Soldier Boy Read online

  Dear Mrs Martin,

  Before this reaches you, you will have already heard of your very sad loss in the death of your son. I thought you might like a few lines from me as I was with him for the very short time he was on this boat.

  He was brought on board from the shore yesterday at 5 p.m. in a very collapsed state. We got him to bed comfortably and did everything possible for him. He said he was feeling much more comfortable and thanked me so nicely for what had been done for him. He then settled down to get a sleep but died quite suddenly and quietly of heart failure at 6.40 p.m … He will be buried at sea …

  Frances Reddock enclosed something she found among his papers, though what it was became forgotten over time. A photograph? A last letter to Amelia? Possibly the first version of Jim’s letter of 9 October, for two different copies survived in his boyish handwriting. The military records said letters were found among Jim’s effects, but the family memory remained clear: he received none of the letters that were sent to him.

  The rest of Jim’s ‘little treasures’ as Matron Reddock called them – his New Testament, a notebook, the aluminium dog tag with his battalion number on it and his name crudely scratched, his belt and pouch with the paper streamer – were done up in a parcel and eventually sent home to Mary Street through the regimental office.

  Nine days after Jim’s body slipped beneath the Aegean Sea, his mate, Cec Hogan, wrote to Amelia.

  Dear Madam,

  I am writing to you on behalf of the old No 10 Tent party to express our great sorrow at your late bereavement.

  Jim was in the firing line with us and he took bad. But he stuck to his post till the last like the brave lad he was and made the greatest and noblest of sacrifices for his Country. Sargt Coates of his platoon No 4 speakes very highly of him, and says he never had a man in his platoon who paid more attention to his duty.

  I am yours faithfully, Cecil Joseph Hogan.

  The local Member of Parliament, Mr W.M.McPherson, wrote to Charlie and Amelia to express sincere sympathy and public sentiments.

  Australia is proud of the spirit of self-sacrifice that prompted our men to come forward in the Empire’s hour of trial, and to give up their lives in upholding Britain’s Just Cause and in defending our National Honour.

  Of course there was the military telegram at the beginning of November, informing the family of Jim’s death. It was followed by a letter dated 16 November, three days after Annie’s birthday, advising formally that Private Martin of the 21st Battalion had died of syncope (low blood pressure due to heart failure) following enteritis (the term they used for typhoid).

  Nowhere in these letters was there any indication the authorities – or even his closest mates – knew Jim’s true age. They may have guessed he wasn’t quite eighteen. There was the hint of it in Cec Hogan’s letter. He only turned seventeen himself on the day Jim was buried. But fourteen? It was a secret Jim Martin seemed to have kept to himself until the end.

  Strangely, though, the fact that this soldier boy was probably the youngest of all the Anzacs was put on the public record within two months of his death.

  On Saturday, 18 December 1915, the Melbourne Herald newspaper published a photograph of Jim Martin in his slouch hat beneath the heading:

  YOUNGEST SOLDIER DIES

  It is believed that Private James Martin, who died of enteric while on active service, was the youngest soldier in the Australian forces.

  Though the regulation provides that the minimum age shall be 18, Private Martin is said to have been only 14 years of age when he enlisted. He was the only son of Mr and Mrs C. Martin of ‘Forres’, Mary Street, Hawthorn, and was on board the transport ‘Southland’ when that vessel was torpedoed. He was rescued after having been in a ship’s boat for several hours.

  For some reason – possibly military embarrassment – the authorities censored news of the Southland for over two months. It wasn’t until late November that reports and photographs of the torpedo attack appeared in the Melbourne newspapers. Six days before Jim’s story appeared, the Herald published a photograph of the ship and a statement by the 21st Battalion’s CO, Lieutenant Colonel Hutchinson. ‘It was a remarkable sight to see the steadiness of the men. It was a grand sight. I never felt prouder of the boys.’

