Soldier Boy Read online

  Jim knew he’d swallowed some. He retched and spat.

  ‘Don’t worry too much, son,’ laughed the digger. ‘You can’t stop ’em. You’ll even find they give the bully a bit of flavour …’

  That evening, as the sun set, the sky was bleeding red and orange over Imbros Island behind them. Again, there was no sleep. The nightly cannonade and sniper fire went on, the same as they had witnessed when they came ashore less than twenty-four hours earlier. So long ago!

  At midnight, Jim’s platoon was taken back to the firing line to work the shift until dawn. He peered with them into the darkness, pulling the trigger nervously in reply to each fire flash from the lines opposite, but gradually getting more confident with the periscope rifle’s action and with himself. Listening to the scream of a shell overhead – ours or theirs you couldn’t tell, until the explosion and the night sky lit up.

  He watched and waited with his companions, talking softly with repressed elation as this first night’s work came to an end. Real work. Soldiers’ work. The work for which they’d enlisted those long months ago. All that remained was to claim their first kill. Their first Turk.

  ‘I’ll pot that sniping Jacko tomorrow,’ Jim boasted with the rest of his section. ‘You see if I don’t.’

  Quietly, the relief shift moved into the trench: Standing To together, as another grey dawn crept across the Gallipoli landscape from the direction of those friggin’ Dardanelles they were destined never to see.

  ‘Well, hoo-roo boys,’ said the 8th Battalion men next day, as they got ready to depart. ‘We’re off for a little holiday on Lemnos. Give our regards to Abdul. He’s all yours now, till we get back. Enjoy yourselves. You and them flies!’

  They left in ragged file, down the slopes to Monash Valley and the beach and the ships that would take them from Gallipoli for an all-too-brief respite. These veterans of Anzac, some of whom had landed on that first day; who had fought with the British divisions at Helles; and held the ridge as the 1st Brigade assaulted and famously took Lone Pine, to their south, in August.

  Weary and gaunt and carrying their sick, they took their leave. There was not a watching man of the relieving battalion whose heart did not go out in pride to them.

  Then they turned to the task at hand. They were on their own.

  Three cheers for the old Twenty-first,

  Three cheers for the bold Twenty-first,

  There is nothing on earth that will stop us,

  Three cheers for the old Twenty-first.

  12: LINE OF FIRE

  So they settled to the realities of trench life.

  In early autumn, things were quiet on this part of Gallipoli. Unless the brass were planning a demonstration of some kind against the Turks, the soldiers’ days followed a general routine: so many hours in every twenty-four for rest, for duty in the firing line, for work in the support trenches or on fatigues. Though as always with the army, routines could change at any time.

  Within the firing line, the platoon sections were divided into smaller groups of four to six men. Each group watched one narrow part of the front, for the trench didn’t go more than six feet before turning a sharp, defensive corner. Two soldiers at a time generally manned the periscope and periscope rifle, the others standing by at loopholes in the parapet, weapons and bayonets at the ready, or just taking a breather. It was concentrated and tiring work – even more so when things were quiet, as at present – and a man needed regular breaks. An hour could go by without anything happening.

  POW!

  A single shot from a sniper’s loophole.

  At once the rifleman responded with a round of his own.

  POW!

  POW!

  Then stillness once more. Silence in their own little slice of the world, whatever else was happening around them.

  ‘Gets on your nerves, Jim, this waiting. Not knowing. Why don’t they attack us? Or the brass let us have a go at them?’

  They didn’t because, after the August battles, both sides had fought themselves to a standstill. It was a matter, now, of hanging on. Of getting through the winter which would soon be upon them.

  Sometimes, to relieve the monotony, opponents engaged in bomb-throwing duels: trying to lob hand-bombs and grenades into each other’s trenches, where they did a lot of damage to men caught in the blast. Within days of the 21st Battalion’s arrival, four men were wounded by Turkish bombs at Courtney’s and Steele’s.

