Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War

by E. C. Buley

"There were three brothers in my company, all as brave as lions. Fred, the youngest of the three, was reckless with it; and his two brothers were always worrying about him. One day he was hit on the shoulder, and when they saw him go down one brother shouted to the other, 'Thank Heaven, young Fred's got it!' Of course, we all knew what he meant—he was pleased the boy had got off with a light wound—but it made the fellows laugh. After that, whenever one of them was hit, he'd shout, 'Thank Heaven, young Fred's got it!' and then lie down and curse.

"This brother was the coolest customer in the trench, and that was saying something. He was a crack shot, and a great hand at destroying Turkish periscopes. Smashing the business end of a periscope with a rifle bullet, even at short range, is not so easy as it sounds; for the observers keep them moving about erratically, so that it is something like a very small disappearing target. But Bill nailed one nearly every time he shot, and the Turks used to chatter with rage at each loss. I don't think they had too many of them.

"They broke a good many of our periscopes in the same fashion; and the broken glass used to fly about in a very nasty way. I had five men cut about the face and head on one day, through their periscopes being broken at observation work. Then we improvised a sort of safety helmet out of half a kerosene tin, and put an end to that trouble. We tried the new steel embrasures at Quinn's Post, but I consider them sheer death traps, where the trenches are so close to those of the enemy as twenty yards. The fellows who used them at a distance of 150 or 200 yards spoke most highly of them; but where I was, a gap in the sandbags served much better.

"The Turk is a punctual beast. We used to time our watches every evening by the first shell of the evening bombardment, which invariably came along at ten minutes past six. On the night of May 18, that first shell was followed by 170 others before it had gone seven o'clock, which was pretty good going. The armistice of the 20th May was supposed to end at four o'clock in the afternoon, and at one minute past, along came the first shell, just to show us that our friend Abdul had his eye on the clock.

"It came from an entirely new direction, too, which showed that the opportunity for observation afforded by the armistice had not been wasted. But I think we were able to show that we had not shut our eyes to things that were easily noticeable. They certainly did not gain much in the exchanges over that armistice. It's all in the game, after all. There has been little said about the work of the Australasian artillery, and for the very best of reasons. But the gunners, and especially the New Zealanders, will get their due later on.

"There is one New Zealander who is a perfect marvel with a machine-gun—Captain Wallingford, a champion shot. He got the Military Cross for his great work on the opening days, so one can speak about him. A machine-gun soon draws fire, and it was no uncommon thing for the whole of a section to go down soon after a machine-gun opened fire. The way he shifted his gun about in unfamiliar, broken country, through thick scrub and in the dark, was something to dream about. He had a sharpshooting section, too, that was death on snipers, and cleared a whole section of the front in very quick time.

"Colonel Owen's men (the 3rd Battalion) always call him 'Old Never-Retire.' I asked one of them the reason, and he said that on the morning of the first landing the Colonel had to take his fellows up a very steep bit of cliff, almost inaccessible. His position worried the Admiral so much that he signalled that he had better retire, and try farther to the right. The Colonel turned on the chap who brought the message and said, 'My compliments to the Admiral, and tell him I'll see him damned first.' I don't know whether that is true, for I never had the chance of testing it. But his men swear to it.

"The loudest cheer I heard from the trenches was given to a sergeant[1] whose name I never found out; but I heard he was a Western Australian. Two sharpshooters had crawled out about thirty yards for a better shot, and had gone down together; one with a broken arm, and the other with a shot through the thigh. They lay there, with bullets kicking up the dust around them, when this sergeant went out with a rope. He tied it round the waist of the man with the broken arm, who was dragged to the trench, yelling with pain. Then he picked the other fellow up on his back, and brought him in through a perfect rain of bullets. He never had a scratch. It was away to the left of me, and below me, and I saw it all through my glasses, and heard the cheers, as if I were sitting in the circle at a theatre. We found by signal he was unhurt, but could not get his name.

"There were two platoons away on the right who distinguished themselves by getting farther inland than any one else. Not many of them returned to tell the tale, but it was a queer story. They lost all their officers and most of the non-coms. quite early on. The rest only knew they were there to take a hill, and so they took one. Then, for fear that might be the wrong hill, they took another. That set them off taking all the hills in sight, a pretty tall order. They only stopped when they blundered on to the Turkish camp; the wonder is that any of them ever got back.

"I wish the Turks were as cleanly as they are brave and punctual. They keep their trenches in a filthy condition. I know, because I occupied one for half a day. We were told to take it; and that was all right, with the help of the bayonet. We stayed there half a day, and were quite glad when we were ordered back again. It was dangerous enough there; but, for the moment, the danger was nothing compared to the stench and vermin. We lost a lot of men getting out; but were told the tactical purpose had been achieved. So that was all right.