FOOTNOTE:
[1] I am informed that the hero of the exploit was Sergeant Duffy, of the 8th Battalion (Victoria).
THE BAND OF BROTHERS
Captain Richardson of the 1st Brigade, who was awarded the Military Cross for his fine work at the landing.
[CHAPTER XIX]
THE BAND OF BROTHERS
An Australian officer had been telling me of the remarkable bravery of two men of his company, and I asked the natural question: "Did you report them for recognition?" "No," was the answer. "They did no more than their duty; no more than any other two of my men would have done in similar circumstances."
The feeling that underlay that reply cuts far deeper than the award of crosses and orders. It proclaims the Australasians for what they are, a band of devoted brothers, fighting for something far dearer to them than public recognition. I will allow the same officer to tell what kind of men they were, and to describe the mutual love and respect that animated them as a band in the worst of their days in Gallipoli. He said:—
"The Australian soldier is often said to be lacking in discipline. Well, it all depends what you call discipline. Let me give you an example. When we landed the men were ordered to advance with fixed bayonets and do the work with the cold steel. They were not to fire unless it was absolutely necessary. Days afterwards we found some of our men out in the bad country around Quinn's Post dead with their rifles beside them; the bayonets fixed and not a round fired. They had obeyed orders until the last, because they were good orders. They must have had innumerable temptations to loose off their rifles, but they died like soldiers with red-tipped bayonets and clean barrels. I call that discipline.
"On August 7 our fellows were relieved in the firing line by a draft of Kitchener's men. The scrub around was stiff with snipers, all eager to pick off an officer or two for choice. Yet here were these chaps saluting every officer who looked at them; saluting like clockwork. Our major is a peppery chap who rose from the ranks in the African war. 'What the blue fire do you mean by it?' he roared at one of the 'Kitchener's.' 'Do you want to have me killed?' They simply couldn't understand him. Now you may call that discipline, but I do not. I call it rank foolishness, and worse.
"The reputation of the major was that he never threw away a life and never risked his own unnecessarily. Yet he was always risking his own, and the men would follow him anywhere. He had only to speak to get the most implicit obedience. One day he said, 'Look here, men! Some English staff officers are coming to see you this afternoon. Shave yourselves and try to look smart if you can. And, for Heaven's sake, don't call me Alf.' My word, they did him proud that day.
"I see some of them now, with their hard faces shaded by their slouched hats, and I remember them a grousing, cursing crowd in the transport, and I think to myself, 'Can these be the uncomplaining, unselfish, God-fearing heroes I fought with at Courtney's Post?' I tell you that battle turned those fellows' best side outermost. Having seen their best side I can never pay any attention to the other side of them as long as I live. They made me proud to belong to the same race as they, and more than proud to be entrusted with the command of such splendid men.
"Their bravery had as many facets as a well-cut diamond. But the side I admired most was their sheer grit. The first five days in the firing line they had no sleep at all, and were fighting every minute of the time. They had no food except some dirty water and a few hard biscuits. On the evening of the fifth day the C.O. came into the trench and said, 'Boys, you've stuck it splendidly, and now you're going to be relieved. I've got you some hot tea that will come round in a minute or two, and shortly after you will be relieved.' And they answered, 'Only get us some tea, sir, and we'll stick it as long as you like.'
"Their hard, stern-lipped faces will never more blind me to the big, soft hearts they mask so effectually. One day I was resting in a bit of a dug-out, sopping wet, shaking with a feverish cold, no greatcoat or blanket or cover of any kind. I was not feeling very good. A great big fellow went toiling up the hill, pulling himself from one tree to the other by the branches, the only way to get up. He had got some way past me when he caught sight of me. I suppose I looked very wretched. Back he came with the good word, 'Feeling knocked out, matey?' asks he. 'Never mind, you buck up and —— Oh, I beg pardon, sir.' A day or two later he came up to me and again began to apologize. To apologize, when he had done me more good than I had imagined anything short of a quick and painless death could have done!
"We had a young subaltern from Duntroon College, as gallant a boy as ever looked death in the face, and that he did every hour of the day and night for weeks. He commanded men old enough to be his father, and he was the darling of their hearts. One day the inevitable happened and he went down (to the sea front) with a big hole in him. Some days afterwards his men were going back to rest camp and they came to me to inquire after him. I can see them now, half a score of as unsavoury-looking ruffians as ever could be seen. Their faces were shaggy with two weeks' beard and their eyes were red and bulging with unintermittent vigils. They had cheated death for yet another week. And the tears ran down their cheeks as they begged to know if 'there was any chance for the Boy.' Men like that stir your innermost fibre.
"I have seen those men shepherding that boy in the trenches in all sorts of ways. I have seen them standing between him and the place from where the rifle fire was coming and he did not know it. One man, to my certain knowledge, was hit that way. I charged him with it in the dug-out—he was not badly wounded—and he gave me the lie in the most emphatic Australian fashion. I don't know what discipline demanded of me, but I do know that I shook hands and whispered to him that I would never tell the boy. And he grinned and winked like the jolly old bushman he was.
"Some of them were pretty rough, but it is wonderful how they yield to the refining fire of battle. There was one trench where the language was pretty sulphurous. One day they lost their lieutenant, a great favourite, by a shell which wounded him mortally and kicked a lot of sandbags on top of him. The men set to work like maniacs, pulling away the sandbags and cursing horribly. He heard them and said, 'Don't swear, men; that does no good.' They were his last words. It is a fact that an oath in that trench was a worse crime than cowardice from that day forward.
"The best laugh we had for six weeks came out of the lurid language used by Tommy Cornstalk. Our post was at the head of a deep gully between two high hills and there were places in that gully where the weirdest echoes lived. A few words spoken at one of these spots would ring through the hills for a minute after and eventually die away in a ghostly whisper. After the great armistice near the end of May we had good reason to know that the enemy had been using their eyes to some purpose. They had new lines of fire, and places that were safe before the armistice were deadly dangerous afterwards. I suppose that is part of the game of war.
"While the armistice was on two platoons were down in the rest camp, and when they came back none had told the men of the altered state of affairs. Next morning two of these fellows were basking in the sun on the hillside, drinking hot tea and smoking. As far as they knew the place was quite safe. I was just going to call out to them, when the first bullet arrived. It kicked up a great patch of dust between them. Both men jumped down simultaneously, a drop of 20 feet, and as they jumped both made the same emphatic remark. The echoes took it up and passed it along in a sort of monotonous repetition. We stood spellbound to hear the immortal hills of Gallipoli repeating to one another the round oaths of the Australian backblocks in a shocked whisper.
"When it was all over it was like the curtain going down on an excruciatingly funny scene in a theatre. The men were all strung very high by the events through which they had lived, and they gave themselves up to laughter that was almost hysterical. In the middle of it the Turks in the trench opposite began to blaze away as if cartridges cost nothing, and that made us laugh harder than ever. We held our sides and yelled. An hour afterwards you could see men wiping the tears from their cheeks and thumping their mates on the back, and telling them not to be blooming fools. Then they would all start over again.
"We had a good many brothers in our battalion, and it was touching to see the anxiety of the elders for their younger brothers. One fellow was a signalman, and if I say that the casualty average among signalmen was 100 per cent., I am guilty of only the slightest exaggeration. His young brother was about the youngest man there, and we had him in a place where he was as safe as possible, in such circumstances. I used to hear this fellow come in at night from his signalling work, where his life wasn't worth an hour's purchase, and the first thing he would say was always: 'Is Hal all right?' I tell you he would wring my heart. I used to lie in my dug-out waiting for that question and fearing I would not hear it. For it was not Hal that I was worrying about.
"I remember the last service the battalion had before we landed. We were steaming past Cape Helles to Anzac, the untried soldiers of a new country preparing for our first battle ordeal. The warships were roaring together to cover the British landing at Cape Helles, and the padre gathered the men together for a simple service and talk. One thing he told them that sank in. The band, who were also the stretcher-bearers, had come in for a lot of chaff, as non-combatants. 'And the time is at hand,' says the padre, 'when you'll want to bite off your tongues for every idle word you've said to the band.' If ever words of man came true those words did. Ask any Australian who were the bravest men at Anzac, and you are sure to get the unhesitating answer, 'The stretcher-bearers.'
"I have seen them carrying wounded men down those hills up which we pulled ourselves by ropes passed from tree to tree. The bullets were spitting all around them, and they were checking and going slow, their only concern being not to shake the tortured man they were carrying. I know an officer whom they carried down through shell fire, and every time they heard a shell coming these two men put down the stretcher and threw themselves across his body to protect him from the shrapnel. The proportion of their dead and wounded in the casualty lists shows how these non-combatants did their work. Jokes about the band are not popular any longer; they never were very funny."
Perhaps the most famous of all the stretcher-bearers at Anzac was the ubiquitous hero known to every Australasian there as the Man with the Donkey. They were a quaint couple. The man was a 6 ft. Australian, hard-bitten and active. His gaunt profile spoke of wide experience of hard struggles in rough places. The donkey was a little mouse-coloured animal, no taller than a Newfoundland dog. His master called him Abdul. The man seemed to know by intuition every twist and slope of the tortuous valleys of Sari Bair. The donkey was a patient, sure-footed ally, with a capacity for bearing loads out of all proportion to his size.
Some days they would bring in as many as twelve or fifteen men, gathered at infinite risk in the dangerous broken country around far-out Quinn's Post. Every trip saw them face the terrors of the Valley of Death; here all day and all night the air sang with the bullets from the Turkish snipers hidden on Dead Man's Ridge. Their partnership began on the second day of occupation of the Anzac zone of Gallipoli. The man had carried two heavy men in succession down the awful slopes of Shrapnel Gully and through the Valley of Death. His eye lit on the donkey. "I'll take this chap with me next trip," he said, and from that time the pair were inseparable.
When the enfilading fire down the valley was at its worst and orders were posted that the ambulance men must not go out, the Man and the Donkey continued placidly at their work. At times they held trenches of hundreds of men spellbound, just to see them at their work. Their quarry lay motionless in an open patch, in easy range of a dozen Turkish rifles. Patiently the little donkey waited under cover, while the man crawled through the thick scrub until he got within striking distance. Then a lightning dash, and he had the wounded man on his back and was making for cover again. In those fierce seconds he always seemed to bear a charmed life.
Once in cover he tended his charge with quick, skilful movements. "He had hands like a woman's," said one who thinks he owes his life to the man and the donkey. Then the limp form was balanced across the back of the patient animal, and, with a slap on its back and the Arab donkey-boy's cry of "Gee," the man started off for the beach, the donkey trotting unruffled by his side.
For a month and more they continued their work. No one kept count of the number of wounded men they brought back from the firing line. One morning the dressers at the station near the dangerous turn in the valley called "The Pump" saw them go past, and shouted a warning to the man. The Turks up on Dead Man's Ridge were very busy that day; moreover, a machine-gun was turned on a dangerous part of the valley path. The man replied to the warning with a wave of his hand. Later he was seen returning, the donkey laden with one wounded man and the man carrying another. As they reached the dangerous turn the machine-gun rattled out, and the man fell with a bullet through his heart. The donkey walked unscathed into safety.
There was a hush through the Australian trenches that night, when the news went round that the Man with the Donkey had "got it."
His grave bears the rough inscription:—
"Sacred to the memory of Private W. Simpson, of the Third Field Ambulance, West Australia."
But if you wish an Australian to tell you his story, you must ask for the Man with the Donkey.
A TRIBUTE TO THE TURK
[CHAPTER XX]
A TRIBUTE TO THE TURK
In his speech delivered in the House of Lords on September 15, the Minister for War said: "It is only fair to acknowledge that, judged from a humane point of view, the methods of warfare pursued by the Turks are vastly superior to those which disgraced their German masters."
The unanimous testimony of the Australasians supports this statement of Lord Kitchener. The decency and fairness with which the Turk makes war came as a pleasant surprise to the Australasians, who had been led to expect something so entirely different that they landed on Gallipoli with very stern resolves. My own cousin, a private in the 2nd Brigade, has told me that he and all his mates had determined to end their lives, rather than fall into the hands of the Turks as prisoners. A similar resolve was carried out by many an Australasian soldier in the first weeks of the fighting. Yet the testimony of the Australasians who fell into Turkish hands is now to hand and shows that they are treated with remarkable consideration.
The rumours of Turkish atrocities were rapidly dissipated, and the Australasian soldier soon got to respect the Turk as a brave man and fair fighter. The fact that a hospital ship was always moored off Anzac Cove within easy range of the Turkish guns, and was never known to suffer, is prima facie evidence to the Australasians of the honesty of Turkish intentions. The consideration shown to their wounded general, mentioned elsewhere in this book, made a deep impression in the Australasian ranks. The prevailing opinion of the Turk is now a very favourable one; and I will let one of the Australian friends I have made in British hospitals voice it on behalf of his comrades.
"Foreign travel expands the mind," sententiously observed Trooper Billy Clancy, of the Australian Light Horse. "I had to travel in a troopship to Gallipoli to learn that all I thought I knew about the Turk was not so. Many's the time I didn't know anything at all about Turks. I expected to find a lot of jelly-bellies in baggy trousers and turned-up slippers, with gaspipe guns and hooked noses. I thought they'd be cruel cowards, rotten shots, and easy marks. I thought I was going to serve it up hot to the men with the bull's-wool whiskers. And that was just where I was wrong; I know better now.
