The Other Anzacs (7 page)

Alice was concerned that the men were ‘getting terribly out of hand . . . Last night there was a row at Heliopolis and amongst other things the boys broke into the big Hotel across the way and stole all the ice cream and pastry they had prepared for Sunday’s dinner—after all one can’t blame them, they know they are going away and I suppose at least 30 per cent will never return.’
¹²

In Australia, the poet C.J. Dennis, author of
The Sentimental Bloke
, heard of the riot. He wrote a poem called ‘The Battle of the Wazzir’, which tells how ‘Bill from up the Billabong, ’oo’s dearest love wus cow’ fell to Eastern sin and his mates decided ‘to clean the Wazzir out’. Within only three weeks the troubles in Cairo would seem like child’s play.

With the fires in the Wazzir doused, the fractious mood subsided as the troops prepared to leave for Gallipoli. Walking to the camp with three other sisters, Elsie Cook found the scene abuzz. All the tents were down and the troops packing up and burning rubbish. They had tea and watched the 1st Battalion march away along with half of the 2nd Battalion as the band played the national anthem. After dinner, they sat for a long time talking over coffee. Elsie looked around the mess at the familiar faces and ‘wondered how many would soon be missing from a future reunion’. After saying her farewells, she walked with Syd to the hill overlooking Mena to take a last look at the camp with its huge fires. They said goodbye at Mena.

Feeling miserable, Elsie sat with friends in her room and heard the 2nd Battalion marching past. They rushed out, hailed a taxi and went down the road, stopping ahead of the troops and waiting for them to pass by. Colonel George Braund, riding ahead, rode up and asked them to move. ‘But on seeing who we were, the frown melted to smiles and he stayed with us. Meanwhile, I was staring eagerly into the faces passing looking for Syd, when he suddenly saw me and dashed out, gave me a parting hug and kiss and was gone again, so surprised to see me there. I feel so glad to have said goodbye actually en route.’
¹³
All next day could be heard the marching of departing soldiers. Things became ‘horribly lonely and dull’. Syd wrote from Alexandria that he was on board a troop transport.

With convoys of men leaving daily, those still in Cairo sought out the sisters’ company. After Frank Smith sailed, a Captain ‘X’ asked Alice Ross King to meet him on the hospital’s flat roof. They met ‘and flirted a little . . . He is a clever man and has well learnt the gentle art. But my real thoughts are still with dear old F.S. Still no word from him yet.’
¹⁴
Alice decided they would be ‘playmates’, but she was ‘not quite sure if I like the man’. Captain X and Alice were creative in arranging their meetings. ‘A note from X under the carpet this a.m. We have a little post office. It’s the 3rd step under the carpet on the stairs. It’s a great way of communication.’
¹⁵
Nonetheless, Alice confided to her journal that he was ‘going a little bit too fast’ in his amorous pursuit of her.

In Cairo, 25 April was a hot, windy and dusty day. It was the season when the oppressive
khamsin
blew. After dinner Elsie and another six sisters rode horses across the desert to the 4000-year-old New Tomb, which had just been discovered and opened up. She enjoyed the ride, under a brilliant moonlit sky. On their return, they sat in the garden and drank iced lemonade. She wrote a letter to Syd, now at a location unknown to her. Elsie went to sleep that night, unaware of the significance of the day.

That same day, Alice Ross King and six of her colleagues accepted an invitation from some 2nd Light Horse officers to drive the thirty kilometres from Heliopolis to Heliwan for tea in the Palace Hotel. She was introduced to a soldier she found interesting. A Boer War veteran, he had been a pearl-shell diver in Queensland. ‘He hung on to me rather—is going to take me out riding. Brought us into town and to the amusement of others asked me to go to the picture show in front of them all.’
¹⁶

The sisters’ fun was short-lived. The next day, 26 April, Alice wrote that nothing much was happening. There was no mail for her, except a copy of the Melbourne
Argus
. She met Captain X on the rooftop. ‘Kissed him but did not mean to do it. Won’t let him do it again.’ And then all leave was cancelled. Alice did not know it, but in the past forty-eight hours, the world that she, Elsie Cook and Kath King knew had changed dramatically. Just a few hundred kilometres away, the full fury of war had been unleashed.

5
GALLIPOLI

The day that was to resonate down the decades in Australia and New Zealand, was one Kath King never forgot. From the vantage point of the evacuation hospital ship
Sicilia
, she witnessed the battle for Gallipoli. In front of her, just half a mile away, advancing men were shot down as they ran from cover to cover. ‘Our men, ’ as she put it. Dead and wounded strewed the beach. The unimaginable was happening. The terrain, with its steep cliffs, narrow beaches, ravines and gullies, was as much the enemy as the Turks it hid. No one had dared think this would be the outcome when the Australian and New Zealand troops had set out for the Dardanelles.

The
Sicilia
had sailed from Alexandria on 12 April for the Greek island of Lemnos, in the eastern Aegean, arriving at the port of Mudros three days later. Hundreds of British and French ships, old and modern, had gathered in the harbour for war. From the
Sicilia’s
deck, Kath watched crowds of townspeople line the port. Overhead, Allied reconnaissance seaplanes droned incessantly. The tents of the French gleamed white on the hillside below ancient windmills, and across the water floated the sound of trumpets calling the 18, 000 French Territorials and Senegalese to battle practice. Troopships continued to arrive. As each ship passed the anchored British troopship
Ionian
, the men on board would shout a soon familiar cry: ‘Are we downhearted?’ The response from the
Ionian
was instantaneous, a mighty ‘NO-O-O’.

