Quinn's Post: Anzac, Gallipoli

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Quinn's Post TEXT PAGES

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Quinn’s Post, Anzac, Gallipoli

Peter Stanley


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First published in 2005 Copyright © Peter Stanley 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that adminsters it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Stanley, Peter, 1956- . Quinn’s Post. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 1 74114 332 2. 1. World War, 1914–1918 - Campaigns - Turkey - Gallipoli Peninsula. I. Title. 940.426 Set in 12/14 pt Granjon by Midland Typesetters, Victoria Printed by CMO Image Printing Enterprise, Singapore 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


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Acknowledgments s ever, I have called upon the support of many individuals and institutions in the course of researching and writing this book. Two principal acknowledgements must be made. Firstly to Major General Steve Gower, AO, Director of the Australian War Memorial and to Ms Helen Withnell, Assistant Director, Public Programs, my senior colleagues, whose support for military history in general and this project in particular has enabled me to make the progress I have in the time available. Their support allowed me to undertake archival research in Britain, New Zealand and Turkey. I am grateful to colleagues throughout the Memorial but particularly my colleagues in the Military History Section for their advice, support and forbearance, and especially Mr Eric Carpenter for research assistance, Ms Joanne Smedley for assistance with photographs, Ms Betty Snowden for assistance with works of art, and almost everybody in the Research Centre at one time or another. Mr Roger Lee and the staff of the Army History Unit, particularly Ms Emma Robertson, provided the wherewithal through the Australian Army’s Military History Research Grants Scheme to enable me to undertake research in Queensland. I am also grateful to the following people in the following places: In the Australian Capital Territory: Ms Judy Becker and Ms Antoinette Buchanan, (ACT Heritage Library) and members of the ACT Local Studies Network; Mr Mike Fogarty; Mr Ian Flint; Ms Jenny Horsfield and Ms Rebecca Lamb and other Minders of the Tuggeranong Homestead; Mr Keith Mitchell for his maps; Mr Art O’Brien; Mr Doug Watkins of Environment Australia; Ms Jane Williams for research; and to His Excellency M. Tansu Okandan Ambassador of Turkey and Mr Kadri Caner for assistance with field work on Gallipoli. In New South Wales: Mr Bob Black of Milton, Prof. Bruce Scates of the University of New South Wales, who supported the project when it was merely an idea; Mr Andrew Blundell and members of the Queanbeyan Local Studies Network; WO1 Steve Winner of the Geomatic Engineering Wing of the School of Military Engineering and the staff of the Mitchell Library and particularly Mr Arthur Easton. In Queensland: Mr Nathan Brotherton, Banana Shire Library, Biloela; Mr David Blacket, St Georges; Ms Kim Cundell, Charters

A

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Towers & Dalrymple Archives Group, Charters Towers; Ms Joan Adavell and Ms Colleen Moss, Excelsior Library, Charters Towers; Mr Shaun Crawford, Samford; Ms Sue Mills and Ms Pat Fish, Gold Coast City Council Library Services, Local Studies Library, Southport; Mrs Judith Hanna, Goondiwindi, Mrs Margaret Hickey, Samford Historical Society; Mr Peter Loft, Hervey Bay; Mr Alec Logan, Kumbia; Mr Edward Logan, Forest Hill; Mr John Logan, Toowong, Miss Pat Logan, Goondiwindi; Mr Graham McKerrow, Winton; Mr John Meyers, Maryborough (and his associates Mr Bryn Dolan and Pat Gariepy); Mr Daniel McDonald, Mudgeeraba Library, Mr Simon Farley, Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland; staff of the Townsville City Library; Ms Margaret Watson, Charters Towers; Ms Sally Harper and Mr Dylan Schiess, Zara Clark Museum, Charters Towers. In South Australia: Mr Sven Kuusk of the Army Museum of South Australia, and the staff of the Somerville Room at the State Library of South Australia. In Tasmania: Ms Madeleine Shuey. In Victoria: Mr Mark Derham, QC, Ms Penelope Alexander, Ms Katherine Derham Moore, for permission to consult the papers of their grandfather, Major General Brudenell White; and the staff of the La Trobe Library. In Western Australia: Ms Leslie Baker, Hillarys; Mr Laurie Harvey of Perth Digi Film Productions; Ms Jenny Kohlen, The West Australian newspaper, Mr Wes Olsen, for research in Western Australian archives, Mr Mick Ryan, Mrs Ailsa Wilson, Albany; Mr Adrian Glamorgan, Perth. In India: Squadron Leader Rana Chhina of the United Services Institution of India, New Delhi, and the staff of the institution’s library. In New Zealand: Mr Sean McCawley and his colleagues, Alexander Turnbull Library; Ms Christine Clement, Te Puke; the Defence Force Historian, Mr John Crawford, and the library staff at New Zealand Defence Force Headquarters; Mr Paul Frawley and his colleagues, Archives New Zealand, Wellington; Director Major Chas Charlton, Curator Mr Windsor Jones, Ms Faith Goodley and especially Archivist Ms Dolores Ho, Queen Elizabeth II Army Memorial Museum, Waiouru; Dr Ian McGibbon; Mr Gareth Winters of the Wairarapa Archives, the staff of the Masterton Public Library; Mrs Shirley Judd and volunteers at the Wairarapa Branch of the New iv


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Zealand Society of Genealogists, Masterton; the reference staff of the Wellington City Library; Ms Jennifer Twist, National Museum of New Zealand; Mr Pat White, Masterton. In Turkey: Mr Kenan Çelik, AO; Barbaros Demirci of the Middle East Technical University, Güven Eken of BirdLife International and many individuals in Çannakale and on Gallipoli. In the United Kingdom: Mr Gordon Cruickshank; Mr Richard Davies and the staff of the Special Collections, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; Ms Sabina Ebbols, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives; Mr Jeremy Greenwood, British Trust for Ornithology; Mr Matt Little, Royal Marines Museum, Eastney; Ms Edith Phillips, National War Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; Dr Chris Pugsley, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, who provided inspiration, guidance and vital support; Mr Nigel Steel and staff of the Imperial War Museum; Staff of the National Archives; Staff of the National Library of Scotland. At Allen & Unwin I am grateful to Mr Ian Bowring for his support for another book, and to his colleagues Ms Emma Singer, Ms Ruth Williams and especially Ms Alexandra Nahlous for producing it with both efficiency and good grace. I am honoured by Professor Geoffrey Blainey’s generous Foreword. Finally, my loving thanks to Claire, who has again encouraged this among other enthusiasms.

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Foreword uinn’s Post was on the front-line at Gallipoli in 1915 and, in the words of one general, ‘our most dangerous and difficult post’. Originally a scrubby hill, its scrub was soon blown away by the enemy’s explosives, or uprooted by the soldiers’ digging and burrowing. Soldiers too were blown away. Quinn’s at times was almost surrounded by dead bodies. Here the Allied and Turkish lines faced each other, not quite parallel, with a gap ten yards wide in one place and 40 yards in another. New Zealanders were the first to occupy the post, and their description lives on. In their words, the no-man’s-land separating the Turkish and Allied trenches and dugouts was ‘the width of a Wellington city street’. From the day of the landing at Anzac Cove to the day of the evacuation, eight months later, the street and its surrounds were a hub of fighting. Here prevailed a military stalemate even more rigid than that on the Western Front in France and Belgium. When I began to read this book by one of Australia’s most skilled military historians I thought it would be a fluent and perceptive version of the old, old story, already told 60 times. Moreover Peter Stanley tells the history of only one small patch of the battlefield. And yet by focusing on this patch, by dissecting a vast assemblage of records, and depicting the Anzacs’ fears and hopes, sickness and nostalgia, sounds and stench, mistakes and successes, he illuminates the war day by day in an arresting way. We read about 26-year-old Quinn who came from Charters Towers and died at his post; we observe a soldier who in one month walked nineteen times from Quinn’s to the sea just for a swim and another who was formally sentenced to death for falling asleep at his lookout; we learn how the soldiers likened Gallipoli to a piece of home—it seemed like Tasman Bluffs (NZ) or the Eyre Peninsula (SA) or other hilly spots—and we feel in the end that we have almost lived at Quinn’s Post. Along the way we see myths exposed and insights unveiled on the whole Gallipoli campaign. Here, the reader is always in the company of individuals. Perhaps this is the distinctive merit of a book which chooses one place. Thereby the individual soldiers are allowed their space to live in, and so they themselves become the war.

Q

Geoffrey Blainey Melbourne vii


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Contents

Foreword Note on style Maps Photographs Prologue Tuggeranong Homestead, 1922 Introduction ‘Key of the Anzac position’

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1 ‘The fatal power of a young enthusiasm’: the men of 1914 and the Dardanelles 2 ‘The most critical position’: the creation of Quinn’s post 3 ‘The defence of Anzac’: holding Quinn’s in May 4 ‘Some uneasiness at Quinn’s’: two attacks and a truce 5 ‘The Turks break into Quinn’s’: climax on 29 May 6 ‘Several minor operations’: the New Zealand sorties in June 7 ‘If he had had roses . . .’: the transformation of Quinn’s 8 ‘No turning and no escape’: mid-summer at Quinn’s 9 ‘Men devoted to die’: the August offensive 10 ‘Serious offensive action underground’: autumn at Anzac 11 ‘Hillsides abandoned to the enemy’: the evacuation of Anzac 12 ‘Anzac now belonged to the past’: looking back on Quinn’s Post

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‘An unbroken stillness’: Quinn’s today Epilogue Note on sources Bibliography Index

195 197 198 201 221

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1 18 34 53 72 88 101 118 132 148 166


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Note on style

ne of my minor ambitions has been to write military history without using any abbreviations. In this book only the following are used in the text: AIF (Australian Imperial Force) and DCM (Distinguished Conduct Medal). All quotations are given verbatim, without use of the pedantic [sic]. As the Bibliography shows, while Quinn’s Post, Anzac, Gallipoli is based on extensive scholarly research, it contains no footnotes or endnotes. Detailed notes are instead available on the Australian War Memorial’s website at www.awm.gov.au. In accordance with the period I have generally retained imperial measures. A pound comprised 20 shillings. It is impossible to give a modern dollar equivalent of a 1915 pound, but in 1915 an unskilled worker might have made about two pounds two shillings a week, while a doctor might have made about 500 pounds a year. These relative amounts were reflected in the army’s hierarchy, in which a lieutenant colonel in the AIF was paid one pound seventeen shillings a day and a private in his battalion five shillings a day. I have attempted to keep military technicalities to a minimum or to explain them, but it may help lay readers to know that a battalion at full strength in the armies of the British empire in 1915 comprised about 750 men organised in four ‘double companies’, each commanded by a captain or major and up to 150 men strong. A company comprised four platoons, each of about 30 men and commanded by a lieutenant. (The remaining men in each case were part of battalion or company headquarters, transport drivers, stretcher-bearers and so on.) My editor at Allen & Unwin has graciously agreed to my preferrence for ‘light horse’ as a description of the arm, in contrast to ‘Light Horse’ used as part of a unit title.

O

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Maps

Map 1 Map 2 Map 3 Map 4 Map 5 Map 6 Map 7 Map 8

Australia and New Zealand Gallipoli and the eastern Mediterranean Gallipoli Anzac Monash Valley and Quinn’s Post Machine-guns in Number 3 Sector Quinn’s Post: trenches Quinn’s Post: tunnels

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5 14 21 26 43 65 108 160


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Photographs

Quinn’s Post cemetery, October 2002 (author) Announcing the British empire’s declaration of war, Adelaide, 5 August 1914 (State Library of South Australia) AIF march in Melbourne, December 1914 (Australian War Memorial) ‘The last few minutes’ (Townsville Library Service) A New Zealander by the Virgin’s Tree, Cairo (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington) The aftermath of the riot in the Wazza (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington) Jack Dunn of Masteron (lent by Mr Pat White) Hugh Quinn as a boxer (courtesy of the Zara Clark Museum and Excelsior Library, Charters Towers) Frank, Annie and Francis Armstrong (lent by Lieutenant Colonel Iain McInnis) Men of the Machine-gun Section of the Wellington Battalion (Queen Elizabeth II Army Memorial Museum, Waiouru) Men of the 13th Battalion, 27 April 1915 (Australian War Memorial) Hamilton and Birdwood (Australian War Memorial) ‘In the trenches, Quinn’s Post’ by Ellis Silas (Australian War Memorial) Ellis Silas’s drawing of the dead after ‘Bloody Monday’ (Australian War Memorial) Front line trench at Quinn’s (Australian War Memorial) Ellis Silas’s depiction of the 15 May charge (Australian War Memorial) Burying the dead during the 24 May truce (Queen Elizabeth II Army Memorial Museum, Waiouru) Godley and Chauvel (Australian War Memorial) Bill Beech’s periscope rifle (Australian War Memorial) ‘Macquarie Street’ at Quinn’s (Australian War Memorial) Men waiting to counter-attack, 29 May (Australian War Memorial) Captured Turks, 29 May (Australian War Memorial) Hugh Quinn’s grave in Shrapnel Gully (Australian War Memorial) Godley addressing the 4th Brigade, 7 June (Australian War Memorial) xi


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No-man’s-land at Quinn’s was ‘the width of a Wellington city street’ (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington) The straggling bivouacs of Quinn’s (Australian War Memorial) Lieutenant Colonel William Malone, 1914 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington) A New Zealander on a water fatigue at Quinn’s (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington) 26th (Jacob’s) Indian Mountain Battery (Australian War Memorial) A New Zealand sniping team at work (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington) Blurry frame of Ashmead-Bartlett’s ‘Kinematograph’ film (Australian War Memorial) New Zealanders in the front line at Quinn’s (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington) Reading war news in New Zealand, 1915 (photograph courtesy of the State Library of South Australia) Major Tom Logan (lent by John Logan) Cuthbert Finlay displaying a note thrown into the trenches at Quinn’s (Australian War Memorial) From the report into Edward Fogarty and Frank Charles’s deaths (National Archives of Australia) Ellis Silas painting in London later in the war (Australian War Memorial) The terraces of Quinn’s (Australian War Memorial) Jack Dunn hearing the sentence of death pronounced on him (Australian War Memorial) A page from the Sydney Mail (ACT Heritage Library) Soldiers ‘chatting’ at Quinn’s (Australian War Memorial) Looking through the bomb netting at Quinn’s (Australian War Memorial) Two of Tom Logan’s grandchildren, standing before his portrait (author) Beatrice Logan, Tom Logan’s mother Harriot, and the children: from left to right, Jack, Rene, Meg (on Beatrice’s knee), Bob, Trix and Tom (lent by John Logan) A Garland gun (from The Story of the Seventeenth Battalion) Charles Bean and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett (Australian War Memorial) Wounded survivors of the 7 August attacks (Australian War Memorial) General Gordon Legge (Australian War Memorial) Quinn’s Post early in 1919 (Australian War Memorial) xii


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Men of the 2nd Light Horse (Australian War Memorial) Men of the 17th Battalion at Quinn’s Post (Australian War Memorial) Shrapnel Valley cemetery, July 2004 (author) Looking towards Quinn’s from Dead Man’s Ridge, July 2004 (author)

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Prologue

Tuggeranong Homestead, 1922 Around nine each weekday morning in the winter of 1922, Old Bob Cozier’s sulky left the Queanbeyan Post Office in Monaro Street. It carried sacks of letters and parcels for what was then known as the Federal Capital Territory. Suburbs today, in those days Isabella Plains, Woden and Tuggeranong, were stations and villages in the open sheep country to Queanbeyan’s south-west. Old Bob geed up his horse along the street, past the site of what would soon become Queanbeyan’s war memorial, and up the gravelled road running south out of the town towards Tharwa. Among the postcards, invitations, postal orders, bills and birthday cards Old Bob carried were a succession of letters addressed to ‘Mr C.E.W. Bean, Official Historian, Tuggeranong Homestead’. They bore the postage stamps of the Post Master General’s Department, with the head of King George V in dignified profile, in dull shades of violet, bluish green and rose, and in various denominations—sixpence or perhaps a shilling, depending upon their weight and the distance they had come. Many had travelled a considerable way, carried by coastal steamer and mail train across the Commonwealth. Most came from Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia, from what Charles Bean had described in the first volume of his official history (published the year before) as the ‘outer states’. Old Bob’s horse walked up the long road that climbs out of the valley of the Molonglo at Queanbeyan and turned along the motor road leading to Tharwa. By Jerrabomberra Hill the fields on its western side still sparkled with frost on many winter mornings. Four miles on the road ran over the railway to Cooma and then crossed Woden Creek. On the right were the blocks which had just been taken up by soldier settlers. Five miles further on, just before the bridge over Tuggeranong Creek, Old Bob turned onto the straight, tree-lined track that was the Tuggeranong Homestead xiv


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drive. His horse plodded on, through the scattered gums in the sheep paddocks and splashing across Tuggeranong Creek again before pulling up at the house. The sheets within the envelopes came from all kinds of addresses. Some bore impressive letterheads—of the Resident Magistrate at Broome, the Adams Motor Company, Perth, the Drill Hall at Launceston. Some came from houses with names—‘Merimbah’, Drummoyne—and some from streets without house numbers. Many had been typed, some by Militia clerks on machines and time borrowed from making up returns and requisitions. Some had been scribbled on notepaper in the reading room of the Perth Club, others carefully written in ink on a kitchen table. At least one, sent by a blind man, had been dictated. Many envelopes contained sketches or drawings to explain the burden of their contents. When Old Bob and his mail cart arrived at Tuggeranong he would hand the letters over to Bean’s assistant, Arthur Bazley, and perhaps stop for a smoke and a chat, catching up on news from the lodgers in the station homestead-turned-historian’s office before moving on up the valley. Bazley would open and smooth their contents, annotating them in neat letters on the top edge before placing them before Bean in his study, where he worked looking out into the bright sunshine and sharp air of Tuggeranong’s paddocks, westwards towards the Brindabella Ranges beyond the Murrumbidgee River. Throughout that bright, sharp winter, Bean turned to these letters with interest. He had written to many of their authors, asking them to refer to him others who could also answer his questions, so that a number opened with an explanation of how they came to be answering his questions. The tone of the letters was as varied as their origins and forms. Some presumed a long friendship (‘Dear Bean’), others adopted the formality of the unintroduced. Some reminded Bean of meetings in billets and trenches in France: ‘One time you interviewed a brother-officer and myself after the Hamel stunt. Probably you don’t remember . . .’ All took him back seven years, to a place far removed from the peace of Tuggeranong, with its quiet broken only by the calls of the magpie and cockatoos, where the worst smells were of sheep droppings. They took him back to a place of evil memory, to a couple of hundred yards of dusty trenches cut into the side of a scrub-covered hill in Turkey, a place where the sounds of bomb bursts, machine-gun chatter and rifle fire barely ceased for eight months, where the stench of dozens of rotting bodies lying in no-man’s-land permeated the xv


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clothes and sickened all who served there. The letters that Old Bob brought to Charles Bean during the winter of 1922 took him back to a place the writers all remembered as Quinn’s Post. Charles Bean also remembered Quinn’s, because he had served throughout the Gallipoli campaign, and indeed, the entire war, as the official correspondent to the Australian Imperial Force. He had lived on Gallipoli from April to December 1915, had been wounded there, and had visited the peninsula often from then until the evacuation. His diaries make frequent reference to the sounds of close fighting heard from Quinn’s even when the rest of the line was relatively quiet. The Anzac area was a tiny place less than a thousand yards from the Cove at its apex, but Bean spent much of his time with the 1st Australian Division, the units of which were never sent to Quinn’s. Its defenders saw him as a visitor rather than as an inhabitant: Monash grumbled that ‘Charley Bean seldom comes our way’ and complained that he had neglected his own 4th Brigade, battalions of which for the campaign’s first month formed Quinn’s garrison. But Bean had been to Quinn’s, and had written about it in his careful wartime despatches: indeed, shortly after the Turks broke into Quinn’s on 29 May a cricket-ball bomb hurled into the support line just missed him. In any case, it had been impossible for Bean to be present at every significant action, and when he came to write the official history of the Australian Imperial Force on Gallipoli and on the Western Front, he found that he needed to call upon the individual memories and records of those who had survived. For Quinn’s, and for the Gallipoli campaign as a whole, Bean needed to redress the deficiencies of the unit records and war diaries. The war diaries, and the messages, orders and reports they contained, were sketchy compared to the massive documentation which he created for the Western Front. Bean needed more—his vision for his history demanded a more minute record. His two Gallipoli volumes, The Story of Anzac, document the service of a small force, often devoting pages to the minute-by-minute movements of small groups of men; no more so than at Quinn’s. To achieve this detailed account, Bean needed to enquire beyond the official records that lay spread about him at Tuggeranong, marshalled and ordered by the faithful Bazley. Almost as soon as he returned from the war he began writing to former members of the AIF. He put questions to them and soon asked them to read and comment on draft chapters. He asked them to send him extracts of their private papers and to suggest other ex-soldiers xvi


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who might be able to describe what they saw at particular places, dates and times. By the time the final volume appeared, in 1942, he had developed a network of correspondents across the country whose recollections constituted a sort of collective memory of the AIF’s war. Bean’s papers complemented both the huge collection of unit war diaries that his assistants collated, and the gathering of individual papers first made by his colleague John Treloar, the long-serving Director of the Australian War Memorial, the basis of the Memorial’s still-growing Private Records collection. The mass of the Bean papers, Australia’s single most valuable collection of Great War records, testifies to Bean’s commitment and energy in striving to understand the AIF’s part in the war. He did not simply turn his notebooks—over 20 for 1915 alone—into chapters of a popular history (as many had expected him to do). Instead, for 20 and more years he gathered quantities of first-hand evidence. This lode he continued to check and amend: annotations in his frail handwriting appear in the margins of his notebooks into the mid-fifties. Much of the evidence Bean collected has still not been fully explored by the historians who decades later at last followed his lead. Indeed, ironically, the sheer quantity of material he assembled meant that while he read and absorbed the mass of detail his correspondents gave him, neither he nor his successors were able to use much of it. The margins of the Quinn’s Post letters collated during the winter of 1922 are marked in coloured pencil, indicating points and quotations which Bean incorporated into successive drafts of his history. Some passages have become familiar through repeated quotation, others have been read only by a handful of scholars. Thus, while some passages are now repeated like a mantra, the bulk of the recollections they were taken from have long lain unused. For example, most writers on Gallipoli record that Quinn’s was both the key to the Anzac position and that, as a result of its position and the proximity of the opposing trenches, it was a scene of almost continuous fighting. Many quote a line from Bean’s second volume to the effect that men ‘looked upon it as they would a haunted house’. Always alert to the lively quotation, Bean took a line from the recollections of Edwin Little, though neither he nor any subsequent writer attributed the quotation. Little’s memories of Quinn’s are particularly vivid and poignant because on the morning of 29 May a jam-tin bomb he was about to throw exploded, blowing off his right hand and blinding him. But in response to Bean’s invitation, even he had a friend record xvii


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his impressions of the last place he was ever to see: no wonder he thought of it as a haunted house. Edwin Little’s memoir, like all the letters Old Bob delivered that winter, was placed in a folder which Bazley labelled ‘Historical Notes—Gallipoli’ and filed with a growing archive of similar records. It was that file which, in November 2002, became the very first document I was to open in researching this book. But my journey in search of Quinn’s Post did not begin in the cool and mostly quiet Research Centre of the Australian War Memorial. Rather, it began at Quinn’s itself.

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Introduction

‘Key of the Anzac position’ I had waited over 20 years to travel to Gallipoli. Despite having written and spoken about the Gallipoli campaign, and even developed exhibitions about it, I had never visited the place except in imagination. I had been successful in finding reasons and funds to visit many other Australian battlefields, but somehow I had never managed to wangle a trip there. On a fine, warm autumn day in October 2002 I at last puttered up the tarmac road to the Cove and parked my noisy little scooter. Shouldering a pack, shifting a map case to one shoulder and gripping a walking stick, I strode out to become acquainted with a landscape I already felt I knew. Having embarked upon preliminary research for a projected book on Australian winners of the Distinguished Conduct Medal on Gallipoli I wanted to see the places in which they had served. Apart from wanting to see the Anzac area as a whole, I had no particular place in mind to find first. Unthinkingly almost, I walked toward the mouth of what was in 1915 Shrapnel Gully and turned inland. I followed the track towards the cemetery and then plunged into the scrub, making for the ridge I could see on the horizon just a thousand metres away. For 40 minutes I followed the muddy creekbed eastwards, pushing through scrub, becoming tangled in thick, thorny bushes, even losing my glasses to a springing branch (fortunately I had packed a spare pair). But I was not lost. I soon realised that I knew exactly where I was heading: Quinn’s Post. Presently the ground began to rise and I climbed on, angling to the right. Soon I was pulling myself upwards, grasping bushes and standing on roots as the hillside became vertical. I emerged a few yards south of the Quinn’s Post cemetery. A few steps up the road that now follows the old front line and I reached the cemetery. By now hot, sweating and panting, I threw down my pack and began my lunch of bread and cheese and water. As I ate I took out a copy of Bean’s The Story of Anzac and read again—but this time with xix


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great attention—his account of how Quinn’s had been ‘the key of the Anzac position’. For me too, I realised, Quinn’s was the key to this place. I immediately felt the need to understand Gallipoli through the medium of this tiny patch of tortured ground, an area about the size of a school playground, for which hundreds of men had fought and died. Walking about the small cemetery, looking back down the valley toward the beach and reflecting on what I’d read, I realised in a moment of clarity that I had reached the one place on Gallipoli that I really wanted to write about. The book on DCM winners was abandoned. Instead, this book is the product of that journey. Gallipoli is surely the most overworked subject in Australian military history. Every year we see one or two books with Gallipoli in the title, appearing regularly about early April, the spawning season of Australian military publishers. As Robin Prior remarked at a recent Australian War Memorial conference, historians should be awarded grants for not writing books on Gallipoli. And yet here I am offering another: why? Answers might be self-serving but nevertheless justifiable. Gallipoli gave Australia its single most influential national myth. The campaign has always been understood and interpreted as part of an evolving national mystique, one beginning with an identification within an imperial family and becoming the basis of an identity independent of it. Anzac has been a tenacious founding myth and shows no sign of losing its power. But if that power is to be more than sentimental and self-congratulatory, it must be based on an historical reality. The men of 1915 were not cardboard cutout sun-bronzed Diggers: they were real people who swore and prayed, who suffered and grieved and exulted. The reality of Gallipoli, though, is more elusive than ever, even as more Australians visit Gallipoli itself. Our understanding of Gallipoli is in danger of becoming submerged by the nationalist rhetoric of the Anzac Day address and even more by the shallow ockerism of the stereotyped Anzac Day news story. The sentiments of remembrance are genuine, but they are increasingly tending to be based on an ideal, one as simplified as any of the patriotic eulogies of the decade following the war. If Australians are to continue to regard Gallipoli as important—and they should—then there is a profound need for them to understand Gallipoli as a reality as well as the subject of a national myth. The story of Quinn’s Post reminds us that Gallipoli was not only about courage, endurance, self-sacrifice and mateship, but included the xx


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human attributes of fear, incompetence, folly, rivalry and selfishness. Men at war remain men, even Australians in 1915. As the reverence and revelry at North Beach memorial every 25 April reminds us, Gallipoli has largely been appropriated by Australia. And yet it also belongs to other nations: to Britain and New Zealand, and not least to Turkey. Quinn’s Post was held not only by Australians but also by British marines and soldiers and by New Zealanders, during the months of a summer when it passed from being a vulnerable weakness in the Anzac line to one of its most invulnerable bastions, albeit remaining one of the most dangerous places on the peninsula. The Turkish experience remains tantalisingly elusive. While we have snippets of sources from the Turkish side of the ridge, not least because during the last decade historians from both sides have opened a dialogue, the Ottoman archives have until recently been largely closed to researchers. Turkish authorities have recently adopted a more liberal attitude to non-Turkish unofficial researchers, but their abundant sources are still in a script incomprehensible to most scholars, irrespective of nationality. While not ignoring the men who crowded the stinking and dangerous trenches of Bomba Sirt, what the Anzacs called ‘Turkish Quinn’s’ is still largely unknown to us. With good fortune and generous funding, perhaps by the centenary of the campaign we will at last penetrate the reality for the Turks as we have been able to for their enemies. Tim Travers’s book Gallipoli 1915 shows the value of taking a transnational approach to the campaign, a need more pressing for Australia than other protagonists. Quinn’s Post reminds us that Australians need to come to terms with the detail of that experience, to take the trouble to ask questions about it, to reflect on it, and reach a more refined, more honest insight. Phillip Schuler, the Age’s correspondent on Gallipoli, visited Quinn’s in July 1915. He thought that it was ‘doubtful if the true history of Quinn’s . . . will ever be collated’. Perhaps; much occurred which was not recorded, much was recorded which has not survived, and much that was written has gone unread, even by research which has taken in sources in four countries and in every Australian state. But if the definitive history of Quinn’s will never be produced, this book at least seeks to tell us more than we previously knew. It has been written to remind Australian and New Zealand readers of a part of their respective and shared past that is in danger of being forgotten. Hugh Quinn assured his mother in what was to be his final letter home that Quinn’s Post ‘will be remembered throughout history’, but xxi


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it will not be unless we exert ourselves. Speaking to individuals and groups in the course of researching and writing this book I discovered that most people vaguely know that Quinn’s is famous, but no one seems very sure why. This book tries to explain what happened at Quinn’s, why that was important at the time and why it should still be important to us today. Though several writers have written about significant events on Gallipoli (notably my colleague Peter Burness, whose The Charge at the Nek is a gem), no one has told the biography of a place on the peninsula. This is the first book to tell the story of one place on Gallipoli from 25 April to 20 December. It is entitled Quinn’s Post, Anzac, Gallipoli because it seeks to tell the story of that place within the broader setting of events at Anzac, in the context of the campaign as a whole. Like Newton I am conscious that if we see further than before it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants. The greatest of these is Charles Bean, of course, but many others have given me a boost, including the late Lloyd Robson, John Robertson and Eric Andrews, and others who, knowingly or not, have shared insights and evidence either in person or in print. Though I began by reading Bean’s official history sitting in the cemetery at Quinn’s Post, I have made a deliberate effort not to fall into the all too simple trap of simply rephrasing what he wrote. I have done this in two ways. First, I refrained from re-reading Bean until I had finished my own draft. Second, I tried to draw as much as possible on sources that Bean did not use or could not have used—virtually all the personal diaries and letters we now value as embodying the story of Anzac were collected after 1922. In fact, I have tried to avoid including material quoted by Bean, even though I necessarily deal with the same events. It is a sign of the strength of our Gallipoli collections that it is possible to write about the campaign without needing to use or quote familiar material. Indeed, many men prominent in Bean’s account are hardly mentioned here: even such a small part of the Gallipoli story can be told with different emphases and angles, all flowing from new sources, questions and interests. It is vital for the continuing health of our nations’ understanding of the Great War that we not simply regard what Bean wrote as the last word, but use the sources gathered over the succeeding 80-odd years to follow the evidence to reach new interpretations. Quinn’s Post, Anzac, Gallipoli makes a number of points. It tries to break out of the parochial mould constraining Gallipoli studies, especially in Australia, to encompass the experience of at least the British xxii


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empire story: it is arguably the first truly ‘Anzac’ detailed account of the campaign. It critically evaluates the various phases of the campaign as they were evident at Quinn’s. It proposes that the raids of May and June—about whose justification Bean maintains an embarrassed silence—were unjustified and poorly executed. It makes clear that Quinn’s was created by New Zealanders and was saved by them in summer. It reminds us that there was an underground war on Gallipoli as well as the more familiar conflict in the trenches, a battle which has been largely overlooked. It reminds us that the traditional concentration on the disastrous charge at the Nek and the tragedy unfolding on the range north of Anzac were only parts of the August offensive. (George Bourne’s decision to halt the attack of the 2nd Light Horse from Quinn’s deserves to be at least as well known as the ruinous decision to insist that the charges of the 8th and 10th Light Horse proceed at the Nek.) It reminds us that the campaign continued after August, for another heartbreaking four months, and explores what this experience was like for the final garrison, the 17th Battalion, whose story has remained untold. It reminds us that for all the savagery of the battle at Quinn’s—and it continued without ceasing for the entire campaign—Anzacs and Turks communicated more at Quinn’s than anywhere else. Finally, it tries to connect home front and battle front, 1915 and now. The headings for the titles of the chapters of this book comprise phrases taken from the two volumes of Charles Bean’s official history, The Story of Anzac, which I devoured along with my bread and cheese at Quinn’s Post on that October afternoon. Peter Stanley Australian War Memorial

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1 ‘The fatal power of a young enthusiasm’ The men of 1914 and the Dardanelles

everal thousand men spent some time at Quinn’s Post. About half of them were soldiers of the Ottoman empire, but this book will not tell their story: that task must be left to a Turkish historian. Perhaps 3000 men served at Quinn’s in the forces of the British empire, mainly from Australia and New Zealand. Almost all of them volunteered to fight in the great European war, most at or within a few months of its outbreak in August 1914. Several hundred of them are still there. We, like some of them, might wonder how in the space of less than a year men from the most distant dominions of the empire came to be burrowing into or charging across a remote hillside in Turkey. The story of the progress to war of these volunteers of 1914 is familiar to Australians and New Zealanders. It takes in the initial rush to enlist, the training of the first volunteers, the gathering of the convoy in King George’s Sound and its voyage across the Indian Ocean, with the dramatic defeat of the raider Emden along the way; the encounter with the exotic in Egypt and the preparations for the fateful landing on 25 April 1915. Though the outline of the story is familiar it is important to be reminded of who these men were.

S

‘A little adventure’: the volunteers of 1914 It is important to recall that (contrary to the impression fostered by film and fiction), the volunteers were relatively few in 1914: 50 000 in Australia, perhaps 10 000 in New Zealand, a small percentage of the 400 000 and 100 000 who would eventually enlist. Though town-dwellers 1


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naturally made up the majority, across the states and islands relatively few men were drawn from any one place, and small communities contributed fewer: in Queensland, five from Forest Hill, only one from Mudgeeraba, for example. The spirit of the original volunteers can be discerned from their photographs, from their letters and diaries and from the memories of survivors. Unselfconscious, idealistic, often unthinking, as Lloyd Robson, Bill Gammage and Richard White have shown, they enlisted from a great variety of motives. Some sought adventure, an escape from the humdrum round of workshop, farm or office. Idealistically, some were prepared to meet their responsibilities as subjects of a great empire, called to defend it against what was seen as, and indeed was, a direct threat. Others sought a cheap trip home to Britain. The men of Quinn’s reflect all of these motives. Terence McSharry, a 30-year-old surveyor from Brisbane, was to take a prominent part in the defence of Quinn’s. As a member of the select Australian Instructional Corps, he was a committed citizen soldier. A week after the outbreak of war he scrawled in his diary that he felt ‘lucky to be alive’. He had envied men who had lived during the Napoleonic wars, a century before: ‘I don’t now’. McSharry had a dreadful run of injury in the war’s first months—floored by colds and flu, kicked by a horse and flattened by vaccinations—but retained an intense interest and enthusiasm for soldiering. His fellow volunteers felt the impulse of duty, a powerful ideal to that society. The impost of duty can only explain why men such as Frank Armstrong volunteered. Armstrong, a 34-year-old bank clerk, was a Boer War veteran but also the new husband of Annie, whom he had married in June 1914 and who was expecting a child. Another surveyor, Eric Mulvey, enlisted in August. He told his family in Maitland simply that ‘I can hardly do anything else but volunteer’. Enlistment became a kind of madness. Wilbraham Fowler, a bank clerk at Innisfail, ‘caught the war fever badly’. He felt it ‘my bounden duty as a single man to offer my services [for] the glorious traditions and the everlasting Supremacy of the good old British Empire’. At first turned down, he persisted and was accepted in September. Farewelled from Innisfail by various sporting clubs, he caught a boat to Townsville clutching presents including a pipe, a pair of binoculars and a ‘housewife’ sewing kit. Fowler joined twelve other volunteers waiting for another coastal steamer to take them to Brisbane on the way to Enoggera camp. In Western Australia Ellis Silas, a 2


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‘ T H E F ATA L P O W E R O F A Y O U N G E N T H U S I A S M ’

British artist, enlisted in the 16th Battalion. An idealist, he also probably hoped for a ticket back to London. Silas was a dreadful soldier, left behind by his squad at drill while marvelling at a sunset. He became the butt of jokes from his rougher comrades when he asked for a china cup rather than a tin mug. In New Zealand much the same feeling can be detected. Frederick Scarborough of Auckland reflected that he had never been ‘stirred by the grandeur of war’, but felt both the call of duty and the appeal of ‘a little adventure’. Aubrey Tronson likewise volunteered for the Wellington Battalion, inspired ‘partly by patriotic motives, but principally through a pure love of adventure and travel’. Private Jack Dunn, also of the Wellington Battalion, had been a journalist on the Masterton Daily Times and enlisted in August 1914. Jack was a popular young man, a member of the Wairarapa Amateur Athletic Club, the Masterton Harriers and the Red Star football club. He was, perhaps, the epitome of the volunteers of 1914. The diary he began the day he enlisted reflects the high-spirited combination of cheerful idealism and romantic patriotism characteristic of the volunteers of 1914 from anywhere in the ‘white’ dominions of the empire. The dominions’ response must be dissected, not least because modern readers need to be reminded of the very different understandings of their predecessors. On the part of their governments, the motivation for participation was not, as has so often been assumed, a knee-jerk reflex, or to somehow gain credit in London or status as a nation. Rather, as Ian McGibbon puts it for New Zealand (an explanation which perfectly fits Australia as well), it was ‘to sustain a security system which it believed all the country’s defence needs could be met at an acceptable cost’. That the cost later seemed far too high for what was achieved does not gainsay the sincerity of the original intention. It is difficult to disentangle the mixed motivations of the thousands of men who waited hopefully outside recruiting offices from Geraldton to Gisborne from the first days of August 1914. The absence of a direct German threat to the Antipodes was irrelevant; there was much talk of kinship. For many their identification with Britain helped them regard Britain’s need as their own. This was a society difficult for many of today’s Australians and New Zealanders to sympathise with or understand, but that is our challenge if we are to comprehend what would take men so far to fight in 1915. The impulse of duty or the impetuosity to embark on an adventure changed their lives. 3


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‘The best regiment in the Brigade’: soldiers and units The men who fought at Quinn’s between its creation shortly after the landing on Gallipoli on 25 April and the end of the summer came mainly from units of three brigades. From Australia they were members of John Monash’s 4th Infantry Brigade and Harry Chauvel’s 1st Light Horse Brigade, and from New Zealand they were part of Earl Johnston’s New Zealand Infantry Brigade. From mid-August 1914 men from all over the dominions gathered in country towns and large cities to join up. The great majority of those who joined the ranks in August and September 1914 had no previous military experience, though many of their officers and non-commissioned officers had served in the Militia. In October in Australia, the battalions and companies forming and training as far apart as Brisbane and Perth arrived in Melbourne to form Monash’s brigade. Monash, a 49-year-old Melbourne engineer, was an ambitious citizen soldier. His brigade comprised four battalions, drawn from every state. Granville Burnage’s 13th Battalion was from New South Wales, Richard Courtney’s 14th from Victoria, James Cannan’s 15th came from Queensland and Tasmania, Harold Pope’s 16th from Western and South Australia and Tasmania, though each included numbers of footloose young men who had enlisted far from home. In Egypt each battalion received the distinctive ‘colour patches’ worn on the shoulders which came to embody the unit’s identity in an otherwise drab war. Within the battalions sub-units were generally grouped geographically. For example, in Cannan’s battalion, C Company (which was to feel the greatest connection with Quinn’s Post) came from around Maryborough. This concentration helped to build identity and comradeship, but it also discouraged mixing: in the 16th Battalion, not until 1916 did the men from different states feel like a unit. While Federation had occurred fourteen years before, many people continued to identify primarily with state and empire rather than with nation. A Townsville poet, celebrating the (as it turned out abortive) service of the Kennedy Regiment in the seizure of German New Guinea, saw the episode parochially: But she needs her sons from Queensland, where the tropic waters flow, And cowards never were produced where rich bananas grow. 4

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Australian and New Zealand, showing towns and cities mentioned in the text and the notional areas from which the units that served at Quinn’s Post were drawn. Note, however, that many men served in units raised far from their nominal homes, mainly because they enlisted where they were living and working rather than where they grew up.

Australia and New Zealand

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He was not alone: The First Expeditionary Force from Queensland and similar souvenirs published for other states likewise celebrated state rather than national contributions. The national identification fostered by the AIF was engendered in France rather than on Gallipoli. Harry Chauvel, almost the same age as Monash, came from a very different background. A patrician regular soldier with South African service, his only common ground with Monash was, as his biographer Alec Hill put it, ‘their dedication to soldiering’. Chauvel’s 1st Light Horse Brigade’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd regiments would each serve at Quinn’s, but especially Lieutenant Colonel Robert Stodart’s 2nd Light Horse Regiment. Mainly a Queensland unit, its three squadrons each had a strong regional complexion: A had been recruited from the state’s south-east, B from the Darling Downs and central Queensland, and C from north Queensland and the northern rivers of New South Wales. Eric Mulvey reflected his comrades’ pride that it was ‘generally considered the best regiment in the Brigade’, known for the emuplumed hats Queensland mounted soldiers had claimed since their units had served in the shearers’ strike of 1890. In contrast to the supposedly civilian character of the AIF, the light horse regiments especially were imbued with the ethos of their Militia counterparts. Officers encouraged their men to follow them in volunteering for the AIF. Indeed, Major Tom Logan, a South African veteran and noted citizen soldier, is said to have induced some men from his district of Forest Hill to enlist. Earl Johnston, a New Zealand-born British regular officer, was neither particularly effective nor popular: it was rumoured he had a drinking problem. His New Zealand infantry brigade comprised four battalions, each raised from the dominion’s four military districts. Each of their four companies was drawn from four regional territorial regiments and wore its parent regiment’s cap and collar badges, encouraging ‘a tendency to create cliques’ within units. Lieutenant Colonel William Malone’s Wellington Battalion, for example, comprised companies from the Taranaki, Wellington West Coast, Ruahine and Hawke’s Bay regiments. Each company’s four platoons were in turn strongly regional: the Wellington West Coast Company comprised platoons mainly from Levin, Palmerston North, Marton and Wanganui. Casualties would in time dilute this local affiliation, and on Gallipoli its effects would come home to the various communities when their men went into battle. Malone himself was to have the most profound effect on the story of Quinn’s. A British migrant, 6


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a devout Catholic, a Stratford farmer turned solicitor and a dedicated citizen soldier, he had foreseen the coming war and sought to harden himself in anticipation, sleeping on a camp stretcher rather than a bed. He insisted on his men wearing uniforms instead of slovenly dungarees, and boots rather than deck shoes, when they took ship to go to war.

‘Thousands of sad faces’: off to war The ten grey ships of the convoy which steamed out of Wellington harbour on 14 October carried the 8500 men of the ‘Main Body’ of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Wellington’s wharves were packed with a jubilant assembly bigger than any New Zealand had seen before, though as George Bollinger noticed, one also ‘crowded with thousands of sad faces’. Though many of the transports’ passengers had enlisted on impulse or in excitement, the force itself reflected years of preparation. New Zealand had carefully planned its mobilisation, and within six weeks sent off an infantry brigade supported by artillery, engineer and medical units. Just over a third of its members had some past military experience. The New Zealand ships joined the Australian ‘first convoy’ at Albany, which early in November left King George’s Sound, as their passengers thought, for Britain and the Western Front. A few months later the 4th Brigade’s units also left for Egypt. Lieutenant Burford Sampson described the representative departure from Melbourne of the 15th Battalion. It was a close, sullen day in February 1915 and the men arrived at the station sweaty and dusty after the march from camp. Too many for the trains booked by inexpert staff officers, his Tasmanians had to travel from Broadmeadows by ordinary suburban services, clambering awkwardly into carriages full of matrons going shopping and refusing seats offered by patriotic older gentlemen. Changing trains at Essendon and again at Flinders Street, they pressed through crowds of office workers to catch another train to Port Melbourne. After the farce of the journey to the wharf, heartbreak followed as the men pushed through a press of women, anxious and upset, desperate to catch a last glimpse of their men. ‘Is Harry here? . . . Have you seen Dick Russell?’ They gathered behind the police barricades in the heat. At last the police allowed them through and a mass of wives, mothers, sisters and sweethearts rushed along the pier alongside the Clan Macgillivray. 7


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Sampson noticed one young woman holding up her long skirts, running along the wharf and crying, ‘Jim! Jim!’ ‘I hate farewells at boat or train,’ he wrote in the diary he began aboard ship a week out of Melbourne, glad that ‘there was not a living soul on the pier I knew’. The various transports crossed the Tasman or the Great Australian Bight to gather at Albany before steaming in convoy to war. As they left, many men clustered around their ships’ sterns, wondering if they would ever see the sight again. Thousands of men recorded their voyage to war in letters, diaries and memoirs, describing it in detail both because it was novel and because they had time on their hands. Whether in the first convoy or in later contingents, the story was much the same. Hudson Fysh, known to his section of the 3rd Light Horse as Bill (and later to join the Australian Flying Corps and in time found Qantas), evoked the voyage in one of the first paragraphs of the autobiography he wrote 50 years later. He remembered the sea-sickness in Australian waters, the dreary round of drill and mess and church parades, constipation relieved by explosive ‘No. 9’ pills, dozens of men in hammocks swinging in unison on the swell, clandestine crown-and-anchor games guarded by men standing cockatoo against prowling sergeants, a burial at sea, with the flag-covered, canvas-wrapped body sliding over the rail to plop into the ocean. For several of these few deaths the convoy hove to—ironically, in the light of the slaughter that was to follow.

‘A revelation of Empire’: the Australasians in Egypt As the first convoy crossed the Indian Ocean, deteriorating relations between the Entente powers and the Ottoman empire finally resulted in Britain declaring war on Turkey. The coincidental lack of winter accommodation in Britain resulted in the Australasian troops being diverted to Egypt to complete their training from December 1914. John Monash’s (admittedly carefully crafted) letters home convey the sense of what he called ‘a revelation of Empire’. As the ships carrying the various contingents arrived in the Suez Canal they passed warships of the Royal Navy and transports carrying troops from Britain and India, and the Australians and New Zealanders who had preceded them. Each greeted the other with cheers; Monash, ‘welcomed by mile after mile of Sikhs, infantry, cavalry, Bengal Lancers’, was—like his men—proudly conscious of joining a great imperial enterprise. 8


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Just as many diaries describe the voyage to Egypt as a set piece, likewise the troops’ time in Egypt is expressed in similar and often stereotyped passages. The diary of Private William Dundon of Blenheim takes in his awareness of the strength of the empire, the wonders of the encounter with ancient Egypt and the Biblical East, the rigours of training, the sights and sensations of Cairo, such as the Ezbekiah Gardens and the less innocent Wazza, and the eventual departure for the Dardanelles. Australians and New Zealanders were to form General Sir William Birdwood’s Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Birdwood, a British-Indian army general, was just 50. A veteran of India and the African wars, he had encountered Australians in South Africa and contradicted the stereotype of the typical British Great War general as stupid or stuffy. Finding there were too few New Zealanders to make a complete infantry division, but too many Australians, the solution was to combine Johnston’s New Zealand brigade, Monash’s 4th Australian Brigade, Chauvel’s Light Horse brigade and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles brigade as the New Zealand and Australian Division under General Alexander Godley. The result, Godley admitted, was ‘abnormal’ in composition, its very title reflecting the ambivalence its members felt. Australians talked of the ‘Australian and New Zealand Division’, New Zealanders described the ‘N.Z. Division . . . including 5000 Australians attached’. On Gallipoli, deficiencies in command rather than unorthodox organisation were to prove more harmful. Godley, a 48-year-old British regular, had commanded New Zealand’s defence force since 1910. He was never a popular commander, though the focus of the men’s ire was often Lady Godley, who accompanied him to Egypt and whose patronising air upset many. James Meek annotated his copy of the New Zealand official history with a series of ‘Gags about Godley’, but acknowledged that they were ‘fabricated against the pair’. The most notorious story was that Lady Godley, watching troops marching past in soft sand, had called out ‘Make ’em run, Alec!’ Vicious but quite unfounded, the catch-phrase appeared even in interviews with veterans 70 years later. Godley’s demeanour was impassive and, unlike the gregarious Birdwood, he rarely made an effort to win over his citizen soldiers, who damned him as aloof and uncaring. By the time Monash’s brigade arrived in Egypt the telegraphic address for the headquarters of the Australian and New Zealand 9


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Army Corps had been devised and was being stamped onto paper all over Cairo as ‘A.N.Z.A.C.’. However closely the two were to become married in memory, at the time there were differences between the various dominion forces scattered around Cairo. While the Australian Division, camping and training together at Mena on the western bank of the Nile, felt an identity, its members had little to do with the Light Horse (at Ma’adi), with the New Zealanders (at Zeitoun) or with Monash’s brigade (at Heliopolis), all on the east bank. Still, a friendly rivalry grew up whenever the two forces met. The reciprocal Australian and New Zealand perspective differed from the start. Godley’s patrician aide de camp, Lieutenant Arthur Rhodes, found the AIF ‘very untidy and slovenly . . . we are superior to them in every way’. Some officers evidently encouraged this attitude but relations generally were cordial. New Zealand diaries often refer to friends in the AIF, and the force’s nominal roll discloses that about 800 New Zealanders served in AIF units on Gallipoli. Both damned what Percy Fenwick called the ‘No Colonial need apply’ mentality they struck among some British officers. Egypt intrigued the antipodean soldier tourists. Like Frank Armstrong—by this time a father—many were fascinated to see sites such as the tree ‘that the Virgin rested under in the flight through Egypt’. Some sought spiritual consolation far from home—Chaplain George Green of the 2nd Light Horse confirmed a group of young men in Cairo’s Anglican cathedral. Others, however, embraced other attractions of Egypt, intimately in some cases. Hudson Fysh saw his first naked woman when the 3rd Light Horse passed through a brothel quarter and a woman pulled her dress up to her neck and invited the soldiers to visit her establishment. Many evidently responded. Lieutenant Henry Tiddy recorded that 160 men of Chauvel’s brigade were being treated for VD within a month of their arrival, bringing ‘a straight talk from the Brigadier’. Charles Bean, a 35-year-old bachelor who believed in ‘purity’, deplored the VD cases in one of his official reports. ‘I suppose you have read all that rot written by his wowsership C.E.W. Bean,’ Eric Mulvey wrote to his family in Maitland. He did not contest the report’s truth, but ‘was there any necessity to mention it at all?’ he asked. In what was perhaps the largest single episode of misogynist violence in the two countries’ history, on Good Friday 1915 hundreds of soldiers rioted in the Wazza, one of Cairo’s brothel quarters. They broke into brothels and prostitutes’ apartments, destroying furniture 10


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and property, burning possessions in the streets. When the local fire brigade arrived the soldiers cut the hoses and drove the firemen off. Only when British mounted police and picquets arrived did the rioters disperse. In the aftermath of the disturbance there were many contradictory explanations of who had started it and why. Australians blamed New Zealanders; New Zealanders blamed Australians. ‘Some Australians started to wreck a house,’ explained a Wellington machine-gunner. Charles Bean spoke to Australians and decided that ‘there is no question that in this scrap a leading part was played by the New Zealanders’. They all blamed the wretched Egyptian prostitutes and took out their hostility on the hapless Egyptian firemen and the British territorials summoned to suppress the riot. Monash’s men continued training. He circulated a memorandum to his battalion commanders suggesting the skills he wanted to impart. Reflecting the traditional reverence for the bayonet, he reminded his men to keep theirs sharp. But turning to a more realistic view of modern warfare, Monash urged them to dig, even when they were tired, to learn to carry heavy machine-guns and ammunition in the dark, to learn how to site trenches at night and to practise by rote advances covered by ‘motions of rapid fire’. The novices of the 4th Brigade began to acquire the skills they would use on Gallipoli but, soldiers for only a matter of months, many still reacted as civilians. Fred Anderson, a bullocky from Mudgeeraba (the township’s only volunteer in 1914), wrote that the 15th Battalion had ‘two guard tents full’ of defaulters, including transport drivers who as Queenslanders refused to remove the emu plumes from their slouch hats. Even intensive training failed to eradicate their civilian characteristics.

‘To Constantinople!’: the Dardanelles expedition The Ottoman empire had been in slow decline for 300 years. The subject of contempt, pity and avarice, it had gradually lost territory and prestige, suffering losses by rebellion, such as in Greece and the Balkans, and excisions by foreign powers. Though professing amity, Britain had annexed Egypt and Cyprus, while the Ottomans’ traditional adversary Russia had fought a series of wars in the Caucasus. A military coup in 1909 had ousted the autocratic but ineffectual Sultan and installed a ‘Committee of Union and Progress’; backward in many other things, in this title Turkey anticipated the brutal regime 11


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change and the euphemistic nomenclature of the twentieth century’s dictatorships. Defeats in a series of atrocious Balkan wars and rebellions in Turkey’s remaining north African colonies had strengthened the Ottoman desire to retain what remained and to sharpen the military skills on which success was to depend. In 1914 a junta of ‘Pashas’ controlled an empire desperate for external support but wavering between the blandishments of Britain and Germany. Britain, handicapped by its alliance with Russia, threw away its chance to retain Turkey’s allegiance through unskilful diplomacy and found itself with a major (if underestimated) enemy whose territory extended up to the Suez Canal, the empire’s principal artery. The arrival in Egypt of Australian and New Zealand troops coincided with the British empire’s need to deploy a force intended to defeat the Ottoman empire in what was hoped would be a swift, visionary campaign. The Dardanelles expedition remains one of the most contentious enterprises in military history, a subject still liable to arouse passions in Australia and New Zealand, and often the subject of myth and misunderstanding. Though the campaign resulted in defeat and humiliation for the Entente powers, not to mention over 130 000 deaths, it was not necessarily folly from the outset. Indeed, the vision of the youthful First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was to use British sea-power to open a route to support Russia and knock Turkey out of the war. It was a vision flawed in the execution rather than the conception; but badly flawed. In March an Anglo-French fleet was to have forced a passage through the Dardanelles, the strait separating Europe and Asia but linking the Black and Aegean Seas. The appearance of British and French battleships off Constantinople would, it was expected, force Turkey’s surrender. According to current military theory this was not unrealistic. The British theoretician Edward Hamley expressed the orthodoxy in The Operations of War: ‘the occupation of its chief city paralyses a civilised country’. Underestimating the determination of the Turkish defence and hampered by some very bad luck when ships ran into unsuspected mines, the naval attempt to force the straits literally foundered. It was thus decided to land a military force to finish the job. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps became part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, a force hastily formed, poorly supplied and inexpertly commanded. British and French divisions were to land at the tip of the peninsula, at Cape Helles. Birdwood’s corps was to come ashore halfway up 12


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the west coast, north of the headland of Gaba Tepe. The two forces were to advance north and east respectively to seize the high ground overlooking the Dardanelles and its forts. Few envisaged the trench warfare that would follow. Hamley’s The Operations of War expressed the expansive vision of the early twentieth century strategist. In emulation of Napoleon, armies would be ‘thrown’ across rivers, bold advances would be made by corps moving along parallel roads to concentrate on the decisive point. Schooled on the campaigns of Wellington and Napoleon, and drawing on the lessons of the German wars in Europe and more recent conflicts in the Balkans and Manchuria, the commanders of the first year of the Great War understandably thought in terms of open warfare, giving little thought to the impact of the military firepower now available. As the first Australians left Egypt in early March, rumours abounded. Were they to go to France, to Cyprus or even Greece? (In the volatile diplomacy of the Balkans the possibility of Greece entering the war against Turkey—an aim of British diplomacy— meant that the destination of the Dardanelles and Constantinople was not at first obvious.) By late March, with the repulse of the AngloFrench naval attack on the Narrows, it took no deep strategic insight to foresee the likelihood of an Anglo-French attack on Gallipoli, and half of Egypt knew. The failed naval attacks had given the Turks ample warning and they were prepared, even if they did not know exactly where the invasion would fall. The force gathered on the island of Lemnos (taken by Greece in the recent Balkan war and lent by a government eager to discomfit its traditional enemy). Here Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett first saw the empire troops he was to extol. For ten years Ashmead-Bartlett had made a name as an adventurous war correspondent, and had been appointed as the London Press representative to Hamilton’s force, an appropriately prestigious position. Ashmead-Bartlett was impressed with the Australasian troops, even if he thought that Tasmania was a separate dominion. The Wellingtons left Zeitoun on a day when the thermometer reached 100º Fahrenheit and a khamseen blew from the desert. Captain Edward Cox of the Wellingtons thought his men ‘cheerful and pleased at the prospect of fighting’. Cox was in general an obtuse leader but he read his men’s mood correctly in this case. At Lemnos, in what George Bollinger, a Wellington man, described as ‘a real N.Z. day heavy rain and mist’, the force waited for the weather to clear. These men from Australasia had little idea of the enemy they 13


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Gallipoli and the eastern Mediterranean

Britain had taken a strategic interest in the Mediterranean for several centuries. Its colonies and protectorates included Cyprus and Egypt, on which the security of the imperial route to India depended. Its diplomatic effort in 1914–15 failed to prevent war with Turkey and Bulgaria or to win over Greece to the Allies. The strategic significance of the Dardanelles, controlling the route to Russia, can be appreciated. 14


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would meet. An English-speaking Greek Orthodox priest on Lemnos horrified Burford Sampson’s men with stories of atrocities committed in the Balkan wars and over centuries past, making them ‘madder and madder to have a go at the Turks’. Private Tom Chataway, later the author of the 15th Battalion’s history, heard stories from sailors at Lemnos that British Marines had been captured and crucified, untrue but a rumour that accorded with their prejudices. The men in the transports and warships anticipated the events of the landing with a mixture of eagerness and dread. Carl Jess, Monash’s brigade major, thought it would be ‘the most eventful day of my life’. While many might have been apprehensive over their own fate, almost all were confident that the expedition would succeed. Raymond Baker of the Canterbury Battalion saw the words ‘TO CONSTANTINOPLE’ chalked on the black-painted hull of the transport Lutzow.

