Solomon's Song (59 page)

Incredibly the Australian officers in command didn’t abort the attack. Instead they played by the formula set out and waited the seven minutes. At four-thirty on the dot the whistle went and the 8th Light Horse scrambled from their trenches yelling blue murder. They had barely taken the first step when those soldiers at the front buckled and fell as the machine-gun fire and the Turkish rifles cut them to ribbons. Yet on they went. Twenty yards is not a long way, but they got no further than five yards and not a single man made it to the enemy parapet.

The second line, waiting, saw the fate of their mates but they never flinched and stood the allotted two minutes, many of the dead from the first line lying at their feet where they’d tumbled back into the trench, some clasping at their ankles, begging to be helped. The Turks were jabbering, excited, not quite able to believe the brave stupidity they’d just witnessed. Then the second line went over the top and, like the first, advanced little more than a few paces before they fell in great heaps over the bloodied bodies of their comrades who had died two minutes before them. The wounded tried to move from under the dead bodies, some howling their anguish, others calling for their mothers, but most too stunned to do anything but crawl back. A few made it, most were cut down a second time as they crawled away.

One wonders at such stupidity, but there was so much of it at Gallipoli where men too brave for their own good took orders from officers too stupid to rescind them. Men were fed like fodder into the mouth of hell.

The 10th Light Horse obediently filed into the places of the 8th. By now the men knew they must die, but reckoned still that they must run with all their heart as swiftly as their legs would carry them and so die with honour going forward into the attack. ‘I do not want to die running away,’ one of the lads was heard to say as he stepped up to wait for the order to go over the top.

‘Boys, we have ten minutes to live,’ their commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel Springthorpe told them, ‘and I am going to lead you.’

The men shook hands with their mates and when the order came they sprang from the trenches, jumping over dead bodies. Even the Turks could not believe the foolishness as they once again chopped them down to a man. Incredibly, the fourth line followed and they too tumbled into the blood-soaked dust as the attack was finally completed in a terrible defeat. They never stood a chance from the first to the last man dead. Two hundred and forty Light Horsemen lay dead or dying in an area no larger than a tennis court. They lie there still, we left them when we escaped from the peninsula, unable to retrieve them for burial. Of five hundred and fifty men who stood waiting in the trenches for the whistle to blow their lives away, only forty-seven answered to their names at roll call. The battle had lasted less than half an hour.

As the Light Horse lay dying, with the wind howling in the peaks above them, plainly visible from The Nek were the British troops at Suvla Bay making their evening tea. But this is not an indictment of the English who fought valiantly and died in greater numbers even than us, but of their leaders.

When summer comes again the bones of these gallant Light Horsemen will whiten in the sun along with so many others we could not bury with a Christian prayer. No doubt fat officers with bristling moustaches will sip port in clean uniforms at the Shepheards Hotel in Cairo, their chests ablaze with medals and garnished with campaign ribbons while they talk of the glory of this battle, and others like it. These are the names that will tumble carelessly from their lips, Quinn’s Post, the Daisy Patch, the New Zealanders at Chunuk Bair. (What splendid fighting men they proved to be.) They will speak with pride that two hundred men attacked the Turks’ trenches on Dead Man’s Ridge and suffered one hundred and fifty-four casualties, and that fifty-four troopers of the 2nd Light Horse attacked Turkish Quinn’s and all but one died. At German Officer’s Trench, three hundred of our men went forward with bayonets fixed and one hundred and forty-six lost their lives. These are the only attacks after Lone Pine I heard of at first hand, but dozens of others like them took place and all of them failed. They failed, not because they lacked a full measure of courage, no soldiers ever fought harder or with more determination, but because good fighting men cannot make up for the gross incompetence of those who lead them.

Perhaps I am being unfair for I have become bitter with the months of senseless fighting, but it seems to me that having, in the very first instance, made the wrong decision to attack the Gallipoli Peninsula, those who led us tried to vindicate themselves and enhance their careers by sacrificing the lives of the men under their control. How very much more sensible it would have been if our leaders had let us live to fight a better campaign elsewhere where, in return for courage and determination, there was some small hope of victory.