"To begin with, my friend Bismillah is quite as well equipped as anyone else for modern war. He has a better rifle than we have, if anything. I have two scars on my left forearm that show he knows how to use it. He carries plenty of cartridges, and in his pockets two or three up-to-date bombs guaranteed to hurt the other fellow. Sometimes he paints his face green and lets on that he is a tree. Sometimes he quits his trench and pretends he is a mountain goat, trying for a record in the hill-climbing class. But he's a soldier all the time—a born soldier and a brave one. Fighting for home and country dear is meat and drink to him.
"They used to say the Turks were cruel and tortured the wounded. No Australian believes that at Anzac now. Why, there was a Turk in the trenches opposite us at Russell's Top that we used to call Fatty Burns. Of course, that was not his name, but we called him that because he looked so much like Fatty Burns that kept the Ninety-mile shanty on the road to Winton. He had the same short beard and Roman nose, the same bright black eye and a benevolent expression as much as to say, 'I wouldn't lamb a bushman down.' This Turk was the dead spit of Fatty—like brothers they were.
"He was always sticking up his head and getting fired at. Then he would signal a miss and laugh like one o'clock. You could hear him quite plain, for the trenches were only twenty-five yards apart. At last the fellows gave up shooting at him. 'It's only Fatty Burns,' they used to say. We got to look for his cheerful grin, and sometimes we used to fire just to hear him laugh.
"One morning early, we made a bit of a demonstration, and left two of our boys wounded out on an open space between the trenches. No one could go to them, and there they lay in the burning sun. Presently somebody said, 'Here comes Fatty Burns.' The old chap puts his head and shoulders out of the trench and salaams like a Cairo shopkeeper. We were all struck dumb. Next he climbed out of the trench, which was a bold thing to do, and walked over to our wounded. A dozen rifles were covering him, and I expect he knew it. But Fatty just strolled.
"You could have heard a pin drop, as the saying is. We watched him stroll over to the two men and lift up their heads and give them a drink of water each. He tried to make them comfortable, with us looking on, hardly able to believe our eyes. Then he strolled back quite unconcerned; and we gave him a cheer. That's not all. Just before dusk he came out again, and dragged both men over near a bit of cover, so that we could get them in when dark came. And those are the people that were supposed to be cruel!
"We always had too much bully beef, and when we left the firing line we had to dispose of the surplus and leave the trench in order for those who relieved us. This time we made up our minds to chuck the beef—there were three four-pound tins of it—across to old Fatty Burns. We did, and there was a terrible hullabaloo when it landed. I suppose they thought they were some new-fangled bombs. But an hour or so later some one threw a whole lot of fine dates into the trench, and we reckoned it was Fatty. Some one said they might be poisoned, but we risked that and enjoyed them fine.
"But that's not all. A day or two after we returned to the firing line we got one of our meat-tins back—with additions. I just had time to throw my overcoat down on it when it exploded. The overcoat was never any more good, and it wasn't Fatty Burns's fault that we were sound after the meat-tin came back. He had put in a stick of gelignite and filled up with the remains of an old clock and some spare scraps of iron and things. The clock-wheels fair murdered my overcoat. But what an old sport!
"There was a Maori up on Walker's Ridge who was a very fine swimmer and diver; he could stay under water longer than any man I ever saw. When he was spelling he would go in swimming, no matter what the shrapnel was like on the beach. And there was a Turkish sniper up on 'Baby 700' who was after his goat and used to fire at him all the time he was swimming. That made a bit of fun for Te Patara, who used to tantalize the sniper something cruel.
"But these Turks have a lot of time to think, and one day the sniper turned up with a pal and a loader as well. They made it very hot for the Maori gent, who found the bullets arriving two to the second in one long stream. He kept under water and breathed through his ears, or something. Anyhow, he got flustered and made a long dive for the shelter of an iron barge that was stranded on the beach. He got the cover all right and stood up behind the barge in about a foot of water. Abdullah and Co. up in the hills made up their minds to keep him there.
"I should say they got two rifles fixed on each end of the barge and fired them at irregular intervals. And every now and then they would bombard the barge, 'ping, ping,' just to let him know they were watching. It wasn't a particularly warm day; there was a cold sea breeze. Te Patara had no dressing-gown at all, and about two hundred of the boys were down on the beach under cover giving him advice. It was good enough advice, but it was dangerous to take it. He only got away after dark, and then he was the chilliest Maori I ever saw. He seemed to have lost some of his love for swimming, too.
"We reckoned the Turk would not stand up to the bayonet; and he certainly ran away from it a good many times. Then the First Brigade was sent out to take the trenches at Lonesome Pine, and got the surprise of their lives. A good deal of the fighting was in roofed-in trenches, where it was as dark as Jack Johnson. And there Bismillah stood up and fought with the bayonet. He wasn't a bit particular; if he couldn't use the point he used the butt, clubbing and hacking like a madman. That rough-house in the dark, through 150 yards of underground trenches, was one of the toughest fights of 1915. And the Turk took all the beating the First Brigade could give him. He died fighting, but he would not run.
"Between Anafarta Village and the big salt lake there was a wide valley of agricultural land; the maps do not show how big it is. Before the landing at Suvla Bay all this land was under cultivation, and we used to watch the Turkish farmers at work. They were old boys with big long beards, and we used to imagine them going about saying to one another, 'By the beard of the Prophet,' and things like that. But we decided they were quite harmless, and we let them get in their crops without touching them in any way. A good many of us were thinking of the crops ripening 8,000 miles away south, and us not there to help get them in. So we let these farmers do as they pleased.
"Then came the landing at Suvla; and do you know these old boys raked up great long Snider rifles from somewhere, that fired an expanding bullet big enough to kill an elephant. One of my mates was hit with one, and it blew the shoulder clean off him. And these old boys fought as bitter as poison. Then the Regular Turkish Army came there, and when the officers found out what these farmers were doing, they kicked up an awful row and took the old guns away from them. We noticed that they went out of use very suddenly, and a prisoner we took told us how it happened. But it shows that the Turks want to fight fair; and that was our experience always.
"This prisoner was a curious fellow. He spoke as good English as I did, and he told me that he used to serve coffee at a big London restaurant. He said he used to go round in a Turkish uniform with a sort of truck, and make special Turkish coffee for those who wanted it. Of course, I did not believe that; where's the sense of it? But he told me a lot of things about the Turks I never knew before, and put them in a new light to me. After all they are only fighting for their own country, and every man ought to do that.
"Whoever planned their defences was a master hand. Every trench is enfiladed from some other one, and the lines of defence fall back, each one endangered to the attacker by that behind it. Some of their trenches were nothing but deathtraps to anyone who might choose to occupy them, so skilfully were their machine-guns and snipers posted. I can tell you that we learned a lot about trench digging from our despised brother Bismillah before we had been a month at Gallipoli.
"Yes, the Turk has taught us to respect him for a fair and brave fighter and a dashed sight better man than the fat-faced Germans I've seen driving him against our trenches with their revolvers and the flat of their swords. He is a cunning beggar, is Bismillah; but we bear him no malice for that. It is a pity he was dragged into this scrap by those German beasts. They are the enemy we are all longing to have a cut at. But when poor old Bismillah comes charging in droves against our trenches we hardly like to shoot him down with machine-guns. As one of our chaps said, 'It hardly seems fair to take the money.'"
GURKHAS, WHITE AND BROWN
[CHAPTER XXI]
GURKHAS, WHITE AND BROWN
"Here you are," cried my friend Trooper Billy Clancy, of the Australian Light Horse, as I entered the convalescent camp. "Ask him. He knows what I'm saying is true." His very charming visitor regarded me doubtfully. "Go on; ask him," urged the soldier; "he knows." "Is it true," asked the fair ministrant to lonely Colonials, "that there is a real Australian language and a different way of comparing such adjectives as good?" "Good; bonza; boshter," I answered promptly. "There," crowed Trooper Clancy, "what did I tell you?" "I don't believe either of you," replied his visitor, and departed with an effect of dimples and blushes.
"These English ladies are awful kind-hearted," said Clancy, evading my eye, "but they do ask some rummy questions. Did you never hear what happened to Shorty Shaw? You know Shorty? He's six feet five and got a face like a grown-up baby's. Everybody likes old Shorty, but the lady I'm going to tell you about took the greatest fancy to him. She used to come in a motor-car and bring her little boy and girl to see him. She treated him as if he was a very nice, interesting specimen from the planet Mars. Why, when he said he felt the cold she brought him a contraption she made herself of Jaeger goods to wear next his skin.
"It was all patent fastenings and tied itself into knots when he tried to get into it. And when he had it on he couldn't sit still; kept hunching his shoulders and rubbing his back against the chair. She asked him how he liked it without batting an eye, and Shorty up and said he was all of a glow. Well, one day she was talking to Shorty when I heard a noise like a hen clucking, and saw her going out with her face very red and her nose in the air. And Shorty was squirming about like his wound was hurting him. It seems she had asked Shorty wasn't he proud to be called a White Gurkha? What Shorty said he would never tell us, but it was the last we ever saw of the kind-hearted lady.
"Of course she wasn't to know that Shorty's teaming business had been ruined by Afghan camel-men. She didn't guess that Shorty used to say that when he died the words 'A White Australia' would be found written on his heart. 'White Gurkhas!' he used to say; 'they'll be calling Chinamen smoked Australians next.' I tried to argue with him. 'Look here,' I said. 'Why do we call you Shorty?' 'Because you are a lot of naturals,' says he. 'No; because you're the longest chap in the brigade. Well, it's the same with the name of White Gurkhas. The Gurkhas are all little, short, broad chaps, and the Australians are all long, thin blokes. Don't you see?' But Shorty didn't; his prejudices prevented foreign travel from improving his mind.
"As a matter of fact, there was only one Australian I ever saw that looked at all like a white Gurkha; and that was Jimmy Young, the celebrated footballer. He was a cabdriver in South Melbourne, and the trickiest footballer that ever played the game. He was short and as broad as he was long; he wore whiskers and he was bandy-legged. His capers earned him the name of Diddly. He'd come down the field bouncing the ball and breaking evens. Being so short he seemed to be running even faster than that. When the other side tried to stop him they'd be tackling a man who wasn't there; and all the South Melbourne barrackers would call out, 'Oh, you Diddly!' He was a ringer, was Diddly Young.
"The first mob of Gurkhas we ever saw was in charge of a sergeant that must have come out of the same mould as Diddly. He and his push had come from Cape Helles way, where they'd been fighting with the English and the French. They hadn't been an hour at Anzac when this sergeant got in a hurry about something and started to run. At once about half a dozen of our chaps said at the same time, 'Diddly Young!' You simply couldn't mistake the action. And he answered to the name of Diddly with a grin a foot wide; it turned out that it wasn't so far from his real name.
"We saw a lot of the Gurkhas then, and soon got to like them fine. They were always laughing and joking; you never saw jollier little chaps. Not like the Tommies, who were solemn and worried; nor like the Sikhs, who were a bit sour. It was astonishing how quickly they picked things up; this Diddly learned to talk Australian in no time. One day he was chatting to me and a shell burst a bit close; and I said something. He burst out laughing. 'One shell go bang,' he says; 'Frenchman lie down flat. Two shell go bang, Englishman go in his dug-out. Three shell go bang, Australian look up and say "You ——."'
"Just about that time we were getting a lot more bursting shells than we altogether cared about. They came from all directions, but the two worst nuisances were two guns that had our beaches ranged from north and south. The one to the south was Beachy Bill, that they say has knocked out over 2,000 men and is still going. He lived somewhere among the mangroves between Gaba Tepe and Achi Baba. The other was Anafarta Anne, that was hid up in the hills—behind Suvla Bay. Anafarta Anne was our particular worry and there was nothing we wouldn't have done to shut her up.
"It afterwards turned out that she lived in a deep cutting, driven sixty feet in the hillside, and was run out on rails when they wanted to use her. The kick of her recoil drove her back into her hole and shut a door in the front that was dodged up to look like the hillside. Everybody was out after Anafarta Anne. Cruisers used to come along and shell the hillside where she lived. A destroyer came fussing up every day almost to give her a round or two. They sent up captive balloons to watch for her and aeroplanes observers hovered over the spot. All to no purpose.
"Then there would come a day when the cruiser was away at Cape Helles. The destroyer would be engaged on important business elsewhere and the captive balloon deflated. Perhaps the aeroplane man was away dropping bombs on Maidos. And there would be a score or two of our chaps in swimming after a fortnight in the firing line without so much as a rinse. Then Anafarta Anne would pop out of her hole and send a great shrapnel shell that would spread a spray of bullets over a piece of water a hundred yards long by fifty wide. Our chaps would be lucky if they ducked in time and could swim under water to the beach. They would come out nearly black in the face, but not so strangled that they could not find breath to curse the name of Anafarta Anne.
"One day Anne went a bit too far. There was a mule team coming up from the beach with water. There were five mules with Indian drivers and two kerosene tins to each mule. The water was pukka Malta water sealed in the kerosene tins and was most important water indeed, as it turned out. You see, it was specially reserved for the sacred ablutions of the Gurkhas. Well, this Anafarta Anne had no more sense than to drop a high-explosive shell right on top of the procession. Up in air went three good mules and every drop of the water was wasted. I believe there was a mule-man or two missing as well, but I never counted them myself.
