The Other Anzacs (8 page)

The engineer on the
Ionian
, George Mackay, witnessed the landing at Gallipoli and was stunned by what he saw.

It was a heart rending sight to see men being shot even before they left the boats, some wounded in the water, but others flinging aside their packs and fixing their bayonets jumped into the water and charged the Turks who broke and fled, closely pursued by the men of the 9th, 10th and 11th Battalions all mixed together. So terrible was the slaughter that by the afternoon, although there were several hospital ships to receive the wounded they were unable to cope with the vast numbers and it was necessary to convert several of the troopships into hospital ships to take on wounded.
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By 6 p.m. the
Ionian
had 700 wounded on board. The situation was distressing. Underlining the woefully inadequate preparation of medical and nursing services, there were only two doctors and no nurses on Mackay’s ship to attend to the wounded.

But fortunately we had three stewardesses. These women worked unceasingly amongst those poor wounded men, doing all in their power to alleviate pain never ceasing until we reached Alexandria, a matter of two days and nights. I saw one doctor who had amputated a man’s arm asking another patient where he was wounded and still having the amputated arm under his own arm. One soldier, when the doctor asked him where he was wounded replied, ‘Just a wee bit off me dome’ at the same time lifting his scalp, showing a gaping wound.

The heavy casualty count far exceeded expectations, and with no nursing staff on the ground at Gallipoli, the hospital ships effectively became casualty clearing stations for first-line medical treatment. By 2 p.m. on the day of the landing there were 500 wounded waiting for clearance to leave the beach. By mid-afternoon the number of serious cases—distinguished by a red tab tied to a tunic button—had greatly increased. The first evacuation began at 5:30 p.m. and continued under high pressure for the next six hours.

Evacuating the casualties was difficult because there were no piers or causeways. The men were brought down the steep cliff faces on stretchers or on the backs of mules. The shallow water meant barges had to be used to ferry the wounded from a makeshift pier out to the evacuation ships, where a crane lifted them on board.

As the second day dawned, Turkish defences in the village of Seddulbahir, on the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula, were silenced and in flames, and Kath King had the satisfaction of ‘seeing our men march in later in the morning’. The enemy were now in the valley behind the brow of the cliffs, and Allied guns were being dragged up. Several batteries were in action before nightfall. ‘All day long we were kept busy, ships, boats, lighters, launches and trawlers bringing over wounded just as they had fallen on the field, ’ Kath continued. ‘That night there was a sharp attack on our shore positions, as soon as the moon went down and we heard the bugles sound the charge and then all was quiet for the remainder of night except for the boom of the warships guns.’
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Sleep became a memory, with 27 April ‘just as busy a day for us and those on shore as the day before’. The workload was constant, with as many wounded brought in during the night as during the day. If the sisters managed four hours’ sleep it was as much as they could expect. On shore, the troops were engaged in seemingly endless actions. Enemy sniping in country intersected by trenches made life doubly hazardous.

It was not as if the sisters themselves were safe from the shelling. Warships around the
Sicilia
continued to shell enemy gun positions on the furthest hills and ‘occasionally shells from their positions fell very near the [cruiser]
Euryalus
not 100 yards from us’, Kath noted. ‘Three fell into water, one barely missing a launch which was, curiously enough, bringing off with others a wounded Turk; one whizzed right over us and fell 100 yards the other side.’
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Kath began to understand just what was happening around her, and how different that was from the picture that would be painted for Australians half a world away. ‘All the reports at home persuade people to believe that it is a very simple affair, this forcing of the Dardanelles; that they will eventually be forced it would be un-British to doubt, but it will be at enormous loss of life limb and ships.’
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Kath was frantically tired, and the ‘weird’ way the
Sicilia
quivered to the vibration of cannon fire from the nearby English and French warships did nothing for her peace of mind. But the grind of attending to the avalanche of wounded was relentless. Two hundred of the less serious cases were sent to a transport ship to provide room for more.

The conditions the wounded men endured on these ships taking them to Lemnos and Egypt were dreadful. They lay crowded on bare decks in their torn and bloodstained clothes. The food was sorely inadequate, just ‘ship biscuits and bully beef for men with shattered jaws!’
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The doctors had no skilled assistance, as the orderlies on board were untrained, and, at that stage on the transports, there were no nurses.

Once beachheads had been secured at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove, the aim of Commander-in-Chief Hamilton was to open the peninsula land campaign. This would involve the main Allied force at Cape Helles breaking through the Turkish defensive lines, capturing the village of Krithia and its prominent hill feature Achi Baba, and so linking up with the Allies at Anzac Cove. Once Krithia was in Allied hands Hamilton intended to continue pushing northwards, removing Turks from the heights defending the Dardanelles as a crucial step towards the ultimate goal of capturing both the straits and Constantinople. The aim was to open up a crucial supply route to the Allies’ Russian partners.

The first of three battles of Krithia began on 28 April with a moderate bombardment. The Allied attacks were finally repulsed that day, and the troops returned to the trenches. Towards sunset, Kath King on the
Sicilia
witnessed heavy enemy fire from the village. Ship cannon sought out Krithia, and by nightfall she saw a ‘burning mass’. Kath thought the shelling was a wonderful sight: ‘As each shell struck crowds of burning debris flew high in the air and in the dusk the scene was most weird and awe inspiring.’ The challenge for the men, she decided, was exciting and fascinating—if they were ‘fortunate enough to pull through’.

