The Other Anzacs (23 page)

In the mayhem, Vic Nicholson and a mate, George Cook, knew immediately from their rural upbringing that the panicked horses and mules could cause havoc if they got among people. They picked up a couple of rifles and prepared ‘to shoot any horse or mule that came into sight’. They also saw the periscope of the sub, almost a metre out of the water and not more than 150 metres away, and ‘were tempted to blow the lights out of his periscope’. They decided not to, wrongly thinking the sub would surface and pick up survivors.
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The nurses assembled at their stations, eighteen on each side of the ship, with Lieutenant Colonel Donald McGavin and three officers in charge. Poppy Popplewell recalled that everyone was calm, ‘and although men and girls alike were as white as sheets, no one cried out or spoke even, except to give orders’.
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The boat drills they had practised during the voyage paid off, but the task was made hazardous by the sharp list to port, reducing the number of boats that could be lowered from the starboard side. An open iron door on the mule deck below, which projected just underneath the davits, compounded the difficulty.

On the port side of the deck, the nurses were going about things quietly. Jeannie Sinclair later recalled that there was no noise—not even a single scream—as they prepared to get into the lifeboats. ‘I cannot think how it was that we were so cool and collected.’
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About ten of the sisters stationed on the port side had clambered into the first forward boat and were being lowered into the water when it was realised that the ropes could not be unhooked. The boat dropped astern, broadside.

The remaining nurses on port stations swarmed down a rope to reach the second boat which, still attached by ropes, appeared to be resting on the water, hanging far out from the ship’s side. It was lowered with the first boat directly underneath. As it hung about two metres above the water, the officer in charge immediately stopped lowering it, but when the ship rose by the stern it swung forward. The ropes broke under the strain and fell heavily on the first boat and its shrieking occupants, tossing nurses out, Catherine Fox among them. Marie Cameron and Hilda Hooker were severely injured. Amid the panic, Mary Gorman, a strong swimmer, jumped into the water and gave her lifejacket to her friend Catherine Fox, a non-swimmer, but they were pushed under the lifeboat and drowned. Two of the four port boats were now unseaworthy. Jeannie Sinclair was in the first boat, but it was soon full of water. ‘The men in the top boat pulled two of the nurses in and I was pulled in as well, but the boat was hopelessly overloaded, ’ she recounted.

It was a dangerous situation for the ropes had not been cut free and the
Marquette
was slowly coming over. One girl ahead of me had decided to swim for it, so I followed her example though I cannot swim much. However, one of the crew was swimming clear, and I asked him to give me a tow, which he did. It was awful going past the ship and seeing a large, gaping hole, and all the mules there, and wondering if the vessel would fall on top of us and I would be killed. At last we got past her propeller, to which some men were clinging. Ultimately, we cleared the ship altogether.
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Fanny Abbott and Poppy Popplewell were also fortunate. Fanny had been bathing when the torpedo struck and had only a pair of slippers on her feet. She was in the boat that crashed on top of her colleagues and immediately ‘sprang into the water . . . I always thought I could not swim but somehow or other I got away from the ship, although the suction of the ship was so great I thought the propeller would hit me. The great big thing seemed to lift right out of the water and go straight down.’
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She surfaced and grabbed a life belt floating nearby before finally grabbing hold of a raft. Poppy, ‘floundering in the sea’, feared that the listing
Marquette
would roll on top of her. But ‘an absolute miracle happened’. In what seemed barely a second, a wave carried her and those nearby past the end of the stricken ship.

But not all the women on the port side had been put into lifeboats. One survivor, believed to be Mabel Wright, later recounted that she owed her life to the
Marquette’s
chief officer, who picked her up and put her in a boat. She then described the fate of Marion Brown and Isabel Clark, who ‘got a few steps down the gangway and jumped into the sea’. They were not seen again. Many of the men also jumped. Captain Isaacs later wrote that the scene was awful. ‘Men jumping from great heights, some striking the side with sickening thuds, others, with arms and legs stretched out, landing on the propeller and being cut to pieces, whilst others reached the water safely.’
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Before long the port deck was at water level; then it slid under water.

On the starboard side, when a lifeboat was lowered to the promenade deck level, New Zealand Medical Corps Captain J.L. Frazerhurst found it contained soldiers who thought the sisters had already gone. He ordered them out of the lifeboat. Eighteen nurses clambered over the deck rail and got in. Because the boat was lower at the bow than the stern, Captain Frazerhurst ordered a soldier to release the stern rope. The stern end of the boat dropped suddenly, throwing it into an almost perpendicular position. Five sisters fell into the sea. Captain Frazerhurst helped release the bow end of the boat, jammed against an open door on the mule deck. The door stove in the side of the lifeboat.

Mary Beswick was one of the nurses still in the boat, which was finally lowered into the water. They pushed off from the ship, but because of the hole it quickly began to fill. They began baling, Mary using her shoes while another nurse used a man’s cap. Someone was using a small bowl, but they could not keep the boat clear of water. Four of the sisters thrown into the water clambered into other boats or grabbed onto rafts that troops had thrown overboard. The fifth nurse picked up, Margaret Rogers, was close to death.