"The boss mule-driver was an excitable Punjabi who loved mules like a pawnbroker loves diamonds. He came leaping down to the Gurkha camp, making a chattering noise like the whole Turkish army, and the first Gurkha he ran into was Diddly. What he said I couldn't tell you, but he must have rubbed it in about the Gurkhas' holy water, for Diddly got very serious and very busy. He got all his push together and sent somebody for the white officer sahib. In his presence they all drew their big knives and nicked one another's thumbs and swore an oath. They swore they would put an end to Anafarta Anne. So much I gathered from Diddly afterwards.
"Naturally there was a good deal of interest among our chaps to see what would happen. Fellows like Shorty Shaw said it was all nonsense for a pack of Gurkhas to expect to do what everybody else had failed in. It seemed a tall order, and some of the boys betted long odds against the thing ever being done that way. I don't mind telling you that I had my little bit at five to one on little old Diddly. He gave me confidence somehow or other; I don't know why.
"Well, every night some of the Gurkhas would be out of the trenches. As for Diddly, he used to be missing for days on end. And when you saw him he was no longer laughing and full of jokes. He looked just about as happy as a Belgian farmer. This went on for a bit, and then one day Diddly turned up all jokes and smiles again. The odds went down to six to four that night, and even Shorty Shaw admitted that little old Diddly must know something.
"Then came the Suvla Bay landing on August 6. The night before all the Gurkhas went off somewhere, and we were left behind. We had our own troubles early next morning, and they were bad enough. But not so bad, but every man was on the keevee (qui vive) for some sound of Anafarta Anne. When there was not a word from that quarter we all allowed that Diddly had done it on the Turks; and that night I could have had my money if I had insisted on it. But, as it turned out, it wasn't so.
"It was a good time afterwards that I had the true story of what happened from a man in the ——th, who was in the big night march from the Maori Outpost. The ——th were hot after Anafarta Anne, too, and got to the gun emplacement a few minutes after Diddly and his Gurkhas. He says he found them there in possession of the place, and of a lot of dead Turks pretty badly cut about with knives. But Anafarta Anne, drawn by a mule team, was just showing her tail around a bend of the hills half a mile or so away. He said Diddly was very sore about it; but I never heard that till much later.
"I saw Diddly himself the following day, but only at a distance. The Gurkhas were just going out to charge, and that was worth seeing. Each man of them had his rifle slung over his back, and his big knife in his teeth, so as to leave his hands free. They had been laughing like in camp; a very gay push. Then they got the word to go. An English officer ran first, a fair-headed man a foot taller than his Gurkha band. He was in front, but not a pace away ran old Diddly and another Gurkha tough. They had only eyes for one thing: the sahib officer. So I saw them charge away into the dusk of early morning.
"You know that charge carried them right away to the top of the big hill, and to a sight of the Dardanelles beyond. But Diddly never saw the Dardanelles. We moved up behind them in support, and found Diddly in a little spur of the gully. He and his tough little mate were lying dead, and underneath them was the dead body of that fine white officer. The left hands of the two Gurkhas were all cut to ribbons, where they had grabbed the Turkish bayonets, and there was awful evidence that they had known how to use the notched knives they still gripped in their other hands. The rest of that day, and of some bad days that followed, I felt as if I had lost another dear old mate. And I wasn't the only one that felt like that about good old Diddly.
"So, you see, it doesn't do to judge a man by the colour of his skin. I knew a good Chinaman once. And my Uncle Fred, who used to spar with Peter Jackson, often used to say he would as soon shake hands with Peter as with any white man he ever knew. That's why I say to Shorty Shaw that I'm never going to worry if nobody never calls me nothing worse than a White Gurkha."
THE MAN WHO WASN'T LET
[CHAPTER XXII]
THE MAN WHO WASN'T LET
Perhaps he was Let, eventually. But when I met him he was emphatically the man who wasn't Let to fight.
I met him in London, a tall, well-set Australian, wearing the all-wool khaki of the Commonwealth and the neat leather cap of the Australian Divisional Supply Column. In his own words he was a "Leatherhead." He was a thirteen-stone man, but without a spare ounce of flesh on him anywhere; one could quite believe him when he said he was "as strong as a Monaro steer." And over his right eye he wore a pink celluloid patch.
This decoration moved my curiosity, for I knew the Leatherheads had not taken part in the Dardanelles fighting but were at that time destined for very active service elsewhere. In fact, they were on the very eve of embarking; therefore I opened a conversation by asking if he were off "to the front."
"No, worse luck," he said, "I'm the only man staying behind. They won't let me fight." This with some bitterness.
A little sympathy, judiciously expressed, started him talking; and in the monotonous drawl affected by the men of the Australian bush—natural to them, it may be—he unfolded a strange story of his wanderings in search of a fight. He told me who he was, and what he was; they are not essential to the point of his story. It is enough to say that he sacrificed a very good income and excellent prospects to join the Australian Expeditionary Force.
"You see," he said, "I've got only one eye, my left; but it's a good one. I lost the other eight years ago—mining. Since then I've come to the conclusion that a man doesn't need two eyes, except in case of accident, like mine. I had a glass eye fixed up in Sydney, just like the other one, and you couldn't tell the difference; well, when I tell you, you'll know that you couldn't.
"I was always fond of soldiering, and joined the militia. I got my musketry certificate, so that shows you a man with one eye can shoot as well as any man with two, and a sight better than most of them. I've done some 'roo shooting, too, and a fellow that can knock over an old man running at three hundred with a worn Martini, don't want any spare eyes.
"When I was in Sydney I learned to drive a motor-car, and never had any trouble. A man who can take a fast car through the Sydney traffic don't want to worry about being shy of one eye. And nobody ever noticed; I used to get on well with girls, and all that; and they're the first to grumble if a man's got anything wrong with him.
"I've seen a lot of bush life; done thirty miles a day with a big swag in my time, and was never sick or sorry in my life. All this leads up to what I'm going to tell you.
"Naturally I volunteered when the war came, having no one dependent on me. Besides, I never liked Germans. I passed the medical examination all right; and they are mighty particular over there. Of course the doctor never tumbled to my glass eye, and there was nothing else the matter with me.
"When they found I could drive a motor, they put me among the Leatherheads; but I had to pass a driving test first, and that was no child's play. But still nobody tumbled to my glass eye, and I wasn't saying anything. I went into camp in the Domain, and everything was all right till they inoculated me against typhoid.
"It took pretty bad with me; they tell me that's a good sign. But I was feverish and felt rotten, and had to go into hospital. When the doctor came round the second day, I had a dirty tongue and a temperature, and he whistled a bit.
"'Let's look at your eye,' he said; and before I knew what he was after, he had pulled back my bottom lid to see if there was any inflammation there. Of course, my old glass eye rolled out on the pillow.
"You oughter seen that doctor jump. He went quite white in the face, too. Well, there was nobody about, and presently he burst out laughing, which I took to be a good sign. So I said, 'Are you going to be a sport, doctor? No one knows but you, and there's no need for you to know.'
"'Are you sure nobody knows?' he asked, still laughing fit to burst. 'Not a soul,' I told him. He tried the eye. 'Wonderful,' he says; 'don't know either.' So I got away with the Contingent."
"When our boys got off at Egypt we came on here, because our motor outfit was no manner of use in the sand there. We never went to the Dardanelles for the same reason; but have been five long months in camp at Romsey. All that time I've been doing the same work as the rest; transporting gravel in the motor wagon, and all the rest of it. And not a soul ever tumbled to my glass eye.
"Then it was settled that we should be sent—somewhere. But before we could go, the whole lot of us had to go through a fresh medical examination; British Army doctors this time. I was going to chance it; and I don't think they would ever have found me out. But you never know what you're doing with these English doctors; they're not reasonable chaps like in Australia, as you shall see. And I didn't want to get the C.O. into trouble; he's a grand chap, Tunbridge.
"So when the doctor came to me, I made a clean breast of it; you ought to have seen the C.O.'s face. He was dead surprised; so would any one be. But the doctor turned nasty. 'I can't pass you,' he said. 'A one-eyed man driving a car! Disgraceful!' And so on.
"Nothing I could say or do was any use; I was rejected. I'm as strong as a Monaro steer, and my eye is as good as three ordinary ones. But—no good.
"So I got a week's leave, and went off to see a bit of England. Down at Southampton I fell in with some Canadians; real good sorts, they were. We had a drink or two, and I found they were off to the front that very night. Here was a chance! I fixed things up with them, and borrowed a slouch hat; then I made my cap into a neat parcel, and left it at the railway parcels office. There was I, as good a Canuck as any of them. Except that I had 'Australia' on my shoulders instead of 'Canada,' but that didn't matter.
"It was dark when we lined up on the pier and they called the roll. I got into the back row, and they called everybody's name but mine; and everybody said 'Here,' except me. Bit neglectful, I call it; but I was there all right. 'Australia will be there.'
"We got over to Havre, and everybody was fussing about his dunnage, so I fussed about mine. Of course I didn't have any, but I gave such a good description of it that to get rid of me the fellow said, 'It's over there.' So I got on to the train, and up to the front at a place I think they called Dickiesborough. It sounded like that.
"We were all billeted in a big barn with stacks of grub; and next evening my pals were detailed to go out into the trenches. I got hold of a rifle and some ammunition; there was no difficulty. And I went off with them.
"It was dusk, and about 400 yards from the communication trench we all went down on our hands and knees and crawled. I crawled, too, and kept low, as they told me, when we got to the communication trench; and presently we were all snug in the first line of trenches.
"Then my luck turned. Along came a Canadian officer, to inspect. 'Are you all right here, sergeant?' he says. 'How many men have you got?' 'Twenty-one, sir,' says the sergeant in quite a little voice. 'Twenty, you mean.' 'No, sir, twenty-one. There's a long Australian galoot here, that wants to have a shot at the Germans, so we brought him with us.'
"Now if that'd been an English officer there'd have been a row, and I should have been shot, or something. But this captain says, 'Here, that won't do. Let's have a look at you.' So he ran the rule over me, and examined my papers, and felt my khaki—he even felt my khaki! He knew a bit, that Canuck captain.
"Then he said, 'I believe you are telling the truth, but I can't have you here. You'll be getting wounded or something; you're just the sort of fool that would.' He spoke very nice. 'You wouldn't have the sense to get killed,' he said. 'You'd be wounded, and I couldn't account for you. So, get,' he says.
"'How am I to get out?' I asked. 'The same way you got in,' he says, very short. 'And where am I to go?' And I wouldn't like to tell you where he told me to go to.
"Well, I stooped and went back along the communication trench. I wasn't going to draw the fire on the boys who were in the firing line. But when I got to the end of it, I stood up, and put my fingers in my mouth and I whistled as loud as I could. I couldn't shoot at the Germans, but I did want a bit of fighting. I put my hands in my pockets and strolled back over that ground where we'd been crawling; and I whistled 'The Wild Colonial Boy'. Nobody took a bit of notice.
"I slept in the billet that night, and had a real good breakfast; then the wounded began to come in. There was a pretty lively scrap through the night; of course I slept through it all—just my luck. I made myself useful—stretcher-bearing and what not. But I could see that if I stayed there, I'd only get myself into trouble, and somebody else, too, very likely.
"I went to the little base hospital, and I said, 'Can you give me an eyeshade. My eye is paining me.' And they gave me this. They were just making up a hospital train for the coast, so I chucked away my glass eye—I was disgusted with it anyhow—and put on the shade. Then I got on the train as one of the poor wounded.
"Presently another doctor comes round—this place seems stiff with doctors—and examined me. 'That's getting on nicely,' he says, looking very hard at me. 'Yes, doctor,' I says, as if I was in pain. Of course he must have seen there was something wrong, but he was too busy to worry about a little thing like that.
"We had a pleasant journey down: nurses fussing around, and so on. And what do you think I struck on the ship? 'Another blooming doctor!' (unconsciously quoting Kipling).
"He was so pleased with my quick recovery that he brought an assistant to look at me. They seemed quite dazed about it, but they were busy men: plenty to keep them occupied without troubling about me, which is just as it should be.
"I got my cap at Southampton, and joined up with my old corps. No fighting for me.
"Now I've got to send in my papers. But I've not come 12,000 miles for a fight with the Germans to go home without firing a shot. I'm getting a new eye made here in London; I've seen it in the rough and it's a boshter, the real thing. They know how to make them here.
"And I'm going to have it riveted in, and soldered down and fastened in its place with concrete; then I'm going to enlist with Kitchener's boys. If they find me out, they can only jug me. Do you think they would?"
I could not tell him. It is more than likely. A strong man with a glass eye, who insists on fighting the enemy at a time like this, is apt to be considered a danger in this country. Especially when he has an undetectable glass eye.
THE AUSTRALASIAN SOLDIER
[CHAPTER XXIII]
THE AUSTRALASIAN SOLDIER
And Southern Nation, and Southern State aroused from their dream of ease,
Shall write in the book of Eternal Fate their stormy histories.
"The Australasians are possibly the finest troops in the world."
The considered judgment of an observer at the Dardanelles, Commander Josiah Wedgwood, M.P., deliberately pronounced for publication in the Press, caught the attention of many readers of newspapers in this country. Cabled out to the Southern Hemisphere, it was reproduced in every newspaper in Australia and New Zealand, where a thrill of pride and gratitude vibrated from end to end of the country, radiating back to the most remote township at the very Back of Beyond.
