Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War

by E. C. Buley

"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.