The Turks, for their part, were simply defending their motherland. How happy they would have been if we’d simply packed up and gone home. When we finally did, they let us go with hardly a shot fired. Make no mistake, we now talk of fooling them, as though our nocturnal escape was somehow a great vanishing trick in a game of blind man’s buff. Even some sort of victory. But they knew well enough that we were leaving and were happy to see the last of us. Enough blood had been shed on both sides.

It is claimed their own dead number eighty-nine thousand and ours twenty-nine thousand. One hundred and eighteen thousand men lie dead and no explanation for any of it is sufficiently plausible to convince the mother of a single Australian lad that he died for something of value. We did not die for King and Country or for some great human cause, we died because of the vanity of old men. It should be as plain as the nose on any father’s face that his son was murdered. Make no mistake, this was senseless slaughter, men led like cattle to the abattoir, yet we will praise the colonels and the generals and the field marshals and give them more ribbons for their chests.

Speaking of such things, I was visited in hospital yesterday by a major from staff H.Q. who informed me that I am to receive the DCM for the axe incident on Lone Pine. I told him I had no use for it as it cannot bring my mates back to me. He told me not to be so ungrateful and that I was insulting the King.

‘Sir, have you led a charge where you lost your entire battalion?’ I asked him.

‘If I had, Sergeant-Major, I would wear the medal my country gave me with pride.’

‘And I, sir, will wear mine with the deepest sorrow.’

“That is enough from you, Sergeant-Major,’ he replied. Then, moustache bristling, he turned on his heel and strode from the ward. I have no doubt that the loudest explosion he’s heard in this war is the popping of a champagne cork.

I neglected to tell you that I have been promoted to sergeant-major.

11th January

I intended to write about the lads and the way they died, but yesterday, after the major’s visit, I had no stomach for such writing. I do not know if I can do so today, we will have to see if I have the hand to write it without the shakes.

WORDY SMITH

I will begin with Wordy Smith, Lieutenant Peregrine Ormington-Smith, the most unlikely soldier on the Gallipoli Peninsula. I have with me his book of flowers and while the last page is soaked in blood the beautiful little blossoms in the spray he was painting have, with one exception, miraculously escaped the bloodstains. They peep around the patches of brown that often smudge the ink where he has written his notes. Every page is filled with his paintings, right up to this last bloodstained page. Above this half-completed watercolour he has written Ulex europaeous. But it looks to me just like the blossom of the bloody furze bush that has given us such trouble. As you will see, it is plain enough to look at and only Wordy Smith could see virtue enough in it to want to paint it. I am sending his precious book to you, as he told me on two occasions that if he should die I was to have it. It is my most ardent hope that you will find some place of scholarship where it may be placed in perpetuity.

Wordy Smith died as he would have liked, quietly and without any fuss, though he was a hero. His last moments were spent not with a rifle blazing at the enemy but with a paintbrush in his hand. He had taken a much-needed spell from the fighting and had settled with his microscope and box of paints in one of the communication trenches. Earlier in the day I had watched as he saved enough water from his precious daily ration to half fill a small tobacco tin so that he could use his watercolours. When I emptied his tunic pocket it contained several sprigs and the heads of dead flowers he had somehow gathered, though God knows when he could have done so over the last four days of fighting. He left no letter for me to send on to his parents though. Like Numbers Cooligan, there was a note addressed to me personally.

Gallipoli 1915

Dear Ben,

You are to keep my sketchbook and if my parents should make a fuss please show them this note. They did not care for the notion that I desired to be an artist and, in their possession, it will only remind them of the son who did not turn out well.

For my part, knowing you and the lads has been the very best period of my life. Now that I am dead I am able to say this, whereas alive you may have thought it sentimental and over-effusive.

And now I require a personal favour. I am the beneficiary of a small bequest left to me by my grandmother in England. I wish you to use it to establish a bursary at my old art school. It is to be called The William Horne Art Scholarship.

By going back to retrieve my sketchbook from the cliff face at Aden, Hornbill changed my life. Perhaps some budding artist in the future may study in a little more comfort because of what Hornbill so generously did for me.