  From the start, the Turks had a steady supply of bombs from the German factories. The trouble for Abdul was that they had long fuses, which often gave the Anzacs enough time to catch the bombs and hurl them back like cricket balls. Until the Turks learned to shorten the fuses. Many diggers lost eyes and hands that way. At first, the Anzacs had no grenades of their own. In time, though, there was quite a production line on the beach, men manufacturing bombs out of old jam tins packed with bits of shrapnel, barbed wire, nails, gun cotton, a detonator – and short fuse.

  On the night the 6th Brigade formally took over its section, and again six nights later, a big demonstration was held along the whole line. Artillery from the battleships and shore batteries pounded Turkish positions. Coloured flares burst in the sky. Troops in the firing line hurled jam-tin bombs and gave a burst of three rounds of rapid fire into the enemy’s trenches.

  The Turks responded with rifle and machine gun fire, the bullets spraying along the parapet. They’d have been deadly to any man poking up his nose. In Jim’s sub-section at Wire Gully, two bombs were hurled towards the trench. They fell in no-man’s-land, exploding against the sandbags and showering the men behind with dirt and stones.

  ‘Nice try, Jacko!’ they shouted in reply. ‘But you’re bowling ’em short, like a sheila.’

  There were no casualties; but further up a man was hit when the enemy opened up on his machine gun with mortar and artillery fire. He was their first to be killed in direct action.

  ‘You bastards!’ screamed his companions seeing the bloody corpse. ‘Give this to the friggin’ German Kaiser! And this! And this!’

  They gave him a burst of rifle fire.

  One bloke had to be physically restrained by his corporal and a lieutenant from clambering over the parapet and wanting to strangle the German Emperor (had he been present on the battlefield) with his bare hands.

  Strange, but already they were seeing their real enemies not as the Turkish soldiers – who were generally seen to be fair fighters – but rather their German military advisers.

  ‘Abdul don’t use exploding bullets, Jim. He don’t fire on our hospital ships. And he don’t use poison gas. Not like them Huns.’

  When the Anzacs raised dummy human figures above their trenches to try to draw the enemy’s fire, they were sometimes cut-out shapes of the German ‘Kaiser Bill’. The Turks shot at such targets with pleasure. Indeed, the two sides occasionally had shooting contests, and chucked tins of food and cigarettes into each other’s trenches as prizes. There were even brief moments of fraternisation: men climbing out and swapping gifts, much to the horror of Headquarters staff.

  Not long after the 21st took up its responsibilities, a note written in French was flung from the Turkish lines to the men in the trenches up at Courtney’s. It was wrapped around a small packet.

  ‘We understand you lack cigarette papers,’ the note said. ‘We send you some.’

  The boys threw them tobacco in return. They also tossed over a tin of bully beef, but Jacko threw it back. Half an hour later they were exchanging bullets again.

  Strange, too, how quickly Jim – as with every soldier – got used to the constant dangers around him: how he soon slept through gunfire (though always with half an ear open), and accepted with sardonic Anzac humour the prospect of sudden death. It was a way of coping.

  A week or so after their arrival, a bloke was on duty in the firing line when Ping! A Turkish bullet hit the swivel of his periscope rifle. The bullet was deflected downwards, passing through his eye, coming out his cheek, re-enter
ing his shoulder and coming out again through his armpit. A medic staunched the bleeding and had the man taken down to the field ambulance, with every chance he’d pull through. The others standing around cracked a laugh.

  ‘We always said Bert was a one-eyed coot.’

  ‘Don’t keep me too long, Doc,’ said Bert as he hobbled out of the trench. ‘I want to take a bet with these blokes on the chance of it happening again …’

  A few weeks later, a shell fired from a Turkish battery landed near the dugouts shared by Jim’s platoon. It exploded just as they were walking to the rest terraces after their second shift. The men were knocked off their feet by the force of the blast.

  Jim felt a shard of metal whiz past his cheek. Another inch or two …

  ‘That was a close shave, Sarge.’

  ‘Close enough, lad,’ said Sergeant Coates. ‘You won’t need to use your razor tonight.’