This was generous appreciation indeed, and accepted in the same spirit of generosity in which it was tendered. The vow, "Our last shilling and our last man," with which Australasia had solemnly entered upon the Great War was as solemnly renewed. The Southern Britons quivered with comprehensible pride at the generous and timely praise; it was more than they would have claimed—much more—but it carried a message of consolation to many a stricken home ten thousand miles away from the blood-stained battlefields of Europe. "Good soldiers, none better!" Then they have not died for nothing if they have merited that epitaph from the Motherland.
A New South Wales Battalion, ready for the Front.
Nature, as well as the deliberate plan of the Australasians themselves, has ensured that an army of Australasians must necessarily compose a very fine fighting force. It may be that the qualifications of the soldier of the future shall consist of an incredible callousness of heart, and an extended knowledge of all the detestable forms that can be assumed by the most hideous of human crimes. But the qualifications of a warrior have not yet been so far modified by the Great War that he has been converted into a poisoner. It is still assumed that he is a man who risks his life in the fair fight he wages with fair-minded men, whom unfortunate circumstances have made his foes for the time being. Coolness and resource in danger, magnanimity in the glory of victory, and stoutheartedness in the first abashment of defeat may still be called the soldier's virtues; and the oldest excuse for war, that the soldier kills without murder in his heart, can still be pleaded by the Briton who takes up arms in defence of his country.
Soldiering of this sort has always been an instinct with the Southern Briton. The individual citizen there is under no misapprehension about the preparedness of his country for war; he looks around and sees for himself. To desire to retain a great continent for ever for the exclusive use of the white races is a privilege involving heavy responsibilities. There is an obvious danger in excluding one's neighbours because they do not conform to the high ideals of civilization adopted by the Briton. Very deliberately the Australasian has adopted this provocative attitude toward his coloured neighbours, who far outnumber him, though possessing only very restricted areas of territory for their habitation, as compared with the spacious elbow room which the Australasian reserves for himself.
From his early boyhood the young Australasian is made familiar with the possibility of taking up arms in self-defence. Whatever may be thought of the measures he takes for the development of his holding, in proof of his title to it, there can be no difference of opinion as to his readiness to fight for his spacious heritage. He knows what such a war would mean to his country, with its long stretches of undefended coastline, and the sparse population of the country behind them. These coasts are so obviously vulnerable spots that only a purblind fool could ignore their terrible significance. And the Australasian is certainly no fool.
There are other circumstances, too, in his daily life that may be partly responsible for his curious readiness to take off his coat and fight. The uncertainty of his surroundings may be responsible for his belief that life is one long fight with circumstance. He goes forth to his daily occupation with the light of battle in his eye; there is something pathetically cynical in his creed that it is necessary to fight for what he gets, even after he has fairly earned it by more peaceful means. He gives his admiration to the man he calls a "battler," and reserves a contemptuous surprise for the man who expects to get anything at all without fighting for it.
Wherever he comes into contact with Nature, the Australasian finds justification for his idea that life is a long struggle against adverse conditions, a struggle which must only be relinquished at the merciful call of Death itself. Considering the fewness of his numbers, he is engaged in the most terrific task that engages any of the nations of the world. He is developing a vast unknown continent, and contending with conditions that are most curiously fickle. The unconsidered circumstances of one year become the determining factors of the next, and that by some whimsical no-law that baffles all intelligent prevision. In another century he may have mastered some of the tricks that climate and environment, to mention but two of his ever-present problems, are playing with his means of livelihood; for the present they make his existence one long uncertain struggle.
For instance, a bag of seed wheat brought from another district may contain a few seeds of a harmless weed, known for many years to be innocent; not worth worrying about one way or the other. The transfer to new conditions of soil and atmosphere suddenly transforms this inoffensive plant into a vegetable pest, that climbs over all saner growths and chokes them out of existence with the ineradicable monstrosity of its new functions. Fertile farms are rendered useless, and the product of the work of whole lifetimes negatived by such malevolent miracles; but they give the Australasian the fighting spirit. Two or three men will go out and face a roaring bush fire with a two-mile front, in the apparently hopeless task of holding it in check till further assistance can be procured. Drought, flood and pestilence are fought in the same uncompromising way, for the race has the instinct of grim battle implanted deep down in its nature. The Australasian knows there is always something to contend with; he knows it is no use to expect a soft time; he must fight.
So he becomes resourceful, inventive, open to suggestion. He is certain there is a counter to every blow delivered by Fate, if one could but discover it. To expect to fight, to realize that there is always a chance to win, but a reasonable expectation of defeat, to seek expedients without being discouraged by failure; all these things make good training for soldiering. They are all part of the daily life of the Australasian, even of the Australasian of the cities. Disaster, sudden and swift; change, inexorable and sweeping; disappointment, bitter and undeserved; he recognizes them all as everyday factors in his existence. The fighting spirit cannot be held long in abeyance if they are to be countered and overcome.
Then the Australasian has the fighting equipment. He is superbly healthy, in spite of his leanness and the drawn look due to the lines that life bites into the faces of even the young men. These men of the sun-dried plains and the rocky ranges look upon illness as something unnatural, something to be ashamed of and concealed; they seem almost to have the instinct that prompts the sick animal to hide from its fellows, and sometimes impels the hale beasts to slay the sick one for the reason that illness is unnatural, dangerous, and an offence. Australasia has the lowest death-rate of the world, a significant fact in the health record of a nation. A nation of athletes! Swift runners, fast swimmers, tall lean men whose movements are made with incredible and deceptive swiftness, inured to the saddle and to long marches under a tropical sun. Compare a regiment of them with a regiment of home-bred Britons, and the advantage in smartness of appearance would lie with the latter. The Australasian is inclined to be loose-jointed and slabby; they use the word "lanky" themselves. They are inclined to economy of physical effort, to walk with a slouch and a swing. Do not be misled by the lack of "snap" in their movements; it is deceptive.
Enterprise and daring are theirs by heredity. They have descended from a race of adventurers. Their immediate forbears were those whom the love of adventure drew to new and little known countries, who were not content to rust out in quiet English villages, to economize for a lifetime on oatmeal and potatoes in a Scottish croft, or to die of rheumatism on the edge of an Irish bog. They married brave girls, and crossed the long oceans to become pioneers of the newer races, transmitting their health and love of adventure to a whole nation.
The Australasians have been accustomed to the weapons of the soldier all their lives; they are part of the daily life of many of them. The rifle and the entrenching tool pass into accustomed hands, which know just how to make the best use of them. Their far-sighted eyes detect little signs of the country through which they pass; their trained minds, versed in all the lore of the country-side, draw the just conclusions. All the work of the camp comes naturally and easily to their hands; many of them are practised guides and scouts. They find the shortest and best way from one place to another by an uncanny kind of instinct; they select the best paths by some natural process that cannot be explained.
When the Australasians were first submitted to the practical test of campaigning to prove their worth in actual warfare, they were held by experts to have failed in one particular, due to their lack of special training. One requisite of the modern soldier was wanting in their composition; they were deficient in discipline. They insisted on ignoring many of the formalities in behaviour exacted from the trained soldier; they protested that they could not see the necessity for them. It would have been easier to underestimate this disadvantage than to correct it, had the Australasians adhered to their original schemes of national defence. But before a second time of testing had come round, they had made differences of a vital kind in their military system, and in the change the defect in training had been remedied.
The Last March through Sydney Streets.
With the introduction of national service in Australasia, provision was also made for the local production of the implements and munitions of warfare, and for military equipment. Their local supply of the raw material for such purposes is unequalled in the world, and thus it came that the Australian forces in the Great War were equipped in a style of serviceable comfort that was the admiration of all who examined it. In short, the Australasian forces who were sent to participate in the Great War were first-class material, well-trained and excellently found, a body of men of whom it was reasonable to expect fine deeds should the chance ever come their way.
The other factors to be taken into consideration are important ones. The first was their fine youthful pride in the opportunity of serving side by side with the soldiers of the Mother Country, and of the proud European nations allied to her. There will always be generous rivalry between the troops of two great nations fighting side by side in a just cause. But the spirit in which the Australasians went out to the service of the Mother Empire goes deeper and further still. It holds nothing questioning or calculated, it is the conduct of men who hail as a proud privilege the opportunity of laying down their lives for the underlying principles on which the structure of the British Empire is reared. The danger note had only to be sounded and these men hastened to record their eagerness to serve; more, they well knew why they were so keen. With them duty and inclination walked hand in hand.
Finally, the people of Australasia are well assured of the justice of the cause for which they fight. Nowhere was more interest displayed in the speeches that explained the causes to which the war is due, nowhere is there a public better informed of the efforts made to preserve peace, and of the deliberate flouting of them by Germany. Small nations themselves, the Southern Britons fully comprehend the danger to the small nations of Europe from the grasping aggression of their strong unscrupulous neighbours. They claim as part of their heritage those pages of British history which tell how gloriously Great Britain has espoused the cause of the weak in the past. There is no quarrel in which the men of Australasia would more gladly take up arms with the Mother Country than one for the innocent weak against the guilty strong. And such a quarrel, they are well persuaded, is the root cause of the Great War in which they are now fighting.
FILLING THE GAPS
[CHAPTER XXIV]
FILLING THE GAPS
From Blackboy to Mena, from Mena to where
They drew the first blood with the bayonet,
They hoisted the heathen foe out of his lair
Who'd the Germanized courage to stay in it.
From Suez they scattered the truculent Turk,
To far Teheran and to Tripoli;
And at last they beheld British Jackies at work
On the gun-bristled hills of Gallipoli:
On the gun-bristled hills of Gallipoli,
A minute of wading in bullet-splashed waves,
The Cooees of Motherland thrilling 'em.
But those minutes cut holes in that brown line of braves
And—What about filling 'em?
So wrote one of Australia's bards when the first news of the battle of Brighton Beach reached the Commonwealth. The practical patriotism of Australia at once grasped the fact that there must be wide gaps in the ranks, and that the best reward the Commonwealth could make to those who had upheld the honour of Australasia so nobly was to support them with all the additional men and money required for the completion of the task so nobly begun.
It has already been stated that the original Expeditionary Force from Australasia totalled 28,000 men in all; but even before they had left Southern waters, arrangements for further contingents were well advanced. As a matter of fact, the second contingent, which was 10,000 strong, had arrived in Egypt in time to take part in the training at Mena, and was part of the landing force of April. With the New Zealanders the infantry of this contingent served under General Sir A. J. Godley as the 4th Brigade, and reference has already been made to their gallant defence of the central position at the battle of Quinn's Post, where Sanders Pasha led the Turks to an irretrievable disaster.
Their General expressed his personal opinion of the services of the gallant 4th at Anzac on June 2, when he gathered the men together and delivered to them the following inspiriting address:—
General Sir A. J. Godley, commanding the New Zealanders and the 4th Brigade, Australian Infantry.
"Colonel Monash, officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the Fourth Australian Infantry Brigade:—I have come here to-day to tell you all with what great pride and satisfaction I have watched your performances for the past five weeks, and to tell you also that not only your comrades in this division, but also those of the whole Australasian Army Corps, have looked on with the greatest admiration at your gallant doings, from the moment that you landed in the Gallipoli Peninsula. You have been for five weeks continuously in the front trenches, fighting particularly hard the whole of that time. Never have troops been subjected to such heavy shell and rifle fire, not to speak of bombs and hand grenades; you have lived and fought in a din and turmoil which would have sorely tried most men. You began your fighting immediately on landing, pitchforked, I might say, into the middle of the battle, with the whole brigade scattered in small fragments in different parts of the firing line, as the several units landed. You were in the firing line continuously for seven days with nothing but what you carried on you. It took days of hard work for the brigadier and his staff to collect the battalions together and to consolidate the section of defence allotted to this brigade. During this time many deeds of heroism, many acts of gallantry were performed, which will remain unknown and will go unrewarded, and many of your comrades were killed and wounded. Again, on May 2 and 3, this brigade undertook a sortie from its lines which was very far-reaching in its results, and which shattered the enemy's plans for a combined assault most effectually. Again, on May 9, this brigade made another highly successful sortie, and only a few days ago, during the greater part of May 18 and 19, you bore the brunt of the very severe Turkish attack by which the enemy hoped to drive this army corps into the sea.
"Yours is a fine record, and one of which you yourselves, and the whole of the people of Australia, have the fullest reason to be proud. You have made, and are making, the military history of Australia—a history equal to that of any other brigade or body of troops in the Empire, or in the world—and you have performed deeds, and achieved successes, of which the Commonwealth will surely be proud. Pope's Hill position is named after the gallant commander of the 16th Battalion, which held it so long against such odds; Courtney's Post will for ever be associated with the 14th Battalion, which has defended it against all attacks for the whole period; the most difficult post of all—Quinn's Post, named after Major Quinn, who bravely died at this post in the service of his country, and who, I am sure, would have preferred no more glorious death—this post will be for ever associated with the name of Lieut.-Colonel Cannon, and the 15th Battalion. Nor will be forgotten the gallant behaviour of the 13th Battalion, under Lieut.-Colonel Burnage, who, among many other fine performances, held on for a night and a day in a difficult advanced position, which they had stormed, and from which they did not withdraw until ordered to do so in view of the subsequent course of the operations.