  In their grief at the news of Jim’s death, the family made it known that he, too, had been on the Southland. Clearly, from the report that Jim had spent some hours in a ship’s boat, he’d written to them describing his experience. But, like much else, this letter would not apparently survive. In an interview, many years later, Jim’s last living sister, Annie (Mrs Nan Johnson), recalled that he’d spent four hours in the water, and expressed the family’s belief that this was what weakened him. Annie remembered the mourning of that time: of the news coinciding with her own tenth birthday, and of Amelia’s hair turning white overnight from shock.

  Two days after Jim’s story appeared in the newspaper, his sister Alice gave birth to her first child, a son. She and her husband, Percy, named the baby after the dead soldier boy: James Martin Chaplin.

  Remarkably, on that same day, 20 December 1915, the last of the Australian and New Zealand troops left Gallipoli. Headquarters was becoming alarmed by the severity of the winter, with men already suffering frostbite and some even freezing to death. Cec Hogan was one of those who had a bad case of frostbite and trench feet. By curious coincidence, he was taken aboard the Glenart Castle on 7 December and evacuated to the 1st Auxiliary Hospital at ‘Luna Park’, Heliopolis, where he and Jim had visited those sick and wounded diggers a few months before.

  Convinced also by the weather and the military futility of hanging on, the British Government decided to evacuate Gallipoli. Between late November and 18 December, the Allied forces were gradually reduced to 20,000 men each at Anzac and Suvla. They were then taken off the peninsula over the next two nights.

  Elaborate stratagems were devised to fool the Turks into believing the army was still present in force. There were long periods of inactivity to get the enemy used to silence. Men played cricket on Shell Green. Battleships bombarded Turkish positions. Men rigged devices to keep their rifles firing at intervals. But stealthily in the night, their boots wrapped in hessian, the Anzacs filed down to the beach and into the waiting boats. Just after 0400 on 20 December the last boat left Anzac. The remaining British troops at Suvla departed an hour later. The Turks attacked that day – to find the trenches empty and the invaders gone.

  The evacuation was a masterpiece of planning. While quantities of stores and ammunition were left behind or destroyed, some 80,000 men, 5000 horses and 200 guns were taken off this part of the peninsula. High Command had reckoned on losing half the troops in the operation. In fact there were only half a dozen casualties. The following month, Allied troops at Cape Helles were also withdrawn at negligible cost in human life.

  It was often said that if the invasion of Gallipoli had been planned with the same care and attention as the withdrawal, the campaign could have been won within a week. As it was, there were over 33,000 Allied dead and 78,000 wounded. Of these men and boys, there were some 7600 Australians and 2500 New Zealanders killed, and more than 19,000 Australians and 5000 New Zealanders sick and wounded. Turkish casualties were estimated at over 200,000.

  Not all the sick died, of course. Unlike Jim Martin, many soldiers recovered at hospitals in Egypt or England, and rejoined their units to fight in Palestine or France. Cec Hogan was one of them. During the Gallipoli campaign itself some soldiers were sent back, too soon and unfit, to the trenches. Others were invalided home to Australia, their war over. But Jim’s death, not in some heroic feat of battle but rather killed by flies and the infection they carried, was all too typical of what the medical historian of Australia in the Great War, Dr A.G. Butler, who was there himself, called the ‘disease debacle’ of Gallipoli. During September and October alone, some 50,000 Allied casualties were evacuated through Mudros Bay. Of these men, 44,000 – almost nine out of every ten – we
re sick.

  Insufficient fresh food, little water for drinking and washing, dirty eating utensils, heat, fatigue, unburied corpses, vermin, sick men returned to the lines, dysentery – above all, flies and the lack of fly-proof seats in the latrines during summer – were compelling factors.

  ‘Black swarms of flies carried infection warm from the very bowel to the food as it passed the lips …’ Butler wrote. ‘Sticking it out against disease was made a point of honour; it was, indeed, accepted by the corps commander as the official policy. A man was evacuated only when he was no longer of use or had some blatant contagion.’ By which time it was often too late.

  Some 220 men of Jim Martin’s battalion were among the last of the troops to leave Anzac on 20 December 1915. They were taken to Lemnos, and then back to Egypt. From there the 21st Battalion went to the Western Front, where it fought with great distinction and valour as part of the Australian Imperial Force throughout the rest of the war. It was the first Australian infantry unit to serve in the front line in France. It was the last AIF infantry unit in the line before the Great War ended with the Armistice at 1100 hours on 11 November 1918. Remembrance Day.