‘The most Historical date’: 25 April The Dardanelles expedition is often represented as scraping the barrel of the empire’s military power. In fact, though hastily assembled and including novice Australasians and poorly trained naval troops, it also had the regular 29th Division and HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy’s newest and most powerful battleship. While some British generals were old and slow, its commander was one of the most intelligent soldiers of the time. Sir Ian Hamilton had seen as much active service as any senior British officer. He had served, been wounded and decorated in campaigns in Africa and India, seemed to have absorbed the lessons of the South African and Russo-Japanese wars and had written about modern war in a series of articulate books. Hamilton knew he faced a tenacious enemy. He had interviewed the Sultan of Egypt who, as he told a courtier in Britain discouragingly, ‘kept rubbing in [that] the flower of the Turkish Army was massed to meet him at the Dardanelles’. As Stephen Roskill and Denis Winter have shown, for over a decade British planners had contemplated the difficult task of forcing the Dardanelles. Inexplicably, little of the intelligence accumulated was passed on to the staff of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force and much planning proceeded in ignorance of the terrain or the disposition of the Turkish defenders. Though later condemned as impossible, the expedition had a relatively clear objective: ‘to assist the 15


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fleet to force the Dardanelles by capturing the Kilid Bahr plateau, and dominating the forts at the Narrows’. Survivors and historians have argued about the aims of the operation for decades, dissension partly spurred by the desire to vindicate or damn the reputations of individuals, or to rescue or bolster national dignity. The arguments are complex, but the orders for the operation were clear enough. Birdwood’s corps was to land north of Gaba Tepe and advance inland and south-eastwards to seize the hill of Mal Tepe, about 6000 yards east of the landing beaches and the key to an advance to the Narrows. Its object was to threaten the line of retreat of the Turkish force facing the Helles landings. Hamilton’s essential error was to split his force, unwisely in the view of both contemporaries and historians. Unable to summon the strength to break through a thin but tenacious Turkish defence, the invasion force was to be confined in two beach-heads, at Cape Helles and at what was soon to be called Anzac. It has been an article of faith in Australia that the landings were made in the ‘wrong place’. Recent research by Denis Winter, Tim Travers and Tom Frame conclusively refutes this idea. Winter and Travers have shown that the landings were intended to be made pretty much where they were, and Frame demonstrates that it would have been impossible for naval navigators to have made a more precise landfall. The idea that currents or poor navigation in the run to the beaches carried the force a mile too far north should be disregarded, as Bean disregarded it in later editions of his history. The landing failed to get anywhere close to Mal Tepe. Parties of gallant and unlucky men pushed on to Scrubby Knoll, a ridge nearly 3000 yards east of the cove around which the force landed. A few came back; some vanished. The force as a whole was held to a confused line on the second ridge inland. The real achievement in the landing was holding on, but it was no victory. Tim Travers, in his recent Gallipoli 1915, ticked off the many reasons why the landings failed. They included the loss of surprise, the confusion in landing and advancing that led to the fatal slide to the right, the lack of adequate communication, mediocre leadership in some units (all novices), the failure to land reinforcements and artillery, the inadequacy of naval gunfire and the effectiveness of the Turkish artillery. Above all, Travers regarded the rapid Turkish response, even if the counterattacks were uncoordinated and costly, as the decisive element in throwing the invading force off-balance and making its commanders 16


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doubt the wisdom of their enterprise and dig in at the positions they had reached on the afternoon of the first day. The men who were to hold Quinn’s did not come ashore at dawn on 25 April. The New Zealanders landed on the afternoon of the first day, the 4th Brigade not until the following day. Those waiting on the transports were conscious of the significance of the test they faced. Wilbraham Fowler, the Innisfail bank clerk, saw it at the time as ‘the most Historical date in Australian History’. These men had been carried to this place by what Bean called ‘the fatal power of a young enthusiasm’. He meant Churchill’s zeal for the Dardanelles expedition, but it could also refer to the impetuosity of those who volunteered for the adventure of war. They were now to learn how fatal that conjunction of eagerness was to prove. Ellis Silas, the artist turned signaller, looked about his fellow members of the 16th Battalion and, surely like many, wondered who was marked for death. He felt awed by stronger, more competent soldiers, though mental resilience did not depend upon physical strength. Men were carrying heavy loads: rifle, bayonet and ammunition, tinned rations, hard biscuit and water, a bundle of firewood, blanket and greatcoat, an entrenching tool and, in Malone’s battalion, half a pound of energygiving raisins each. Many men were carrying a full stone (fourteen pounds) more than the expected 60 pounds of kit. Making inland, the men pushed through thick scrub as tall as themselves. Many compared it with places they knew. Australians thought it resembled the country around the Hawkesbury in New South Wales or the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. New Zealanders recognised the manuka or toetoe bush around Christchurch; a Canterbury man likened the coast to Tasman Bluffs near Nelson. Scotsmen among the Marines even compared Gallipoli to Scottish heathland. None foresaw that this would be home for the next eight months. While the invaders’ plans had envisaged the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force entering Constantinople, the end of the first day’s fighting saw them digging in only 1000 yards inland. At the furthest point from the beach a small group of Australians and New Zealanders were entrenching on the spot that would come to be called Quinn’s Post.

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2 ‘The most critical position’ The creation of Quinn’s Post

s the New Zealanders arrived at Anzac Cove on the afternoon of 25 April they were sent towards the firing line willy-nilly. Despite attempts by some officers to maintain order, the men arrived in dribs and drabs of sections and platoons, fragmented by the rugged terrain and the vagaries of battle. The line they reached was held by men of the Australian battalions which had landed earlier that day. Depending on the diarists’ turn of metaphor, Turkish bullets were singing, buzzing or cracking through the scrub from the east and Turkish shrapnel was bursting in what became known as Shrapnel Gully, to their west. They were disoriented, bemused by their sudden immersion in the chaos of battle and shocked by the wounds and death they saw about them.

A

‘Dawson took charge’: establishing Quinn’s, 25 April At the apex of the rough line the Australians and New Zealanders were intermingled—Australian George Tuck found himself lying between an Auckland private and an officer. Frederick Scarborough, of the Auckland Battalion, described the day in a diary written in the present tense, capturing the drama of the moment: ‘a few of us are over a ridge & down we race . . . while bullets rip-rip all around’. Scarborough saw some Australian officers on the side of a hill calling for help and his small party of Aucklanders climbed to join them: ‘Soon among many dead & wounded lying among the scrub—a fusillade of Turkish rifle & machine gun fire is passing overhead . . .’ Scarborough confessed that ‘we don’t know where we are . . . troops are all mixed 18


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‘THE MOST CRITICAL POSITION’

up’, but it is likely that he was lying in a patch of scrub close to where Quinn’s was established. Private Alfred Smith of the Canterbury Battalion was a member of a small, leaderless group of Canterbury and Auckland men who that afternoon found themselves among a group of Australians, also without an officer. Unsure where they were or what they should do, the two groups drew apart and conferred separately. Sixty-three years later he remembered, ‘the Aussies had a talk and we had a talk’. A corporal suggested that it was better to stay where they were rather than try to retreat through the shelling and the New Zealanders began to scratch out rifle pits. Before joining them an Australian said, ‘You will forget about the Battle of Waza!’, for three weeks before members of both groups had been in the Wazza that Good Friday evening. ‘We all shook hands,’ Smith remembered, ‘and said that we would forget bygones and we settled down.’ The shallow scrapes the men were digging with their entrenching tools were the beginning of what came to be named Quinn’s Post. Here, at the crucial point of the Anzac line, the Wazza riot was important enough for them to shake on before putting it behind them. Another Aucklander, Frank McKenzie, found himself climbing an almost vertical hillside to reach ‘the most advanced position in the line’, a series of shallow scrapes under constant fire. ‘I never felt so utterly helpless,’ he admitted, and when someone shouted ‘retire . . . we obeyed and ran’, but then returned at another’s urging. Fifteen yards below the crest of the ridge McKenzie, his fellow New Zealanders and the Australians began to dig ‘coffin trenches’—as long as a man and just deep and wide enough to fire lying prone. The Turks, equally wary, failed to push on. And then, McKenzie recalled, ‘Dawson took charge and he held on like a hero.’ With the arrival of Major Tom Dawson of the Auckland Battalion around five o’clock in the afternoon the defence of the head of Monash Valley was at last secure. Dawson became the first identifiable figure associated with what was to become Quinn’s Post. He urged men to dig, sent wounded down the hillside, called for ammunition and scrounged food and water. Under Dawson, about 150 men remained throughout the first night. And yet his name is barely remembered. A 37-year-old solicitor from Remuera, near Auckland, with long service in the Territorial Force, Dawson was a Boer War veteran, having served in the Border Regiment and the New Zealand Rifle Regiment. His only idiosyncrasy was that he had his regimental 19


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number tattooed on his arm. He was stolid and unimaginative—he went on to staff jobs and command of a convalescent depot. But his ability to get a mixed bunch of tired, hungry, scared novices to lie down and keep shooting was exactly what was needed. A line from the diary of a fellow Auckland lawyer turned soldier, Francis West, provides an appreciation of his achievement: ‘Dawson . . . took charge of all the supports in a small bight in the ridge . . . firing line is fearfully rowdy . . . Dawson had held a very difficult position . . .’ Through the night he shouted orders to imaginary defenders, deterring the Turks from attempting a rush. The following day Dawson was carried away wounded, returning to an otherwise undistinguished military career. In the meantime he had ensured that the most precarious spot in the Anzac line would hold. Through the night of 25 April, corps and division commanders at Anzac debated whether to order an evacuation and sought a decision from the pyjama-clad Hamilton. The success of the landing hung in the balance. Imbued with the theories of Edward Hamley, senior commanders wavered. Hamley had taught that ‘in the face of serious opposition a landing is almost an impossibility’. A force attacked while landing, ‘even if part is already ashore, will be in a precarious situation’. Ian Hamilton’s celebrated order (‘now you have only to dig, dig, dig’) confirmed that the force would remain; perhaps less a mark of confidence in the power of the offensive than a recognition that evacuation could bring a humiliating massacre. Birdwood’s staff expected a determined counter-attack on 26 April but the Turks were unable to coordinate more than a disparate response. Mustafa Kemal’s attacking zeal, the subject of admiration outside Turkey and adulation within, may have prevented the Ottoman force launching a conclusive attack. Between the disorganisation of the attackers and the defenders’ lack of coordination the line remained where the men had stopped at the end of the first day.

‘Firing all night terriable experance’: 26 April Understanding the detail of the fighting at Anzac in the first week is difficult. Parties moved across the ridges without leaving traces on the ground or on paper. Majors Harold Jacobs of the 1st Battalion and Jack Walsh of the 15th both passed across the hillside that would become Quinn’s but moved on, Jacobs to join the desperate fight for the head of Monash Valley, Walsh to die on 28 April. Few men had the opportunity 20


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Gallipoli

The plan to force the Dardanelles by taking the forts lining its shores from the rear was not necessarily impossible. Hamilton’s decision to divide his force between what became Anzac and Helles was perhaps the single greatest mistake the Allies made. A single landing made near Gaba Tepe might have achieved the Allied goal. 21


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to record their experiences, and when they sat down and licked a pencil to begin they often could not put into words what they had seen and done. The first entry that George Tuck, a Boer War veteran, made in his diary was: ‘It has been indescribable hell. Cannot and will not write it down . . .’ Many entries reflect the horror without the detail: ‘firing all night’, Private Harry Daniels scribbled on 26 April, ‘terriable experance’. Even if a man wanted to say what he had done, he often had no idea how to describe where he had been, since names only gradually became attached to hills and gullies. Other details were less palatable. Captain Jesse Wallingford, a former British boy soldier who had won his commission through his renown as a marksman, had been training New Zealand’s Territorial Force in musketry at the war’s outbreak and become the brigade machine-gun officer. A man of rigid self-discipline who expected nothing less from his men, Wallingford found ‘a mob, principally Australians’. He started to get them to dig in. Suddenly, as he recorded in his diary: ‘Turks charge; men bolt; I draw revolver and threaten.’ It is not surprising that small groups of novices, thirsty, unsure of where they were or whether they would be cut off in the thick, tall scrub, facing an enemy whom they believed to be barbarous, would panic. A man might crash through the scrub shouting that the Turks were coming on; it would be a brave or foolhardy man who would not prudently shift. There was no more general Turkish assault on the 26th, but both sides poured bullets at the other. In those first days few—including the staff at divisional and corps headquarters—had any clear idea of who was where. Carl Jess tried to locate the units of Monash’s brigade. He found the 13th and 16th Battalions ‘mixed up holding solitary hill at head of gully’ (at what later became Quinn’s) but could find no sign of the 15th. Platoons of that battalion were reported spread from Fisherman’s Hut in the north to Johnston’s Jolly in the south. Many who became separated from their units believed themselves to be the few survivors of their battalion—the stretcher-bearer George Gower thought that the 15th Battalion had lost all but two of its officers dead or wounded, but later found the ‘number killed not so great’. It was grievous enough, though. Messages received by Monash’s headquarters reveal the confusion all experienced: ‘have lost touch Otago’; ‘know nothing of Major Lock’s company’; ‘our men being fired on by your troops on left’. Headquarters staff, reading maps and the ground, realised that what was to become Quinn’s was, as Bean wrote, ‘the most critical 22


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position’ on the peninsula. The invaders held the second ridge (with Quinn’s at its northern end), Pope’s Hill at the head of Monash Valley and Russell’s Top at its neck. There existed what Bean called a ‘chasm’ between Pope’s and Quinn’s. For a week neither side was able to dominate this deadly disputed ground. In the desperate early days parties from several battalions were directed to plug gaps in the line on these rugged ridges. Early on the morning of 26 April Granville Burnage of the 13th Battalion sent Captain William Forsythe’s company up the ridge to what would be Quinn’s. Unaware of Harold Jacobs’s men on the next bump of the ridge, Forsythe’s men held the centre against a series of uncoordinated but still fierce Turkish attacks, while all the while machine-gun and sniper fire came from their rear from the slopes of the Chessboard and Baby 700 to the north. The first days made heavy demands on those trying to control the battle as well as those fighting it. The scrappy, staccato entries in Carl Jess’s diary suggest the pressure the brigade staff faced: ‘Just about tired out. Shrapnel again . . . Calls for ammunition. Stretcher bearers and reinforcements on every side in the dark.’ Even so, a few officers took the trouble to write citations for men they had seen performing exceptionally. Jack Craven, a 21-year-old sailor from Halifax, Yorkshire and now a signaller of the 15th Battalion, was recommended for the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) for carrying food and water to the firing line through heavy shell and machine-gun fire and then for carrying messages under fire. It would be a decisive step on his way to gaining a commission and surviving the war. Munching tinned bully beef and hard ration biscuits and scavenging the water-bottles of the dead, they deepened the coffin trenches into ‘T-heads’ (T-shaped trenches) and ducked at the shrapnel bursting overhead. Periodically snatching up their rifles, they shot at the Turks moving toward them, shouting ‘Imshi!’ (‘Get out of here!’), as if the Turks were bothersome Cairo urchins. Bravado masked fear: it was not clear for days that the lodgement had succeeded. As a 16th Battalion signaller put it in a letter to his family, ‘the first of the Australians at Constantinople’ would be the handful captured in the days following the landing. No one else would get any closer than Quinn’s Post.

‘All you need to do . . . ’: the 14th Battalion’s ordeal Having waited at the Cove right through 26 April, the 14th Battalion—the only unit still intact on either side—at last formed up after 23


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breakfast on 27 April and marched down the beach and then inland, up Shrapnel Gully towards the critical point in the beach-head, the head of Monash Valley. A Company, its commander wounded, was led by its second-in-command, Major Robert Rankine, towards what Charles Dare, the battalion’s adjutant, described as ‘map reference I.3 sq 224 later known as Quinn’s Post’. At first unaware of Forsythe’s and Jacobs’s parties, Rankine found a few Australians of several battalions, supposedly under a lance corporal, all exhausted. He swiftly sent his three platoons to occupy the scrapes on the cliff-top. Alfred Guppy, a Benalla farmer, was one of the 14th Battalion’s scouts, who had been selected and trained by Captain William Hoggart, a Western Districts schoolteacher. The scouts followed Hoggart up the ridge to ‘a portion of the line named Quinn’s Post’—like many he went back over his diary and added place-names decided later. This, he found, was ‘a veritable death trap’. Hoggart led them into the shallow rifle pits amid the bulletcut scrub with a calm, ‘Follow me, it’s alright’. By noon Hoggart was dead, shot through the head as he peered through the scrub, but worse was to follow. As the Victorians dug in, Turkish machinegunners set up in the scrub between Quinn’s and what would become Courtney’s Post. Without warning they fired, catching the reserve platoon on the open hillside. Within seconds some 30 men were dead and others writhing in pain. It was the 14th’s first experience of the power of the machine-gun, the weapon which above all would prove to be the key to the holding of Quinn’s. That afternoon the firing died down as the wounded were pulled into cover and readied to be carried to the beach. Mistaken rumours spread that the deadly machine-gun fire had come from the neighbouring 15th Battalion, damaging working relations within the brigade. The antics of Gunner, the battalion’s fox terrier mascot, diverted some men, but when they began risking wounds to carry him to safety he was taken back to the beach and sent aboard a transport. Gunner was soon immortalised in a fanciful drawing in the Illustrated London News. At dusk the Turkish attacks increased, with at least two major attacks during the night. Shouts of ‘Officer here!’ or ‘Ammunition wanted!’—from Turk or Australian none could say—drew fire, fostering confusion among men new to battle. Inexperienced citizen soldiers frightened each other with their cries for ammunition or stretcher-bearers; of course the Turks fired at their voices. That night a cold drizzle fell, soaking shivering men huddling in their shallow 24


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rifle pits, some digging away in the dark. At the direction of the New Zealand engineer Lieutenant F.W. Skelsey they began to sap forwards, making a new front line a few yards forward of the disconnected line of the T-heads of the rifle-pits, which became the support line. This was as far forward as Quinn’s ever reached, until August the furthest inland of all Anzac positions. In the early hours of a sodden morning, panting Royal Marines arrived along the slimy tracks, men whose time at Quinn’s was to be marked, as we shall see, by scorn and acrimony. By this time the sniping had begun. Some, such as Richard Casey, writing from the security of a headquarters dugout, thought the ‘sniping mania’ exaggerated, that every over, stray shot and random bullet was attributed to snipers. But it seemed different on the ridge. Quinn’s occupied the rim of a shallow curve, the southern face of which was open to Turkish positions to the north. One after another, men fell to sudden shots. Douglas Hallam, a Canadian lieutenant of the Royal Naval Air Service Motor Maxim Squadron, who arrived at Quinn’s on the 29th, collapsed next to an Australian as he reached the rim. Hallam offered the man a cigarette, and in return was given advice that may have saved his life. ‘Officers is their meat,’ the man warned, and advised Hallam to take off his cap, Sam Browne belt and rank badges. Some men died while digging; others because they did not dig as energetically as they should have. Officers returning from the peninsula later in 1915 vowed that they would instil in recruits discipline and a determination to dig. The sappers who directed their work paid for their skill: half of the 28-strong platoon of New Zealand engineers sent to work at and behind Quinn’s became casualties within six days. Charles Dare recorded ‘trenches improved as far as possible’ under the constant fire. On the 28th the first periscopes arrived, hastily knocked up by resourceful naval artificers and sappers with mirrors of silvered glass ransacked from the washrooms of the fleet. Rankine was understandably feeling the strain and asked to be able to withdraw. On the morning of the 28th Monash sent him a signal, scribbled on a message pad by John McGlinn, his staff captain. ‘I cannot allow you to withdraw, nor can I send men to relieve you . . . All you have to do is hold your ridge’, Monash urged, to prevent the Turks firing down the valley. ‘All you need to do is dig in securely & watch your front, save your ammunition and feed and water your men.’ Monash was reflecting the orders he had from 25


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Anzac

Anzac, showing the positions reached by Anzac troops after the August offensive, though Quinn’s remained without change throughout the campaign. Throughout the campaign the precipitous valleys and ridges around the head of Monash Valley left the line on both sides curiously truncated. Quinn’s, the northernmost position on MacLaurin’s Hill, was overlooked and enfiladed by Turkish positions on Baby 700 in the north and German Officers’ Trench to the south. 26


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Godley: ‘You must ensure that the head of your ravine is held . . .’ There was no other position tenable between Quinn’s and the inner defence line based on Plugge’s, which could do nothing more than hold the Turks off what would be a crowded and chaotic evacuation beach. If Quinn’s were to fall Anzac faced disaster. But as men toppled over, skidded down the steep hillside, fell back or slumped over shovels and rifles, casualties mounted. The dead lay where they fell during the day but on the evening of the 28th, as the 14th’s men looked anxiously down the valley for signs of relief, the bodies were gathered and carried down the slope to where sweating men were digging a common grave. A sudden commotion on Dead Man’s Ridge had the grave-diggers take up rifles and turn the grave into a trench, but soon the emergency passed and Andrew Gillison, the 14th’s padre (himself later killed on Gallipoli), was able to say a hasty prayer. Someone inscribed on a board in pencil that the grave held 29 Australians and some New Zealanders. Those arriving at Quinn’s in the coming weeks would notice the rough inscription. Half a dozen of the bodies would later be lost as the burial plot became part of the massive infrastructure of the post, but most remained and today lie in the Quinn’s Post cemetery. Even as the burials proceeded the Turks made further attempts on the line. By the time the 14th were withdrawn so many Turkish dead lay in no-man’s-land that it looked to Charles Dare ‘as though a battalion was sleeping in the open’. The cold, rainy, weary nights continued; all the while machinegun and rifle bullets thudded around the garrison of the so-far unnamed position—still unconnected to Courtney’s, 100 yards to the south—together with the occasional burst of shrapnel, though shells mostly exploded over the valley behind, so close were the front-line trenches on the ridge-top. Not until 30 April were brigade staff able to get rations up the ridge, by when men were living on what they had carried ashore and what they could scrounge from the discarded packs of the dead and wounded. At last, as Alfred Guppy wrote, ‘after another weary night of work and watching’, Rankine’s company of the 14th was told to scramble back down the cliff-face to rest. That evening they dragged themselves back again to stand as a reserve during one of the last attacks made by the Turks, and the 14th’s tenure at Quinn’s ended. Guppy’s platoon, 52-strong on 25 April, had lost exactly half its members killed and wounded in a week. 27


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‘Run, My Lads, Imshi!’: the Royal Naval Division Another product of Churchill’s fecund imagination, the Royal Naval Division had been formed in the war’s first month. With more sailors than ships, he sought to use the surplus pragmatically. Churchill wanted to use the Royal Navy’s strength at sea in concert with the fighting power of a naval division to exert leverage on the land war in Europe. Though justified by the prevailing theory of the influence of sea-power on war, the force was almost lost at Antwerp. It was hastily evacuated to Britain to rebuild and train, enduring the discomfort and disorganisation of the war’s first winter. One brigade comprised battalions of the regular Royal Marine Light Infantry. Two others comprised sailors outfitted in khaki but wearing naval badges and using naval jargon. All had been hastily and inadequately equipped and incompletely trained. Between January (when the division’s transports steamed out of the Bristol Channel) and April (when they finally landed at Anzac) most units had spent more than two months cooped up on board ship. The division’s Marine Brigade landed at Anzac on the cold, wet evening of 28 April, its Chatham and Portsmouth battalions fed piecemeal into the fight to the north. Thomas Baker, a young Marine in the Chatham Battalion, recalled the sound of the machine-guns up on the ridges, a ‘bonk, bonk, bonk, like a motor bike engine’. Its commander, Brigadier General Charles Trotman, had experience of Australian soldiers at war going back further than anyone else in the campaign: he had been at Suakin when the New South Wales contingent had served in the Sudan in 1885. On 1 May Trotman’s men were sent to the head of Monash Valley, standing out from the Australians and New Zealanders in their light khaki uniforms and sun helmets. They immediately came under heavy fire. Baker lay under machinegun fire next to an Australian who was swearing that ‘the bastards can’t kill me’. But they did, and Baker himself was hit in the foot. Pondering on the popular belief that a man’s past swims before him at such moments, he found that ‘I had not much past at only 19’. The Marines got off to a bad start at Quinn’s. While men of the Chatham Battalion waited for orders at the head of the main track into the post, they sat around on the graves of men of the 15th Battalion, smoking and chatting. The Queenslanders rebuked them, as Tom Chataway said, ‘rather violently’. Even the fact that they were hanging about annoyed some Australians. George Gower, a 28


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stretcher-bearer of the 15th, abused them as ‘a dam pest’ because ‘they stand around and wait for officers orders’. They needed closer supervision, and without it displayed little initiative. Chief Petty Officer Johnston of the division’s Royal Naval Air Service machine-gun squadron recorded with disgust how his men burnt the carrying handles of their guns for firewood rather than gather kindling from the bushes around them. Compared to the Anzacs—fit, trained and hardened by a winter in Egypt—the sailor soldiers of the Royal Naval Division were unimpressive. They were mainly young, less well trained and led by inexperienced officers. Again and again Australian observers describe them as ‘boys’ or ‘lads’. The Australians, though novices to war themselves, felt superior to these men. The Marines’ officers were in turn irritated that Australians failed to salute them. The Australasian contempt for the Royal Naval Division was all the more intense because the Anzacs had imagined and expected that the British troops they would fight alongside would be, as a Canterbury officer explained, ‘the finest and smartest infantry in the world’. When Australia had been settled the Royal Marines was, after all, already a century old. Despite their corps’ lineage, though, they seemed unable to withstand the strain of combat. Arthur Rhodes, Godley’s aide de camp, described how at Quinn’s some Marines ‘completely lost their heads and ran away down the hill’, leaving Australians to hold the line. Several diaries echo the common, cruel joke that RMLI stood not for Royal Marine Light Infantry, but for ‘Run My Lads, Imshi!’ Australasian scorn was understandable but not always justified. The first Victoria Cross won at Anzac was awarded not to Albert Jacka in May, but to Lance Corporal Walter Parker, a stretcher-bearer of the Portsmouth Battalion, for saving wounded men under fire just south of Quinn’s on 30 April. By definition Parker is exceptional, but the evidence of an anonymous sailor places the Marines in a different light. Wallace Saunders, a pragmatic, sceptical New Zealand sapper whose account of engineer work at Quinn’s is such a valuable record, at first shared his compatriots’ disdain. He recorded in his diary that ‘I don’t go much on the Naval Division [because] several have shot their toes off while cleaning their rifles’. Then he met a middle-aged sailor who offered to cut his hair. The sailor told Saunders of the division’s troubles, of Antwerp (‘where they got badly cut up’) and of the enervating cruise about the Mediterranean when the men should have been training. Saunders felt sorry for this man, whose eyes filled with 29


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tears as he described the division’s troubles: he knew what the Anzacs thought. When Saunders passed back down the trench minutes later he found his barber had been blown to pieces by a random shell. Perhaps the most telling evidence is statistical, that the Royal Naval Division went on to serve at Cape Helles and on the Western Front. Though numbering just 10 per cent of the Royal Navy’s strength it lost 40 per cent of its casualties for the entire war.

‘Semi-permanent fortification’: the line solidifies On the afternoon of 29 April Captain Hugh Quinn’s C Company of the 15th Battalion arrived to join the defence. The Queensland battalion would form Quinn’s main garrison through May, and would suffer accordingly. Four of the company’s five officers would die within the month; the fifth, Cyril Corser, would be wounded in the stomach. Corser’s platoon sergeant, Bob Hunter, whom Corser eulogised in an address in their home town of Maryborough, would soon emerge as a mainstay of the defence. Quinn’s arrival marked an intensification of the fighting in the post, which was to see, as Bean later wrote, ‘no cessation night or day, for eight months’. Already everyone was exhausted; the wonder is that anyone had energy or time to scribble entries in the stained and battered pocket diaries which are today among the treasures of the Australian War Memorial’s collection. By 30 April, Monash reported to Godley, his brigade was scattered from Pope’s Hill to Courtney’s and was ‘by no means . . . capable of coordinated action’. For those at Quinn’s the ordeal had an edge of urgency. The line there had solidified within 50 yards of the Turkish line, and for some of its length even closer. Douglas Hallam recalled an Australian or a New Zealander—as a Canadian he was unsure— describing Quinn’s as ‘right up against the Turks’. Few of the men who fought at Quinn’s had expected to have to fight like they did—especially the professional soldiers, despite the intensity with which they had pondered the war they had all foreseen. What did they expect? Through his book Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, a summary of the lessons of conflicts in Asia and Africa, Charles Callwell had become became one of the chief theoreticians of modern war, by 1914 Director of Military Operations in the War Office. Conscious of the effects of smokeless powder, machine-guns and rapid-firing artillery, Callwell had also published The Tactics of Today during the South African war, which showed the magnitude of changes, and later 30


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revised it to take into account the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war. But Quinn’s Post (and, indeed, much of the tactical circumstances on the peninsula) confounded current wisdom. It was impossible for attacking troops to form up in long, loose skirmish lines with yards between successive waves, advancing in ‘bounds’ of fire-and-movement, supported by field guns up to the moment of the decisive bayonet charge. The fighting on Gallipoli—from and against what Callwell called ‘semi-permanent fortification’—had few precursors in military thinking and experience. The closest that educated soldiers could come to categorising this sort of war was as what Field Service Regulations described as ‘siege operations’. This little red-covered book defined how the army thought and acted. Using it, the soldiers of 1914 were able to incorporate the seemingly new world of war of 1915 into a familiar framework. Quinn’s and the other positions which formed the Anzac front line were conceived of as part of a siege, and their situation, manning and tactics were informed by Field Service Regulations. Not only were all under the command of layers of military authority (from subalterns up to Hamilton himself), but officers were constrained by what we would today call ‘doctrine’. The book discloses the reasoning behind many of the decisions taken by those officers, and therefore the orders and directions they gave their men. Anzac was crowded, crazy, shellswept, chaotic to new arrivals and those concerned with order, but viewed through Field Service Regulations it was intelligible. In conventional military thought the Anzac line was part of what officers soon grasped was essentially a large-scale siege. Within the first week senior engineers were contemplating ‘long occupation of present ground’. Accordingly, Birdwood’s men began organising their position. Within a week of the landing, order gradually emerged from chaos in the Anzac area. At 4 a.m. on 27 April the first of 237 ‘standtos’ occurred, when weary men were roused in readiness for a dawn attack. Still, hundreds of men continued to simply make off to the beach (the 16th Battalion complained of ‘a continuous stream . . . going to the beach’ on the 29th). Seeking to stem what New Zealand brigadier Earl Johnston called the ‘vast amount of shirking and straggling going on’, picquets were sent to ‘sweep up batches of men who have established themselves in holes in the gullies’. Staff officers slowly imposed a sort of domestic routine. Barges deposited piles of crates on the beach; mule convoys carried rations and water up each night; in the trenches units sorted out routines and rosters to give men 31


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rest as well as turns in the firing line. Men even found time to swim in the Aegean at the Cove, though, as George Gower quipped, it was ‘mixed bathing—men & bullets’.

‘Popping away’: the machine-gunners save the day Though the Turks suffered hideous casualties, on the afternoon of the 27th they made another determined attack on Quinn’s. The Turkish attacks were the more terrible because they were seemingly unstoppable. Richard Casey, who from the 1st Division headquarters kept in touch with developments all over Anzac, described the attacks. As the Turks formed up in trenches or in hollows over the crest the defenders heard ‘a tremendous amount of jabbering’. Then they would see bayonets moving about as men gathered into the little groups in which they would go over. Listening tensely, the Anzacs would hear ‘Mohammed!’, ‘Ali!’, ‘Achmed!’, as men encouraged each other. ‘Presently,’ Casey wrote, ‘they tumble over the top of the trench and lumber forward.’ This was the most disconcerting part of the ordeal. The Turks did not dash or run, they advanced at a slow jog-trot, calling out ‘Ul-lah! Ul-lah!’ slowly as they moved. These great, terrifying, slow-moving columns would move into the cones and sheets of bullets spat out by defending guns and there, after recoiling in confusion, they would stagger backwards. The great killer of these men would be machine-guns. Conventional machine-gun tactics placed the guns not at right angles to potential targets, but so they could fire along lines of attackers— ‘enfilade fire’, in military jargon. Battalion machine-gun officers placed their guns to gain such positions from the start, and within days of the landing the start of a network of machine-guns was established across the Anzac front. It was guns of the Wellington Battalion on Russell’s Top which fired across the no-man’s-land of Quinn’s during the first hectic days. Joseph Milburn took charge of one of these guns, hazy about the date but certain that in firing across the valley from Russell’s toward Quinn’s ‘it was here I shot my first man’; in fact, the first of many men. It took some days for the brigade machine-gun officers to construct this deadly network of fire. Jesse Wallingford complained that guns were endangered because infantry officers intervened and pushed them forward; even in the first week he found both that machine-gunners killed or wounded could not be replaced and that the survivors were becoming increasingly tired. But 32


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the invaders’ ability to bring concentrated machine-gun fire against Turkish counter-attacks—the Wellingtons’ machine-gunners were said to have ‘saved the day’ on 27 April—enabled the Anzacs to hold on to their foothold. Unlike the rifle companies which were withdrawn to rest, if only for a day or so, trained machine-gunners could not be rested or replaced. Machine-gunners had been in the line since the landing and badly needed relief. One of them, Jack Dunn, the Masterton volunteer, kept a diary which shows how the depleted machine-gun crews managed to fire and still survive. Dunn’s crew ‘went into action “at the double”’ on the 27th, and soon after saw the crew of their companion gun killed before the gun was disabled. On that day he listed seven killed and four wounded among the Wellingtons’ machine-gun section. They were busy digging in on the 28th while ‘still holding our positions [and] popping away’, remarking on near misses and learning to ‘creep about like burglars’. The jaunty tone of Dunn’s diary would not long survive. On 27 April Anzac was divided into four ‘sector’ commands, numbered from the south. The Australian Division held 1 and 2, with the New Zealand brigade and the newly arrived mounted rifles holding the northernmost, number 4. Quinn’s lay in the vital central sector, number 3, extending from Courtney’s to Pope’s. By this time the beach-head seemed secure—but it was no bigger. Indeed, as Charles Bean recognised, ‘the enterprise had failed’: Birdwood’s force had not reached the objectives set for the first day and never would. May would see a series of further attacks on and attacks from the area soon known as Anzac, not least at Quinn’s.

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3 ‘The defence of Anzac’ Holding Quinn’s in May

he Anzac battlefield, today mapped, named and marked, was in April 1915 an unmapped, unnamed, unknown tangle of gullies and ridges which the men of Anzac had to learn their way about. Alfred Pfeifer, a Londoner who had enlisted in Bundaberg, did not learn until two weeks after the landing where he was: ‘Gabatepe name of Battlefield’, he recorded in his diary. Not until 5 May was Richard Casey able to record, ‘This place is now officially known as Anzac Cove’—as a word and not an acronym. The men’s diaries refer vaguely to ‘the firing line’ or ‘the Post’, and to Monash Valley as ‘the Gully’ or ‘the big donga’. It took weeks for uniformity to be established.

T

‘Under repeated attack’: Quinn’s on 1 May The stretch of trench Dawson had held on 25 April was named Quinn’s Post, probably by Monash, on 1 May. Monash summoned Captains William Forsythe of the 13th and Hugh Quinn of the 15th. ‘Which of you is senior?’ he asked. It was Quinn; in fact that day he became a major. ‘Well, we’ll call it “Quinn’s Post”.’ There were those who argued that it should have been named after Forsythe, others that it should have been named after Captain Robert Rankine of the 14th (‘I am told it certainly should have been called Rankine’s,’ Bean later scribbled in his diary). Men of Major Jack Walsh’s company of the 15th claimed that it should have been named Walsh’s Post in memory of their now-dead officer. New Zealanders would press Dawson’s claims, not to mention those of the unnamed lance corporal who held it when Rankine arrived. Monash’s robust decision took some time to 34


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‘THE DEFENCE OF ANZAC’

become accepted. Hugh Quinn referred to it as ‘Quinn’s Hill’ and ‘Quinn’s Corner’ in his final letter to his mother. Frank Armstrong simply called it ‘a death trap’. The post reverted to its main tenants in the campaign’s opening month, the Queenslanders of the 15th Battalion, often under the direction of Hugh Quinn himself. Despite his fame Quinn remains an enigma—more a name than a man who is known and understood. The 26-year-old son of a policeman, he had become a public accountant and was known around Charters Towers and Townsville as a sportsman and a rising young businessman. A member of the Kennedy Regiment, he had volunteered to join the expedition hastily despatched to seize German New Guinea in the war’s opening weeks. When the half-trained and unruly Militia were sent back from Port Moresby, Quinn, like many of his men, enlisted in the AIF. Quinn has been hailed as a heroic leader, though it seems that he emphasised strenuous active defence to the less dramatic but more demanding digging, which he seemed prepared to leave to the sappers. Though inspiring his company during the crucial early weeks, Quinn understandably had little energy left (and perhaps little understood the need) for engineering work. Neither Cannan, Quinn’s commanding officer, nor Monash rectified the lack (indeed Monash seems to have rarely if ever climbed up to Quinn’s from his headquarters in the valley). Carl Jess, Monash’s brigade major, admitted to Bean that there was ‘no trench system . . . directed from higher authority’ until later in May because no one wanted to admit that the force was penned into the confines of Anzac. Nor did Quinn devise an effective system for manning the trenches. Like many inexperienced officers, he tended to crowd the front lines, intimidating the Turks with firepower but equally exposing his men to sniping, enfilade fire from Baby 700 and the bomb-showers beginning on 27 April. He also operated a roster of hourly reliefs that left everyone dog-tired. Bob Hunter, a 22-year-old miner from Maryborough in Queensland, and one of Quinn’s platoon sergeants, often had to kick men awake as they drowsed in the front line. Tom Chataway described a frightening night when, after a tot of rum, he fell asleep and had to be repeatedly shaken awake. Chataway hinted that Quinn spent little time in the front line. Whether the charge was sour grapes or a failure to see Quinn’s need to supervise the entire post will never be known. While his name is widely known and the post named after him was celebrated, Hugh Quinn the man remains a shadowy figure. 35


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QUINN’S POST

Quinn and the post’s garrison faced frequent Turkish attacks or attempts to occupy trenches on the surrounding ridges dominating the position. Messages Quinn sent to Monash’s headquarters on 1 May show how perilous the post’s defence remained a week after the landing. While Monash’s staff were urging Quinn to ‘push on’ with digging saps and joining up T-head trenches ‘as a means of aiding our advance’, the reality was that Quinn and his men were hanging on under repeated attack. At dawn he reported, ‘Enemy advancing in large numbers on left flank of Captain Quinn.’ By lunchtime he was able to report on the repulse of these attacks. The 15th Battalion controlled ‘a fair field of fire’ on the right flank (that is, facing south) but on the left Turks were infiltrating through the scrub on what was called Bloody Angle, the next knuckle of the ridge to the north, digging trenches where it was ‘rather difficult to get at them’. In midmorning Turks rushed the centre of Quinn’s but were beaten off. ‘Can I get another periscope?’ he asked. Early in the afternoon Quinn’s subaltern Frank Armstrong, a Brisbane banker and Quinn’s friend, reported that 200 Turks were now on the left flank. They scrambled up the gully-side from Bloody Angle and threw grenades into the far left of Quinn’s. Quinn reported that Turkish machine-guns were enfilading his trenches and asked for reserves and more ammunition to be sent up. ‘Can I get one periscope?’ he asked again. With the arrival of the Turkish bombs—later called hand grenades —which began fizzing into the nearest trenches, Anzac troops hastily devised their own bombs. On 1 May John McGlinn, Monash’s staff captain, had sent an urgent signal to the Commanding Royal Engineer of the division asking for a supply. At first they seem to have imagined bombs to be a passing novelty. ‘Further bombs not required for tonight,’ McGlinn signalled. Except for pessimistic regulars like Jesse Wallingford (who had already ordered periscopes from an Egyptian factory), few of the invaders had come prepared for the trench warfare they now faced. Hamilton had anticipated the need for grenades and had asked for them in March but none had arrived. The invaders were forced to improvise and immediately established a ‘bomb factory’ near Hell Spit at which sappers and armourers filled tins with scrap metal, bits of wire and explosive. Though usually called ‘jam-tin bombs’, in fact any handy tin would do. By 4 June McGlinn was pleading for ‘as many cases as possible of the large hand grenades’, the first consignments of thousands that would be thrown between the two sides during the campaign. It was bombs that were to make Quinn’s the object of a particular horror. 36


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‘Bloody Monday’: the advance on Baby 700 The landing had failed to reach its objectives and the invaders’ line ran where they had stopped. This created what Bean called ‘the problem of Monash Valley’: that a route existed into the heart of the Anzac position. Quinn’s remained the ‘most precarious’ position. Now Birdwood’s staff devised what Godley described as ‘a local offensive movement . . . in front of Quinn’s Post’ (the first time the name appeared in an official document). The orders issued by Birdwood’s headquarters on 30 April had been bold: ‘The Army Corps will occupy tomorrow a general line in advance of its present position.’ Formation and staff officers, concerned that an ambitious attack could leave the line open to a Turkish riposte, had the plan reduced in scale and deferred, but despite Hamilton instructing Birdwood on 1 May that ‘no general advance’ should be made it went ahead. The orders for the advance were deceptively simple. Godley’s battalions were to advance from Quinn’s and Bloody Angle and, changing direction up-hill, under fire and at dusk, attack Baby 700. The attack finally got under way on 2 May. That evening the guns of the New Zealand and Australian field batteries and the Indian mountain guns opened a thin bombardment of the Turkish trenches on the slopes of Baby 700 and the clumps of trees at the head of Monash Valley and Dead Man’s Ridge. The trees were soon slashed and splintered; they have never returned. The attack, involving units of three brigades from three countries, starting from three different points, was badly coordinated. On the left, the Otago Battalion, which only started from its positions on Russell’s Top shortly before 7 p.m., had no chance of meeting the timetable. On the right, Harold Pope’s 16th Battalion rose from Quinn’s and began to toil diagonally up the crest of the ridge to the north or left. It was said that the men sang ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ as they climbed. (If they did, it can only have been for a few bars.) In the centre Granville Burnage’s 13th Battalion moved up the long valley. Looking to their right in the gathering dusk they could see men of Pope’s battalion tumbling down the slope. Though lacking tactical skill, Pope was at his best in inspiring his young, tired citizen soldiers, and he encouraged them quietly with, ‘It’s all right, boys . . . You’re quite safe . . . Just work your way along as far as you can go . . .’ Edwin Chabrel, an Adelaide clerk, composed doggerel describing the attack, verses copied out by another, 37


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Arthur Oxer. Chabrel’s verse portrayed the attack heroically, even boastfully: The Turks they saw our bayonets And thought of the cold steel Then faster up the Hillside did run And louder yet their squeal

In fact, the advance halted under heavy Turkish machine-gun fire, and the Australians and the Otagos who joined them began to scratch trenches in the stony hillsides. As they entrenched in the dark on the precipitous slopes they came under heavy enfilade fire—‘machine guns inflating our position’, the near-illiterate Harry Daniels recorded. A Kentish labourer working in Western Australia, he had not read Charles Callwell’s 1909 book, The Tactics of Today, but he could probably have corrected Callwell’s view that ‘it does not appear probable that machine guns will ever play a very great part in battle’. After midnight they were joined in the dark by Marines of the Portsmouth Battalion. The young Marines had already spent four days in continuous, confused fighting. They were told to advance up steep slopes in the dark and into heavy fire. Some, led by confused officers, wavered and withdrew. They were later blamed by the Australians and New Zealanders for their withdrawal from a position that was untenable by anyone. ‘Talk about a narrow squeak,’ Ernest Skinner told Gert in Fremantle, ‘every man who came through is lucky indeed.’ The unlucky ones lay scattered across the scrubby hillsides, the gullies, as Ellis Silas recalled (and later depicted) ‘choked with dead and wounded’. Men described to Red Cross investigators the deaths of some of their compatriots. Private Arthur Bushell told them how he had been with Private William Bealin, a 22-year-old cabinet maker from Moss Vale. ‘He kept with me,’ Bushell wrote, ‘[until about 1 a.m.] he was riddled by machine gun bullets and fell back into a shallow trench.’ With more pressing worries, Bushell recalled, ‘as he was dead we threw his body over the parapet’. Bealin, who is today buried in the Quinn’s Post cemetery, was not the only casualty. The stretcher-bearers of battalions not involved in the attack helped out. George Gower and the bearers of the 15th Battalion worked through the night, carrying 200 casualties down Monash Valley. ‘Poor old Dr [Luther] done up,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘never want to see such a night again.’ 38


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The attacking battalions had suffered severely. The 16th, the battalion most heavily engaged, by 4 May had lost over 650 of the 995 men landed. When the sun rose on 3 May men peeking out from trenches on Pope’s and at Quinn’s could see bodies hanging in the bushes on the slopes of what would soon be called Dead Man’s Ridge. Dozens of men—Otagos, Marines and Australians—lay about the scrubby hills and the ravine. Some, such as Private Nelson Berry of the Otagos, who had a bullet in his thigh, dragged themselves through thick scrub and down towards shelter and the stretcher-bearers. Others lay out in the sun, dying slowly, painfully and alone.

‘A definite scheme of defence’: the key to the defence of Anzac The failure of the Baby 700 attack left the Anzac line clinging to the seaward crest of the second ridge and on the footholds of Pope’s Hill, Walkers’ Ridge and Russell’s Top, with the head of Monash Valley still in Turkish hands. Pope’s and Quinn’s especially, which Bean described in his diary as ‘the jaws of Monash Valley’, remained precariously exposed to Turkish fire, the key to the security of the entire Anzac position. Again and again witnesses remarked upon how Quinn’s particularly had become the central position in the Anzac line. ‘My men are very tired and worn out,’ Quinn reported to Monash, ‘but are sticking it very well.’ A rough roster was established in which front and support lines were held for 48-hour shifts, with reserve companies sleeping in dugouts or in the open at the rear of the post. Battalions, mostly the 15th and 16th, took turns over two or three days though at anxious times—which was often—companies or squadrons were called up from the units supposedly resting in Monash Valley, and Quinn’s saw men from the 13th Battalion and the 1st, 2nd and 10th Light Horse. In improvising a roster, Monash and his staff devised what the Royal Naval Division’s war diary described as ‘a definite scheme of defence’. It formed the basis of the post’s garrison until the evacuation, a complex ballet of companies or squadrons in the firing line, in reserves and supports, with resting men perennially on ‘fatigues’. Until about 12 May parties of Royal Marines were also sent up to Quinn’s. They were used largely to support the Australian front-line 39


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units forming the post’s main garrison. On 7 May when Godley visited Quinn’s, a sudden shower of bombs in number 2 post wounded half of a party of nine young Marines in one bay, and they ‘came rushing out panic crying “Run! Run!”’. Thinking that a serious Turkish attack was developing, Godley reacted quickly, ordering men of the 13th Battalion to line the crest of the ridge while supports rushed to the place. His hasty orders (made without knowing the topography of the post in detail) put them in jeopardy, and six were caught by a Turkish machine-gun commanding that patch of ground. Godley’s own orderly, James Aitken (‘a charming boy . . . of a well-known Christchurch family’) was killed in the attack. The ridge-crest was later marked ‘dangerous ground’ on the maps made of Quinn’s; Aitken’s grave was lost. The 13th Battalion’s men stayed until the Marines pulled themselves together. (Visits to Quinn’s, Godley remarked, were ‘always exciting’.) The Marines’ reputation at Quinn’s has been tarnished by the poor impression their ‘lads’ made on arrival. But again, contrary testimony comes from two sources. One is their losses. The division’s war diary shows that the two Marine battalions lost over 700 killed, missing or wounded out of a combined strength of just under 1000 in less than a fortnight. The other source, Major Fred Jerram, was brigade major to Trotman, and later took over a company of the Portsmouth Battalion. A teetotal bell-ringer, Jerram had cheated death as a lieutenant—he avoided shipwreck by catching typhoid from tainted oysters. Early in May he chatted to Hugh Quinn (‘the bravest man I ever met’), who congratulated Jerram on the ‘hopeless gallantry’ the Marines had shown in the attack on Bloody Monday, ‘the bravest thing I ever saw’. Jerram thought that ‘recognition from a man like Quinn is worth all the official reports ever written’. Between the failure of the attack on Baby 700 and the first of the raids to be attempted from Quinn’s a week later, Anzac as a whole became somewhat quieter. At Quinn’s, however, continuous bomb fighting sapped the strength of the men packing the front line. By then the adjutants and clerks of the battalions had almost sorted out who had been killed, who had been sent to Egypt or Malta wounded, and who remained. The ‘continuous operations’ of the first week had cost the 15th Battalion eight officers and 350 men, more than a third of its strength. Fred Anderson, the Mudgeeraba bullocky, counted the effect on his eleven-man section, with five dead and one wounded by 7 May, the names of the dead punctuating his diary. Losses had been 40


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severe among key men. James Cannan reported that a sniper had ‘just got his machine gun officer, corporal and sergeant’, leaving the 15th Battalion without any trained men to direct his guns. Monash reported that with companies without officers it was ‘imperative that the brigade should be withdrawn’. It was in fact to remain in Quinn’s for another 27 days.

‘Simply a rabbit burrow’: describing Quinn’s Only a few sketch maps exist of Quinn’s in the first weeks, most drawn from memory years after. Edmund Kretchmar, a New Zealand-born lieutenant of the 16th, began a survey on 5 May but was sniped and killed while passing a loophole. A fellow lieutenant, Edgar Baker, spent another couple of hours ‘crawling about with a compass and notebook’, and he was shot and evacuated. No one seems to have attempted it again until the campaign’s closing weeks, and even the maps Bean commissioned vary. While differing over detail, the feature of Quinn’s everyone commented upon was how close the opposing lines were, though all gave different figures. In fact, the two lines were not parallel. At the southern end—number 1 post as it became— the two trenches were up to 40 yards apart. In the centre—numbers 3 and 4—the lines were as little as ten yards apart (Bean noted this during the 24 May truce, a more reliable estimate than a hasty squint through a loophole at ground level). The lines were so close that men of the opposing sides could hear each other coughing and talking; noises that drew bombs. Edwin Little—who became a lieutenant at Quinn’s on 30 April and was blinded there a month later—was able to recall the post in great detail. It was, after all, the last thing he ever saw. He served in the left-hand or northern sections, the closest to the Turks and the more dangerous. On the far northern edge number 6 post looked both eastwards to the main Turkish line and northwards out over Bloody Angle to Pope’s Hill and Baby 700, 450 yards to the north. Eventually sandbagged snipers’ nests were cut into its northern face, but in May Turkish snipers could still fire into the trenches. Tom Chataway described men pressing their backs to the rear wall and praying for nightfall. This part could only be reached by crawling through a hole from number 5 ‘like an Esquimeaux entering his ice hut’. Anyone in it during an attack must have known they would never get out. The trench had been widened to about six feet and recesses like armchairs 41


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had been cut along its front and rear faces. Little remembered how the walls in the left-hand part of number 5 post were stained with blood. Number 5 post was divided in half by a partition or traverse and it too was reached from number 4 by a roundabout route. Number 3 post, the section closest to the Turks, was ‘bomb swept’ and parts were already being roofed over with planks carried up from the beach depots. Already communication trenches were being dug through the crest of the ridge, with slightly larger ‘terraces’ scooped from the almost vertical reverse slope and ‘bomb-proofs’—large dugouts with strong overhead cover. Coming from a continent overrun and denuded by recent rabbit plagues, the image many men reached for when describing Quinn’s was the familiar one of a rabbit burrow. Quinn’s changed with every day of digging and buttressing and wiring, but for the first month the trenches did not change as much as they might have. Nearly a month after the landing they were ‘still very bad in Quinn’s’. Three weeks after the landing, a light horseman recalled, some could only be negotiated on hands and knees; Tom Chataway described officers adopting ‘caterpillar manners’. There were simply too few sappers—a few New Zealanders and no Australians—and infantry who worked only reluctantly. Despite the joke passed around the division that communication trenches should be deep enough for the exceptionally tall Godley and wide enough for the portly McGlinn, the front-line trenches remained undeveloped. Throughout May they remained relatively shallow, partly because no one, from Birdwood down, expected to be staying there, and because men were told they should be able to spring out of them easily. But the 4th Brigade’s men (‘more amateurish and casual’, Bean thought, than other brigades) were disinclined to dig. As a result, throughout May trenches at Quinn’s were shallower, their parapets lower and sandbag traverses thinner than they would later become. The corollary of the Australian flair for improvisation was, perhaps, that near enough remained good enough for too long. Behind the front-line trench the support lines reached back a dozen yards to the cliff-edge. The connecting saps were slightly deeper than the front line (because of the slope of the ground) and some had already become narrow tunnels. When Bean squeezed through one he pushed past a dead Turk’s boot and hand; somebody probably hacked them off with a spade before long. Late in May the sappers were able to plan and build a couple of ‘bomb-proofs’—large 42


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Monash Valley and Quinn’s Post

Quinn’s Post and the related positions around the head of Monash Valley, showing the sorties made by Anzac troops on 2 May (1), 9 May (2), 14 May (3), 4 June (4), 7 June (5) and 7 August(6), and the two main Turkish attacks, on 19 May (7) and 29 May (8). This map is based on one in The Story of Anzac, which unaccountably shows the opposing trenches at Quinn’s further apart than they were. Today Quinn’s Post cemetery is actually on Bloody Angle, a hundred metres north of the post itself. 43


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dugouts with timbered roofs, able to withstand the explosions of cricket-ball bombs and providing cramped and smelly but safe boltholes for the front-line garrisons. The biggest bomb-proof, in number 3 post, was to become the scene of one of the climactic fights for Quinn’s. Hugh Quinn’s own dugout was squeezed beside a plot of graves where the main track up the hill entered the post. ‘This place is hell,’ Tom Logan told his family in Forest Hill, ‘there are horrible things happening which I’ll not write about.’ But other men became inured to sights which only weeks before would have seemed revolting or shocking. Sapper Ernest Clifton reflected on how he sat alongside Australian corpses, buried and unburied, in a fold of the gully behind Quinn’s and still ate his bully beef. Ellis Silas, the artist who felt so heavily the burden of meeting his comrades’ expectations, described the scenes he saw and was later to depict in his Crusading at Anzac, one of the few representations of Quinn’s made by a participant at the time. He captioned one drawing ‘In the trenches— Quinn’s Post’. It showed one ‘poor chap . . . badly caught, but I don’t think he knew much about it. He was lying there some days’. Silas often had to climb over the man’s body as he ran messages about the post but ‘I didn’t dare look at his face—if there was any . . .’ Crusading at Anzac was published in 1916 and was bought by the families of men killed and wounded at Quinn’s. Despite attempts to conceal the reality of war and its effects, the truth would out, even at the time. By early May Quinn’s reputation had spread. When George Gower went up there on 6 May ‘for a few shots’—though he was a stretcher-bearer— he already knew it was ‘one of the hottest corners of the firing line’.

