Gallipoli (17 page)

The what?

The venereal disease? Yes, of course there's a bit of a worry about that. Some blokes are pissing razor blades, and others have got the most shocking sores all over their old fella and worse. But I am sure none of that will happen to me.

You say this is why the authorities don't like the Australians heading into the Wazza this regularly – in such numbers, and drinking so heavily – consorting with the whores and so forth? So what? As a species, we Australians are locally notorious for not caring
what
the authorities think.

Not for nothing does the joke soon spread among the other troops camped there that there is an exchange that goes on night after night among the camp sentries:

And it's not just the authorities that many of the Australian troops have no respect for. A disdain for the local folk in general is growing wilder each day. For what started as amused wonderment – to watch them run scared from a scrub wallaby, to see that ‘they won't work on Friday, they say their prayers in the open. Women are beasts of burden, child marriage, harems … ploughs drawn by a camel and a donkey harnessed together'
¹⁸
– descends quickly into a clear sense of superiority over them, and their
disgusting
and
backward
ways.

As one soldier later writes of the local women in a letter to his parents, ‘The women, when they decide to have their clothes washed, once in 3733 years, simply wade right in and wash the clothes on them, at the same time filling their water jug for drinking purposes.'
¹⁹

Generally, the men in these parts seem very timid, refusing to engage and even running away whenever the soldiers chance across them in the desert.

21 DECEMBER 1914, ANZAC: A LEGEND IS BORN

His name is Lieutenant-General William Riddell Birdwood, a veteran English officer of dapper distinction with long and successful campaigns in India and South Africa on his record, and he has been personally given a dashed important task by Lord Kitchener. That is to weld the Australians and New Zealanders into one comprehensive fighting force, an army ‘corps' answerable to one General Headquarters and ruled by one Army Corps Commander – him.

After arriving with his senior staff at the Mena Camp on this morning, having travelled for nine days from his previous base in Bombay, Birdwood sets to with a will. Despite his lack of a soldierly air, and his rather nervous manner – his stammer is pronounced – ‘there is no mistaking his perfectly wonderful grasp of the whole business of soldiering'.
²⁰

Right then …

This corps will have at its base two infantry divisions and a mounted division. To bring the New Zealand Infantry Brigade up to the level of a division, the 4th Australian Infantry Brigade will be added when it arrives in Egypt, as will another infantry brigade if it can be assembled. The mounted division will be composed of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigades (the 3rd Light Horse Brigade will arrive in March) and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade.
²¹

Commanding the Australian forces, of course, is Major-General William Bridges, while the New Zealanders are under the command of a British officer, a long streak of misery, six foot bloody six of him, General Sir Alexander John Godley.

Together, they will be called the ‘Australasian Army Corps', and …

And oh no, they bloody well
won't
.

The men from the ‘Shaky Isles' – as New Zealand is sometimes known, for its propensity for earthquakes – strenuously object to their own identity becoming lost in a name only two letters different from ‘Australian'. (Truly? A lot of the New Zealanders, many of them professional soldiers in the image of Colonel William Malone of the Wellington Battalion, simply don't warm to the loud Australian soldiers with their hard-drinking and wild, whoring ways, and they will
not
be in a corps subsumed by their name. Simply put, at least from the side of the New Zealanders, the tribes of
coo-ee
and
kia ora
are not a natural fit.)

The obvious then beckons.

The ‘Australian and New Zealand Army Corps', then?

Yes, that will do. Bridges and Godley are in agreement.

Now, of course, that is rather a mouthful to put in every cable and on every official document, and it is for this reason that, at a meeting in Cairo's swish Shepheard's Hotel – chosen as the Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces (MEF) headquarters – a discussion takes place as to the best code-word for it. The officers do so in a rather disinterested manner, trying out the sound of such names as ‘Ausnew', which of course wouldn't do, as the New Zealanders would no doubt complain that their part of it is without a capital letter.

It is then that the lowest ranked man in the room, Sergeant K. M. Little of Feilding in New Zealand, comes up with the bleeding obvious on his notepad. ‘Perhaps,' he says to his Major, ‘the word the initials form, “ANZAC”, would serve?'
²²

At this very moment, a junior member of Birdwood's staff enters the room and the Major offers this as a solution. ‘ANZAC!' the junior member says, rolling it around his tongue. ‘Hmm, sounds all right. I'll see the General.'
²³

General Birdwood likes it, and it is done. In a similar salute to equality, the New Zealand Infantry Division, which, along with the 1st Australian Division, makes up ANZAC, is soon renamed the New Zealand and Australian Division.

Broadly, the men come to quite like Birdwood and rather enjoy his sheer
English-ness
. He is the epitome of what they had imagined an English officer to be – with a mouth big enough to hold
two
plums. (Not that Charles Bean minds. Having spent his formative years in England attending the same school as Birdwood, Clifton College, he has one plum himself, and the two get on famously from the first.) And yet, despite that, ‘good old Birdie',
²⁴
as the soldiers refer to him, is not too bad for a Pommy, and he clearly has much the same affection for them. He is openly admiring of their physical strength, if not always their sense of discipline and innate respect for their English superior officers.

It will be the stuff of unproven legend – but the men love the story either way – that one of Birdie's officers, who wears a monocle, turns out on the parade ground one day to be confronted by hundreds of grinning Australian soldiers, each with a penny in their eye. With some aplomb thus, the English officer takes his monocle, throws it into the air,
catches
it in his
eye
, and roars at them, ‘All right, you bastards, let's see you do that.'
²⁵

They cannot, and he has their respect thereafter.