  While the true figure would never be known, it was estimated that over eight-and-a-half million soldiers from both sides were killed in the war, and another twenty-one million wounded. Interestingly, in February 1918, nine months before the Armistice, the hospital ship Glenart Castle was itself torpedoed by a German submarine in the Bristol Channel. There were no sick on board, but more than 150 nurses, medical officers and crew drowned. Matron Reddock was not among them. After Gallipoli she was embroiled in a dispute over staff and discipline, and her contract as a military nurse was not renewed. She returned to England in September 1916 and died in June 1919, aged only forty-three.

  Altogether, nearly 60,000 Australian soldiers were killed in the Great War. Jim Martin’s mate, Cec Hogan, survived the slaughter, and returned to Australia in March 1919. He was gassed in France, nearly died from double pneumonia, and was there when they tried to amalgamate the 21st Battalion, reduced to a few hundred men, with other battalions of the 6th Brigade. The men flatly refused to obey the order – though subsequently, in the last weeks of the war, they became part of the 24th Battalion.

  While he was at Nalinnes, in Belgium, waiting to return home, Cec engraved a brass shell case as a ‘Souvenir of the World War.’ The quality of his workmanship was remarkably fine. Around the top he included reminders of Egypt: a sphinx, a pyramid, the crescent moon and star, and Arabic writing. On one side, Cec engraved a shield surrounded by the Australian and New Zealand flags, with the Rising Sun badge of the AIF, two boomerangs and a kookaburra. The shield was surmounted by a kangaroo, the words ‘Egypt, Anzac, S.S. Southland, Belgium, France’ in a ribbon, and the 21st Battalion’s red-and-black diamond colour patch. There was a cannon and shell beneath, with the motto Aut. Pace. Aut. Bello. (Either In Peace Or In War). On the other side of the shell case, Cec engraved the letters RIP. And in a scroll he wrote the names of six close mates who had died. Second among them was J. Martin.

  Cec came home to Benalla, on the same day as his mate, Bob Briggs; and while he didn’t become an architect (though his son, Cec, did), he was a skilled builder and designer in the Albury district. He supervised the construction of the Regent Theatre in Albury, eventually listed with the National Trust. Cec married in 1925 and had three children. And when the Second World War broke out in 1939, Sergeant Hogan enlisted again to serve in Australia, among other things as a guard at Prisoner of War camps. He died at Albury in 1951, at the age of 53.

  For the Martin family, life ran its uncertain course through sunlight and shadow.

  Jim’s sisters married and had families of their own. Esther had two sons and another daughter, Millicent (‘Billie’), who years later would help make Jim’s story more widely known. Alice had a second son, William Glen, born in 1917. Mary married John Harris in 1921. They had two sons, John (Jack) and Robert. Amelia married Frederick Bullock in 1934, and they had one daughter, Nancy. Annie married Albert Johnson in 1939, but they had no children.

  The bond of kinship between the sisters and their families was a close one, united by the affection and strong personality of their mother, Amelia. Visiting, sharing, helping Amelia in her businesses. Keeping the memory of their dead brother alive. Talking about Jim to their own children, though less so as time went by. It was in the past. Still, Amelia gave some of his photographs and letters to her daughters. She gave them his service decorations, too, when they arrived after the war: the 1915 Star, the British War Medal, the Victory Medal, the Memorial Plaque and a Memorial Scroll from King George himself:

  He whom this scroll commemorates was numbered among those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom. Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.

  As it turned out, it was well that these things were shared among the family.

  Charlie and Amelia continued to live at the boarding house in Mary Street until 1921. By 1922 or 1923 they had separated. Doubtless there were many reasons, but inevitably there must have been recrimination – even guilt – that they’d let their soldier boy go to war. If only they’d been stronger, whatever Jim’s threat to run away … If only they’d meant it when they’d said no … If only they’d made sure the authorities discovered Jim’s true age … The catalogue of ‘if only’s’ would have been endless.