  Some joke. They’d spent the shift helping the sappers dig a tunnel – a sap – deep underground, beneath the Turkish trenches. The engineers filled the mine with explosives and detonated them at the right time.

  Boom! And suddenly it was raining dirt, and barbed wire, and bits of Turk.

  They even dug saps under their own trenches, just in case the enemy over-ran them and could be blown up. Both sides went in for mining, especially up at Lone Pine where the 23rd and 24th Battalions relieved each other every two days. Cec Hogan had a couple of mates up there – Benalla boys, with the home town inked on their hat bands. They spent much of their time digging. It was said to be one reason the Anzacs called themselves ‘diggers’ in the first place. The tap-tap-tap of people digging away under you was one of the sounds you got used to in the trenches. And you were never quite sure if they were our sappers or theirs!

  Like every digger, Jim found it hard, dangerous and dirty work, lying for hours on his stomach, burrowing away like a ferret with always the risk of a cave-in. The men came off the shift covered in muck, with hardly any water to wash themselves. And here was a shrapnel shell exploding outside the rest terraces and Sergeant Coates saying, ‘You won’t need to use your razor tonight …’

  No one, thank God, was seriously hurt in the blast. Nor were they when a shell burst near Church Parade one Sunday.

  ‘You must have been praying extra hard that time, padre.’

  They were not always so lucky.

  One afternoon, Jim and Cec were on water fatigues. In the summer heat, acute water shortages were one more hardship endured by the Anzacs on Gallipoli. There were few wells, and they were mostly dry. The good water was on Abdul’s side of the line. Little rain fell. The Anzacs had to bring in clean water for drinking and washing by barges from Lemnos and sometimes even from Egypt, and pump it into storage tanks at Anzac Cove.

  Each day a water detail had to make the trip down Monash Valley to the beach carrying kerosene tins, fill them with precious water, and carry them back up the slopes to the trenches. It was a risky job, exposed in the open to artillery. But then, nowhere was safe at Gallipoli – and water duties were a break from trench routine. Sometimes you could even nick down to the sea for a quick swim. It was a rare chance to get your clothes off and wash your whole body – even if you did have to share the seawater with mules and shipping, with oil slicks and lively bursts of shell fire from the Turkish battery known as ‘Beachy Bill’.

  On this particular afternoon, the water party was returning up the valley carrying the laden kerosene tins. From time to time came the sullen thud of a Turkish gun over the ridge. Above them, they heard a German biplane buzzing, a black iron cross painted beneath its wings. The pilot was manoeuvring to drop a bomb on the Anzac lines. Ahead of them, beside the track, a group of diggers were standing in a ring playing two-up.

  ‘Head ’em up!’ they cried, as the spinner got ready to toss the pennies. ‘Head ’em up again!’

  A second buzzing sound could be heard. The water party looked up and saw a British aeroplane flying across the sky, like a large insect, to intercept the German. They stopped and put down their tins to watch the fight. The two-up game took no notice.

  ‘All bets on?’

  ‘Come in, spinner!’

  The pennies spun in the air. The German pilot spotted his enemy and quickly changed course.

  KKKRUMPPP!!

  There was a terrific explosion. A shell had landed just beside the two-up game. When the dust cleared and Jim raised his head, only half the game were still standing. Four men lay dead on the ground, and a fifth was screaming.

  ‘Oh no, God! Oh, please mother! Not me guts! Not me friggin’ guts …!’

  The soldier’s prayer. Anything, except shot in the stomach. The wound was usually fatal. And death was slow and agonising.

  The water party ran across. A head, like a discarded football, lay in the dirt. The man nearest the shell had been blown to pieces, his limbs scattered into the scrub. Blood dripped everywhere, attracting hosts of Gallipoli flies. The screaming soldier held his stomach, to stop his intestines spilling onto the ground.

  ‘Oh, sweet Jesus, not that … not me guts …’

  There was a field ambulance station near by in Rest Gully. Someone ran to get help, but the stretcher bearers had heard the explosion and were already on their way.