‘If I have to die . . . ’: the 9 May raid Though no further general attack was to be made from Anzac, Birdwood and Godley planned a series of raids, particularly at the most vulnerable part of the line, Quinn’s. Godley arrived at Monash’s headquarters on the morning of 9 May, insisting on ‘some offensive enterprise’. Monash and his battalion commanders argued against the plan, but were overruled. Accordingly, senior officers of the brigade had to direct their men to make an attack in which they did not believe and which they thought would fail. That attack was timed for the evening of 9 May. At dawn on 9 May a Turkish soldier began waving a dirty white rag on a long pole. Burford Sampson, in charge of number 3 section, 44


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thought that this flag heralded a truce, but it was soon followed by the explosion of a shell fired from the south. The rag had been an aiming mark, and shells—‘galling and accurate’—landed through the day, killing several reinforcements who had just arrived. Among them was Lieutenant Ken Anderson, a 20-year-old mining engineer from Hobart. It was, John Kidd, a Tasmanian in the mainly Queensland 15th Battalion, recalled, ‘a beautiful bright spring day’. Quinn’s was rarely shelled, but that day the Turks had placed a gun firing from Johnston’s Jolly, far to the south. About nine a shell landed near Anderson and shattered his legs, abdomen and spine; he died soon after reaching Guy Luther’s aid post. His men and fellow officers sent Anderson’s mother and father accounts of his death. They may have been confused because each gave differing accounts, and especially of his dying words. Major Robert Snowden said that he ‘never murmured’ but died peacefully within half an hour. A soldier’s sister passed on the news that he said ‘Goodbye 15th, play the game’ before dying. Another man claimed he said ‘Trust in God, lads and fight on’, a fourth wrote that ‘his last words were of . . . his father and mother’, another that they were ‘Cheer up, Fifteenth, this is nothing. God will be with you’. Perhaps Anderson’s parents took comfort from these words, and certainly from the respect in which their son was held (‘the whitest man that ever lived’) when they learned that his men laid him in the growing burial ground in Shrapnel Gully, ‘the lads deckrating his grave with bully-beef tins’. One of the witnesses, John Kidd, was to take a prominent part in the story of Quinn and Quinn’s Post three weeks later. That afternoon the 15th Battalion’s officers gathered around their young commanding officer, James Cannan, to hear what they were to do. There had been a ‘general issue of stripes and stars’ after the losses of the battalion’s first tour in the trenches. Several of the lieutenants had been commissioned for only a few days; some wore stars marked on their shoulder-straps in indelible pencil. Lieutenants Nikolai Svensen and Frank Armstrong carefully copied the orders into their field message books. There was ambiguity over the raid’s purpose. ‘The object of the assault,’ Cannan stressed, ‘is reconnaissance.’ Carl Jess, Monash’s brigade major, recalled that it was ‘a preliminary to performing a repeat of May 2nd show’, a more general attack. Arthur Hinman, a 24-year-old mining engineer who had served with the Tasmanian Rangers, objected, pointing out that the ground was swept by machine-guns. Cannan could only reply that he hoped that the 45


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Turkish trenches were thinly held and that ‘the main thing was to do what we had been asked to do’. The attackers were to be drawn from three battalions, most from the 15th, but a company of the 16th held the front line and a company of the 13th was sent in as reinforcements later, along with some Royal Marines. Even over such a small ground, the number of units involved inevitably brought confusion. Frank Armstrong and Burford Sampson, both Boer War veterans, were sombre. Chataway said that Sampson ‘knew exactly what was going to happen’. Like other men ordered to attack—on Gallipoli, on other fronts, and on both sides—the men of the 15th accepted that they had a duty to fulfil. As would become usual for raids from Quinn’s, the attack was to be made by three assault parties and three digging parties. Men of the assault parties were to carry their rifles and 250 rounds of ammunition, entrenching tools, rations and water, but no bombs. The unarmed digging parties were to take more ammunition, picks and shovels and empty sandbags. Eager to have what they saw as the honour of leading the attack, the young officers drew lots. Confusingly, two of the lieutenants who led their men over that night were named Armstrong. Frank, a new father, married for less than a year, led a digging party in the centre. Hutton Armstrong, a former regular sergeant in the Torres Strait garrison and a noted marksman, who had been commissioned in Egypt, led a party on the right. Newly arrived the day before, Hutton won. They waited impatiently for nine o’clock, Frank Armstrong writing a last letter to his wife Annie and scribbling a will, witnessed by his schoolfriend from Brisbane Grammar, Graham Wareham. A few minutes before nine they were told that the attack had to be put off for an hour, and endured ‘an endless wait’ as they listened to the ominous ‘plug, plug, of the bullets . . . hammering’ the parapet. Even Sergeant Bob Hunter felt the rising tension. He scrounged some rum for his men and he too scribbled a note in his paybook: ‘Dear Mum. This could be it. All the best. Love from Bob.’ The attack was to open with a 30-second burst from one of the 13th Battalion’s machine-guns. Svensen ordered Hutton Armstrong to ‘hop it’ and over they went. Soon one of his runners (‘lightly equipped, intelligent and fleet of foot’, Sampson recalled) returned to report that Hutton Armstrong and his men had in fact overrun the Turkish front line and reached some distance into the Turkish support line. His 26 men had taken prisoner about 30 Turks, who, he claimed ‘they were forced to despatch’ before returning to find and 46


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fortify the original objective. Nine of Armstrong’s party were killed, some having reached the Turkish dugouts and support trenches in Mule Gully. Shouting, and driving startled Turks before them, Hutton Armstrong’s men ran on down the slope for up to a couple of hundred yards. Two men, Sergeant Ray Tickner and Lance Corporal Frank Cawley, reached a group of dugouts and tents that they recognised as a headquarters of some kind. With ‘great coolness and courage’, as the citation to the DCMs they received put it, they ‘killed all the occupants, and cut the telephone wires . . . thus preventing communication from the rear’. Realising they were deep within Turkish lines, they made their way back to the front line. Though members of a Queensland battalion, neither was from that state. Tickner was a 22-year-old labourer from Alexandria in Sydney, Cawley a miner from Parramatta. Those watching anxiously from Quinn’s thought that they and all of Armstrong’s party had been wiped out. Waiting in the Australian front line they heard only what Sampson called ‘shouts, shots and general din’ in front. In the darkness a group of Turks between the centre and right parties remained undetected, adding to the confusion. Private Fred Blake, a Townsville labourer, encountered one of these men as he made his way across no-man’s-land with a digging party. Stewart Stormonth saw him smash the Turk’s head with the point of his pick. Frank Armstrong’s runner, Jack Craven, a signaller recently promoted corporal after his bravery a fortnight before, had waited in the crowded front line, barely able to move. He ran over to drag wounded men back to the front line before carrying messages to the party on the right. Disoriented, he approached the Turks, to be wounded in the head by a bomb. Frank Armstrong, finding machine-gun bullets striking his men from both sides, quickly scribbled a note. ‘I would not evacuate these trenches,’ he wrote, but reported that they were shallow and that ‘we are being heavily enfiladed’. Before he could send the message back he was distracted by Turkish bombing, and shoved the note into his tunic pocket. Meanwhile Hutton Armstrong’s party had built a bomb-stop—a barricade—in the Turkish trench they held, but had no bombs. Even worse, the Turkish trench had no traverses, that is, zig-zag sandbag barricades to prevent enfilade fire, and the trench could be seen by machine-gunners on Baby 700. The attack was failing. Svensen sent more men over, some from the 16th Battalion whose 47


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men were crowding into the front fire-trench, and then moved across no-man’s-land, surviving in the open when he should by rights have been hit. Indeed, survivors’ accounts make clear that there was a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing across no-man’s-land, though more went out than came back. John Toft, Fred Youden’s runner, crossed eight times. Captain Sam Harry, the 15th’s Philadelphia-born and Charters Towers-raised adjutant, went out to reconnoitre the Turkish trenches but ‘was never seen again’. On the right, Burford Sampson waited with his digging party for Youden to call them forward. Instead, a runner scrambled down, panting, ‘We’ve no officer, Mr Youden is shot.’ Leading his men forward, Sampson met Youden, being helped back, bleeding from a head wound. His men began strengthening the Turkish trench (it was ‘in a beastly filthy condition’, with rotting bodies half-buried in the walls) and digging a communication trench between the two front lines. One of them, Tom Chataway, found Sampson sitting on the Turkish parapet ‘cursing fluently’ and directing his party to ‘dig for all your worth’. He recalled the disgust they felt when obliged to hack parts of dead Turks out of the earth. The diggers, now helped by 20 Marines, ‘worked with a vim [with] flying bullets making all keen to get down and under’. By 6 a.m. the trenches had been connected and Sampson was able to send his wounded back protected from fire. Soon after Sampson was himself bruised on the left shoulder by a bullet which passed through three shovels, his haversack and map case. On the left, Cannan summoned Edwin Little about 4 a.m. and asked him to take a party out to the extreme left of the captured line to dig a communication trench on the northern edge of Quinn’s. As his men collected picks, shovels and sandbags Cannan urged them to hurry. ‘For God’s sake, Little,’ he said, ‘push on as we have very little time left before day break.’ Little and his men pulled themselves over the parapet of number 6 post and crawled across no-man’s-land, ‘to dodge the flying bullets’. When they reached the Turkish line they began to hack their way back toward Quinn’s, working at a frantic pace, one man at a time, each wearing himself out and stepping back panting as the next relieved him. They could hear Turks gathering in the Turkish support line and began firing their rifles over the parapets, blindly, in the usual way at Quinn’s. One little party was led by Corporal Herbert Broadbent, a 22-year-old clerk from Sydney who had been working in Rockhampton 48


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in 1914; another of the many young men who enlisted out of their home state. A big man, six feet tall, Broadbent was one of those natural leaders who so often emerge in a crisis. He steadied a group who did not know exactly where they were or who was firing on them. Soon bombs began bursting among Broadbent’s men. They thought at first they had been thrown by Australians—it was not the only time that men came under friendly fire that night—but they came from Turks pressing along the trenches, throwing bombs as they cleared each bay. The attackers were by now mixed up along the length of Turkish trenches. More parties joined them, including 30 men of the 16th Battalion under Captain Eleazar Margolin, who crowded into the already packed trenches, pushing Turkish and Australian dead over the sandbags. Margolin’s runner was Ellis Silas, ‘the joke of the Battalion’, who hesitated to push in until a man pointed out ‘you’re not in a drawing room’. That night Silas crossed no-man’sland with messages six times, though he had already confided to his diary that ‘my nerves have quite gone to pieces’. But the impetus had gone out of the attack, and the attackers awaited the inevitable Turkish counter-attack. In the meantime they endured a growing enfilade fire. Tom Chataway evoked their feelings, describing the horror of being ‘cooped up in a straight trench, four feet deep, with enfilading fire from both flanks and no hope of securing cover . . .’ Margolin was hit in the chest but—in the classic manner—was saved by the bullet hitting a thick pocketbook. On the left somewhere near Little’s men was Sapper Ernest Clifton, of Pahiatu in the Wairarapa, who described in detail at the time his horror when he went forward with the Australians. Clifton was to direct the digging and building of the infantry entrenching in the Turkish trenches. Just getting to the Turkish line was an ordeal. More than half of the group he was with were killed or wounded in what he, like Armstrong, called a ‘deathtrap’. ‘There seemed to be a bad want of cooperation between our guns, machine guns and infantry,’ Clifton wrote. He heard the Australians ‘shouting that our machine guns were firing on them . . . whether true or not . . . the idea seemed to demoralise them’. Some men ran back and some returned, but New Zealanders and Australians lay hugging the earth for about half an hour while bullets spattered about the now-burning scrub. Svensen, on one of his trips from the Turkish trench to the Australian firing line, found men of the 16th Battalion ‘very much shaken’, crouching in the trench and even ‘retiring by the rear communication 49


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trenches’. He roused them out and made them fire over the parapet, but soon all were killed or wounded. Svensen too was hit in the face and later in the chest. His last recollection of Quinn’s before he was carried down to Guy Luther’s aid post was ‘a glimpse of some bushes, some dead bodies and bayonets moving along the Turkish trenches’. The bayonets signalled a series of determined Turkish counterattacks, preceded by bombs, which the Australians could neither stop nor reply to. Gradually the Australians were pushed back along the trenches they had seized and then back across no-man’s-land, along the shallow communication trench now joining the two front lines or more hazardously over the top. Casualties were heaviest during this hour as they had to pass through heavy Turkish fire to reach safety. Many dead and even some badly wounded men were left behind: Red Cross investigators later recorded how several men were left behind, ‘almost dead’. Survivors, like the bruised Burford Sampson, were surprised that they had lived to see another dawn. His tunic, shirt, haversack and water-bottle were riddled with bullet holes. Tom Chataway went down with a bullet in the neck and narrowly avoided being pushed over the parapet with the dead. As the light strengthened snipers went to work, firing at Australians illuminated by the rising sun, and more died. Hutton Armstrong was shot looking over the parapet while checking that his men were returning. Soon after, Frank Armstrong was sniped. A witness described him as ‘perturbed’ when the survivors returned. He said, ‘All my boys are killed or wounded out there,’ and tried to climb out of the trench. Before Jack Craven could restrain him, Armstrong was shot dead through the head. Hugh Quinn, beside him, was grazed by another bullet. Armstrong had given his schoolmate Graham Wareham the letter to Annie. Wareham was himself shot dead soon after but the letter was found in his effects. Arthur Hinman, who had pointed out the Turkish machine-guns, died of his wounds alone in no-man’s-land. In the darkness and noise command arrangements broke down. Though the area was quite small—about the size of a line of suburban backyards—confusion prevailed. When Edwin Little ran back from the front line he found Cannan, who asked offensively, ‘Well, Little, it was too hot for you, was it?’ (Sampson described Cannan as ‘much cut up’, excusing his rudeness.) Little shrugged off the slight and tried to report what he had done. ‘Oh, damn the report!’ Cannan replied. Little, showing admirable restraint for a young man under strain, realised that ‘he was thinking of his broken battalion’. Cannan asked 50


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Little to return, adding that as some of the reinforcements had ‘shown signs of nerves’, he was to ‘shoot the first man that shows any signs of panic’. Little, meeting men dragging the wounded Broadbent back on a waterproof sheet, had his men throw bombs to keep the Turks away but soon they too were obliged to run back across no-man’s-land to number 6 post. At least one badly wounded man was said to have been killed rather than be left to the returning Turks. Australian dead thrown out of the Turkish trench were recognised by their friends as they peered through periscopes. Clifton described the attack as ‘a disastrous bungle’, but he also drew attention to ‘a want of ordinary leadership’, damning the ‘whitelivered beggars’ who dug scrapes in the shelter of the gully-sides, keeping tools back from where they were needed. ‘And the worst of the ghastly affair,’ he concluded, was that ‘the best men get shot’. They included seven young officers of the 15th killed or missing. The survivors bitterly criticised what they had been asked to do. Stewart Stormonth said that if the Turkish trenches had simply been filled in then evacuated, fewer than 50 men would have been lost. Afterwards, when Monash came around the survivors’ bivouacs, he spoke to Staff Sergeant Ernest Corbett and asked about the machine-guns. Corbett told him that they had not been used well. Monash contradicted him—though he had spent the night at brigade headquarters—and looked at Corbett sternly. As Monash moved on, Edwin Little heard Corbett murmur softly but forcefully that Monash was ‘a bl——dy liar!’ Corbett’s scorn was justified. A regular, just a week before he had been recommended for the DCM for rallying his machinegunners and, though wounded, keeping them in action. Corbett’s assertion did not damage his career: he was commissioned that day and survived three years fighting on the Western Front. Their generals warmly congratulated the survivors. George Gower, who had helped carry away the wounded, described how Cannan read a letter from Godley who ‘was proud of us’. At Anzac, Birdwood put a positive gloss on the reports he read, telling the 15th Battalion that the attack had ‘inflicted a punishment on the enemy far outweighing their losses’. Staff put about that the Turks had suffered 300 killed and 2000 wounded, wildly exaggerated claims that could not possibly be true. While appreciating the men’s courage, not all the generals saw the lessons of the attack. The next day Ian Hamilton, reading the reports arriving at Imbros from Anzac, reached the conclusion pressing upon commanders on both sides of the lines in the 51


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war’s first year. Building on what he had seen in Manchuria, he told the courtier Clive Wigram that the ‘modern scientific mechanism of machine guns etc. . . . is too much for the old straight-forward dashing form of attack’. Though a failure, the attack of 9 May would not be the last of its kind made, on Gallipoli or elsewhere. For the time being there seemed to be little alternative. The men of the 15th and 16th Battalions buried their dead behind the post and wearily clambered down the track to rest. Then the surviving officers and sergeants called the company rolls. Ellis Silas, the sensitive 16th Battalion signaller who had run across no-man’s-land many times, evoked the scene both in words and drawings and later in a painting. He recalled how in the chill dawn ‘name after name would be called’ followed by ‘a deep silence’, a silence apparent despite the crackling of rifles and the noise of explosions on the ridge-crest above. His painting, The Roll Call, was to become one of the iconic images of Anzac. It depicts what he described as ‘a thin line of weary, ashen-faced men’, the men on whom rested the defence of Quinn’s and the security of the entire Anzac line.

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4 ‘Some uneasiness at Quinn’s’ Two attacks and a truce

hough Godley told Monash that he was pleased with the results of the 9 May raid, it had in fact worsened the situation for the garrison. The digging parties had almost finished the communication trenches across no-man’s-land, which now allowed both sides to approach the other more closely to continue the bombing duel characterising the post. With great courage men crawled out from Quinn’s with sandbags, making barricades to block the communication trenches connecting Quinn’s and the Turkish line. For the next fortnight Turks and Australians crouched on either side of these barriers, watching for bombs and hurling their own in reply, one of the most nerve-wracking tasks on Gallipoli.

T

‘By Jove it is a warm corner’: bombing at Quinn’s The single most important feature of Quinn’s, the thing that explained its fearsome reputation, was that much of the post was within bombing range of the Turks and became the site of an almost continuous bomb-fight. ‘Bombs on Quinn’s’, a typical entry in Harold Pope’s diary, was a reminder of how bombs and Quinn’s were forever associated. Though Robert Rankine had asked for netting on 30 April, little could be done at the time and for weeks the bombs rained in, especially in numbers 3 and 4 posts. Hugh Quinn told his mother that ‘their bark is worse than their bite’ and professed that it was ‘very cheerful and amusing to dodge bombs’, but conceded of the post named after him, ‘By Jove it is a warm corner.’ Others were more candid. A South African veteran told Edwin Little that ‘one night up 53


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there was as bad as the whole Boer War’. Bean wrote that the strain of just holding Quinn’s was the equivalent of a battle. Men soon worked out that bombs could be avoided or smothered. When one arrived fizzing on the trench floor there would often be a general stampede around a traverse (a response hampered by the way the front-line trenches were often ‘packed’ in the first month). Bolder men found that explosions could be muffled by throwing a sandbag or a greatcoat over the bomb. One man threw his folded greatcoat over a bomb and sat on it, admitting afterwards, ‘I’m a bit shook up, though.’ Responding to the Turks’ grenades, boxes of jam-tin bombs began arriving at Quinn’s early in May. They first were handled gingerly and used sparingly—Edwin Little’s men sat eyeing their first bombs warily before letting a former miner light one and throw it. They were such a novelty that few knew what to do with them initially. One man told Richard Casey that ‘we don’t know which end to put in our mouths’, others threw them without lighting them—a gift to the Turks—but soon most of the output of the improvised ‘bomb factory’ at the Cove was being hurled from Quinn’s. ‘Certainly bombs were caught and thrown back,’ Robert Wordsworth, a light horse bombing officer, affirmed. Indeed, two men of the 15th Battalion, Corporal Thomas Maher (‘a brave and expert bomb thrower’) and Private Wilfred James, another British Anzac, received the DCM for doing exactly that at Quinn’s early in May. But both sides soon realised that a bomb with a five- or sixsecond fuse was useless, not because it would be returned, but because the delay gave its intended victims time to scuttle around a traverse or damp it with a sandbag. Accordingly, shorter-fused bombs arrived, allowing just a couple of seconds for reaction. Fred Anderson, in telling of how he was ‘shoved into the firing line [in] one of the worst corners’ of Quinn’s, described how ‘one man was struck by a bomb only two paces away on my left, and later another bomb caught the two men on my right, while a third tore into the sandbags behind my head’. He wrote jauntily of having ‘a lively time’, but was killed by a bomb six days later: Mudgeeraba’s first volunteer became its first fatality. Even medical officers were appalled at the wounds inflicted by the bombs, for they drove jagged pieces of metal into men’s bodies from close range, causing ragged, horrific injuries. Will Harvey, a 16th Battalion signaller, described the injuries his friend Edgar (probably Edgar Bulling) suffered on 7 May. The bomb exploded at head-height, 54


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splinters hitting him in half a dozen places, the worst being a fragment that caused a five-inch wound through his chin, broke all his teeth and lodged in his neck. Edgar spent six weeks in hospital in Alexandria and, to everyone’s surprise, returned. ‘The Doc [Roy MacGregor] sent him away again,’ Harvey explained to his family, ‘he was a wreck.’ David Crosby (one of the few Queensland jackeroos to hail from Liverpool in Britain), also of the 16th, was wounded on 17 May. He wrote reassuringly to his friends back at Quinn’s, but they knew that he had been ‘badly knocked about’, wounded in the thigh, arm and stomach, and the top of his penis sliced off. Burford Sampson recorded that he had ‘suffered agony but is mending’. Crosby was evacuated to Australia by October but re-enlisted in 1916, having married in the meantime. Bombs were a danger to those who threw them as well as to their targets. Joseph Beeston, treating the 4th Brigade’s wounded in his dressing-station on the beach, recorded in his diary an encounter with one of the 15th Battalion’s wounded. ‘A humourist’ arrived, describing how ‘his cobber’ found that a bomb’s wick would not light. ‘Bugger you, light!’ he said, and blew on it. ‘The bloody thing blew his head off. Gorblimey, you would have laughed.’ His friend and colleague Percy Fenwick, in the New Zealand hospital at the other end of the beach, told the same story, as did several other diarists. Could the story have been false when experienced officers recorded it? It suggests how war wounded men’s minds as much as their bodies. Ellis Silas at Quinn’s confessed to his diary that he did not ‘seem able to get a grip of myself’. He felt ‘utterly crushed and unmanned’, though resolving to ‘stick it to the last’. By mid-May he was taking morphine from the medical officer to help him through, and was shortly afterward evacuated with shell shock. By then welcome reinforcements had arrived in the shape of the 2nd Light Horse. Hugh Quinn told his mother of how his men received the ‘cheering news’ that the light horse would relieve them before they ‘at once vacated the trenches’.

‘We know you’re there!’: the 2nd Light Horse arrives In Egypt the men of the light horse and mounted rifles left behind were restive. The arrival of wounded from Gallipoli intensified the speculation and they hung about the doors of hospitals asking after friends and acquaintances, gaining a sobering glimpse of what war could mean. By the first week in May most of the light horsemen were 55


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expecting to be called over to join the infantry. Many went to the brothels for what they feared might be the last time—Henry Tiddy’s raids pulled out 105 men, including five wounded just returned from Gallipoli. The issue of infantry kit, including puttees and big packs, confirmed the rumours. Transports carried the light horsemen across the Mediterranean and the Aegean (‘where all those Grecian Heroes used to romp about’, Terence McSharry noted). Enjoying the beautiful spring weather, they sat on deck peering curiously at the spectacle of the warships bombarding Achi Baba as shells burst on the ridges on the horizon, brilliantly illuminated in the rays of the setting sun. ‘Struth, this is better than the pictures!’ one man said. Chaplain George Green observed that the light horsemen ‘never entirely lost the schoolboy ardour’ with which they landed. Private Charles Ruddle later described to his mother how they waited on board, sleeping fitfully, listening to the rattle of rifles on the ridges above the cove, anticipating their arrival on the peninsula. They were unprepared. Lieutenant Robert Wordsworth claimed that not a man in his regiment had fired a rifle or dug a trench, and knew nothing of infantry tactics: ‘We didn’t know how to attack at all.’ They were soon to learn, the hard way. By this time the infantry were ‘so mixed up in Quinn’s Post’ that Monash asked for them to be ‘entirely withdrawn’ and urged that Godley find ‘an entirely fresh garrison’. The light horse arrived at just this time. On the morning of 12 May the men formed up on the beach to march up the gullies toward the firing line. Infantrymen gathered to cat-call and chiack them. ‘Where’s your Gee-Gees?’ they called, watching the light horsemen struggling with the unfamiliar infantry kit. Dirty, red-eyed infantrymen and Marines—now regarded as veterans—gave the newcomers lurid descriptions of what they might expect; not that any hurried briefing could properly prepare the newcomers. Terence McSharry, soon to know Quinn’s as well as anyone, noticed the little cemetery patch with its packing-case crosses: ‘seems very sad’, he wrote in his diary. The untiring Sergeant Bob Hunter stayed behind to school the new chums but otherwise the infantry left the light horsemen to find out for themselves how to smother bombs. The infantry, Fred Robson recorded, looked forward to a six-day spell and cleared off. The Turks, detecting the relief from the sounds coming from the opposing trenches, quickly deduced that the new garrison were novices. They 56


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even established their identity, presumably from officers calling out, ‘Come on, Second Light Horse!’, as they entered a world which none of them could have imagined. Seemingly within minutes the Turks opened a furious fire. The light horsemen could neither hear each other speak, nor look over the parapet: one officer who attempted to fire his revolver over the sandbags was wounded in the arm (he later lost it). Officers, including Guy Luther (who as a medical officer had no business in the trenches), went around shouting into the ears of the startled light horsemen, ‘This is all a ruse. They know you’re new . . . don’t fire—lie doggo.’ After a while the fire slackened off—but then the bombs began. In the interval between the bullets and the bombs some of the men claimed to have heard a Turk shout out, ‘Come on Second Light Horse—you bastards!’ In the unfamiliar, shallow, dusty trenches, the light horsemen were startled when the bombs landed among them, fizzing and smoking until they exploded with terrifying bangs. These men had either never heard of bombs or vaguely associated them with the Crimean war. They began to pass George Green envelopes, just in case: ‘If anything happens to me, Padre . . .’ Joseph Ranford told his wife that the light horsemen all thought a lot of Green, because ‘he knocks about among us taking his chance of stopping a bullet’. All that afternoon the Turkish bomb shower continued. By the end of it the 2nd Light Horse had sent 33 men to Captain McCartney’s dressing-station. The strain proved too much for these raw young men. All but Major Dugald Graham’s squadron were withdrawn, and the infantry returned. Fred Robson was disappointed that the 15th Battalion had only one rather than six days’ rest.

‘Brothers, we love you!’: speaking with the enemy One of the threads running through the story of Quinn’s Post is the paradox that while it saw the most bitter and persistent fighting of any position on the peninsula it was also the scene of the most frequent communication between the two sides. Sometimes the contact was crude, cruel and violent. Early in the 15th Battalion’s time there, Private Joe ‘Ganger’ Slack (a middle-aged railway labourer whom Bean praised as the archetypal Australian soldier) threw a hambone into the Turkish lines, calling out, ‘Here you bastard—you can have it now.’ After an affronted silence, the insult to the Turks’ religious sensibilities brought an hour of heavy bombing. Ganger’s mates were 57


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furious at him for having provoked the barrage; more sophisticated attempts to reach the men occupying the nearby trenches were also unsuccessful. Even talking normally at Quinn’s could attract a bomb. But even if speech within the post was hazardous, the two sides were already talking to each other across the shot-blasted remnants of scrub between the trenches. On 13 May a Turkish soldier crept into the blocked communication trench in no-man’s-land, wearing a discarded British cap and calling out softly, ‘Greek, Greek.’ He was pulled over the sandbag barricade, blindfolded and taken off to Monash’s headquarters. Later the Turks threw over a message in French, signed ‘Sergeant’, inviting the Australians to desert. The following day they pitched a note into the light horse lines, which Captain Gilbert Birkbeck copied out. It sought to refute the ‘lie’ that men captured by the Turks would be killed. The note reassured them that ‘everybody of you who has been taken prisoner will be treated just as well as the international law commands’. It went on to say that the Entente armies had lately been ‘beaten awfully and suffered tremendous losses’, detailing Russian defeats in eastern Europe and claiming that Calais and Warsaw were in danger. Ominously—and as it turned out, accurately—it ended, ‘there is no chance for you to get the Narrows’. The best-documented contact was that of Aubrey Herbert. An urbane and eccentric staff officer (a product of Eton and Balliol, the Tory benches in the House of Commons and the Irish Guards), Herbert became one of the most perceptive witnesses at Anzac, not least because he had spent time in Turkey before the war, and spoke Turkish. He encountered Hugh Quinn in the first week of May when he visited the post to hold a shouted conversation with the Turks. He found Quinn an engaging character, ‘tall and open-faced, swearing like a trooper, much respected by his men’. Herbert had already survived one British disaster, the retreat from Mons. Several times he climbed up to Quinn’s to a short sap just by Edwin Little’s Esquimeaux hole to direct a megaphone toward the trenches opposite, trying to entice Turkish soldiers to desert. Charles Bean, who later went up with him, described Herbert’s technique: ‘Brothers, we love you!’ (bomb) ‘We English are the friends of all Mussulmans!!’ (whiz, whiz) ‘If you come in we will feed you and give you cigarettes!!!’ (shrapnel) 58


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Herbert’s appearance soon became unwelcome, the usual response to his presence being a shower of bombs. Percy Fenwick, the New Zealand doctor, recorded one man’s wry comment that as a politician Herbert would have been used to having rotten eggs thrown at him. In return, the Turks devised their own propaganda campaign, responding with surprising speed and vigour. George Gower described them abusing the Australians as ‘kangaroo shooting bastards’. They threw over pamphlets, telling ‘Colonials’ that ‘the British Government was forcing us to fight’, that they would not be paid or fed, and that if they surrendered they would be treated well. Later in May, some of the men attacking across no-man’s-land carried sheaves of Allied propaganda leaflets to strew about the Turkish trenches. Overall, however, except that Herbert’s blandishments attracted a few disgruntled Greeks and Kurds to desert, the propaganda from both sides was misdirected and ineffectual.

‘They hadn’t Buckley’s chance’: the 2nd Light Horse’s attack Birdwood visited Quinn’s often, explaining to William Malone’s family later that ‘I felt constantly apprehensive’ about Quinn’s, ‘our most dangerous and difficult post’—an apprehension that was justified. Quinn’s was soon to make a more personal impact on him. While visiting number 3 post on 14 May, Birdwood took Burford Sampson’s periscope and peered over the parapet. Sampson warned him that he had had two periscopes smashed that morning. Birdwood was expressing astonishment at the number of corpses in front of the post (‘Are those Turks?’ he asked) when ‘bang went the top mirror’, shattered ‘into smithereens’. It deflected a bullet down onto his head—doctors dug scraps of nickel from his infected scalp months later. In a letter to Hamilton he described how he was ‘prospecting’ within 30 yards of the Turkish trench and had been sniped through the sandbags on the parapet by ‘a rascal opposite’. Birdwood breezily remarked to his son’s tutor at Clifton College (Charles Bean’s old school) how his skull was too thick to break. Godley abused Sampson for letting his parapets become thin, a charge which he indignantly denied. Godley had withdrawn the light horsemen because of what Monash called their ‘fidgettyness’, leaving a squadron to ‘take Turkish trenches tonight’. Dugald Graham’s C Squadron was chosen 59


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to make an attack in the early hours of 15 May. Its aim was to retain control of the front line long enough to fill in the northern of the two communication trenches running across no-man’s-land. Graham, a 42-year-old sugar grower from Ayr and Boer War veteran, was another of the Militia officers so prominent in the Gallipoli campaign. George Green, the brigade chaplain, who stayed at Quinn’s with Graham’s men, described them as ‘bravely silent’ in the face of this prospect. ‘Most of them by this time could guess what they were in for,’ he wrote. They had been at Quinn’s long enough to know the volume of fire that both sides could put over the parapets and few were under the illusion that they would emerge unscathed. The attackers were due to go over the top at 1.45 in the morning, in full view of the Turkish machine-guns commanding no-man’s-land from Baby 700. Three groups of light horsemen were to go over, followed by a digging party, instructed to fill in the communication trench. Burford Sampson, who had given the light horse officers some tips on taking over, watched them prepare for the attack. ‘We all knew before they kicked off what they were in for,’ he recalled for Bean in 1923, ‘they hadn’t Buckley’s chance and knew it.’ He described the attack concisely: ‘they were met with rifle fire and showers of bombs and were bloodily repulsed’. As soon as the first men clambered over the parapet the Turkish guns opened fire from German Officers’ Trench and Baby 700, followed seconds later by a hail of bombs. Only four men reached the Turkish parapet unscathed. They decided that it was pointless to remain and returned via the shallow shelter of the remains of the communication trench. More than 30 lay in no-man’s-land, some still, others struggling to crawl to shelter. Stretcher-bearers and others dashed out in ones and twos to pull some back. Dugald Graham ordered the digging party to remain in Quinn’s but himself climbed over the sandbags and ran out to help his wounded. He fell, shot in the chest. He was carried in and died in McCartney’s aid post a few minutes later. The squadron’s senior surviving officer, Gilbert Birkbeck, ordered the survivors back. The few minutes of chaos had cost the light horse 24 killed—most of whose bodies lay in the narrow space between the lines—and 21 wounded, some of whom could not be reached. At daybreak they were shot by the Turks before the survivors could go out to rescue them, though they surely would have died too. Terence McSharry wrote coldly how ‘the Turks shot our 60


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wounded as they lay’, a report Bean repeated. Eric Mulvey, the patriotic surveyor from Maitland, was among the dead. A mate wrote to Eric’s family assuring them that though his body had been left in the Turkish trenches the Turks would have buried him because they showed ‘a great respect for our dead’. The attack had failed: the trench was filled only with more corpses. Ernest Clifton wrote candidly that it ‘must have been badly bungled again’. A ‘Report on Sortie made from Quinn’s’ by a staff officer hints at misgivings in headquarters. While optimistically claiming that the attack had resulted in less intense bombing, and even that it had forestalled a Turkish attack, he also acknowledged that the Anzacs might have fallen for a ruse. He wondered whether the ‘persistent bomb throwing’ to which the light horse had been subjected had been ‘done with the object of inducing us to make a sortie, for which they had prepared’. It was a caution that was to go unheeded. Only fourteen of the 60 attackers had returned unharmed, and they were shocked by the disaster. Even the corps war diary, which tended to the optimistic, described the survivors as ‘a little rattled over the affair’. The light horsemen passed what Henry Tiddy called ‘a rotten night’. They buried the few of their comrades’ bodies they had been able to recover. Their families, told that they were ‘missing’, asked after their fate for months. The survivors, questioned by Red Cross officials, could give only vague answers. ‘Casey went out in a bayonet charge from Quinn’s Post . . . and never returned,’ one of the regiment’s machine-gunners wrote in Cairo early in 1916, ‘no one knows what happened to him.’ Two majors who were to take a prominent part in the light horse’s effort at Quinn’s, George Bourne and Tom Logan, stood at their men’s graveside, struggling to retain their poise as Chaplain Green read the burial service. Green resolved privately to become ‘studiously callous’ at funerals in future, foreseeing that unless he armed himself against grief he would not last a further week. Judging from the absence of emotion in many survivors’ accounts it seems that others made similar resolutions. The next morning the survivors of Graham’s squadron stumbled out of the post and made their way down the gully. Chaplain Green watched their shocked, strained faces as they passed. Perhaps he reflected on the ‘schoolboy ardour’ the light horsemen had exhibited a few days before when they first looked upon the hills where so many of them were to die. 61


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‘The bastards are on top of us!’: the 19 May attack By this time Terence McSharry was back at Quinn’s, having transferred from the 2nd Light Horse to the 15th Battalion. James Cannan, whom he had known in Queensland, had asked him to become orderly officer and later adjutant in the post. McSharry became with Hugh Quinn and later William Malone one of the men most closely connected with the defence of the post. Despite the shortage of sappers and the difficulty of finding infantry working parties, by mid-May the trenches at Courtney’s and Quinn’s were at last connected, and on 16 May Godley was able to walk along parts of his division’s front line. By this time Harry Chauvel had arrived. Senior to Monash, he took over command of the sector, though most of its troops belonged to Monash’s brigade. Monash found Chauvel as ‘fidgetty’ as his men and, chagrined at being outranked, was ‘rather annoyed’ by his interference. Though 18 May drowsed ‘as quiet as a lazy holiday afternoon’ at Anzac headquarters, at Quinn’s the bomb duel continued. Fred Anderson, the Mudgeeraba bullocky, was killed that day. Lance Corporal Henry Dillon, a comrade, wrote to his sister from a hospital in London to explain that he had just been wounded in the right shoulder and left hand when ‘the last I see of poor Fred he was fighting as only a brave man knows how’. Dillon explained reassuringly that ‘a bomb death is instanainious’. Bean, suspicious of the relative quiet elsewhere, went to bed thinking ‘we shall probably be attacked tonight’. On the evening of 18 May word came from corps headquarters of unusual movement on the Turkish side of the peninsula. Royal Naval Air Service observers flying over the Narrows had seen boats bringing Turkish troops ashore at Maidos. Intelligence officers predicted that an attack was imminent and sector commanders were warned to be vigilant. Soon after midnight heavy fire fell on the Anzac line. The corps war diary described the ‘fire directed chiefly on Quinn’s Post’ as ‘the hottest known since the landing’. Bean described it as the most furious rifle fire Australian troops ever endured. Shortly before 3 a.m. attacks began all along the Anzac line, from Russell’s Top in the north to Bolton’s Ridge in the south. For six hours the Turkish infantry attacked, in long, slow-moving waves, chanting their rhythmic ‘Ullah! Ul-lah!’ as they jogged up the slopes and into the defenders’ fire. Their attack was uncoordinated, however. The Turks fell on various 62


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sectors at different times, giving the Anzac machine-guns and artillery the opportunity to meet each assault in turn. From about 4.30 attacks began against the trenches in number 3 sector. By 5 a.m. large bodies of Turkish troops began massing near Quinn’s and Courtney’s. Two companies of the 16th Battalion were called up to reinforce the 15th Battalion and the troop of the 2nd Light Horse in garrison. Turkish fire and then attacks began to press heavily against Quinn’s. The massing of Turkish troops on the brow of Mule Valley was several times broken up by machine-guns firing from north and south of Quinn’s, but the lines were so close that defenders at Quinn’s threw bombs and even fired revolvers into the packed masses emerging from the opposing trenches. In number 6 post was Joseph Sparks, a Manly clerk who had survived the 9 May sortie and been commissioned lieutenant. Sparks was scanning the Turkish lines through a periscope, watching the bayonets clustering above the parapet. Spotting the periscope, the Turks began throwing bombs at it, and Sparks’s men retaliated. A few minutes later Sparks’s hand was blown off—some said he was trying to throw a bomb back—and he was helped away. Many of the several hundred defenders killed or wounded that day had exposed themselves recklessly, with a dozen dead and 40 wounded at Quinn’s. As the wounded Sparks ducked into the narrow tunnel separating his post from the rest of Quinn’s he heard one of his men call, ‘Come on lads—they are running.’ A few Turks were rounded up—a wounded prisoner confirming that the attacks were ‘a real effort to push our force into the sea’—but thousands more lay dead and wounded in no-man’s-land. Cyril Longmore of the 16th described the ‘convulsive movement’ of the Turkish wounded lying in piles. In the end five major attacks had been made against Quinn’s— more than any other part of the line. All had been repulsed, Chauvel reported, with ‘great slaughter’. Over 500 bodies lay in the narrow strip before Quinn’s; over 3000 along the length of the Anzac line. The surviving Turkish infantry returned to their lines by 10.30, from where they continued to throw huge numbers of bombs—over 400 on three of Quinn’s subsections on the morning of the 19th alone. Quartermasters later calculated that Anzac’s defenders had fired more than 1300 eighteen-pound shells and nearly 950 000 rounds of rifle or machine-gun ammunition that day. In repulsing the attack HMS Triumph fired into the masses of Turkish troops gathering in Mule Valley, the last time warships assisted the defence before the submarine scare later that month drove 63


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them away. Anzac still had few field guns and between problems of communication and control and the rugged terrain they were often ineffective. Chauvel affirmed that without Major Francis Sykes’s New Zealand gunners and the Indian mountain gunners ‘[Monash] valley would have become untenable’. Ammunition was always limited and at Quinn’s the trenches were so close that shelling could not be trusted. One solution was the trench mortars which arrived in mid-May. These mortars, made in Japan and able to loft a 30-pound bomb directly into trenches 50 yards away, gave front-line units the ability to strike back directly. First used after the 19 May attacks, they provoked consternation, and sentries reported hearing shouts of ‘Ul-lah!’ as the bombs, sparking like rockets, fell into the Turkish trenches. The Turks called these bombs ‘Black Cats’ and found they could kill or maim dozens. They began building head-cover for protection. In contrast to the shallow trenches made by the Australians, the Turks invested prodigious labour in making their trenches. They had absorbed the lessons of the great Russian siege of Plevna in 1878 and, determined to prevent any further occupation of their own soil, dug deep into it to hold off the invaders. They brought in logs and beams to strengthen their parapets, built walls of ammunition boxes packed with earth and fixed double rows of steel loop-holes in them, one at ground level, the other a couple of feet up. McSharry knew that Quinn’s was ‘the hardest to hold’ because of the proximity of the Turkish trenches. The solution was to direct as many bullets as possible onto the narrow strip of no-man’s-land. Because the line at Quinn’s turned a corner—running south for 60 yards and then abruptly turning west for another 60 yards, it presented a challenge to its defenders. While every man who was able would put a rifle over the parapet and fire as rapidly as he could— often shooting blind—the greatest volume of fire came from the network of machine-guns firing across the Anzac front. Wallingford and the other machine-gun officers had fought to retain the guns under a central direction and the proof of their point of view soon lay in writhing Turkish heaps all over no-man’s-land. Quinn’s real defenders sat in small, smelly, sandbagged embrasures at Walker’s Ridge and Courtney’s Post, firing machine-guns along the front, crisscrossing no-man’s-land with a curtain of lead bullets that cut down the attackers as they rose from their parapets. The gunners included men such as Lance Corporal Harry Murray of the 16th Battalion. A ‘bushman’ from Launceston, Murray had put his age down to enlist. 64


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Machine-guns in Number 3 Sector

Quinn’s was protected from being overrun by Turkish attacks more by machine-guns firing from neighbouring posts than by its own fire-power. The Turks had a similar and equally effective network of guns playing across no-man’s-land. 65


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He was recommended by battalion and brigade machine-gun officers ‘in the very highest terms’ for having ‘exhibited courage, energy and skill’ while operating a machine-gun covering Quinn’s between 9 and 31 May. Twice wounded in May, Murray would soon be commissioned, and became by 1918 the most decorated man in the AIF.

‘Eight acres of dead’: truce negotiations The night of 19–20 May and the following day were regarded as the quietest period since the landing. Optimists—including Terence McSharry—hoped that the slaughter had deterred the Turks from making further attacks, and indeed 19 May had seen the last major Turkish attack. Most of the line was quiet through the next day, although Quinn’s, where there was never a minute when something was not being fired or thrown, was ‘subjected to a heavy bombthrowing bombardment’. But the relative silence was broken by a buzzing noise. The Turkish dead were quickly swelling and rotting, the addition of hundreds of fresh corpses bringing on a crisis. By the time the 2nd Light Horse arrived at Quinn’s the smell, as South African-born Mullumbimby carpenter Maurice Weeks recorded, was ‘pretty solid’. Quinn’s was ‘alive with maggots’. Birdwood described to Hamilton how he had asked one Australian soldier in the front line how many Turks he thought lay dead before the Anzac line. A country man, the soldier replied that he thought that ‘there were eight acres of them there’. The story was repeated often in the folklore of Anzac and in hack propaganda published soon after the campaign. The corpses, adding their thousands to the dead of the campaign’s first three weeks, posed a serious threat to the health of both sides. The stench permeated the ridge-top and could be smelt on the offshore breeze by those in the boats standing off the peninsula. Under the Hague convention of 1907, local and general armistices were both possible and regulated. Existing accounts of Gallipoli date the official armistice to 24 May, and indeed British and Turkish commanders did negotiate a truce for that day. But moves to cease fighting and bury the dead in reality began on the day after the great attack, and they began in the front line. About 5.30 on the afternoon of the 20th, Red Crescent flags appeared over the Turkish trenches opposite Steele’s Post. Corps headquarters staff had already anticipated moves 66


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for a truce and issued ‘Instructions regarding Communication with the Enemy’. The parleys worried Monash. Padre Ernest Merrington saw him standing by the entrance to his headquarters dugout, fiddling with his pipe and looking up suspiciously at men emerging from trenches on the skyline. By seven that evening along most of the line, even on the ridge-crest of Quinn’s, firing died away for a time, but in obedience to the instructions no one in the firing line was authorised to offer or agree to terms. On the 21st Godley directed interpreters to shout instructions to the Turks to display Red Crescent flags and emerge in unarmed burial parties of no more than twelve, though no Turkish officer seems to have had the authority to comply. The following afternoon, with the stench of thousands of decomposing bodies poisoning the air, word passed along the front line that white flags had again been raised further south. Captain William Mansbridge, responsible for the 16th Battalion in the southern half of Quinn’s, ordered his men to keep their heads down (so as not to disclose how strongly the post was held) and to be ready to defend the post in case the flags were a ruse. No one could find a piece of white cloth to signal that the Turks’ overtures had been understood, but Captain Roy MacGregor, the 16th’s medical officer, bravely climbed onto the parapet of number 4 post, hoping that his Red Cross brassard would protect him. An English-speaking Turkish medical officer emerged on the other side and MacGregor called down that the Turks wanted an armistice. MacGregor and two other men, including a 16th Battalion private who spoke French, talked in no-man’s-land. The Turks asked for an armistice of eight hours and MacGregor went down to Monash’s headquarters to relay the request. Mansbridge, eyeing the bayonets visible over the Turkish parapets, asked, ‘What guarantee have I?’, but agreed to ask Monash’s permission. Monash, still suspicious, told them that only official overtures from officers ‘with proper credentials’ would be considered. Meanwhile the troops began to look over the sandbags and ‘much banter’, along with articles of food, began to be thrown back and forth across no-man’s-land. Mansbridge decried his ‘young soldiers’’ fraternisation, and nervously refused MacGregor permission to bring in some Australian bodies just out of reach of the parapets. When MacGregor returned to inform the Turkish medical officer of the required conditions he had gone, though he noticed the trench ‘crammed full of Turkish soldiers’. When MacGregor asked for his 67


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Turkish counterpart ‘a lot of Turks sang out “No! No! go back”’. He had just reached safety when fierce machine-gun and rifle fire broke out. It is possible that the approach was a ruse that failed, or that communication had foundered on suspicion and the lack of a common language. The following day Turkish officers rode down the beach from Gaba Tepe under a flag of truce to begin what Hamilton described as ‘a long palaver’. At times Hamilton ‘assumed a very stiff demeanour’, rejecting Turkish demands that the fleet be withdrawn. He was ‘horrified’ at the Turkish proposal, which he felt favoured the Turks ‘as if our force was the beaten side’. At last an agreement was reached. Orders went out on both sides of the line to suspend hostilities from 7.30 on the morning of 24 May, Queen Victoria’s birthday, and what would for a time become Empire Day before rising nationalism washed it away. Despite the moves toward a truce, the sniping had continued. On 22 May, Hugh Quinn’s nephew John died in the 2nd Light Horse’s lines at Pope’s Hill, hit in the leg by sniper fire and shot twice more as he lay helpless on the ground. One of the ‘bright lads’ confirmed by Padre Green in Cairo, he was buried at the growing cemetery near the mouth of Shrapnel Gully. Anzac snipers were equally cold blooded. Some deaths were due to bravado—signs and even wire had to be erected at some dangerous spots to prevent men taking lethal shortcuts—but some were the result of poor planning. Late in May the 10th Light Horse proposed timing reliefs for darkness instead of in daylight, when large numbers of men crowding the narrow saps made inviting targets. That same day William Malone went up to Quinn’s to see for himself the key position. He was unimpressed. The Australians (in fact Hugh Quinn’s 15th) ‘do not seem anything like as keen as our men’. He was concerned to find ‘only an odd man observing the Turks’ and thought that Quinn had ‘no sort of plan to deal with them’ in the event of another attack. A staff officer inspecting the main sap leading to Quinn’s in the rain that fell on the 22nd reported that it was ‘impossible to reinforce a position such as Quinn’s Post rapidly’ on such a narrow, steep and slippery path. Meanwhile, a truce had been arranged.

‘A hush over the peninsula’: the 24 May truce 24 May dawned wet. While the rain soon stopped the morning remained overcast and humid. The terms of the truce set, both sides 68


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prepared for its beginning at 7.30 a.m., but in the meantime the war continued. In the hours between dawn and the beginning of the cease-fire snipers remained active on both sides. William McAllister, one of the Forest Hill men whom Tom Logan had encouraged to volunteer, was shot and killed as he sat on a latrine behind Quinn’s, just outside the dugout of the startled Chaplain Green. Staff officers travelled over from Imbros to supervise the truce, astonished at their encounter with what they saw as amateur colonial soldiers. Compton Mackenzie delightedly recorded an Australian looking disgustedly at a pannikin of water and saying, ‘If I was a fucking canary I might have a bath in this.’ Mackenzie followed Aubrey Herbert up what he called ‘a narrow zigzag of sticky mud’ and emerged at the top of the main sap at Quinn’s. Panting from the climb, Mackenzie caught the choking reek of the dead, ‘tangible . . . and clammy as the membrane of a bat’s wing’. Parties of men carrying white flags, other parties hefting picks and shovels, climbed up the sap. At 7.30 whistles blew and they cautiously left the trenches, facing equally cautious Turks a few yards away. The flag parties stood at the mid-point of no-man’s-land while the burial parties began their grim work. Chaplain Green and several men of the 2nd Light Horse had returned to Quinn’s to try to find the bodies of their comrades killed in the futile attack of 14–15 May. Men of the 15th searched out the bodies of their comrades. Edwin Little and Burford Sampson found and buried the remains of their friend Arthur Hinman, only recognisable because he was still wearing his spectacles. Jack Craven found the body of a man of the 15th who had kept a diary up to the moment he went over the top on the night of 9 May. Its last entry read ‘1 minute to go . . .’. Jack Syme of the 10th Light Horse remembered nearly 60 years later what it was like to pick up the decomposing bodies. ‘You would get hold of somebody,’ he recalled, ‘and you would probably just get his leg. Somebody else would get his arm.’ It was, he remembered, ‘a very gruesome day’, whose sights and smells remained with many for the rest of their lives. Private Samuel Fenn of the 13th Battalion (another British labourer on the tramp in Australia in 1914) thought that ‘if ever I get through I will be able to look [at] and eat anything’. Fenn was not to survive long, or to see Britain again. He died of his wounds on 30 May. Others, interviewed in the 1980s, recalled the swollen bodies they deflated by driving a pick through, and the smell as they rolled them into shallow pits. ‘It was a smell you can never 69


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lose,’ an Otago man recalled. ‘I can still smell it.’ Even Green only got through the day by taking odd nips at his flask of rum and water. The truce enabled men on both sides to see each other face to face. The Turks saw that, contrary to their assumption, the Australians were Europeans. (The Turkish doctor Roy MacGregor had spoken to had been surprised—‘he thought all Australians were black’.) The Australians, while still mistaking fair-skinned Turks for Germans, saw their enemies as men for perhaps the first time. They noticed their shabby clothes and irregular footwear. Some Turks steadfastly refused to communicate, probably like Monash wary of treachery: the Hague convention accepted that ‘serious violation gives the other party the right to . . . recommence hostilities immediately’. A few Turks were willing to talk. A student ‘said he was sick of the war, another volunteered . . . that they didn’t want to fight . . . a third said “English good, German no good”’. Aubrey Herbert’s account of the day, in his memoir Mons, Anzac and Kut, has become trite through repetition, but he describes well the tentative overtures between the two sides, the conversations in fractured English or French, the swapping of cigarettes and souvenirs and his own breezy conversations with Albanians and Anatolians he claimed to know, with everything permeated by the stench of decay. Mackenzie had the smell of death in his nostrils for a fortnight. For those not on burial details the day became a holiday. The muggy heat of early morning turned into a brilliantly sunny spring day. Many men took the opportunity to swim unmolested by ‘Beachy Bill’ and his ilk, or to catch up on correspondence—many letters are dated 24 May. Others did laundry or chased the lice that with the warmer weather had infested everyone’s clothes. Some took a stroll without fear of shrapnel—George Bollinger, recently returned with the Wellingtons from the disaster at Helles, described men milling about like a half-time crowd at a football match. Visitors swarmed over Quinn’s and the other positions on the second ridge; it was then that Bean visited, for the first time. They were at last able to inspect the front-line trenches and compare positions, Anzac and Ottoman, along the line. It became obvious that Quinn’s had not been as strongly developed as had other places, and much less than the Turks’. Percy Fenwick, in charge of the ‘delimiting’ parties standing in no-man’sland with their white flags, described the Australian line as ‘not so well loop-holed as theirs’. Wallace Saunders, a sapper, described Quinn’s as ‘very dickey and shakey’. 70


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Quinn’s, where the two sides virtually shared shovels, became a particular focus of the truce and senior officers from both sides visited the sector, each studying what Bean called ‘the problem in Monash Valley’. Carl Jess spent an hour watching his opposite numbers studying the terrain, trying to solve the same puzzle from the other side. Many men referred to Turkish officers they believed were Germans because of their fair skin. It was said that Mustafa Kemal or Enver Pasha visited, disguised as a medical orderly. Diaries of the time tend to refer to Enver Pasha but later accounts mention Kemal, who became famous after the war. It seems likely that such a visit was no more than a plausible rumour. On the Anzac side, Birdwood, Cyril Brudenell White and Monash walked the parapets. Both sides, Bean noted, ‘frankly reconnoitred the other’s position’ for next time. In the trenches, canny sergeants laid fixed rifles on loop-holes they could see clearly for the first time. As well as burying their dead, the Anzac burial parties were able to fill in the communication trenches dug during the raid on 9 May and which had been so much trouble since. They rolled Turkish bodies into the trenches and piled soil over them, ignoring the objections of a Turkish officer. Towards four o’clock it became obvious that Turkish and Anzac watches showed different times, but the deadline was reached without incident and after some hasty handshakes men were shepherded back into their own lines. His interpreting responsibilities at Quinn’s now over, Herbert gratefully accepted a whisky. For a time there was, he recalled, ‘a hush over the peninsula’. Then the bombs and bullets began again.

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5 ‘The Turks break into Quinn’s’ Climax on 29 May

he day after the truce was warm and wet. As men gathered around midday to open tins or warm stew on little fires all over Anzac, they saw the single most-witnessed event in the entire campaign. Hundreds of men on the seaward slopes watched the sinking by a German U-boat of the battleship HMS Triumph, dozens recording descriptions in their pocket diaries. The appalled garrison of Quinn’s looked down from their dugouts. Cecil Malthus of the Canterbury Battalion heard ‘a shout of horror . . . They’ve got the Triumph!’ Bean, who at that moment was tramping up Shrapnel Gully, turned to see launches and destroyers hurrying to the aid of the stricken ship. It soon capsized and after fifteen minutes slid beneath the waves, taking 50 sailors with it. That evening he described the interval as ‘like watching a man die, slowly . . .’ As the battleship settled rafts of flotsam floated away from the hull, including hundreds of onions from the ship’s stores. As they drifted to shore soldiers eagerly gathered up the first fresh vegetables they had seen in a month. In the face of such threat, the Entente warships largely disappeared. They would reappear from time to time to bombard the Turks but, as a disgruntled Arthur Hutton put it, ‘then F’d O’. Meanwhile, the fight on the second ridge continued above and below ground.

T

‘Attack by mines’: ‘subterranean warfare’ begins at Quinn’s While Ray Tickner and Frank Cawley had been ratting around the Turkish rear area in Mule Gully on the night of 9 May they had 72


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‘THE TURKS BREAK INTO QUINN’S’

noticed a tunnel entrance ‘with much spoil showing’. Their reports had been passed on but no one at brigade, divisional or corps headquarters seemed to take the news seriously. Listening pits had been started about 6 May, but half-heartedly. About the same time, Ganger Slack and other former miners in the 15th Battalion reported hearing the sound of Turkish digging below Quinn’s. They were at first dismissed, but men working in ‘rabbit holes’ (technically, ‘wynzes’) dug down from the front line confirmed that the Turks had taken the fight underground, clearly hoping to lay mines large enough to destroy the Australian trenches clinging to the cliff-edge. In fact, neither side’s mines were able to make any such dramatic impact on the neverending fight for the post, but the first Turkish picks began an underground contest that lasted until the campaign’s final days and was to cost some blood and much sweat. When Bean returned the following day to the tunnel in which he had seen the dead Turk’s hand he found it had become the beginning of a wynze leading down to one of the first tunnels to be dug out under no-man’s-land. Beginning belatedly soon after the armistice, digging continued every day, directed by engineer officers (at Quinn’s, British Royal Engineers and New Zealanders). As well as cutting into the ground from above, men began to burrow into the cliff-side at several points—notably at Russell’s Top and Pope’s, but first and most energetically at Quinn’s. Godley reported to Birdwood on 25 May that five galleries were being driven from Quinn’s under ‘expert miners’ making, as New Zealand staff officers wrote, ‘an attack by mines’. Siege operations had traditionally included the digging of tunnels underneath enemy walls or trenches and the explosion of mines. Based on a study of the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese war in Manchuria (which Ian Hamilton had been sent to as an observer), British engineering manuals emphasised that ‘subterranean warfare’ would become a part of future conflicts in which the power of machine-gun-based defence would block manoeuvre. The British army had conducted ‘Siege Manoeuvres’ in 1907 to test methods and equipment, and its engineers arrived on Gallipoli prepared to begin tunnelling underground to blow through the trench-bound stalemate on the surface. The first charges laid were of guncotton, but soon the new and more powerful chemical explosive ammonal was introduced. Anzac engineers dared not lay large charges, however, for fear of blowing the top off the ridge and doing the Turks’ job for them. The trick was to lay mines to destroy hostile tunnels without disturbing the surface. 73


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The manual spelled out the qualities demanded of the tunnellers—engineer officers needed technical skills in directing underground excavations and ‘a clear, cool head, combined with decisive and energetic action’. Those detailed to labour needed to be strong and skilled in digging and prepared to work in the cramped darkness. Many former miners volunteered, including Queenslanders from Mount Morgan, Gympie and Charters Towers serving in the 15th Battalion and the 2nd Light Horse. One of their most important skills was the ability to judge the direction and distance of enemy digging. They would spend many lonely hours squatting at the end of long, narrow galleries, listening for the sound of digging being transmitted through the soil. As long as digging continued all was well. Its stopping could herald a mine being charged—a nerve-wracking business. The tunnels of Quinn’s, and indeed the entire peninsula, were driven through dry, sandy, compacted conglomerate subsoil rather than rock, hard enough that props were not needed, but soft enough to be easily cut with pick and shovel. By the end of May large spoil heaps from six tunnels began to appear at the back of Quinn’s, the first of the massive changes the campaign would bring to the terrain of what was now known as Monash Valley. The Anzac tunnels were intended to locate and destroy Turkish tunnels approaching the front line. While the defeat of the attacks on 19 May appeared to show that the Turks could not easily push the invaders back into the Aegean, the head of Monash Valley, and especially Quinn’s, continued to worry senior British commanders: Godley visited Quinn’s specifically ten times in the later part of the month. The underground threat was particularly serious, and Godley discussed it with Joly de Lotbiniere, the corps engineer. A ‘countermine’ fired on 27 May gave Godley grounds for optimism. It had stopped Turkish work for some time, and aroused ‘a good deal of shouting and confusion’, but Godley’s optimism was misplaced, as would soon become frighteningly clear.

‘To be held at all costs’: the Turks break into Quinn’s By late May Quinn’s had become a horror. Ernest Clifton, one of the New Zealand sappers who worked to build and repair the parapet there, recorded how ‘bullets strike bodies & spatter brains & pieces of skull over us’. The truce had helped to put many corpses underground, but a dreadful stench lingered, and everyone who arrived 74


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gagged on it. But the smell, the flies and the consequences also came from other, avoidable sources. Unused to sanitary discipline, the citizen soldiers seemed not to realise or accept the need for cleanliness. Relieving units complained that those before them had left the trenches dirty—James Cannan complained that Harold Pope’s 16th Battalion had left Quinn’s ‘very untidy’, with even ‘latrines not filled in’. Later a routine order complained that a man had fouled even the sap outside Chauvel’s headquarters: perhaps a sign of the epidemic of dysentery to come. On the evening of 28 May Anzac lay illuminated by ‘a lovely moonlight’, though the moon shone on a landscape blasted by bullet and bomb, and punctuated, as every night, by their chatter and blast. That evening Ganger Slack is said to have knocked off work in the galleries below Quinn’s and, shrugging his shoulders in disgust, declared that his warnings had been ignored and that a Turkish mine would explode within hours. At 3.30 a.m. the ground under number 3 section erupted. All the men in the front trench were killed, many of them buried and crushed under tons of soil. It was the greatest single Turkish mining success of the campaign, and would bring Quinn’s closer to capture than any other attack. A couple of weeks before he was killed in France in 1918, Terence McSharry described to Bean the moment when the mine exploded. Sitting in the communication trench near the headquarters dugout he heard ‘the devil of a thud’, and soon after was buried to his knees in loose earth. Hastily dug out by his batman, he made immediately for the post bomb-store. As men of the 13th Battalion milled about in confusion with sparkfizzing Turkish bombs falling around them, he called out, ‘Come on Australia’—that seemed to steady them—and set an example by lighting bombs with a candle flame and hurling them at the Turks emerging from the dust and smoke of the saps. ‘Imshi, Johnno! Imshi, you bastard!’ men shouted as they faced the attack. Following the explosion of the mine a shower of bombs fell among the dazed sentries. Watchers from Pope’s and Courtney’s saw sparks from hundreds of Turkish bombs, the flashes of explosions, but in the murky moonlight could not make out what was happening at Quinn’s. Granville Burnage of the 13th, a popular though not an effective colonel, was wounded in both arms. One elbow shattered by a bomb, he shrugged stretcher-bearers aside and told James Durrant, his adjutant, to prop him against the trench wall: ‘I don’t want the boys to know I’m hit.’ But he swooned from loss of blood and was 75


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carried away, muttering, ‘Keep them together, Durrant, and they’ll fight.’ In bright moonlight obscured by clouds of dust, the startled men of the 13th’s supports rallied and climbed up immediately, running into the smoke and dust and losing about 80 wounded in the first half hour of the melee. Men all around Monash Valley heard the mine explode. Light horseman George Edwards was roused and sent to join the reserves gathering in the valley. They stood in the chill spring dawn and listened to the racket on the ridge-crest. ‘Things got lively last night at . . . Quinn’s,’ he wrote in his diary later that day, one of dozens who described the fight as onlookers. Down at the Cove, Charles Bean was woken by the sound of the mine. Rising reluctantly (he had been up late), he asked a signaller what the noise was. Told it was ‘a dummy attack’, he went back to his bedroll. When he awoke several hours later he found that Quinn’s was fighting for its life. Dressing hastily, he joined a press of men struggling up the track which narrowed as it rose toward the firing line, permitting only a single stream of traffic frequently interrupted by stretcher-bearers and walking wounded on their way down. As the reserves reached the almost vertical head of the track they faced bombs rolling down and exploding among them. Roused from sleep already booted and kitted, men of the 15th Battalion climbed quickly up to the line to join the men of the 13th in shooting and bombing the attackers. The Turks crowded into the maze of trenches died in the narrow saps or made for the big bombproof dugouts, where they took shelter, firing out at the Australians. McSharry quickly organised counter-attacks against the Turks, now bottled up. While Lieutenant John Hill attacked one side of the southern bomb-proof, Edwin Little led his platoon against the other side. Little’s platoon included men of the transport section disciplined in Egypt for sticking with their emu plumes. Young country men eager to join the fight, they had volunteered to join Little’s platoon. Many were wounded in the slogging bomb-fight in and around the trenches in 3 and 4 sections. Little called, ‘Come on, transport’, leading them up onto the exposed ground above the breach, where they rolled several bombs down on the Turks crowding the shattered trenches. A bomb burst in Little’s hand, blowing it off and blinding him. Despite his appalling injuries, Little insisted on being taken to Major Bert Carter, commanding the 15th temporarily while Cannan lay ill in the hospital ship Arcadia, to praise one of his sergeants. 76


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As the sun rose, officers at Courtney’s tried to establish what was going on at Quinn’s and artillery observers and machine-gun officers brought their guns to bear on the Turkish trenches immediately opposite. All the Turks in the northern bomb-proof were now dead but resistance continued in the larger southern one. Messages arrived from 1st Division units on the right of Quinn’s: ‘am now arranging Japanese trench mortars to assist Quinn’s . . .’ As a divisional order had put it a few days before, ‘the Post is to be held at all costs’. The defenders of Quinn’s faced their most serious threat.

