The Other Anzacs (10 page)

Gordon Carter couldn’t understand it. Somehow he had survived Gallipoli. A bullet had passed through the back of his uniform, and shrapnel had torn another hole in his sleeve. He thought himself lucky. In a letter to his parents on 30 April, he could find no explanation that he was alive ‘except the mercies of providence’. He and his troops were now resting after four days and three nights of incessant pressure, practically no sleep and very little food. ‘The strain is the worst for we were absolutely fighting for our lives, ’ he wrote. He had come ashore on the day of the landing at 7 a.m, three hours after the first troops captured the beaches. He had landed under no enemy fire, but had been called on to reinforce the line a few minutes afterwards.

I never hope to have to go through such a fire as we were subjected to all day. The worst of it was coming direct from the flank—enfilading us. The shellfire was the worst but their machine guns did a lot. I was thoroughly scared and wondered how on earth any one was to go through a campaign at this rate for I had no idea as to whether the conditions were normal for war or not.
¹

In a letter on 5 May, Gordon thought the situation in the trenches a bit milder, ‘but nevertheless the war game is not what it’s cracked up to be. It’s pretty nasty to hear of a lot of one’s friends getting knocked.’ His parents could not have been reassured by his letter. Before long he would be the sole survivor of a group of friends who’d been photographed together a few weeks earlier.

That same day, the
Sicilia
sailed into Malta before dawn, disembarking the wounded after daylight. The condition of most of the troops had improved on the voyage. But Kath King was appalled when she heard about the squalor endured by the 850 wounded on the troopship
Clan McGillivray
. Just two doctors and thirty orderlies ‘who didn’t know much’ attended the patients. ‘They say the men were never washed and some didn’t even have their wounds dressed, ’ Kath wrote in her diary, adding that by comparison the
Sicilia
’s patients must have felt they were in heaven. She thought the situation was completely unsatisfactory ‘when Australia is paying so much for hospitals and everyone is helping such a lot’. The Maltese authorities were ‘delighted at the way our patients were landed and congratulated the OC [Officer Commanding]’. Kath had no doubt what this meant: ‘I certainly think there should be women on every ship.’
²

Back in Cairo, Elsie Cook had no word about how Syd was faring at Gallipoli, but the huge casualties gave her reason to worry as she went about her duties. On 29 April, as hundreds of wounded Australians headed for Alexandria, she was one of eight sisters from No. 2 Australian General Hospital detailed for duty in the new British military hospitals in the port. ‘Feeling anxious about Syd, can hear nothing, ’ she wrote in her diary.
³

At Alexandria, an officer met Elsie and her colleagues and drove them to the Beau Rivage Hotel, where, after dinner, she met a colleague from Sydney, Sister Nellie Morrice, whose pet dog, Tip, brought some sense of normality. Elsie started work the next morning at the British 17th General Hospital, a former boys’ college, just as word came that the ambulances were on their way ‘and my first experience with wounded began’. Within minutes her wards were full of badly injured men.

In this blur of activity, reality hit. One of the wounded had news of Syd. ‘My first patient was a 2nd Battalion boy who told me that Syd had been wounded and was in Alexandria—shot through thigh.’
⁴
But the soldier had no information about where Syd was, or his condition. Elsie didn’t have time to dwell on the shock, for she was ‘frightfully busy, getting off their bandages and dirty blood stained clothes, washing them—the wounds to be dressed, some had not been touched for days’. The ‘poor old things’ were simply starving. ‘Then we were busy at dressings ’til night. When I eventually got back to the hotel, tried to ring up to find Syd, but without success.’ At 11:30 p.m. Elsie was called out of bed to return to the hospital because another batch of wounded had arrived. Thoughts of Syd again had to be put aside.

The wards were in chaos, littered with ‘boots, packs, bandages [and] blood stained tunics’. The men were miserable and dirty and had not slept. There were ‘shocking cases’ among them, and the operating theatre was going all night. Elsie finished duty at 2 a.m. She noted next day that they were terribly short-staffed in the hospital. ‘We have got 700 badly wounded men and six sisters and matron!’
⁵
Tents were erected in the grounds to provide extra beds. The nurses worked non-stop, dressing wounds from early morning until late at night. There was no time amid the frenzy to search for Syd. She had to trust that he was alive.

Elsie feared Syd had been sent to Cairo, but a wire came confirming that he was in Alexandria, at the Deaconesses Hospital. With great relief, she made up her mind ‘to go to him when I got finished, even if it was 2 a.m’.
⁶
She reached the hospital at 10 p.m. and surprised Syd by switching on the light. ‘Poor old thing, it seems so queer to see him lying there wounded, a patient, in hospital attire.’ Elsie could not stay long, but Syd was delighted to learn that she was working in Alexandria.

After the failure of the first Allied attempt to capture Krithia and Achi Baba on 28 April, a second attempt was made on 6 May. The forces for the renewed attack had been boosted by two Anzac brigades and now totalled 25, 000 men. Nevertheless, there was an ammunition shortage, and the Turks had also been reinforced. Gains from the attack were negligible. Yet another attack on 8 May resulted in a further loss of 6000 men for the gain of just a kilometre, and Achi Baba remained in Turkish hands. The net result was more feverish work to evacuate the wounded from Gallipoli to Lemnos and then to Egypt.

