When the Ulysses sailed through the Suez Canal at the end of the month, the troops lining the banks greeted the new arrivals with cheers. The Australians yelled back: ‘D’you want some stew?’ They disembarked in Alexandria on 1 February 1915 and took the train to Cairo. From there, the men marched the last three miles to the camp at Heliopolis. The band’s clarinets, trumpets, euphoniums, bassoons, tubas, bugles, cornets, cymbals and drums were transported by truck.
The presence of the Australians was designed to discourage any local dissent in Egypt, which the British had declared a protectorate in December. The 13th trained hard in the hot dust and sand, engaging in sham fights, drills, night manoeuvres, trench-digging, twenty-mile marches through the desert. Egypt was ‘Bum – very bum’, concluded Private Susman: ‘Hell with the lid on.’ The men complained among themselves about the incompetence of their officers, particularly their commander, Colonel Granville John Burnage, whom they dubbed ‘Granny’, and his stiff, rule-bound sidekick Major Walter Ellis.
The soldiers bought drugged cigarettes and embroidered sateen souvenirs in the Cairo bazaars, and paid for sex in the brothels. Outside the city, they climbed pyramids and rode donkeys and camels, pursued by street vendors who cried out ‘eggs-a-cook!’ as they pulled boiled eggs from the folds in their gowns. The soldiers were strange and comical to the Egyptians, too, with their weird pets (one battalion brought a kangaroo as a mascot) and futuristic vehicles. The AIF had an armour-plated desert truck that the troops called ‘The Terror’, the name that the dime-novel hero Jack Wright gives to an electric carriage that he has invented to ride across the American West. The Australian soldiers had been raised on the same penny fiction as their British counterparts.
Robert’s band performed at church parades and funeral services and on marches. At the start of a night march through the desert, they stood in two feet of sand as they played their boys out with ‘Here We Are, Here We Are Again’. After a forty-eight-hour sandstorm they played them into camp with ‘The End of a Perfect Day’. On 1 April they performed for the troops by moonlight in a palm grove by the Nile. Even Private Susman was by now smitten with pride: ‘Our band,’ he told his diary, ‘is at present the crack band of the military forces in Egypt.’
Robert and his fellow bandsmen doubled as their battalion’s stretcher-bearers, the soldiers who would administer first aid on the battlefield and carry wounded troops to safety. The size of a band roughly corresponded to the number of stretcher-bearers required by a battalion, and it was convenient to train them as a group. Captain Cyril Shellshear, the battalion medical officer, taught the musicians to dress and bind wounds, to fashion slings and splints for broken limbs and to load a man on to a stretcher. The collapsible wood and canvas stretchers were fitted with leather halters that the bearers could strap over their necks to spread the load. They were also taught to carry the wounded without the aid of a stretcher: hoisted over a bearer’s back in a fireman’s lift or sitting on two bearers’ clasped hands.
In April the Australian troops learnt that they were to sail for Turkey as part of an Allied plan to seize the Gallipoli peninsula, gain control of the Dardanelles strait, capture Constantinople and knock Turkey out of the war. On 11 April, recalled Sergeant Charles Laseron of the 13th, ‘we left Heliopolis and marched to the station with the band playing and everybody swinging jauntily, much bucked-up by the prospect of immediate active service’. In Alexandria, they boarded a filthy tramp steamer and set out to sea, the band performing ‘The Marseillaise’ as they sailed past the French troop ships in the bay.
The 13th Battalion soldiers were known for the excellence of their trench-digging and their marching, for the speed with which they could load their guns, and for a cool, stubborn spirit known as ‘hide’. The flippancy of some could shade into a harsh contempt. As they lay in the dark ship crossing the Mediterranean, horse urine dripping on to them from the deck above, they sang to the tune of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’:
Onwards ragtime soldiers
Fed on bread and jam
For our bloody colonel
We don’t care a damn.
See our gallant major
Strutting on ahead,
And our only prayer is –
May God strike him dead.