"Among so many whose names are worthy of record and distinction, it has been very hard to single out individuals, but as commander of this division, I have had the honour of sending on the names of some twenty officers and men, from that of your brigadier downwards, for special and honourable mention in despatches for most meritorious service and conspicuous gallantry.
"It has pleased his Majesty the King to confer upon this brigade eleven honours, comprising two Distinguished Service Orders, two Military Crosses, and seven Distinguished Conduct medals. These rewards, earned between the landing of the brigade on April 25 and May 5, are surely a rare and enviable distinction.
"On behalf of the Imperial Government, because of the great services you have rendered to the glory of the Empire—greater services than you probably yourselves realize—I thank you, Colonel Monash, your staff, your commanding officers, and all your personnel from the highest to the lowest, for the work you have done during the past five weeks."
This second contingent, which distinguished itself so remarkably from the time of its landing, was followed by yet a third, also of 10,000 men, led by Colonels Spencer Browne, C.B., V.D.; W. Holmes, D.S.O., V.D.; and Linton. They were of physique equal in every respect to their forerunners, and may be trusted to render an equally good account of themselves.
These supplementary contingents are to be regarded as additions to the first Expeditionary force, for the Australian method of filling the gaps is to send monthly reinforcements, sufficient to replace all men lost in battle. The original estimate was for 3,000 a month, but when the Australian Government grasped the serious nature of the operations in which their men were engaged, and the extent of the casualty lists, they increased this number to 4,000 monthly. These steps were taken before the full accounts of the Gallipoli fighting had reached Australia; they provided merely for what was thought a serious operation bearing a prospect of success at no remote date in the future.
But the full grandeur of Australian patriotism was only to be realized when it was gathered that the whole Turkish army was mustered in defence of the Straits of the Dardanelles, and that Australasia was called upon to bear a very considerable share of a separate war, waged against the full strength of a desperate warrior nation. Then Australasia became one vast recruiting ground; and military enthusiasm reached a pitch which has not yet been realized in the Mother Country.
It would be a salutary lesson to that section of the London Press which persisted in a sour pessimistic view of the whole of the Dardanelles adventure to be made to reprint a few columns of the sane but ardent patriotism with which the Australians were spurred by their worthy Press to shoulder the load apportioned to them. There were none of those hints of possible failure which so appalled the unsophisticated Briton during the summer months of 1915. A nation of 5,000,000 people that prepares to put 250,000 men down on the spot, and back them with its last shilling, cherishes no such unworthy doubts. A more splendid answer to croakers than that given by Australasia could hardly have been devised.
Perhaps, though, the spirit of calm and unshaken resignation with which Australia and New Zealand accepted the tidings of the evacuation of Anzac was even a better answer still. The assurances of the Prime Ministers of the Commonwealth and the Dominion that the reverse would but nerve those countries to still greater effort rang through the Empire like a clarion call. Australia decided to increase its quota of 250,000 men to 300,000, and New Zealand made a similar increase, in proportion to population. And throughout the width and breadth of those great Dominions went the call for more men still.
Only cabled accounts of that wave of recruiting energy, which converted Australia into a great armed camp, have yet reached this country. But they make the heart swell with pride at the indomitable courage with which the Southern Nations are preparing to tackle the problem of the Gallipoli Peninsula.
The cost was laid before Parliament and, after consideration, approved without question. An expenditure of £40,000,000 was faced without a murmur. "In three months' time," said a responsible minister, "Australia would be paying more per head for the war than the people in England." The statement was received with cheers. The suggestion of a war tax met with no opposition in the House of Parliament; nor from the mass of the Australian people. The money is to be found without any grumbling.
As for the men, they sprang to the call. The State of Victoria showed the way with a great recruiting campaign, with the avowed object of getting a thousand men per day. At the end of a fortnight the record was 18,970 applications, of which 13,810 were accepted. On the same scale of recruiting, the United Kingdom would yield nearly 500,000 soldiers in a fortnight. The figures, in proportion to population, seem almost incredible, but they are accurate.
The Mother State of New South Wales followed with a similar campaign. One city of less than 100,000 people—the city of Newcastle—provided 363 applicants in one day. On the same lines recruiting was organized all over Australia; as these words are written it is going on with such enthusiasm that there can be no doubt of the result. The farmers and stock-raisers were facing the best season the country had ever seen. They left their bumper harvest to ripen and be gathered by the women and boys; it is for them to see this business through "on the gun-bristled hills of Gallipoli."
The spirit of Australia can best be gauged by reading an extract from a letter written to the Australian wounded by a young lady who is a teacher at the High School in Ballarat, and which was cabled all over the world, since it echoes truly the pride of Australia in its heroes, and the determination of the Commonwealth that all shall be worthy of their devotion and grand patriotism. The letter was received at the hospital at Malta, and runs as follows:—
"May 12.
"Dear Australian Boys,—Every Australian woman's heart this week is thrilling with pride, with exultation, and while her eyes fill with tears she springs up as I did when the story in Saturday's Argus was finished and says, 'Thank God, I am an Australian.' Boys, you have honoured our land; you, the novices, the untrained, the untaught in war's grim school, have done the deeds of veterans. Oh, how we honour you; how we glory in your matchless bravery, in your yet more wonderful fortitude, which the war correspondent says was shown so marvellously as your boatloads of wounded cheered and waved amid their pain as you were rowed back to the vessels!
"What gave you the courage for that heroic dash to the ridge, boys? British grit, Australians' nerve and determination to do or die, a bit of the primeval man's love of a big fight against heavy odds. God's help, too, surely.
"Dear boys, I'm sure you will feel a little rewarded for your deeds of prowess if you know how the whole Commonwealth, nay, the whole Empire, is stirred by them. Every Sunday now we are singing the following lines after 'God save the King' in church and Sunday school. They appeared in the Argus Extraordinary with the first Honour Roll in it:
God save our splendid men!
Send them safe home again!
Keep them victorious,
Patient and chivalrous,
They are so dear to us:
God save our men.
"What can I say further? With God the ultimate issue rests. Good-night, boys. God have you living or dying in His keeping. If any one of you would like to send me a pencilled note or card I'll answer it to him by return.—Your countrywoman,
"Jeanie Dobson."
Farewell to the Troops in Melbourne.
That Australian purses were opened with Australian hearts is proved by the remarkable total of gifts in money and kind made by Australia to various funds on behalf of sufferers by the war. In the first ten months the Commonwealth contributed in cash the sum of £2,329,259 to the various funds arising out of the war, apart from immense gifts in kind, the value of which is not estimatable. The State contributions are totalled as follows:—New South Wales, £980,889; Victoria, £850,000; Queensland, £200,825; South Australia, £127,540; Tasmania, £36,750; and Western Australia, £133,255. Total, £2,329,259.
The Australian care for the wounded is the subject of a testimony from Sir Frederick Treves, which may be included here to show the appreciation with which this care has been met by the most eminent surgeon in the Empire:—
"The generosity with which Australia has provided motor ambulances for the whole country, and Red Cross stores for every one, British or French, who has been in want of the same, is beyond all words. I only hope that the people of Australia will come to know of the admirable manner in which their wounded have been cared for, and of the noble and generous work which that great colony has done under the banner of the Red Cross."
New Zealand is no whit behind Australia; indeed, in proportion to population, the Dominion supplied more men during the first ten months of the war than even the Commonwealth. The troops actually sent on active service by this community of a little more than a million people were:—
| First Samoan Force | 2,000 |
| Main Body | 8,000 |
| First Reinforcements | 800 |
| Second Reinforcements | 2,000 |
| Third Reinforcements | 1,800 |
| Samoan Relief Force | 500 |
| Fourth Reinforcements | 2,200 |
| Fifth Reinforcements | 2,000 |
| Sixth Reinforcements | 2,000 |
| Extra Force | 2,500 |
| Seventh Reinforcements | 2,000 |
| ——— | |
| Total in 10 months | 25,800 |
Throughout this period the Dominion held a valuable reserve in hand, for the minimum age had been kept at twenty years. This excluded a fine body of young men between the age of eighteen and twenty, all of them well trained under the compulsory system; as grand a body of young soldiers as the world can show. Their number is estimated at 22,000, and over 90 per cent. of them have volunteered for service abroad. At the time of writing the question of lowering the age limit to eighteen was being considered in New Zealand, though the number of recruits of the standard age was still so satisfactory that the step was not necessary. New Zealand is preparing, like Australia, to send out five per cent. of its whole population to fight the battles of the Empire abroad; that is a force of 50,000 men. The whole number of men of military age in the Dominion is less than 200,000.
The Canterbury Section of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.
Those who remain for the defence of the Southern nation are now busy in preparing munitions for the Great War. The factories of the young nations have already been converted into arsenals under the control of Munitions Boards, and hosts of volunteers are working long hours to supply the men of Australasia with every requisite for victory.
Lastly, Australasia has not forgotten that the duty of providing the Empire's food is one of the most important within her province. The year of the outbreak of war saw her producing industries hampered by a disastrous drought, so that the harvest failed and less than twenty per cent of the anticipated wheat supply was garnered. The year 1915 saw quite a different state of affairs; bountiful rains prepared the way for huge crops, and the farmers had sown lavishly, so that full advantage might be taken of this favourable state of affairs.
The wheat crop of 1915-16 nearly doubled the previous record for an Australian harvest. It was garnered by boys and old men and women. Over 200,000 tons of this precious wheat was placed at the disposal of the Allied nations, its freighting and sale being made a national affair. Thus Australia was able to supply 200,000 tons of wheat as one contribution to the fighting forces of the Allies, and was a price as obtained never before approached in the history of Australian agriculture, the Commonwealth was the better able to bear the burden of warfare the Australians had so generously taken on themselves.
Thus Australasia keeps a watchful eye on the gaps wherever they occur, and sets about filling them with a single-minded devotion to the great object which has obliterated all other consideration in the minds of those young nations of the peaceful lands beneath the Southern Cross.
THE ARMIES OF AUSTRALASIA
[CHAPTER XXV]
THE ARMIES OF AUSTRALASIA
Until the year 1870, the Imperial Government maintained a small body of troops in Australia for the defence of the country. They existed for two purposes: the chief one being to protect the country from risings of the convicts. The other purpose was to assist in repelling any foreign invasion, for they formed the garrisons of the rather primitive forts which protected some of the Australian harbours. From time to time local defence bodies were formed, when the troubles of the Mother Country seemed to bring a foreign invasion among the actual possibilities of Australian history. As soon as the trouble, whatever it might be, had blown over, these defence organizations would die a natural death, to be revived when fresh clouds appeared upon the horizon.
The withdrawal of the Imperial troops in 1870 forced each Australian state to initiate measures for defence, and caused the establishment of a small professional army in each of the six separate states, that were later federated into the Commonwealth of Australia. These very small groups of soldiers were designed to form a nucleus for a citizen defence force. This was purely voluntary, the men of Australia drilling and training without any payment; and the Governments finding uniform and weapons, and allowing a fairly large supply of ammunition for practice, at a very cheap rate.
In 1880 a militia system was substituted for the volunteer system, and a yearly payment of something like £12 for each volunteer soldier was arranged. At the same time an admirable cadet system was established, and the schoolboys of Australia entered into the business of drilling, training and shooting with an enthusiasm that did much to keep the ranks of the militia full, as they grew up. The smaller country settlements also established rifle clubs, which had a remarkably large membership. A little drill was combined with a great deal of shooting under service conditions, and to the rifle clubs Australia owes the possession of a very large number of sharpshooters that certainly have no superiors in the world.
The cadets attracted the notice of King George when, as Duke of York, he made his great Empire tour in 1900. They took part in a remarkable review of defence forces held on the famous Flemington racecourse; and Mr. E. F. Knight, one of the London journalists who accompanied the King on that tour, wrote of them in the following terms:—
"The first to pass the saluting base were the cadets, who to the stirring strains of the British Grenadiers marched by with a fine swing and preserved an excellent alignment. They presented the appearance of very tough young soldiers, and they exhibited no fatigue after a very trying day, in the course of which they had been standing for hours with soaked clothes in the heavy rain. They looked business-like in their khaki uniforms and felt hats.
"During the march past I was in a pavilion reserved chiefly for British and foreign naval officers. The German and American officers were much struck with the physique and soldierly qualities of the Australian troops, but they spoke with unreserved admiration when they saw these cadets."
The cadet system was elaborated, between the years 1909 and 1911, into a system of compulsory military training based on a scheme drawn up by Lord Kitchener himself, followed by a report on Australian defences made by Sir Ian Hamilton, the General who is now in supreme charge of the Australasian forces at the Dardanelles. When the new scheme came into force, the numbers of the land forces of the Commonwealth were nearly 110,000 men and boys; the figures comprising 2,000 permanent troops, nearly 22,000 militia, over 55,000 members of rifle clubs, and 28,000 cadets.
At the time the new compulsory system came into force, the number of males in Australia was—
| Between 12 and 18 (of cadet age) | 260,000 |
| Between 18 and 26 (of citizen soldier age) | 366,000 |
| Between 26 and 35 | 330,000 |
| Between 35 and 60 | 614,000 |
For compulsory training it was enacted that the citizens of cadet and military age should be divided into four classes as under:—
Junior Cadets, from 12 to 14.
Senior Cadets, from 14 to 18.
Citizen soldiers, from 18 to 25.
" " 25 to 26.