‘We took the trenches back’: Quinn’s counter-attack In accordance with the post’s standing orders, at 4.50 a.m. Chauvel sent a message to Harold Pope, ordering that it ‘must be retaken by your reserves’ even if ‘they have to go across the open area to do it’: the crest which the defenders had already learned was a death trap commanded by Turkish machine-guns. Bean, waiting below the crest with the press of reserves, took one of the photographs showing men of the 15th Battalion waiting to make the counter-attack. The attack was to be made by Hugh Quinn’s men, and Carter ordered Quinn to lead the charge himself. Quinn had the men take off their greatcoats and they bunched together, ready to climb over the crest of the ridge into the fire that awaited them. Quinn was anxious about what they were to face. He put the whistle to his lips and removed it. He had far outlived his fellow company commanders in the 15th—the other three had been killed by the 9 May raid—and must have known that his chances of surviving were rapidly declining. Still unconvinced that Chauvel and Pope’s plan was warranted, he walked up the main sap to check that a charge was necessary and fell almost immediately into McSharry’s arms, shot dead by a Turk in the entrance to the southern bomb-proof. John Kidd, who had given Ken Anderson’s parents an account of their son’s death, gave Bean a detailed account of his prominent part in the counter-attack, describing how he was in the leading ranks of the 15th Battalion’s supports as they clambered up the main sap, but Bean quoted none of it in his history. Kidd described how as the men of Quinn’s company lined up he ‘felt worse than I [had] ever done . . . terrible’. He recalled the haggard looks of those about him, even Quinn. Like many who have faced sudden death in battle, his greatest fear was ‘that fear would conquer me’. Tom Chataway thought 77


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Quinn was ‘in a very argumentative mood’. Quinn and McSharry conferred: Chataway thought McSharry disagreed with Chauvel’s orders, and Bean gently hinted that Chauvel’s plan—to charge directly over the open summit of the ridge—was needlessly costly. Kidd could not hear them over the roar of weapons on the ridge above them, but they appeared doubtful of what they were to do and appealed to Harold Pope to argue for a change. A staff officer arrived, possibly from Chauvel, urging them to attack. ‘Neither of them seemed too pleased,’ Kidd wrote. John Kidd claimed that only four other men witnessed Quinn’s death, two Tasmanians ‘(both now dead), a man I did not know, and myself’. His desire to be associated with one of Anzac’s heroes was not uncommon. News of the death of a man who had become a figure as well known as Simpson rapidly spread. Men all over Anzac recorded it in their diaries, sometimes getting details wrong. Fred Aspinall, a light horse signaller, heard he had been ‘shot through the back while leading his men to victory’. One of his men scribbled the simplest tribute: ‘Major Quinn being shot dead. A brave man gone.’ Quinn’s body was carried back to the Shrapnel Gully burial ground, newly marked out after the 19 May attack, where he was buried near the nephew who had been sniped exactly a week before. Word reached his mother, Mary Jane, at the remote station of Uanda, south-west of Charters Towers. Flags flew at half-mast in Charters Towers, a mass was said, and the sportsmen of the town recalled Quinn’s prowess at boxing and lamented his passing. Quinn’s death delayed the projected charge but Syd Herring got the men in order; jostling each other in the crowded, wrecked main sap they prepared to run up the slope into the machine-gun fire. Just as they nerved themselves to start, the machine-gun fire sweeping the crest slackened and the Australians overran the southern bomb-proof, floundering into the shelter of the ruined front-line trenches. While their move was seemingly successful, the Australians were still coming under fire from the unsubdued bomb-proof. Here light horsemen joined the defence. The 10th Light Horse was in Monash Valley and had sent troops up to crowd the slopes soon after dawn. They joined in the counter-attack, losing 23 wounded in what their war diary called ‘a perfect hail of shrapnel & bullets & bombs’. Lance Corporal Charles Grimson happened to be at Quinn’s with a working party of men from the 1st Light Horse and, as a member of the regiment recorded, also ‘got into the mix up’. 78


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Grimson, a bushman who had put his age down from 38 to 28, was a Boer War veteran, the embodiment of the Anzac legend. He crawled over the rubble left by the explosion of the mine towards the Turks sheltering in the southern bomb-proof and, in the genteel language of his citation, ‘prevailed upon them to surrender’. The Turks there in the dust, many wounded, squatting amid the dismembered remains of their comrades, at last surrendered. Seventeen filed out apprehensively, expecting to be put to death. While Grimson received a DCM for his part in inducing them to give up, credit for their capture was variously claimed. Some said they surrendered to Major Leslie Tilney of the 16th, others to Herring or Hill of the 13th. Bean was there again, photographing the dazed prisoners as they were led away down the main sap, crowded by Australians curious to see face to face the men they were fighting. Chauvel came closer than he wished when a Turk, grateful that he had not been killed, seized him and embraced him. ‘He seems to know you, Sir,’ Durrant of the 13th wryly remarked. Lieutenant Tom Kidd, no relation to John Kidd, guessed (essaying an unlikely familiarity with the ethnic composition of the Ottoman empire) that the prisoners were ‘by the look of them . . . Armenians, Circassians [and] half Greek’. The ‘real Turk’ soldiers, he thought, lay dead in the bomb-proof. George Edwards, waiting with the 1st Light Horse’s supports at the foot of Quinn’s, saw the prisoners as ‘in the best of spirits’, except for one shedding tears, who ‘shook hands freely with our chaps’. Giving up on the attempt to capture the post, the remaining Turkish attackers turned and ran across no-man’s-land to their own lines. Ashmead-Bartlett claimed that as they ran their own men turned machine-guns on them and threw bombs, though in the confusion it was easy to make or magnify an error. The defenders reoccupied the remains of their front line, rebuilding parapets while still dodging Turkish bombs. Though shaken, they were triumphant. By 9 a.m. Quinn’s was back in Australian hands. The artillery observers watching through binoculars and directing the field and mountain guns onto Mule Valley reported that things were ‘well in hand’. By their inspiring leadership Quinn and McSharry had saved the post. McSharry became the first Australian officer to be recommended for the new Military Cross for his conduct at Quinn’s on 29 May. A mystery concerning John Kidd’s part in the happenings of 29 May arose when in September Hamilton received a letter from a 79


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Mr Alex Kidd of Springfield, Tasmania. Mr Kidd had received a letter from his son describing the attack and his part in repelling it. He had been struck by his son’s complaint that ‘we never got as much as a thank you or the slightest bit of credit’, even though he claimed to have remained near the bomb-proof and to have thrown 20 bombs. Mr Kidd had been galled to read of how ‘as soon as the Turks surrendered there was a swarm . . . rushed up & took part in escorting them down’. ‘I dare say,’ John Kidd concluded, they will have claimed how ‘they took them all single handed.’ Mr Kidd felt that his son would not relish his intercession but he wanted to ensure that his gallantry would not be overlooked. He added a postscript giving his son’s account of saving a wounded man from a bomb. Mr Kidd’s letter concerned Hamilton, Birdwood, Godley, Monash and Cannan as it was passed down, from army to corps, division, brigade and battalion. Birdwood had endorsed a citation to award a DCM to Lance Corporal Grimson for the recapture of the bombproof and the taking of its Turkish defenders. Here was a claim that the wrong man had received credit. Mr Kidd’s letter did the rounds of the various headquarters and within a couple of days an answer came back, having reached John Kidd’s platoon officer, who had survived the August fighting. Not only had no one seen John Kidd do anything outstanding on the morning of the 29th, but Cannan, his colonel, asserted that he had twice been reprimanded for leaving the trenches and had ‘very closely approached a crime for “cowardice in the face of the enemy”’. There was no question that the medal had gone to the right man. Never having dreamt that his father might take up the matter, Sergeant Kidd, it seems, was guilty of some exaggeration in his letter home. Hamilton decided that no good would come of telling the father the truth and sent a bland reply, but decided to ‘file the papers as he seems the sort of impostor who might spring out upon one later’. As indeed he did. Kidd was one of the Quinn’s survivors who in 1922 provided a recollection to Bean. His account is corroborated by other accounts in all but the detail of the taking of the bomb-proof—in describing Edwin Little being blinded, for instance. He claimed to have witnessed Quinn’s death. Can his letter to Bean be trusted when his letter home can’t? We might charitably see him as much a victim of the trauma of Quinn’s as those who were wounded more visibly. The attack had cost the defenders 33 killed and 178 wounded. All through the morning wounded men arrived at the aid posts. Some 80


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limped down. Others, including a number whose feet were blown off when bombs exploded on the trench floors, were carried down by stretcher parties whose endurance was extraordinary. Percy Fenwick noted that one pair brought in 29 men, a total of about 20 miles carrying well-built men down steep hillsides on rough tracks. The wounded may have included Sergeant Bob Hunter, shot in the thigh. Wilbraham Fowler, the Innisfail bank clerk, lay in an aid post too. He also had been wounded in the thigh, by bomb fragments, at about five in the morning, but lay in the support trenches all day. ‘I had a pretty bad time near the firing line,’ he wrote, ‘the only thing I wanted was water.’ He was not brought down until five that afternoon. By then rows of wounded, the serious cases with red-bordered wound tickets, lay by the piers, awaiting evacuation to the hospital ships moored offshore. Monty Spencer, an Auckland medical student who had enlisted as an orderly, described in his diary some of the men he treated there. One, his right hand blown away, wounds all over his body, and who would probably lose his sight, was asked by a padre, ‘How are you, old man?’ ‘Right as rain,’ he replied. Perhaps this man was Edwin Little. At the hospital down at the beach Joseph Beeston stitched up the face of a man with half of one cheek torn away by a bomb. As he finished the man signalled for a paper and pencil. He wrote, ‘We took the trenches back again . . . they would not wait for the bayonet.’ Turkish dead lay all over Quinn’s. Harry Daniels, though he had served on the peninsula since the landing (and was to remain until the evacuation), was turned up by the ‘horrible site of the dead Turk’ he saw being cleaned up in number 3 post. Disgruntled men with sandbags picked about the filthy bomb-proof, looking for fly-blown fragments of Turkish dead. Lieutenant Tom Kidd, a 45-year-old Geraldton accountant, commanding a party of the 10th Light Horse which had been doubled up the main track and waited all morning under fire, saw a ‘huge heap of mangled and dismembered Turks’ dragged out of the trenches. A less pressing concern than the Allied dead, he claimed that ‘they lay in this heap in view of us for days’. Later that morning Charles Bean, sitting just below the crest yarning to Harold Pope, watched as men began pulling corpses out of the trenches which had been alive with bullet, bomb and bayonet just a few hours before. Suddenly they scattered, dropping a dead Turk. ‘What is it, a bomb?’ asked a bystander. A bomb—naturally Bean compared it to a cricket ball—came bouncing down the path to explode against the corpse, blowing off a leg. It was close enough to 81


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Bean to splatter him with blood and flesh (‘fortunately not very thickly’, he wrote that evening). Had the body not taken the force of the blast perhaps Bean might have died at Quinn’s too.

‘A day in hell’: relieving the Australians The New Zealand engineer Wallace Saunders, one of the most astute and candid observers of Anzac, commented in the aftermath of the 29 May attack that at Quinn’s there had been ‘some bad management somewhere I should think’. Another New Zealander described the Australians as having been ‘blown out of the trench’, emphasising the near loss of the post rather than its recovery. Their superiors at Anzac headquarters agreed. The 29 May attack seems finally to have persuaded Godley and Birdwood that this vital position could no longer be entrusted to the exhausted Australians, and their relief was almost immediately arranged. By late May Godley, Birdwood and Hamilton had come to recognise that the key point in the defence of Anzac was in the hands of units which were unequal to the demanding task and under a commander (Chauvel) who was unprepared to exert sufficient direction. Hamilton had confessed to Birdwood how Chauvel made him ‘downhearted’. Birdwood shared his army commander’s misgivings. ‘From the time he arrived’, he complained to Birdwood of Chauvel, ‘he has always struck me as taking the gloomiest views of everything’ and ‘never seems to put life into things’. Godley had again visited Quinn’s on the morning of the break-in, while bombs were still flying, seeing for himself how serious the crisis had been. Rhodes, his aide de camp, described him as ‘liverish and very worried’. To Rhodes’s regret Godley walked about ‘damning everyone he sees’ and his ire settled on Harry Chauvel. Godley chose the New Zealand Brigade to relieve the 4th Brigade—not that it was at all ‘fresh’. After its scrappy experience following the landing the brigade had been sent to Cape Helles, there making a major and costly attack as part of the abortive battle of Krithia. The brigade (‘what was left of them’, wrote Ernest Clifton, ‘looked wrecks’) returned on 20 May, and had been resting since. The New Zealanders were warned to take over the front of Number 3 Sector on 29 May. Quinn’s in New Zealand hands became a very different place with a distinctive atmosphere. It was natural for New Zealanders to want 82


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to distinguish themselves from the more numerous Australians. On the very day that Godley decided on the relief of Quinn’s he told the New Zealand Defence Minister, James Allen, how he was looking forward to the arrival of correspondent Malcolm Ross because he ‘did not like being dependent for a report on our doings on Captain Bean . . . though he is a very good fellow’. The first New Zealanders to arrive were the Canterburys. Some of them had heard rumours that their battalion would be relieved and sent away for a spell, but their hopes were ‘dashed to the ground’ when they were ordered ‘in the centre at Quinn’s Post’. ‘Everybody’s spirits zero,’ Henry Kitson recorded disconsolately in his diary. He knew Quinn’s to be ‘the worst & most trying position in these trying parts’. As they arrived, the New Zealanders expressed general dissatisfaction with the Australian tenure of the post. When Cecil Malthus entered the trenches he charitably decided that ‘the desperate nature of the fighting must have prevented the Australians from making any elaborate system of fortifications’. Others were less forgiving, one declaring that ‘they can’t get the Australian infantry to work’. It was easy to criticise if you hadn’t been obliged to remain for even a day in what was arguably one of the worst experiences of combat in a war full of horror, but the New Zealanders in general refrained from overt criticism. They were entering a position which had been the location of continuous heavy fighting for over six weeks, and the evidence of it was all around. As they emerged from the saps leading to the firing line they saw ‘in every bay . . . these old Australian coats covered in blood and shattered where they had withstood the bombing’. They described how maggots wriggled in every fly-infested trench, how the bodies of their mates lay bloated and stinking within a few feet of them in no-man’s-land, and how at any moment a bomb might lob into a trench to mutilate or kill. The wonder was that Quinn’s had held in such disgusting and traumatic conditions. Like all new arrivals, they were shocked by the intensity of the violence into which they were pitched. They looked for guidance and found it in Terence McSharry who, as a Canterbury man remembered, moved about ‘like an inspiring god’. At the end of their first night at Quinn’s, Ted Baigent’s platoon had lost eight men wounded from bombs. ‘A day in hell doesn’t equal an hour in these trenches,’ he decided. The New Zealand sappers set about repairing the damage caused by the mine explosion, although on that first night (30 May) almost 83


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nothing could be done under the constant bomb barrage. The sappers found that they could approach the gap through a narrow tunnel, though they had to clear one end of debris before beginning work on the sandbag barrier which formed the parapet. Only one man could work at a time, creeping out into what a sapper officer called the ‘blood-soaked and fly-covered ruins’ of the front line, gathering spoil into sandbags and passing it back through the tunnel while sentries watched, calling out ‘Bomb!’ as they dropped into the gap. The rebuilding continued through the next night, even as the post’s new garrison was called upon to make yet another sortie.

‘What can thirty men do?’: Kidd and Colpitt’s raid While men worked to clear debris and bodies from the ruins of number 3 post, a few yards away the Turks were using the noise of the digging and the bomb-throwing that accompanied it to cover the construction of a sandbagged blockhouse in the crater caused by the mine. Sentries first reported this work at dusk on the 29th. A mine fired in the early hours of the 30th made no impact, so Harold Pope ordered a party of 60 men from the 10th Light Horse to attack it and a crater caused by an Anzac mine that had disturbed the earth in no-man’s-land. The failures of 9 and 15 May had persuaded many thoughtful observers of the impossibility of attacking successfully from Quinn’s. Richard Casey, writing from the eminence of the 1st Division’s headquarters, wrote that ‘I cannot see the force of attempting any more small individual attacks’. All the same, Godley ordered another raid for the early afternoon of 30 May. It was intended to demonstrate to the Turks that the garrison still had the heart and capacity to inflict a blow in retaliation, even so soon after the last assault. Forty-six men— the smallest of all the raiding parties at Quinn’s—were to attempt to cross the narrow no-man’s-land, by this time stripped of all vegetation, ‘as bare as a billiard table’, as one witness described it. Once again the raid would be made by a unit new to the peninsula. Regiments of dismounted light horse had continued to reach Gallipoli, the 10th from Western Australia arriving on the 21st. It sent a large burial party to Quinn’s on the day of the truce, descriptions of their task probably tempering the eagerness of their fellows. On 27 May, 100 of them were sent to Quinn’s, and had been in the crowded trenches on the 29th. Now they were to make yet another 84


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raid, though this time it was to comprise two parties, each of just 22 men under an officer. Without time for elaborate preparations Harold Pope called for volunteers. Tom Kidd jauntily replied, ‘Put me down for one and Colpitts for the other’ (John Colpitts’s reaction is unrecorded). When Kidd realised the gravity of the task he gave his paybook and ‘a letter to the wife’ to the medical officer before gathering his men shortly before 1 p.m. Five minutes after one, after a fifteen-minute bombardment, the two parties rose from the trenches and ran out, Kidd’s on the right, Colpitts’s on the left. Turkish sentries and machinegunners dozing in the sun must have been surprised by their sudden emergence and the attackers reached the crater almost without loss. On the left, Colpitts’s party occupied the small ‘Anzac’ crater. They were invisible from the Anzac lines, but in clear view of the Turks, who rained bombs down on them. The rumour flew around Quinn’s that they were all dead. Soon, however, Colpitts threw back a message inside a cartridge case—‘I have seven men left . . . will try to dig in and hold on’. Pope set a party of Canterburys to dig a trench toward the crater. ‘Please tunnel as fast as possible,’ Colpitts sent back. As Turkish bombs continued to rain into his crater, the men threw many of them back. Not until 11.30 that night, after ten unending hours of danger and strain, were his men able to scramble back along the Canterbury tunnel. A group of New Zealanders crawled out to replace them and the fortified crater became an outwork to Quinn’s, always under bomb-fire. On the right, Kidd’s men had hurled themselves on the Turks in the other crater, shooting and bayoneting several and capturing one man. Kidd counted all 22 of his party crowded into the shallow crater in the glare of the afternoon sun. Despite being under constant fire for the next three hours, in which 20 of the 22 were wounded, the light horsemen befriended the captured Turk, sharing cigarettes, scraps of biscuit and sips of water with him. ‘He was soon great friends with my boys,’ Kidd wrote. His party of light horsemen, many of whom had never faced bombs, like Colpitt’s party, caught and returned the Turkish bombs which fizzed into the crater. One of Kidd’s men, Jack Syme, many years later in an interview with Peter Liddle, recalled the events of that day with great clarity, insisting on them in the face of sceptical questions. Syme said he was catching bombs and throwing them back. Liddle asked whether it was ‘absolutely certain this is not a false story’. Syme insisted that he had caught a number of bombs, but then ‘missed one and . . . copped 85


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the lot’. Liddle found his story difficult to credit. ‘What time of the day was . . . when you were in fact wounded?’ he asked sceptically. ‘So all . . . this took place in full daylight?’ It had indeed—Bean confirmed it. About four o’clock they saw Turkish bayonets gathering in the nearby trench, ready to rush the crater. Kidd ordered his men to rush back to Quinn’s. As they went, the Turks scrambled in from the other side, thrusting and shooting. The Turkish prisoner picked up a discarded rifle and, in an extraordinary gesture, fired at his own men, giving the Australians a chance to get away. ‘I don’t know what became of our friend,’ Kidd mused. ‘I only hope he was killed outright . . .’ Within days the story of the Turk who had saved the light horsemen and died at the hands of his own men had spread throughout the units in the Monash Valley sector and beyond. Fred Small, a sapper working at Pope’s, recorded a detailed and dramatic account of it, including the detail that Turkish machine-guns fired to ‘nibble away’ the lip of the crater. Percy Fenwick and Joseph Beeston heard it from their patients. By the time Fenwick heard it the Anzac rumour mill had the Turk ‘fighting furiously on our side’, an exaggeration he rightly dismissed. The story even reached Hamilton, who passed it on to the King’s confidant, Clive Wigram (‘Yesterday a curious thing happened . . .’). Scrambling over the parapet, Jack Syme stumbled across noman’s-land and reached the Anzac parapet, falling against the sandbags. An officer—he thought Pope—dragged him over to safety. Henry Kitson described the mood of the garrison: ‘thoroughly exhausted . . . simply dropped & slept’. Bean heard that the survivors of the raid were all ‘very rattled’. Only fourteen of the 46 involved returned unwounded. A further sortie, intended to send out another 100 light horsemen that evening and a similar group from Courtney’s, was cancelled to concentrate on repairing the badly damaged defences at Quinn’s. The 10th Light Horse’s raid had been supported by machine-guns on either side of Quinn’s. From Steele’s Post the 1st Battalion’s machine-gunners fired, using ‘a row of dead Turks in front of Quinn’s as his aiming point’. Two Turkish guns in turn fired at Price’s guns, cutting to rags the sandbags protecting them. One gun was operated by Thomas Arnott, a 20-year-old pattern-maker from Sydney, formerly a compulsory trainee. Arnott fired until badly wounded in 86


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the jaw. In hospital in Cairo he is supposed to have anxiously asked a padre if he had been hit in the jaw in retribution for having sworn as the gun jammed; the padre tactfully replied that he didn’t think so. Arnott’s family received the usual telegram and waited anxiously for further word. They had a long wait, but by mid-August his father had read ‘numerous reports in [the] Public Press . . . scrap[s] sent direct from the trenches [and] . . . congratulations from the people of Balmain’. His son, he realised, was to be awarded the DCM. He read ‘the report of Capt. Bean, special War Correspondent’, who described ‘a young Balmain trainee’s fine work’. Thomas Arnott was by this time on the way home. In 1967 his widow Dorothy, writing from her house ‘Gaba Tepe’, applied for his 50th anniversary medallion. The repeated failures of May depressed and angered many at Anzac. Richard Casey again questioned ‘what good these small individual attacks can do. Men get cut up and no apparent good comes of it . . . what can thirty men do?’ Terence McSharry, who had succeeded Quinn as the soul of the defence, knew by what narrow margin the Australians held it. ‘We are hanging on by our teeth,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘hanging on . . . to what is according to theory an untenable position.’ Fred Small, for all his admiration for the light horsemen’s courage, reflected that ‘four attacks had been made from Quinn’s and all have been messed up’. The 4th Brigade’s month at the head of Monash Valley had cost its units dearly. Samuel Fenn, who had used the quiet following the 24 May truce to scribble an account of his month on the peninsula, described the fates of the fourteen members of his section of the 13th Battalion who had come ashore a month before. Already six had been wounded, two were missing and one had been evacuated sick. Fenn was one of five survivors, and he was to die of his wounds on 30 May. It was a story emblematic of what Quinn’s had done to Monash’s brigade. For the next two months, though, the dead of Quinn’s were to be New Zealanders.

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6 ‘Several minor operations’ The New Zealand sorties in June

n early June the wildflowers bloomed, purple and yellow, even on the edges of the new-cut saps. While the songbirds had flown the bullet-cut scrub a few pigeons remained. The weather was warm and dry. To Charles Bean, who had climbed up to Quinn’s for perhaps the third time, it appeared ‘the most desolate spot on earth’. Grass and shrubs had been cut by bullets or torn up as kindling. The ground was ‘scorched to the bone . . . pink and brown earth lies bare—tumbled this way and that with trenches’, looking like ‘a deserted mining camp’. Bean noticed the explosions that hung over the place; little white bomb-clouds, deceptively fleecy, that rose over the edge of the escarpment before dissipating in the breeze; sometimes black-powder bombs, spouting a single dark column of smoke ‘like the puff of a railway engine’, and the occasional big explosions of trench mortars, shooting clods of earth, baulks of timber or fragments of bodies ten or 20 feet into the air. On his way up he passed an intermittent stream of wounded, some the victims of bombs, with ‘frightful wounds’. With the trench lines seemingly fixed and no prospect of a major offensive until later in the summer, the troops might have hoped for relief from the stress of operations they had endured in the five weeks since the landing. Hamilton, however, believed that ‘troops tend to go back in morale when they are not actively engaged in worrying the enemy’. Accordingly, as he reported to Clive Wigram at Sandringham, ‘I have got my Divisional Commanders to organise small cutting out expeditions’. Two of these sorties were made from Quinn’s by the New Zealanders who held the post for two months that summer.

I

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‘ S E V E R A L M I N O R O P E R AT I O N S ’

‘Better men and finer soldiers’: the New Zealanders enter Quinn’s The last men of the 15th had filed out of the post with relief. Their tenure had been costly. The 15th was to be the only Australian unit on Gallipoli to suffer more than a thousand casualties. Certainly it was to suffer many of those in the debacle on Sari Bair, but other battalions of the 4th Brigade also lost men in the August offensive. On the afternoon of 2 June, after a short rest, the entire brigade filed into Reserve Gully, lining the steep sides to hear a speech by Godley. The normally taciturn Godley praised the brigade as ardently as he ever did. He described how they had been ‘pitch-forked’ into action and how in holding Quinn’s and Courtney’s they had ‘made already a Military history for Australia’. Godley announced that two of the 15th’s men had been recommended for the DCM for their actions in the abortive attack on Baby 700 a month before, but his highest praise went to Quinn, killed three days before. If Quinn had been consulted, Godley said, ‘he would have liked to die as he did, fighting most gallantly . . . leading a charge in the post that bore his name’. ‘Hear, hear,’ men called out. Soon after, the 15th left for a rest on Imbros, the first of the Anzac units to be relieved from Gallipoli and a reflection that the ordeal of holding Quinn’s was widely recognised. Some believed the 4th Brigade to be inferior to its Australian counterparts. Betraying his preference for the 1st Division, Bean thought that though including ‘fine brave chaps with some good officers’, the brigade was ‘not so neat or rigid as our division’. There were tensions within it. The 14th still blamed the 15th’s machinegunners for their losses on 27 April; when Godley praised the 14th, men of the other battalions laughed derisively, and men of the 16th derided it as ‘the Yellow Streak’ battalion. Though he would become the most senior Australian soldier of the war, Monash was still struggling to mould the brigade into the fighting formation it would become. Quinn’s was by this time known to be the key to the Anzac position. Padre Ernest Merrington was only one of those who could see that ‘the heart of our area would lie open to the enemy if Quinn’s failed to stem the flood’. Richard Casey, recording headquarters gossip in his diary, wrote that it was ‘a part of our line which we cannot lose . . . easily the most ticklish’. It was also apparent that the force’s senior commanders had no confidence in Monash or Chauvel’s being able to hold it, and for the following two months Quinn’s became the responsibility of the New Zealanders. 89


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As the 4th Brigade scrambled down the path from Quinn’s, Chaplain Green remained, recording that ‘we were surrounded by New Zealand Infantry’. Green remarked on how ‘sorties continued . . . but they were mostly New Zealanders and that is another story’. For Australians the New Zealand part in Gallipoli has remained another story, one which they do not know. They have been happy to praise their Anzac comrades in arms, but in general terms, not to take the trouble to learn what they actually did. The New Zealand Infantry Brigade took over this most dangerous and critical position in the Anzac line and not only did they hold it successfully, making several further attacks, they also changed its topography and with it altered the dynamics of the defence of Anzac. The New Zealanders found, as Frederick Scarborough wrote, ‘smashed rifles and gear of all sorts—shovels, overcoats, ammunition [and] a terrible stench of blood and dead’. The evidence of bombfights struck the newcomers forcefully. Men found the walls of the trenches smeared with blood of men wounded by bombs that day. They were at first confused by the maze that Quinn’s had become— Edward Cox, now a major in the Wellingtons, likened it to the Catacombs and needed a guide to find his way into the front line. They looked gingerly over the parapet, startled to find, as George Bollinger wrote, that the Turkish trenches were ‘only a cricket pitch away’. A sapper described no-man’s-land as ‘the width of a Wellington city street’. They immediately understood the essential problem Quinn’s presented to its defenders. As another sapper told his mother, ‘should the Turks push us over the crest . . . they would command practically the whole of Monash Gully’. This, he explained, would ‘drive a wedge into our country’. It was now the New Zealanders’ turn to prevent this happening. They assumed this responsibility with confidence in their own ability, dismissing their predecessors’ efforts. Saxon Foster, one of the Wellington’s sergeant majors, wrote disdainfully that ‘other regiments were frightened of Quinn’s but Wellington isn’t’. His boast would in time be confirmed as true. The New Zealanders quickly realised that the Turks enjoyed fire superiority at Quinn’s. David Scott, a Timaru man, described the situation as the Canterbury Battalion took over. Sentries could not raise a periscope without it being shot to bits. Turkish machine-guns were cutting up the sandbags on the parapets and their bomb showers were so heavy that some parts of the front line, especially in 3 and 4 posts, had to be virtually abandoned. The orders issued by the New 90


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Zealanders’ commanders showed that they were ready to adopt a new approach. Colonel William Braithwaite (known as ‘old Grumpy’ within divisional headquarters) issued orders which showed his dissatisfaction with the unsystematic Australian practices, his list of instructions suggesting how poor previous practice had been. He ordered platoon commanders to ensure that every man had a firing position, that loop-holes be properly made (slantwise rather than facing forward), that sentries be posted ‘within kicking distance’ of sleeping men (along with directing that men be made to rest when possible), that good sanitation be observed, and that officers lived in the trenches alongside their men and submitted regular reports. The Turks, Braithwaite directed, ‘must be made to feel’ that they faced ‘better men and finer soldiers’. Cannan’s Queenslanders had left without regret, but Terence McSharry was asked to stay on as the post’s adjutant. Though tired— he had gone for days without a wash, without taking his boots off and without having more than a few hours’ rest—he felt ‘rather flattered’. He knew Quinn’s to be ‘the weakest in the position and we get all the Turkish attacks here’. Anxious that it should not be endangered again, he remained to nurse the New Zealanders into becoming successful landlords, although his initial impression of them was poor. After several days he loyally confided to his diary that they ‘don’t work the post as well as the 15th’. Not surprisingly, the new troops took some time to become accustomed to the particular horrors of Quinn’s. Frederick Scarborough’s stream-of-consciousness diary suggests something of the hysteria the post could arouse in newcomers. During his first night he snatched a few minutes to describe what it was like to endure a Turkish bomb shower: One sees a string of sparks coming over god knows how one escapes but we plunge here & there if only a yard or so it is sheer hell . . . cannot describe the horror & terror enough to drive a man mad but still we hang on the sap behind is blocked with dead & dying . . .

McSharry’s misgivings about the New Zealanders’ fitness seemed to be confirmed on 5 June when a Turk ‘sneaked up to our parapet’— something that had not been achieved before—‘then threw bombs right over’. They rolled down the hill and wounded the Canterbury’s commanding officer, Charles Browne. McSharry raced to the spot and 91


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himself ‘got this Turk with percussion bombs’. Browne was replaced by the genial and popular but unskilled Jackie Hughes.

‘A sensation on a small scale’: the sortie of 4 June Field Service Regulations laid down that the general principle for the defence of fortresses, such as Anzac, was that ‘the offensive is the soul of defence’. Obedient to this doctrine and Hamilton’s orders, Birdwood ordered another sortie for the night of 4–5 June, an attempt to distract the Turks from sending their reserves to meet the renewed British offensive at Cape Helles, where Hamilton’s divisional commanders had induced him to adopt a policy of ‘hammering away’ in a series of attacks. Seeking to divert Turkish attention from Cape Helles led to Birdwood ordering elsewhere what Bean was to describe dismissively as ‘several minor operations’. It seems absurd that an attack by the equivalent of a company could seriously divert more than local reserves, but the belief persisted, consecrated by the theoretician Edward Hamley, whose text The Operations of War affirmed that ‘every small tactical success tends to disturb the balance of moral to the advantage of the victor’. It was in accordance with this almost mystical doctrine that another sortie was ordered. Soon rumours swept up Monash Valley, swapped by yarning men at piers and wells, as they waited for shelling to ease or for rations to be issued. By the morning of 4 June many men knew of plans for an attack from Quinn’s that night. In his beach hospital Percy Fenwick, who had better reasons than most for hoping for light losses, prayed that ‘our boys may not pay too heavily for it’. William Dundon, a Canterbury man who had just lost his oldest army mate to the bombing in his company’s first night at Quinn’s, was among those who volunteered. He only had to run 20 yards, he thought, ‘but that piece of ground will be “hot”’, reflecting that the attack would be ‘one of these affairs which always carries a fair element of risk’. Many weighed the risks realistically, and when Frank McKenzie’s company commander called for volunteers he could raise only four of the 25 wanted. Only after their lieutenant ‘explained it did not mean certain death’ did eight more men step forward. Even the ideal of duty was insufficient to impel many to volunteer. Norman Hardey, a captain in the Canterburys, ‘picked it for a disaster right away . . . straight suicide’, and did not go. 92


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Charles Bean, who heard a rumour that the New Zealanders were to ‘take the trenches opposite Quinn’s’, put aside the articles he was writing for Australian newspapers and, because ‘Quinn’s is always interesting’, made his way to Chauvel’s headquarters on a pitch-dark evening as bullets thudded into the sandbagged traverses and the planks of his dugout. There he learned that its aim was ‘to create a sensation on a small scale’ in support of the attacks at Helles. Nearby, in the dressing-station dugout in Macquarie Street, behind Quinn’s, Thomas Ritchie of the Canterburys helped out his friend William Aitken, the Aucklanders’ medical officer. During the bombardment before the attack they stood as the shells passed close overhead, watching as ‘an object like a white hot cricket ball would come shooting through the air towards us’ before exploding on the ridge beyond. The raid, involving 27 Aucklanders and 33 Canterburys, was to be led by Hugh Stewart, one of the most striking officers of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, who had drawn a winning ballot against another lieutenant. A Scot, and the youthful Professor of Classics at Canterbury University, Christchurch, Stewart was told that the trench he was to take was ‘to be held at all costs’. The attackers went over at 11 p.m. on the dot, with men immediately falling wounded. After two minutes Stewart realised that his men had taken the first Turkish trench, killing nearly all its defenders, as well as a Canterbury man shot by mistake in the scrimmage. They hastily began to build sandbag barricades, realising as the light grew that they could see into Mule Valley and, by a small rise, were mostly protected from fire coming from German Officers’ Trench to the south. Out of touch with the Aucklanders on his left, Stewart found the Turks recovering, with enemies frighteningly ‘coming round corners and popping out of saps’. Hugh Stewart’s leadership was dynamic—profane but effective. One of his men commented wryly that for a professor of dead languages, ‘his language that night at Quinn’s was live enough!’ Among the Aucklanders on the left Frank McKenzie leapt over the parapet with six other men with the job of building a barricade in the captured trench and holding the Turks off. They raced across no-man’s-land and lay panting against the Turkish parapet as Turks fired blindly from the loop-holes. McKenzie dropped a bomb into the Turkish trench and they ‘sprang in with a roar’ and ‘for a wild delirious minute stabbed and cut the demoralized beggars’. He later 93


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reflected on how it felt to have been in a bayonet charge ‘with a few bombs in his belt and ten deaths in his rifle’. He confessed that it was ‘the best and most exciting feeling I’ve ever had’, musing that ‘the old primeval instincts and blood lust are only thinly buried after all’. As they hastily threw sandbags across the trench a Turk emerged from a dugout and an Aucklander stabbed him repeatedly with his bayonet until it buckled. They threw thirteen corpses over the parapet and awaited the inevitable counter-attack. A Canterbury man, Ernest Williams, who had been detailed to fire a trench mortar, volunteered to join one of the sandbag parties. He jumped into the Turkish trenches, finding ‘every trench within bomb-cast of another’, and began filling sandbags, working until about 3 a.m., when the rising moon cast a bar of light across the trench. A Turk approached, emerging into the pale moonlight, and Williams and his three mates shot him down. He never forgot the ‘look of surprise’ when the man saw the tall barricade, nor the ‘frightful cry’ when he fell dead. Still, 20 Turks survived the first mad rush, to be captured and passed back across no-man’s-land. As the eastern sky paled the usual confused bombing fight continued, though the attackers had once again gone over with too few bombs to meet the shower thrown by the Turks. But the absence of an organised Turkish counter-attack boded well. Earl Johnston, the New Zealand brigade commander, was hopeful but he refused to pass on a congratulatory signal from Godley. ‘Let ’em wait until they’ve really done it,’ Bean heard him say sardonically. Johnston knew that a small supporting raid on German Officers’ Trench had ended in failure, which meant that the Turkish machine-guns directed at Quinn’s from the south could play freely. Once the telephone lines had been repaired (snapped by men stepping on them in the dark), the guns were asked to fire on the surrounding Turkish positions. In the shambles of the captured trenches Ernest Williams and his party crouched behind a thin palisade of staves, showered by dust and stones as bombs burst around them, meeting repeated rushes by Turks with bayonets and bullets, a pile of dead Turks lying beneath the wrecked barricade. The message came back from the front line, ‘can barely hold on’, and Sykes’s New Zealand gunners quickened their fire at Turkish Quinn’s, dropping shells into the communication trenches in Mule Valley, as close to the front as they could fire. By this time both Stewart and McKenzie had been wounded. With their leaders disabled and the Turks bombing into the Aucklanders’ 94


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position on the left, it became clear that they could not hold on. Colvin Algie, who led a party of reinforcements just before dawn, described the end of the raid succinctly: ‘they bombed us and we bombed them but they were too good for us and we had to retire’. James McWhirter remembered trying frantically to light the fuses of jam-tin bombs while minutes passed like hours. He recalled the moans of the wounded as ‘awful . . . you would hear them crying “don’t leave me boys, the enemy will finish me”—but we could do nothing’. Clearly McWhirter heard their cries in his mind for many years after 1915. By five the survivors had tumbled back into Quinn’s, leaving another 24 men dead in no-man’s-land, some of them ‘missing’: wounded men lost in the darkness and confusion. They included William Dundon, who had miscalculated the risk. In Thomas Ritchie’s revealing phrase, the wounded were ‘dragged as gently as possible’ to where he and Aitken waited. Ritchie, new to the front line, found the bomb wounds ‘absolutely ghastly’. Shaken men piling back into the trenches provoked a minor panic. McWhirter thought that the Australian machine-guns on Pope’s were firing on their own side throughout the raid, though in the darkness and dust it is hard to see how he could be sure. ‘Machine guns & bombs’, McSharry wrote in his diary. The Aucklanders ‘lost heavily and had to retire’. Percy Fenwick, his foreboding fulfilled, wiped the blood from his hands at the New Zealand hospital and recorded that he did not think that the Turks had lost as many. Cyril Malthus, who had stumbled alone along trenches occupied only by dead New Zealanders and Turks, reflected bitterly that the impression had spread among the survivors that the task ‘was known to be an impossible one and had only been ordered as a stunt’ to keep Turkish reserves from Cape Helles. Wallace Saunders, candid as ever, recorded in his diary that another raid had been repulsed. ‘Each time,’ he noted, ‘the Turks are given a new lease of life.’ The defeat left the Turks ‘cocky and impertinent for days after’. This, he decided, was ‘very bad generalship’, and it appears to have begun with the battalion commanders responsible for the sortie. The amiable Jackie Hughes, of whom Arthur Temperley (the brigade major) said ‘personal gallantry was almost the only military quality he possessed’, must be held accountable for his failure to ensure that the raid was not better organised and supported. Though a failure, the sortie had produced 28 Turkish prisoners, the most taken at Quinn’s in the entire campaign. Many Anzacs took 95


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an interest in the prisoners they saw. The Australian sergeant Charles Boswald, visiting Monash Valley from the 1st Division further south, ‘had a good look’ at the prisoners being brought back. He found them ‘fine big young well fed healthy looking men . . . splendid fighters’, he imagined. He was to die at their hands at Lone Pine before the summer’s end. Here at the extremity of both the Anzac line and the human experience of war the ordeal of spending a night in the front line tested the nerves and the humanity of every man. But on the afternoon of 6 June Frederick Scarborough gingerly opened his loop-hole and peered at the Turkish loop-hole fifteen yards away across no-man’s-land. He was startled to find himself looking into the face of a Turkish soldier; one of the few occasions when the enemy at Quinn’s had a face: My eyes and the Turk’s met: he was young, dark, grim and solemnlooking. I don’t know why I grinned; I felt as if he could not hurt me & yet a pull of a trigger might have dropped me. Still a few seconds gaze: he closed his loophole & I closed mine. I expected a bomb over & moved. Perhaps he thought the same & so neither of us fired at each other.

‘They would not face the heavy fire’: the 7–8 June sortie On 7 June the New Zealanders mounted another sortie. Godley, stung by criticism that his men had left behind weapons and tools on 4–5 June, ordered another, again a small effort, of fewer than 50 men, again bound to fail. Each of the three small parties included just three men carrying bombs, and about a third of the attackers carried neither rifles nor bombs, but sandbags. Once again arrangements for supporting the initial rush were inadequate. The Aucklanders, this time under the command of a Marton dentist, Robert Young, were pessimistic: the very idea of having to retrieve gear (not even knowing whether it was still there) depressed them. Colvin Algie thought the attempt ‘impossible . . . we have already made three attempts’, counting the Australian and New Zealand sorties. On the left a group under a recently arrived officer, John Corbett, an assayer from Thames, reached the Turkish line, but with men armed only with sandbags was eventually forced back by bombs. (Arthur Hutton, watching the 96


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fight from Pope’s, recorded that Quinn’s ‘looked like a furnace’ from exploding bombs.) As on 9 May, men of the storming parties refused to move forward. Most of a group of ten supposed to rush out of a ruined ‘blockhouse’ in the crater Kidd had held failed to follow their sergeant out, and the one who did was hit by a bomb. A party running out from number 2 post met heavy fire and came back. Colonel Young himself pushed through the trenches and tried to lead them out but, he reported sadly, ‘they would not face the heavy fire and again came back’. James McWhirter was again in the attacking party and reached the Turkish line. As he and two other Aucklanders were building a sandbag barricade they came under ‘a shower of bombs’. They found Turks sheltering in a bomb-proof, hauled them out and made them stand on their parapet in the open until one of the wounded Aucklanders could escort them back. By this time the sap was full of New Zealand wounded, with others lying outside the parapet. Soon a man stumbled along the trench, saying ‘Here they come’, and the Aucklanders and Turks traded shots, firing blindly around a sandbagged traverse. McWhirter called for a bomb. A wounded man handed one up, and with trembling fingers McWhirter lit the fuse, counted to three and threw it around the corner. While the Turks recoiled, amid groans and cries of ‘Ul-lah!’, the Aucklanders obeyed an order to retire, carrying or dragging their wounded. The next morning McWhirter found himself covered in the blood of the man he had carried to the dressing-station, a friend whom he had not recognised through the blood. The Aucklanders called for help from the Canterbury company still at Quinn’s. On the afternoon of the 7th Ernest Williams and his mates had been down to the beach to bathe. That evening he and nine men under Lance Corporal William Halkett, from Rakaia, south of Christchurch, volunteered to—as they thought—escort prisoners to the rear. Instead they were told to run out into noman’s-land looking for eight or nine Aucklanders sheltering in the Pit, a ten-yard stretch of trench midway between the two lines. Williams was the first man to reach the startled Aucklanders, who at first mistook the reinforcements for Turks. ‘Young Holderness’ (Gerald Holderness, another Christchurch man) ran too far to the left and almost fell into the Turkish trench. His mates grabbed him and hauled him out, wounded but alive. The Aucklanders in the pit, with Turks close by on three sides, were understandably ‘nervy’. For 97


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an hour they waited, crouching with fixed bayonets, awaiting the bombs they thought must come. At last, after runners sent for orders failed to return, Halkett decided that they should get out. They sent the wounded back first, stumbling through the rifle fire. Then the dozen or so unwounded men made a rush. Several fell dead, including Halkett, whose body was never recovered, but most reached safety. As he climbed over the parapet Williams looked back, horrified to see what he recalled as ‘a black mass of Turks’ swarming into the pit. He never understood why the Turks had not used bombs against the isolated party: if they had, he thought, surely none would have survived. The presence of reinforcements added to the confusion. Some Aucklanders had arrived on the peninsula only that afternoon, and Corbett was killed leading men who must have been overwhelmed by the horror of what they were seeing. Henry Kitson, who had done his bit in two previous sorties and was forbidden from going over with the leading waves, nevertheless went out to try and see what was happening. He reported that the Aucklanders on the left had given way and that Turks rushed on and almost surrounded the remainder. ‘We were told to get out somehow.’ Robert Young’s report was honest but unfair to his men, who, he said, ‘shewed no dash and were very half-hearted throughout’. He thought that they had ‘not quite recovered’ from the earlier failure. McSharry was openly abusive. ‘Another abortive attack,’ he stormed. ‘These small attacks are useless.’ The waste of raw men—33 out of the 50 who had attacked—disgusted many Aucklanders. One officer described how the result left Young ‘extremely unpopular’. He had made ‘some foolish remarks’ resented by men who had ‘twice faced death and taken the trenches at Quinn’s’. Later, an Aucklander recorded that men had shouted at Young, ‘Get back to your dug-out or you might get hurt’, and he himself did ‘not think a lot of him’. It signified the tension all were under.

‘Miserable hole-and-corner scrapping’: the strain of Quinn’s Field Service Regulations predicted that ‘the brunt of the work will fall upon the outposts . . . in siege operations’. After seeing the post and the exhausted Aucklanders filing out after the latest raid, George Bollinger scribbled in his diary, ‘Is it a wonder men break down?’ 98


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Bollinger, by now a sergeant, spent the next 72 hours without sleep trying to keep his men awake; ‘quite a contract’, he noted. Describing the heat, the flies and the stench, Bollinger recorded his conviction that ‘every man . . . cannot help desiring immediate peace’, which was something no one at Quinn’s could obtain. It became common to talk of the ‘strain’ to which Quinn’s especially subjected men. Even those who lived at headquarters and perhaps could be excused for taking an optimistic view began to realise how the neverending fighting was affecting men’s resilience. Aubrey Herbert noted that ‘some men in a sap up at Quinn’s have been going off their heads’. A New Zealand friend called on Richard Casey at 1st Division headquarters after spending several days at Quinn’s. Casey was shocked to find the man ‘rather upset’. He explained that ‘he has had no sleep for several days and the bombing up there is severe’. Bean acknowledged after the failure of 7–8 June that ‘the men are getting pretty sick of these half-hearted side shows’ but he excused Birdwood, supposing that he was ‘not allowed by his instructions from down south to attempt anything more’. The troops’ confidence in their commanders, especially Godley, began to wane. Far from the trenches of Gallipoli, Winston Churchill remained sanguine that the gamble he had encouraged could bring the spectacular result he had foreseen. As the survivors of the 4–5 June sortie slept in dugouts behind Quinn’s, he addressed his constituents at Dundee. Hamilton’s force, he said, was ‘separated by only a few miles from a victory such as this war has not yet seen’. He conjured a vision that ‘beyond those few miles of ridge and scrub [lay] the downfall of a hostile Empire’. Men on Gallipoli read this speech in the Peninsula Press a fortnight later and snorted derisively into their mugs of tea. The problem was that getting more than a few yards had so far proved to be impossible. The summer brought stagnation and frustration. The brigade commanders on whom the defence of the various sectors rested proved to be disappointments. Despite his reputation as a thruster, Chauvel, the sector commander, continued to displease his divisional, corps and army commanders. Godley shared Birdwood’s concern; Malone had learned that Quinn’s was ‘causing our General great anxiety’. Birdwood, in one of what he coyly called his ‘little daily inspections’—a reflection of his unease—saw for himself the results of Chauvel’s apathy. Unlike the chateau-bound generals who were to become notorious on the Western Front, Birdwood went into the 99


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front line, spending long periods walking and even crawling about, observing the men and their demeanour. At times he would chat with them, though his own reserve and their diffidence in the presence of a red-tabbed senior officer usually made their exchanges a matter of platitude and routine exhortation. Birdwood reported to Hamilton how keen he was for ‘small enterprises to keep things going’. Like commanders on the Western Front, he sought to maintain his own men’s ‘keenness’ and to demoralise the enemy by mounting small raids. Indeed, the process arose at exactly the same time as in France, where the Canadians developed a policy of making small raids on opposing trenches. Birdwood now recognised, however, that these attacks entailed ‘more serious sacrifice of life than one feels justified in risking for only a small enterprise’. His men, especially junior officers, echoed this view with bitterness. Henry Tiddy, whose 2nd Light Horse had made one futile attack from Quinn’s, learned of the New Zealanders’ sorties with dismay. ‘When will the authorities take a tumble for these minor enterprises?’ he asked. The 2nd Light Horse now ‘dread the place purely through these stupid attacks’. In fact there were to be no more attacks while the New Zealanders held Quinn’s. Some Wellingtons claimed that Malone defied Godley by refusing to make another sortie, but besides Malone’s own diary, in which he wrote that he would ‘take some forcing’ before making ‘isolated attacks’, there is no written evidence that any more were planned. Even Charles Bean now ironically described how ‘the fight has come down to little things’. A raid by 100 men would occupy the attention of the corps headquarters; Birdwood’s chief of staff would discuss plans for the placement of a couple of snipers. Having landed and held on, the Anzac force seemed to have run out of energy to do much else. The strain was weakening its resolve and power to do more, and the frustrations at Quinn’s came to symbolise its incapacity. ‘I don’t think this miserable hole-and-corner scrapping at Quinn’s is improving the force,’ Bean confided to his diary. Canterbury men struggling up the faggot-floored track for their second stint in Quinn’s would have agreed. ‘This war is not the exciting adventure you read about,’ Ted Baigent reflected.

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7 ‘If he had had roses . . .’ The transformation of Quinn’s

he failure of a fourth sortie coincided with the arrival of the battalion which would make Quinn’s its own, William Malone’s Wellington Battalion. Malone handed his battalion over to his senior major and took over command of the post on 9 June. He and the Wellingtons had just spent a strenuous ten days rehabilitating Courtney’s Post, which he had found in a ‘very higgley-piggley’ state. Godley now sent them to do the same to his most vital position. Malone protested. ‘We have to . . . tackle a new messed up Post,’ he complained. This was ‘not altogether fair’. Many Canterburys and Aucklanders had thought poorly of the Australian effort at Quinn’s, deploring the Australian habit of ‘dossing down anywhere’ and their practice of burying their dead all over the post rather than in defined plots. They had found loop-holes neglected and precious periscopes smashed and discarded. But while doing more than those they had replaced, the New Zealanders had done little more than clean up the worst of the neglect. The Wellingtons found matters little changed in the ten days in which their countrymen had held the post. They were disappointed that the Aucklanders, despite having had a hard time in the two attacks, had been ‘in no mood for straightening things up’. They now found themselves in charge of what Malone called ‘a dirty, dilapidated, unorganised Post’, but still the crucial position in the Anzac line. Despite their irritation at having to do for Quinn’s what they had done at Courtney’s the Wellingtons tackled their new responsibility with disciplined resignation. Malone saw two critical shortcomings under

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Australian tenure: the loss of fire superiority and the poor physical state of the post.

‘To boss the situation’: regaining fire superiority The New Zealanders had immediately noticed the Australian loss of fire superiority. David Scott described how when the Canterbury Battalion arrived, sentries had periscopes shot out of their hands, sandbags were cut to pieces by traversing machine-guns and so many bombs fell on the front line that parts had been abandoned. Malone had observed that the Turks ‘seem to boss the situation’ and he resolved to reverse the balance. The battle for fire superiority began with bombing. ‘On the very first day,’ Malone wrote to a friend, ‘I ordered 2 bombs to be thrown for every one of the Turks.’ Soon his bombers were reporting that they had thrown over 180 bombs a day, almost all the bombs made in the bomb factory by the Cove going over the parapet at Quinn’s. McSharry organised bombing parties in accordance with divisional orders. Men were appointed as ‘bombers’, men cool enough to handle the fuses and strong enough to hurl the heavy tins again and again. To sharpen their skills some battalions organised bombthrowing competitions in the gullies while resting, awarding prizes of cigarettes and marmalade, with men disqualified for exposing themselves. With increased practice, bombers could now aim at cigarette smoke rising from the opposing line. The engineers of Anzac devised more powerful weapons, notably the Lotbiniere bomb, named after the corps’ chief sapper and first used on 6 June. The Lotbiniere was a lump of guncotton wired to a hairbrush-shaped wooden paddle. Intended to be used against structures rather than men, it caused a mighty bang and fearful damage to overhead cover. On 19 June one thrown by a New Zealander threw a plank from the Turkish lines high into the air and back into the New Zealand lines, where it brained a particularly unlucky sapper. (By now trench garrisons had become much more canny, with sentries standing under overhead cover and bombers darting out to hurl bombs.) For nearly two months now, Turkish snipers had been wounding and killing men in Quinn’s and Monash Valley; indeed, one Wellington man thought that ‘we were losing more men behind the trenches than in them’. These sudden deaths demoralised the men, turning them into fatalists who took fewer precautions rather than more care. 102


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‘ I F H E H A D H A D R O S E S . . .’

As late as 7 June, Turkish snipers had prevented the evacuation of wounded men down Monash Valley itself. The introduction of periscope rifles for use against the Turkish snipers had not so far proved effective. Regarded as ‘public property’ and fired by often inexpert men detailed to sniping as a fatigue, the guns were often left dirty. Marksmen derided them as ‘funk rifles’, suitable only for men who could fire from safety but whose shots could not be aimed carefully. It was New Zealanders who at last defeated the Turkish snipers. Jesse Wallingford, famous as a shooting champion, selected and trained large parties of marksmen on the periscopic rifles and gave them the job of suppressing Turkish snipers. Led by Lieutenant Tom Grace (described by Chaplain Green as ‘The Sniper King’), they came from all the battalions of the brigade. Grace sent out pairs as snipers and observers every day, and saw almost immediate effects. As early as 11 June diarists were recording Monash Valley free of sniper fire. Though it sounds like a typical piece of Gallipoli folklore, Birdwood watched ‘regular matches’ between opposing trenches. He saw a Turk cheekily wave a flag over his parapet to signal a ‘wash-out’ (a miss) after a shot, and then hastily drop the flag as a Wellington’s bullet hit him. By late June the New Zealanders had up to 70 men working against snipers, some using home-made dum-dum bullets, their ends filed off against international law. This was a much more personal war than the business of flinging bombs randomly over the sandbags. Frederick Scarborough, despite the revelation that the Turks opposite were men as well, took his turn at the periscope rifles. Like many he found that the recoil of the rifle banged the bottom mirror into his nose, but he persisted. ‘I guess I shifted some of them,’ he wrote dispassionately. James Swan, a Gisborne miner, described a duel he fought with a Turkish sniper 400 yards away on the eastern slopes of Mule Valley. The Turk lost: ‘I can see him kicking and struggling in the bushes’, Swan wrote, as his counterpart bled to death in the scrub. As the attacks of May and early June had shown, the key to the defence of Quinn’s was not so much the number of rifles that its garrison could point over the parapets as the quantity of fire able to be brought by machine-guns from flanking positions to the north and south. Godley’s foresight in ensuring that the infantry battalions of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force had four rather than two Maxim machine-guns paid off. By summer Jesse Wallingford had 22 machineguns under his direction, with up to eleven available to fire on any one 103


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point on the brigade’s front. Wallingford had five spare guns, but very few spare crews. Machine-guns were so vital, and trained gunners so scarce, that their crews were given little rest or respite. Machine-gunner Jack Dunn, the Masterton journalist who recorded his initial impressions of the peninsula so cheerfully, had in the meantime had a bad time. His diary records one after another the death or wounding of his friends. He had been sent to the beach hospital with pneumonia for a month and come back because doctors had merely advised rather than ordered him to remain in their care. He returned to his section on Russell’s Top, covering the front of Quinn’s. He found that Wallingford, that stern champion of the New Zealand machine-gunners, had been sent off to rest, replaced by a strange officer from the mounted rifles. On 27 June, Dunn and his mate narrowly missed being shelled, reaching their gun-pit ‘over debris and past wounded men’. This experience—‘not at all a pleasant one’—may have been the last straw for him: ‘did not feel too fit’, he wrote in one of the final entries before he abandoned keeping his diary early in July. While their Maxim machine-guns would be cared for and carefully maintained, the men who fired them would increasingly suffer as the summer wore on, and Jack Dunn was soon to pay the ultimate price. Despite their growing strength, the Anzac machine-guns could never eliminate their Turkish counterparts, sited to fire along the Anzac line. This was work for the trench mortars. George Donovan, a Wellington man proudly detached to one of the Japanese mortars (‘we are as destructive as a 6-inch howitzer’), described how Quinn’s trenches were ‘the worst trenches along the line’. He explained that they were dangerous because ‘they are being inflated by Turkish machine guns’. Every so often the word would be passed from corps to division, to brigade and battalion, to be alert for a further attack. Joseph Beeston, watching the effect of repeated alarms on the men in the trenches, thought that the effect of these warnings was to make men ‘panicky and unnerve them’. Constant alarms and stand-tos wearied the unfortunate gun crews. The New Zealanders continued and it seems intensified the garrison’s practice of firing virtually all the time. Our conventional wisdom of trench warfare is that most of the time men did not fire from them continuously. But at Quinn’s that was exactly what they did. Charles Elsom, a New Zealand sapper who had enlisted in London and joined the force in Egypt, passed a man in a fire-trench one day while 104


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making his way to one of the wynzes. The man lofted his rifle above his head and fired randomly. Elsom asked him what he was firing at. ‘Nothing in particular,’ the man replied, ‘just to let them know that we are here.’ It exemplified Malone’s doctrine of aggression that so swiftly reversed the situation at Quinn’s. Within days Godley acknowledged the transformation that Malone had produced at Quinn’s and at other front-line posts. He issued a circular to post commanders commending the ‘marked improvement’ he had seen, especially in gaining fire superiority. Typically, he urged that ‘much can still be done’ to maintain the aggression which the New Zealanders had brought into play. Bean later learned that the Turks had considered abandoning the front line at Quinn’s and withdrawing down the slope of Mule Valley. They could not, for the same reason the Anzacs had to maintain their line, because neither side could surrender the advantage of the ridge-crest; and so the killing continued.

‘Domestic virtues’: Malone transforms Quinn’s Massive physical improvements were needed. Wallace Saunders scathingly described the post as ‘a damned rotten disgrace to anyone calling himself an engineer’—a crack at Captain F.A. Ferguson, who in turn blamed half-finished jobs on the infantry. The arrival early in June of a second New Zealand field company gave Malone the means to begin a massive program of work at Quinn’s, and he detailed his tired resting battalions as labourers to make good the engineers’ plans. The sappers’ war diaries document the extent of the work. Day after day they catalogue the tasks, building overhead cover, tunnels and machine-gun posts, deepening and strengthening fire-trenches, saps and steps, widening communication trenches and paths, making and repairing loopholes, and making and ‘launching’ bomb-screens. Organisational changes accompanied structural work. Wider saps meant that reinforcements could be hurried up to the line two abreast instead of in slow single file, and Malone had companies practise drills, chivvying tired men up steep paths in full kit to ensure that in the event of a breakthrough supports could be sent up in time. Quinn’s was given priority. It was the first position on the peninsula with a telephone system linking the front-line subsections with the post headquarters dugout, which in turn was connected to the higher headquarters. By mid-June, as the sergeant major of the Ruahine 105


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Company of the Wellingtons wrote approvingly, ‘one can hardly recognise the place now’. Not only had saps and trenches been in poor repair, the unsanitary state of the valley was causing growing losses in illness and infection. Just as Thomas Ritchie straightened up from treating the last of the wounded from the 4 June sortie, he was appointed sanitary officer and given the task of cleaning up the valley. It was a huge job. All over the area corpses dating from the campaign’s earliest days lay a few feet below the surface. Men were helping themselves to water trickling from soaks and springs, many of them polluted by these corpses. Ritchie found it hard going to get men to comply with his efforts. He built new latrines, spread lime over the corpses he could reach, and urged men not to foul the ground more than they could help. Battalion orders supported Ritchie’s work. Men were rebuked for leaving excreta lying about and told not to discard meat tins. As the Wellingtons’ lines were nevertheless reported to be ‘very clean’ and its sick list was the shortest in the division, it suggests that the general standard of hygiene on Gallipoli was deplorably low. The flies would have been horrific from the unburied dead alone, but the filthy state of the trenches was, as the Wellingtons showed, avoidable to an extent. The arrival of the fresh sapper sections at Quinn’s to bolster the under-strength and tired section of the 1st Field Company enabled stretches of trench abandoned by the Queenslanders to be reclaimed. The Racecourse was reoccupied, after long and hazardous labour in the face of the constant danger of bombs falling into the narrow trench. Eventually four strong loopholes were installed where previously men had been driven out by bombs. The several new positions were designed and built by Wallace Saunders, by mid-June a lieutenant newly commissioned and freshly shaved. With Turkish listening posts just 20 yards away, the sappers had to work silently and in the dark. The second position was sited too low—its bullets would hit the ground rather than fire the length of no-man’s-land. Malone had uncharacteristically told the sapper that near enough would do, but Saunders made him come and see, showing Malone with a periscope how a low embrasure made the entire effort useless. While being sniped at Malone agreed and Saunders went out at night, working between moonset and dawn with random shots thudding into the sandbags, to raise the gun’s level by six inches. It was done on the shortest night, though Saunders recalled that ‘the first few hours of it were long enough for me’. 106


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The engineering effort came at a cost. The sappers drew fire. ‘Bugger these two,’ the infantry said of Saunders and William Abbey, ‘they always draw fire.’ When sappers threw Lotbiniere bombs to destroy Turkish overhead cover and make their front line untenable, the Turks retaliated with cricket-ball bombs that wounded three infantrymen. After another narrow escape Arthur Bellingham wrote feelingly of how ‘it plays hell with a man’s nerves working in a trench with the damn things coming over’. He calculated that of 61 New Zealand sappers who had enlisted in Britain twelve had been killed, 38 wounded, three died of disease and only eight survived. The survivors included several of the most notable contributors to the New Zealand engineer effort on the peninsula. Indeed, three of the six DCMs won by New Zealand sappers on Gallipoli were awarded for work at Quinn’s. Malone, whom Saunders sarcastically described as ‘an amateur Architect’ with ‘great ideas’, knew what he wanted but not how to design it. The pressing need was for sleeping quarters for the infantry, who occupied dugouts randomly all over the slopes, exposed to the weather as much as to Turkish bombs bouncing down the ridge. Saunders designed large shelters with bomb-proof roofs, the famous ‘terraces’ of Quinn’s. These terraces, one of the largest engineering tasks on the peninsula besides the jetties at the Cove, are one of the most recognisable images of Quinn’s. They gave the garrison comfortable, secure quarters close to the firing line, safe from bombs and the sun’s glare. Malone inspected the job a few days after it had begun, puzzled that the terraces looked nothing like the sketches he had given the sappers. Saunders explained that his design used less scarce timber: Malone was satisfied. But the work sickened the men digging the holes for the uprights. James Meek remembered that the hillside had become ‘one huge grave’, with bodies just below the surface. As usual, Malone walked about encouraging them with ‘Good work’ and ‘Fine job’. Quinn’s was now regarded as a showpiece and many visitors, including the correspondents, were taken to it. They commented on and quoted Malone’s catch-phrase, that the art of warfare, as he said over and over, ‘lies in the cultivation of the domestic virtues’. Bean recalled him saying whimsically that ‘if he had had roses . . . he would have planted them on the terraces’. Pre-eminent for Malone were neatness and cleanliness, his standards apparent from the orders in the battalion’s war diary. Men were forbidden from taking rucksacks, 107


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Quinn’s Post: trenches

By the time Ronald McInniss made his survey of Quinn’s Post in November (on which this map is based) the post had become an intricate network of trenches, covered and uncovered. Malone’s terraces are at the top left. A complex network of tunnels lay beneath the ground, shown for clarity on a separate map. Virtually everything to the west of the main crest-line has now eroded away: Quinn’s no longer exists. 108


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blankets and waterproof sheets into the post (because they tended to be left behind and cluttered it up); were advised to wear specifics against lice (unsuccessfully), and were ordered to carry field dressings even if working in shirt-sleeves or singlets. His instructions could be seen as fussy beside the more rough-and-ready attitude of the Australians. Malone devised detailed schedules for fatigue parties and ensured that his company commanders saw that their areas were ‘perfectly clean’ before leaving the post. Whereas the Australians had revelled in the danger and drama of Quinn’s, Malone sought to domesticate it. It was a place to live in as well as fight from. Though sick in increasing numbers and tired to exhaustion, the Wellingtons knew that they had succeeded. ‘Quinn’s belonged to the Wellington Infantry Battalion,’ Vic Nicholson remembered, ‘we were very proud and proprietorial.’ Birdwood was delighted at the swift results produced under Malone’s regime, telling him that his ‘anxiety is at an end’. Having again toured Quinn’s on 14 June he scrambled down the slope to Chauvel’s headquarters and told him of how satisfied he was with Malone. Chauvel, Birdwood found to his sorrow, ‘hardly seemed to agree’. Indeed, he ‘seemed to think the previous state was more preferable’. An angry Birdwood immediately suggested to Godley that Chauvel be relieved as section commander. Coincidentally, upon returning to his headquarters dugout near the Cove, Birdwood found a letter from Hamilton who had reached the same conclusion. Chauvel, who would soon leave Gallipoli sick with pleurisy, had failed. Malone’s fame now rivalled Hugh Quinn’s. When Admiral John de Roebeck met him he said, ‘Oh! You are the man who turned the Turks down at Quinn’s Post.’ Others were less impressed. His brigadier, Earl Johnston, found him a difficult subordinate. Malone claimed that Johnston failed to press for the building materials needed to make Quinn’s secure and comfortable. The relationship between the upright Malone and the mediocre Johnston could never have succeeded, and men died because of it. McSharry also found Malone’s strictness hard to take, particularly as much of what Malone found unsatisfactory McSharry had created, and asked to be transferred back to the 15th Battalion, now resting in readiness for the August attacks. ‘Malone is an old woman,’ he scribbled in his diary, ‘I am fed up.’ Malone’s devotion to order bemused a man intolerant of ‘red tape in the presence of the enemy’. Malone played up his eccentricity, joking to a succession of visitors about his 109


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fancy to plant roses on the terrace outside his dugout and entertain visitors to tea. McSharry never quite got the joke. ‘He has wonderful ideas about turning Quinn’s Post into an ornamental garden,’ McSharry complained. Malone’s vision seemed incongruous when the entire post, and particularly no-man’s-land, remained foul-smelling and fly-ridden. Gradually McSharry warmed to the men who had displaced his fellow Queenslanders, and they to him. ‘I’ll soon be a New Zealander,’ he jotted in his diary. Despite his growing rapport with the new garrison, McSharry never quite became reconciled to Malone. The two remained ‘civil’ but Malone’s eccentricities left McSharry cold. Still, Malone’s devotion to strengthening the physical defences of Quinn’s and his training of its defenders made the post stronger and more secure than it had ever been, ensuring that from June onwards the Turks made no serious attempt to storm Anzac’s most vulnerable position.

