CHAPTER XX
LUCKY ESCAPES
TRUTH IN WAR STRONGER THAN FICTION—IS IT FATE OR LUCK?—CLOSE SHAVES FOR GENERALS AND SERGEANTS—SWIMMERS, AND SHELLS NOT OF OCEAN—A FATAL RICOCHET—BURIED AND DISENTOMBED
When I was a good little boy going to Sunday school, teacher gave me a book entitled Wonderful Escapes. I read it with absorbing interest, for it told of the marvellous escapes of princes and princesses from fortified castles in the hands of their enemies.
Yet these delightful tales which so thrilled my youthful imagination pale into insignificance and seem quite commonplace when compared with the hair-breadth escapes which I have witnessed, and which I have myself experienced since the 2nd Light Horse Brigade landed on battle-scarred Gallipoli.
With the Taubes dropping bombs and darts from the sky, with the Turks undermining and blowing up our advanced trenches, with snipers cunningly concealed on the ridges, and the enemy's big guns sending high explosives right across the Peninsula, there is really not a single safe spot in all Gallipoli. So, when these Australian soldiers get home again and fight their battles o'er again, don't disbelieve them. The truth here is much more startling than any fiction.
I vouch for the absolute accuracy of the following incidents, for they all came within my own ken. Some will say 'tis "luck"; some, "fate." Others speak of the law of averages. It may be that the prayers of thousands of Australian mothers and sisters beseeching Heaven for the safety of their loved ones are not all in vain. For in very truth there have been occasions when escape from instant death has savoured of the supernatural. Men have left their dug-outs for a few seconds, and almost on the instant a shell has wrecked those same dug-outs. Others have seen shells fall on the identical spot they occupied a few seconds before. Men have come back scatheless from the open field which has been ploughed with shrapnel. Some have charged across the hills in the teeth of murderous machine-guns, which were spitting death-pellets unceasingly.
General Birdwood was having a look at the enemy's position when a sniper's bullet parted his hair and split his scalp. Half an inch lower would have been certain death. It would take pages and pages to tell of the lucky escapes I could relate.
Take the case of Colonel Ryrie, now a brigadier-general. There is a very comforting idea that regimental headquarters are always a long way behind the firing-line, while brigade headquarters are further back still. Therefore, it is argued, a brigadier has a nice, safe job. This may be all right in theory, but it does not work out so in practice. I call to mind that hearty send-off given to the then Colonel Ryrie by his constituents at North Sydney, and what the recipient of that favour said on the occasion. "Don't you worry about me," he said, "I'll come back all right. They may knock some corners off me, but they won't get me." Some "corners" have been knocked off him. I do not believe there has been a day when the Brigadier-General has not visited the firing-line of his brigade—up to the time when a bullet got him in the neck and he was lost to us for some time in hospital. Time and again he has taken the sniper's "posey" and mingled in a bit of sharpshooting himself. Also, he has at different times gone in advance of our firing-line to select new positions. Once, with his brigade-major and orderly officer, he suddenly stopped to watch a squadron at bayonet exercise, and a shrapnel shell burst, and the case landed right in front of him. Had he not stopped, it is certain the party would have been wiped out.