Australia in Arms / A Narrative of the Australasian Imperial Force and Their Achievement at Anzac

by Phillip F. E. Schuler

Never before in any hundred square yards of ground have so many honours been won and such wonderful gallantry shown. Men and officers fighting in that inferno seemed to be inspired with unparalleled courage. Private Keysor (1st Battalion) threw back enemy bombs into their own trenches, and, though twice wounded, continued till the end of the engagement to act as bomb-thrower wherever there was need. Private Hamilton (1st Battalion) on the 9th sat calmly on the parados, thereby getting fire to bear on the enemy. He rallied his comrades, and they drove back the enemy.

Major Sasse (1st Battalion) won distinction by charging at the head of a small body of men down a Turkish sap, and then directing a bomb attack from the parados of the captured trenches. One has only to turn to the stories of the Military Crosses gained, to find how attack was met by counter-attack; how trenches were taken at the bayonet's point during the four days that battle lasted.

The men who sold their lives in these herculean efforts to shake off the Turks, numbered nearly 800. Officers made noble examples for their troops. Colonel Scobie, 2nd Battalion, was leading back a small section of his command from an ugly sap from which they were being bombed, when he was killed by a bomb. Colonel Brown, passing the head of one of the many dangerous saps that led to the Turkish position on the other side of the plateau, was shot through the breast and fell dead at the feet of his men.

Lone Pine on that second day, when I was through it, presented a spectacle of horror. The dead Australians and Turks lay deep in the trenches. Parapets had partly buried them.

It was at the entrance to a tunnel that I saw our lads sitting with fixed bayonets and chatting calmly to one another. There was a horrible odour in the trenches that compelled one to use the smoke helmet for some little relief. At the end of this tunnel, 40 yards away, so one of the men told me, were 30 dead Turks. In through a shell hole that had broken open a Turkish tunnel, and over these dead bodies, a wounded sapper had crawled on the day after the battle from the battlefield above, thereby saving himself from exposure and probable death. How these men had died none exactly knew. A shell may have broken through the tunnel—probably had—and those who had not been killed outright had died of suffocation from the shell fumes. It became necessary now to fill in the end of the tunnel, to prevent any entry by the enemy as much as to safeguard the health of our men. The thousands of rifles, broken belts, scattered cartridges, clothing of all descriptions that were to be seen belonging to either side were being collected in order to make the way clear. One realized that there must be days before the trenches could become normal again. For all the time, simultaneously with the relief of the wounded, existed the need for the protection of the fighting troops, the changing over of the parapets, the filling of sandbags to pile up the traverses, the erection of the overhead cover. All that involved a horrible waste of men—the ruin of scores of lives—in the accomplishment. Yet never must it be forgotten that the enemy was driven from what might well have been considered an impregnable position, had been shaken, had lost five to every one of our troops.

As I walked down the trenches it was impossible to avoid the fallen men lying all around. They lay on the parapets and their blackened hands hung down over our path. While this bombing continued it was no use trying to clear the way. Amidst the horribleness of the dead, the men fought and lived. They fought, too, knowing that behind the ramparts that protected them, must lie their comrades.

It was the most touching sight in the world to see units that had won the fight being withdrawn on the second day. Perhaps only a few hundred came back. They were covered with blood; they were unrecognizable in the dirt that had been scattered over them; they were lean and haggard from want of sleep. But they bore themselves without the least touch of fatigue as they passed by British troops working behind the lines. They had in their demeanour that which showed a confidence in something accomplished and a pride in a victory won. They acknowledged modestly the tribute of those who had known the fury of battle—who had seen the charge. As they came out of the tunnel which led from the firing-line there were comrades who waited to grip their hands. For news travels in a curious manner from trench to trench of a comrade hit, wounded, or one whose life has gone. You hear it soon even down on the beach.

And amidst these brave men and those waiting to take their turn at defending, the dead bodies of the enemy were drawn, to be buried in a great pile on a hill slope. The tracks of the canvas shroud showed in the loose earth, the air polluted by the stench of the passing corpse. Not far away was a heap of Turkish equipment, 30 feet high, piled up, waiting sorting, which had been taken from the trenches. Of Turkish rifles we had enough for a battalion. Already I had seen a party of our men in the trenches handling with a certain satisfaction, and no little rapidity, the captured machine guns, which, with the ammunition also captured, gave us a splendid opportunity of turning the enemy's weapons on himself. The spoils of victory were very sweet to these men.

I have referred more than once to the bravery of the Turkish soldier. The fight he put up on these Lone Pine trenches would be enough to establish that reputation for him were there not other deeds to his credit. Not that that diminishes one degree the glory of the achievement of our arms. The fury of the fire of shot and shell was enough to have dismayed any troops. The Australians went through that with heads bent, like men going through a fierce pelting rain.