  The soldier, as they carried him down, found enough strength to cry out, ‘Tell the missus … tell me kid …’

  He was fortunate, in a sense. He died quickly that afternoon on the operating table in the Red Cross tent, and was buried with his mates in the little cemetery by the beach.

  ‘Poor old Hughie,’ said the spinner of the two-up game. ‘His luck was just starting to change, too.’

  ‘We should send his winnings to his missus.’

  ‘Double ’em or nothing …?’

  ‘Nah … We should send ’em.’

  The water party picked up their kerosene tins and began the hard climb back up the hill to Wire Gully.

  The water they carried was more than precious. It was everything. Sure, it always had a faint taste of kerosene, and sometimes men got by with only two cups a day. But with that half pint of water they had to cook their food, sponge themselves, shave, clean their teeth and – with luck – have enough left over to wash a pair of socks. It could be done, with practice. It all depended on the order in which you did it!

  Even so, as the excitement of the first week on Gallipoli gave way to acceptance and even monotony, disease began to make its presence felt. Men came down with high temperatures and fevers. Symptoms of diarrhoea and dysentery appeared at the daily sick parades, especially among the reinforcements. Nine days after they arrived Cec Hogan went down to the Casualty Clearing Hospital with a bad attack of diarrhoea. He was kept there for four days before being sent back to duty.

  The battalion Medical Officer, making his report, observed that many of the sick had defective teeth, one important way by which infection could enter the body. But the problem was very soon not confined to the reinforcements. By late September, the Adjutant was noting in the battalion diary that four officers and eighty-three other ranks had been sent to hospital, of whom twenty-four were injured, most of them accidentally. The rest – over sixty men – were sick.

  Partly it was the poor diet – that disgusting mix of tinned bully beef, an occasional bit of cheese or bacon, and hard biscuit ground into porridge or spread with a little jam. Rarely was there fresh bread, meat or vegetables.

  ‘We are not doing bad for food,’ Jim Martin wrote home a few weeks later. But he was just telling them what he thought they’d want to hear. In truth, the food was such it was no wonder a man’s strength was weakened and his constitution sapped by disease.

  Partly, too, it was vermin. The CO was strict about hygiene. No food or liquid was to be left uncovered. The latrine pits were well away from the sleeping dugouts. Soldiers on fatigue duty daily swept the trenches for every bit of litter and rubbish.

  ‘Mother would be proud of the clean-as-a-new-pin-like appearance of o
ur trenches,’ Captain Gordon Maxfield told his parents in a letter home, ‘even if she was not altogether proud of the grimy and bearded inhabitants.’

  But the best housekeeping in the world couldn’t keep fleas and lice out of trenches, and out of men’s hair, and out of men’s clothes. Every day, when he came off duty, the first thing Jim did was have an ‘insect hunt’: going through his clothing, piece by piece, picking out lice and fleas. It was why men grabbed any chance for a swim in the sea, whatever the risks.

  The most rigorous sanitary precautions couldn’t keep away rats either. It didn’t matter if every scrap of food was covered. There was much else for them to eat in the bloated and decaying corpses that lay unburied on no-man’s-land between the trenches. Turk and Anzac alike.

  Even the buried dead were not left undisturbed. Every so often, diggers mining underground broke into an unmarked grave. The rotting corpse, crawling with maggots, provided another feast for the vermin and flies which had grown fat in the hot autumn weather from the dead, the dunnies, and the food men tried to get into their mouths.

  Not surprising that one in twenty of the battalion’s strength were sick, after only three weeks. The figure would rise to nearly eight in every twenty by the time they left Gallipoli in December.

  For the time being, though, these things didn’t seem to greatly affect young Jim Martin. The soldier boy still had his strength. He still had his mates. He was still doing what he wanted. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he wrote home on 4 October, ‘as I am doing splendid over here.’

  That day, the troops received a special treat, courtesy of Lady Ferguson, the Governor-General’s wife: two fancy biscuits, a half stick of chocolate and a couple of sardines each. Life was full. If anything, Jim was becoming a little bored with the long periods of inactivity on the front. Whole days went by when the Adjutant noted in the battalion diary, ‘Nothing of importance happened.’