Fanny Abbott had seen Lorna Rattray on board after the torpedo hit. Clearly terrified, Lorna had managed to put on just one sleeve of her dress as she struggled to fasten her life belt while coming up the stairs to the deck. She managed to get off the ship. ‘The poor girl was very frightened and absolutely demented before she was five minutes in the water, ’ Fanny remembered.
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As the lifeboat filled with water and rolled from side to side, Mary Beswick soon realised she had to swim for it. ‘This I did, and swam for a raft on which were perched about 12 men. They willingly gave me a corner.’
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The boat that she left capsized. When righted, it held just six nurses—Edith Wilkin, Nona Hildyard, Violet McCosh-Smith, Mary Rae, Bessie Young and Mary Christmas. Two of these women would not survive. Another nurse, Emily Hodges, would later recall falling off the side of the
Marquette
as it was sinking, and being amazed that she was still alive when she came to the surface.

After helping a patient from the ship’s hospital into a life belt, Private William Tennant, of Christchurch, slid down the sharply listing deck and into the water. He swam away as quickly as he could, but he thought he was going too slowly.

The steamer continued to list over and the mast was right above me and it looked as if it was going to ‘clout’ me, but swim as I would I couldn’t get out of its way when suddenly the boilers burst, and everything came flying round about, but nothing struck me except the soot, which got me on the back of the head and neck.
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People, wreckage, rafts and boats littered the sea. Everyone who could looked towards the sinking vessel. As they watched, the stern rose about thirty metres into the air and pitched forward and down. The
Marquette
slid through the grey water. William Tennant thought it was ‘truly a magnificent sight’. There was a dreadful, unforgettable sound as hundreds of terrified mules squealed and wagons, heavy machinery and cargo rolled around, crashing and grinding, inside the ship. To Captain Isaacs, it seemed ‘as if the engines had slipped out and were tearing their own way down the bow’.
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As the
Marquette
made her final plunge in a cloud of smoke and steam, sliding down almost perpendicularly, it was accompanied by a strange keening moan from the survivors. It rose from ‘an aloneness feeling’, said one of the men, remembering it long afterwards.
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And they were alone, adrift with land twenty-five kilometres away to the west and nearly sixty kilometres to the east, at the mercy of the sea.

15
‘WE THOUGHT THEY
WOULD LET US DIE!’

From the moment the torpedo struck to when the
Marquette
sank, only eight to fifteen minutes passed, according to the survivors. Loose and buoyant fittings shot to the surface, striking and damaging some of the lifeboats that had floated free. However, two of these boats were serviceable, and survivors clambered into them. Several nurses were pulled aboard.
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People scrambled or were helped onto many of the
Marquette
’s thirty-six rafts, as well as several metre-square copper tanks. Medical Corps Staff Sergeant Len Wilson recalled that ‘We had four on our raft, one with a broken arm and the other three fairly solid chaps.’
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They were soon thirty centimetres under water.

Within a short time people began to be pulled away by the current or to tire in the cold water. Many drowned because of their shock and injuries, or because they simply could not hang on to whatever they were using for flotation. They slipped from the sides of boats or rafts and disappeared. Some gave up their places aboard to others who were in greater difficulty.
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Survival became a question of endurance. But amid the shock of the tragedy there was a surprising calmness among some of the survivors, one of whom would later remark, ‘It might really have been a bathing party except that we had our clothes on.’
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When Captain Findlay drifted past some nurses on a raft, he hailed one and asked how she felt. ‘She laughed and replied in a very cheery manner, “I’m all right, how are you?”’
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Someone called, ‘Shark!’ The panic abated when another survivor shouted back that there were no sharks in the Aegean, and a sister declared that it was not a fin but the ear of a mule—one of several that had been seen swimming away from the ship. One mule even had a nurse clinging to its neck. Sucked under when the ship went down, she caught hold of the animal and rose with it to the surface.
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The many mules and horses swimming about were ‘one of the biggest dangers’, Len Wilson said. A mule kicked Matron Marie Cameron in the water, adding to the injuries she had already suffered.
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She was pulled into a lifeboat and collapsed.

When the ship disappeared, Chief Officer H.L. Saunders was in the water nearby, somehow not sucked under in the final plunge. He heard a cry and looked around to see a nurse about twenty metres away. He swam towards her, adjusted her life belt and fetched her a lifebuoy that was floating nearby. He then looked around and saw a boat with one soldier standing up in it, about 100 metres away.

I told the nurse that I would go and fetch the boat to her. She asked me not to leave her, but I took no notice of this and swam to the boat. On reaching the boat I saw a soldier holding on to the lifeline, and with the assistance of the soldier in the boat helped him in. He immediately collapsed in the bottom. I then scrambled in myself and got the other soldier to take an oar. We went back to the nurse I had just left and got her on board safely. About fifty yards away I saw a great quantity of wreckage, with more nurses and a number of soldiers clinging to it, and calling out, ‘Here we are, Chief, this way, there are nurses among us.’ I proceeded towards them, and as I approached some of the soldiers left the wreckage and swam towards the boat. I kept calling to them, ‘Not yet, not yet, the nurses first.’ I then noticed two nurses more or less detached from the rest, whom I safely got on board. I think the matron was one of these. Hearing a voice calling out at the side of the boat, I looked over and saw the adjutant supporting another nurse, whom we took on board.
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Saunders pulled another two nurses on board, making six in all along with twenty-three men, in a boat that was about one-third full of water. The Court of Inquiry into the disaster would later report there was unanimous praise of the conduct of the nursing sisters.

From the first moment when they fell in quietly at their stations, whether clinging to wreckage, sitting in a water-logged boat or on a raft, they exhibited a calmness and cheerfulness wonderful to see. Survivors say that many men on the point of giving in to exhaustion and letting go their hold were encouraged and cheered to fresh efforts by these brave women, who called out such things as ‘Come on boys; are we downhearted?’ and in other ways infused new courage and endurance into them.
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