‘The most “nervy” part of the business’: mines and mining Under the New Zealanders the mining continued, still with little more than picks and shovels. Miners from around New Zealand now mostly replaced the Australians from Ballarat and Mount Morgan, though some Australians remained. Corporal Robert Mason, a 35year-old Broken Hill miner, was awarded the DCM for ‘conspicuous gallantry and resource’ in mining operations at Quinn’s between 26 May and 28 June. Now men from Thames and Greymouth were asked to volunteer to join him underground. Some officers pressed for a formed company, easier to discipline and manage. One of the obstacles was the question of whether it should comprise Australians, New Zealanders or both, since it would work on a position occupied by both. The divisional staff minuted ‘mixing of Aust & NZ personnel is not a success’ and recommended it not be tried again. The proposal was not approved and for the entire campaign infantry fatigue parties, including volunteers and experienced miners, laboured underground. Typically a couple of men picked and shovelled at the face of the shaft—working in a tunnel usually no more than four feet high and two feet wide in what an Australian called ‘the hardest labour on the peninsula’—while another pair filled sandbags with spoil. These they passed to a larger party spaced down the shaft who would hurl the 110


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bags between their legs in a bizarre parody of a school ball-game or sit sideways and hand them from knee to knee as if in some crazy parlour entertainment. It was hot, sweaty and demanding labour, and all the time they lived with the prospect of being suddenly entombed by the explosion of a Turkish mine. ‘The most “nervy” part of the business,’ Raymond Baker wrote, ‘was listening to the enemy pick, pick, picking away.’ As long as it continued the miners were safe. Did it stop because a shift changed or because a mine was being placed? To mislead listeners, wily miners would continue picking in one shaft while they tamped a nearby chamber. Where explosives were being handled, candles or torches with their glowing elements were banned, and men worked in the faint but safe glow of sheets of zinc coated with ‘Balmain’s luminous paint’. Inspired by the War Office manual, Charles Elsom ingeniously rigged up a series of reflectors using flattened biscuit tins to bring sunlight into the shallower galleries. The explosives—the new chemical ammonal—were laid according to strict limits set out by the manual. But local circumstances—particularly the depth of the shafts and the nature of the soil—introduced imponderables which made mining as much an art as a science. Miners learned to use larger charges, placing them in alcoves off the main shaft and ‘tamping’ them—placing a weight of heavy sandbags on top of the charge, preferably positioned by a skilled bricklayer—to direct the force of the explosion toward the enemy rather than back along the tunnel. Charges, first of about 30 pounds but later up to about 100 pounds, were fired by an ‘Exploder Dynamo, Electric, Mark V’, the maintenance of which—the testing of circuits and connections—was a major task in itself and consumed the bulk of the War Office manual. By June the initiative in the underground war had swung toward the Anzacs. The Turks had abandoned the hope of destroying the Anzac front line and were now dedicated to locating and destroying Anzac tunnels and mines. Anzac sappers laid far more mines than did the Turks. So active had the Anzac tunnelling become that it threatened the very substance of the soil. As early as 1 June engineers reported that the ground under no-man’s-land at Quinn’s had become ‘pulverised’ and that ‘revetting’ (wooden planking to hold loosened soil) was increasingly needed. This instability would eventually cause the post to disappear. The deadly game of bluff continued underground. On 12 June, Sergeant William Abbey called Ferguson and Saunders underground to listen to the thudding of Turkish picks close to their own 111


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gallery. Squatting in the candle-lit tunnel they heard a crack. ‘What’s that?’ Ferguson hissed. Saunders reassured him it was a bomb on the surface. Deciding that the Turks could be caught, Abbey hastily tamped a mine and blew it. On the surface, sentries peering through their periscopes saw arms and legs—one with Turkish puttee and boot still visible—sticking out of the ground. Indeed, fragments of bodies embedded throughout the post were turned up by the diggings. Frank McKenzie recorded in disgust after his first few shifts at Quinn’s how it was ‘necessary to cut through Turkish bodies buried in trenches’ while excavating galleries. The fatigue parties shovelling spoil out of the galleries into sacks had to pick out stones, bits of kit and, wrote Frederick Scarborough, ‘maybe part of a human being’. The infantry heard the miners’ yarns and shuddered. It gave Ted Baigent the ‘creeps’ to hear them talk about meeting a Turkish miner in the dark and killing him with an entrenching tool, or to hear them describe how the ground beneath them was ‘riddled with Turkish tunnels . . . many of them with mines in place, ready to be touched off’.

‘Plucky reconnaissance’: forays from Quinn’s Among the clearest signs of the New Zealanders’ confidence is that they began to leave their trenches and take the war to the Turks, first and notably against the ‘blockhouse’ erected after the 29 May attack, which had now been an irritant for ten days. On the night of 9–10 June a New Zealand sapper, Lance Corporal Francis Fear, a cheese-maker, volunteered for the task. He persuaded Edgar Hodges, a mechanic who had also enlisted in the New Zealand British Section, to go out with him. They fashioned a 90-pound charge of guncotton, fixing six slabs to a wooden board and attached to a fuse concealed in a haversack. Wearing handkerchiefs on their heads to disguise their outlines they gingerly crawled out of the post. Inching along silently, with Fear pushing the heavy bomb ahead of him, they crawled toward the blockhouse, passing over the rotting bodies of the dead. At last Fear reached the Turkish parapet. Rather than simply push the board against the sandbags, light the fuse and run, he began to scrape soil away to make a secure bed for the charge. We can only imagine what the two must have felt as they lay exposed, a few feet from the Turks they could hear in the blockhouse, waiting for Fear to give the signal for the fuse to be lit. Even when dirt 112


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began to trickle into the Turkish trench Fear did not stop, and they lay there for half an hour, slowly and silently packing the explosives against the beams. At last he motioned for the fuse to be lit inside the haversack to conceal the flame, and as it spluttered into a shower of sparks they stood and leapt for the Anzac line. Behind them a massive explosion tore apart the blockhouse, throwing heavy timber baulks into the air. The crater, filled with debris and the bodies of its Turkish garrison, was not reoccupied. Fear and Hodges received the DCM, with Hamilton and Birdwood making the obvious jokes about Fear’s name: ‘if only the King could arbitrarily give him the name of “fearless’’’, Birdwood remarked. As he threw himself over the parapet Fear quipped, ‘Eggs-a-cook’—the catch phrase of the egg-wallahs at Zeitoun. Within days this quip had circulated through the valley, Fear’s composure widely admired. Wallace Saunders (who had known Fear and Hodges since volunteering in Britain) thought that they deserved the Victoria Cross, but concluded cynically that ‘V.C’s are not for New Zealanders’. Birdwood’s staff acknowledged that the New Zealanders had gained a ‘complete ascendency’ over the Turkish snipers and had ‘got entirely the upper hand’ of their bombers: on the day before the compliment the Canterbury Battalion’s bombers had thrown 527 bombs from Quinn’s. Bombing became highly organised. From late June a bombing officer toured each section, advising units how best to use the weapon in both defence and, anticipating the coming offensive, in attack. Instructions, again devised by Grumpy Braithwaite, the division’s chief theoretician, urged attacks to be opened by ‘showers of grenades’. In July two Wellington men, Lieutenant Tom Grace and Sergeant Arthur Swayn, crawled out from Quinn’s and turned north to reconnoitre the Turkish trenches at the head of Monash Valley. They threw bombs at a Turkish picquet and swiftly and successfully returned. It was a pinprick, of course, and was recorded sketchily in the brigade war diary, but it demonstrates the growing New Zealand confidence. By mid-July the determination to maintain fire superiority had become formalised, with a ‘combined fire demonstration’ arranged between Courtney’s and Quinn’s, involving trench mortars and artillery joining in to interfere with Turkish attempts to repair trenches from Johnston’s Jolly up to Baby 700. On 12 June, Sergeant Bent and Private O’Sullivan had made what the battalion war diary described as a ‘plucky reconnaissance’. A few days later another pair ‘shot two Turks & threw 2 bombs & came back with a good report’. 113


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The aggression the New Zealanders demonstrated at Quinn’s confounds their reputation as more cautious than the reckless Australians. Individual Turks also ventured out into no-man’s-land, sometimes pulling up lightly staked bomb-screens and erecting them on their own parapet. The dearth of Turkish records, a scarcity of memoirs and the absence of a system of individual awards means that the details of these ventures and the names of the men who performed them have been lost.

‘Something in the air’: thirst, flies and food Within weeks of arriving on the peninsula everyone was dirty, unshaven and lousy. By mid-June, Padre Merrington wrote, the weather became ‘roasting . . . hotter than a Queensland summer’. Men began to discard their woollen tunics and to cut their breeches off at the knees. Finding their wide-brimmed hats awkward in the confined spaces of the trenches, some even cut their hats down, removing the sides of the brims or even leaving only a short piece at the front to shade their eyes. Notionally men at Quinn’s received a third of a gallon of water each per day, for all purposes—drinking, shaving, washing—less if water barges were lost: about as much as a family-sized bottle of soft drink. Getting it to the ridge entailed climbing a slow, hot, often slippery path, with the water slopping out of open kerosene tins whenever a carrier stumbled. Birdwood gained respect for refusing refreshments while visiting the front line, knowing that every drop had to be carted up. The scarcity of water on the ridge increased the attraction of the opportunity to swim at the beach. Despite being further inland at Quinn’s than anyone else, the New Zealanders managed to continue bathing. Again and again New Zealand diaries record trips to the beach whenever companies were rested. George Donovan slipped away from his mortar to swim at least nineteen times in June, Hartley Palmer about once every three days. Bathing continued despite the Turkish gunners’ growing skill at reaching the Cove. On 24 June, Chaplain Green saw eighteen bathers hit by one shell. Trips to the Cove offered other attractions—opportunities to gather news, rumours and gossip and the chance to scrounge or steal food or even building materials to make dugouts more habitable. Beachcombers continued to retrieve flotsam washing up from the sunken Triumph, including wine casks for some: John Treloar, the straitlaced young 114


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Methodist, recorded that ‘there was a great deal of good humour on the beach’ that night. Later, as chronic diarrhoea took its toll on their strength, the stiff climb back from the beach was, for many, too much to cope with. Rest in the daytime was almost impossible. Having stood-to all night, tired men were disturbed by others stepping over them, by heat, by noise, by lice crawling under their clothes and above all by the flies. Virtually every diary, letter, memoir and interview touches on the flies. They formed a constant, buzzing backdrop to every action; a never-ending, maddening adjunct to every meal; a torment to every wounded man. The memory of the flies of Anzac—big, black, slowmoving blowflies bred in corpses, smaller house-flies in mule droppings—coloured old memories with disgust. Hartley Palmer of the Canterburys remembered them in an interview: You couldn’t sleep because of the flies . . . they flew in and out of your mouth like a hive of bees . . . You couldn’t drink your tea or stew a bit of food without the flies pouring down. Every bush you touched buzzed with flies. You couldn’t see the open latrines for flies, thicker than anything you ever seen . . .

Flies have been regarded in most writings on Gallipoli as an inevitable consequence of the numbers of decomposing dead lying inaccessibly in no-man’s-land. The Wellington’s diarist at Quinn’s, however, blamed ‘the amount of rubbish’ left by ‘other troops occupying the position’. Nor were flies the only pest—meat tins tossed over the parapet became aiming points for Turkish snipers as well as breeding grounds for maggots. Malone darkly complained in his diary that ‘this is not a clean army’. Perhaps the most bearable time of the day on Gallipoli was early evening. As the sun set behind Samothrace in a glory of gold and purple the heat diminished and the flies settled down, allowing the men to rest and eat in peace and relative quiet. Food was another difficulty: though abundant, the rations were unsuited to either the climate or the men’s bodily needs. Opening a tin of bully, Frederick Scarborough wrote, was ‘like pouring hot fat out of a pan’; Vic Nicholson remembered for 60 years how sun-warmed bully beef became ‘cat’s meat floating around in a tin of oil’. Fresh meat was issued rarely—Raymond Baker estimated about three times in three months, Thomas Ritchie about twice 115


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a week—and was more likely to become fly-blown than the unappetising bully. Many men literally could not stomach the food. Arthur Rhodes, insulated by headquarters cooks from the realities of rations, noted in mid-June that 40 or 50 men of the division were going sick every day with ‘slight tummy ache. Nothing serious’, he thought. Those closer to the front line already detected in mid-June an increase in colds and, ominously, ‘dysentery’, though medical officers differed about whether the griping guts and shitty squits their men suffered were best classified as diarrhoea or the more serious dysentery. For sufferers the distinction was clinical. Frederick Scarborough spent an hour each morning doubled up in pain from what he called indigestion but which was probably chronic diarrhoea. This was only the beginning of an epidemic of gastric illness which would destroy the fighting effectiveness of the corps at exactly the point it was most needed. While the younger men in the battalions held out longer, illness first became apparent among the older senior officers. By mid-June Chauvel, Hughes, Harold Walker and Johnston had gone to hospital ships: ‘must be something in the air which disagrees with Brigadiers’, the obtuse Rhodes mused. But as the weather became warmer and the flies more numerous the number of men who crouched over the open, stinking pole latrines or lay in their dugouts with their knees drawn up increased. The growing heat of summer would bring further misery. The New Zealanders’ first month at Quinn’s ended with a flurry of alarm. A renewed British offensive at Helles had opened on 21 June, resulting in the bloodiest battles of the campaign around Gully Ravine. The diversionary attacks in support of British attacks at Helles had made the Turks nervous. At about 9 p.m. on 29 June a front passed over Gallipoli from west to east. The wind blew violently, stirring up dust and blowing newspapers and other rubbish over the trenches at the head of Monash Valley and towards the Turkish line. Edward Cox could not open his eyes for the dust: ‘it was like hell let loose’, he wrote with unusual colour. Thunderclaps as loud as shellfire burst over the ridges, flashes of lightning lit up the countryside as bright as daylight. In the sudden darkness that followed, with rain pouring down, the Turks began to fire wildly, keeping it up until 11 p.m., somehow imagining the storm to be an attack in conjunction with an attack at Helles. Their opponents naturally responded. On Walker’s Ridge Turkish troops actually advanced 116


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against the mounted rifles and light horsemen. In fact, no British empire attack was planned or made (nor could one have been organised to take advantage of a sudden turn of the weather) but Turkish accounts still describe an attack. In the early hours of the morning about 30 Turks came over the parapet at Quinn’s but were ‘soon driven back’; it was the last Turkish attack at Quinn’s.

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8 ‘No turning and no escape’ Mid-summer at Quinn’s

n the early hours of 1 July lightning lit up the sky in another of the peninsula’s summer storms. The day dawned clear, as Sergeant Cyril Lawrence recorded in his diary, ‘just glorious again’. Again and again through the month Lawrence and other diarists would record how the weather remained clear and hot, although the summer weather was a mixed blessing. The strain of simply being in Quinn’s needs to be appreciated, although it is difficult to generalise about conditions. What was possible in number 1 post—to raise a head tentatively and look out at the glimmer of the lights of Maidos—was suicidal in number 3 post, just 50 yards away. Number 1 post was too far away to be bombed, while along the trench men would be constantly on the watch. Minute folds of ground meant the difference between survival and sudden death from a sniper’s bullet. While men would be driven to madness by bomb explosions, those in reserve 100 yards down the slope could be asleep. But no day passed without a few casualties, generally from bombs. In account after account men strove to convey what it felt like, exposing the inadequacy of attempting to do so in words. Impressions and vignettes together suggest something of the strain—the word recurs in many memoirs—of service there. Cyril Malthus recalled his spells in a bomb-pit. He remembered what it was like to lie ‘cowering in the darkness of that cramped and evil-smelling pit, and watch a big bomb spluttering among the corpses just against our loophole’. No wonder he described men who ‘ran screaming out of the post’, and quoted a mate’s description of a scout carried out ‘a nervous wreck . . . a pitiful sight with wild staring eyes’—only to disclose that the man was himself.

I

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‘NO TURNING AND NO ESCAPE’

‘Usual attack of disentry’: the ordeal of summer After a month at Quinn’s, as the sniper James Swan put it, ‘the boys are beginning to get very stale’. The system of reliefs, with companies taking their place in the line each week, worked well enough, but on their rest days men worked so long and hard that the result was not to be wondered at. By July sickness had become universal. Thomas Ritchie, the New Zealand sanitary officer for number 3 sector, told the Dardanelles Commission which later investigated the campaign that 99 per cent of men had diarrhoea ‘very badly’. He explained the elements of the problem he faced succinctly: the water delivered to the trenches was untreated; it could seldom be boiled for want of firewood; flies bred on corpses and in open latrines and even fresh meat (‘if you left anything two minutes you could not see it for flies’) became a hazard rather than a help. The numbers evacuated differed widely between battalions and between forces. The Wellingtons (because of Malone’s strict hygiene discipline) evacuated fewer than any other unit in the division, while the Aucklanders were the most sickly. But while six of the healthiest seven battalions were New Zealanders, seven of the least healthy nine were Australian. The monotonous and unpalatable diet and the griping guts-ache sapped the will to continue. Frederick Scarborough, who continued to carry spoil from the galleries for four hours a day when supposedly at rest while suffering what he began to call the ‘usual indigestion’, decided that ‘to get wounded would be a blessing’—if he could choose the wound. Having seen men shredded and slashed by bomb fragments, Scarborough confessed that ‘mutilation is our only dread’. By mid-summer no one gained respite from the work needed to keep the ramshackle machine that was Anzac functioning. Sick men had to be put to strenuous fatigues, weakening them even as they strengthened the physical defences of the line. They had to carry food, ammunition, water and building materials up the steep paths, standing aside for stretcher parties and ducking occasional shrapnel bursts or the whine of a bullet from a sniper or a stray. They were put to digging—tunnels, trenches, steps, dugouts, terraces or dumps— carting spoil and sandbags. Hartley Palmer of the Canterbury Battalion described the fatigues he performed in detail. They included water-carrying—three trips a day, with three gallons a trip, a total of eight miles—carrying ‘dickseys’ of hot food from the cook-houses up 119


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to the firing line, carrying dead and wounded out of the line, roadmaking and heaving newly arrived 4.7-inch guns up from the beach. All of this work was necessary, and it all had to be done by fighting troops because there were almost no labour units. Good leaders like Malone, as he urged men to work on the post, made sure that they were encouraged in their labour. Other officers, like Edward Cox, who commanded the Wellingtons from 15 July, thought that fatigues served another purpose—‘keeps the men from getting soft’, he brusquely recorded in his diary. Since his men were in danger of collapsing from chronic diarrhoea rather than over-eating, his insensitivity is monstrous. While describing his work, Hartley Palmer also chronicled the decline in his health. By late June he thought that ‘work seemed hard for the food we were getting’. A week later he was referring to the ‘usual attack of disentry’. By late July he was ‘much too tired to sleep . . . completely knocked up’ (for which he was given the army’s celebrated, and useless, emetic ‘No. 9’ pill) and soon described how ‘all the bones in my body seem done in’ and was ‘too crook to stick it’. Palmer was not alone: enteric fever—typhoid—secured his evacuation. His mates—‘suffering with disentry and all looked knocked up’—were not regarded as sufficiently ill for evacuation, since almost everyone had diarrhoea. The dozens of bodies lying in the narrow no-man’s-land bothered everyone—the stench of the dead of the June attacks was, a Wellington officer complained officially, ‘extremely nauseating’. It was said that Turkish machine-gunners would fire at bodies to push them closer to the Anzac parapet, leaving fragments decomposing within a few feet of the fire-trench. Disposing of the corpses was difficult, and the one thing senior commanders would not countenance was another truce. Hamilton had decided that asking for or even agreeing to an armistice ‘seems to imply that one has had the worst of the encounter’. The result was to leave his troops living with the disgusting stench. Those bodies close to the Anzac parapet could be squirted with paraffin and ignited. The flames did not always completely consume them though, and then the sentries would have to stare out of their periscopes at the partially burnt bodies of men they had known. ‘At Quinn’s,’ Charlie Clark of the Wellingtons remembered, ‘you got callous pretty quick.’ The dry summer heat did bring an unexpected boon, however. Thomas Ritchie, who as sanitary officer took a professional interest in the corpses, noticed that many had got beyond 120


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the stage of smelling. They had dried out, desiccated or mummified. Several diaries describe how bursting bombs sometimes accidentally set alight Turkish corpses in no-man’s-land, body fat fuelling the flames. Some were deliberately set alight, perhaps an attempt to demoralise an enemy believed to regard cremation with horror. Joe Mahoney described in his local paper in Feilding how, while dozing in the front line at Quinn’s one night late in June, he had smelt burning rags. He had taken no notice but was shaken awake by his mate. They found that ‘flying bullets had set alight a dead Turk’. The body burned for several hours, just out of reach of dirt thrown out on a shovel. The New Zealand medical historian recorded ‘strange stories’ of corpses apparently bursting into flame spontaneously. Bean wrote powerfully of the resignation and alienation these horrors fostered in men’s minds, observing that they felt that there was ‘no turning and no escape’ from the peninsula except through wounds or death.

‘These brief glimpses’: Ashmead-Bartlett films Quinn’s ‘You hear as much talk of Quinn’s as of the whole of the rest of the line,’ sapper Phillip Hanna told his mother. News of Quinn’s reached the ears of King George V as well as a mother in Whakapirau. The King kept abreast of his army’s ordeal through a friend of Godley’s, his Assistant Private Secretary, Clive Wigram. ‘I have a small Post, called Quinn’s . . .’ Godley began, and told of the attacks and counterattacks of late May and early June, of bayonet charges and dead and prisoners. ‘And so it goes on,’ Godley ended, betraying for a moment how he was resigned to the campaign continuing without result and to an uncertain end. Quinn’s had hitherto become known across Anzac as a place of dreadful danger. With war correspondents visiting occasionally its fame began to spread. Visiting reporters would be taken to Quinn’s to see one of the wonders of Anzac, and by July articles in British papers began to appear on Gallipoli in parcels sent from British friends and charities. ‘Quinn’s! The famous post,’ wrote Phillip Schuler effusively. McSharry dismissed them as flannel: ‘they did not go close enough to it to learn much,’ he scoffed. Quinn’s became a regular attraction on the tours organised to give visiting senior officers and journalists a taste of the danger of the front line. The visitors were sometimes dangerous in themselves. When 121


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Commander Hugh England of the destroyer HMS Chelmer visited he was allowed to throw a bomb, which he inexpertly put into the netting. Malone pulled England down against the parapet and the bomb exploded over their heads. The naval officer was apologetic. ‘It was a rotten shot,’ Malone confided in his diary. Malone hosted these visits, devising a routine including afternoon tea on his terrace accompanied by a ‘bomb orchestra’ on the trenches above. He would ask visiting correspondents if they would like to see the front line. ‘Oh yes!’ they would invariably reply. Malone would take them to a stretch of trench partially exposed to sniper fire from Turkish positions about 350 yards away. ‘Can’t they shoot us?’ the visitors would ask, and Malone (gambling that a shot at that range would miss) would agree, adding that the Turks often trained a machine-gun on the spot. ‘Thrills!’ he wrote home. ‘They feel very pleased with themselves & their adventures.’ Other correspondents were taken into the mine galleries to listen to the sound of Turkish digging. Their accounts invariably ended up as colourful copy in despatches published in newspapers across the empire. Those at home hungered for news, and reports from the front appeared in metropolitan and local newspapers all over Australia and New Zealand. The enterprising Port Augusta Dispatch, like many others, sold war maps at a shilling a copy. In Australia vivid reports by the celebrated Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett appeared within days of being filed. Despatches by the official correspondent, Charles Bean—more colourful than detailed—appeared up to eight weeks later. All remained unduly, misleadingly optimistic. ‘Fall of Constantinople BELIEVED TO BE IMMINENT’, the Port Pirie Recorder trumpeted even after the failure of the August Offensive. ‘It is freely rumoured that the Turkish people are clamouring for peace,’ the Barossa News confided. Through July, towns and suburbs across Australia prepared for ‘Australia Day’ (to be celebrated at various dates in July and August), when communities would contribute money and men to help those at war. In Charters Towers the Australia Day program included Ashmead-Bartlett’s celebrated report of the landing, obituaries of local heroes Jack Walsh, Sam Harry and Hugh Quinn, as well as verse by Byron, Kipling and even a Mr Sholto Douglas of Auckland. The patriotic rhetoric was undercut by letters from the men on Gallipoli, passed on to newspapers by families. Many had evaded censorship. A letter was published in the Advertiser in July in which a man described how the sight of the dead ‘almost makes you ill’. He 122


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described men ‘lying with their heads blown to pieces . . . bodies frightfully mutilated’. The steady publication of casualty lists and obituaries fuelled a growing apprehension. Frustrated at the censorship imposed on him at Hamilton’s headquarters, Ashmead-Bartlett had returned to Britain to try to bring to the attention of Prime Minister Asquith how the campaign had stalled. His determination to find and tell a story aroused the suspicion and scorn of gentlemanly officers disinclined to rock the boat. Arthur Rhodes (as close to an aristocrat as New Zealand produced) described him as ‘an awful bounder’. In July, Ashmead-Bartlett returned to the peninsula, bringing with him what was described as a kinematograph machine. Always alert to commercial possibilities, he had entered into a contract with an impresario in Britain to film ‘the taking of Constantinople’; optimistically, as it turned out. Though Ashmead-Bartlett had never before operated a camera, he sat up late in his tent on Imbros and worked out how to take moving pictures. The next day he set off for Anzac, heading first for the hot spot of the campaign, Quinn’s. Malone recorded how Ashmead-Bartlett had visited on 22 July and ‘actually kinematographed part of the post at the back, taking in the terraces and the men at work’. He took Ashmead-Bartlett into the fire-trenches where he filmed some more. Malone and Ashmead-Bartlett did not take to each other: one a soldier with a rigid code of ethics, the other an opportunist whose reputation for sensational reportage had already percolated through the force. ‘He seemed a bit swollen headed and full of his own importance,’ Malone wrote, and—perhaps to teach Ashmead-Bartlett a thing or two—took him to a section of the trench subject to Turkish rifle fire. ‘I gave him a thrill,’ he told his brother-in-law. That night AshmeadBartlett in turn wrote of his impressions of the day, describing Malone as ‘a hard old New Zealand knut’. The following month he was mortified to discover that through bad luck or inexperience some of the film taken in July had been ruined. What survived—about a fifth of the original footage—eventually became the 20-minute film Heroes of Gallipoli. Re-captioned in 1919 by Charles Bean, it showed what he described as ‘these brief glimpses’, the only moving film taken on the peninsula. Most of the footage is of Helles and the landing at Suvla, with a sequence of light horsemen firing from a trench (a shot in which the self-promoting AshmeadBartlett had himself filmed approaching the camera, stooping along the firing line). Bean’s captions are not without flaws. He mis-dated 123


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the earlier shots to May, which they plainly were not, and was vague about places. The earlier shots of Anzac are mainly of positions around the head of Monash Valley, in the New Zealand and Australia Division’s sector which Bean knew less intimately. Troops are shown on MacLaurin’s Hill—Quinn’s formed its northern end—carrying stores up Shrapnel Gully and in the vicinity of number 3 sector’s sandbagged headquarters, from which a man cheekily waves to us across the years. The most intriguing sequences show men in the ‘Anzac uniform’ Bean took pains to explain (pointing out the men’s thinness). They walk about self-consciously in deep, partially covered trenches, delivering messages with grins and a half-hearted salute that suggests Ashmead-Bartlett’s stage directions, called out over the clanking of the hand-cranked camera. Their dress strongly suggests that they are Malone’s Wellingtons. They wear undershirts and a variety of hats— sun helmets, slouch hats and flat caps with sun-cloths or fly-nets hanging from the crown. Perhaps they had business up and down the reserve trench—at one point an officer passes wearing a tie (another sign of Malone’s standards). But perhaps men were drafted in to provide movement in an unusual sort of fatigue. While much of this early Gallipoli film was spoiled, the setting still looks like Quinn’s. The description Ashmead-Bartlett offered when he gave the footage to the Australian War Records Section in 1919 strongly suggests Quinn’s: ‘an excellent picture of fighting . . . taken at a distance of about 30 yards from the enemy’s lines’. It may be, then, that these three short sequences—no more than a minute of grainy, jerky footage—are all we have of the garrison of Quinn’s under Malone. Though long forgotten, Heroes of Gallipoli was restored and screened for the first time in 84 years at a conference on Gallipoli held at the Australian War Memorial in 2000. By this time number 3 sector was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Jackie Hughes of the Canterbury Battalion, a likeable chap who enjoyed soldiering and even at Quinn’s professed to be ‘thoroughly enjoying himself ’. A genial but ineffective leader, Hughes presided rather than commanded; Malone remained in charge. Despite McSharry’s scepticism, Malone had made a difference at Quinn’s. Joseph Beeston came up from his beach dressing-station early in July. He was surprised to find the post ‘very clean’, with ‘not a speck of dirt about’, with even ‘little tins for “fags” and matches burnt’. The contrast with the slovenly conditions the New Zealanders 124


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had inherited was striking. Malone’s improvements were necessary to secure the Anzac line against the day that the lodgement became the base for a further, decisive advance.

‘These Australians will tunnel to Constantinople!’: mining in July By July the magnitude of the Anzacs’ underground effort began to be apparent. ‘Just fancy,’ Sergeant Lawrence, working with Australian sappers at Brown’s Dip near Lone Pine, noted, ‘one can walk now (in the dark of course) for about 11⁄2 miles underground ninety feet out in front of our firing line.’ Major Zeki Bey, wondering at the growing piles of spoil visible from Turkish lines, remembered thinking, ‘What are they about? These Australians will tunnel to Constantinople!’ To reach not Constantinople but Turkish Quinn’s, the Royal Engineer officers directing the mining brought up new and specialised equipment. Men operated a ‘Blower, Rotary, Mark IV’, a fan which drew air into the tunnels, powered by two men turning handles—heavy, hot, exhausting work in the heat of summer. Officers used breathing apparatus—the Denyrouze Respirator or the Applegarth Aerophone—gas-proof masks which allowed them to breathe in the poisonous fumes of explosions. The mines of Quinn’s became another of the marvels of Anzac. In July, Godley himself managed to squirm his long frame into its galleries. Promised ‘an interesting experience’ by a sapper officer, he lay in the dark listening to Turkish miners picking away just above his head—perhaps the closest any general came to the enemy in the war. Bean and the other correspondents were also shown around the galleries on the left of Quinn’s. They entered by tunnels running from the terraces up under the brow of the escarpment and then down through low, candle-lit tunnels to the higher, wider envelope and then down another narrow shaft toward a low squarish chamber in which a listener sat. The visitors were making ‘a good deal of noise’ but the conducting officer, a New Zealander who had been a mining engineer, shushed them and then said ‘there they are’. The visitors could hear the rapid pick-picking of Turks about eight feet away. Within a few days of this exciting and dangerous encounter the Turks had blown another mine. While several Australian mines caught and killed Turkish miners underground, few Australian or New Zealand miners were entombed, though it was sometimes close. In mid-July 125


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the Turks fired a charge just as a shift changed at Quinn’s; these men cheated death by chance. Men going into the tunnels often optimistically took water and food in case they were trapped, and revolvers in case they broke into Turkish works. Shots had been exchanged on 26 June when, the corps war diary recorded, ‘some fighting occurred with bombs and rifles underground’ at Quinn’s. There were relatively few direct encounters between miners underground, however, and those clashes tended to be re-told and exaggerated. On 7 July, Jack Horneman, an Auckland officer, described how a miner blew an opening into a Turkish sap and when ‘one of the Turks put his head round the corner to have a look one of our miners put a bullet clean through his head’. In the smoke, dust and gloom of the tunnels it was an unlikely story, one that even the sappers did not claim. Anzac miners had many traumatic experiences in the claustrophobic gloom of the tunnels. Representative was the drama of the ‘curious double explosion’ of 8 July. Listeners reported movement in the area of the tunnels blown in on 7 July. Lieutenant R.P. Butler, the Royal Engineer officer in charge, had prepared a charge of 50 pounds of ammonal and began to tamp it within five feet of the Turkish gallery. Butler exploded the mine at 10 p.m. on 8 July. Unsure if it had blown in the Turkish tunnel, Butler and several miners immediately entered the smoky, dusty tunnel, wearing respirators and carrying revolvers, though with only one torch between them. Thirty seconds later a second explosion knocked them off their feet. Butler felt it was ‘too remarkable a coincidence’ that the Turks had exploded a mine of their own in the same minute. Waiting for a minute in the dark tunnel thick with poisonous fumes they went on, finding that they had not broken into the Turkish tunnel. One man was overcome by the fumes and had to be dragged out by his revolver lanyard, the others weaving drunkenly about. They decided that their explosion had somehow set off a Turkish charge. Turkish miners continued to fight back. Early on the morning of 30 July a Turkish mine exploded under number 4 section. William Watts, a man from the Forty-Mile Bush on the North Island, described the explosion as he sat on the terraces, when ‘the earth & stones . . . came down over the trenches on to the men in reserve . . . killing four and wounding about six’. A proprietorial Wallace Saunders, now sick but still working elsewhere at Anzac, recorded his concern at the blow: ‘cannot understand it . . . we left 126


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the place very safe’. The Age correspondent Phillip Schuler happened to be visiting Quinn’s at the time. He thought it had been an aerial bomb—he had seen a Taube ‘skimming overhead’ and heard an explosion on the crest. He saw the men involuntarily sway back in unison in response to the blast. Three men were killed and eight wounded, all on the terraces.

‘Bomba Sirt’: Turkish Quinn’s We can gain few glimpses into the life of the Turkish soldiers in the trenches opposite Quinn’s. They too were plagued by the stench and the flies, but they had no cove in which to swim. They too had a nickname for their adversary, ‘John Kikrik’, whom they regarded with the same wary respect. Their Anzac opponents could glean only scraps of intelligence from prisoners. One snippet did the rounds that the Turks considered Quinn’s so dangerous that every man who volunteered to serve there was promoted corporal: it was untrue. Individual Turks crept out from their lines and deserted. Anzac troops had to be reminded not to shoot single unarmed men approaching their lines. The trickle of intelligence that reached Anzac came from men who had a grudge against their Ottoman overlords, and who often told their interrogators what they wanted to hear. As a result, intelligence reports often gave an unduly optimistic gloss on conditions on the Turkish side of the line. Major Jeremiah Selmes interrogated and observed the prisoners and formed the view that Turkish troops were ‘fed up’, demoralised and would surrender in large numbers if they could to escape what they called ‘The Slaughter House’ of the peninsula—but the troops’ conduct gave the lie to his optimism. Turkish soldiers stoically endured appalling conditions, primitive medical arrangements and heavy casualties. Appalling though conditions were on the Anzac side, the Turks had the worst of it. Two battalions of the 57th Regiment alternated as the garrison at Turkish Quinn’s. Hans Kannengeisser, a German commander of Turkish divisions on Gallipoli, recorded his memories of the campaign. Turkish uniforms were ‘almost unbelievably bad’, their footwear often strips of cloth tied with string. Though unable to bathe in the sea like the Anzacs, the Turks’ advantage was that they had more and better drinking water, from springs in the hills. Mostly peasant soldiers, their food was that of the villages they had left— bread, lentils, onions and beans. Their officers, however, enjoyed a much 127


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higher quality of food and comfort, as did their German advisers, a few hundred of whom served in the campaign. There was little love lost between the Turks and their senior ally. ‘Who has heard of a German officer being killed at the Dardanelles?’ a Turkish officer asked. Even more than their enemies, Turkish soldiers craved tobacco (tütün) not least to mask the appalling stench of the thousands of unburied bodies littering their trenches and rear areas. Corpses were neither recorded nor buried individually, and today the gullies of the peninsula on the Turkish side of the line are still littered with drifts of decaying bones. No one knows exactly how many Turks died on Gallipoli—perhaps 85 000—or how many were wounded or fell ill. The custom of allowing men a ‘change of climate’ (teptil hawa) meant that thousands left for home to recuperate, many never to return. Like many at Anzac, Charles Bean remained intensely curious about the Turkish side of the line. Early in 1918 he met an American officer who, as a then-neutral military attaché in Constantinople, in 1915 had not only visited the peninsula, but had often witnessed the bomb-fighting at what Bean established had been Turkish Quinn’s. Looking cautiously from a loop-hole on the Turkish side, he told Bean that ‘never a few minutes passed without bombs being thrown at that place’. In 1919 Bean made detailed notes during conversations with Major Zeki Bey, who had served with the Turkish 57th Regiment in number 3 sector and had spent time at what the Turks called Bomba Sirt—‘bomb ridge’. Like his Anzac counterparts, he recalled the bombs above all other impressions of the place. Losses from bombs were so great that his superiors considered abandoning the post for the next ridge to the east. They could not relocate, any more than could their opponents. The Turkish response was to ‘keep our trenches crowded’, despite the inevitable losses. While interpreters no longer slogged up from Anzac headquarters to shout ineffectual propaganda through megaphones at derisive Turks, the Turks had increased their efforts to demoralise the invaders. Their attempts were energetic but equally futile. In June they had thrown over leaflets asking: ‘Why fight for the greedy English?’ The leaflets were welcome to men who had little paper for writing or any other purpose. Messages wrapped around rocks were thrown into the Anzac trenches. One combined the celebrated stern reminder that the Turks would never give in as long as there were ‘Turks and Turks’ sons’ with what Bean primly described as ‘some very filthy remarks about our wives and mothers’. On 2 July, 128


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a Turkish plane dropped messages over Monash Valley inviting the Anzacs to surrender. A fortnight later, Saxon Foster noted, ‘Turks heaved over tons of paper.’ One of their propaganda messages warned the Anzacs that the Turks could not avoid hitting the hospitals on the beach when they shelled Anzac Cove. The shared ordeal of the spring and summer began to efface the glib racism of the earlier months, reflecting the growing realisation that the Turks were also victims of the war. The Turks, Ben Smart remarked in his diary, ‘strike me as being very game fellows’. That did not prevent him from hacking off the noses of bullets to make crude dum-dum rounds, ostensibly to slash open sandbags, but knowing that if they hit a man the tumbling bullets would smash muscle and bone to bloody pulp. Still, Smart thought that the Anzacs ‘always try to fight fair’.

‘Court martial—Anzac’: Jack Dunn’s court martial Private Jack Dunn of the Wellington’s machine-gun section was now as worn-out as all the Anzac machine-gunners. Denied the regular reprieve given to the infantrymen, who spent spells out of the firing line, he was ill enough to justify evacuation. Leonard Leary described the Wellington’s machine-gunners as ‘nothing but skin and bone’, with hollow eyes huge in their gaunt faces. The diary of William Hampton, one of Dunn’s mates, shows how the lack of trained men and losses to wounds and sickness intensified the pressures on those who remained. Even in June, Hampton had recorded how he was ‘dead tired . . . 8 weeks is beginning to tell on us’. Dunn had reported sick with dysentery one morning in mid-July but stayed on duty—a comrade noticed him nodding off and warned him not to fall asleep. By this time the exhausted Dunn had stopped keeping his diary, but other records tell his story. An officer found him dozing and charged him with sleeping on his post. The offence was common, so common that the Wellingtons’ officers had tried for a month to warn their men against it. In mid-June, Ben Smart recorded, the Wellingtons had been lectured (while resting) ‘mainly about the heavy punishment one can expect on active service’, and on ‘Discipline & Cleanliness’. Dunn had been warned. He was held in custody in the post, confined under guard in a dugout near the dressing-station at Quinn’s. The Wellingtons, men who knew that they could have shared his fate, regarded him as a poignant 129


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figure. Arthur Wilson and his mate Kenny Lynch had both fallen asleep while listening in a sap. Wilson survived the war and settled in Perth, Western Australia. Sixty years later, he guiltily remembered how ‘every time we went up to Quinn’s Post we would see him’. Dunn appeared before a Field General Court Martial on 18 July 1915. The battalion’s acting commanding officer, the unsympathetic Edward Cox, recorded the weather that day—‘as usual hot and sultry’—but did not record the fact that one of his men faced a trial for his life. It was held at the Wellington’s battalion headquarters, just beneath the crest of Quinn’s. Dunn was found guilty. Field Service Regulations stipulated that for ‘a soldier acting as sentinel on active service sleeping on his post’ the maximum punishment was death. The sentence was read out to the assembled troops, parading on Malone’s new terraces, the same day. A photograph taken by Charles Shore, a 14th Battalion corporal who happened to be visiting Quinn’s that day, shows Dunn at the moment at which he learned that he was sentenced to be shot. Taken from the terrace above the little parade ground, no larger than a sizeable living room, the photograph was duly developed and copies made their way to New Zealand and Australia. Shore claimed copyright over ‘Court martial—Anzac’, in 1916 and his daughter donated a faded print to the Australian War Memorial in 1965. At the time a curator minuted that it was of dubious value and could as well be declined, not realising the significance of the event it depicted. Christopher Pugsley, the historian of discipline in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, conjures up the scene on the terraces— the bustle of the garrison around them, the men dozing in the blanket-draped shelters, the drone of flies and the rattles and bangs from the trenches a few yards above them. As Pugsley makes clear, the officers of the court—an Otago major, an Auckland captain and a Wellington lieutenant—knew as well as anyone that exhausted men would fall asleep on duty. They may have understood that Dunn had been on duty that day because he was trying to do his duty. But they also knew that adequate rest and good food were simply not available, and to deter repetition of the offence—by men like Wilson and Lynch—they felt they needed to make an example. The sentence needed Hamilton’s endorsement; as it was transmitted up the chain of command Godley recommended on 30 July that it be remitted. Not until 5 August did Dunn learn that instead of being shot to death, as were British soldiers on Gallipoli, his punishment would be ten years’ 130


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penal servitude. Still on active service, however, he was to remain with the Wellington Battalion and go with it into the coming offensive. The first of 28 New Zealanders sentenced to death in the Great War, Dunn was the only one to be sentenced on Gallipoli and the only one sentenced for sleeping at his post. That it happened at Quinn’s adds to the post’s reputation. For Jack Dunn and for many others of those who had endured Quinn’s, August was to bring further tragedy.

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9 ‘Men devoted to die’ The August offensive

y the time Jack Dunn learned of his reprieve everyone at Quinn’s was feeling sick and tired. The Wellington’s adjutant was admonishing men for sending in returns tardily and for being late for parades. Dunn returned to his mates, ashamed at having let them down, and learnt that the Wellingtons were to leave Quinn’s to take part in what was expected to be the decisive battle of the campaign. The Anzacs as a whole remained surprisingly optimistic. Bundaberg schoolteacher Charles Ruddle cheerfully told his mother that ‘another month might make a vast difference’, remaining absurdly positive in the circumstances. Ruddle was right: the offensive planned for early August would indeed make all the difference to the outcome of the campaign. Sadly, it was virtually to doom the invasion to failure.

B

‘Something doing on a large scale’: preparing for the August offensive Hamilton sympathised with Birdwood’s men who, he imagined, must feel demoralised to spend so much effort and so many lives holding ‘a few square miles of worthless, scrubby mountain’. He continued to prepare and plan for the advance that would break the stalemate and bring victory for the Allies in the Dardanelles. Hamilton entertained great hopes for the coming offensive. The advance from Anzac, he told Birdwood, would ‘prove to be the fulcrum for the lever which will topple over Germany and the pride of the Germans’. There would indeed be toppling. Despite the failure of the landing and the offensives at Helles, 132


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senior officers continued to ponder a way to escape from the confines of the Anzac lodgement. Birdwood recognised that until his forces were strong enough to take the main range not even a minor advance was feasible, as the debacle of 2–3 May had shown. On 30 May he had proposed a ‘big sweeping movement’ to the north, over the main range, ‘by night on a really broad front’. This was the genesis of what became the August offensive, approved by the Dardanelles Committee in June, and which saw in July the despatch of large reinforcements from Britain in preparation for a great effort to finally achieve Allied aims. Security for the coming offensive was woeful, however. As early as 3 July, over a month before it was to begin, Saxon Foster was recording in his diary how ‘General Hamilton has said this show will be over in 6 weeks’. Bean complained that ‘everybody in this garrulous force . . . seems to spend his time discussing plans’. The obvious preparations for something fostered speculation, though almost no one beyond the divisional staff knew any details until days before the offensive began. Even so, there were misgivings. Richard Casey wondered, ‘Why did we not break out on our right [southern] flank sooner?’ The plan adopted involved an attack by several brigades from Anzac—two of them weak in numbers and stamina—over the most rugged country on the peninsula. A plan to attack across the more open country towards the Maidos plain and the original objective of the April landing did not proceed because the Turkish defences were stronger on that flank. By late July no one at Anzac, Turkish or Australasian, could miss the preparations for the coming attack. Areas for fresh dugouts were marked off; roads were scraped, stores and piles of ammunition were dumped; new medical units landed. Arthur Hutton of the 3rd Light Horse, returning from hospital on Malta just as the offensive began, foresaw ‘the fiercest battle in the history of the War’. Birdwood’s plan involved the virtual doubling of the British empire force in the northern peninsula. Apart from an Indian brigade ferried up from Helles, almost all the reinforcements were members of Kitchener’s New Army. They looked about with astonishment at the vast shanty town cramming the gullies and hillsides. Ted Baigent, road-making in Australia Gully on one of the Canterbury Battalion’s rest days, surmised that it ‘looks like something doing on a large scale soon’. Grumpy Braithwaite warned that Turkish aircraft were more often seen over Anzac. He directed that men should not look up at the machines lest they give away their positions and 133


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directed them to restrain the impulse to fire, telling them (wrongly) that ‘the machine is bullet-proof underneath’. Hamilton planned a massive offensive, for which he had gathered four additional divisions. The plan entailed a major advance over the main Sari Bair range to the north by three columns of British, Australian, Indian and New Zealand infantry aided by a British landing at Suvla Bay. In addition to the big diversionary attack at Lone Pine, Australian light horse regiments would make diversionary attacks from the Nek, Pope’s Hill and Quinn’s. The aim of the offensive was ambitious. ‘We are about to make our second advance on our way to Constantinople,’ Birdwood told his troops. Many were sceptical, like Aubrey Herbert, who darkly predicted that the elaborate offensive must fail. The light horseman Joseph Ranford looked apprehensively at the coming fight. ‘There will be some terrible fighting within the next few days,’ he wrote, ‘and I am afraid that Australia will be mourning the loss of a good many of her six shilling a day tourists.’ Misguided nationalistic disdain directed against British bungling in the landing at Suvla has tended to obscure the fact that the August offensive went wrong on the slopes of Chunuk Bair, and that Monash and his 4th Brigade was as responsible as any for the failure of the attack. The plan was perhaps doomed to failure before the troops stepped off. Sending sick and weakened troops into the broken country of Chunuk Bair would always have been a risk; but even if it had not been, a succession of accidents and misfortunes scuppered it. The Chunuk Bair attack involved Monash’s and Johnston’s brigades, almost all of the battalions of which had passed through Quinn’s at some point in the preceding three months. Despite his pride in his battalion, Malone was not happy that Johnston had given the Wellingtons the hardest task. They had laboured hard at Quinn’s, had not enjoyed a spell on Imbros as had the Canterbury and Otagos, and would be going straight from the trenches at Quinn’s ‘to fight again, climbing great hills’. It was ‘not altogether fair’, he thought. On the evening of 4 August a small group of officers crowded into Malone’s headquarters dugout. He formally convened a meeting of the Wellington’s Regimental Fund Committee. William Cunningham proposed that 200 pounds be sent to Egypt for the battalion’s wounded and sick, a motion seconded by Malone and carried unanimously. A few hours before handing over command to Robert Stodart of the 2nd Light Horse, Malone reflected in his final notes to his wife how he was ‘quite sorry’ to have to leave ‘Dear old Quinn’s Post’, 134


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which he regarded as ‘a monument to my gallant men’. He made a dark joke that he would be in danger of becoming fat if he remained: like all of the Wellingtons he suffered from a wracking diarrhoea. In a note written on the evening he left, Malone told Ida candidly that ‘if anything untoward happens’ she should ‘not grieve too much’. Reflecting on the ‘many years of happiness’ they had shared, he regretted becoming ‘too absorbed in work’ and asked her forgiveness. Facing the prospect of the coming attack, Malone told Ida he was ‘prepared for death’. Edward Cox as usual misread his men’s mood, hearing ‘good humoured remarks’ as denoting a ‘happy state of mind’ that reminded him of the Wellingtons’ departure from Egypt in April. Certainly jokes, but surely, like Malone’s, dark and sardonic. The Wellington Battalion went into the Chunuk Bair fight 851 men strong. Joined by 292 reinforcements just before the attack, it came out 300 strong: the battalion lost the equivalent of its entire strength in a week’s intensive action. One of the dead lying out on the slopes of Chunuk Bair was Jack Dunn, whose reprieve had given him three days of life. In the days before the opening of the offensive, life continued as usual at Quinn’s. Sudden, violent death and hideous mutilation continued to erupt in the trenches. A New Zealand sapper, Sergeant Robert Nairn, had contrived a trench mortar that could throw a 60-pound guncotton charge to smash Turkish overhead cover that was too far away to be reached by hand-thrown Lotbiniere ‘hairbrush’ bombs. He gained permission to test it on 2 August while infantrymen and officers, including Malone, watched from a safe distance. As he lit the first of two fuses, Nairn realised that the propellant charge had failed to ignite, which meant that the blast was imminent. Instead of throwing himself to safety he tried to snuff out the fuse. It exploded inside the tube, blowing off his arm. He died soon after.

