Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War

by E. C. Buley

"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.