Australasia Triumphant!: With the Australians and New Zealanders in the Great War on Land and Sea

by Arthur St. John Adcock

All along the line they had dug themselves in securely, and remained immovable. The Turks threw away thousands of men in fruitless assaults on the new positions; occasionally the British or the French by sudden rushes captured here and there an enemy trench and scored small local successes, but more and more the fighting became a matter of reconnaissance, of sapping and mining, till by the first week of June both sides had settled down to the dogged conditions of siege warfare.

During these same weeks the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Anzac, between Gaba Tepe and Saribair, had held their little half-moon of conquered land with its 1,100 yards of diameter, and were not to be ousted from any part of it by intrepid massed attacks or by a constant shelling of their trenches and the beach beyond, often with as many as over 1,000 shells in an hour. How many bayonet charges succeeded these merciless bombardments, how many fierce night-attacks boiled over from the enemy trenches, which were everywhere within twenty and thirty yards of the Anzac front, to be unfailingly dammed all along the line and hurled back broken, decimated, defeated, I have given up trying to count. Over and over again, when the Anzacs hurled the Turks back in this fashion they swarmed out of their defences, chased the flying foe, leaped after him into his own trenches, drove him out of them and kept him out till he brought up a continuous stream of reinforcements and by sheer weight of numbers forced the Australians and New Zealanders to give up their new possessions and withdraw once more to their old ones.

The fiercest, most sanguinary fighting went on round about such advanced positions as Pope's, Courtney's, and Quinn's Posts–especially about the last, which was won and lost and went on changing hands at frequent intervals until it was finally taken by the Anzacs, and strengthened and strongly garrisoned and permanently retained. On 9th May the Turkish trenches in front of Quinn's were carried at the point of the bayonet, but at dawn next morning the enemy came hurtling back in such multitudes that the Anzacs had to retire to the Post, and stubbornly repel a hot attack upon that. Day after day the same sort of thing continued with little cessation, here and at all sections of the line. Between the attacks there were endless bomb-throwing, tempests of shells from big guns and howitzers, sniping, withering outbursts of machine gun fire, subtle sapping and mining, in which now one side, then the other successfully blew up trenches, and, dashing for the breach, made grim onslaughts that had to be held off and beaten and cleared out of the way before the shattered defences could be repaired. In our second and third and fourth line trenches the men might sit in dug-outs and bomb-proof shelters and yarn and play cards or write letters or sleep as comfortable under the roaring, whistling hail of shells and bullets and almost as safe as if they were at home; but some of the foremost trenches were little more than giant gullies on the verge of steep precipices, and if they more or less commanded the enemy's positions in the valley, they were in turn commanded more or less by the enemy's guns and trenches on higher ridges farther in-shore.

The stories of individual heroism and self-sacrifice–of the carrying of wounded comrades in under fire, of scouts crawling out on exposed heights and calmly completing their observations after they had been discovered and become targets for hundreds of rifles, of the bringing of supplies of food and ammunition to the firing line over hills and bare plateaus that were swept by the enemy's guns–these are numberless. There were bombing parties who went out unobtrusively at twilight or at dawn to raid an apparently inaccessible trench on the opposite hill-side and silence a troublesome gun, and as often as not they succeeded, though few of them returned to tell the tale; there was a doughty little remnant of Anzac heroes who fought and slew terribly and had to be shot or bayoneted to the last man before the Turks could get back into a trench that had been newly wrested from them. And there is a story of an unnamed New Zealander that stands out even amidst the splendour of the rest. This man, during an attack in force, found himself isolated and cut off from his friends. He was on a high, bald promontory, and the Turks were swarming on all sides of him. Escape was impossible; he had been wounded and left behind, overlooked by his comrades when they were compelled to retire; and there seemed nothing for it but surrender. The full strength of the reinforced Turks was unknown to our commanders, but from his lofty eminence the New Zealander could see the oncoming hordes flooding the lower levels, and proceeded to take careful observations. And a chief scout of the New Zealanders who, from the distance, had detected the solitary figure aloft there was suddenly amazed to see the man begin signalling with his arms; he was signalling information as to the position and numbers of the Turks. How many shots reached their mark in him nobody will know; twice he fell, but each time he regained his feet to semaphore with his arms and continue his message. "The last shot disabled one arm," says the scout, "yet the dying man raised himself and completed the message before he dropped dead." If one started to repeat such stories one would never know where to end, and there is the less need for me to make the attempt since I hear that the best of them are now being gathered into a book of their own by another hand.