‘Defeat printed right across the sky’: German Officers’ Trench Just as the Australian and New Zealand machine-guns on the ridges and rises north and south of Quinn’s were sited—and sighted—to pour bullets into the narrow no-man’s-land, so Turkish guns had been positioned to deter or destroy any attack on what they called Bomba Sirt. The plans for the diversionary attack from Quinn’s depended upon the capture of German Officers’ Trench, 350 yards to the south, 135


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whose machine-guns fired northwards, roughly parallel to the Anzac front line. James McCay’s Victorian 2nd Australian Infantry Brigade held the line from Steele’s Post through MacLaurin’s Hill towards Lone Pine. Its battalions had landed on 25 April, had been sent to Cape Helles in May to make a disastrous attack on Krithia, and had been holding the northern sector of the 1st Division’s line ever since. McCay himself, however, had been evacuated with a broken leg on 11 July. It was a double disappointment for the ambitious soldierpolitician: he had been slated for command of the newly formed 2nd Division, now to go to the widely disliked Gordon Legge. The brigade was taken over by Colonel John Forsyth, a light horseman. One of Forsyth’s battalions was to attack German Officers’ Trench in the early hours of 7 August. The job was given to the 6th Battalion, commanded by Major Gordon Bennett after its colonel had been bayoneted accidentally by Royal Naval Division men. Bennett was later to gain notoriety for escaping from Singapore in 1942 and leaving his men behind to become prisoners of the Japanese. The young major’s task was seemingly quite straightforward: to seize the trench and hold it, at least long enough to enable the light horsemen to attack from Quinn’s. Carl Jess, formerly Monash’s staff captain at Quinn’s and now brigade major of the 2nd, wrote the orders for the attack. Perhaps he had learned from the ruinous attacks made from Quinn’s in May. He had shallow tunnels dug out from Steele’s Post to within 40 yards of the Turkish trench. Mines, laid at the end of deeper tunnels, would be blown just before the attack to alarm the defenders. At a signal, engineers would break the ground and men would, in theory, pour from the holes—‘like rabbit holes’, Private Walter Dyer explained to his father. They would make a short dash across no-man’s-land toward the startled Turks. On the evening of 6 August, as the sounds of fighting could be heard from Lone Pine, Bennett’s men crawled into the narrow tunnels to await the signal, sitting in stuffy darkness relieved only by occasional candle stubs. They wore white armbands and white patches on their backs to help identify each other in the confusion of a trench fight in the darkness. Despite his years of training and his reputation as one of the citizen army’s most able young staff officers, Jess’s plan soon came unstuck. Three mines exploded at intervals, but began up to an hour before the whistle was supposed to blow. The blasts alerted the Turks but failed to damage their trenches. 136


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The attack, like so many others made on Gallipoli, quickly turned into a bloody fiasco. Bennett’s men were supposed to attack at midnight but were delayed because cutting through the tunnels took longer than expected. At last, at about 12.30 a.m. the first men broke through the soil and quietly scrambled out of the tunnels; a line of bombers began to run toward the Turkish line. As other men emerged, encumbered by rifle and kit and moving clumsily and too slowly, Turkish machine-gunners found them and began to direct fire at the tunnel exits. One after another, as the men crawled out they were hit, bodies soon marking each of the exits. Forsyth, Bennett and Jess, waiting anxiously for news, at first thought that the attack had succeeded, but German Officers’ Trench had not even been entered, let alone taken. Forsyth reported to 1st Division headquarters that the attack had failed and had better be abandoned, only to be rebuked by chief of staff Cyril Brudenell White who, Jess said, ordered ‘that they were to be put at it again’. John Treloar, at division headquarters, heard reports of wounded men being trampled to death on the floor of the enclosed trenches, and of men crawling back over the bodies piled up in the tunnels. Jess went forward to find Bennett organising his men to renew the attack. The wounded and the dead were dragged out of the choked tunnels and at 4 a.m., as the moon rose and gave the Turkish gunners even better targets, Bennett sent his men out. As they left the tunnels they were again shot down. Private Dyer crawled out and crouched in a shell hole as bullets sang over his head. He saw dead and wounded, and more besides. ‘I could see defeat printed right across the sky,’ he wrote to his father the following month. White, Jess wrote, ‘nearly went mad’ and ordered a further attack. Bennett, who had seen his battalion destroyed, insisted on leading it himself, a quixotic gesture which may have persuaded White of the futility of continued sacrifice. Despite the arrival of Walker, the divisional commander who insensitively asked if a better battalion could be found to renew the assault, by 9 a.m. the attack had been abandoned. Treloar reflected the confusion at headquarters by describing it as ‘a great victory’. White later regretted his insistence that the 6th Battalion persist in its costly attacks. It had failed in an impossible task, and the machine-guns in German Officers’ Trench remained free to fire at anyone attacking from Quinn’s. This the 2nd Light Horse was now to attempt. 137


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‘You will soon be dead’: the 2nd Light Horse attack After leaving Quinn’s on 15 May, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Stodart’s 2nd Light Horse had held Pope’s Hill—one of Anzac’s most exposed and dangerous posts—in partnership with other light horse units. Pope’s, however, they regarded as ‘a rest compared with the strenuous Quinn’s’. Over the ten weeks after leaving Quinn’s late in May, the 2nd had lost five killed holding Pope’s. But in a few minutes on 7 August it was to lose another seventeen killed in the final attack mounted from Quinn’s. What Henry Tiddy—now a captain—called ‘our share in the general advance’ was to make a feint to distract Turkish reserves from joining the critical fights on Chunuk Bair. The 2nd’s attack at Quinn’s was to be one of three diversionary attacks to be made from Anzac to support the general advance expected to be made over the Chunuk Bair range on the morning of 7 August. A conference at Anzac headquarters on the 4th, however, had specified the conditions under which the attacks would be made. They were only to proceed if German Officers’ Trench and its machine-guns had been taken, if Anzac troops were advancing down the main range toward Baby 700 and if the Turkish machine-guns on the Chessboard had been subjected to a thorough bombardment. Having already made a futile attack at Quinn’s, the light horse regarded this undertaking, Bean wrote, as a ‘pledge’. Chauvel, just back in number 3 sector after being evacuated to Egypt with pleurisy, was dubious about the plan. His biographer, Alec Hill, thought that Chauvel was ‘appalled by the prospect’ of the planned attack, though like them all his duty was to see it through. As the light horsemen crowded into Quinn’s they found the place ‘greatly improved’, noting with approval the netting, like ‘fowl yard fences’, which deflected Turkish bombs. Soon sentries passed the word that they had seen a placard pushed up from the Turkish parapet. George Green described it as a crudely lettered sign, probably soon shot to pieces by alert machine-gunners. It read, ‘Warsaw has fallen. Say your prayers you will soon be dead.’ It was not an auspicious omen for men who had lost so heavily in a few minutes on 15 May in the same spot and who were again to climb over the parapet and run toward the most fiercely defended trenches on the peninsula. Green reflected the stoic realisation that the attempt was doomed. ‘Balaclava won’t be in it as a forlorn hope,’ he wrote, alluding to Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, a poem about 138


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another group of doomed troopers which every schoolboy in the empire could recite. The attack was to be directed from the front line by one of the 2nd Light Horse’s majors, George Bourne, an auditor with the Bank of New South Wales in Queensland. (Bourne was 33 years old; contrary to popular belief even senior regimental officers were relatively young men.) On the night of the 6th his light horsemen adopted the by now traditional ‘ruses’, hurling bombs into the Turkish lines and deciding, with eyes and ears more practised than they had been in May, that the Turkish front line was fully held. Tom Logan, whose squadron would be attacking over exactly the same ground on which Dugald Graham’s men had charged in May, was apprehensive. At dusk the previous day they had seen and heard the 1st Brigade’s charge at Lone Pine. Jim Ashton, a stretcher-bearer in Logan’s squadron, recalled a conversation with him the night before in which Logan had said, ‘It’s our turn tomorrow’, and had asked, ‘How do you think we’ll go?’ before admitting that ‘it didn’t look too good’. The light horsemen exemplify Bean’s description of the attackers, ‘men devoted to die’: they knew their fate and they faced it. At dawn on the 7th two squadrons of light horsemen stood jammed into the front-line trenches. The signal for the charge at Quinn’s was to be a mine, but the sappers erred. When it went off at 4.30 a.m. no one heard it—Bourne described it as making ‘as much noise as a jam tin bomb’. Logan, his apprehension deepening, told Bourne that he did not consider the attack justified, presumably because the conditions of what Bean described as the ‘pledge’ remained unmet. He could see that Baby 700 remained in Turkish hands and no one could see whether Chunuk Bair had been taken. Though Bourne too, felt reservations, he was reluctant to cancel the attack. He did not know how close the attackers on Chunuk Bair were to success or failure. At the same time, 400 yards to the north, the 8th and 10th Light Horse (including Tom Kidd and the survivors of the 30 May sortie) were preparing to make their much more famous charge at the Nek. Immortalised in George Lambert’s painting The charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek and Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, the charge was a notoriously costly failure. The 1st Light Horse was also to make a diversionary attack from Pope’s and it too would waste lives to no purpose. Logan blew his whistle and led his men out. William Markwell, who had shared a tent with him, told Beatrice Logan that Tom was 139


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‘a real hero, first over the parapet . . . leading always’. As squadron commander he did not have to lead the first wave, but the sense of duty that obliged him to enlist likewise obliged him to go over the top first. As the whistles sounded the men began to clamber out. But Quinn’s had not been built to let large numbers of men leave swiftly. Only seven or a dozen could emerge at a time. Though the bomb-nets had been pulled aside many men became caught up in the wire, which in some places had flopped back over the trench, the supporting posts cut by Turkish fire. They scrambled into no-man’s-land as Turkish rifles began firing from the front and, more effectively, machine-guns fired from each flank, from the unsubdued German Officers’ Trench and Baby 700. Though many men had only to run ten or fifteen yards, no one in the first line survived. As a witness told Charles Bean (who lay in his dugout wounded all through the August fighting), the entire attack ‘didn’t take a minute’. Tom Logan fell within a few yards, cut almost in two by the intensity of fire. His brother Joe was hit by five bullets, several of which almost severed an arm, another tearing off a testicle. He was dragged back. Lieutenant Joe Burge—who had served in South Africa with Tom Logan and had left the humdrum work of an auction clerk to enlist—led the parties on the left. He fell dead within ten yards, some said calling out, ‘Go back, boys!’ Harold Kerr, clutching a bag of bombs, heard Burge call, ‘Out lads!’ but was immediately hit in the shoulder and thrown back into the trench. Like the Anzacs, the Turks could direct a solid volume of fire onto this narrow strip. Nearby, Private Cecil Marson lost his leg, cut off by machine-gun bullets. He crawled painfully back to the trench and died. Charles Ruddle, a sergeant in Logan’s squadron, wondered at his survival, telling his mother that ‘the marvel of marvels is that I am alive’. Concussed by a bomb, he too must have been pulled back into the trench. Other men could not tell their stories, like Sergeant Norman Simpkin, hit through the neck and unable to speak. Like dozens of others, George Green saw ‘men mown down by machine guns as soon as outside parapet’: the metaphor was fresh at the time. Crawling out to pull in the wounded brought more casualties among both the rescuers and those (like Herbert Hinton, another of Logan’s lieutenants) who stood to give covering fire and were shot. Bourne, his forebodings realised, pushed along the front line, shouting to stop the second line from rising. Chaplain George Green was in the trenches ready to comfort the wounded and dying. He later 140


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recorded what occurred in his diary; at the time he had been ‘too dazed to recall things . . . don’t want to for a while’. Green was ‘so thankful Major Geo Bourne did not go out & that his action stayed further slaughter’. But he noticed too that Bourne was ‘v[er]y depressed’, like the rest of the regiment, because of the horrific casualties. Even his letter of condolence to Beatrice Logan ended, ‘I’m sick of it all’. It is important to recognise that Bourne’s decision, though doubtless activated by concern for his men, also reflected Quinn’s Post’s vulnerability. Bourne knew that if he allowed a second squadron to run to its death—as at the Nek at that very moment—then Quinn’s would be held by just 100 men. The only reserves on hand were a couple of companies of British soldiers of the untried New Army. In the only explanation Bourne ever gave he made clear that it was because Quinn’s was still the key to the Anzac line that he was impelled to call off his regiment’s attack. Carl Jess saw the aftermath of the attack on the terraces behind Quinn’s. The sight, he wrote, ‘would make anyone’s heart bleed’. He saw ‘weary nerve-strained men moving listlessly into their places’. Beside them, in the fly-infested dressing-station, were ‘scores of badly wounded men’, some writhing in pain. Green, kneeling among the wounded, later recorded that there were men lying in the sun on the steep path near his dugout from dawn. He moved among them, brushing off the flies, passing canteens and talking to them. The last of them was carried down the path eleven hours later. ‘Oh! The wounded in the valley,’ he scribbled in his diary, and then after dark buried in the Shrapnel Gully cemetery the few dead who could be dragged back into the trench. Quinn’s became the 2nd Light Horse’s grave. Its casualty roll discloses that it served for about 130 days between Pope’s, Quinn’s and the reserve positions around the head of Monash Valley. In that time it lost 69 dead and 221 wounded. But almost exactly half of the men wounded were hit in the seven days it spent at Quinn’s, and almost all of its deaths occurred there. At least ten men lay in no-man’s-land. The light horsemen could see some of their wounded still moving more than two days later. Henry Tiddy felt ‘sick at heart’ at the effects of their loss on their families. Tom Logan, whose body lay beyond the wire, he knew had six ‘kiddies’. Word of Tom’s death reached Beatrice through the usual medium in that war, a clergyman: her father, who suffered a stroke from the 141


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strain of breaking the news. Ten days later Queensland newspapers published a casualty list. Within hours the first of over 160 sympathy cards and letters was posted to Beatrice Logan. The Forest Hill state school (Tom had chaired its committee) closed for a day in sympathy. Later in August family, friends, neighbours and representatives of local bodies gathered for a memorial service for Tom. Senior cadets led by Tom’s younger brother, Peter (soon to serve in France) and local Masons marched down Forest Hill’s main street to the School of Arts. The officiating Presbyterian minister acknowledged the grief of this and other bereaved families but affirmed the purpose of their deaths and urged ‘all young men’ to volunteer. For weeks the cards and letters continued to arrive; Beatrice kept them until her death in 1959. One of the letters came from Ada, the sister of Joe Burge from Allora, over the range to the south. Though it was known within the regiment that Burge had been killed (they could see his body), he had been posted missing for ‘a week of sickening suspense’ for Ada. She told Beatrice that she was ‘trying to find some consolation in the fact that he . . . died the most glorious of all deaths’.

‘We have not succeeded’: the failure of the August offensive The Anzac garrison of Quinn’s was now joined by British troops of the 13th Division of Kitchener’s New Army; units of the 40th Brigade (from Wiltshire, Cheshire and Wales) which had left Avonmouth in June and after a ‘prosperous voyage’ landed at Cape Helles to become accustomed to active service on Gallipoli. In a fortnight at Helles they had learned how to live in the festering trenches there and had begun to lose men. Two companies of the 8th Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers were sent to support Chauvel’s light horsemen. They comprised Kitchener volunteers from north Wales, many Welsh-speakers, whose first experience of active service was in the stench of Quinn’s under a sun hotter than ever felt at Llandudno or St Asaph. They were astonished at the half-naked Australians they met, who seem to have acted the part with bravado. A light horse officer who took a Welsh officer around Quinn’s refused to use a periscope, pointing out landmarks over the parapet. Both were lucky not to be killed. The fusiliers’ role in the August attack was to ‘co-operate in the consolidation of the line Quinn’s Post–Scrubby Knoll’. As with every other attempt, the attack got nowhere near the ambitious objective. 142


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Australians have been taught to focus on the gallant but futile attacks the light horsemen made at the Nek. Few have even the faintest knowledge of the British attacks made at the head of Monash Valley on this day by the fusiliers, supported by two companies of the 8th Cheshires and the light horse’s machine-guns. The Cheshires’ war diary—even scrappier than most British diaries on Gallipoli—merely records ‘this attack could not be pushed home’. Sixty-five Welsh dead rolled down the slopes, joining the corpses of the Royal Marines, Australians, New Zealanders and Turks that had been lying there for three months. By the week’s end the British 40th Brigade had lost over 120 dead and 130 missing and 478 wounded: the best part of a battalion, with the 5th Wiltshires virtually destroyed on the slopes of Chunuk Bair alongside the New Zealanders and Monash’s Australians. Those who ignorantly diminish British effort and sacrifice on Gallipoli are cruelly mistaken. Ten days after the debacle on Chunuk Bair so many of the Wellington Battalion’s officers had become casualties that a quorum existed at the New Zealand General Hospital, Cairo. In the officers’ ward Majors Cunningham, Cox and Saunders, with Captain Short, all in hospital pyjamas, met to decide on how regimental funds should be used to help the dozens of Wellingtons in hospital in Egypt. Only one man of those who had been present at the previous meeting, held on the terraces at Quinn’s on the eve of the offensive, was not with them. That was Bill Malone, whose body now lay out on the slopes of Chunuk Bair along with those of 309 of his men, including Jack Dunn. Malone had been killed by a New Zealand shell falling short. Neither Malone nor Dunn’s body was ever found. The attack on Chunuk Bair had failed amid widespread recrimination, with Monash seemingly as responsible as anyone for his brigade becoming lost in the tangled country on the slopes of the range. The offensive saw the end of many others who had survived Quinn’s. Among the New Zealanders Tom Grace (the Sniper King) and John Corbett (who had reached the Turkish trench on 7 June) were killed, while Frank McKenzie and sniper James Swan were wounded. Among the Australians Fred Blake, who had brained a Turk on 9 May with his pick, was killed; Stewart Stormonth (who had seen him do it) was captured. Bert Carter, Frank Cawley DCM, and Edwin Chabrel (whose doggerel documented the 2 May attack) were wounded. Chaplain Andrew Gillison (who buried the first Australians at Quinn’s) and Arthur Oxer (who recorded Chabrel’s verses) were also 143


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dead. Terence McSharry, by now with the survivors of the 15th Battalion on the slopes of Chunuk Bair, recorded a melancholy catalogue of those whom he had known at Quinn’s who had now died: Tommy Logan, ‘Poor Hinton’ and even ‘Molly Malone’, whom he had not liked but had in the end come to respect. Soon afterward, another of the men who had made Quinn’s—Guy Luther, the 15th’s doctor who had gone around the trenches encouraging the frightened young novices of the light horse—was sniped on 25 August. McSharry himself carved Luther’s name on a wooden cross to erect over his grave in the cemetery behind Number 2 Outpost. The 2nd Light Horse’s war diary embodies the failure of the offensive. Anticipating the success of the 7 August charge, the adjutant had written ‘General advance began’, a line he was later obliged to score out. At Godley’s headquarters Arthur Rhodes, desperate to strike an optimistic note, conceded that ‘we have not succeeded in capturing the position we wanted’ but still affirmed, against all the evidence, ‘we have done wonderfully well’. For many others the failure of the offensive, and especially how it failed, proved disillusioning. Aubrey Herbert—who had foreseen the outcome—was profoundly distressed by the sight and sound of the wounded lying in the sun in no-man’s-land, calling for water as they died. He could understand the calls of both Turks and the soldiers of the British empire. Like others, Herbert never forgave the senior officers who refused another truce. The wounded of August suffered in the summer heat from want of organisation in the over-worked medical services. Compton Mackenzie, among others, became enraged at how arrangements for their transport were almost as bad as in April. By mid-August thousands had reached Egypt and more were on the way to Malta and Britain. In a huge, hot, tin-roofed shed in Luna Park in Cairo, over 1400 wounded lay pestered by flies, recalling, perhaps, how they had visited the amusement park as tourists on leave before the campaign. The theorist Hamley had quoted Von Moltke’s dictum: ‘errors in the original concentration of an army can seldom be remedied in the course of the subsequent operation’. Hamilton, who must have known the truth of Hamley’s aphorism, confided to Clive Wigram that ‘the thought of how very near we were to carrying through a real decisive coup’ made him feel ‘as depressed as it is in my nature to be’. The defeat dealt Hamilton a blow from which he never recovered. Some weeks later an officer at Quinn’s who had met him in Australia 144


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before the war noticed how he now looked ‘tired, careworn . . . with heavy care and responsibility stamped on his face’. The August offensive, which had not quite succeeded or only just failed, signalled the end of Hamilton’s career and of the campaign. Shortly before, the Port Augusta Dispatch had published a paragraph asking, ‘Where is Anzac?’ It reported a snippet from the peninsula in which ‘a captured Turkish officer has just pointed out a quaint coincidence . . . The name he says is actually a Turkish word signifying “only just” ’.The Turkish ‘ancak’ has indeed this meaning.

‘When is it going to end?’: sickness at Anzac In the aftermath of the failed offensive, but now with a much longer front line to hold, the old Anzac line became less critical and Quinn’s became correspondingly less visible in the Anzac war diaries. Indeed, the corps war diary fails to mention Quinn’s for a fortnight after the attacks. When it is again mentioned Quinn’s had become a place where ‘sniping and the usual bombing’ had become routine. But it was now not so much bullets or bombs that were depleting Hamilton’s force, but bacteria. Faced with the inexorable erosion of the force with which he had had one chance to end the campaign, Hamilton wrote to Prime Minister Asquith about how his worry was not the deaths of his men (‘Maladies do not kill people’), it was that ‘once a man gets away from the front he never seems to come back’. Many left reluctantly. Wallace Saunders and William Abbey were evacuated—Abbey only after Saunders insisted that he had enteric and was not malingering. Others obliged to leave included McSharry, with tonsillitis and malaria. Another sapper, Phillip Hanna, evacuated to Malta with dysentery, expressed remorse: ‘can’t get rid of guilty feeling of running off and leaving my pals . . . and I’m not actually wounded’. The days following the offensive left both sides unsettled. Ruses and demonstrations kept sentries on edge—at dawn on 9 August the light horse at Quinn’s provoked the Turkish garrison into exposing themselves and shot and bombed them, causing heavy losses, and repeating the ruse later that morning. The next day Chaplain Green, like the light horsemen, felt ‘tired, worn and war-sick’. Gathering together a number of men, including some Welsh fusiliers, he consoled them and himself by leading a hymn service. Almost all of them were suffering from sickness of some sort. The dysentery afflicting them all left weakened more than bowels and bodies. It sapped men’s 145


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minds and their will to endure. Malcolm Ross told the New Zealand Defence Minister how it left men feeling ‘very weak, and not caring a damn whether a shell gets you or not’. Ashmead-Bartlett noticed the loss of enthusiasm, a contrast to the stubborn optimism he had seen in July. He found many men voicing the question, ‘When is it all going to end?’ The effects of illness are suggested by the dismal returns submitted from the light horse units that held Quinn’s for the rest of August. On 5 August the 1st Light Horse Brigade was 1125 strong. It fluctuated throughout the month as reinforcements arrived and men returned from hospital, but gradually sank from 900 on the 15th to 650 by the 25th. In addition, those who remained became gradually weaker, while returning convalescents never regained their vigour. The war diary of the 3rd Light Horse also discloses the effects of sickness on one unit. The 3rd took over Quinn’s from the exhausted and depressed 2nd Light Horse a few days after the attack. The month was a quiet one. During it the regiment lost only two men killed and twelve wounded, most from C Squadron, holding the notorious left subsection closest to the Turks. During the month, however, it evacuated 76 men sick. In just the first six days of September a further 45 were sent away with diarrhoea or dysentery. The sick rate was due to the poor water and unappealing food, especially in the summer heat. Hudson Fysh, a machine-gunner of the 3rd Light Horse, remembered Drapkin’s jam as ‘Drapkin’s diarrhoea’, after its appearance and its effects. Arthur Hutton was more candid: ‘I am passing slime and blood,’ he wrote, ‘but we have to stick it.’ Above all, sickness was spread by the flies. Orders distributed in the 3rd Light Horse when it took over Quinn’s show that the New Zealanders’ scrupulous attitude to hygiene was at last taking root and that all were expected to keep their lines ‘clean and sanitary’. But the flies fed on the thousands of unburied dead lying in no-man’s-land and in the gullies on the Turkish side. However careful the Anzacs became over scraps and latrines, nothing could be done about the flies that swarmed indiscriminately between the armies. The light horsemen now holding Quinn’s were not happy: Joseph Ranford complained that his regiment had been ‘locked up there for over three weeks’. Though they had not made the attacks on 7 August they had seen their fellow light horsemen vanish and could now see their corpses desiccating in no-man’s-land. The strain of three months on Gallipoli brought discontent. To relieve his feelings Private 146


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Wynfrith Reynolds drafted an ‘open letter’ to his officers in his diary. He damned the ‘holiday spirit’ in which the regiment’s original officers had been appointed, criticised the ‘boy scout element’ among them, expressed disgust at their disciplinary policy and described the ‘state of turmoil’ in which the regiment reacted to ‘orders and counter-orders’. Reynolds recorded how he had yet to see a sick man evacuated who wanted to return. Hudson Fysh recalled that the 3rd Light Horse had ‘rather a dreary life’ on Gallipoli. He neither made nor lost friends, ‘committed no brave deeds and gave no distinguished service’, though his bomb-scarred rifle testified to some near misses in the trenches of Pope’s and Quinn’s. Another member of the 3rd Light Horse, Reg Cattle, wounded in the hand by a bomb fragment in August, had it extracted only in 1984. At the end of August the light horsemen at Quinn’s learned that they would be sent to the slightly easier trenches around the outposts north of the old Anzac position. They would be replaced by fresh infantry of the new 2nd Division. Some of the light horsemen saw the new units coming ashore at the piers around the Cove. To the worn-out survivors—80 per cent manifesting clinical emaciation—the newcomers looked ‘like a lot of well-fed jolly school boys’. These men, of the 17th Battalion, were to become the final lot of tenants of Quinn’s. From the end of the August offensive Quinn’s disappears from the mainstream of Gallipoli sources. Bean’s diary barely mentions the post after August. While the position was as crucial as ever, the strength of its defences eased senior commanders’ concerns over its security and it rates only routine reports even in headquarters war diaries. Because— mercifully—the later months of the campaign were marked by no suicidal sorties, the more ordinary events were overlooked in the records and neglected in the histories. Only the men who occupied Quinn’s had cause to care about it, and their war would continue through the autumn and into the biting winter. For those involved it was as compelling as any of the earlier seasons and was also often a matter of life or death.

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10 ‘Serious offensive action underground’ Autumn at Anzac

n the autumn the birds came. With the end of summer the skies above Anzac were filled with birds. They came over in dense, Vshaped formations, drowning the crack of rifle fire with their hoarse cries. An anonymous man of the 20th Battalion watched them ‘go screeching southwards all day long’, sentimentally speculating that they were ‘migrating to warmer climates . . . where we should like to be going’. Many would stop working to look up at the flocks wheeling above them. Others took a more prosaic attitude. Arthur Lush watched the Wellingtons’ surviving machine-gunners trying the odd belt at them, vainly hoping to supplement their monotonous rations. The Dardanelles has long been a stopping-off point on the migration route for birds ranging from storks and geese to terns and even tiny warblers, along with the falcons that prey on the migrating flocks. Even large migratory birds prefer short water crossings, and the strait separating Europe and Asia enables them to easily bridge continents to reach the warmer south. Chaplain Ernest Merrington mentioned the geese on Trafalgar Day, 21 October. ‘Good-bye summer!’ he recorded in his diary. The largest birds and the ones flying furthest were cranes and wild geese of several species. They had left the forests and lakes of northern Russia weeks before. In 1915 the geese encountered a new scene, and not only on the peninsula. The Wellington machinegunners tired of bully beef were probably not the first soldiers to take pot shots at the flocks. German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Turkish soldiers, weary of black bread, sausage, beans or lentils, had perhaps also tried to down them for the pot as they had flown over

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the Russian front, over Galicia and the Carpathians, down the Danube and along the Black Sea coast. All the way the geese would have seen soldiers in grey and green engaged in the colossal battles between empires that would alter the borders and the destiny of eastern Europe. By autumn the war’s first year had seen the warring eastern empires make dramatic progress. German and AustroHungarian armies had driven deep into Russia; Turks and Russians struggled in the Caucasus. In the Balkans, Serbs and Montenegrins had been defeated by Austro-Hungarians. Now, further changes were about to occur. Bulgaria had at last thrown in its lot with the Central Powers and the result would affect the lives of the hungry soldiers dreaming of fresh roast goose.

‘As raw material—quite as good’: the arrival of the 2nd Division Despite the failure of the August offensive the campaign continued to draw in more troops, and the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force grew to become the Dardanelles Army. The new troops came mainly from Britain, but also from Australia. A second Australian division was raised, and by July its first battalions had arrived in Egypt to complete training before going to the peninsula. Gordon Legge assumed command early in August. Within the month, after training in the trying conditions of an Egyptian summer, Legge’s division was ordered to Gallipoli to relieve the exhausted and depleted units of the 1st Australian Division and the light horse at Pope’s Hill and Quinn’s. The ambitious and abrasive Legge, Governor-General Sir Ronald Monro-Ferguson acknowledged, was ‘well hated’ within the Australian army. Sir John Maxwell, the commander-in-chief of the imperial army in Egypt, told Godley that the new formation ‘will never be a good Division with that Commander’. Maxwell regarded the jockeying of senior Australian officers with amused condescension. While in retrospect Australians were more interested in their troops relationships with their British counterparts, at the time Maxwell observed that Australians were ‘funny people to deal with . . . much more jealous of each other than they are of Imperial officers’. Despite the arrival of Legge’s division the force at Anzac continued both to lose men, now overwhelmingly from sickness, and to not see cured or convalescent men return. By mid-September the 15th Battalion had lost 1126 men evacuated, more than the unit’s initial 149


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strength, but only 158 of them had returned. Quinn’s other major garrison, the Wellington Battalion, had lost even more—1511, many wounded on Chunuk Bair—but less than a third, 436, had rejoined. As a result, the older formations fielded but shadows of the 1000strong units that had paraded on the decks of the transports in April. Legge’s battalions were now the strongest on the peninsula, and it made sense that, though novices, they should take charge of the most critical position in the front line. As a result of their arrival the defences were reorganised, and Quinn’s became part of what was re-named II Section, the responsibility of the 2nd Division. Walker’s 1st Australian Division took over I Section (the old Anzac line from Courtney’s south) while the survivors of Godley’s weak New Zealand and Australian Division, including Quinn’s former occupants, took over III Section (the north of the old Anzac line.) William Holmes’s 5th Brigade was most advanced in training and became the first of the 2nd Division to reach Gallipoli. On 25 August its first units began occupying the front line in II Section. The old hands impressed and intimidated the newcomers. Lieutenant William Sheppard described to his family how it was ‘a treat to see the cool way . . . men who have been here since the first landing go about their work’. Even if their nerve was part fatalism and part bravado, they gave the new men a standard to meet. On 3 September Quinn’s acquired its fourth and last lot of tenants with the arrival of the 17th Battalion.

’Up Broadway’: the 17th Battalion at Quinn’s The 17th Battalion had been formed at Liverpool camp, near Sydney, in April 1915, according to Frank Lesnie ‘one thousand strong, mostly raw recruits’. Many had been impelled to volunteer by the stirring story told by Ashmead-Bartlett. They had drilled for a few weeks and soon embarked for active service, cheered by so many well-wishers that the men had to push through the throng on the pier at Woolloomooloo in single file. At Fremantle on the way the 17th had jacked up, pelting officers with fruit after being denied leave. Arriving in Egypt in June it suffered from the summer heat and what Lesnie coyly called ‘a temptation of a certain kind’ in Cairo. Holmes had complained of the ‘slackness of dress and manner’ of his men in the streets of Heliopolis, and urged them to emulate the Egyptian police, ‘whose smartness should put Australian soldiers to shame’. He was glad to get his brigade away from Cairo. Leaving Heliopolis ‘for the 150


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Front’ in mid-August, the 17th arrived at Anzac on 20 August and was sent piecemeal to various parts of the line for several weeks. The 17th Battalion spent some days with the survivors of Monash’s depleted brigade, who perhaps talked to the tyros about what they had done and seen at Quinn’s. A 100-strong company of the 17th Battalion had been fed into the savage fighting at Hill 60. There the 17th lost 25 wounded and 40 killed in the stinking warren of what was left of Hill 60 (where Tom Kidd made his third charge, and lived). The 17th battalion had been formed from New South Welshmen, including Militiamen who had volunteered to serve in German New Guinea in 1914. Several officers and many men had already served together in the humidity of Rabaul and the Sepik River mouth, reminiscing about the exotic jungle as they brushed flies away in the dusty trenches. The 17th’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Goddard, a 44-year-old Melbourne stockbroker and citizen soldier, became the last commander of Quinn’s when he arrived early in September. His battalion’s experience of Quinn’s is documented prosaically and sparsely by official war diaries and reports, which form the framework of an account of the forgotten months. The real story is told through a series of letters and diaries written by a handful of officers and men—Captain Keith Chambers, Lieutenant Basil Holmes (wounded by shrapnel soon after arriving but who crossed ‘a sea of red tape’ to return in October); Private David Roberts, a young blacksmith’s assistant of Lithgow; Private Frank Bernard, a Warsawborn London orphan who served under the pseudonym Frank Lesnie; Private Donald McDonald, a warehouseman from Manly, and Private Jack Emanuel, a bookmaker’s clerk, broken to private for pursuing his civilian calling in uniform. The first of the new troops to arrive hardly impressed the old hands. Bean found to his disgust that some 2nd Division men had ‘not the remotest idea of sanitation’, fouling crowded bivouac areas in weather that still encouraged flies. When they reached the line the new units could not have been expected to equal the troops they had relieved. When sergeants of the 2nd Light Horse returned to Quinn’s they were appalled to see that the 17th Battalion’s sentries had no periscopes up over the parapets. They would learn; they had already learned that at Quinn’s bombs were thrown without respite, and had themselves thrown 350 the night before. Like their predecessors, the 17th had to learn on the job. They naturally had less confidence in moving about the Anzac beach-head 151


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than the veterans they replaced. David Roberts was over three weeks on the peninsula before he found his way to the Cove for a swim; even Lieutenant William Sheppard went eight days without a shave after his arrival. But inexperience told in more serious ways. Men were sniped when incautiously peeking over the parapet, or had periscopes shot out of their hands. Diaries refer to officers and men losing their limbs and even their lives in accidents with the novel and temperamental bombs. The second round fired by the 17th’s trench mortar section exploded prematurely, killing one man and leaving three others, as Donald McDonald wrote, ‘cut up very much’. Nervous sentries shot at least two men by mistake in the first fortnight and novices were appalled by the sight of what bombs could do to flesh. However, they quickly adopted many of the procedures of the veterans they replaced. They engaged in ruses, though their Turkish opponents, more experienced and wary, were not easily tricked. Indeed, aware of the presence of new troops, the Turks attempted the sorts of ruses which Anzac troops had been using on them, firing rockets and flares to draw fire. On one occasion astonished sentries even reported Turks in no-man’s-land ‘dancing towards our trenches’, an act of bravado that seems to have saved the Turks’ lives. The corps war diary soberly noted that, schooled by more experienced officers, generally ‘our men were not unduly drawn’. They took over their predecessors’ place names, such as the Racecourse, and added their own: the Sydneysiders christened sections of the post Martin Place and Five Ways, and called the main sap into the post Broadway. The war the new garrison entered was different from the daredevilry of the first weeks in shallow, ramshackle trenches, and no one expected these men to make suicidal charges. Keith Chambers tried to assure his parents that holding Quinn’s was both monotonous and ‘comparatively safe unless you duck your head up’. The steady trickle of casualties belied his breezy comfort. But the war had changed. By September the days of the primitive jam-tin bombs had long gone. Ordnance had begun reaching the peninsula in useful quantities. Anzac troops could now employ half a dozen types of bomb—now coming to be called ‘grenades’—each intended for a particular job. Lotbiniere bombs were still used to destroy wire screens and timber cover. Copies of the Turkish cricket-ball bombs were the least effective, breaking into large chunks rather than small, sharp fragments when they exploded at all. Some had been found to lack detonators, whether from inefficiency or sabotage in 152


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Egyptian workshops no one could say. The new Mills grenade was safe to handle and powerful: it was to become the favoured grenade on the Western Front. The garrison was stronger than ever and the New South Welshmen continued to dig and deepen. Two new communication trenches were excavated from Seaview Terrace through to 3 and 5 posts, named Goddard Street and Short Street after the battalion’s colonel and quartermaster. Newcomers described the unpleasant novelty of trench warfare— what William Sheppard described (inevitably) as ‘our rabbit warren existence’—in letters home. George Short, the quartermaster, described the rations he was able to draw for the battalion—breakfast of porridge of crushed biscuit with bacon, lunch of boiled rice and dinner of soup of dried vegetables and pancakes, with every meal accompanied by biscuits and jam. Fresh bread arrived from the big field bakeries on Imbros three times a week, and fresh meat occasionally, though it was no safer than in summer, and most meals included the inevitable bully. As late as 28 September the flies remained bothersome, ‘very thick and most industrious’, and like the rest of Anzac’s garrison almost everyone had stomach pains and diarrhoea—by 1 September the brigade field ambulance had 160 cases of diarrhoea. Most men had their hair shorn to deter lice and hunted through the seams of their uniforms to crush them in a never-ending battle. There are very few references to rats in the diaries; the scourge of the trenches in France seem not to have thrived on the peninsula.

‘A sort of “semi-official” armistice’: communicating with the Turks Like the veterans they joined, the 2nd Division men arrived believing that their enemies were cruel, liable to mutilate the dead and torture the wounded. The meetings in no-man’s-land on 24 May had helped to efface that lie, and the two sides had formed a grudging respect for each other during the long stalemate of summer. The newcomers learned the old hands’ attitudes as well as their skills: William Sheppard told his father how he had made ‘pretty general enquiries’ about ‘the alleged inhuman practices’ of ‘Jacky Turk’, and he reported that ‘he is a gentleman fighter’, though he still believed that the Germans were ‘brutes’. Basil Holmes—son of the brigade commander—told a lady friend at Bowral, New South Wales, how Turks were ‘very clean and fair fighters’ against whom he held no personal grudge. 153


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This lack of animosity led to a tendency to fraternise, at Quinn’s more than anywhere. As early as mid-September 17th Battalion men began regarding the Turks opposite as men as well as targets. David Roberts saw Turks throwing stones across no-man’s-land, trying to attract the attention of Australian sentries, and the next day heard that men of his battalion had ‘exchanged words with Turks’. This was the first of a series of encounters, unheard of earlier in the campaign, in which Turks and Australians openly fraternised, even while shots and bombs were exchanged elsewhere. Men threw notes over asking for cigarettes and tobacco, and informal truces occurred. ‘They never shot at each other all day and night,’ Roberts recorded of that part of the post. Nor were these exchanges clandestine: they were witnessed by George Short, and another captain showed Short a cigarette box thrown over in a separate incident. The 17th held Quinn’s for three months continuously on its own, without being relieved by any other unit: longer than any of the post’s previous occupants. Presumably their Turkish counterparts also settled in for long stretches. The two groups, separated by just a few yards of wasteland, began to communicate on a more widespread scale. The result, the corps war diary noted, was ‘a disposition to parley’ on the part of the Turks, but also among their Anzac adversaries. Staff officers were ambivalent about these exchanges. On the one hand they provided opportunities to gather intelligence—they were interested to note that Turks showing themselves to talk at Quinn’s were ‘healthy, clean, well and warmly dressed’—on the other, fraternisation could sap the offensive spirit particularly necessary at a vital post such as Quinn’s. Again and again in October diaries describe how ‘messages of a friendly nature’ passed between the lines. They come not only from infantrymen of the garrison, but also from men sent to Quinn’s on various jobs. Duncan Mulholland, a light horseman manning one of the machine-guns concealed in the ridge-top, wrote home of how he had seen notes thrown between trenches. Unexploded bombs were found to contain scraps of paper rather than deadly shards of metal. An Australian signaller—an officer—described how at Quinn’s late in October Turkish soldiers threw a note over weighted with a knife. Replying to a question sent from the Australian lines, they wrote: ‘You ask how far it is to Constantinople. How long will you please be in getting there?’ The Turks were evidently determined that the 154


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Australians should get no further than Quinn’s Post: and they did not. The Turks asked the Australians not to fire while they retrieved the knife and they did not. Later the Turks signalled the Australians to keep their heads down while a machine-gun played along the Australian parapet. The signaller finished his account with, ‘This shows something of the fairness with which the Turk fights.’ After a couple of extended exchanges in mid-October, Donald McDonald noted, ‘Day & night following quietest yet known’, a hint at why headquarters looked askance on local truces. Pig French proved to be a common language. In another of these exchanges around 24 October, the Turks threw over several packets of cigarettes which an Australian bravely hopped out to retrieve. In reply the 17th threw a tin of bully beef. Perhaps the Turks tasted the contents because the reply came back ‘bully beef non’. The following day the Turks signalled that it would be safe to look over the parapet (a dangerous business if snipers unaware of the local truce were about) and an officer rashly stood exposed for several minutes. Keith Chambers described this ‘sort of “semi official” armistice’. An interpreter came up from the valley—a sign that formation headquarters must have known of it. The interpreter ‘sang out . . . & finally got about a dozen Turks up on the parapet having a yap’. Basil Holmes escorted the interpreter up, but ‘didn’t trust him an inch. He looked like a Turk to me’. Holmes thought the whole exchange a waste of time because the men said ‘a few silly things, nothing of any consequence’. Later an Australian walked over and collected a cigarette case as a souvenir. Then they all climbed down and bombing started again. On the third morning the battalion received ‘a first class raspberry’ from Holmes’s father, the brigadier; the exchange ended and fire resumed. Contact continued, however, and the 17th devised a regular method for attracting the Turks’ attention. ‘We “ring them up”,’ he explained, ‘by knocking a stone on a tin periscope.’ The Turks acknowledged by waving one of their periscopes. When the note arrived they gave another wave. Indeed, the extent of fraternisation at Quinn’s is revealed by the 17th Battalion’s history, which not only describes Australians sending over tins of food (and can openers, because the Turks did not rely on tinned food) but also messages which hint at a real reluctance to regard the Turks as an enemy to be hated. One Turkish note in return read, ‘We knew you were gentlemen, but why do you throw bombs?’, suggesting bemusement at an adversary who could throw bombs one minute and bully beef the next. They also threw notes which praised British success 155


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at Loos—actually one of the most costly reverses of 1915 for the British on the Western Front—and wished them the compliments of a Turkish religious holiday. Another informed the Australians ‘we are your brother soldiers’. Though discountenanced by senior officers, fraternisation at Quinn’s was both connived at by battalion officers and engaged in by more than just a handful of men. It is deeply ironic that here, where bombs were thrown almost without ceasing, Quinn’s should also be the post at which Australians and Turks said the most to each other as ‘brother soldiers’. David Roberts copied down one note that the Turks had thrown over, describing the attackers (in unusually sophisticated English) as ‘too strong to retire, too weak to advance and too proud to surrender’. Here was the essential problem of the garrison of Anzac after the failure of the August offensive, a failure which precipitated actions and reactions far away.

‘In strict confidence . . . ’: war correspondents The correspondents with the Dardanelles Army represented a range of experience, personality and talent. The correspondents’ camp on Imbros included hacks like Sydney Moseley (who reassured his readers after touring Quinn’s that ‘danger here . . . was at the minimum’), men who were prepared to write anything to support the war effort. They included writers who had become celebrities in their own right, like Ashmead-Bartlett, whom Compton Mackenzie (the novelist serving as an intelligence officer) jealously described as getting ‘£2,000 a year and all expenses’. It also included men like Charles Bean, who struggled with the dilemma of reporting truthfully without damaging his side. Bean acknowledged the need to ‘throw a cloak’ over the ‘horror and beastliness and cowardice and treachery’ he had seen in support of the cause he served. Bean, exasperated by Ashmead-Bartlett’s nose for sensation, thought his despatches ‘crude’. Though his copy today appears innocuous, he was believed to wield great influence. Ian Hamilton feared, as he told Churchill, that publication of Ashmead-Bartlett’s report could have ‘turned Italy back at the last moment’ from joining the Allies (which it did on the day of the May truce). The correspondents lived parasitically on headquarters contacts, picking up scraps of staff gossip and breaching security without hindrance. The New Zealander Malcolm Ross, for example, told Sir James Allen, ‘Sir Ian also has told us that 156


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we shall not be here for the winter.’ Like most off-the-record snippets, ‘this is in strict confidence!’ One of the correspondents who blew in and out was the opportunist Keith Murdoch, who was arguably to exert a greater influence over the campaign’s course than any other. Murdoch, an ambitious journalist who was determined to overcome the handicap of his stutter and his colonial origins, had already failed once in an attempt to enter Fleet Street, the centre of the newspaper world. In 1914 he had narrowly lost the ballot for the Australian official correspondent to Bean. In mid-1915, however, he was appointed to a London cable service and thus was able to travel to the theatre of war. Securing a commission from Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher to investigate postal services for Australian troops, he seized the opportunity to make a mark. Murdoch obtained permission from Hamilton to visit Gallipoli on the understanding that he not write anything without official sanction. At the correspondents’ camp on Imbros Murdoch met Ashmead-Bartlett, by now bitterly critical of the campaign and its command. On 3 September Murdoch travelled by fleet sweeper to Anzac and on 6 September Bean took him up to Quinn’s. He was given the by now standard correspondents’ tour. Deeply impressed by what he had seen and what he had heard from the disaffected Ashmead-Bartlett, and sensing an opportunity, he penned a long letter to Fisher. Murdoch deemed Gallipoli ‘one of the most terrible chapters in our history’. He described the failure of the April and August operations, and the impossibility of advances from Helles or Anzac. He spent most space damning the Suvla landings, apparently not realising that the main break-out from Anzac was to have been made over Chunuk Bair. Throughout, he bitterly criticised the Dardanelles Army’s command and staff work and the deficiencies of the medical services during the recent offensive, and praised the conduct of the Australians equally extravagantly. Protesting that he remained optimistic, he foresaw success only by the investment of even more troops. Professing to have had long and confidential talks with officers and men, Murdoch reported famously that ‘sedition is talked round every tin of bully beef on the peninsula’. Murdoch mentioned only two places at Anzac by name: Lone Pine, where he deplored the 2500 lives it cost to gain, and Quinn’s Post. The Turks’ fear and respect for ‘our men’ was, he said, exemplified by Quinn’s, where ‘our sniper’s and bomb-throwers have got their men down’, repeating the untrue rumour that Turks could be induced to enter Quinn’s only by promotion to corporal. 157


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Murdoch’s insinuations arrived in London at an opportune moment. Though a private letter, within a week it was in the hands of the enigmatic Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, and had been printed and circulated as part of the machinations which would in time bring Asquith down. Hankey (who had visited Gallipoli in August and supported holding on, and regarded Murdoch as ‘a horrible scab’), was directed to print the letter as a Committee of Imperial Defence paper, probably by Lloyd George. Lloyd George, Murdoch later told Bean, ‘afterwards wrote to me to say that my representations had a most powerful effect on the Cabinet’. Murdoch’s letter created a sensation in Whitehall, Downing Street, and the clubs and drawing rooms of the small circle in London who ran the British empire’s war. Despite coming from a brash colonial journalist—of the kind usually patronised when not snubbed—it was taken as confirmation of the rumours and reports which had seeped out of the Dardanelles for the past three months. Murdoch’s letter, Charles Callwell told a War Office colleague, had ‘illicitly got past the Censors’, though perhaps someone had turned a blind eye to it as they had not to Ashmead-Bartlett’s attempt to divulge word of bungling early in the summer. It confirmed the widespread suspicion that ‘Ian Hamilton and his crowd are [not] telling us the truth’. Hamilton was understandably outraged, arguing that based on ‘hardly a bowing acquaintance with the Peninsula’ Murdoch had dealt out ‘unrelieved condemnation to every section of the force’— men, officers, generals, the lines of communications, base and home administration—‘always excepting the Australians’. Murdoch’s unofficial, ill-informed diatribe, written in direct contravention of both orders and Murdoch’s word of honour, exerted a profound effect, not least on Hamilton, who in October was relieved by Kitchener and replaced by General Sir Charles Monro. The drama of the letter’s arrival was taken as proof of its veracity. Its reception suggests the degree of dissatisfaction in influential circles in the empire. The former Victorian naval officer Robert Collins, the Australian Commonwealth’s official representative in London, protested to George Pearce that the ‘strategical incapacity’ shown over the Dardanelles ought to be ‘sheeted home’. He felt that the Australian government had a direct interest in the campaign, ‘seeing how much their men have suffered’, and deplored that ‘the Dardanelles business’ had been ‘marked by blunders all along’. ‘Nobody seems to 158


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quite know who is responsible,’ he complained. Murdoch’s letter reflected and fed the desire to take decisive action. Though Murdoch saw himself as a crusader for Australian interests, and has been represented as a nationalist hero, in fact he became a tool of the intriguers in the War Office and Whitehall. The letter aggravated a crisis which would within months see the campaign closed down.

‘Mining and sapping schemes’: the war underground continues Meanwhile, a more literally subterranean campaign proceeded at Quinn’s. While fighting above ground subsided in autumn, the war underground never lost its intensity. The 2nd Division soon took over control of the mining operations at the head of Monash Valley. Birdwood emphasised the ‘extreme importance’ of these posts and reminded their garrisons of the ‘constant vigilance, care and hard work’ which their predecessors had put in to make them secure. Without that vigilance, he warned, the Turks could ‘blow us down the cliff’. Legge, a scientific soldier attuned to technical novelties, took readily to ‘mining and sapping schemes’ as ‘part of the offensive policy’ of the corps. At his direction, engineer officers had first call on increased supplies of technical stores and on the labour of infantry working parties. Gangs of labourers from other battalions were drafted in to work at Quinn’s around the clock with men of the 17th Battalion. At the end of summer the ground was very hard—men digging fresh latrine pits actually had to blast to loosen the undisturbed ground behind the post. From mid-September the underground war became if anything more extreme with the arrival at Quinn’s of Captain William Farquhar, whose 5th Field Company assumed responsibility for engineering work. He set infantry to repair and deepen the main envelope tunnel and the network of more than 30 galleries running off it under the front line toward the Turks. Farquhar’s diary provides a continuous and detailed account of the spade war at Quinn’s from then to the evacuation. Day by day he recorded the progress of both his own galleries, gradually extending under the Turkish line, and the approach of Turkish tunnels. Even reading Farquhar’s diary for the first time is exciting. He recorded where his listeners were hearing picking sounds, and through September they came seemingly from all over his front. We can imagine him plotting the sounds on the sketch 159


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Quinn’s Post: tunnels

Though not the largest or longest on Gallipoli, the thirty tunnels of Quinn’s Post became the scene of some of the most aggressive underground warfare on the peninsula. The outlined trenches show the location of the surface works, the solid lines the tunnels. Tunnels that appear to intersect were often at different levels, as were many of those that projected beyond the main envelope. 160


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maps he had made of his works, which numbered the galleries from south to north from 16 to 46. He must have wondered if the pattern of sounds meant anything or was random; they were heard in gallery 23 and 43, then 17 and 18, then 37, 45, ending the month at 42. Farquhar drove his galleries further out toward the Turkish positions, timbered the long, narrow tunnels and prepared to take on the underground war which developed through the autumn. The underground war continued largely isolated from the stalemate above ground. Occasionally mining would intrude: on 3 November a larger than usual Turkish mine exploded fifteen yards in front of number 6 section. Jack Emanuel was on the right of number 6 post as the winter dusk fell, unloading a periscope rifle because the light had failed. The mine burst out of the ground ten yards away, the concussion knocking him across the trench. He dived for the overhead covering marking the boundary of the two posts, but it collapsed just before he reached it so he quickly darted back through the sap leading to the support line. By this time the earth thrown upwards was now falling and huge clods, he thought weighing up to a ton, were falling around him as he sheltered beneath fallen timber beams. It seemed like hours but all this took a few seconds. Besides blowing down several feet of parapet—which in turn provoked an exchange of fire—two men were killed by falling debris: one, Julius Bloom, the son of a Bathurst Street financier, was ‘a great pal’ of Emanuel’s. As usual, the explosion provoked a storm of fire above ground. Phil Utting, a 20th Battalion sergeant drafted in to help the garrison’s labour gangs, described how ‘the excitement was great’, with ‘volleys of rifle fire and bombs flying about’, making him think that the Turks were about to attack.

‘Might as well be in George Street’: Quinn’s in autumn As the days shortened the hours of stand-to changed: the morning stand-to came later and evening earlier. The weather began to turn. The Australian journalist Hector Dinning, who arrived with his signal section early in October, thought the weather Melbournian, with raw cold alternating with mild sunny days. ‘The autumn had shown little bitterness,’ he wrote, but on October the first of the winter gales swept down the Aegean and smashed the flimsy piers at Anzac. David Roberts complained ‘everything wet and muddy’ in the autumn 161


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rain. The cooler weather at least allowed quartermasters to bring up fresh meat without risk of it arriving fly-blown and stinking. For a time Roberts enjoyed ‘bosker food’ and indeed, sorting out the worst bungles of the summer left men enjoying at least better food. This was ‘a kind of comfort’, though Dinning’s observations suggest that Quinn’s latest tenants had lapsed from the standard of tidiness established by Malone. He saw ‘symbols of creature comfort scattered up and down . . . tobacco-tins, egg-shells, orange-peel and the wrappings of Mexican chocolate’. Goddard’s battalion soon established the regular routine of reliefs and stand-tos that holding Quinn’s required. Jack Emanuel, a sergeant, felt able to describe his experience at Quinn’s to his family in Sydney once the evacuation of Gallipoli made security irrelevant. According to the detailed rosters maintained by the warrant officers, 425 men were needed to man the six front-line posts, including the reliefs, the working parties that kept the men fed and watered, and the fatigue parties working on the unending repairs to wire and sandbags and tunnels. With a strength of about 500 in October, constantly dwindling from sickness, the 17th was permanently short-handed. Few had much time off—Emanuel spent ten of his thirteen weeks on Gallipoli in number 6 post—‘the most unlucky place on Quinn’s’. The 17th’s daily rota had men spending six hours on and six off, turn about in the fire-trench and support line, a wearying routine when ‘it really meant that each had to do 2 men’s work’. Visitors remarked at the amount of soil and timber shifted or lifted to create the earthworks covering the the hillsides of Quinn’s. Hector Dinning found their magnitude impressive, but was disturbed by the seeming permanence of the structures. ‘One might think the beggars are here for a year,’ he wrote. ‘God forbid!’ Keith Chambers reassured his parents that his company had ‘got into a regular methodical “swing” ’, and even tried to persuade them that ‘it is sometimes hard to realise that you are actually at the front . . . You might as well be in George Street’. The daily reports which Henry Goddard kept (and, indeed, took home with him—the battalion war diary is a poor, scrawny thing) suggests otherwise. Every day or so men were killed or wounded, and more went sick with the griping trots that sooner or later afflicted everyone. Even Ian Hamilton’s aide de camp, his nephew, who lived better than most on the peninsula, contracted ‘the common Gallipoli complaint’ after visiting Anzac in mid-October. As ever, the medical services proved to be 162


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more efficient at evacuating the sick than they were at returning the well. Indeed, many sick men ended up in Britain, months away from returning. Those left behind were outraged at men able to ‘strike it lucky’, as Keith Chambers wrote, even if luck involved a dose of dysentery or worse. The 17th Battalion was never given a spell on Imbros as were the older units. The unavoidable result was that men lived with diarrhoea and became weaker. Quinn’s new garrison soon became as hardened to the sights and smells of the post as had the units that had gone before. Death came sporadically and randomly—a man shot through the face as he looked over the parapet once too often in the same place; a bomb rolling down the hillside and into a cooking fire; a quartermaster’s clerk sniped in the stomach as he queued with a batch of indents at a stores dump. Beyond the bomb-screen terrible sights confronted sentries as they peered into their periscope mirrors. For weeks men saw a watch hanging on the remains of a light horse officer. Mummified bodies continued to burst into flame—one the body of another light horse officer killed in August, which burnt for an hour just beyond the Australian parapet. Men adopted the callous black humour of the front line; a form of behaviour in which the macabre becomes the norm. Early in October an officer accompanied two Queensland light horsemen to the front line; at number 6 post one looked out through a periscope at the debris and the dead in noman’s-land. As they stared at some rotting remains a few yards away they were told, ‘That is your brother there.’ Whit and Jack Logan, Tom Logan’s brothers, recognised him by the white moleskin breeches he usually wore. For the men of the 17th Battalion huddling in their trenches on the heights, the miseries of the weather added to the strain of holding what remained a vital post, albeit one no longer likely to be overwhelmed, for the casualty figures disclose that Quinn’s remained dangerous. For half the days of October, the 17th had the equal or highest sick rate of the 2nd Division, and of the division’s twelve battalions the 17th was responsible for more than a quarter of its wounded. Holding Quinn’s still entailed immense labour. Late in October, as a safeguard against winter rain closing the steep tracks, they carried no less than 21 000 pounds of rations, a third of it tinned meat, up the main sap to a dump laboriously cut into the hillside. Quinn’s retained its importance in the thinking of those responsible for the security of Anzac. Though Holmes’s 5th Brigade 163


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was responsible for three crucial posts at the head of Monash Valley, Quinn’s was always mentioned first in daily reports.

‘Look out for Auntie!’: exchanges of fire at Quinn’s Despite the friendly greetings passing between the trenches, the main exchanges between the two sides continued to be of the lethal sort. In mid-October the Turks introduced the first innovation in weapons since trench mortars reached Anzac in May. On 16 October the first ‘broomstick bomb’ was fired into Anzac; significantly, into Quinn’s. More of these powerful missiles arrived, giant lollipop-like objects producing powerful boiling-black explosions. Not until several failed to explode later in October were Anzac gunners able to work out what they were—artillery shell cases filled with sticks of Excellite, five detonators, half a pound of black powder and a couple of dozen iron cubes, all on the end of a stabilising wooden ‘broomstick’ and fired from a three-inch mortar. The Australians could do little about them except call out, ‘Look out for Auntie!’ as the bombs rose over noman’s-land, and ask the gunners to bombard likely firing positions. The shooting war above ground had changed dramatically from the haphazard business of May. Increasingly the firing was orchestrated. Observers directed fire from periscope rifles onto loop-holes, with round after round slamming into sandbags and pocked metal, killing or intimidating Turkish sentries. (Not until August did the Turks see a periscope rifle close-up, and then only because a British newspaper stupidly published a detailed drawing, which soon enough was sent to Constantinople.) Machine-guns were directed towards cutting the frames of bomb-screens so that bombers could deluge stretches of Turkish trench to prevent repairs at the same time as trench mortars fired to break up and set alight overhead cover, rendering untenable widening stretches of front-line trench. The destruction never presaged an assault, for no more attacks would be made after the massacre of the 2nd Light Horse—it was intended to demoralise and disturb the defenders. By mid-autumn both sides were holding their front lines with far fewer men, and the Turks had abandoned some stretches, as had the Queenslanders in May. The volume of fire needed to begin these violent episodes astonished visitors. The garrison of Turkish Quinn’s also fired at the Baltic pine posts holding up the bomb-screens on the Anzac side. As they splintered and the netting sagged, the gap became the target of Turkish bombs. 164


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Even iron pipes were cut through by machine-gunners playing upon them. Despite local emergencies, however, the fire superiority won by the New Zealanders in June was never again lost. By mid-autumn three times as many men were being evacuated sick from Quinn’s as were wounded. A diet low in fresh vegetables caused a kind of scurvy—country men named it the familiar ‘Barcoo rot’—with insect-bites and scratches turning septic. Many contracted a jaundice that turned the whites of their eyes yellow and left them feeling tired irrespective of how many hours of sleep they could snatch. Hector Dinning noticed even the relatively fresh 2nd Division men were now looking ‘pasty-faced ghosts, with nerves on raw edge’. And soon autumn would give way to a miserable winter.

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11 ‘Hillsides abandoned to the enemy’ The evacuation of Anzac

he Gallipoli campaign, however large it may loom in the Australian consciousness, was only one part of a vast conflict and intimately connected to it. By November, decisions were being reached in London which would affect the outcome of the campaign and all involved in it. On Gallipoli, the arrival of a tall, portly officer on 13 November would alter the course of the campaign. General Kitchener apologised to a staff officer whose advice he had ignored in February that a landing on Gallipoli was bound to fail. He strode up to Russell’s Top and looked out over Monash Valley towards trench lines that had remained stubbornly unchanged since April. Aucklander Frank McKenzie, who had recovered from the wound he had suffered in the 4–5 June raid at Quinn’s and survived the destruction of his battalion on Chunuk Bair, happened to be at Anzac Cove when Kitchener arrived. The field marshal essayed some bonhomie: ‘Good morning Sergeant,’ he said. ‘What is your regiment doing?’ McKenzie told him that the Aucklanders were getting ready for winter. Kitchener replied—somewhat improbably—‘Well, don’t work too hard.’ McKenzie only realised later the import of his remark.

T

‘The biggest disaster’: evacuation canvassed Keith Murdoch’s letter had precipitated a crisis in the conduct of the war. Sir Charles Monro, the new commander in the Dardanelles, favoured evacuation of Gallipoli while costly reverses in France, at Loos and in Champagne, made reinforcement unthinkable. Rumours that the campaign would be abandoned had been circulating in London and 166


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‘HILLSIDES ABANDONED TO THE ENEMY’

Paris for weeks and a War Office general, Sir Arthur Lynden-Bell, was sent to investigate. As his train steamed out of Charing Cross station early on the morning of Trafalgar Day, Churchill rushed alongside and tossed a bundle of papers through the window, calling out, ‘Don’t forget—if you evacuate it will be the biggest disaster since Corunna.’ Every schoolboy knew Charles Wolfe’s poem ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, referring to a British army evacuating another peninsula in another costly seaborne operation. Hamilton had by now left Gallipoli, humiliated by his failure, never to be actively employed again. While he had been quite unjustly impugned by Murdoch, Hamilton was still responsible for the initial landings, the single most significant failure in a campaign distinguished by blunders and bad luck. Britain had lost the diplomatic war in the Balkans. Bulgaria’s entry into the war allowed the Germans to transport heavy artillery to Constantinople by rail. The Germans were the world’s leading exponents of heavy artillery and when their Krupp howitzers arrived on Gallipoli the Anzacs would be shelled out of their positions, slowly but surely. So close as it was to the Turks, Quinn’s was largely spared enemy shellfire, but the men could look over from the post to see shells bursting on Courtney’s. Frank Lesnie described in a letter to his mother how he had been sickened to see arms and legs blown into the air; he ‘did not look that way again’. As the campaign entered what was to be its final stage it began to seem important to record what had been achieved by the units that had created Quinn’s. A survey of the 2nd Division’s trenches was ordered in October, but not until 19 November was Ronald McInniss, an infantry private and former surveyor, told to report as Post Surveyor. Installed in a ‘palatial’ dugout near Broadway, McInniss began mapping what he called (of course) the ‘rabbit warren’ of tunnels and galleries below ground and the trenches, dugouts and saps above. Using an old, unreliable compass, a clinometer and a 66-foot surveyor’s tape, McInniss bustled about the saps and candle-lit galleries, producing drafts which he collated and finished in a reed hut on the banks of the Suez Canal months later. Today, several coloured copies of his map (the original was stolen from his kit in France) depict the final form of Quinn’s before its abandonment and destruction. Quinn’s would have gone to the 1st Australian Division, but other calculations would intervene: there would be no more reorganisations in the Anzac front. The 17th remained. Frank Lesnie wrote to 167


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his mother in London; he was ‘neither attacking nor retiring’, he explained, ‘just obeying orders . . . we are holding the post’. By November the defence scheme had again changed, a result of the attrition of personnel. The 1st Australian Division, wasted by the savagery of Lone Pine and months of sickness, occupied a smaller sector than before, from the sea to Lone Pine. Legge’s division—now the strongest formation—held from Lone Pine to Russell’s Top. The New Zealanders and then the British 54th Division held the ridges of the extended Anzac area, stretching along the seaward slopes of Chunuk Bair, overlooked by the Turks on the main range. Australians now comprised a smaller proportion of the force. In April Anzac troops had provided two out of five divisions, but by the end of the campaign the Anzac divisions in Birdwood’s Dardanelles Army made up only three of twelve, and of those the original formations of his old corps were worn out and seriously under strength.

‘Unending, dreary day’: Quinn’s in winter By late October diarists were recording ‘bitter cold morning’ as autumn turned to winter. As the weather worsened, living virtually in the open became increasingly uncomfortable, particularly for those of the 2nd Division, who had to wait until late October to swap their thin khaki cotton drill uniforms for woollen serge. The sleeping terraces Malone’s men had built at the height of summer no longer provided shelter from biting winds and driving rain. Trenches became drains and dugouts turned into sinks. In a rural image familiar to many country men, Hector Dinning described the muddy tracks and trenches as resembling a cow-yard in the winter rain. Paradoxically, drinking water remained scarce, the issue being now with a quarterration daily; a hardship on a diet heavy with salt beef. Most of the men spent the autumn cold and thirsty, dirty and lousy, smelly and sick. Apparently facing a winter campaign, corps staff belatedly ordered units to build deep dugouts only on 1 November: too late for some, who were to lose toes or fingers when the blizzards began. November, the most changeable month of the campaign, encompassed days of bright sunshine and no wind, days of fierce gales and heavy rain and, later on, heavy snow. The gales made supply precarious. A naval officer confided to Bean that the force was ‘within two days of a disaster’. Bean foresaw ‘a sort of Crimea’ in which a weak, sick and hungry force hung on through a miserable winter ‘at the cost of the 168


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utmost suffering’. Everyone was as dirty as in summer—there was no water for washing, and sea bathing had become impossible. Ronald McInniss hinted at the discomfort this caused, recording that he could ‘never get any to drink—let alone clean my teeth, or even wash my eyes’ after he emerged from the filthy tunnels he was mapping. Even senior medical officers went for days without washing more than face and hands. Food in the autumn became bearable, though monotonous and often poorly cooked, for the shortage of firewood was now so acute that the men rarely had hot tea and had to endure lukewarm bully beef stew. A private dismissed it as ‘very much “off ”’ to have to put up with a diet of rice for breakfast, fat bacon for lunch and bully stew for dinner. Late in October Goddard decided to break up individual messing and have cooks prepare food for the entire battalion at a new cook-house, located at the top of Broadway. Officers inevitably fared better. George Short (as quartermaster best placed with contacts in the depots) enjoyed stewed chicken, toast and gooseberry jam. Men had to be happy with ‘comforts’ parcels made up by families and by charities such as the Red Cross. Attempts to provide canteen goods—as Keith Murdoch had urged—foundered on administrative muddle and the impossibility of supplying as much as was needed. They were sometimes able to buy tinned milk, chocolates and even, ironically, Turkish delight. Canteens opened at intervals and when they did men elbowed their way to buy chocolate or chewing gum or cigarettes, supposedly looted from British comforts parcels (a canteen opened at Quinn’s in mid-October was bought out within a few hours). ‘Looting of Gift Clothing and Comforts’ parcels became a major concern. Witnesses recorded ‘systematic looting’ on transports reaching the peninsula, while the troops objected to being charged for items they knew to have been donated. Comradeship sometimes extended no further than from the front line to the reserve trenches. Some men summoned enough energy to respond creatively to Gallipoli. As the evenings lengthened, aspiring writers sharpened their pencils in dugouts all over the Anzac area in response to an invitation from Charles Bean to produce a magazine. Bean edited and carefully shaped The Anzac Book, the classic expression of what became the Anzac legend. A comic contribution, ‘The True Story of Sappho’s Death’, came from a New Zealander who harked back to his time at Quinn’s in the summer. He claimed that the poem had been ‘deciphered—with much labour’ by a New Zealand bomb-thrower 169


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‘from a very old tablet dug up in the trenches at Quinn’s Post’. He attributed its deficiencies of metre to ‘a hurried translation from the Ancient Greek during a Turkish attack’. As Jill Hamilton points out in her anthology of Gallipoli verse, it was a clever parody of Byron’s Don Juan, part of the stock of English literature that this British empire citizen force carried to Gallipoli among its mental equipment. At least one contribution to Bean’s Anzac Book was written at Quinn’s. Vernon Hopkins, a medical corps private attached to the 17th Battalion’s regimental aid post, submitted ‘From Quinn’s Post’, a dreamy love poem addressed to a ‘gentle maid’. Its ending hints at the tedium of Quinn’s in winter, in which he asks the object of his affection to ‘Drift back, bright star, and comfort me / In this unending, dreary day’. Sadly, Hopkins would never again see his ‘bright star’: he was to die of his wounds in an attack at Ypres two years later. But the days the Anzacs were to spend on Gallipoli were now short, and they were certainly not ‘unending’, for the evacuation was being debated.