The prescribed training was: (a) For junior cadets, 120 hours yearly. (b) For senior cadets, 4 whole-day drills, 12 half-day drills, and 24 night drills yearly. (c) For citizen soldiers, 16 whole-day drills, or their equivalent, of which not less than eight should be in camps of continuous training.
The scheme came into operation at the beginning of 1911, when the new cadets, to the number of over 120,000, were enrolled. At the same time 200 non-commissioned officers, as a training force for the new army, went into camp for a six months course of instruction. From July 1 the new system of cadet training began, 20,000 of the boys, of the age of eighteen, going into training as the first year's crop of recruits. Every year afterwards this number, approximately, of trained senior cadets was added to the citizen army in training, while the number of cadets remained about 120,000; some 20,000 junior cadets at the age of twelve reinforcing the cadets as each draft of eighteen-year-old cadets became citizen soldiers.
It will be seen that the outbreak of the war in 1914 found the Australian scheme still incomplete, since the number of citizen soldiers in training was approximately only 80,000, even including the 20,000 cadets of that year, who had just been drafted into the citizen army.
Australia had also arranged for the training of its own young officers, who in time should develop into Area Officers under the compulsory services scheme, which provides for the division of the Commonwealth into over 200 military Areas, with an officer in charge of each. The establishment of a military college at Duntroon, near the new Australian Federal capital city of Canberra, had made excellent progress when war came.
The Duntroon establishment was an efficient rather than a showy establishment; its modest wooden bungalows, in which the officers were quartered, contrasting strangely with the elaborate arrangements at similar establishments such as Sandhurst or West Point. But the teaching was remarkably thorough for such a young institution. The democratic tendencies of Australia are illustrated by the fact that tuition at Duntroon is absolutely free, the parents of the young officer being not even asked to supply him with pocket money, since an allowance of 5s. per week is made by the Government to each cadet in training. The course of instruction is one of four years' training, and necessitates the daily application of six hours to instruction, and two hours to military exercises. A vacation of two months is observed at Christmas time, the height of the Australian summer, and there are frequent camps for practical instruction in all branches of field work.
Cadets are required to make their own beds, clean their own boots, and keep their kit in order. Special emphasis is laid upon the value of character, and any cadet, however able in acquiring knowledge or brilliant in physical exercises, must, if he lacks the power of self-discipline, be removed as unfit to become an officer who has to control others. The College was opened in June, 1911, with forty-one cadets, and has since been employed by the New Zealand Government for the training of its young officers, a step in co-operation which is likely to show the way to still closer relations between the Dominion and the Commonwealth in many matters relating to defence.
The Commandant of the College was the late General Bridges, whose death in action at Gaba Tepe is so universally mourned by Australians. Writing of him and the College in the Sydney Morning Herald, V. J. M. says:—
"Duntroon is his masterpiece. To have left it as he did, after a bare four years, represents the greatest educational feat yet accomplished in Australia. Before attempting it he studied the greatest colleges in Europe and America—Sandhurst, Woolwich, West Point, Kingston, Saint-Cyr, L'Ecole Polytechnique, L'Ecole Militaire, die Grosslichterfelder Kadettenanstalt—all were visited and carefully investigated by him. His endeavour was to incorporate, so far as local conditions would allow, the best of each in Duntroon. How far he has succeeded is well known. In the opinion of Viscount Bryce, Sir Ian Hamilton, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, and others, it stands out one of the most efficient military schools—some say the most efficient—in the world. Four years ago there were a station homestead and a rolling sweep of lonely country. What a strong driving force must have been behind it all. The crisis found Duntroon ready. Already seventy-one officers from its class-rooms and training fields are at the front, of whom some twenty have fallen. So excellent has been the work of these young soldiers in the desert camp that, in a recent letter, General Bridges mentioned that General Birdwood has specially written of them to the King. Australia will have reason in the troublous years ahead to be thankful that her great military school was conceived by a man of broad grasp and wide knowledge. The soldiers of the future will be moulded and the armies of the future organized by its graduates. He meant it to be, and it is, a great military university."
The precedent that Australasian soldiers should take part in the wars of the Mother Country was set in 1883, when the State of New South Wales sent a contingent of 800 infantry and artillery to the Soudan. The initiative in this matter was due to Mr. W. B. Dalley, then Premier of New South Wales. The force, after being reviewed by Lord Loftus, the State Governor, sailed from Sydney on March 3, 1883, on the transports Iberia and Australasian. The services rendered by them were comparatively slight; indeed, they were treated by the Imperial authorities as rather a gratuitous nuisance, intruding where their presence was not required. But the precedent had been set, and was followed by all the Dominions Overseas, on the outbreak of the African war.
Once again the War Office was inclined to regard the Greater Britons as useless interlopers, and the offer to provide cavalry was met with the historical cable that in Africa "foot soldiers only" were required. It is further a matter of history that the authorities very sensibly revised this estimate as the war progressed, and were glad of the services of every man who could ride and shoot. Contingent after contingent was despatched from Australasia, New Zealand especially providing a wealth of fine soldiers. In proportion to population, the Dominion supplied more men to fight the Empire's battle in South Africa than any part of the British realm.
CLEARING THE PACIFIC
[CHAPTER XXVI]
CLEARING THE PACIFIC
When the war broke out, the ports of Australasia lay within striking distance of German harbours, where lay a powerful squadron of armoured and light cruisers. A very real danger to Australasian shipping and seaports had to be encountered; and the first warlike steps taken by Australia and New Zealand were expeditions against Germany's Pacific Colonies.
At that time they were very considerable possessions, about 100,000 square miles in extent. Chief among them was Kaiser Wilhelm's Land, or, to give it its British appellation, German New Guinea, contiguous to the Australian possession of Papua, and 70,000 square miles in area. Next came the Bismarck Archipelago, better known as New Britain, a group of islands with an area of 20,000 square miles. Other colonies were German Samoa, and the Caroline, Marshall, Ladrone, Pelew, and Solomon Islands. In these colonies were established wireless stations of great strategical importance to Germany.
The squadron maintained to protect these possessions was a very modern and powerful one, as Great Britain was to learn to her cost. It consisted of the armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the light fast cruisers Leipzig, Nürnberg, and Emden. The units of the British navy on the spot were the three old third-class cruisers Psyche, Pyramus, and Philomel; and upon these New Zealand, the Dominion most threatened, would have been forced to rely if Australia had not been provided with a navy of her own.
That navy had made ready for sea at the first sign of a great European war, and met at an appointed rendezvous off the coast of Queensland on August 11. One section of it, consisting of the battle-cruiser Australia, the light cruisers Sydney and Melbourne, and the destroyers Parramatta, Yarra, and Warrego, set off to the Bismarcks in the hope of encountering the German squadron. The destroyers, under convoy of the Sydney, made straight for Rabaul, the chief German settlement there, although there were no charts of the harbour, while the big ship and the other light cruiser kept watch at a distance.
In the darkness of a pitch-black night the destroyers steamed into the harbour, and captured all the ships in the bay. Right up to the pier they steamed, and then out again, having effected their purpose for the time being. They set out from that point to a rendezvous at Port Moresby, in Australian New Guinea, while the Sydney returned to Australian waters. The Australia and the Melbourne made for New Caledonia, where their presence was needed in aid of the Sister Dominion of New Zealand.
With the greatest secrecy the New Zealand Government had equipped a force of 1,300 volunteers from the province of Wellington, for an expedition against German Samoa. They knew the big German warships were somewhere in the vicinity, but that risk did not deter them. The men were sent on transports, and convoyed by one of the antiquated British cruisers; their first port of call was New Caledonia, distant five days. Fortune favours the brave, and this was a brave little adventure, if ever there were one such. But they won out all right, reaching New Caledonia safely, to receive a joyous welcome from the Australia, the Melbourne, and the French cruiser Montcalm, which were awaiting them at Noumea.
Their course to Samoa was now a safe one, comparatively speaking, and they had the satisfaction of lowering the German flag at Apia, and hoisting the Union Jack in its place, before the war was a month old. The warships left the Expedition in possession, and steamed away. A fortnight later the two big German ships were sighted off the harbour, and the little garrison had a thrilling experience. They prepared to defend the place against the heavy guns of the Germans, but it was not necessary. After some delay the Germans, apparently fearing some trap, steamed off, and were not again seen in the vicinity.
Samoa fell on August 29, and on September 9 the Australia and the Melbourne were keeping another rendezvous at Port Moresby. Their appointment was with the transport Berrima, which, escorted by the cruiser Sydney, conveyed to that port an Expedition launched against the German Colonies in the North Pacific. It consisted of six companies of the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, under Colonel Holmes, D.S.O., and a battalion of infantry with machine-guns. With the Berrima were the two Australian submarines AE1 and AE2, both of which came to an untimely end before the war was nine months old. At the rendezvous were the destroyers, a transport with 500 Queensland soldiers, and store ships and other requisites for such an expedition.
The Australian Submarines AE 1 and AE 2, both lost in the First Year of War.
The objects of the expedition were two; they meant to occupy Rabaul, the chief settlement in the Bismarck Archipelago, and to destroy the German wireless station they knew to be established somewhere in Neu Pommern, the principal island in the group. The Australia, with the transports, made straight for Rabaul, which capitulated. The destroyers, under convoy of the Sydney, were sent forward to search for the wireless station. The first landing party marched straight inland, and soon encountered trouble. A heavy fire was directed upon them from sharpshooters, who were so well hidden that it was suspected they were in the trees; and the Australians were forced to take to the bush. They signalled for help, and also worked through the dense scrub until they came upon an entrenched position.
The signal for help brought every available man from the destroyers ashore; a picturesque touch was added to the reinforcement by the uninvited presence of one of the ship's butchers, who attached himself to the party in a blue apron, and armed with his cleaver of office. This relief party was followed by two others, one landing at Herbertshöhe to execute a flank movement. The first party had some stiff bush fighting, in which Lieutenant Bowen was wounded, and three Germans were captured. When the first two forces joined hands, Lieutenant-Commander Elwell was shot dead; and they were glad to see the main expeditionary force, with machine-guns, arrive on the scene of action.
The machine-guns settled the question, and the German commander, Lieutenant Kempf, at once hoisted the white flag. With some Australians he proceeded to a second line of trenches, and ordered the occupants to surrender. A number of them were taken prisoners; and then resistance broke out, and they all tried to escape. They were fired upon, and eighteen were shot in the act of running away. In the end the remainder were content to surrender.
The surrender of the wireless station was negotiated by Lieutenant Kempf himself, after giving his parole. He cycled alone to the place, and announced that he had arranged that there should be no resistance. Three Australian officers followed him and, placing reliance upon his word, boldly entered the station late at night. They found it strongly entrenched, but the natives who formed the majority of the defending force had quite understood Admiral Patey's threat that he would shell the place unless the flag were hauled down, and had no relish for such an ordeal. The next afternoon the British flag was hoisted over the station.
Rear-Admiral Sir George Patey, commanding the Australian Squadron.
The next objective was Toma, a town inland whither the German administrator of the Colony had fled when the warships appeared before Rabaul. An expedition against this place, with the complement of a 12-pounder gun, was accordingly arranged. The Australia paved the way for this expedition by shelling the approaches to the town, with the result that a deputation was sent out by the Administrator to meet the force half-way. The column continued its march without paying any attention to this deputation, and entered Toma the same day in a dense cloud of tropical rain.
The Administrator sent another messenger to the officer in charge, promising to repair to Herbertshöhe the next day to negotiate a surrender. As the French cruiser Montcalm had now arrived the most sanguine German could not expect any continued resistance, and the surrender was signed.
Thus on September 13 all resistance had been crushed in the Bismarck Islands, and the Colony had been reduced by the Australians at a cost of two officers killed—Captain Pockley and Lieutenant-Commander Elwell—and three men. One officer, Lieutenant Bowen, and three men were wounded.
On September 24 the warships put in an appearance at Friedrich Wilhelmshafen, the chief settlement in German New Guinea, where no resistance was encountered. That evening the German flag was blotted out of the Pacific Ocean, the last of the German colonies there having fallen to the energetic Australian navy.
Two wireless stations established by the Germans, one at Nauru and the other at Anguar, were seized and destroyed, to the disadvantage of the German Pacific squadron against which the Australian navy now directed its operations, taking a prominent part in the driving movement which finally committed them to the battle of the Falkland Islands and their destruction by Admiral Sturdee on December 8.
THE YOUNGEST NAVY IN THE WORLD
[CHAPTER XXVII]
THE YOUNGEST NAVY IN THE WORLD
On the morning when the news of the sinking of the Emden reached London there was at least one good Briton of that city whose elation was curiously mingled with puzzlement. He was puzzled to know how Australia came by a navy; he had seen references to an Australian navy before, but had always supposed that a misprint had been made for "Austrian navy."
His wonder is so far excusable that the first ship of that navy was only launched as recently as 1911, when the battle cruiser Australia left the stocks in the yards of Messrs. John Brown & Co., of Glasgow; and she only arrived in Australia two years later. The other units of the navy are of even later construction. The existence of these vessels in Australian waters is a tribute to the enterprise and foresight of the Commonwealth of Australia. Their history and performance since the outbreak of the war has utterly confounded the naval experts of this country, who, if they had had their way, would not have had such ships in such a place.