But one loses sight of all the honour and glory in work such as we are dealing with. We have nought but the horrors, the primary results of the war. Nothing will induce any of our staff to tell of the horrors they have seen and dealt with and no one who has not seen it in its awful reality could imagine a portion of this saddest part of the war. The fighting men push on and leave such sights behind.
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Kath now knew what ‘honour and glory’ really meant. Allied casualties during the first battle were heavy, with approximately 3000 losses from the original British and French force of 14, 000 men. Such a toll only added to the already intolerable burden on medical capabilities. Australian surgeon Captain John Deakin recounted what it was like in the hold of the hospital ship where he was attending to the wounded.

Picture to yourselves the hold of a ship, the portholes open, a few electric fans revolving, scattered electric lights overhead, the mess tables and benches previously used by the troops still in position; the floors, benches and tables covered with wounded, some on blankets, others on the bare boards, a few specially bad ones on mattresses, an occasional delirious soldier strapped to a stretcher, and all the time a stream of wounded coming down the steps or being lowered down the gangway on slings. Such were the conditions under which we worked after the landing at Anzac.
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In one corner a mess table was set apart for operations. At one end of it sat a battered primus stove, which needed constant attention to keep it burning, sterilised instruments, and cotton wool used for swabs. At the head of the same table a wounded soldier in dirty and bloodstained clothes was anaesthetised ‘by a man who in civil life was a commercial traveller, his whole experience in anaesthetics consisting in having once been anaesthetised himself ’.
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Standing between bench and table, the gowned and gloved surgeon was faced by his assistant, ‘who until the war was a school boy about to commence his medical studies’. Chloroform was the only anaesthetic used. There were no deaths under anaesthetic, according to Deakin, ‘but the strain of working under such conditions was considerable’.

Mostly, the wounded were strangely quiet. They bore their pain resolutely, the only moans being from unconscious men. One man had lost an eye and suffered severe damage to the other after being sprayed with shrapnel and dirt three days earlier. Although blind, he had stuck to the trench, digging shelter holes for his mates for two days before he would leave them. ‘He had worked until his horny hands were a mass of raw blisters. He apologised for being a coward when he groaned as I examined his eyes!’
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They did not touch the hopeless cases and, Deakin noted, ‘undoubtedly many whose lives would have been saved in civil practice had to perish because we did not have the time to attend to them’.

With their cargoes of human suffering, the hospital and transport ships sailed for Alexandria. The mortality rate among the Australians was already frightening and still huge numbers of wounded were pouring into the hospitals. The first few days showed just how inadequate the military and medical preparations for the campaign had been. The reality made a powerful case for more nurses to be stationed closer to the front.

6
BLOODED

In the urgency of the moment, the
Sicilia
delayed its departure from the Dardanelles to take on the rapidly increasing number of desperate cases. But the postponement was costly. By the time the ship reached Egypt, hospitals in Alexandria were overflowing with casualties. There were no beds to spare, and the
Sicilia
was diverted to Malta after offloading only its three most seriously wounded men. The voyage gave Kath King time to collect her thoughts and to reflect on the extraordinary experiences of the previous few days. What she had seen dismayed her. There was no glory in war, only suffering and grief. The social whirl of the past few months took on a new perspective, and life a new meaning.

Shall never forget the awful feeling of hopelessness. On night duty it was dreadful. I had two wards downstairs, each over a hundred patients and then I had small wards upstairs and some officers, altogether about 250 patients to look after with one orderly and one Indian sweeper; had two Turks and a Frenchman, both taken ashore at Alexandria. Shall not describe the wounds they were two [
sic
] awful, had one poor little boy who had a fractured femur, developed tetanus and died but I had to keep watching him all the time and every now and then I would hear a groan.
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In Egypt the authorities struggled frantically to cope with the sudden and unforeseen influx of wounded. Every available school or hotel in Alexandria had been turned into a makeshift hospital. On 29 April, Elsie Eglinton and seven of her colleagues were sent from Cairo to one of the hurriedly established hospitals in Alexandria to help receive the wounded. One of Elsie’s group later recalled that they arrived at the hospital in the morning, met the matron, and were immediately given beds to make up.

It seems the orderly staff had been working very hard, but there were such numbers to be got ready, that we had plenty to do. Apparently the building was undergoing a lot of alterations, as I believe it had before been a College, consequently, there were numerous workmen about, and much hammering and inconvenience generally. The idea of bringing wounded men into a place of such unpreparedness, seemed almost impossible, however, in the midst of things the patients arrived. Some hundreds were admitted in a very short time.
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At first, Elsie proudly asserted that ‘our boys are bricks’ and that ‘they have made a name for Australia’. But she quickly saw that their newly won reputation came at an awful cost, with ‘hundreds of our poor boys arriving all the night on stretchers from various ships’. Some were dying, others were in a terrible state. No one could say enough ‘about the noble way they all behaved’. A couple of hours into her shift, someone shouted that there was no sister in the upstairs ward.

So I simply flew upstairs and found hundreds of poor fellows in every condition. There were a few doctors and orderlies working steadily on trying to attend the worst cases as they came in. I helped the doctors all night and did my best to instruct the orderlies, but as they were mostly inexperienced it was hard work. But they did their very best. We only had cold water for the wounded to drink but they were thankful to get that. If there had been a few hundred sisters there we would have been able to cope with the work but we were terribly shorthanded.
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