Nor were the Protestant chaplains behind their Roman Catholic colleagues in zeal and cheerfulness. The Reverend S. Hutchinson in the 31st Brigade, and the Reverend J. W. Crozier (a son of the Primate of All Ireland) in the 29th, worked untiringly and devotedly for the good of the men who belonged to the Church of England. Nor should the Reverend F. J. Roche, who was Church of England Chaplain to the Divisional Troops, be forgotten. Originally, he was sent to Cairo with the Artillery of the Division; but he had seen service in South Africa in the Imperial Yeomanry, and was mad to get into the firing line once more. By dint of many entreaties and much ingenuity, he finally succeeded in reaching Suvla on August 29th, and laboured unceasingly with the Pioneers and Royal Engineers. He was a man of exceptionally high character, and all who knew him were grieved when two days before the Division left the Peninsula he was invalided with dysentery. Unfortunately, the attack was a severe one, and after rallying slightly he died in hospital at Alexandria. The Presbyterian and Methodist chaplains, too, did excellent work, though since their flock was so widely scattered they had less opportunity of becoming personally known to those outside it.
The jewel of the Protestant chaplains, however, was Canon McLean. Although he must have been nearly sixty years of age, and was probably the oldest man in the Division, he had the heart of a boy and the courage of a lion. No dangers or hardships were too great for him to endure, and his one regret was that his cloth did not permit him to lead his Brigade in a charge. He had, too, the more valuable form of courage—the power of patient endurance, for though seriously ill with dysentery, he absolutely refused to go sick and leave his men. There were many brave fellows in the Division, but none gained a greater reputation for courage than Canon McLean.
The second great alleviation of the monotony of trench life was the arrival of the mail. In France, this happens daily, and is taken as a matter of course; but in Gallipoli it rarely arrived more often than once a week, and great joy was felt in the battalions when Brigade headquarters telephoned that a mail was coming up. Expectation grew, until at last the Indian drabis led up their grunting mules, and deposited the mail-bags at the door of the Headquarters dug-out. Orderly sergeants of the companies were at once summoned, and the slow process of sorting began—a process made even slower by the fact that in many cases the writers had not indicated anything more than the name of the addressee, and that it took a considerable time in an Irish regiment to ascertain which Private Kelly was meant.
“The postmark’s Glasgow. Is either of your Kelly’s a Scotsman, Sergeant McGrath?” the Adjutant would say.
“They are not, sorr. One’s a Mayo man and the other’s from Dublin. Try ‘B’ Company, sorr.”
The Orderly Sergeant of “B” also disclaims any Scotch Kelly, but is reminded by the signalling sergeant of a Glasgow man of that name who went sick from Mudros. Repeated ad infinitum this process takes time, and it was long before the officer who had undertaken the sorting could turn to his own correspondence. Then followed the painful task of returning the letters that could not be delivered. These were sent back from companies to the orderly-room and were there sorted into three piles:—
Dead,
Missing, and
Hospital.
The officer then endorsed each, writing the word in an indelible pencil, always dreading that by some accident this might be the first intimation of the casualty that the sender of the letter had received. The “Hospital” letters, of course, were not returned to the writer, but were sent in pursuit of the addressee round Mudros, Malta, and Alexandria, usually returning to the Battalion after he had rejoined it.
Nor did one’s own mail consist entirely of personal letters, for the officers who survived found themselves in September receiving many letters from the relatives of their comrades who had fallen begging for details of how they died. These letters were not easy to answer, since details were often lacking, and the writer was always afraid of inadvertently opening the wound again; but it was a labour of love to reply to them. More amusing semi-official letters were also received, such as the demands of railway companies for sums of three-and-sixpence due by men who had travelled without tickets four months earlier. As even supposing the men in question had not been killed or wounded, they had certainly received no pay for more than a month, and were unlikely to receive any for an indefinite period, so the prospect that the Company Officer would be able to recover the debts before being killed or wounded himself did not seem large.
With the mail came newspapers and sometimes parcels. The latter were specially welcome, since they served to fill up the nakedness of the officers’ mess, and as a rule they arrived safely when sent by parcels post. Complaints of non-arrival of parcels were indeed frequent, but in most cases this was caused either by inaccurate addressing, or by careless packing. Very seldom was a parcels mail-bag opened for sorting at the battalion without the bottom being found to be filled with broken cigarettes, crumbs of crushed cake, and a mass of cardboard, brown paper and string. It must be remembered that the mails had to stand a good deal of rough handling. The bags were sent by ship to Alexandria, then thrown on to a lorry and jolted over the stony streets to the Base Post Office, there sorted, sent on shipboard again, conveyed to Mudros, transhipped to Suvla, Anzac, or Helles, thrown overboard on to a lighter, dumped on the beach, and finally carried up to their destination on the back of a pack mule. It was not astonishing that a parcel was occasionally crushed, or even that a bag sometimes fell into the sea. Under normal conditions, however, parcels usually arrived safely.