repertoire, combined with a monthly visit from the paymaster, removes one far from the commissariat hardships of the Crimea.

The visualising of unstinted civilian meals is a prevalent pastime. Men sit at the mouths of their dug-outs and relate the minutiæ of the first dinner at home. Some men excel in this. They do it with a carnal power of graphic description which makes one fairly pine. One has heard a colonel-chaplain talk for two hours of nothing but grub, and at the end convincingly exempt himself from any charge of carnal-mindedness. Truly we are a people whose god is their belly. But that we never admitted until this period of enforced deprivation.

Those comforts embraced by the use of good tobacco and deliverance from vermin at night are the most desired; both hard to procure. There is somehow a great gulf fixed between the civilian quality of any tobacco and the make-up of the same brand for the Army. Once in six months a friend in Australia dispatches a parcel of cigars. Therein lies the entrance to a fleeting paradise—fleeting indeed when one’s comrades have sniffed or ferreted out the key. After all, the pipe, given reasonably good tobacco, gives the entrée to the paradise farthest removed from that of the fool.

Of the plague of nocturnal vermin little need be said explicitly. The locomotion of the day almost dissipates the evil. But it makes night hideous.

The tendency is to retire late and thus abridge the period of persecution. One’s friends drop in for a yarn or a smoke after tea, and the dreaded hour of turning-in is postponed by reminiscent chit-chat and the late preparation of supper. One renews, here, a surprising bulk of old acquaintance. Old college chums are dug out, and one talks back and lives a couple of hours in the glory of days that have passed. Believe it not that there is no deliverance possible from the hardness of active service. The retrospect, and the prospect, and the ever-present faculty of visualisation are ministering angels sent to minister.

Mails, too, are an anodyne. Their arrival eclipses considerations of life and death—of fighting and the landing of rations. The mail-barge coming in somehow looms larger than a barge of supplies. Mails have been arriving weekly for six months, yet no one is callous to them.

Of incoming mail, letters stand inevitably first. They put a man at home for an hour.

But so does the local newspaper. Perusing that, he is back at the old matutinal habit of picking at the news over his eggs and coffee, racing against the suburban business train. Intimate associations hang about the reading of the local sheet—domestic and parochial associations almost as powerful as are brought by letters.

And what shall be said of parcels from home? The boarding-school home-hamper is at last superseded. No son, away at Grammar School, ever pursued his voyage of discovery through tarts, cakes and preserves, sweets, pies and fruit with the intensity of gloating expectation in which a man on Gallipoli discloses the contents of his “parcel.”

“AT THE LANDING, AND HERE EVER SINCE”Drawn in Blue and Red Pencil by DAVID BARKER

“AT THE LANDING, AND HERE EVER SINCE”

Drawn in Blue and Red Pencil by DAVID BARKER

“’Struth! a noo pipe, Bill!—an’ some er the ole terbaccer. Blimey! Cigars, too!—’ave one, before the mob smells ’em.... D——d if there ain’t choclut! Look ’ere.... An’ ’ere’s some er the dinkum[3]coc’nut-ice the tart uster make.... Hallo! more socks! Nev’ mind: winter’s comin’. ’Ere, ’ow er yer orf fer socks, cobber?... Take these—bonzer ’and-knitted. Sling them issue-things inter the sea.... I’m d——d!—soap for the voy’ge ’ome.... ’Angkerch’fs!—orl right w’en the —— blizzards come, an’ a chap’s snifflin’ fer a —— week on end.... Writin’ paper!—well, that’s the straight —— tip, and no errer! The beggars er bin puttin’ it in me letters lately too. Well, I’ll write ter-night on the stren’th of it. Gawd! ’ere’s a shavin’ stick!—’andy, that! I wuz clean run out—usin’ carbolic soap, —— it!... Aw, that’s a dinkum —— parcel, that is!”

Hector Dinning,Aust. A.S.C.

FOOTNOTES:[3]Dinkum—Australian for “true.”

[3]Dinkum—Australian for “true.”

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