Solomon's Song (58 page)

It is best, I’ve found, not to speculate about these things and to take each day as it comes. Though, I confess, if I had been in charge I would have culled men such as these from the bayonet charges where they could be mowed down from the parapets without firing a single shot. They were too valuable behind a rifle. Though, of course, we are all cattle in this abattoir we called Gallipoli.

We were to go over together when the whistle went at five-thirty. Waiting was always the worst time, to be sitting ducks while the shrapnel burst overhead, a Heritable cloudburst of deadly pellets, and at any moment you imagined that you would take a direct hit. We had stacked our packs behind the lines so that we could run with all our might, water bottle and ammunition pouches and iron rations all that we carried. We expected to fight well into the night and sewed white calico patches to our sleeves and backs so that we could be seen in the dark by our own men. Of course, this proved just as handy to the Turk who could now distinguish us from his own.

8th January

The whistle went and we were over, it was too late to be afraid now. The new chums were shouting out, ‘Here come the Australians!’ Some were even singing and all rushed forward as though it was a race at a Sunday school picnic. To use an expression coined here at Gallipoli ‘all hell broke loose’, it was not yet dark enough to conceal us and a fire started by shrapnel on the Daisy Patch lit us up clearly enough for the waiting Turkish machine guns. Sixty yards at a Sunday school picnic is not much but now it seemed a mile or more. Machine-gun fire, artillery shells, lyddite, hand-thrown bombs and a wall of rifle fire rained down on us. Men fell on either side of us, some sprawled over the barbed wire so that others coming from behind simply used them as mats. I glanced to either side of me and to the back to check my platoon. The ground all the way back from the trenches where we’d started was littered with the bodies of our men, some of whom had taken no more than a single step forward before dying.

We had already decided to go for the trenches we’d occupied as we knew the layout with the covered section at the southern end. We’d make for this part so that we couldn’t be fired directly upon and then we’d come down from the roof of what we’d preciously called the shed and jump into the trench. We’d rehearsed this carefully and I’d drawn a map of the dugouts, communication trenches and saps with each man allocated a place to enter and fight. Even the new recruits knew the layout of this particular section and where they should go. Wordy Smith with his long legs was the first over and onto the roof, closely followed by Crow Rigby. The roof was almost safe as the Turks were firing forward and would have had to turn halfway around to fire directly at us. In the confusion they seemed not even to see us about to descend from the roof of the trench down into them. It was exactly how Jack Tau Paranihi had described the way the New Zealanders had taken the trench on the early morning of the day of the landing.

I looked back over the ground we’d just covered to see if there were any stragglers from our platoon, a quick look seemed to indicate that we’d lost a few in the charge and I could only hope that they were wounded and not killed. But what I saw about thirty yards from the trench was Woggy Mustafa trying to come forward, his chest a splash of crimson. He would rise to his feet, take a few steps towards us, then fall and rise again.

Suddenly I heard a cry of anguish from Numbers Cooligan, ‘Woggy! The bastards! The f… ing bastards!’ Whereupon he dropped his rifle on the roof of the Turkish trench and ran straight back into the melee, pushing some of our own troops aside as he ran against the tide of oncoming men and flashing bayonets. He reached Woggy who had risen again and now fell into Cooligan’s arms. Cooligan was one of the smallest men in our platoon and Mustafa one of the biggest, but the little man hefted him across his shoulder and, turning, ran towards us. He was no more than five yards away from where we stood when a Turkish machine gun turned on him and cut them both to pieces at the foot of the parapet.

I am not sure what happened next. I know we were down into the trench from the roof. I was not conscious of dropping my rifle nor that I had unslung my fighting axe from the holster at my back. All I can remember was seeing the machine-gunner deliberately turn his gun on little Cooligan and the next thing I knew was that eight Turks lay dead between me and the machine-gunner. And then, apparently he saw me and turned the machine gun into the trench but before he had the barrel around in an arc sufficient to aim at us the axe had left my hand and split his head open, cleaving his skull in half from the brow down to his mouth.