CHRISTMAS DAY 1914, MENA CAMP, IT'S A BONZA FEELING BEING SHICKERED

Yes, for the Anzacs it is a strange thing to spend the holy day of Christmas in a land not so far from where Jesus was born, only to find that the locals for the most part don't care and actually spend much of their time doing what they do every day, banging their heads in the direction of Mecca, but such is their lot.

However, the soldiers are allowed to sleep in for once, and during Church Parade each man is given a specially embossed tin with an image of Princess Mary on the front – the same gracious lady who has donated this present – packed with a heady mix of confectionery, tobacco and spices.

Whacko!

And then to Christmas lunch …

For the occasion, large, temporary sheds are constructed and painted white by the locals, trestle tables put up, with the whole thing decorated by palm fronds and branches of eucalyptus,
²⁶
and a rough kind of Christmas dinner served. ‘Xmas under the pyramids,' Bert Smythe writes home. ‘Fine romantic for a penny horrible isn't it. Give a man a dusty taste in his mouth wouldn't it. All things considered, dust, sand, stew, wind, after dinner [aches], & other misfortunes – our Xmas was fairly Merry & bright we have all survived the unusual ordeal … The plum puddings that we were issued with, were about as big as a large orange & were tied up in small pieces of cloth …

‘We were informed that some of the puddings contained coins. But I doubt it very much as they were made by niggers. After the food has been disposed of, we knocked the heads off the wine bottles & we all got Shickered. It's a bonza feeling being shickered, especially when you reach the stage of seeing double or in my case fourble.'
²⁷

29 DECEMBER 1914, CAIRO, BEAN SPILLS 'EM

Just what is the role of an official war correspondent anyway? To whom does his duty ultimately lie? Is it to the public or to his editors? Is it to the rank and file of the army that he is covering or to that army's senior officers, whom he is most directly answerable to, the same men he depends on for continued access of information? It is a question Charles Bean has great cause to reflect on, and it is an extremely uncomfortable one. Particularly on days like today, when on the stairs of Shepheard's Hotel he is rather brusquely buttonholed by Major-General William Bridges, the man commanding the AIF.

Bridges asks him to write an article essentially explaining why, as Commanding Officer, he is about to send more than a hundred soldiers home in disgrace for reasons varying between gross ill-discipline and having succumbed to venereal disease. ‘It is just as well,' Bridges explains, ‘that Australians should have some idea of why some of them are returning, or else they will probably treat them all, on their own representation, as heroes.'
²⁸

In the end, Bean agrees. For one thing, ‘One gets very ashamed of oneself writing continually all is well when as a matter of fact all is not well. It doesn't seem fair to the people of Australia.'
²⁹
So why not tell the truth, instead of writing the relatively trivial stories he is about to?

Certain he is doing the right thing, he starts to write the long article on his Corona 3 portable typewriter …

Of course, it is not just senior officers and journalists who worry about the number of Australian soldiers going whoring. For many AIF soldiers themselves are gutted by what is going on, and no one more than 32-year-old Private Tom Richards, a 1st Field Ambulance stretcher-bearer. A famous rugby union flanker – both a Wallaby
and
a British Lion before the war – he writes in his diary on 29 December, ‘I have not been inside one of those places, but I am told from six to a dozen soldiers are often waiting in one room for their turn. It also shows a terrible weakness in our educational affairs when young men must run this awful risk to get their knowledge of the world and thereby learn to curb their carnal appetite.'
³¹

Still, not all of the encounters are sordid. Trooper Bluegum – despite having pledged his love to Jean forevermore – is one soldier completely smitten with a particular woman he has met out on the town in Cairo. ‘I will never forget those Egyptian nights,' he would later reminisce, ‘and one girl of girls. Tall and stately, like a queen she moved amongst the revellers. The rest of the dancers were just the frame round her picture … We danced. Her blue eyes laughed into mine … And the world has never been the same world since.'
³²

Somewhere between smitten and
bitten
, he simply cannot get her out of his head.

AFTERNOON, 31 DECEMBER 1914, ALBANY, HITCHING A RIDE

It is a measure of just how confident the Australian authorities now are that the Indian Ocean really has been swept clean of German raiders that on this afternoon, as the second contingent of troops takes its leave of Albany, bearing over 11,000 Australian soldiers and 123 nurses, nearly 2000 New Zealand soldiers and over 6500 horses on 17 transports, it is escorted only by the tiny
AE2
. The submarine is being towed by the armed merchantman turned troop-carrier HMAS
Berrima
, and it is ready to detach at a moment's notice and engage in battle if necessary.

On board HMAT
Ceramic
, one English-born soldier who in civilian life had been an accomplished artist, Ellis Silas of the 16th Battalion of the AIF 4th Brigade, records in his diary, ‘A greyish day. Nature is sad. She weeps for us as we steam away close to the great bluffs of the coast of Western Australia. Far away astern of us there are a few specks getting ever smaller – the last sight of Australia – 'tis fitting that the dusk should be creeping on, for it was seven years ago that I saw these same specks of land at the dawn of a glorious day – that was my first view of Australia, the land which has been so much to me, which gave me my great chance in life, which I now leave perhaps for ever.'
³³