‘Look out for a bomb’: an incident at Quinn’s The bombing duels continued. Basil Holmes, back at Quinn’s after a hasty convalescence, recalled that one of his men had acquired ‘a habit of . . . blowing at the fuse . . . to make certain it hadn’t gone out’. One day the fuse took and the bomb burst before he was able to throw it away: it blew off his hand. A series of similar accidents disclosed that men were fraying the ends of fuses to encourage burning. The fuses on the bombs not thrown by one shift would often be frayed again by the next, so that when they were lit the bombs would explode far sooner than expected. Though part of life at Quinn’s, bombing could never be regarded as routine, as an incident in the early hours of 3 November suggested. Two men stood in the bomb pit in number 6 section, probably the most dangerous spot on the peninsula, as Monash and Malone’s men testified. Edward Fogarty, a 32-year-old labourer from Horsham, Victoria, had been throwing bombs from this section for seven weeks, as long as the 17th had held Quinn’s. Fogarty (he had changed his name from the German Schulz on enlisting) was an experienced man, well regarded by his mates. They and the battalion’s bombing sergeant agreed that he handled the bombs carefully and always ‘sang out’ before throwing. Fogarty was being assisted by Frank Charles, a reinforcement with only a day’s experience of bombing and presumably still apprehensive 170


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about the business. They stood by a sandbag traverse and, taking up jam-tin or cricket-ball bombs, hurled them over the parapet toward the Turkish trench, no more than ten yards away. A few yards along the trench, around a corner, sat a group of men shrouded in greatcoats and cap comforters against the chill of the night. At about 3.45 a.m. Fogarty’s practised arm landed a bomb in the Turkish trench. Lance Corporal William Flanagan, in charge of the little group around the corner, fired a couple of shots over the parapet and Fogarty prepared to throw another bomb, as usual calling out, ‘Look out for a bomb.’ Flanagan looked around to see Fogarty holding the bomb in his right hand. Within two or three seconds a bomb-burst wounded three of the five men nearby. Flanagan rushed over to find Fogarty lying with his hand blown off at the wrist, his right shoulder and head ‘peppered’ with shards of bomb case. Frank Charles, standing behind his number one, had taken the full force of the blast, which shredded him from face to groin. His femoral artery was ripped open and he quickly bled to death. Within two minutes Sergeant Cuthbert Finlay, in charge of numbers 5 and 6 sections, arrived. He summoned stretcher-bearers, but by the time they reached Captain Nigel Smith’s dressing-station both men were dead. Ten minutes later Captain Frank Murphy climbed up to the section. Taking in the scene, he cautioned the survivors that they would be wanted as witnesses at the inevitable enquiry. The following day Colonel Goddard convened a court of enquiry at which three officers collected statements from the survivors. Smith essayed a little amateur forensic analysis, concluding from the place and nature of the wounds that the bomb had exploded as Fogarty extended his arm. No one believed that Fogarty had been careless. They suggested that either the fuse had been faulty or— because no one saw him light the fuse or heard its noisy sizzling—that by awful mischance a Turkish bomb had exploded beside them just as Fogarty was drawing his arm back. The officers decided that the bomb had exploded prematurely due to a faulty fuse and that no blame attached to Fogarty or any of the men in the trench. By then the dead had been buried in what became the Shrapnel Valley cemetery and the process of informing families begun, though Charles’s next-of-kin were untraceable. The other bombs in the pit were gingerly examined, though whether anyone was game to use them is not recorded. Fogarty’s and Charles’s deaths were not the last at Quinn’s, but they were among the most carefully documented. The incident suggests 171


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what a striking transformation had occurred at the post over the preceding six months. In contrast to the uncounted, unnoticed and unrecorded deaths of the campaign’s first weeks, deaths were now so unusual that they required a careful investigation and a detailed report. As Basil Holmes complained, Quinn’s had become a place of routine—but still deadly for all that.

‘The silent stunt’: snow and stillness Privy to headquarters discussions, Brudenell White, Birdwood’s chief of staff, had already grasped the need to accustom the Turks to change if the campaign were to end in evacuation, which seemed increasingly likely after Monro’s arrival and Kitchener’s visit. White realised that if the Anzac force was to escape without detection and annihilation the Turks had to be accustomed to the silence that would inevitably follow as the Anzac lines were progressively evacuated. Late in November he devised what came to be known as ‘the silent stunt’. Beginning on the evening of 25 November, all firing was forbidden. Artillery, mortars, snipers, machine-gunners and bombers were silenced. A sudden and sinister quiet fell on the Anzac side of the line. Puzzled Turks peered through their loopholes over the night of the 25–26th. Perhaps urged on by curious headquarters or on the initiative of local commanders, a few bold soldiers eventually began to probe forward. Small parties emerged all along the line. About seven o’clock the next morning, around 40 Turkish soldiers clad in threadbare greatcoats climbed gingerly out of Turkish Quinn’s and threw themselves down behind heaps of broken earth, craters, debris and corpses, craning cautiously toward the Anzac line. Some were just 20 yards from anxious sentries peering at them through periscopes. Four of the Turks began to crawl closer toward the line, perhaps expecting the crack of a sniper’s rifle in another Anzac ruse. They were watched by the machine-gunners at Steele’s and on Russell’s Top, all holding the grips of their guns but not firing. The Turks dragged the wire bomb-screens aside and looked over the sandbags into Quinn’s—the first to do so since the repulse of the attack on 29 May, nearly six months before. They threw bombs into the fire-trench—from which the New South Welshmen had prudently withdrawn—then scrambled in. The largest of the patrol was a big sergeant who boldly explored, entering the dark 172


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passageways formed by the overhead cover ‘as firmly as any Australian’, as Charles Bean wrote when he collected the story a couple of days later. As he rounded a traverse the big sergeant met Corporal James Aitken, a 23-year-old Scottish migrant, perhaps one of those enlisting in the hope of a free trip home. Aitken lunged at the Turk with his bayonet. The Turk grasped the bayonet and made to pull a pistol from his pocket, shouting ‘Ul-lah! Ul-lah!’ Aitken was also a big man. He pulled the revolver from the Turk and in the struggle both lost their balance. Aitken jumped to his feet first and drove his bayonet into the Turkish sergeant’s side. Frank Lesnie was outraged that the Turk had been killed—‘butchered’, he thought. ‘There was no justification for the killing,’ he wrote later, ‘the man would have been more useful alive.’ The Turks following their sergeant threw a bomb and ran for their own lines, some wounded by bomb fragments. The 17th’s sentries later heard groaning in no-man’s-land. As always, reports of the incursion went around the dugouts and bivouacs in neighbouring valleys and hills. The following day a few more parties of Turks half-heartedly approached the front line at Quinn’s and, despite the silent stunt, were fired on. When in the early hours of the 27th six tried to reoccupy a crater in no-man’s-land at Quinn’s they were bombed out. The silent stunt—not so silent at Quinn’s—ended at midnight on the 27th, with the sound of bullets and bombs again echoing around the ridges. Next morning men climbed stiffly from their dugouts to find snow blanketing the hillsides. Few Australians outside those from New South Wales and Victoria had seen snow before. Queenslanders such as Ronald McInniss, the post surveyor, were enchanted. Some, shaking off their lethargy, skylarked, tossing snowballs about like children. McInniss thought the snow ‘beautiful’, because it ‘covers over so many things which are not’; the desiccated corpses and bones in no-man’s-land were concealed beneath a soft white mantle. Though the snowfall was a memorable event, some veterans later contested the idea that it had fallen on Quinn’s. Ernest Burgess, a Sydney labourer, told a perplexed Peter Liddle 59 years later that there was no snow at Quinn’s itself. (‘I don’t care who says . . . The snow was all down on the bottom . . . there was no snow in Quinn’s’.) Photographs in the battalion history, however, show chilly but cheerful officers standing outside dugouts covered in snow. It killed the last of the flies, though not, unfortunately, the fleas or the lice. 173


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Anzac snipers huddled against the cold soon discovered that the Turks stood out boldly against the snow-clad hillsides. Turkish snipers discovered the same thing about the Anzacs. Taking advantage of the lull, the Turkish snipers crept back onto Dead Man’s Ridge, making Monash Valley once again unsafe, as it had not been since Tom Grace’s marksmen beat them during the baking days of mid-June. With the silent stunt over, the Australian marksmen returned to the hunt. Basil Holmes recalled how ‘we had a field day’. He spent the day with a sergeant sniper, spotting for him through a high magnification telescope. ‘You could see the bullet hit the fellow,’ he remembered. The water shortage led directly to David Roberts being sniped. On 1 December he was sent out onto the slopes of Dead Man’s Gully to gather snow when a sniper spotted him against the whiteness. A bullet struck the back of his right knee—‘just like the blow from a hammer’—and he used ‘some strong Gallipoli expressions’ before being carried down to the brigade field ambulance on his way to Mudros, Alexandria and Cairo, where the wounded were treated, he recalled, like millionaires. It was about time. With the post now more organised, the dead were usually buried in the cemetery in Shrapnel Gully. By the autumn the cemetery contained several hundred graves, many cared for. An unknown 20th Battalion man described some graves as ‘very artistically finished’, with crosses and plank headstones, or even a bottle with a paper inside, recording the identity of the dead. Though the survivors of the 4th Brigade units that had served around the head of Monash Gully in May had by this time moved to the far north of the Anzac area, some still visited to tidy up their mates’ graves.

‘A foolish deadlock’: hanging on into December Up to the final days Quinn’s and the head of Monash Valley remained the strongest and most heavily protected part of the line. The 2nd Division had half of the Garland guns at Anzac, two of the six Japanese mortars and as many periscope rifles as the other divisions in the corps combined. Nor did the fire-fight slacken, with Goddard’s marksmen hitting no less than 33 periscopes in the first ten days of December alone, and machine-guns and mortars blowing away Turkish bomb-screens or damaging them so that bombs could be skidded under the mesh. Tiring of this, the Turks began lugging in steel railway track to replace timber shattered by 174


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the destructive Lotbiniere bombs. More worrying, while a study of the possible use of poison gas on Gallipoli had concluded that it was ‘improbable’, Royal Engineer officers thought that if the Turks did obtain any they could soak the area around Quinn’s with it and allow the heavier-than-air gas to ‘stream down’ into Monash Gully. Like previous occupants of the post, the 17th had suffered severely. It was the only unit of the 2nd Division besides the 18th Battalion (badly mauled at Hill 60) to have lost more than 400 casualties. Of 33 officers in September, 22 had been killed, wounded or sent away sick by the end of October, the high casualties attributable to the continual danger of Quinn’s. Henry Goddard’s daily reports disclose the day-to-day wastage. On most days, even in December, men were killed or wounded: by snipers; by random machine-gun fire; by bullets passing through loop-holes or by a broomstick bomb falling ‘right through the bloody [new] cook-house’. One man died in another grenade accident; how many died or were maimed at Quinn’s from carelessness and bad luck will never be known. But the greater drain came from sickness. While the 17th lost only four men killed in the campaign’s last month, 118 were evacuated sick— fourteen on one day alone. Only below ground did the effort tail off. Though sappers had eight tunnels in progress as late as 11 December—the last day of serious mining—they now rarely heard Turkish digging. The miners had won the underground war, though like everything else on Gallipoli there was now no point to it. But after eight months of continual combat the soil structure of Quinn’s was beginning to weaken. The detonation of up to 100 mines in an area little larger than a line of suburban backyards had loosened the soil. Rain running down the saps created erosion gullies, smearing steps with slimy mud and undercutting traverses. Trenches up to seven feet deep had been dug, dry and unrevetted in the summer but in winter becoming saturated and unstable. Goddard’s reports record the collapse of sections of sandbagged walls; even before the evacuation Quinn’s was ‘running away’ down Monash Valley. The campaign had stagnated into what Ronald McInniss called ‘a foolish deadlock’, though in the way of lance corporals he supposed that it was ‘all part of some scheme’. In fact, the scheme being developed was to abandon the campaign altogether. Australasian opinion (including Australia’s new Prime Minister, Billy Hughes) robustly supported the campaign, despite mounting casualties and 175


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nagging doubts, but through October and November political and diplomatic reconsiderations and military misgivings decisively changed the willingness to sustain what was now seen as a costly and pointless commitment.

‘With our tails between our legs’: the evacuation Though Asquith’s Cabinet finally decided to abandon the campaign on 7 December, staff officers had already begun to plan for what they believed was inevitable. The evacuation of Anzac (‘evacuation’ often rendered with a capital E) was one of the triumphs of British staff work in a campaign in which staff work was too often mediocre to negligent. In Australia the legend has been fostered that the evacuation was planned by Brudenell White, chief of staff to Godley in his capacity as commander of the Anzac Corps (now that Birdwood had taken over the larger Dardanelles Army). In the light of Charles Bean’s adulation, especially in his biographical study, Two Men I Knew, Brudenell White has been generally regarded as the author of the evacuation plan. However, even before he joined a group of staff officers at a conference aboard the headquarters ship Aragon on 26 November, White had been told by Birdwood that evacuation was likely. Cecil Aspinall (later the British official historian of the campaign) was given the task of drafting the plan, on which White certainly commented. It was in implementing the evacuation that he really placed his stamp on the operation. He had already anticipated the need to school the Turks to changes by proposing ‘the silent stunt’, which occurred at the same time as the Aragon conference. White’s special contribution was to work out the complex tables of movements and times which governed how the force would gradually be thinned, and the various ruses by which this dangerous diminution would be concealed from the Turks. It involved demanding staff work of a high order, if not the genius Bean portrayed. The orders for the withdrawal of Anzac (and the adjoining sector of Suvla) were among the most impressive of the war, exceeded only by the complexity of the directions governing the intricate battles later in the war in which White also had a hand. The bold plan involved spiriting men, animals and equipment away at night while not allowing the Turks to glimpse or even guess that they faced a progressively 176


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weaker force. The most critical part came in the final days. From 18 December the remaining garrison of 42 000 was reduced to 20 000, then halved on 18–19 December, with the final 10 000 withdrawn from almost deserted trenches on the night of 19–20 December. On the final day the force held a frontage of less than one man to two yards, a contrast to the crowded trenches of May. Nor was there firepower to compensate: the 99 field guns available on 9 December were reduced to 34 on the 18th and twelve on the final day. It remained a possibility that if the Turks tumbled to the ruse and attacked, a small rearguard would have to be left to fight it out on an inner defence line while the remainder scrambled for the boats, an action leading not only to dead, wounded and captured but also to humiliation. White later confessed that he had anticipated losses of more than a third if the Turks had realised the evacuation was occurring and attacked. There were more silent stunts to create confusion, though none was as long as the first. While the more observant suspected that something was up and rumours circulated, not until 17 December did Birdwood formally announce to his men the impending evacuation, ‘trusting to their discretion and soldierly qualities’. ‘Mind you,’ Frank Lesnie admitted, ‘we all wanted to get away . . . but did not agree with the manner of leaving.’ He called it ‘sneaking off . . . with our tails between our legs’. In the final days the thoughts of many turned to the little cemeteries around Anzac. George Tuck thought of the ‘sad-eyed wraiths which peopled the hill-sides’ and imagined how the dead would hopelessly watch the survivors depart; ‘ ’tis too depressing’, he wrote. Jack Emanuel, part of a batch evacuated on the evening of the 18th, described padding silently down the saps on a beautiful, cold, still, moonlit evening. They met parties from other battalions leaving Courtney’s and Steele’s, all moving toward the piers where transport officers waited with clipboards and watches, calling in hoarse whispers as they directed lines of men toward launches and lighters. As they passed the burial plots Emanuel’s mind ‘wandered back to those . . . that we are to leave in the Penin. for ever’. Men who had served throughout the campaign were desolate at realising that evacuation was imminent. George Tuck, who had lain between an Aucklander and an Australian on the cliff that became Quinn’s on 25 April, recorded in his diary his belief that ‘Australasian troops did all & almost more . . . than men could do’. 177


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‘Turkish Patrol’: leaving Quinn’s The weather continued to favour the evacuation. On 18 December the sea remained calm and a light fog wreathed the gullies, muffling movement and deepening the air of unreality about the half-empty trenches. Men spent the final days packing and despatching stores or destroying what they could not take. Dead-end gullies looked like rubbish tips with smashed kit and spoiled rations lying about, and the gear carried up to the line with so much labour was tipped into open cesspits. With rations having been stored for the winter, so much was slated to be left behind that the depots were opened and the men were allowed to help themselves. They gorged on jellies, tinned fowl, pea soup and tinned milk, living, as they said, ‘like fighting cocks’. At Quinn’s in the hours before the final departure several ‘drip guns’ were rigged up. Of all the many legends of Anzac, that of the drip gun must be the most exaggerated. In every book, and even in the Gallipoli gallery of the Australian War Memorial, the story is told of the ingenious drip gun, implying or sometimes affirming how the contraption made possible the daring evacuation. The gun itself was remarkable enough. It was devised by Lance Corporal William Scurry, who was awarded a DCM for his invention, perhaps the first time anyone received one for being clever. Its principle was simple and ingenious: water dripped from one container into another, which when it fell pulled on a string attached to the gun’s trigger. The real story is that relatively few drip guns were set up, they each fired only one shot, and those shots did not go off until almost everyone was on the piers or in the boats. Bean’s diary and the corps war diary’s first mentions of the ‘device’ are on 17 December. The drip guns may have helped to conceal the fact of the evacuation from the Turks for an extra hour or so, but by the time the first one fired the evacuation was already a success. The war diaries and files preserved in both the Australian War Memorial and Britain’s National Archives strongly suggest that the drip gun was peripheral to both the planning of the evacuation and to its success. The drip gun caught the imagination, its ingenuity seeming to cap the success of the evacuation, a bright end to a story of failure and defeat. The real success was attributable to the less glamorous movement tables and watches used by the staff officers who devised and directed the evacuation. The departure of the A Party left 200 men of the 17th at Quinn’s, along with the machine-gunners and artillery observers on whom, 178


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at the end as much as during the campaign, the defence relied. They worked hard to give the impression that the post was still fully manned. About dusk on the 19th a further 130 men left, then, through the night into the small hours of the 20th, the C parties of 14 to 28 men slipped away. At 2.56 a.m. Colonel Goddard looked at his watch again and he and his adjutant shook hands with the final party under Captain Cecil Lucas. Earlier in the evening Lucas had placed a record on the gramophone in his dugout, and as they filed out of the post it played the popular piano march ‘Turkish Patrol’. As the battalion history put it, ‘a graceful compliment to a chivalrous foe’. Basil Holmes left a bottle of Johnnie Walker in his dugout, possibly a rather pointless gift given Moslem attitudes to alcohol and suspicion of the possibility of poison. But he accompanied it with a genuine sentiment, a scrap of paper reading ‘A Present for The Good Turk’. Then he turned and began the trek to the beach down empty trenches. Interviewed 60 years on, Holmes’s memory was both sharp and honest. He remembered being conscious of a desire to run, and thought that the haste with which he and his party made for the Cove made a nonsense of the staff officers’ careful tables. Unsentimental in old age, he recalled passing the cemeteries without pause—‘I’m afraid we weren’t thinking about the chaps buried there.’ When they reached the beach they stood about nervously, waiting for launches and barges, listening anxiously for the crack of rifles and the explosions of bombs in the gullies that would announce that the Turks had tumbled to the deception. But no Turkish patrol investigated the sound of the jolly pianoforte tinkling through the icy air. Charles Bean, watching the evacuation as he had the landing from aboard ship, kept a minute-by-minute record. By 2.30 a.m., as he sipped cocoa, he looked at his watch and estimated that those still ashore were only small parties at the inland posts such as Quinn’s and Lone Pine. This, he jotted down, was ‘an extraordinary end to a fine history’. He heard two or three rapid shots from the drip guns at Quinn’s and reflected that ‘the Turks at last have got it—the place they could never take . . .’ The evacuated troops shivering on the decks of the transports discussed what they had been a part of. They looked over to see Anzac in unaccustomed darkness, just the flames from a few burning dumps illuminating the scene. Perhaps understandably in the light of the number of tunnels dug under Quinn’s and the tons of ammonal packed into them, many believed that the mines there were detonated 179


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soon after the evacuation. Donald McDonald recorded seeing sappers connecting wires to charges in the tunnels on 17 December. In fact, none were fired; perhaps the charges are still there, in the remains of the tunnels running under the road that today climbs along the crest of the ridge, from Chatham’s Post past Lone Pine and up to the summit of Chunuk Bair. Quinn’s was not obliterated in one blast in the hours after its abandonment: but all the same it is no longer there.

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12 ‘Anzac now belonged to the past’ Looking back on Quinn’s Post

or three years Quinn’s remained silent, the haunt of scavengers— returning villagers or Turkish soldiers—sifting through the abandoned lines for timber for building or burning. In the meantime the war had been fought to a conclusion, though its cost made victory vague. For the Turks, it meant the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire and the establishment of a new nation, though much more blood would flow before that further conflict ended. For the men who had created and occupied Quinn’s the war took most to further campaigns, where they continued to lose heavily. From Egypt the light horse advanced east and north to defeat Turkey in Palestine. The infantry went on to the more costly war against Germany on the Western Front. Australians and New Zealanders again served for a time together, on the Somme, at Passchendaele and in the great offensives of 1918. Even the unfortunate sailors of the Royal Naval Division served on the Western Front as the 63rd Division.

F

‘He had suffered much’: the fates of the men of Quinn’s The 1914 volunteers served longest and suffered accordingly. Many who survived Quinn’s died later in the war. Terence McSharry lived to command the 15th Battalion on the Western Front, but the war marked this energetic young man. An officer recalled him in tears after he had seen his battalion destroyed at Bullecourt, describing the ‘deep lines on his face, which disclosed that he had suffered much’. McSharry was killed on the Somme in August 1918, at the height of 181


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the AIF’s triumph. Joseph Ranford died with the 3rd Light Horse at Romani. Among the 17th Battalion men, Keith Chambers died at Pozières in 1916, Frank Lesnie in the advance to the Hindenburg line in 1917 and David Roberts on the Somme in 1918. Many of the men who served at Quinn’s survived only because they were evacuated sick. In this way Chaplain Ernest Merrington went home with malaria, George Bourne with dysentery and Henry Tiddy just ‘sick’. The wounded were more numerous. Few 1914 men would survive the war unwounded and many Quinn’s veterans returned home well before 1918, too often disabled. William Forsythe, Joe Logan and Nikolai Svenson were invalided with serious wounds, as were DCM winners Charles Grimson and Frank Cawley, who was feted as ‘a big, tall, handsome Anzac’ at a social in the School of Arts in Mareeba. Along with the bomb-blinded and limbless such as Edwin Little and Edward Sparks, Herbert Broadbent, who had held his men together in the 9 May attack, was evacuated to Egypt and then to Australia mutilated by bomb fragments, only to die in hospital in Sydney before the year’s end. Many were wounded less visibly, in the mind. William Beech, the inventor of the periscope rifle, returned suffering from rheumatism, malaria, sciatica and ‘neurasthenia’, one of the Great War’s terms applied to psychological casualties. Charles Ruddle, the formerly cheerful light horseman, had lost his optimism by the time of the evacuation. Though reassuring his mother and making light of his ordeal, he told his father candidly that the survivors ‘can never be the same men again’. Disdaining bombast, he soberly told him that ‘you cannot realise the excessive strain on the nerves’ of trench warfare. Commissioned in the infantry, Ruddle was to die in the bombardment at Pozières the following July. Like many others, Ellis Silas had been evacuated suffering ‘from a nervous breakdown’, as his old platoon commander told Silas’s mother. He painted out his trauma, exhibiting his Gallipoli drawings in a Bond Street gallery in 1916. They excited the interest of King George V. Did he, perhaps, recall the tit-bits passed on by Clive Wigram, to whom Hamilton and Godley had mentioned Quinn’s Post? One Sunday afternoon in May, Silas was summoned to Buckingham Palace, and trudged down long passages to set up his works in an apartment. The King took a gruff interest in his pictures; the Queen and the Princess Royal rather less. After an exchange of generalities punctuated by thoughtful silences, the audience ended with what Silas called ‘a vague . . . feeling around for 182


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topics of mutual interest’. For what, after all, could the King-Emperor truly ask of a man who—as his art showed—had endured an horrific ordeal? Silas’s truthful depictions of bandaged and bleeding men, of corpses lying in the corners of trenches, of faces exhibiting the trauma Silas himself had felt, surely spoke more powerfully than any words he could have summoned. The royal family withdrew among further handshakes. They did not, it seems, purchase anything. Silas published a surprisingly candid series of drawings of the campaign, accompanied by even more honest text, in a book introduced by Hamilton (not as much a buffoon as he is often portrayed). Eventually 45 of his works were acquired by the Australian War Memorial. Long service gave others opportunities to gain promotion and awards. Among those who survived Gallipoli, officers did best. Monash and Chauvel became corps commanders—perhaps surprisingly, given their shortcomings. Charles Dare and James Durrant both ended the war as lieutenant colonels, Tom Kidd and Gilbert Birkbeck as majors, but able other ranks also prospered in the meritocracy of the AIF. Harry Murray, who rose from private to lieutenant colonel and gained a Victoria Cross on the Somme, is the pre-eminent example, but other Quinn’s survivors did well. John Toft, a runner in the 9 May attack, became a captain with the Military Cross. James Aitken (he who killed the big Turkish sergeant in the silent stunt) came home as a lieutenant, as did Tom Chataway, Ernest Corbett and Cuthbert Finlay. The fate of the volunteers of 1914 is exemplified by the twelve men who in September 1914 waited with Wilbraham Fowler in Townsville for the ship to take them to Brisbane and the 15th Battalion’s camp. Three died: two on Gallipoli at Quinn’s, and Fowler as a company quartermaster sergeant at Ypres. Two, both decorated, were commissioned; a fair statistical distribution, you might think. But no less than five returned to Australia in 1915, badly wounded on Gallipoli, mainly at Quinn’s. They included Ray Tickner, who had received the DCM for his part in the 9 May attack. Two others returned before the war’s end, also wounded. In fact, the only survivors to return after the armistice were the two officers, and they too may have been wounded. Not a man of those thirteen volunteers escaped some profound impact from the war they had joined so light-heartedly. New Zealanders mirror the patterns of their Australian counterparts. As we have seen, many besides William Malone and Jack 183


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Dunn died on Chunuk Bair. Edward Cox was wounded in August and evacuated, as were Jack Horneman of the Auckland Battalion and Ray Baker of the Canterbury. More died on the Western Front—James Swan, Fred McKee and Francis Fear (the cheesemaker turned DCM) died on the Somme in 1916; George Bollinger as a lieutenant in 1917, Earl Johnston and Ernest Williams later the same year; and many others. Percy Fenwick and Jackie Hughes came home sick, as did Claude Comyns, who died in a railway accident soon after. Wallace Saunders, evacuated sick in August (which probably saved his life), returned to Britain to work as an engineer in the Ministry of Munitions. Families suffered the consequences of Quinn’s in private. Who knows what the widows of Quinn’s felt or what the effects of their loss were? The grandchildren of Beatrice Logan, widow of Tom Logan, killed leading the final charge at Quinn’s on 7 August, describe her as good-natured and enduring, undemonstrative but taking pleasure in her children and grandchildren. The effects on the children, and on the even more numerous mothers and fathers, have been sensitively explored by Anne-Marie Condé and Joy Damousi (in books such as The Labour of Loss), though there is much about their grief we can never know. Mary Jane Quinn, who died in 1938, was remembered in an obituary delivered by Jack Craven, by then a brigadier, as the ‘Mother Who Gave AIF Gallant Son’. The epitaph which Mary Jane Quinn chose for her son’s headstone in the Shrapnel Valley cemetery read, ‘Some time, some day I trust to see the dear face I hold in memory’. (Quinn left no widow, but was famous enough to attract an impostor, a Sydney woman who in 1928 claimed to be the widow of ‘Hugh Vincent Quinn, VC’. Described as ‘a woman of immoral character’, she was sent packing.)

‘The riddles of Anzac’: Bean returns to Gallipoli On Gallipoli, the dead of Quinn’s Post that Silas had exhibited to his monarch’s impassive gaze lay mainly where they had fallen, many unburied in no-man’s-land, others in cemeteries on the peninsula. The continuing impact of their deaths is apparent from the files of the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, an agency run by Miss Vera Deakin (Alfred Deakin’s daughter) as a link between soldiers overseas and anxious or grieving families at home. One individual representative case suggests the continuing trauma for those 184


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who received the official casualty notifications transmitted throughout the campaign. Private Lucien Gaillard, a 26-year-old surveyor’s assistant, enlisted in the 15th Battalion on 17 September 1914. He disappeared after the 9 May attack and was posted ‘wounded and missing’. Gaillard had migrated from Britain to Tasmania at the age of nineteen and had enlisted in Queenstown, yet another of the rootless men who enlisted from a different address to that of their parents. His family, variously located in the genteel English resorts of Eastbourne and Buxton, were naturally concerned to know his fate, especially his mother, a widow since remarried, Mrs Laura Jones. Red Cross officials tried for three years to establish the date and circumstances of Gaillard’s death. Investigators toured units, seeking out and interviewing men, asking them to describe what they had seen or heard of Gaillard, just one of thousands missing in action. His platoon sergeant, interviewed at Zeitoun just before he was repatriated, recalled that ‘Gaillard was wounded on May 9th at Quinn’s Post’; he had recorded the fact in his notebook. He had been told that Gaillard had gone back to Australia, but could not vouch for it. Another man supported this story, telling an official that Gaillard had become ill and been evacuated to Australia. But Gaillard was dead, though when and how no one could answer. Another Red Cross official spoke to a Private Barratt (one of two in the 15th Battalion, brothers who had enlisted on the same day) at a Canadian hospital at Boulogne in August 1916. He said that Gaillard, ‘a boy of 21, a runner’ had been killed before May 4th and ‘buried at once’. An officer confirmed that Gaillard had been Captain Douglas Cannan’s runner, but Cannan himself had died on Chunuk Bair in August. Mrs Jones hoped that the official notification might be mistaken. The vague reports from the men of the 15th Battalion must surely have strengthened her hope. By early 1918, however, the closest anyone could come to confirming the date of his death was ‘between May 9th and May 14th’. Mrs Jones continued to press his comrades for details, and they obliged, not always accurately. In the end, Gaillard was confirmed as having been killed in action on 10 May 1915. There had been ‘no burial’: his body had probably been pushed into one of the communication trenches hastily filled in on 24 May. His bones still lie somewhere near the road running along the ridge. Mrs Jones, who completed the Roll of Honour circular sent to her by the Memorial, eventually accepted the official notification. The death of Lucien 185


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Gaillard was only one of the riddles left by Gallipoli, but some others would be solved. In the bitter winter of 1918–19, as the survivors waited impatiently to return home, one of the men who had known Quinn’s went instead to the peninsula. Charles Bean had spent the war living among the force he would immortalise as his life’s mission. He continued to seek out men who had served on Gallipoli, aware that they might not survive to tell their own story. In this way he interviewed Terence McSharry, by then a lieutenant colonel commanding the 15th Battalion, shortly before he was killed. The diaries he had begun as official correspondent multiplied, until they formed the foundation of the history that he knew he would begin once he reached home. He had moved to found an organisation to collect and preserve the AIF’s war records, and created the collection of paintings, photographs and artefacts that documented the existence and achievements of the AIF in memory of those who would not go home. But Bean remained conscious of the gaps in his knowledge; not least what had happened on the Turkish side of no-man’s-land. In February 1919 Bean finally returned, leading an Australian Historical Mission to Gallipoli. Since the evacuation he and many others had pondered what Bean called ‘the riddles of Anzac’. Like many survivors, he had speculated about the Turkish side of the hill, which had been inaccessible, even invisible to those in the Anzac line. At Quinn’s, the only view anyone had had of the Turkish lines since the 24 May truce had been through the tiny lens of a periscope. Now, with Constantinople and the Dardanelles occupied by British troops, Bean and his companions would be able to satisfy their curiosity. The mission included the photographer Hubert Wilkins, and the artist George Lambert. While Bean patiently filled further notebooks and John Balfour gathered the artefacts that Bean called ‘relics’, Wilkins and Lambert clicked and sketched, making an invaluable record of Anzac as it had been. At last, on a bleak winter’s day he and his party rode along the track following the old front line, with the Turkish trenches on his right and the Anzac line on his left. Soon they neared Quinn’s Post, looking down at bones and tattered fragments of uniforms and kit, still lying where men had fallen three years before. Wilkins and Lambert, new to Anzac, were deeply moved; Bean himself felt ‘a strange thrill’ at again being able to stand where once men could not even crawl at night. 186


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Bean’s party would be assisted by Major Zeki Bey, who in 1915 had commanded a battalion of the 57th Regiment opposite German Officers’ Trench and on Chunuk Bair. He and Bean walked Anzac, speaking in French, questioning each other about the other side’s experience of the campaign. Bean made a systematic examination of the battlefield, often stopping to collect ‘relics’, including metal sheets from Quinn’s, shredded by the fragments of dozens of bombs. Today one is displayed in the Gallipoli gallery at the Australian War Memorial. Bean and Zeki Bey passed Turkish memorials built after the campaign. Large-hearted, Bean thought that the Turkish dead ‘well deserved commemoration as soldiers and patriots’, though the Turkish memorials were torn down by the occupying forces. Bean, who had already portrayed the Turks as ‘our friend, the enemy’ in his despatches from Gallipoli, gained insights into the Turkish side of no-man’s-land. He was interested in the Turkish view of ‘the most difficult post’, the postion they called Bomba Sirt. Bean recorded that Zeki Bey had returned to the front in May after having been wounded after the landing, asking, ‘Why don’t we attack and thrust these Australians off their position at Bomba Sirt?’ After visiting the post he became convinced of the impossibility of taking a position ‘held only by the initiative of your men’. Bean returned from Gallipoli ready to begin the massive task of writing the monumental history to which he would give the next 22 years of his life.

‘One big graveyard’: the cemeteries of Gallipoli Within days of the armistice with Turkey on 31 October 1918, a British war graves registration unit had left Salonika, the main British base in the Aegean, travelling with the occupation force destined for the Dardanelles. By 18 November it was encamped near Maidos and had begun locating and mapping the cemeteries on the peninsula. Joined by Christmas by Australian officers including Cyril Hughes, a Tasmanian engineer and Gallipoli veteran, the war graves unit undertook a large, grim task. It first of all had to find the abandoned cemeteries, and the hundreds of individual graves, not to mention the bones of men who had never been buried. Bean, asked to report on the cemeteries, described the peninsula as ‘one big graveyard’. The Anzac graves had of course been abandoned at the evacuation; indeed, the great majority of British empire bodies had never been formally interred. Many survivors and bereaved families remained 187


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anxious about whether graves had been respected, and whether bodies could still be recovered and identified. Hughes and his labourers were to create the cemeteries which are today such a poignant element of the peninsula, but the war graves unit was at first perplexed. ‘Practically every grave’, its commander reported, ‘bore traces of desecration’, and often skeletons partially re-buried. Some cemeteries seemed to have been preserved in good order, others had been robbed of the crosses painstakingly erected in 1915, dogs and jackals had disturbed some graves, and some cemeteries had been thoroughly pillaged. A British report in January 1919 concluded that ‘marauding parties’ 60 or 80 strong had worked over some of the cemeteries. These included the more accessible cemetery in Shrapnel Gully (later known as Shrapnel Valley, in which Hugh Quinn and many of the dead of Quinn’s lay). It had been hastily reconstituted in 1916 when a Papal envoy had visited to investigate reports of desecration. Cyril Hughes reported that as a result it was in ‘a remarkable state of preservation’. The war graves parties, equipped with plans of the cemetery meticulously prepared before December 1915, found that though systematically laid out the orientation of the plots at Shrapnel Valley bore no relation to the plans. A nearby Turkish detachment confirmed that the cemetery had been re-made in 1916 to persuade the Papal visitor that all was in order. The neat cemetery was bogus—the mounds did not correspond with the bodies beneath the soil—and Hughes’s task was first to locate the actual graves and then identify as many bodies as possible. Into 1919 the grim work continued. In February the first 20 of many crate-loads of fresh temporary crosses arrived at Anzac from Salonika, and were soon followed by parties of Greek and, later, Russian labourers. Gradually they brought the cemeteries created where the bodies had been buried in 1915 into order, named, plotted and landscaped. That meant several large plots near the beach and in the rear areas behind the line—at Ari Burnu, Beach Cemetery and Shell Green—and a series of small plots on the ridges above the Cove. One decision taken early in the work was that though some remains found exposed on the hillsides would be brought into the cemeteries, most bodies would remain, as a visiting chaplain put it, ‘where they fell, in most cases on the plot of ground they gave their lives to gain and hold’. He singled out Quinn’s as just such a cemetery. While the main Australian memorial and cemetery was to be at Lone Pine—on which was inscribed the names of the dead without a known grave—small plots were built on the old front line at Walker’s Ridge, Steele’s Post, the Nek and Quinn’s. 188


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An account of the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission on Gallipoli in the five years after the armistice described the creation of the cemetery at Quinn’s, ‘the most famous of all the strongholds’. The cemetery’s eastern wall roughly follows the old front line, the ground built up and levelled. The trenches were filled in and 225 bodies interred in an enclosure about 50 yards long, including remains brought from Pope’s—fittingly, given the close relationship between the two posts. Stone walls and a cross of sacrifice were built, the stone carried up from the beach by an elaborate ‘aerial ropeway’ powered by an engine at Lone Pine. By its completion in 1924 the cemetery held 473 graves, 294 of them unidentified. Many of the dead of Quinn’s, churned up by the digging of trenches and tunnels, by the explosions of shells and mines, remain in the earth of Quinn’s. In fact, of the named headstones in the cemetery 64 are, in the jargon of the Imperial War Graves Commission, ‘special memorials’ to men ‘for whom there is evidence of burial’ in the area. They include men who have figured in this account—Frank Armstrong, Joe Burge, Dugald Graham and Tom Logan. The dead of Quinn’s are representative of the dead of Gallipoli as a whole, both invaders and defenders. Of the 16 000 British empire dead on the peninsula, only some 6000 lie in identified graves. Just as the bones of the Turkish dead of Bomba Sirt still lie in the washaways and gullies of Mule Valley, or in the earth beneath the road, so do the bones of most of their Anzac and British opponents lie unnamed either in cemeteries or on the hillsides.

‘The story of Anzac’: Bean’s history The men of Quinn’s wanted to record their story at the time. After the 15th Battalion’s relief in June a group of officers in Rest Gully discussed writing a history, and a committee that included the doctor, (Guy Luther), the padre (Father Thomas Power) and Douglas Cannan (Lucien Gaillard’s officer) was elected. They collected papers from men as they rested in July, but ‘all trace of anything they put to paper . . . disappeared’ when Cannan and Luther were killed and Power was invalided after the August fighting. Though extolled in wartime rhetoric, the memories of Quinn’s and Gallipoli faded, overshadowed by the more extensive ordeal of the Western Front. While Ashmead-Bartlett’s reports on the war had made a sensational impact in Australia, he had little interest in creating a more 189


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permanent record, and returned to reporting foreign wars and upheavals, dying relatively young in 1931 while covering yet another revolution. By contrast, Charles Bean was to make the history of the AIF his life’s work. He began writing his history as soon as he returned, completing chapters at a cracking pace and finishing the first draft of the 240 000-word manuscript within a year. He sent a draft of the first volume to his publisher, George Robertson, who sat up until the small hours one night in April 1920, reading with mounting consternation. Robertson confided to his friend (and another of the official history’s authors) Arthur Jose that Bean was ‘what our dear friend Henry Lawson calls “a Wanterwriteandcant” ’. Robertson regarded Bean as too self-satisfied to see that ‘it is tosh to say that the A.I.F. “created the history of their country” ’. Robertson opened a tussle lasting a year. He told Bean candidly of his ‘dismay’, complaining of ‘slipshod journalistic talk’, clichés and a lack of order. Bean thanked Robertson with grave courtesy, acknowledging some faults and resolving to do better, though not conceding all of his criticisms. Robertson lobbied Prime Minister Billy Hughes and enlisted Professor George Tucker of the University of Sydney to give frank advice. Tucker, author of popular classical histories, praised Bean for his ‘gift for clear and orderly narrative’ and acknowledged that he possessed a ‘certain picturesque or panoramic vision which lifts the narrative . . . into a very readable story’. However, Tucker also identified several ‘faults of taste or tact . . . vulgarising or slipshod colloquialisms’ and even faulty punctuation. Bean understandably resented this ‘tuckering’, as Robertson’s authors called it. The disagreement was not really over whether Bean could write: it was over what sort of history Bean was writing. Tucker expressed his disappointment that it lacked ‘a certain high literary tone’. Bean, a journalist, sought to write so that he could be understood, as he once memorably put it, ‘by a housemaid of ordinary intelligence’. It ended with an acknowledgement that Bean would consider Tucker’s advice but that Tucker would not infringe Bean’s authority as official historian. Bean and Robertson later admitted that one had thoughts of resigning while the other had considered broaching on the floor of Parliament Bean’s fitness for the task. The dispute with his publisher and his publisher’s literary adviser was fortunately resolved while Bean was writing the second volume of The Story of Anzac, including of course the chapters dealing with Quinn’s Post. The affair explains Bean’s frame of mind: his working methods, and also the care with which he wrote the second volume. 190


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The Story of Anzac remains the most extraordinary achievement in Australian military historical writing. Written within a couple of years (a fraction of the time taken by later official historians), the two volumes totalling half a million words needed few corrections besides those Bean made in later editions as fresh evidence and reactions from readers reached him. The Quinn’s chapters established both the importance of the post and the main episodes in its defence, even if they dealt somewhat sketchily with the New Zealand months. These chapters were based on his notes, on the detailed correspondence with survivors and on the relatively scanty official records, especially the unit and formation diaries. Writing quickly using pen-and-typewriter technology, Bean’s ability to comprehend and express a complex narrative is astonishing. Later writers may—as I have—reach new insights based on fresh evidence and impart new interpretations from perspectives beyond Bean’s situation, but the soundness of his construction, like a great, solid old building, stands. If anything, its completeness has deterred repetition and intimidated successors. As I hope this book has shown, there remains much that can be said which is not within those blood-red volumes.

‘I still dream about it’: memories of Quinn’s For five decades the cemeteries of Gallipoli remained largely undisturbed, visited only by a handful of determined travellers and, as David Lloyd and Bruce Scates have shown, by occasional parties of pilgrims. All visitors remarked upon several obvious elements, and particularly that the cemeteries, however lonely, were beautifully maintained. Because it lay beside the main track along the front line, Quinn’s was visited as often as any. Though not the location of a major memorial, as was Lone Pine (for the Australians) and Chunuk Bair (for the New Zealanders), Quinn’s reputation survived among those who visited. When in 1925 Captain B.L. Moore of the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth accompanied several senior officers who (like the ship) had served in the campaign, he was regaled with a spirited account of the drama of the post. Cecil Aspinall (by now Aspinall-Oglander, the British official historian of Gallipoli) and Ian Hamilton himself told the familiar story of the defenders of Quinn’s having a cliff at their backs, facing Turkish trenches only 40 feet away, and described how a retreat of ‘as much as six inches’ would lead to ‘every 191


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Australian [being] swept into the sea’. Quinn, Keyes felt, had been ‘a really splendid man’, and in the company of the dead of Gallipoli, he thought, ‘that means something’. The reputation of Quinn and his post seemed secure; more secure than the post’s physical remains. When in 1930 a British colonel made an adventurous driving expedition to Gallipoli—on the very edge of Europe—he looked for the remains of the dugouts and scrapes in which men had lived and found that weather and regrowth had almost obliterated them. Quinn’s Post itself was soon eroding. Even during the campaign observers had noted how the trenches ‘silted up’, and how walls fell down. Deep trenches became torrents during the winter rains, and much of what sappers and sweating infantry and light horsemen had built was simply washed away by the muddy yellow stream that ran down Monash Valley with every shower. Almost the entire post except for a narrow strip is gone now—Broadway, the wynzes, Seaview Terrace, Lovers Walk and Saunders and Malone’s terraces, all have melted away under the rains of 89 winters. But if Quinn’s disappeared physically, the memory endured. Quinn’s affected those who served there, often profoundly. Corporal John Hebiton of the 10th Light Horse was wounded on 30 May, and evacuated and discharged soon after. A bullet had torn through his arm, stiffening his fingers for life, while another smashed his upper jaw. He always wore a thick moustache to conceal his mangled lip. But the real damage that Quinn’s did to John Hebiton was to leave him psychologically injured. His great-niece Ailsa Wilson remembered him as a man who could not be asked about the war. He took to the bottle: the war ‘ruined him’. Curiously, he made a brooch which included a piece of the bullet extracted from his arm inscribed with the words ‘Quinn’s Post’. His mother wore the brooch and now Ailsa wears it on Anzac Day in Albany as a reminder of the great-uncle whose life was blighted by that place. For many others of Quinn’s survivors life was touched with tragedy. Edwin Little returned home crippled. Surviving war did not immunise the survivors from the buffetings of ordinary fate. Hugh Stewart, who held the Canterbury men together in the 4 June attack, went on to command a battalion on the Western Front and write a history of the New Zealand Division in that theatre in an astonishing six weeks. Losing two wives in childbirth, he died aged just 50. Many survivors were marked for the rest of their lives. Bruce Milburn, the son of a Wellington machine-gunner, recalled how his 192


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father suffered from stomach cramps and headaches, due to an ‘anxiety state’, for years. He could not bear any form of tension, so his wife’s constant concern became ‘to keep the house peaceful and running smoothly’; he suffered a breakdown in 1930 and died prematurely at 64. His story is representative of many veterans on both sides of the Tasman and beyond. Interviews given by Gallipoli veterans, especially the powerful series conducted by Nicholas Boyack and Jane Tolerton in New Zealand in the late 1980s, convey how strongly the experience marked them. While the Western Front saw prolonged and intense suffering, in its way as traumatic as Gallipoli, service on the peninsula brought its own horror. Candid in old age, Russell Weir acknowledged that ‘from first to last [he] lived with fear all the time, twenty-four hours a day’. For Dan Curham it was the sensation of watching bombs coming at him, only to bounce off the bomb-nets. George Skerrett admitted to having nightmares for years. ‘Occasionally I still dream about it . . . mostly it’s gone away now’—but only ‘mostly’. Like the landscape, some memories of Quinn’s softened over the years. Cyril Malthus, the Canterbury scout who acknowledged his fear while sitting in the stinking bomb-pits in the front line, recalled in his Anzac: A Retrospect how in later decades his ‘abiding impression of Quinn’s’ had become a compound of ‘generosity, good fellowship, [and] cheerful acceptance of hardship and danger’. He was surely not alone. The dead of Quinn’s would also be remembered publicly. Though it neglected their bones, in the 1980s Turkey began commemorating the ‘martyrs’ of 1915 by name, though it had long used their mass sacrifice as a potent force in its national rhetoric. The names of the Australian and New Zealand dead were inscribed on memorials around both countries as they were erected through the 1920s and into the 1930s. Hugh Quinn’s name is on the Soldier’s Memorial on the Strand at Townsville; Tom Logan’s is at Forest Hill, Joe Burge’s at nearby Allora. Jack Dunn’s name is on the figure-topped obelisk in Masterton. Bill Malone is listed on a memorial at Stratford in the Taranaki, as well as in the Anglican cathedral in Wellington; one of the few individuals whose name is recognised beyond specialists and family. Few memorials mention Quinn’s specifically. A plaque in St Andrew’s Church in Brisbane describes Frank Armstrong as having been ‘killed in action at Quinn’s Post’, as does a plaque on the Mudgeeraba memorial to Fred Anderson, and the memorial which Tom and Beatrice Logan share in the Forest Hill cemetery. There are 193


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odd reminders across Australia and New Zealand. In the early 1960s a section of the bar at the Stanthorpe RSL club in Queensland was named ‘Quinn’s Post’, though as Gallipoli veterans died the name seems to have lapsed. Some New Zealanders recall that a hotel north of Wellington was called Quinn’s Post; in truth, however, it was named for a constabulary station and dated from the late nineteenth century. The names of all the Australian dead were eventually cast on bronze panels in the Australian War Memorial, yet another of Charles Bean’s gifts to his nation in memory of the men of the AIF. The dead of Quinn’s are recorded on many local memorials, though they are of course outnumbered by the dead of the Western Front. In any case, one wonders how much notice is taken of them today. In searching for war memorials with Quinn’s Post connections across Queensland I found they are not as well known as we might assume. Even in Charters Towers, Hugh Quinn is hardly remembered. There is no street named after him, the local war memorial, unusually, has no names on it, and the Pocket Encyclopaedia of 101 Facts about Charters Towers distributed by the local Lions Club mentions the price of meat in 1875 but not the service in war of Quinn or the town’s other young men. Even if it did, how deeply the service of long-dead locals in a long-ago war intrudes on modern consciousness is debatable. A few families keep alive the memory of their Quinn’s Post connections, notably Tom Logan’s grandchildren, whose interest and knowledge is touching. But they are themselves nearly all retired. Realistically, the collective memory of the Great War must diminish, while the enrichment of old Australia by migrants—people like me—must dilute the strength of popular memory.

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‘An unbroken stillness’: Quinn’s today

ven in 1915 Ellis Silas had wondered what Monash Valley would be like after the war. He imagined grass covering the raw earth of the trenches and mounds of graves. He foresaw white clouds against a blue sky instead of black gouts of bomb explosions, and the sound of bullets replaced by ‘an unbroken stillness save for the chirping of a bird or the soft buzzing of the bee’. Today that is pretty much what Quinn’s is like. Except when the big tour buses grind up the road scooped out from no-man’s-land and the Turkish line, the ridge-top at Quinn’s is so peaceful that it requires a real effort to imagine the scenes that Silas captured in ink and pencil. This book ended where it began, in the Quinn’s Post cemetery. On a hot but breezy day in July 2004 I puttered up the road on a scooter to the cemetery. After a closer than I would have liked encounter with a snake in the gutter of the cemetery I began to try to work out exactly where I was. By taking bearings on Quinn’s from the surrounding features things began to fall into place. Pushing into the scrub south of the cemetery—wary of that snake and its mates—I realised that the Quinn’s Post cemetery isn’t at Quinn’s at all. It actually occupies Bloody Angle, the bullet-flecked rise too deadly to be occupied by either side for most of the campaign. No one seems to have noticed this before, but it suggests that the bodies in no-man’s-land—now scored by the deep trace of the road—must largely have been recovered and re-buried in a common grave a hundred yards to the north. Some are identified, but the bones of Turks, Britons, Australians and New Zealanders must lie together in the great earth platform Greek and Russian labourers built on the ridge 80-odd years ago. As in 2002 I strolled around its headstones, re-reading and noting epitaphs, but this time familiar with many of the names and their stories. The dead included men from almost every unit that had passed through Quinn’s, at least up to the August offensive. There were men from the 14th Battalion, sixteen killed in the battalion’s first day at Quinn’s alone, including William Hoggart. There was one man

E

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of the Royal Naval Division who died in the abortive attack of 2 May but very few New Zealanders. Despite the number of Aucklanders, Canterburys and Wellingtons who died in no-man’s-land in the summer none of their bodies was recovered or identified. Sadly, visitors to Quinn’s Post cemetery taking in the unit names on the headstones would have little reason to connect New Zealand to Quinn’s at all. Later I drove up the ridge to the New Zealand memorial at Chunuk Bair to find the names of men like Jack Dunn and William Malone. But Australians are well represented. There were fifteen men of the 15th Battalion, mainly killed in the raids in May, including Frank Armstrong. I saw memorials to three of the 24 men of the 2nd Light Horse who died in the 14 May attack, and headstones commemorating Tom Logan and another nine other men of his regiment killed in the 7 August attack. Many of the headstones bear epitaphs chosen by families, some painfully personal. Cecil Marson, who died when his leg was severed by machine-gun bullets within seconds of going over the top on 7 August, was remembered by his widowed mother and sister in Mount Morgan: ‘Though lost to sight to memory ever dear’. Many families accepted the epitaphs suggested by the Imperial War Graves Commission, and the most common in Quinn’s are ‘Their glory shall not be blotted out’, which appears on almost half of its headstones. But these are only the few whose bodies were recovered or identified: the bones of many others—including hundreds of Turks—lie under the scrub, hummocked and pocked from trenches and bomb craters beside the main road. Once through the scrub, I sat on the cliff-edge and looked down on Monash Valley. As I had concluded from the sources, almost all of the post has indeed eroded in the 89 winters that had passed since it was abandoned, with erosion extending perhaps as far as the old Anzac front line. Bushfires over the years must have stripped the vegetation, accelerating the erosion. At about the line of the foremost Anzac trenches a dramatic and livid scar scoops out the hillside. The bare earth suggests that next winter’s rains will continue the destruction. I thrashed out of the scrub, stamping to deter that snake, got on my scooter and puttered off to visit Hugh Quinn’s grave in the Shrapnel Valley cemetery. Quinn’s Post no longer exists, except in our imagination.

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Epilogue

n the Second World War another generation of Logans went to war: Edward to El Alamein, New Guinea and Borneo; Ray, and another Tom, to die at Sanananda; and others serving elsewhere. Another of Tom Logan’s nephews, Colin, joined the Second AIF and served with the 2/15th Battalion at Tobruk and Alamein. Early in 1943 he returned home from North Africa along with the rest of the 9th Australian Division. Arriving unannounced at his Aunt Beatrice’s house in Forest Hill, Colin knocked on the front door of the shady house built for her. Beatrice, working in the kitchen, called out, ‘Come on through, I’m out the back.’ As Colin stood in the passage in his uniform, silhouetted against the light, Beatrice walked out of the kitchen and said, ‘Oh Tom, you’ve come back!’ ‘Don’t you know me, Aunt Beat?’ he asked. ‘Oh! Colin, I thought it was Tom.’ Twenty-eight years on, Quinn’s Post continued to exert a profound influence on the lives of those it had touched. ‘Anzac’, Charles Bean had written in The Story of Anzac, ‘now belonged to the past.’ But it also belonged to the future of all of those who survived it or who lost loved ones there. Whether it will belong to our future too is up to us.

I

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Note on sources

‘I see a different human emotion almost every day’ Though this book, as the Bibliography shows, has been based on research in a dozen archives across three countries, it has been written for interested lay readers and accordingly has not been burdened with scholarly references. For those wishing to check or extend my work, the Australian War Memorial’s website includes a section giving complete references at www.awm.gov.au, where I have attributed all direct quotations. As the Bibliography suggests, the archival sources dealing with even this one aspect of the Gallipoli campaign are abundant and almost overwhelming. They essentially comprise imperfect but still sizeable official records, from general headquarters down to battalions, and the even more extensive private records, from generals down to privates. Consistent with the pragmatic objective of getting the book completed in the time available, I have also covered much of the substantial primary and secondary literature on the Gallipoli campaign. As an historian best described as an empirical humanist, I believe that the cardinal virtues of an historian are engagement informed by respect for evidence and empathy balanced by critical judgement. I think that close acquaintance with the people who experienced Quinn’s is possible through the evidence by and about them. Accordingly, while striving to meld narrative and analysis fluently, I have tried to convey my insights by drawing on the records they created, but by quoting flavoursome chips rather than the indigestible blocks favoured by some writers. Apart from a few verses, this book contains only three block quotes, both making points commensurate with their length. Each kind of evidence deserves comment. Though all units kept and forwarded ‘war diaries’, they vary in quality enormously. The most thorough (not surprisingly, of Malone’s Wellington Battalion) includes a detailed narrative complemented by reports of various 198


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NOTE ON SOURCES

kinds. Headquarters diaries generally are quite full (particularly the ANZAC corps diary), but most unit diaries from 1915 are quite scrappy, some giving next to no detail on where the unit was and what it did. Fortunately Charles Bean gathered reports and messages, today part of the series AWM 25, which to a degree compensate for the shortcomings of officers more concerned to fight the war than record it. Contrary to expectation, perhaps, official records (the skeleton of any military historical study) offer much material that can be both critical and colourful. Headquarters records held in the National Archives in Britain complement the unit records held in the Australian War Memorial and Archives New Zealand. The ‘demi-official’ correspondence of senior officers such as Hamilton, Birdwood, Godley, Monash and Chauvel has provided valuable insights into their view of their formations’ war. This study has drawn on the private records of some 200 individuals, in addition to the testimonies of those quoted in other documents. They comprise about 20 Britons, 100 Australians and about 80 New Zealanders. Their records range from pocket diaries scribbled by men lying out in the scrub in the first hours of the landing to, say, Malone’s detailed diary (though Quinn’s was so taxing that he stopped making daily entries just as he took over command in June). Some are used many times; others once or twice. Many are not quoted, but the evidence they collectively offer has often been used to form understandings of other records. If the official records provide the skeleton, the private records put flesh on the bones, evoking individual and collective experience, emotion, reaction and memory. As Charles Bean, recorded in his diary in November 1915, ‘I see a different human emotion almost every day at Anzac.’ These mainly contemporary written records are complemented by memoirs, at first written, later often taped. These retrospective accounts are also vital. We should be grateful that New Zealand especially actively collected its Great War oral history. Unlike Australian institutions, the National Library of New Zealand (and to an extent the Imperial War Museum) took the trouble 20-odd years ago to record the memories of Great War veterans. The series of taped interviews held in the Alexander Turnbull Library (including interviews transcribed and edited by Maurice Shadbolt in Voices of Gallipoli) proved invaluable. While not always strictly reliable as records of what happened—indeed, I have not sought to use them in this way— they provide a unique insight into how the campaign was remembered. 199


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For both written and oral evidence I have usually indicated in the text the name of the author of a diary entry, a letter or a memoir. Inevitably some individuals, because they figure prominently in the story or because their accounts are vivid or pungent, appear more often. New Zealand sappers in particular proved to be astute and candid witnesses, and the diaries and memoirs of men such as Ernest Clifton and Wallace Saunders are among the most important private sources. Some individuals—such as Charles Bean, Hugh Quinn, William Malone or Terence McSharry—appear throughout the book. In each chapter others come to prominence and then disappear—such as Tom Chataway in Chapter 3, George Green in 4, Tom Logan in 9 or Jack Emanuel in 10 and 11. Again, their words are attributed throughout in the text and specific references can be obtained from the detailed references provided on the Memorial’s website. Collectively the sources on which this book draws constitute a small portion of the massive collections of Gallipoli records held in great institutions such as the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Imperial War Museum and National Archives in London, the Peter Liddle Collection in Leeds, the Alexander Turnbull Library and Archives New Zealand in Wellington, the Queen Elizabeth II Army Memorial Museum in Waiouru and, not least, my own institution, the Australian War Memorial. I hope that bringing to light their existence and demonstrating something of their value will stimulate other scholars to investigate other aspects of Gallipoli in particular and the Great War in general.