On 17 April the steamer anchored off the Greek island of Lemnos, sixty miles west of the Dardanelles, and on the night of 24 April the battalion band gave a final concert. The men roared for encores. ‘Good old band!’ they cried at the close. In the morning Robert put his cornet into storage and buckled on the armband that marked him out as a stretcher-bearer, the initials ‘SB’ embroidered in red wool on cream cloth. At 10.40 a.m. the battalion sailed for Gallipoli.
As the ship anchored near Suvla Bay in the afternoon of 25 April, the men of the 13th looked out at the thin beach, the sheer, scrubby rock face behind it, the shells bursting from the mountains, the rifles flashing and snapping in the dust and smoke. The first waves of Australian and New Zealand – or Anzac – troops had landed on the peninsula in the early hours of the morning and were fighting in the hills while Allied battleships bombed the Turkish positions from the bay.
At 9.30 that night the soldiers began to clamber down the rope ladders on to a destroyer, from which they were transferred to rowing boats that carried them closer to shore. A few of the men were hit by Turkish bullets before they reached land. The rest climbed out of the boats with their heavy packs and waded to the beach, where the bullets continued to whip down among them.
Hundreds of soldiers were wandering about on the beach, having retreated from the front line dazed or wounded. The Turks, though initially outnumbered, had used their superior artillery to inflict great losses on the Australians and New Zealanders, driving the invaders back so that they now held only a broken line of ridges close to the bay. The new arrivals were told to head up the slope to plug a gap in the line.
The soldiers of the 13th were under constant fire as they climbed the hill past scores of dead and wounded soldiers. When they reached the narrow, jutting ridges at the head of the valley they began to dig in. As they dug they fought, shooting at the Turks across the flat fields between the trenches. The Australians were exposed if they moved even a few feet back, and the Turks were, in places, barely forty yards in front of them. Above the steady clink of the shovels, the shells screeched. ‘The noise is hell,’ wrote Hobson in his diary.
The bearers were kept busy from the start. When Robert heard the cry ‘Stretcher-bearer!’, he and a comrade hurried forward with a stretcher and a pannier of supplies: scissors, bandages, dressings, water, morphine tablets. They would staunch and bind an injured soldier’s wounds, lay him on the stretcher and carry him away for treatment. Regimental bearers usually took the wounded only as far as a dressing station or ambulance just behind the front line, but in the chaos of the Gallipoli landings they had to haul them all the way down the ravine to the shore. Robert and the other bearer would edge through the gravelly gully with their load, dodging bullets and shells from the hills, using their bodies as brakes as they slipped on loose stones. At the casualty clearing station on the beach, which was often itself raked with artillery fire, they handed over the wounded. Then they climbed back up, grabbing at tufts of scrub along the tracks, their hands and clothes snagging on bristles as they picked their way through rocky fissures to fetch the next casualty.
In these first days and nights, the bearers worked with courage and tenacity. All around them men cursed and screamed, crazed by thirst or pain or terror. Some of the bearers collapsed from exhaustion as they struggled down the gullies, and then rose to carry on. ‘The stretcher-bearers are great,’ attested one soldier. ‘They go up and down all the time in the open, carrying the wounded through a withering shellfire. It’s magnificent to see them. They are the real heroes of the affair, because they are unarmed and exposed to everything.’ Private Ray Lingard, a twenty-one-year-old 13th Battalion bearer, explained in a letter to his uncle: ‘The Turks are waiti
ng for you to just bob up so as to have a smack at you. We stretcher-bearers are not protected by the Red Cross, so you see they are at liberty to blaze away as much as they like.’ The bearers came to symbolise the ‘mateship’ that was forged at Gallipoli: a spirit of unflagging, selfless devotion that was the kernel of the Australian soldier’s identity. At night they dug graves for the dead.
The bearers slept in the hillside below the ridges, where they were frequently assailed with shells. ‘One landed within seven or eight yards of my dug-out, but luckily did not explode,’ wrote Private Lingard. ‘It buried itself about seven feet in the ground . . . We were trying to cook some tea, but shells kept landing and throwing up heaps of earth in the air all around us.’ The troops treated the danger like play, the proximity of death as a wild joke. ‘I never laughed so much in my life as I did when those big shells were landing,’ said Lingard.
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.