The Wicked Boy (30 page)

The bearers needed unusual resilience to endure the passivity of their role: they were required to witness savage violence, to step forward to comfort the wounded, while never lifting a hand against the enemy. The
Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services
observed that ‘the courage required of the stretcher-bearer was of a peculiar and (so to speak) unnatural quality; not the instinctive response of the courageous animal to attack, but an acquired and “conditioned” inhibition of the instinct to flight; a deliberate disciplining of the mind and will through the impulse of “self-respect”.' The bearers were ‘servants at once of humanity and of hatred, of the Geneva Convention and of the Military Command'. Unlike other soldiers, they had to suppress their impulses to defend themselves or others.

This passivity made the bearers especially prone to nervous collapse. The 13th Battalion bearer
James Dow
, who was later diagnosed with neurasthenia, described the agony of watching a friend slowly die in the dugout beside him. ‘What makes us mad,' he wrote in a letter to his parents, ‘is that they snipe you and you cannot revenge your mates.'

On the night of 2 May, the 13th was instructed to attack the Turks from one of the ridges at the top of the valley. As the soldiers advanced under cover of fire from the British gunships, they sang ‘Tipperary' and ‘Australia Will Be There', the swell of their voices flooding down the valley behind them to the beach. They fought furiously through the night, digging fresh trenches on the plateau beyond their ridges, but when dawn broke they found that the battalions that should have protected their flanks had failed to arrive. Exposed on all sides to Turkish shells and machine-gun fire, the men of the 13th were mown down. ‘
It was just hell pure and simple
,' wrote a private, ‘with the gates wide open.'

Robert and the other bearers ferried dozens of men down to the beach, many with their limbs blown off or their bellies split open. At the 4th Brigade Field Ambulance station, Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Beeston operated on the casualties. ‘
Some of these are very ghastly
,' he wrote in his diary. ‘A shell will carry the whole of the intestines away, others half of the abdomen. Nothing can be done for these unfortunate fellows but fill them up with Morphia, and await the end.' In total, the 13th had now lost more than half of its 934 men, and fourteen of its twenty-five officers. The commander of Robert's company, Captain Brache, fell down a ravine on the night of 2 May and broke his back. Major Ellis, the battalion's second-in-command, was hit by a sniper and died the next day.

The once-derided Colonel ‘Granny' Burnage had been continually in the front line in these first days on Gallipoli. He led his troops into action and steadied them when they wavered. ‘He is as brave as a lion,' said Private Hobson, ‘and we have grown to love him.'

General John Monash, the commander of the 4th Brigade, reflected in mid-May: ‘
We have been fighting now
continuously for twenty-two days, all day and all night, and most of us think that absolutely the longest period during which there was absolutely no sound of gun or rifle fire, throughout the whole of that time, was ten seconds. One man says he was able on one occasion to count fourteen, but nobody believes him!' The general had come to know the sound of each projectile: ‘the bullet which passes close by has a gentle purring hum, like a low caressing whistle, long drawn out. The bullet which passes well overhead has a sharp sudden crack like a whip. . . Our machine guns are exactly like the rattle of a kettledrum. The enemy's shrapnel sounds like a gust of wind in a wintry gale, swishing through the air and ending in a loud bang and a cloud of smoke, when the shell bursts. Our own artillery is the noisiest of all. . . ear-splitting, with a reverberating echo that lasts 20 or 30 seconds.'

The men of the 13th continued to attack the Turks and to defend themselves, with bullets, bayonets, handmade bombs, neither advancing nor retreating from their positions on the ridge. Of all the troops, the stretcher-bearers made the most forays into the lines of enemy fire. Corporal Harold Sorrell, a Methodist divinity student and one of the 13th Battalion bearers, reported to his parents that month: ‘
There is not a front line
trench in the whole of the field into which we have not been. I have been hit four times, and have had countless narrow shaves. One morning I had just dressed a man's broken leg, and was lifting him on to a stretcher when the sniper's bullet whizzed under my arm, and drew blood on the three knuckles, and entered the patient's neck, fortunately not killing him.'