Will you thank the lads for putting up with me, they are a grand lot and no officer ever was more privileged than I to have them in his platoon?

As for you, Ben, I do not have the words sufficient or laudatory enough to express my love and admiration.

Yours ever,

Peregrine Ormington-Smith,

Botanical Artist.

CROW BIGBY

Crow Bigby once said to me that when he was a kid he was considered the best shot of the young blokes in the district and won the blue ribbon at the local rifle club three years running and had developed a bit of a swollen head. His father heard him brag of it to someone and that night drew him aside after tea. They sat on the veranda for a while looking out over the dry paddock in front of the house, the old bloke sipping at a glass of milk stout. Finally his father looked up at him and said, ‘Son, no matter how good you are at something, remember, there is always someone who is better than you.’

Corporal Crow Bigby died after he had been exchanging shots with a Turkish sniper for an hour and the Turk got one through and put a neat hole into the centre of his forehead. Crow would have admired the shot for it was painless, clean and decisive. He’d met his father’s ’someone’ who was better than him. Like Cooligan, Crow was terribly upset by the death of Woggy Mustafa whom he saw as his eyes. He came to me afterwards and said, ‘Ben, I’ve got a confession to make.’

‘I’m not a flamin priest, mate,’ I remember saying. ‘What is it?’

‘There was this sniper having a go and I got him in my sights, easy shot and I reckon we could have gotten to him after without too much danger.’

‘I let him go.’

‘Why’d you do that?’

‘Woggy. He would have got his Mauser telescopic sights.’

‘What are you trying to say, Crow? That you didn’t want another sniper competing with you? You wanted to keep him as your eyes? What?’

‘Nah, he’d ‘ave been the best there is, better than me any day of the week, I wouldn’t have minded that.’

‘Well, what then?’

‘It would have been me made him a sniper and I couldn’t bear to know that’

I don’t think I understood fully what he meant at the time. Crow Rigby was as fine a man as nature can make with a mercurial riposte that never went without a laugh. If a man may be judged by the laughter he brings into the world then he and Numbers Cooligan must sit equally on the throne of top-notch blokes.

Crow never shirked his duty either and volunteered on more than one occasion when one or another of the men was down with the squirts to do their water duty, often getting back after midnight from the long climb up from the beach. Once when I could see, like all of us, he was dog-tired, I told him I’d send someone who’d just arrived back from Lemnos after scoring three days’ leave for a comparatively minor wound. He’d protested, ‘Nah, I need to wash.’

‘Why ever, ‘I’d asked, ‘you’re no dirtier than any of us?’

‘Not my body, Ben, my soul. I must go down to the sea to wash my soul.’

‘Your soul?’ I remember being a trifle embarrassed, it was unlike Crow to talk in this manner and so I remained silent.

Seeing I didn’t understand, he kicked one scuffed boot against the other. ‘Ben, as a sniper I’ve killed at least two men every day we’ve been here. It’s not like in a battle or an attack when we’re all fighting for our lives, it’s seeing some bloke, some poor bastard, it doesn’t matter that he’s a Turk, who’s carrying water to his mates or squatting to do his business behind a bush, seeing him in my sights and thinking I must make a clean shot so he dies well. After a while, mate, well it just sinks in what you’re doing, you’re murdering men, like they was vermin back on the property. You’re not killing in the heat of a stoush, but in cold blood.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s inside you become dirty, Ben, your soul. When I go down that path to the beach to collect water then I’m just like one of the blokes I shoot every day, I’m in a sniper’s sights and that helps to wash a little of the dirt off my soul.’

Crow Rigby was a country boy without much education but he was probably the deepest of us all. I shall miss him dearly. I enclose his letter to his parents unopened, though as their sergeant, in the absence of Wordy Smith, I am supposed to read it. There was too much of the private bloke about Crow Rigby to want to know what he said to his parents. Perhaps you, or Grandfather Hawk, will take the motor and deliver it to them and, at the same time, read those parts of this letter you think suitable. Let them know that he was as fine a man as this country has ever produced and that we buried him facing into the sunrise, so that he would see nothing but the light in his eyes.