For a quarter of a century before the foundation of the Australian navy, the whole question of naval protection for Australasia had been one profoundly unsatisfactory, both to the Imperial government and to the governments of the Southern Nations. Australia and New Zealand paid a naval subsidy to the Imperial coffers; recently it amounted to the annual sum of £200,000 from Australia and £40,000 from New Zealand. In return, the Admiralty maintained a number of obsolete warcraft in Australian waters, at a cost vastly exceeding the annual tribute. The Australasians wanted better ships; the Imperial Government desired a larger subsidy; it was an arrangement that pleased nobody.
The makeshift fleet in Australasian waters was explained by postulating the theory that when trouble came, the battle for the defence of Australasia would be fought in the North Sea, or somewhere far from the reach of Australasian ports. The experience of the first twelve months of the war may surely be held to have exploded that theory. The North Sea fleet did not prevent the Emden from bombarding Madras, and sinking merchant shipping worth £2,500,000 in Eastern waters. It would not have prevented the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau from battering Wellington and Sydney, and destroying half the ships in Australasian waters. But the theory was the pet one of all the experts, and it was employed seriously to disturb the pleasant relations between the Motherland and the Dominions.
For, about the year 1905, the uncontestable fact that the Dominions were not contributing sufficiently to the naval protection of the Empire could no longer be evaded. The question was discussed at Colonial Conferences; it was the subject of bitter newspaper articles. The Dominions wished to meet some part, at least, of their great obligations, but not in the way required by the Imperial Government. Put bluntly, the demand made of them was tribute; they were to supply money for naval defence, and have no voice in its expenditure.
Canada took a straightforward course, and withdrew her naval subsidy. New Zealand, with an admirable spirit, had a Dreadnought built, and handed it over to the Imperial Government. The battle cruiser New Zealand has done fine service in the North Sea since the outbreak of war, but had Australia been as sentimentally generous, Australasia would certainly have had cause to regret it.
But Australia planned to build a navy of her own; and a scheme for the construction of the first instalment of warships was drawn up by Rear-Admiral Sir William Cresswell, now first naval adviser to the Commonwealth. He came to London in 1906 to support his scheme, and to his sane and able advocacy of it Australia and the Empire owe a debt it will be hard to repay. It would be possible to quote some of the criticism he received here, but it would serve no good end. Suffice to say, it was couched in the superior vein that proves so irritating to the Colonial in Great Britain, especially when he knows he is right.
At the Colonial Conference of 1907, the matter came up for discussion, and Mr. Deakin and Senator Pearce, who represented Australia, succeeded in carrying their point. Expert reports were obtained, the probable cost was reckoned, and bravely faced; and Australia began to build her own warships. It is an open secret that she did so with the tacit disapproval of the Admiralty, and in face of the violent criticism of the experts.
Thus it happened that when war broke out, the Australians were able to place at the disposal of the Admiralty the following up-to-date warships in Australasian waters:—
H.M.A.S. "Australia" in Sydney Harbour.
The battle cruiser Australia of 19,200 tons displacement, in length 555 feet, with an 80 foot beam, and a draught of 26½ feet. Her armament consists of eight 12-inch guns, sixteen 4-inch guns, and two torpedo tubes. Of her ship's company of 820 more than half are Australians. She flies the flag of Rear-Admiral Sir George Patey, K.C.V.O.
Three light cruisers: the Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, all of 5,600 tons displacement, and with a speed of 26 knots. (The Sydney made 27 when steaming to her duel with the Emden.) Each has eight 6-inch guns, four 3-pounders, four machine guns and two torpedo tubes. The Sydney and Melbourne were built in Great Britain, but the Brisbane is of local construction.
Six destroyers: the Parramatta, Yarra, Torrens, Warrego, Swan, and Derwent. All are of the same type; of 700 tons displacement, 26 knots speed, and carry one 4-inch gun, three 12-pounders and three torpedo tubes.
Two submarines: the AE1 and AE2.
Thus had Australia provided for the defence of her coast, at a cost which excited strenuous criticism in the Commonwealth itself. Until war broke out—then every penny of the money was saved by the 12-inch guns of the Australia. "No," wrote an officer of the Scharnhorst, shortly before Admiral Sturdee had made an end of that armoured cruiser, "we did not raid any Australian port, nor sink any Australasian shipping. And why? Because we knew our 8·2-inch guns were no match for the armament of the Australia."
It is interesting to remember that at the launching of the Sydney Captain R. Muirhead Collins, C.M.G., the Secretary to the Commonwealth Office in London, made a speech almost prophetic in its prescience of the glory with which that vessel was to cover herself in her first ocean combat.
"From time immemorial," he said, "much significance and ceremony had been attached to the launch and christening of a ship. Apart from the mystery of the sea, and the fact that those who went down to the sea in ships saw the wonders of the deep, the act of placing a vessel in the water appeals to us all strongly, because ships are freighted, not only with human lives, but with human interests.
"How much stronger is the appeal to our emotions when ships, those great engines of war, carried with them the future of the Empire and of the English-speaking races under the flag? (Applause.) To the launch, therefore, of this cruiser, as in the case of the vessels which had preceded her, there was the added significance that they are freighted with, or carry with them, national and Imperial aspirations. National aspirations, because they represent the determination of a young, strong and vigorous community, proud of their British descent and of the glorious traditions of the sea which they share, to be no longer satisfied to dwell under the protection of the Mother's wing, but to take on the responsibilities of a self-governing community and to support the Mother Country in the great task of defence of the Empire—(applause)—and Imperial aspirations, because we see in the unity of the Empire, which depends on free communication by sea, the guarantee of freedom and security of peace to all those who dwell within its borders.
"We see in the co-ordination and consolidation of the naval resources of the Empire the chief means of its preservation, founded as it is on maritime enterprise and supremacy. Naval defence alone, however, will not suffice to save the Empire. Co-ordination in military preparations will also be required, based on the recognition of the obligation of every citizen to take his share. In this respect Australia is setting an example in its system of national training. (Applause.)
"We must go back to the days of ancient Greece for a record of maritime confederacy. It failed; and the Empire, which under other conditions it might have safeguarded, was destroyed and its peoples conquered, because, in the words of a recent writer, the Athenians neglected to make the outlying States of their Empire living and active parts instead of mere dependencies on the central government. These new vessels, which were to form the Australian unit in our naval forces, were the embodiment of a living and active partnership in the defence of the Empire. The Navy of Britain had always been justly the Briton's pride. That pride and that interest should now be extended to embrace the Navy of the Empire."
It is instructive to contrast the events in Eastern waters, where the Admiralty, in pursuance of the great theory that the Empire was to be saved by a battle in the North Sea, had weakened the China fleet almost in proportion to the strength supplied in Southern waters on Australian initiative. The operations against Kiao-Chau so far occupied the British warships that the Emden was able to bombard Madras, to enter the British port at Singapore and to sink the warships of our Allies while at anchor under the protection of the Empire's flag, and to heap insult and damage upon the first sea power of the world.
New Zealand, but for the Australian fleet, would have been as defenceless as the East Indies. The Dominion, while thrilled with a genuine and comprehensible pride at the fine work done elsewhere by its Dreadnought, was frank in admitting that the practical end of the argument lay with Australia. Mr. Massey, the Prime Minister, in a speech of the utmost import to Australasia, declared that the future policy of the Dominion would be one of co-operation with the Commonwealth for the naval defence of Australasian shores.
The work of the Australian warships in the reduction of the German Pacific Colonies has already been detailed. In the first seven weeks of the war the Australia and the Melbourne covered 12,000 miles. Not a single British merchant ship was molested in Australasian waters, while all the German shipping in the locality was gobbled up in the most summary fashion. Then, their work at home being completed, the vessels of the Australian fleet set out for wider adventures.
Some day the manœuvres which led to the destruction of the German Pacific squadron will be described by an expert, and the world will know what part the Australia played in bringing about that desired consummation. A cruise of 48,000 miles, by which the marauders were swept ever farther East, was the share of the battle cruiser of the Commonwealth. She burned 5,000 tons of coal and 6,000 tons of oil fuel, and had the satisfaction of overhauling and sinking a big German liner, of the Woermann line, which was fitted as a store ship and laden with all sorts of necessaries for the German warships. Later she was visible at a British port, where, after an official inspection, Admiral Patey was complimented on the fact that her guns were still in better order than those of any vessel of his Majesty's fleets. She is now serving the Empire many thousands of miles from her own waters, and when next the New Zealand is heard of, it may well be that the Australia also will be there.
The Melbourne and the Sydney returned, somewhat unwillingly, to undertake that convoy work which, incidentally, resulted so disastrously for the Emden. The present outlook promises that much will still be found for them to do in this direction, for the passage of Australasian troops through the Indian Ocean has now been regularized, and the supply is in course of being enormously increased.
The fate of Submarine AE1 was later shared by AE2, in a bold attempt to enter the Sea of Marmora, having pierced the Dardanelles as far as the Narrows. AE2 possessed, it is claimed, the record for a submarine in distance covered, for her operations during the war extended over a distance of 30,000 miles. Before misfortune overtook her, she had rendered excellent service at the Dardanelles, and was the first submarine to penetrate the Straits and enter the Sea of Marmora. Her officers, and all her crew save nine, fell into the hands of the Turks, and are now in Turkish prisons.
Such has been the performance in twelve months of the vessels which form the nucleus of a fleet which will one day consist of fifty-two vessels and be manned by 15,000 men. It is intended by Australia that the warships shall be manned and officered by Australians, and with that end in view, training establishments for navel cadets and for sailors have been established in the Commonwealth. The Australian Naval College is still in its infancy, but it occupies a magnificent position at Jervis Bay, about eighty miles south of Sydney, on the coast of New South Wales.
An area of nearly fifteen square miles has been reserved for the establishment, and modest buildings have already been erected for the future Australian middies. A fine stream flows into the bay, and bathing and boating facilities are admirable. The College was occupied in March, 1915, and a start was made with twenty-four boys of thirteen years of age, selected from a large number of applications. The quality of the boys is illustrated by an incident of the first few months.
One youngster, during a game of cricket, was injured so seriously by the ball that an operation was immediately necessary. The lad walked into surgery, and saluted the doctor, who informed him that an anæsthetic would be necessary. The boy drew himself up proudly. "For the credit of the service, sir," he said, "I must decline."
This naval college—the only one in the Dominions—will in 1916 have 150 picked lads in training.
The Royal Australian College is open to all classes. In the first quota of Cadet Midshipmen—it should be noted that in Australia the English term "Naval Cadet" has a different meaning—more than one half were pupils of State Schools. The cadets enter the College at the age of thirteen and from that day all their expenses are borne by the Commonwealth Government, even to the munificent grant of one shilling a week in pocket money. In return the boy is required to remain in the navy for a period of twelve years on attaining the age of eighteen, that is, on completing a four-year course at the College. A penalty of £75 for each year's training undergone will be imposed on parents or guardians who withdraw a cadet midshipman without the consent of the Australian Naval Board.
Appointments to the College are made by the Minister for Defence, upon the recommendation of the Naval Board, from such candidates as are considered suitable by the Selection Committee, and who have afterwards passed a qualifying examination in educational subjects. Nominations bearing a certain proportion to the number of midshipmen required for the College in any particular entry are allotted by the Governor-General in Council, as nearly as possible in the following proportions:—New South Wales, 38 per cent.; Victoria, 31 per cent.; Queensland, 12 per cent.; South Australia, 10 per cent.; Western Australia, 6 per cent.; Tasmania, 3 per cent.
For the selection of the most promising youths an interviewing committee, on properly advertised dates, sits at Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Hobart; Adelaide doing duty also for Western Australia, and Brisbane for the Northern Territory and Papua. The interviewing committee consists of the Captain of the College, Captain of Training Ship, District Naval Officer, Director of Education (with consent of the State Government), and a Naval Medical Officer.
The Governor-General of Australia.
On a similarly adequate basis, arrangements have been made for the instruction of sailors on training ships at several of the chief ports. The quality of the young Australian sailors on the Australia and the Sydney was one of the most satisfactory features of the fine service rendered by those vessels.
Such, in brief, are the main features of the scheme now in successful operation for the establishment of an adequate Australian Navy. What has been written above is written in no sense of useless recrimination or vainglorious boasting. The Dominions are asking for a conference with the Imperial authorities to discuss matters of Empire defence. One of the reasons which impels them to press for it now, and not hereafter, may be found in a conversation in which a leading citizen from Overseas voiced an opinion too little heard in Great Britain, but familiar enough to those who are in touch with Oversea ideals.
"You shout with rage," he said, "when some big German cruisers slip across the sea in the night and pump a few shells into a one-horse town like Scarborough. But when a little ashcan like the Emden holds up the proudest ports in your wide Empire, and gets off scot-free with her little 4-inch guns, you chuckle and say her captain is a fine sport. A conference is wanted to teach some of your big men a little Empire sense."
Perhaps there is something in that.
THE HEART OF EMPIRE STIRRED
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
THE HEART OF EMPIRE STIRRED
If Australasia sought reward for the devotion and heroism displayed in the time of the peril of the whole Empire, other than the consciousness of duty done ungrudgingly and continuously, that reward has surely been accorded by the proud Mother Country. From the King himself down to the humblest of his subjects, Britons have shared with the Southern nations all the sentiments that have been elicited by the performance of Australasians in their first great essay at waging war.