Many of the dead lay in a wheat field between the two front lines, swelling in the heat. During an armistice on 24 May, hundreds of Turkish and Allied troops walked in to the no-man's land between the trenches to collect the bloated, maggot-infested corpses for burial. The men tied handkerchiefs around their faces to stave off the smell. When the truce came to an end at 4.30 p.m., the Australians exchanged cigarettes and souvenirs with their Turkish counterparts and wished them well. Then the fighting resumed.

The Turks blew in a section of the trenches occupied by the 13th on the night of 29 May: there was a muffled roar as the earth rocked, the underside of a cloud glowed red with the reflected explosion, and men were buried where they stood or lay. The Turks then threw their bombs. ‘
Grenades like showers of peas
,' wrote a lieutenant, ‘and the noise and the flashes and confusion in the darkness, together with thick curtains of acrid smoke, made this portion of the line a terrible Hades.'

‘The stretcher-bearers worked like heroes,' recalled Private Hobson. When Colonel Burnage was wounded, the bearers went quickly to his aid, but he told them to leave him until all the other injured men had been evacuated.

After this attack the 13th Battalion, bearded and scrawny, finally went into rest in the valley.

General Monash and Colonel Burnage congratulated the troops on their courage and endurance, giving special praise to the stretcher-bearers. In the official 13th Battalion history, the bearers were described as ‘magnificent, without exception', and Robert was one of eleven men in the force of almost a thousand to be singled out for the service they had given in the days after the landing. He and the divinity student Harold Sorrell were also lauded for their ‘exceptionally splendid and gallant work' in carrying the wounded down from the ridges in the attack of early May, and in risking their lives to gather and bury all the bodies that they could find.

The official historian of the AIF rated the 4th Brigade's defence of the ridges above the valley as one of the four finest Australian achievements of the war. For Robert, the achievement was very particular. In Broadmoor, every aspect of his life had been regulated, from the temperature of his bath to the location of his tailoring shears; on the ridges of Gallipoli he was subject to unfettered sensation and danger. Some of the sights and smells and sounds were weirdly reminiscent of the scene in his mother's bedroom at Cave Road: the groaning bodies, the sweet, ammoniac stink of rotting flesh, the descent of the flies. This time, though, it fell to Robert to save the wounded and to honour the dead.

The Australians were effectively in a state of siege: 20,000 men were occupying an area less than three-quarters of a mile square, bounded on one side by the ridges, on another by the narrow beach. From their camp in the valley, the men of the 13th looked up at the crest above them, scorched bare by gunfire; and down at the Aegean Sea, pink and yellow as the sun rose and sapphire at noon.

Some of the troops in the valley dug trenches and tunnels, while others were sent to the beach to unload the barges and distribute supplies. They shifted crates of bully beef and cheese, bags of sugar, boxes of biscuits and ammunition; they loaded water on to mules to carry up the hills by night, and wounded men on to boats that would take them to the hospital ships in the bay. Those working on the beach could hear the shrill whistles of the small craft, the rattle of anchor chains, the hiss of steam and the hoots of trawlers as well as the constant din of battle in the hills and of shells hitting the shore. Many of the men stripped off to bathe in the sea, cooling themselves in the water until gunfire lashed up the foam.

In June the heat in the valley rose to 84 degrees. The men were ankle-deep in dust, and constantly pestered by flies: house flies were breeding at the manure heaps, blowflies in the bodies of the dead. The flies settled on the latrines and the mess tins, floated in mugs of tea. The troops had only to open their mouths for the flies to dart in. Captain Shellshear had trained his stretcher-bearers in sanitation but the rate of infection was such that by the end of July, 80 per cent of the men had contracted dysentery, or ‘Gallipoli gallop'. The stench of excrement and decay drifted out to the boats in the bay. Hundreds of reinforcements were shipped in to take the places of the wounded, the sick and the dead.

In August the 13th took part in two further failed attacks on the Turks, in the mountains to the north of Monash Valley, and again suffered terrible losses. The stretcher-bearers were overwhelmed by the task of carrying the wounded to safety; many were themselves injured or killed.