Through all that thunderous storm of conflict, the incessant attacking and counter-attacking, our losses were appallingly heavy, but those of the Turks exceeded them enormously. A diary found on a dead Turkish officer showed that in the stern engagement on the 10th May alone, two Ottoman regiments lost 3,000 in killed and wounded. They had been mown down and bayoneted in tens of thousands round Anzac and in the titanic struggle at the southern end of the Peninsula, but they had been so reinforced that their power had increased rather than diminished; and so by degrees at both places the opposing forces fought each other to something of a standstill. All the Turkish boasts that they would fling the invaders into the sea proved futile; all our attempts to advance beyond the territory on which we were immovably established proved equally unavailing; and by degrees things at Anzac as well as between Cape Hellas and Achi Baba settled down to that condition of siege warfare.

It was not a condition that suited the temperaments of these active, energetic fellows; they were not the sort to find much satisfaction in systematically peppering the other side with lead and wearing them down from behind the safe shelter of barricades; but they were practical enough to see that for the time there was no other effective course open to them, and, with occasional sudden sallies into the midst of the enemy, when they killed a few and captured a few and gathered in some guns, they grimly suited themselves to a state of things that did not suit them, and made the best of it.

The Turks knew enough of them by now to have a wholesome respect for their fighting qualities, and seemed contented to shell them occasionally from a distance or let them alone, so long as they did not come out and make trouble. And the fact that this was the hottest period of the year may have helped to reconcile the Anzacs to the necessity of going slow for a while. The blazing heat, indeed, was more intolerable than the fire of the Turks, and to cope with it they discarded one garment after another until, at length, they were to be seen on duty or amusing themselves, when they were not lying cool in holes and shelters, dressed in nothing but a pair of breeches cut down to "shorts" which did not nearly reach to their knees. Some, with a lingering sense of propriety, or tender feet, retained their boots and socks, but others abandoned even these. Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, who saw them, says, "I suppose that since the dervishes made their last charge at Omdurman no such naked army has ever been seen in the field."

It must have puzzled the Turks considerably to find themselves confronted by trenches filled with apparently naked warriors, and to ascertain, when they came to the test, that these naked warriors were as tough and as full of ginger as the men in khaki who had mysteriously vanished. Possibly they suspected this was a new wild race of secretly landed reinforcements from some remote end of the British Empire, especially after a few weeks, when the skins of the Anzacs had become so tanned and burnt by the sun that they were as dark as the Maoris. And of the Maoris the Turks had all along had suspicions, even when that contingent was clothed in full khaki. For they have weird war-cries and a weird dance of their own, and to hear and see these mysteries in operation is calculated to disquiet those who are not accustomed to them. On special occasions, after the General had been addressing them and complimenting them on their fighting ability, or when they had caught a rumour of the joyous possibility that they would quit the monotonous trenches and move out against the enemy to-morrow, they liked to indulge in this dance by way of expressing the intensity of their satisfaction. An officer of the New Zealand contingent described the dance in The Times in the following terms:

"The Maoris, officers and privates, lined up. With protruding tongues and a rhythmic slapping of hands on thighs and chests, with a deep concerted 'a-a-ah,' ending abruptly, they began the Maori haka–the war dance. Shrill and high the leader intoned the solo parts, and the chorus crashed out. As the dancers became more animated the beat of their feet echoed through the gullies of Gallipoli. The leader now declaimed fiercely, now his voice sank to an eerie whisper, still perfectly audible, and as he crouched low to the ground so the men behind him posed. Suddenly, after a concerted crash of voices, the chant ended with a sibilant hiss, a stamp of the right foot, and the detonation of palms slapping the high ground."

From their trenches, less than a hundred yards away, the Turks could not see the dancers, for the dancers knew better than to show themselves, but they must have heard the strange, rhythmic stamping of their feet and their startling outcries, and you get a notion of what they must have thought of them from a passage which the same New Zealand officer quotes from a Constantinople newspaper of about that date in which the Ottoman journalist remarks that he is still without information as to the composition of the enemy's forces, but has reason to believe that they consist of black men from Africa and Australia, and "thus the Straits for the first time in history have had to endure attacks by cannibals." So it is worth adding that though the Maoris delight, as they should, in keeping up the old customs of their race, theirs is a contingent of as gallant and chivalrous men as any in the British millions, and the leader in that particular war dance was a highly educated gentleman who has the distinction of being an M.A. and an LL.D.