London, the very Heart of the Empire, has been from time to time profoundly stirred as the news of some exploit by the representatives of Australasia has been received. It laughed with glee at the discomfiture of the boasting captain of the Emden, and gladly recognized the maiden prowess of the young Australian fleet. It thrilled with sympathetic pride for the great charge up the cliff at Gaba Tepe; and accepted without cavil the generous estimate of one of the foremost British war correspondents: "It is certainly the most remarkable climb in the history of war since Wolfe stormed the heights of Quebec."
Most grateful of all to hundreds of sorrowing hearts in Australasia, London turned aside from its own countless griefs to mourn with Australasia the loss of the brave dead from the South. Nothing was more eloquent of the profound stir at the Heart of the Empire than that solemn memorial service to the Australasian dead held in St. Paul's Cathedral on the evening of June 15, 1915. In that sacred building, where repose the mortal remains of Nelson, Wellington, and many another great one who died for the Empire that Australasia is so proud to serve, there gathered an assemblage of mourners come to pay a spontaneous tribute to the brave young men who had laid down their lives for a great ideal. The King was represented there; and the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Bonar Law, himself born in the Dominions Overseas, attended on behalf of the Government. Great men and noble women of all shades of opinion thronged in the aisles to pay their tribute to the heroes dead, but never to be forgotten. And the citizens of the greatest city of the world were represented by their Lord Mayor, as by many a humble sympathizer who gained a place in the thronged building as a mark of loving kindness to mourners so far away, yet so near to the Empire's heart.
Some hundreds of Australasian soldiers were there—men who had fought bravely by the side of the dead ones the Empire was mourning, and had themselves sustained grave wounds in that Empire's defence. The rays of the setting sun lit their dull khaki as it lit the brilliant scarlet uniform of the bandsmen of the Grenadier Guards. The hush of true mourning was on the mighty building, and every sentence of the impressive sermon preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury could be heard in the farthest corner.
The Primate, who took for his text St. John xv. 13—"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"—said:
"We are met to-night for a definite and a very sacred purpose. Here at the centre and hub of the Empire's life, we desire to thank God together for the splendid devotion of our brothers from Australia and New Zealand, who in the cause whereto we as a people have set our hand regarded not their lives unto the death. It is as Christians that we are here to-night, as men and women, that is, who hold definitely to certain great truths, and are not ashamed to say so. We are firm in the belief that the bit of life which we spend here—be it, on man's reckoning, long or short—is not all. This part of it is of vital moment. It is a great opportunity. It is a high trust. It is capable of splendid use. But it is quite certainly—as we Christians view it—not all. It is part of something larger, something with a nobler range.
"And Christ has to do with all of it, here and hereafter, and He made it clear that in His eyes it matters vitally how we spend and use this part of it, how we devote it, how, if need calls, we lay it down. He spoke of those things to His friends on the night before He died, when the full moonlight was flooding the upper room, and He was bidding them farewell. This is only a part, He told them, but it ought to be a glad and bright part, of the larger life. And its gladness, its joy, would depend, in each man's case, upon whether he had learned the greatness of its value as something to be used, devoted, laid down, if need be, for the sake of other people. That was the key to His life, His joy; it would be the key to theirs. He bid them try to understand it so. That, He says, was why He had been reminding them of what He had come to do. 'These things I have spoken unto you.' Why? 'That my joy'—the joy of ready sacrifice for others, the true test of love—'might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.... Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.'
"You see, my brothers and sisters, how all that bears upon the thought which is just now sweeping across and through us as a people, and which helps to crowd these seats to-night. We want, as Christians, to say together in St. Paul's this evening that we honestly, deliberately, believe these fearful perils, these wounded or stricken bodies of our best and bravest, these saddened hearths and darkened homes, to be worth while. And if they are 'worth while,' they are right. The offering, terrible as it is, ought to be made without reserve for the sake of what is, as we deliberately judge, the cause of truth and honour, the cause of good faith and ordered liberty among the peoples of Europe and of the world. It is a duty grave, inspiring, urgent, which ought to rally us every one.
"I do not pause to ask whether the sacrifice would be worth while if this life on earth were all. I think it would, but I need not dwell upon that now. It is as Christians that we meet to-night, and to a belief in the larger life lying behind and around and beyond what we see, a Christian, however bewildered he feel about how it can all work out, is clearly pledged. Most of us, I suppose, whisper longingly at times, perhaps in hours like this we say out, almost imperatively, 'We want to know more, a great deal more, about the nature, even the particulars, of that other life. They are so difficult to picture in plain words in their relation to what we are familiar with here, and the more we try to work out the vision the more bewildered we grow. Is there nothing in the Bible to tell us plainly how it all will be, or, rather, how it all is?'
"The answer is not difficult. The Bible does not furnish any such detailed answer to our longing inquiry. It gives us unchallengeably the sure and certain faith in that greater life. That faith underlies as a firm basis the whole New Testament. But neither in vision nor parable is the veil wholly drawn aside. As the old seer said, 'The secret things belong unto the Lord our God,' and these are among the secret things. We know little; but what we do know we know for certain. Remember this. We are loyal to our Lord Christ, Whose life was the light of men, and Whose words and teaching are our strength and stay. We believe Him whatever else we doubt.
"Now, take any section, say, any five chapters of the Gospel story, about what He said and did. Read them anew, trying, as you read, to destroy or do without the basis and background of that other larger life, and you will find the account, I do not hesitate to say, simply unintelligible as words of truth. The belief, the knowledge as to that larger life underlies and colours the whole, and makes it literally true to say that if we are Christians, if we are believers in Him at all, that certitude which He gives us is and must be ours. Without it you cannot advance a yard in the understanding of what His Gospel meant. On that last evening He told them He was going away. But why? 'I go to prepare a place for you ... that where I am there ye may be also.' That is to say, 'You are to live on and to work on.' What meaning else for some of the most uplifting and inspiring of the parables which He had given them? 'Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.' What meaning for the story of the rich man and Lazarus? What meaning for the words of definite and uplifting promise to the thief upon the cross? 'To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.' And so we might run on. Brothers, to us Christians it is not a hope only, it is a sure and certain hope.
"It is well to remember that this is so when in the cloudy and dark day we are fretting and wondering and seem only to stretch lame hands and grope. But we perhaps ask: 'Why, why, this absence of some clear exposition of it all?' Well, what if, to our present faculties, such knowledge would be literally unconveyable in terms that we could understand? Many here are familiar with—some perhaps have ere now quoted—a certain picture-parable which belongs specially to this Cathedral. Just two centuries ago, the Christian philosopher, George Berkeley, a singularly clear thinker, was standing, as he tells us, in St. Paul's Cathedral, where he noticed a little fly crawling on one of those great pillars. He had been uplifted in thought by the overwhelming grandeur of symmetry and design in pier and arch and dome and gallery, and the relation of each part to each and to the whole. And then he watched the little crawling fly, to whom no understanding of the whole was possible, who could see nothing of its harmonies, and to whom, as he puts it, 'nothing could appear but the small inequalities in the surface of the hewn stone, which in the view of the insect seemed so many deformed rocks and precipices.' Here, he thought, is the likeness of each human being as he creeps along. The sorrow which, like some dreadful precipice, interrupts our life, may turn out to be nothing but the joining or cement which binds the portions and sections of the greater life into one beautiful and harmonious whole. The dark path may be but the curve which, in the full daylight of a brighter world, will be seen to be the inevitable span of some majestic arch. 'Now I know in part,' and what a very little part it is, 'but then shall I know even as also I am known.'
"Does all that seem poor and vague and cheerless to the young wife across whose sunny home the dark shadow has fallen, to the mother who, through all her brave faith, looks out dazed and dry-eyed upon the shattering of the hopes which had been her daily happiness and strength? The message is not—or it will not always be—vague and cheerless if the firm and even glad courage with which a few months ago she offered willingly what she loved best on earth, be transmuted now into trustful prayer and into loyal proud thankfulness for duty nobly done, and into quiet awaiting of the ampler life beyond, with the answer it must bring in His good time to the questions of the aching heart. Which of us but has been inspired already by what Our Father has shown us to be possible—nay, rather to be actually attained—in the ennobled lives of those whom He 'out of weakness has made strong.' There is, for we are seeing it every day, as real a heroism of the stricken home as the heroism of the shell-swept trench, or of the quivering deck. For that, too, for those brave women in England, or in the Southern Seas, we are upon our knees to-night, thanking 'the God of all comfort Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.'
"But in this great gathering to-night we want another note besides that. We must have the triumph-note for those whose self-sacrifice has meant so much to their country and to those who honour them. It has been theirs, in enthusiastic eager self-surrender, to reach what Christ marks as the highest grade of human love. 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.' Gratefully and reverently we remember that heroism now. That is what brings us here for thanksgiving and for prayer. Among the lives laid down could be found, as always, bright examples of the young leadership to which we had looked for upholding among their fellows the spirit which sets manliness upon the surest basis, the basis of personal loyalty to Christ. For those lives and for the footprints which they have left upon the sands of time we give praise to God to-day.
"But it would be unnatural, untrue, to claim for all who thus gave their lives in their country's cause, the character of stainless purity, or of the saintliness which we sing of in our hymns. Some of them, perhaps many of them, were not 'saints' at all. They were manly sons of the greatest Empire in the world. They were brave and buoyant, with plenty of the faults and failures which go so often with high spirit. They need, as we shall need, forgiveness and cleansing and new opportunity, and they are in their Father's keeping, and He knows and cares. Be it theirs—shall we not pray it with all our hearts?—be it theirs, under His good hand, to pass onward in the new and larger life from strength to strength.
Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow!
For never shall their aureoled presence lack:
I see them muster in a gleaming row,
With ever-youthful brows that nobler show:
We find in our dull road their shining track;
In every nobler mood
We feel the orient of their spirit glow,
Part of our life's unalterable good.
"Do these words seem too high for what we are remembering? I think not. This vast war, without parallel in history for the horrible scale and sweep of its devastating bloodshed, is unparalleled in other ways as well. The feat of arms which was achieved on the rocky beach and scrub-grown cliff of the Gallipoli Peninsula in the grey dawn of St. Mark's Day, April 25, was a feat, we are assured, whose prowess has never been outshone, has scarcely ever been rivalled, in military annals. As the open boats, under a hail from hidden guns, poured out their men in thousands on the beach, below perpendicular cliffs of tangled scrub, the task of breasting those heights looked, to many expert eyes, a sheer impossibility. But by the dauntless gallantry of brave men the impossible feat was accomplished, and the record of those hours and of the days which followed is now a portion of our Empire's heritage for ever.
"And who did it? It was not the product of the long discipline of some veteran corps of soldiers. It was mainly the achievement of men from sheep-stations in the Australian Bush, or from the fields or townships of New Zealand, who a few short months ago had no dream of warfare as, like other civilians, they went about their ordinary work. But the call rang out, and the response was ready, and the result is before us all. 'I have never,' says one competent observer after the battle, 'I have never seen the like of these wounded Australians in war before. They were happy because they knew they had been tried for the first time, and had not been found wanting. No finer feat of arms has been performed during the war than this sudden landing in the dark, the storming of the heights, and, above all, the holding on to the position thus won while reinforcements were poured from the transports.'
"It is high praise, but the witness is true, and those Australians and New Zealanders are enrolled among the champions whom the Empire, for generations to come, will delight to honour. One of the best traits of all is the generous tribute given by each group to the indomitable valour of the rest. To quote from the private letter of a young New Zealander: 'The Australians were magnificent, and deserve every good word that is said of them.' And all unite to praise the officers, midshipmen, and men who formed the beach parties in that eventful landing, each boat, we are reminded, 'in charge of a young midshipman, many of whom have come straight from Dartmouth after only a couple of terms.'
"But of necessity it was at fearful cost that these gallant deeds were done, and the great roll of drums under this dome to-night will reverberate our reverent and grateful sympathy to the Empire's farthest bound. This memorable act of stoutest service gives response already to the rallying call of the poet-bishop of Australia:
By all that have died for men,
By Christ who endured the Cross,
Count nothing but honour gain,
Count all that is selfish loss.
Take up with a loyal heart
The burden upon you laid;
Who fights on the side of God
Needs never be afraid.
Be true to the great good land,
And rear 'neath the Southern sun
A race that shall hold its own,
And last till the world be done.[2]
"When in conditions the hardest and the most unpromising, Australia and New Zealand came successively to the birth a century ago, as a living part of the British Empire, who would have dared to fashion in remotest vision the stern, yet romantic, story of 1915? The eager manhood of the young raw Commonwealth, the product of our own time, first carried with swift safety across the successive seas, then disciplined and prepared for action under the shadow of the world-old Pyramids, and then gaining their first experience of the shock of the onset within sight and hearing of the plains of Troy—an almost inconceivable intermingling of the old world and the new. The bare story is itself a stimulus and a reminder of what the lessons of history and the trust of Empire mean.
"God give us grace so to bear ourselves as a united people that we may be building out of this welter of fearful pain and strife the walls of His greater kingdom upon earth, the kingdom that is to endure: when the nations of the earth, and not least our own peoples—Britain and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and India—bring into it, each of them, their honour and their glory, the distinctive powers and blessings that God has given to each several one, to make glad the city of our God, the habitation of the Prince of Peace."
At the conclusion of the Archbishop's sermon the band of the Guards played the Dead March in "Saul"; the bugles rang out in the "Last Post," and the mourners reverently left the building. So London paid its tribute to Australasia's dead.