The planned assault called for 75, 000 troops, including the 30, 638 Australians and New Zealanders who now comprised the newly named Anzac Corps under the command of British General Birdwood. The highest ranking Australian officer, General Bridges, and his New Zealand counterpart, General Sir Alexander Godley, were each in command of a division of troops under Birdwood. The overall attack was under the command of another British general, Sir Ian Hamilton. From the ships in Mudros harbour, the troops went ashore daily for drills, and Kath King noted that Australians seemed to be everywhere. Kath and her colleagues accepted an invitation to tea on the battleship
Agamemnon
, and were shown the sailors’ quarters and numerous shell holes. She returned to the
Sicilia
‘just in time for dinner to find Gordon had been to see me but left a letter’.

On the eve of the assault, 24 April, Kath looked out of her porthole at 7 a.m. to find ships sailing away to the Dardanelles. ‘It is a wonderful sight, shall never forget it.’ One of the ships she saw was the troopship
Minnewaska
; unknown to her, Gordon Carter was on board. The harbour was soon almost deserted. ‘We have orders to sail 7 a.m. tomorrow, ’ Kath noted. Casting a retrospective eye over the officers from the previous evening, she judged ‘Major Willcox the N.M.O.B. [nicest man on board].’ Among the officers she talked to was George Mackay, Third Engineer on the troopship
Ionian
, who would soon strike up an enduring relationship with her colleague Elsie Eglinton.

The date of the landing was fixed for Sunday, 25 April, and the part of the attack allotted to the Anzacs was at Gaba Tepe, on the left flank of the landing operations. The landing at Cape Helles, at the entrance to the Dardanelles, was to be carried out by British troops, while French troops were to carry out a mock attack to distract the enemy at Kum Kale, on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles. In the attack at Gaba Tepe, the 3rd Infantry Brigade was first ashore at 4:30 a.m. But the unpredictable sea currents had carried the men three kilometres north of the planned landing beach. Instead, they found themselves at the foot of a 100-metre-high cliff rising straight up from the beach, in what would become known as Anzac Cove. An hour later, the 2nd Brigade began its shore assault. The 1st Brigade followed at 7:30 a.m., and the four battalions of the New Zealand Brigade landed between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. The war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett would later describe the landing.

The Australians rose to the occasion. They did not wait for orders, or for the boats to reach the beach, but sprang into the sea, formed a sort of rough line, and rushed at the enemy’s trenches. Their magazines were not charged, so they just went in with the cold steel, and it was over in a minute for the Turks in the first trench had been either bayoneted or had run away, and the Maxim guns were captured.
¹

For Lieutenant Gordon Carter, 25 April was his first day in action and ‘a day never to be forgotten’. He described how the destroyers came alongside the troopships at 6 a.m. ‘We had about 400 men in the destroyers and came close in, then discharged into boats and pulled ashore. I was thoroughly scared at first, but managed to rally the men. The shrapnel was very bad.’
²
Kath King also woke on the
Sicilia
at 6 a.m. on 25 April, just in time to see the hospital ship
Gascon
sailing towards the Dardanelles. It was, she noted, ‘a most glorious Sunday’. An hour later the
Sicilia
sailed in a convoy of twenty-three ships on a perfectly clear day, the water as smooth as glass. ‘From 8 a.m. we could hear the sound of distant heavy gunfire; as we approached the scene of the conflict the noise grew much more intense and more frequent and long before we could see the ships in action we knew that a very heavy bombardment was in progress.’
³

The
Sicilia
anchored off the island of Tenedos, close to the entrance to the Dardanelles. Kath watched shell after shell burst. Observation planes flew low as they passed to and from their scouting work. The ship’s armoured French transport was steadily shelling enemy earthworks as it and other ships carrying French troops steamed towards the shore. Under cover of darkness, the troops landed. Soon after, Kath King began tending men who had been wounded in minesweeping operations. As she and the other nurses worked into the night, the
Sicilia
entered the firing line off Cape Helles. Kath now saw the full horror of war for the first time.

Steadily throughout the warships kept up a heavy fire but it was impossible to see how things were going although one knew the fighting was terrific, we quickly got to work for a fleet sweeper was alongside as soon as we anchored with many wounded and dead from the beach. The former we dealt with at once.

At 1:30 a.m. received forty-six wounded, mostly badly. Dreadful wounds. And nearly all were soaking wet, their clothes sticking into their wounds. It was just dreadful. We got them undressed, their wounds attended to, made them warm and gave them hot drinks, then all they wanted was sleep.
⁴

Daisy Richmond, on the hospital ship
Guildford Castle
, arrived at the Dardanelles on the morning of the 26th as British, French and Russian battleships bombarded Turkish forts. The first casualties—eighteen men— arrived alongside in a barge at 2 p.m. Six hours later,
HMS Amethyst
came alongside with another 150 wounded. The workload was heavy, and shells and shrapnel from Turkish positions fell close to the hospital ship. In later years, Daisy would recall, ‘It was terrible. Badly wounded men kept crawling in from the barges. At times we worked for thirty-six hours without stopping.’
⁵