Robert had escaped serious injury
in his first six months at Gallipoli, despite being hit at least twice by shells and once by a bullet, but in November he contracted hepatitis and trench foot. Rain, snow and blizzards assailed the peninsula, and Robert's toes swelled, blackened and burned in the icy water that flooded the trenches. That month the Allies at last decided to give up on the Gallipoli campaign. In preparation for an exit, they instructed the soldiers intermittently to fall silent, to accustom the Turks to an absence of noise in the Allied trenches. On 10 December,
Robert's fellow bearer James Dow
reported to his parents that only six of the original 13th Battalion bearers remained on the peninsula. The others, said Dow, had been ‘shot off'.

On 12 December, Robert became one of 900 men to sail for Egypt on the hospital ships. The rest of the Australian troops were stealthily taken off the peninsula over the next week. The attempt to eliminate Turkey from the war had failed, but the evacuation, at least, was a success.

About 10,000 AIF soldiers
spent the Christmas of 1915 in hospital in Egypt. Among the white marble columns of the former Palace Hotel in Heliopolis, Robert was supplied with toothpaste and soap and clean pyjamas, and tended by Australian nurses in starched uniforms. He asked that Nattie be informed of his whereabouts.

Nattie was also serving
with the Australian forces. The
Australia
, on which he was a stoker, had taken part in a mission to occupy the capital of German New Guinea in August 1914 and had since covered more than 40,000 miles chasing two German destroyers across the Atlantic. In the heat of the tropics, the stoke hole grew so hot that the stokers took off all their clothes. ‘
The perspiration dripped
down their naked bodies into their boots, out of which they poured it in streams,' reported the engineer-commander, ‘but we kept after the Germans without losing a knot.' The journey was interrupted only by the dirty and exhausting business of loading fuel from colliers stationed off tropical islands. Towards the end of 1915 the
Australia
was sent to patrol the North Sea, where the crew were issued with
rabbit-skin coats
to protect them from the bitter cold. Nattie was promoted stoker petty officer, the equivalent to the army rank of sergeant. He received the news of Robert's ill health on Christmas Day.

Robert was discharged to a camp on the other side of the Nile in January 1916 but instead of being returned to the 13th Battalion was
transferred to one of the sanitary sections
that were being set up to oversee hygiene in the field. He was promoted corporal, which entitled him to an increase in pay to ten shillings a day and gave him authority for the first time over other soldiers.

Robert's unit formed part of the 4th Division, which included the 13th Battalion and also a new 45th Battalion, to which half of the men of the 13th had been transferred. From March onwards, the division guarded the Suez Canal and trained in the desert nearby. The men were again plagued by insects in the intense heat; Robert and the other sanitary officers helped to limit infection by burning manure and
building box-latrines
. On 25 April,
the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings
, the Prince of Wales visited the camp to watch the division compete at water sports in the canal. General Monash pinned blue ribbons to all the men who had served in the Dardanelles and red ribbons to those, like Robert, who had taken part in the landing. These early recruits would become known as ‘the Adventurers', ‘the Originals' and ‘the Pioneers'.

Robert sailed from Alexandria for Marseilles with the 4th Division's medical section on 1 June 1916, then took a three-day rail journey north to French Flanders. The British commanders urgently needed the Australians to reinforce the Allied line along the Western Front. After the sand and dust of Egypt, the Australian troops were dazzled by the colour of France in June: the green fields, the blue cornflowers, the scarlet poppies, the tiny white blossoms in the hedgerows. Grateful villagers pressed strawberries and cigarettes on the soldiers when the train stopped at the stations along the track; at longer halts, Australians dashed in to the villages to buy chocolate and wine.

Behind the lines in Flanders, Robert and the men in his charge built latrines and urinals. They erected incinerators to burn rubbish, manure and faeces. They cleaned the streets and billets, supervised the baths in which the troops came to wash and the laundries that disinfected their lice-ridden uniforms. They tested the drinking water. The sanitary officers urged the troops to bury their waste in shallow trenches or shell holes, or, better still, to defecate in pits, pans or biscuit tins covered with fly-proof lids. They told the cooks to wash their hands with soap, to disinfect their implements, to burn food waste, and to use grease traps when disposing of dirty water. Robert was promoted acting sergeant.