  Charlie Martin still drove his taxi, waiting for fares outside Camberwell railway station. He saw the family from time to time, though feelings could be strained. Charlie paid Amelia some support money and helped her with odd jobs. For Amelia continued to let rooms in various places around Hawthorn until, in 1927, she returned to Mary Street and took on another boarding house. Two years later she moved back to Forres, which she ran in conjunction with the Maryemeade boarding house next door. In 1930 yet a third establishment, just around the corner, was added to her business.

  It was hard work, and the family was often called in to assist. Not surprisingly, Amelia soon relinquished the leases. Instead, she took over a weekend chalet at the outer suburb of Park Orchards, and a little later became proprietress of the Hartwood guest house and picnic grounds at Mitcham.

  Then in October 1933, Charlie Martin died of kidney failure. It was the first of a number of misfortunes to afflict the family.

  Less than a month afterwards, the Mitcham guest house burned to the ground. Alice and Annie were sleeping in the same room as Amelia when they woke to find the weatherboard house on fire. They escaped with little more than their nightclothes. Annie ran half a mile to telephone, but when the fire brigades arrived the place was a ruin. A photograph appeared in the Herald on 20 November, and the report said Amelia had lost £150 worth of furniture and nearly all her other private possessions representing her life savings. Among them, it would seem, were some of the letters and photographs Jim had sent from the war.

  In August 1934, Alice’s eldest son, James Martin Chaplin, named after Jim, also died. He was only eighteen. The lad was an epileptic. He belonged to a military cadet training unit and, tragically, shot himself at home with his service rifle.

  So passed the years.

  Amelia returned to Melbourne after the fire. She was fondly known to her grandchildren as ‘Ma Martin’, for she often stayed with one or other of her daughters until her death in 1955 at the age of 77. In the following decades Esther, Alice, Mary and Millie passed on, until Annie was the only sister still alive. Although Jim Martin’s name was inscribed on the Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and at the Lone Pine Cemetery and Memorial, it seemed his story might soon fade from memory.

  It didn’t. In 1982 Esther’s daughter, Billie, began to research Jim’s life. Two of her own grandsons, Stephen and Ian Cruwys, were joining the Army
Reserve, and she wanted to tell them of their great uncle, the youngest of all the Anzacs. Documents, letters, photographs and medals were gathered together. Jim’s last living sister, Annie (Mrs Nan Johnson) spoke of him to the newspapers. The family decided to give the material to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. On 25 October 1985, the seventieth anniversary of his death, a service and exhibition was held to honour Jim’s memory. Twenty members of his family were present.

  In the years to follow, the story of Private James Martin would be recounted to numerous schoolchildren visiting the Gallipoli galleries at the War Memorial. His photograph would be published in Anzac histories. Jim Martin would become part of the nation’s story. In 1999 his name would be singled out for mention by the Governor-General of Australia, Sir William Deane, at the Anzac Day service at Lone Pine …

  The morning light slants across the rugged peninsula of Gallipoli. It’s a strong light, just as it is at home, throwing into high relief the cliffs and ravines leading up to the ridges. The landscape is softer than the Anzacs knew, for wild thyme and rosemary, the low scrub, scarlet poppies and Aleppo pines have grown again. Indeed, it is dedicated by the Government of Turkey as the Gallipoli Peace Park. Even so, when the bushfires go through, you can still see the trenches of Anzac exposed like scars in the burned earth.

  From the Lone Pine Memorial you look down to the blue Aegean Sea and marvel at how far those first Anzacs had come. You look up and realise how far they had to go. Here at the cemetery are buried men who died throughout the campaign, from the beginning to the end, the known and the unknown.

  ‘Here too,’ the Governor-General is saying on this April morning, ‘are commemorated over 4200 Australians and 700 New Zealand soldiers who have no identified grave or who were buried at sea. Among them Private James Martin, who died on a hospital ship. He was, we believe, only fourteen – though he said he was eighteen – perhaps the youngest of all the Anzacs to die here …’