Arriving in Alexandria, the wounded often went straight to the operating theatre ‘just as they arrived, dirt, blood, boots and clothes’, Elsie Cook noted. ‘Pathetic old things they do look coming in—crushed, crumpled dirty uniforms, wearing a ticket with the nature and severity of their wound, pinned or tied on to the front of them, smelling strongly of “Gallipoli” as the other boys say—and how happy and contented they look when they get bathed and nice clean pyjamas on and get into a comfortable bed with sheets on. They haven’t slept between sheets or in a bed for months.’
⁷

Elsie was responsible for several wards, looking after about 200 patients. She was ‘simply running all day, dressing, washing and feeding them and yet the awful feeling that they were not getting the right attention—simply impossible’. By the second night the death rate was high. The lack of sisters meant the surgeons had to operate without assistance. Working from 4:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. daily, Elsie had no time to see Syd. Nevertheless, he was soon well enough to visit her at work, tottering along with the aid of a walking stick and ‘wearing a very battered cap’.

Elsie was thrilled when Syd came to see her at the Beau Rivage Hotel. ‘We had dinner in the summer house—Syd the sole man with ever so many Sisters. He had to be in by 10 p.m. I felt amused to think of Syd in hospital clutches and feeling the pinch of hospital discipline and rules re “time off ”—shall appreciate my feelings of past days now.’
⁸
Within days, Syd was discharged from hospital and allowed to convalesce with Elsie at the Beau Rivage for a week. ‘Wound healed, but he still limps a good deal and can’t run as quickly as I can yet, ’ she noted playfully.
⁹

Meanwhile, at the hospital disorder reigned, the situation reminding Elsie ‘more of what a clearing hospital or dressing station at the Front must be like’. Her goal was to get the wards and patients into something approaching a normal hospital. ‘Only time to do their dressings and give them food. Except for the very ill ones, no one has been washed or their bed made, unless they could wash themselves since they arrived.’
¹⁰
To ease the congestion it was decided to send some patients to England, and ‘a great stir’ ensued to find those who would sail on the first hospital ship.

On 9 May Kath King was on the
Sicilia
as it steamed out of Mudros harbour at Lemnos for the Dardanelles to take on more casualties. Moored off Cape Helles, Kath soon had a ward with 112 patients, and could hear battle raging all day. Shells were bursting around the ships. A ‘no lights’ order was issued, and Kath sensed danger ahead. When she next opened her diary, she noted that her ‘diagnosis [was] correct’. Around 1 a.m. on 13 May a Turkish torpedo boat eluded two British destroyers and fired three torpedoes, striking the old battleship HMS
Goliath
. The ship capsized almost immediately, taking 570 of the 700 crew to their deaths. The tragedy was harrowing for Kath: ‘The
Goliath
was only a few hundred yards from us and the screams could be heard quite distinctly as the poor men were being carried down stream.’
¹¹
She and her fellow sisters were being exposed to experiences far more ghastly than they could have imagined or their training prepared them for. Daisy Richmond, on the
Guildford Castle
, looked after some of the luckier
Goliath
survivors, who were suffering from shock and the effects of immersion. In their distress, men had been dragging one another under, they told her. Gallipoli was already a nightmare, and the nurses on the ships knew it.

Soldiers began showing a delayed reaction to the shock and trauma. When Daisy reached Alexandria, she went out in a party of officers and nurses. She didn’t like what she saw. ‘All the cafes are filled with our men and New Zealanders, many of them drunk.’
¹²
Alcohol numbed the senses.

Back at the Dardanelles, there was no let-up in the pressure to evacuate the wounded. But getting them off the beach did not end the danger they faced. Some men died when Turk shells hit barges taking them out to the ships. One ship, the
Ajax
, crowded with wounded Indian troops, was shelled. Less than a kilometre away, Kath King watched from the
Sicilia
. ‘Hear quite a number were wounded but they managed to quell the fire and get away.’
¹³
Along with the Turkish fire, German aircraft flying overhead added to Kath’s sense of danger. The
Sicilia
shifted anchor to a slightly safer position. ‘We are now allowed to have lights again, which is a blessing, ’ Kath wrote.
¹⁴

On 18 May, fifty more patients came aboard. Her friend Gordon Carter had also been injured, but he was not among those taken to the
Sicilia
. Gordon, who had shell shock, was transported to hospital on Lemnos. His injury was not serious, but he was out of action for the next eleven days.

Three days later, the
Sicilia
anchored off Anzac Cove and near Australian troops. ‘Another busy day but it is just great being with our own again, ’ Kath noted.
¹⁵
‘The Turks attacked them last night; they had a lot of reinforcements but our men gained two trenches only and gave them a bad time at the point of the bayonet.’ Enemy wounded were taken aboard. ‘I have two wounded Turks in my ward. They are very dirty and smelly.’ The
Sicilia
was ordered to sail immediately for Lemnos when a submarine was sighted. German submarines were now a constant danger. At Mudros, the ship offloaded thirty-four patients in eight minutes and took more on board. ‘It is rumoured there are five German submarines knocking around, ’ Kath wrote, adding that she had stayed on duty until after 11 p.m. ‘going like lightning’.
¹⁶
The ship sailed for Alexandria the next day, 24 May, where Kath spent more than five hours unloading her 142 patients.