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Bibliography

1 Archival sources AUSTRALIA Army Museum of Western Australia Diary of Sgt Wilfred Bates, 16th Battalion

Australian War Memorial Private records PR85/310, 15th Battalion collection PR00680, Pte Fred Anderson, 15th Battalion 1 DRL 36, Lt Ken Anderson, 15th Battalion PR01055, anonymous member of 20th Battalion 1 DRL 058, Lt Hutton Armstrong, 15th Battalion 3 DRL 6430, Lt Ralph Irving Arnold, 2nd Light Horse PR88/96, Sgt Fred Aspinall, 1st Light Horse 1 DRL 428, Australian Red Cross Society, Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau PR84/268, Maj Edgar Baker, 16th Battalion PR264, Lt Col Joseph Beeston, 4th Field Ambulance 3 DRL 3376, Field Marshal Sir William Birdwood, ANZAC PR86/348, Captain Gilbert Birkbeck, 2nd Light Horse 3 DRL 4104, Sgt Charles Boswald, 4th Battalion 2 DRL 13, Captain Alfred Carne, 6th Battalion PR84/84, SQMS Roland Carr, 1st Light Horse 3 DRL 3267, Maj Richard Casey, 1st Australian Division 2 DRL 49, Captain Leslie Chambers, 17th Battalion MSS 652, Mr Thomas Chataway, ‘Death Rides Abroad’ PR00535, Gen Harry Chauvel, 1st Light Horse Brigade 201


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PR85/257, Pte Ken Conway, 1st Light Horse 1 DRL 216, Lt John Cosson, 16th Battalion 3 DRL 6234, Sgt George Cox, 4th Field Ambulance 3 DRL 7605, Pte Harry Daniels, 16th Battalion PR88/180, Captain Charles Dare, 14th Battalion PR84/88, Pte Arthur Demaine, 2nd Light Horse 2 DRL 337, Maj Archie Dick, 3rd Light Horse 3 DRL 436, Sgt George Donaldson, RAE PR84/211, Pte Walter Dyer, 6th Battalion PR89/76, Sgt Jack Emanuel, 17th Battalion 1 DRL 278, Maj William Farquhar, RAE 1 DRL 284, Captain Cuthbert Finlay, 17th Battalion 3 DRL 6135, Cpl Wilbraham Fowler, 15th Battalion 3 DRL 6277, Chaplain Andrew Gillison, 14th Battalion 3 DRL 2379, Lt Col Henry Goddard, 17th Battalion 3 DRL 2233, Lt Gen Sir Alexander Godley, NZ & A Division 2 DRL 447, Pte Alfred Guppy, 14th Battalion 3 DRL 3554, Pte John Kidd, 15th Battalion PR82/137, Maj Thomas Kidd, 10th Light Horse 1 DRL 415, Pte Frank Lesnie, 17th Battalion 1 DRL 440, Pte Archie Mackay, 15th Battalion 3 DRL 632, Brig-Gen John McGlinn, 4th Australian Brigade PR00917, Lt Ronald McInness, RAE 3 DRL 3250, Lt Col Terence McSharry, 15th Battalion 1 DRL 496, Chaplain Ernest Merrington, 1st Light Horse 3 DRL 2316, Lt Gen Sir John Monash, 4th Australian Brigade 2 DRL 40, Sgt Duncan Mulholland, 12th Light Horse Regiment 2 DRL 233, LCpl Frederic Mulvey, 2nd Light Horse PR88/137, Captain Peter Paull, 16th Battalion 2 DRL 2222, Senator George Pearce PR86/340, Sgt David Roberts, 17th Battalion PR84/172, Pte Fred Robson, 15th Battalion 1 DRL 555, Lt Charles Ruddle, 2nd Light Horse 2 DRL 984, Maj Jeremiah Selmes, 1st Australian Division 2 DRL 314, Captain William Sheppard, 17th Battalion 3 DRL 3467, Maj George Short, 17th Battalion 1 DRL 566, Pte Ellis Silas, 16th Battalion 2 DRL 778, Lt Frederick Small, RAE PR85/427, Captain Lancelot Thirkell, RAE PR01021, Cpl Walter Thyer, 16th Battalion 202


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

PR86/272, Captain Henry Tiddy, 2nd Light Horse 1 DRL 587, Sgt Phil Utting, 20th Battalion PR1028, Lt Herbert Watson, AMTS 3 DRL 1400, Maj Gen Cyril White, ANZAC Corps PR85/95, Sgt Neville Wilson, 1st Light Horse 3 DRL 358, Lt Harold Woods, 4th Field Ambulance PR83/103, Cpl Frederick Wright, 1st Light Horse Official records AWM 4 AIF and NZEF unit war diaries 1/25 ANZAC Headquarters 1/42 2nd Australian Division 1/53 New Zealand and Australian Division 10/7 2nd Light Horse Regiment 10/8 3rd Light Horse Regiment 10/15 10th Light Horse Regiment 14/8 5th Field Company 14/12 CRE New Zealand & Australian Division 23/4 4th Australian Infantry Brigade 23/5 5th Australian Infantry Brigade 23/30 13th Infantry Battalion 23/31 14th Infantry Battalion 23/32 15th Infantry Battalion 23/33 16th Infantry Battalion 23/34 17th Infantry Battalion 26/47 4th Field Ambulance 26/48 5th Field Ambulance 35/17 New Zealand Infantry Brigade 35/18 Auckland Infantry Battalion 35/19 Canterbury Infantry Battalion 35/20 Wellington Infantry Battalion AWM 6 Mediterranean Expeditionary Force war diaries 10 General Staff, Headquarters Royal Naval Division 5 Intelligence Staff, Dardanelles Army 202 1st Field Company, New Zealand Engineers 203 2nd Field Company, New Zealand Engineers 206 Headquarters, New Zealand Infantry Brigade 208 Auckland Infantry Battalion 209, 210 Canterbury Infantry Battalion 211, 212 Wellington Infantry Battalion 203


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AWM 8 AIF Embarkation Rolls AWM 16 Australian War Memorial Registry Files AWM 25 1914–18 Written Records 41/1 ‘Armistice of 24th May 1915—various reports on’ 41/3 ‘Suspension of arms 24 May 1915’ 303/100 ‘Formation of Mining Company’ 359/57 ‘Circular memorandum for commanders of Sections of Defences Anzac Cove Jun 1915’ 367/28 ‘1st Australian Light Horse Brigade—Gallipoli orders and dispositions . . .’ May to August & Nov–Dec 1915 367/86 ‘Gallipoli Phase I New Zealand and Australian Division 4th Infantry Brigade (Signals, reports, casualties) Apr to Jul 1915’ 367/89 ‘Gallipoli—Phase I New Zealand and Australian Division General Staff April to August 1915’ 367/104 ‘Gallipoli Phase I New Zealand and Australian Division—miscellaneous May, June, July 1915’ 367/109 ‘Gallipoli Phase I Auckland, Canterbury, Wellington, Otago Battalions, May and April 1915’ 367/110 ‘Gallipoli Phase I New Zealand Infantry Brigade April, May & July 1915’ 367/115 ‘Gallipoli Phase I 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th Battalions’ 367/129 ‘Notes on machine guns—Gallipoli’ 367/199 ‘ANZAC General Staff—New Zealand and Australian Divisions [sic]—Summary of events messages and signals September 1915’ 367/222 ‘Messages and signals—NZ & A Division including RM Brigade 1/5/15 to 2/5/15’ 367/223 ‘Messages and signals—NZ & A Division including RM Brigade 3/5/15 to 4/5/15’ 367/224 ‘Messages and signals—1st Aust Div & NZ & A Division including RM Bde 29/4/15’ 367/233 NZ & A Div—‘Instructions for the guidance of all Officers and Non Commissioned Officers of Posts & Trenches’ AWM 28 Recommendation files for honours and awards, AIF, 1914–18 War 204


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AWM 30 Statements by Repatriated Prisoners of War B1.2, Sgt William Bailey, 15th Battalion B1.30, Lt S.L. Stormonth, 15th Battalion AWM 38 Bean papers 3 DRL 606 Bean diaries, 1915–19 3 DRL 6673 item 107 ‘1st Brigade to 1st Division HQ, Messages and Signals on Gallipoli . . .’ 3 DRL 8039 item 13 ‘Press cables and articles, Jan–Feb 1918’ 3 DRL 8042 item 16 ‘Historical Notes—Gallipoli Notes on Quinn’s Post April to July 1915 Extracts from private diary of Colonel H. Pope 16th Battalion’ 3 DRL 8042 item 17 ‘Historical Notes—Gallipoli—Turkish attack at Quinn’s Post 29th May 1915 and our sortie of 30th May’ 3DRL 8042 item 18 ‘Historical Notes—Gallipoli’ AWM 44 Manuscripts of official histories 1/13- XX, Manuscripts of chapters of Vol. I, The Story of Anzac 2/1- XX, Manuscripts of chapters of Vol. II, The Story of Anzac AWM 51 Security Classified Records, 1926–86: item 39 Dardanelles Commission item 102 Statements to the Dardanelles Commission item 103 Dardanelles Commission—Evidence AWM 113 AIF Nominal roll AWM 131 Roll of Honour circulars AWM 145 Roll of Honour cards, 1914–18 War, Army

Films Heroes of Gallipoli, 1915/1919 AWM F00069

Charters Towers & Dalrymple Archives Group, Charters Towers Hugh Quinn file Souvenir of Australia Day, 1915 205


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Mitchell Library, Sydney ML MSS 3269 Vol. 134, Angus & Robertson ML MSS B 1184–5, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett ML MSS 1652/90, Mr John Ferguson ML MSS 1651, Pte George Gower, 15th Battalion MLMSS 1296, Pte Henry King, 2nd Light Horse ML MSS 1121, Cpl Donald McDonald, 17th Battalion ML MM 2886, Pte Alfred Morris, 1st Light Horse ML MSS 116, Red Cross Enquiry & Casualty Lists 1915–1919 ML MSS 1172, Pte Wynfrith Reynolds, 3rd Light Horse CY2972, Pte Roy Roberts, 19th Battalion ML MSS 6980, Mrs Joan Worth

National Archives of Australia A192, FCL21/1847 ‘Track between Tuggeranong Homestead and Tharwa Road’ A363, DSL1920/236 ‘Soldier Settlement—Tuggeranong Subdivison’ A364, DSS1921/42 ‘Settlement of Jerrabomberra and Tuggeranong Sub-divisions’ A192, FCL1920/80 ‘Tuggeranong Classification Map’ A364, DSS1921/42 ‘Settlement of Jerrabomberra and Tuggeranong Sub-divisions’ B2455 (AIF personnel files)

National Library of Australia AJCP M2581, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett MS 2823, Keith Murdoch MS 1884, Lt Gen Sir John Monash MS 5172, Maj Gen Cyril White

Oxley Library, Brisbane OM77–14, 2nd Light Horse Regiment collection OM1587, Lt Frank Armstrong, 15th Battalion

State Library of South Australia D4975(L), Pte Arthur Hutton, 3rd Light Horse PRG 1175/1, Pte Arthur Oxer, 1333 16th Battalion PRG 1273/4, Pte Herbert Conrad, 16th Battalion PRG 244/11, Pte Howard Dodd, 16th Battalion 206


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D 7145(L), Dvr Rupert Osborne, 4th ASC Company D 5895(L), Captain Alexander Meikle, 4th Field Ambulance 940.481942 F195, Diary of Corporal J.M. Ranford, [3rd Light Horse], privately published, nd

State Library of Victoria MS 9003, Gnr Robert Calder, 2nd Field Artillery Brigade MS 11671, Pte Leslie Hyde, 14th Battalion MS 9603, Pte Albert Love, 14th Battalion MS 9876, Pte James McPhee, 4th Field Ambulance MS 10225, Lt Consett Riddell, RAE MS 10930, Miss Margaret Carne Riddell

Papers in private hands Papers of Lt Frank Armstrong, 15th Battalion, c/o Mr John Meyers Papers of Lt Frank Armstrong, 15th Battalion, c/o Mr Iain Macinnis Diary of Pte John Robert Dunn, Wellington Battalion, c/o Mr Pat White Commonplace book of Lt Douglas Freeman, 15th Battalion, c/o Mr John Meyers Papers of Sgt William Harvey, 16th Battalion, c/o Mr Laurie Harvey Memoir by Sgt Robert Hunter, 15th Battalion, c/o Mr John Meyers Papers of Maj Tom Logan, held by Mrs Judith Hanna Diary of Lt John Napier, 3rd Field Company, c/o Mr Mick Ryan Diary of Cpl T. Scates, 9th (Chatham) Battalion, RMLI, c/o A/Prof. Bruce Scates Anzac officers died at Gallipoli website—www.anzacs.org

NEW ZEALAND Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand MS-Papers–1560, Pte Raymond Baker, Canterbury Battalion MS-Papers–1418, Pte James Bayne, Wellington Battalion MS-Papers–1676–2, CSM Nelson Berry, Otago Battalion MS-Papers–2350, Pte George Bollinger, Wellington Battalion MS-Papers–2731, Pte Edgar Booth, Auckland Battalion MS-Papers–5432, Pte Henry Burton, Wellington Battalion Copy-Micro-MS–144, Pte Ormond Burton, NZMC MS-Copy-Micro–0549, Spr Ernest Clifton, NZE 207


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MS-Papers–1417, L/Cpl Claude Comyns, Wellington Battalion MS-Papers–1676–1, Gnr Frank Cooper, NZFA MS-Papers–2299, Pte George Donovan, Wellington Battalion MS-Papers–4656, Lt Col Percy Fenwick, NZMC MS-Papers–1647, Spr Phillip Hanna, NZE MS-Papers–6591, Lt Jack Horneman, Auckland Battalion MS-Papers–4019, Col John Hughes, NZEF MS-Papers–4540, Sgt Henry Kitson, Canterbury Battalion MS-Papers–4022, Pte Leonard Leary, Wellington Battalion MSX–4915, Pte James McWhirter, Auckland Battalion MSX–5112, Pte William McCaw, Otago Battalion PA–1-o–308, Dvr Lawrence Mackie, ASC MSX–2552, Lt Col William Malone, Wellington Battalion PA–1-o–1019, M.D. Mason MS–1629, Spr James Meek, NZE MSX–4559, Sgt Joseph Milburn, Wellington Battalion MS-Papers–1310, Captain Alfred Morton, NZ Infantry Brigade PA–1-o–251, L.M. Playford 19–251, Cpl Mostyn Jones, Canterbury Battalion MS-Papers–1690; 1691, Captain Arthur Rhodes, NZEF MS-Papers–3705, Captain Thomas Ritchie, NZMC MS-Papers–7336, Sgt Wallace Saunders, NZE MS-Papers–1697, Cpl Frederick Victor Senn, NZE MS-Papers–1542, Pte Alfred Smith, Canterbury Battalion MS-Papers–1515, Pte Monty Spencer, NZMC MS-Papers–2393, Pte Aubrey Tronson, Wellington Battalion MS-Micro-Copy–52, Pte George Tuck, Auckland Battalion MS-Papers–2359, Pte William Watts, Wellington Battalion MS-Papers–1639, Spr John Wilson, NZE First World War Oral History Archive, including interviews with: OHInt–0006/05 Arthur Bellingham [NZE] 1988 OHInt–0006/27 Francis Fougere [Wellington Battalion] 1988 OHInt–0006/35 Charles Hartley [Auckland Battalion] 1988 OHInt–0006/45 Harvey Johns [Wellington Battalion] 1988 OHInt–0006/48 Leonard Leary [Wellington Battalion] 1988 OHInt–0006/55 James Miller [Headquarters] 1988 OHInt–0006/63 Victor Nicholson [Wellington Battalion] 1988 OHInt–0006/80 William White [Wellington Battalion] 1988

208


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Archives New Zealand, Wellington James Allen Papers Box 7, D1/6/3 ‘Formation of New Zealand Division’ Box 7 D1/11 ‘Instructions to G.O.C. regarding N.Z.E.F.’ Box 7 D1/53 ‘Ross, Malcolm—appointment as N.Z. War Correspondent’ AD 78 Unregistered files—History of the War, Box 25 WA1/1 Private diary of Col William Braithwaite, April–September 1915 WA10/4 NZEF HQ War Records Section Unregistered files, 1–23 1 Report on the action at Quinn’s Post, May–Jun 1915 5 Reports on the action of 29–30 Jun 1915 6 Reports on the operations of NZ&A Div May–Jun 1915 7 Reports on operations of Div Apr–May 1915 8 Reports on the sortie from Quinn’s Post 4–5 Jun 1915 9 Report on action at Quinn’s Post 29 May 1915 11 Interim reports on mining operations Quinn’s Post 5 Jul 1915 12 Report of action on landing at Gallipoli 2–3 May 1915 13 Report of action on landing at Gallipoli 25–27 Apr 1915 15 Report on sortie from Quinn’s Post . . . 2 Aust Light Horse 14–15 May 1915 16 Report on sortie from Quinn’s Post 9–10 May 1915 18 Account of mining operations 4 Jul 1915 19 Mining operations 25 May 1915 21 Report of operations Jun–Jul 1915 22 Report of operations Jul–Aug 1915 WA 23 3/11 (Box 3) NZ & A Division, Miscellaneous personnel papers WA 252/2 Lt Gen Alexander Godley papers WA 62 2nd Field Company, NZE, War Diary, June, July 1915 WA 70 1st NZ Infantry Brigade, War Diary, June, July 1915 WA 71 Auckland Battalion, War Diary, June, July 1915 WA 73 Wellington Battalion, War Diary, June, July 1915 WA 73/2 Wellington Battalion, Box 1 Routine Orders WA 73/3/1, Box 1 Wellington Battalion, Minute Books WA 77 Canterbury Battalion, War Diary, June, August 1915 WA 254 Hilliard photographs

209


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Queen Elizabeth II Army Memorial Museum, Waiouru 1990.595, Lt Colvin Algie, Auckland Battalion 1989.199, Pte John Atkins, Auckland Battalion 1991.2731, Spr Arthur Bellingham, NZE 1999.96, Sgt Gordon Breen, NZMC 1996.1820, Sgt Roland Chadwick, NZMC 2003.407, Reginald Childs, Canterbury Battalion 1999.2964, Pte Dan Curham, Wellington Battalion 1986.1644, Pte William Dundon, Canterbury Battalion 1998.2648, SM Saxon Foster, Wellington Battalion 1994.2336, Pte William Hampton, Wellington Battalion 2003.409, Sgt Keith Little, Main Body HQ 1997.571, Sgt Frank McKenzie, Auckland Battalion 1999.753, Maj Hugh McKinnon, Wellington Battalion 2003.408, Pte William Newell, Auckland Battalion 2003.415, Spr Leo Poff, NZE 1999.759, Pte Frederick Scarborough, Auckland Battalion 1999.1087, Pte David Scott, Canterbury Battalion 1989.369, Pte Benjamin Smart, Wellington Battalion 1998.1737, Pte Peter Sutherland, Wellington Battalion 1999.1086, Pte James Swan, Wellington Battalion 1992.50, Sgt Arthur Swayn, Wellington Battalion 1994.3315, Col Arthur Temperley, NZ Infantry Brigade 1999.805, Captain Jesse Wallingford, NZ Infantry Brigade 1999.3047, Pte Russel Weir, Wellington Battalion 1993.990, Lt Francis West, Auckland Battalion

Museum of New Zealand CA316, box 2, item 8, Maj Edward Cox, Wellington Battalion

New Zealand Defence Force Headquarters Library NZEF Personnel files Biographical files

UNITED KINGDOM Imperial War Museum, London P216, Lt Gen Sir William Birdwood 99/84/1, Pte Samuel James Fenn, 13th Battalion, AIF 82/30/1, Maj Carl Jess, 4th Infantry Brigade, AIF 210


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68/7/1, CPO F.W. Johnston, Royal Naval Air Service 90/1/1, Maj Gen Sir Arthur Lynden-Bell, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force 78/57/1, Pte Andrew McCowan, 5th Battalion, AIF P399, Lt A.M. McGrigor, Royal Gloucestershire Hussars 85/26/1, Captain B.L. Moore, Royal Navy 76/75/1, Lt Col Mustafa Kemal, 19th Turkish Division 79/46/1, Pte Alfred Pfeifer, 15th Battalion, AIF 79/46/1, Pte Ellis Silas, 16th Battalion, AIF

Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London Lt Gen Sir Alexander Godley, NZ & A Division Lt Gen Sir Ian Hamilton, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force Mr John North

Peter Liddle Collection, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds Anonymous machine-gunner, Wellington Battalion Maj Herbert Alexander, Indian Mule Corps Pte Raymond Baker, Canterbury Battalion Pte Ernest Burgess, 17th Battalion Lt George Curlewis, 16th Battalion Pte George Edwards, 1st Light Horse Mr Charles Elsom, NZE Spr Charles Hodgson, NZE Captain Basil Holmes, 17th Battalion Spr Arthur Lush, NZE Mr J.P. Mackenzie, 16th Battalion, AIF Lt Col William Malone, Wellington Battalion WO William McLennan, 2nd Light Horse Mr J.D. McRobie, NZE Pte Hartley Palmer, Canterbury Battalion Pte Ernest Skinner, 16th Battalion Mr J.S. Skinner, Otago Battalion Mr Jack Syme, 10th Light Horse TU001 Turkish items Mr Justin Westenra, Otago Mounted Rifles Mr Albert Wilson, Royal Naval Division Mr Arthur Wilson, Wellington Battalion 211


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QMS H.C. Wood, Royal Naval Division Mr Robert Wordsworth, 1st Light Horse

National Archives, London ADM1/8453/77, ‘Lance Corporal W.R. Parker, RMLI, recommended for the award of the Victoria Cross’ AIR1/2119/207/72/2, ‘[Air operations over] Gallipoli and Asiatic Mainland, 1915’ WO32/4843, ‘Preservation of British soldiers graves in Italy, Greece & Turkey’ WO32/5640, ‘Reports of Chaplains attached to Graves Registration Unit Gallipoli’ WO95/4263–4365, War Diary, GHQ, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, 1915 WO95/4285, War Diary, ANZAC Chief Engineer, 1915 WO95/4289, War Diary, 7th Indian Mountain Brigade, 1915 WO95/4290, War Diary, Royal Naval Division, 1915–16 WO95/4291, War Diary, Royal Marine Brigade, 1915 WO95/4303, War Diary, 40th Infantry Brigade, 1915 WO95/4345, War Diary, 2nd Australian Division, 1915 WO95/4346, War Diary, 2nd Australian Division Train WO95/4347, War Diary, 5th Australian Infantry Brigade, 1915 WO95/4352, War Diary, New Zealand Infantry Brigade, 1915 WO95/4354, War Diary, 1st Light Horse Brigade, 1915 WO95/4954, War Diary, Graves Registration Unit (Gallipoli) 1918–19 WO95/5473, Orders of Battle, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, 1915 WO158/580, ‘Dardanelles Operations Evacuation of Anzac and Suvla’

National Library of Scotland Acc 1656, Maj Gen Granville Egerton, 52nd Division Acc. 3155, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, BEF MS 10791–2, Acc. 6346, Mr Compton Mackenzie Acc. 1700, Mr Orlo Williams

Royal Marines Museum, Eastney Arch. 7/17/3 (20), ‘Albert’s diary whilst at the Dardanelles’ Arch. 7/17/3 (4), Peninsula Press Arch. 11/13/24(A)-(C), Papers, Maj Fred Jerram, RMLI Arch. 11/12/4 (77), ‘The Chatham Battalion Royal Marine Brigade at Kaba Tepe-Gallipoli Peninsula April 28th to May 12th 1915’ 212


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2 Printed sources Newspapers Advertiser (Adelaide) Barossa News Border Chronicle (Kingston SE) Brisbane Courier/Courier-Mail Daily News (Perth) Daily Post (Hobart) Daily Telegraph (Tasmania) The Examiner (Tasmania) Huon Times (Tasmania) Illustrated London News Kambalda Chronicle Kalgoorlie Miner Maitland Watch Masterton Daily-Times (New Zealand) Mercury (Hobart) North Eastern Advertiser (Tasmania) Northern Miner (Charters Towers) Port Augusta Dispatch Port Pirie Recorder Quorn Mercury South-Eastern Star (Mount Gambier) South Western Times (Western Australia) The West Australian (Perth) West Coast Recorder (Port Lincoln) Zeehan and Dundas Herald (Tasmania)

Books Norman Annabell, Official History of the New Zealand Engineers During the Great War 1914–1919, Evans, Cobb & Sharpe Ltd, Wanganui, 1927 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, The Uncensored Dardanelles, Hutchinson, London, 1916 ——Despatches from the Dardanelles, George Newnes, London, [1915?] Ron Austin, A Soldier’s Soldier: The Life of Lieutenant-General Sir Carl Herman Jess, Slouch Hat Publications, McCrae, 2001 ——As Rough as Bags: The History of the 6th Battalion, 1st AIF, 1914–1919, privately published, McRae, 1992 213


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Australian Imperial Force Records Section, Australian Imperial Force: statistics of casualties, etc. compiled to 30th June, 1919, London, 1919 C.E.W Bean, What to Know in Egypt, Sociéte Orientale du Publicité, Cairo, 1915 ——(ed.), The Anzac Book, Cassell & Company, London, 1916 ——The Story of Anzac, Vol. I, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1922 ——The Story of Anzac, Vol. II, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1924 ——Gallipoli Mission [1948], ABC Books, Sydney, 1990 ——Two Men I Knew, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1957 Joseph Beeston, Five Months at Anzac, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1916 H.E. Blumberg, Britain’s Sea Soldiers: A Record of the Royal Marines During the War 1914–1919, Devonport, Swiss & Co., London, 1927 George Bourne, The History of the 2nd Light Horse Regiment, Northern Daily Leader, Tamworth, 1926 Nicholas Boyack and Jane Tolerton, In the Shadow of War: New Zealand Soldiers Talk about World War One and Their Lives, Penguin, Auckland, 1990 C.B. Brereton, Tales of Three Campaigns, Selwyn & Blount Ltd, London, 1926 Harvey Broadbent, The Boys Who Came Home: Recollections of Gallipoli, ABC Books, Sydney, 1990 E.C. Buley, Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War, Andrew Melrose Ltd, London, 1916 Robert Burla, Crossed Boomerangs, Kennedy Regiment, Townsville, 1971 A.E. Byrne, Official History of the Otago Regiment N.Z.E.F. in the Great War 1914–1918, J. Wilkie & Co., Dunedin, nd Charles Callwell, The Tactics of Today, Blackwood & Sons, 1909 ——The Dardanelles, Constable, London, 1919 ——Experiences of a Dug-out 1914–1918, Constable, London, 1920 A.D. Carberry, The New Zealand Medical Service in the Great War 1914–1918, Whitcombe & Tombs, Auckland, 1924 T.P. Chataway [revised and edited by Paul Goldenstedt], History of the 15th Battalion, W. Brooks, Brisbane, 1948 Chris Coulthard-Clark, A Heritage of Spirit: A Biography of MajorGeneral Sir William Throsby Bridges, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1979 ——No Australian Need Apply: the Troubled Career of LieutenantGeneral Gordon Legge, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988 214


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W.H. Cunningham, C.A.L. Treadwell and J.S. Hanna, The Wellington Regiment N.Z.E.F. 1914–1919, Ferguson & Osborn, Wellington, 1928 Lynn Curtright, Muddle, Indecision and Setback: British Policy and the Balkan States; August 1914 to the Inception of the Dardanelles Campaign, Institute of Balkan Studies, Thessalonki, 1986 Rosemary Derham, The Silence Ruse: Escape from Gallipoli, Cliffe Books, Armadale, 1998 Hector Dinning, By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal, Constable, London, 1918 Arthur Douglas, The Dominion of New Zealand, Sir Isaac Putnam & Sons, London, 1909 C.H. Dudley Ward, Regimental Records of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Vol. IV, 1915–1918, Forster Groom, London, 1929 David Dutton, The Politics of Diplomacy: Britain and France in the Balkans in the First World War, IB Tauris, London, 1998 Ronald East (ed.), The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981 Lewis Einstein, Inside Constantinople: A Diplomatist’s Diary During the Dardanelles Expedition April-September 1915, John Murray, London, 1917 David Ferguson, The History of the Canterbury Regiment, NZEF, 1914–1919, Whitcome & Tombs, Auckland, 1921 Tom Frame, The Shores of Gallipoli: Naval Aspects of the Gallipoli Campaign, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 2000 George Franki and Clyde Slatyer, Mad Harry: Australia’s Most Decorated Soldier, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 2003 Hudson Fysh, Qantas Rising: the Autobiography of the Flying Fysh, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1965 Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1990 Alexander Godley, Life of an Irish Soldier, John Murray, London, 1939 Jill Hamilton, From Gallipoli to Gaza: The Desert Poets of World War One, Simon & Schuster, Sydney, 2003 Edward Bruce Hamley, The Operations of War Explained and Illustrated, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh, 1907 Maurice [Lord] Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1961 Glyn Harper, Letters from the Battlefield: New Zealand Soldiers Write Home 1914–18, Harper Collins, Auckland, 2001 215


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[Peter Hart], Gallipoli: Oral History Recordings, Imperial War Museum, London, 1994 C.O. Head, A Glance at Gallipoli, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1931 Aubrey Herbert, Mons, Anzac and Kut, Hutchinson, London, 1919 [?} Alec Hill, Chauvel of the Light Horse, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1979 Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli, Pan, London, 1975 Douglas Jerrold, The Royal Naval Division, Hutchinson, London, 1923 Hans Kannengeisser, The Campaign in Gallipoli, Hutchinson, London, 1927 Amy Lambert, Thirty Years of an Artist’s Life, Society of Artists, Sydney, 1938 John Lee, A Soldier’s Life: General Sir Ian Hamilton 1853–1947, Macmillan, London, 2000 John Lehmann, Rupert Brooke: His Life and Legend, Quartet Books, London, 1981 V.H. Lloyd (ed.), The Burford Sampson Great War Diary, privately published, 1997 C. Longmore, The Old Sixteenth Being a Record of the 16th Battalion, A.I.F., during the Great War, 1914–1918, History Committee of the 16th Battalion Association, Perth, 1929 Ian McGibbon, The Path to Gallipoli: Defending New Zealand 1840–1915, GP Books, Wellington, 1991 ——Kiwi Sappers: The Corps of Royal New Zealand Engineers’ Century of Service, Reed Books, Auckland, 2002 Compton Mackenzie, Gallipoli Memories, Cassell & Company, London, 1929 K.W. Mackenzie, The Story of the Seventeenth Battalion A.I.F. in the Great War 1914–1918, Shipping Newspapers, Sydney, 1946 Ronald McNicoll, The Royal Australian Engineers 1902–1919, Corps Committee of the Royal Australian Engineers, Canberra, 1979 Cecil Malthus, Anzac: A Retrospect, Whitcombe & Tombs, Auckland, 1965 John Monash, War Letters of General Monash, Angus & Roberston, Sydney, 1935 Horace Moore-Jones, Sketches Made at Anzac, Hugh Rees Ltd, London, 1916 Sydney Moseley, The Truth about the Dardanelles, Cassell & Co., London, 1916 216


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New Zealand Expeditionary Force, Alphabetical Roll of New Zealand Expeditionary Force, 1914–1915, Marcus F. Marks, Wellington, 1917 ——Roll of Honour, W.A. Skinner, Wellington, 1924 A.C.N. Olden, Westralian Cavalry in the War, Alexander McCubbin, Melbourne, 1921 Peter Pedersen, Monash as Military Commander, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1985 T.J. Pemberton, Gallipoli Today, Ernest Benn, London, 1926 Jock Phillips, Nicholas Boyack and E.P. Malone (eds), The Great Adventure: New Zealand Soldiers Describe the First World War, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988 Alan Polaschek, The Complete New Zealand Distinguished Conduct Medal, Medals Research Christchurch, Christchurch, 1978 Christopher Pugsley, Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story, Hodder & Stoughton, Auckland, 1984 ——On the Fringe of Hell: New Zealanders and Military Discipline in the First World War, Hodder & Stoughton, Auckland, 1991 Lloyd Robson, The First A.I.F.: A Study of its Recruitment, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1970 Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, Vol. I 1877–1918, Collins, London, 1970 S.F. Rowell, Full Circle, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974 Liman Von Sanders, Five Years in Turkey, United States Naval Institute, Annapolis, 1927 Phillip Schuler, Australia in Arms, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1916 P.A. Selth (ed.), Canberra Collection, Lowden Publishing, Kilmore, 1976 Maurice Shadbolt, Voices of Gallipoli, Hodder & Stoughton, Auckland, 1988 Ellis Silas, Crusading at Anzac, British Australasian, London, 1916 Geoffrey Sparrow and J.N. Macbean Ross, On Four Fronts with the Royal Naval Division, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1918 Nigel Steel, The Battlefields of Gallipoli: Then and Now, Leo Cooper, London, 1990 John Studholme, New Zealand Expeditionary Force: Record of Personal Services During the War . . ., W.A.G. Skinner, Wellington, 1928 Guy Thornton, With the Anzacs in Cairo: the Tale of a Great Fight, H.R. Allenson, London, 1916 Christopher Tobin, Gone to Gallipoli: Anzacs of Small Town New Zealand go to War, Bosco Press, Timaru, 2001 Jane Tolerton, Ettie: A Life of Ettie Rout, Penguin, Auckland, 1992 217


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Colin Townsend (ed.), Gallipoli 1915, privately printed, Paeroa, 1999 Tim Travers, Gallipoli 1915, Tempus, Stroud, 2001 J.L. Treloar, An Anzac Diary, privately printed, Armidale, 1993 Michael Tyquin, Gallipoli: the Medical War, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 1993 Fred Waite, The New Zealanders at Gallipoli, Whitcombe & Tombs, Auckland, 1921 Newton Wanliss, The History of the Fourteenth Battalion, A.I.F., The Arrow Printery, Melbourne, 1929 War Graves of the British Empire Gallipoli Cemeteries GI.1 to GI.31, Imperial War Graves Commission, London, 1928 War Office, Military Engineering (Part II) Attack and Defence of Fortresses, HMSO, London, 1910 ——Field Service Pocket Book, HMSO, 1911 ——Military Engineering (Part IV) Mining and Demolitions, HMSO, London, 1912 ——Field Service Regulations, Part 1, Operations, HMSO, London, 1914 Ernest Weekley, Hugh Stewart: Some Memories of His Friends and Colleagues, John Murray, London, 1939 Ray Westlake, British Regiments at Gallipoli, Leo Cooper, London, 1996 Thomas White, The History of the Thirteenth Battalion, A.I.F., Tyrrells, Sydney, 1924 Frederick Whitton, The History of the Prince of Wales’s Leinster Regiment, Vol. II, Gale & Polden Ltd, Aldershot, 1924 Ernest Williams, A New Zealander’s Diary: Gallipoli and France 1915–1917, Cadsonbury Publications, Christchurch, 1998 Denis Winter, 25 April 1915: The Inevitable Tragedy, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1994 Ronald Younger, Keith Murdoch: Founder of a Media Empire, Harper Collins, Sydney, 2003 Desmond Zwar, In Search of Keith Murdoch, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1980

Articles Anon [Obituary of Lt Col Fred Jerram], The Globe and Laurel, April 1969, p. 130 Anon, ‘Account of the operations by Private Thomas Henry Baker, Chatham Battalion, Royal Marine Light Infantry’, RND, No. 3, Dec 1997 218


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Anon [Winton Troop, Australian Light Horse Association], Spur, October 2002, pp. 16–17 Douglas Hallam, ‘Quinn’s and Courtney’s’, Blackwood’s Magazine, March 1939, pp. 327–344 A.J. Hill, ‘General Sir Harry Chauvel’ in David Horner (ed.), The Commanders: Australian Military Leadership in the Twentieth Century, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984 George Imashev, ‘Gallipoli on Film’, Wartime, Issue 18, 2002, pp. 43–5 F.H. Mann, ‘After Nineteen Years: Some notes on the cruise to Gallipoli April–May 1934’, RND, No. 18, Sep. 2001 H.W. Murray, ‘The First Three Weeks on Gallipoli’, Reveille, April 1939, pp. 10–11; 61–2 Christopher Page, ‘The Re-instatement of the Royal Naval Division Memorial’, RND, No. 20, Sep. 2002 Susan Pfanner, ‘Soldier settlement subdivisions in the Federal Capital Territory after World War I’, Canberra and District Historical Society, No. 37, March 1996, pp. 25–34 Richard White, ‘Motives for joining up: self-sacrifice, self-interest and social class, 1914–18’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 9 (1986) 3

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Index

Abbey, William, 107, 111, 145 Achi Baba, 21 Aitken, James (NZ), 40 Aitken, James (17th Bn), 173, 183 Aitken, William, 93, 95 Algie, Colvin, 95 Allen, James, 83, 146, 156 Anderson, Fred, 11, 40, 54, 62, 193 Anderson, Ken, 45, 77 Andrews, Eric, xxi Anzac Cove, 21, 26 Anzac Day, xix Anzac legend, xix, 200 Annie Armstrong, 46 Armstrong, Frank, 2, 35, 36, 45, 46, 49, 50, 189, 193, 196 Armstrong, Hutton, 46, 47, 50 Arnott, Thomas, 86–7 Ashmead-Bartlett, Ellis, 13, 122–4, 146, 150, 156–7, 189 Ashton, Jim, 139 Aspinall, Cyril, 176, 191 Asquith, Herbert, 123, 145 ‘Australia day’, 122 Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, 9, 12 New Zealand and Australian Division, 9, 150 Anzac relationship, 10–11, 83, 90, 110 Australian Historical Mission, 186–7 Australian Imperial Force Volunteers of 1914, 1–2, 181, 183 1st Australian Division, 33, 149, 150, 167, 168 2nd Australian Division, 147–80 1st Light Horse Brigade, 6, 146 1st Light Horse, 39, 78, 79 2nd Light Horse, 6, 10, 39, 55–7, 59–61, 68, 138–42, 151, 196 3rd Light Horse, 8, 146–7 8th Light Horse, 139 10th Light Horse, 10, 39, 68, 78, 81, 84–7, 139, 192 1st Brigade, 139 4th Brigade, 4, 10, 30, 42, 89, 134 5th Brigade, 150 1st Bn, 20

6th Bn, 135–7 13th Bn, 4, 22, 39, 46 14th Bn, 4, 23–7 15th Bn, 4, 22, 24, 28, 35–87, 149–50, 181, 196 16th Bn, 4, 22, 37–9, 62 17th Bn, 147, 151–82 18th Bn, 175 20th Bn, 148, 161 Australian engineers, 159 Australian War Memorial, xix, 124, 130, 187, 194, 198–200 Baby 700, 26, 60, 37–9, 113 Baigent, Ted, 83, 100, 112, 133 Baker, Edmund, 41 Baker, Raymond, 15, 111, 115, 184 Baker, Thomas, 28 Balfour, John, 186 Bathing, 114 Bazley, Arthur, xiv Beech, William, 182 ‘Beachy Bill’, 70 Bealin, William, 38 Bean, Charles, xv–xiii, 10, 33, 34, 39, 54, 61, 73, 76, 81, 87, 88, 92, 93, 99, 100, 121, 123–4, 128, 140, 147, 156, 157, 173, 176, 179, 186, 189–91, 197, 200 Beeston, Joseph, 55, 81, 86, 104, 124 Bellingham, Arthur, 107 Bennett, Gordon, 136–7 Bent, Sergeant, 113 Bernard, Frank, see Lesnie Berry, Nelson, 39 Birds, 148–9 Birdwood, William, 9, 20, 59, 66, 71, 73, 82, 99, 109, 113, 132, 177 Birkbeck, Gilbert, 58, 60, 183 Blake, Fred, 47, 143 Bloody Angle, 26, 37, 43, 65, 195 Bloom, Julius, 161 Bollinger, George, 7, 13, 70, 90, 98, 99, 184 Bolton’s Ridge, 26, 62 Bomba Sirt, xx, 26, 127–9

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QUINN’S POST Bombing, 36, 53–5, 88, 91–2, 102 Books The Anzac Book (Bean), 169–70 Anzac: a Retrospect (Malthus), 193 The Charge at the Nek (Burness) Crusading at Anzac (Silas), 44 Field Service Regulations, 31, 92, 98, 130 The Labour of Loss (Damousi), 184 Mons, Anzac and Kut (Herbert), 70 The Operations of War (Hamley), 12, 13, 92 Pocket Encyclopaedia (Charters Towers), 194 Small Wars (Callwell), 30 The Story of Anzac (Bean), xv, xviii, xxii, 43, 191 The Tactics of Today (Callwell), 30, 38 Two Men I Knew (Bean), 176 Voices of Gallipoli (Shadbolt), 199 Boswald, Charles, 96 Bourne, George, xxii, 61, 139–40, 182 Boyack, Nicolas, 193 Braithwaite, William, 91, 113, 133 British forces Army Dardanelles Army, 149, 168 Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, 12, 149 New Army formations and units, 133, 141 29th Division, 15 54th Division, 168 13th Division, 142 40th Brigade, 142 8th Cheshires, 143 8th Royal Welch Fusiliers, 142–3, 145 5th Wiltshires, 143 Royal Engineers, 73, 125 Indian units, 64, 133 Royal Navy, 8, 25, 72 Royal Naval Air Service, 25, 29, 62 Royal Marines, 25, 28–30, 38, 39–40, 45, 46, 48, 56 Royal Naval Division, 28–30, 39, 181, 196 Chatham Bn, 28 Portsmouth Bn, 29, 38 HMS Chelmer, 122 HMS Queen Elizabeth, 15, 191 HMS Triumph, 63, 72, 114 Broadbent, Herbert, 48–9, 51, 182 Browne, Charles, 91 Brown’s Dip, 26, 125 Bulling, Edgar, 54 Burge, Ada, 142 Burge, Joe, 140, 142, 189, 193 Burgess, Ernest, 173 Burnage, Granville, 4, 23, 37, 75 Burness, Peter, xxi

Bushell, Arthur, 38 Butler, R.P., 126 Callwell, Charles, 30, 38, 158 Cannan, Douglas, 189 Cannan, James, 4, 35, 41, 45, 48, 50, 51, 62, 75, 80, 91 Cape Helles, 21, 82, 116, 136 Carter, Bert, 76, 77, 143 Casey, Richard, 25, 32, 54, 84, 87, 89, 99, 133 Cattle, Reg, 147 Cawley, Frank, 47, 72, 143, 182 Cemeteries burials, 27, 44, 107, 174, 177, 179, 187–9, 195 Chabrel, Edwin, 37, 143 Chambers, Keith, 151, 152, 155, 162, 163, 182 Charles, Frank, 170–1 Chataway, Tom, 15, 28, 35, 41, 42, 46, 48, 49, 50, 77, 183 Chauvel, Harry, 4, 6, 9, 62, 63, 77, 79, 82, 109, 116, 138, 183 Chessboard, 23, 26 Chunuk Bair, 26, 134, 143, 187, 191 Churchill, Winston, 12, 17, 28, 99, 167 Clark, Charlie, 120 Clifton, Ernest, 44, 49, 51, 61, 74, 82, 200 Collins, Robert, 158 Colpitts, John, 85 Comyns, Claude, 184 Condé, Anne-Marie, 184 Corbett, Ernest, 51, 183 Corbett, John, 96, 98, 143 Correspondents, 107, 121–4 Corser, Cyril, 30 Courtney, Richard, 4 Courtney’s Post, 24, 26, 27, 62, 65, 101, 113, 167 Cox, Edward, 13, 90, 116, 120, 130, 135, 143, 184 Cozier, Bob, xiii Craven, Jack, 23, 47, 50, 69, 184 Crosby, David, 55 Curham, Dan, 193 Damousi, Joy, 184 Daniels, Harry, 22, 38, 81 Dardanelles Commission, 119, 133 Dare, Charles, 24, 25, 27, 183 Dawson, Tom, 19 Dead Man’s Ridge, 27, 39, 43, 174 Deakin, Vera, 184 de Lotbiniere, Joly, 74 de Roebeck, John, 109 Dillon, Henry, 62 Dinning, Hector, 161, 165, 168 Donovan, George, 104, 114 Drip gun, 178–9 Dundon, William, 9, 92, 95

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INDEX Dunn, Jack, 3, 33, 104, 129–31, 135, 143, 184, 196 Durrant, James, 75, 183 Dyer, Walter, 136–7 Edwards, George, 76 Egypt, 8–11, 14 Elsom, Charles, 104, 111 Emanuel, Jack, 151, 161, 162, 177, 200 England, Hugh, 122 Enver Pasha, 71 Farquhar, William, 159–61 Fear, Francis, 112, 184 Fenn, Samuel, 69, 87 Fenwick, Percy, 10, 55, 59, 70, 81, 86, 92, 95, 184 Ferguson, F.A., 105, 111 Films, Gallipoli, 139 Heroes of Gallipoli, 123–4 Finlay, Cuthbert, 171, 183 Fisher, Andrew, 157 Fisherman’s Hut, 22, 26 Flanagan, William, 171 Fogarty, Edward, 170–2 Forsyth, John, 136–7 Forsythe, William, 23, 24, 34, 182 Foster, Saxon, 90, 129, 133 Fowler, Wilbraham, 2, 17, 81, 183 Frame, Tom, 16 Fysh, Hudson, 8, 146, 147 Gaba Tepe, 21 Gaillard, Lucien, 185–6 Gallipoli campaign, August offensive, 132–45 Baby 700 attack, 37–9, 40, 43, 185–6 changes in autumn, 147–8, 167 country, 17 dead of, 189, 193 evacuation, 176–80 landing on, 14–20, 23, 31, 33 plan of, 14, 16 raiding policy, 44, 88, 99–100 Gammage, Bill, 2 George V, 86, 121, 182–3 German New Guinea, 4, 35, 151 German Officers’ Trench, 26, 60, 93, 135–7, 187 Germans, 70, 127–8 Gillison, Andrew, 27, 143 Goddard, Henry, 151, 169, 171 Godley, Alexander, 9, 26, 29, 40, 42, 44, 51, 53, 59, 67, 73, 82, 89, 94, 99, 100, 121, 125, 130, 149 Godley, Lady, 9 Gower, George, 22, 28, 32, 38, 44, 51, 59 Grace, Tom, 103, 113, 143 Graham, Dugald, 57, 59–61, 139, 189

Green, George, 10, 56, 57, 60, 69, 70, 90, 103, 114, 138, 140, 145, 200 Grimson, Charles, 78, 80, 182 Gully Ravine, 21, 116 Gunner (dog), 24 Guppy, Alfred, 24, 27 Hague convention, 66 Halkett, William, 97 Hallam, Douglas, 25, 30 Hamilton, Ian, 15, 19, 20, 51, 66, 68, 73, 82, 86, 130, 132, 144, 156, 158, 167, 183, 191 Hamilton, Jill, 170 Hamley, Edward, 12, 13, 92, 144 Hampton, William, 129 Hanna, Phillip, 121, 145 Hankey, Maurice, 158 Hardey, Norman, 92 Harry, Sam, 48, 122 Harvey, Will, 54 Hebiton, John, 192 Herbert, Aubrey, 58–9, 69–71, 99, 144 Herring, Syd, 78, 79 Hill, Alec, 6 Hill, James, 76, 79 Hill, 60, 151, 175 Hinman, Arthur, 45, 50, 69 Hinton, Herbert, 140 Hodges, Edgar, 112 Hoggart, William, 24, 195 Holderness, Gerald, 97 Holmes, Basil, 151, 153, 155, 172, 174, 179 Holmes, William, 150, 155 Hopkins, Vernon, 170 Horneman, Jack, 126, 184 Hughes, Billy, 175, 190 Hughes, Cyril, 187–8 Hughes, Jackie, 95, 116, 124, 184 Hunter, Bob, 30, 35, 46, 56, 81 Hutton, Arthur, 72, 96, 133, 146 Imbros, 14, 89, 134, 163 Imperial War Graves Commission, 189, 196 Jacka, Albert, 29 Jacobs, Harold, 20, 23, 24 James, Wilfred, 54 Jerram, Fred, 40 Jess, Carl, 15, 22, 23, 35, 45, 71, 136–7 Johnston, Earl, 4, 6, 9, 31, 94, 109, 116, 134, 184 Johnston’s Jolly, 22, 26, 45, 113 Jones, Laura, 185 Kannengeisser, Hans, 127 Kemal, Mustafa, 20, 71 Kennedy Regiment, 4, 35

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QUINN’S POST Kerr, Harold, 140 Kidd, Alex, 80 Kidd, John, 45, 77, Kidd, Tom, 79, 81, 85–7, 97, 139, 151, 183 Kilid Bahr Plateau, 21 Kitchener, Horatio, 158, 166, 172 Kitson, Henry, 83, 86, 98 Kretchmar, Edmund, 41 Krithia, 21, 82, 136 Lambert, George, 139, 186 Lawson, Henry, 190 Lemnos, 14 Lawrence, Cyril, 118, 125 Leary, Leonard, 129 Legge, Gordon, 136, 149, 159 Lesnie, Frank, 150, 167, 173, 182 Liddle, Peter, 85, 173 Little, Edwin, xvi, 41, 42, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 69, 76, 80, 81, 182, 192 Lloyd, David, 191 Lloyd George, David, 158 Logan, Beatrice, 139–42, 184 Logan family, 139–42, 163, 184, 193, 194, 197 Logan, Joe, 140, 182 Logan, Tom, 6, 44, 61, 69, 139–42, 144, 163, 189, 193, 197, 196, 200 Lone Pine, 26, 125, 136, 157, 188, 191 Longmore, Cyril, 63 Lucas, Cecil, 179 Lush, Arthur, 148 Luther, Guy, 38, 45, 50, 57, 144, 189 Lynch, Kenny, 130 Lynden-Bell, Arthur, 167 MacCartney, George, 57, 60 MacGibbon, Ian, 3 MacGregor, Roy, 55, 67–8 Machine-guns, 32–3, 38, 64–6, 104, 129–31 Mackenzie, Compton, 69, 144, 156 MacLaurin’s Hill, 26 Maher, Thomas, 54 Mahoney, Joe, 121 Maidos, 21 Malone, William, 6, 59, 62, 68, 99, 100, 101–10, 123–5, 134–5, 143, 184, 193, 196 Mal Tepe, 16, 21 Malthus, Cecil, 72, 83, 95, 118, 193 Mansbrdige, William, 67 Margolin, Eleazar, 49 Markwell, William, 139 Marson, Cecil, 140, 196 Mason, Robert, 110 Maxwell, John, 149 McAllister, William, 69 McDonald, Donald, 151, 152, 154, 180

McGlinn, John, 25, 36, 42 McInniss, Roland, 108, 167, 169, 173, 175 McKay, James, 136 McKee, Fred, 184 McKenzie, Frank, 19, 92, 93–4, 112, 143, 166 McSharry, Terence, 2, 56, 60, 62, 66, 75, 79, 83, 87, 91, 95, 98, 101, 109, 121, 181, 186, 124, 144, 145, 200, McWhirter, James, 95, 97, 98 Meek, James, 9, 107 Merrington, Ernest, 67, 89, 114, 148, 182 Milburn, Bruce, 192 Milburn, Joseph, 32, 192 Mining, 72–4, 110–12, 122, 125–7, 159–61, 175, 179 Monash, John, xv, 4, 6, 8, 9, 25, 34, 35, 44, 51, 53, 56, 62, 67, 70, 71, 134, 183 Monash Valley, 26; throughout Monro, Charles, 166, 172 Monro-Ferguson, Ronald, 149 Moore, B.L., 191 Mule Valley, 26, 47, 63, 72, 79, 93, 94 Mulholland, Duncan, 154 Mulvey, Eric, 2, 6, 10, 61 Murdoch, Keith, 157–9, 166, 169 Murphy, Frank, 171 Murray, Harry, 64, 66, 183 Nairn, Robert, 135 Nek, the, 26, 134, 141, 188 New Zealand Expeditionary Force Volunteers of 1914, 3, 181, 183 Memorial, 191 New Zealand Infantry Brigade, 88–131 Auckland Bn, 18, 89–101, 196 Canterbury Bn, 19, 83, 85, 89–101, 113, 134, 196 Otago Bn, 37–9, 134 Wellington Bn, 6, 32, 101–31, 134, 143, 150, 196, 198 New Zealand artillery, 64, 94 New Zealand Engineers, 25, 73, 83–4, 105–7, 200 Nicholson, Vic, 109, 115 O’Sullivan, Private, 113 Ottoman empire, 11–12 (see also Turkey) Oxer, Arthur, 38, 143 Paintings The Roll Call (Silas), 52 The Charge … at the Nek (Lambert), 139 Palmer, Hartley, 114, 115, 119, 120 Parker, Walter, 29 Pearce, George, 158 Periscope rifles, 103, 164, 174

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INDEX Pfeifer, Alfred, 34 Plugge’s Plateau, 26, 27 Poems, Burial of Sir John Moore, 167 Charge of the Light Brigade, 138 Don Juan (Byron), 170 From Quinn’s Post, 170 The True Story of Sappho’s Death, 169 Pope, Harold, 4, 75, 77, 81, 84, 85 Pope’s Hill, 23, 26, 43, 65, 73, 134, 138, 189 Power, Thomas, 189 Prior, Robin, xix Propaganda, 57–9, 129 Pugsley, Christopher, 130 Queanbeyan, xiii Quinn, John, 68 Quinn, Hugh, xx, 30, 34, 35, 39, 40, 50, 55, 58, 62, 78, 89, 109, 200, 122, 184, 193 Quinn, Mary Jane, 78, 184 Quinn’s Post, armistice, 24 May, 66–71 artillery support, 64, 94 attacks from, 9 May, 43, 44–52 15 May, 43, 59–61 30 May, 43, 84–7 4 June, 43, 92–6 7–8 June, 43, 96–8 7 August, 43, 138–42 attacks on, 19 May, 43, 62–6 29 May, 43, 75–82 30 June, 117 bombing at, 36, 40, 53–5, 88, 91–2, 101, 102, 113, 151–3, 164, 170–2, 175 bomb-proofs, 42, 44 cemetery at, 27, 44, 107, 187–9, 195 comforts, 169 communicating with enemy, 57–9, 67–8, 70–1, 96, 128–9, 138, 153–6, 179 corpses at, 66, 106, 120–1, 163 correspondents at, 121–4, 156–9 described, 41–4, 88, 162 erosion of, 111, 168, 175, 192, 196 establishment, 18–27 evacuation of, 178–80 film of, 123–4 flies, 115, 119, 151, 153 food, 115–16, 119–20, 153, 162, 165, 169 hygiene, 75, 101, 106, 115–16, 119–20, 153, 169 in 2002, xix in 2004, 195 machine-guns and, 32–3, 38, 64–6, 73, 101–3, 104, 129–31, 164 maps of, 26, 41, 108, 160, 167

memory of, 192–4 mining at, 72–4, 110–12, 122, 159–61, 175, 179 naming of, 34 New Zealanders at, 82–4, no-man’s-land, 41, 90 and rabbits, 42, 73, 153, 167 raids from, 112–14 ruses at, 61, 152, 172 sickness at, 115–16, 119–20, 145–6, 147, 149–50, 153, 162–3, 165, 168, 175 significance, xix–xx, 22–3, 59, 71, 77, 82, 89, 91, 99, 101–2, 147, 162–3, 191–2 ‘silent stunt’, 172–4 sniping, 25, 41–2, 68, 102–3, 113, 115, 174 strain of, 98–100, 118, 121 terraces of, 107, 108, 168, 192 transformation of, 101–10 truces at, 66–71 Turks at, 105, 127–9, 154, 157 water, 114, 168–9, 174 Ranford, Joseph, 57, 134, 146, 182 Rankine, Robert, 24, 25, 27, 34, 53 Red Cross, 38, 50, 61, 169, 184–5 Reserve Gully, 26, 89 Reynolds, Wynfrith, 147 Rhodes, Arthur, 10, 29, 82, 116, 123, 144 Ritchie, Thomas, 93, 95, 106, 115, 119, 120 Roberts, David, 151, 152, 154, 156, 161, 174, 182 Robertson, George, 190 Robertson, John, xxi Robson, Fred, 56, 57 Robson, Lloyd, xxi, 2 Roskill, Stephen, 15 Ross, Malcolm, 83, 146, 156 Royal Navy (see British forces) Ruddle, Charles, 56, 132, 140, 182 Russell’s Top, 23, 26, 32, 39, 43, 62, 65, 73, 166, 172 Russo-Japanese war, 13, 31, 52, 73 Sampson, Burford, 7, 15, 44, 46, 48, 50, 55, 59, 60, 69 Saunders, Wallace, 29, 70, 82, 95, 105, 106, 111, 113, 126, 145, 184, 200 Scarborough, Frederick, 3, 18, 90, 91, 96, 103, 112, 115, 119 Scates, Bruce, 191 Schuler, Phillip, xx, 121, 127 Scott, David, 90, 101 Scrubby Knoll, 16, 26 Scurry, William, 178 Selmes, Jermiah, 127 Shadbolt, Maurice, 199 Shrapnel Gully (later Shrapnel Valley), 26; throughout

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QUINN’S POST Sheppard, William, 152, 153 Shore, Charles, 130 Short, George, 153, 154, 169 Silas, Ellis, 2, 3, 17, 38, 44, 49, 52, 55, 182, 184, 195 Simpkin, Norman, 140 Skelsey, F.W., 25 Skerrett, George, 193 Skinner, Ernest, 38 Slack, Joe, 57, 72, 75 Small, Fred, 86 Smart, Ben, 129 Smith, Alfred, 19 Smith, Nigel, 171 Sniping, 25, 68, 113, 115, 174 Snowden, Robert, 45 Sources, 198–200 Sparks, Joseph, 63, 182 Spencer, Monty, 81 Steele’s Post, 26, 86, 136, 172, 188 Stewart, Hugh, 93–4, 192 Stodart, Robert, 6, 134, 138–42 Stormonth, Stewart, 51, 143 Suvla Bay, 21, 134 Svensen, Nikolai, 45, 46, 47, 50, 182 Swan, James, 103, 119, 143, 184 Swayne, Arthur, 113 Sykes, Francis, 64, 94 Syme, Jack, 69, 85, 86 Temperley, Arthur, 95 Tickner, Ray, 47, 72, 183 Tiddy, Henry, 10, 56, 61, 100, 138, 141, 182 Tilney, Leslie, 79 Toft, John, 48, 183 Tolerton, Jane, 193 Travers, Tim, xx, 16 Treloar, John, xvi, 114, 137 Trench mortars, 64, 77, 104, 135, 164, 174 Tronson, Aubrey, 3 Trotman, Charles, 28 Tuck, George, 18, 22, 177 Tucker, George, 190 Tuggeranong, xiii–xvii

Turkey 57th Regiment, 127, 187 experience of Gallipoli, xx, 70, 127–9, 187, 189 desertion, 58, 127 memory of Gallipoli, 193 morale, 58 prisoners, 46, 79, 86, 95 records, 114 Units, see Australian Imperial Force, New Zealand Expeditionary Force, etc. Utting, Phil, 161 Victoria Cross, 29, 113 Walker, Harold, 116, 137 Walker’s Ridge, 26, 188 Wallingford, Jesse, 22, 32, 36, 64, 103–4 Walsh, Jack, 20, 34, 122 Wareham, Graham, 46, 50 Watts, William, 126 Wazza, 10–11, 19 Weather, 114, 118, 148, 161, 168, 172–3 Weekes, Maurice, 66 Weir, Russell, 193 West, Francis, 20 White, Brudenell, 71, 137, 172, 176–7 White, Richard, 2 Wigram, Clive, 52, 86, 88, 121, 144, 182 Wilkins, Hubert, 186 Williams, Ernest, 94, 97, 184 Wilson, Ailsa, 192 Wilson, Arthur, 130 Winter, Dennis, 15, 16 Wordsworth, Robert, 54, 56 Youden, Fred, 48 Young, Robert, 96, 97, 98 Zeki Bey, 125, 128, 187

230

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