Later Wordy Smith told me that I had pushed them all aside as we’d jumped into the trench and my axe had taken the throats of eight terrified Turks standing between me and the Turk who had killed Numbers Cooligan, my eyes never leading the machine-gunner. The remaining Turks, about twenty in all, seeing me coming at them with the axe, could quite simply have shot me. Instead they turned and fled for their lives. We’d won our section of the trench and the men moved on to clean up the Turks who’d hidden from the artillery bombardment in several small tunnels, communication trenches, the shed and the saps, killing another seventeen of the enemy.

For my part, I can claim no heroics, I was not conscious of what I was doing, my fury overriding any caution or commonsense. In truth, I showed poor leadership. I only tell you this so you will know the power of shock and grief and the disregard one has for one’s own life in such circumstances.

Numbers Cooligan showed the real courage. By going out to bring his mate back in he had no earthly chance of surviving. Our little Gob Sergeant had thought only to bring Woggy back in, to allow him to die with his mates. We pulled them both back into the trench and cleaned them up the best we could and put them in the shed so when the sun rose in the morning they would be in the shade and hopefully away from the worst of the flies. I will see that they get proper graves. I emptied their pockets so that I could remove the letter they’d been instructed to write home. Woggy had left his envelope open and attached a scrap of paper to it asking for his crucifix to be taken from his neck and included in his letter addressed to his mother. To my surprise Numbers Cooligan’s letter was addressed to me. I opened it to find twenty pounds and the following note:

Sergeant Ben Teekleman.

Dear Ben,

I don’t have no parents as I was an orphan boy. The bloke at Flemmo racecourse was not my uncle and a real bastard. But I have you and Wordy Smith and seven other brothers now - so will you use this money what’s my ill-gotten gains and when it’s all over have a beer or ten on me. Tell the lads no bloke ever had a better bunch of brothers and I loves you all. Also, tell Woggy I’m sorry for the hard time I gave him, he is the best Christian I have ever known, bar none, I swear it on my granma’s grave (whoever she was!). It’s been a real pleasure, mate.

Wayne Numbers Cooligan

Gob Sergeant, No. 2 Platoon, B Company,

5th Battalion, 1st Division A.I.F. Gallipoli, 1915.

9th January

If we had hoped for a respite after taking the trench we were to be disappointed. We’d clearly driven the enemy from Lone Pine but at a terrible cost, Woggy Mustafa and Numbers Cooligan were but two of thousands who eventually died, a thousand men or more on the first day. The order was to hold on and to expect a counterattack and, indeed, we were not let down in this regard.

They came at us from the start and what followed were three days, wave after wave, of the fiercest possible fighting, a great deal of it at close quarters and with a bayonet, the cruellest of all the weapons and the only one where we touched the man we killed. Often we could feel his hot breath on our faces, and as he died clutching his stomach, the Turkish lad would cry out for his mama, as our own had. I confess with a degree of shame that I found the fighting axe to be a much more efficient weapon than the awkward rifle with its clumsy knife attached to the end of its barrel. Grandfather Tommo’s skill with the axe, passed somehow on to me, has, I believe, saved my life on several occasions and, of more importance, has helped to save others. It must have proved a very effective weapon in the Maori wars.

We learned from the enemy the nastiness of hand-thrown bombs. They have a small bomb about the size and shape of a cricket ball which they throw into our trenches. It has a nasty explosion which can kill but will mostly blow off a foot or blind you. At first we found these very awkward to handle and used to drop a sandbag over them to prevent any damage. But then we discovered that the fuses were fairly long and that we could pick them up and throw them back at the enemy. They soon enough cottoned onto this and made the fuses shorter so that we had to either catch them in mid-air or move very fast to throw them back for they would take anything from one to five seconds to explode. The men became quite expert at it but, alas, losing a hand was a common enough occurrence.

We have our own version of this little weapon, empty jam tins packed with explosives and any pieces of metal found lying about. These are manufactured at the bomb factory on the beach or by the men in the dugouts and they are just as effective. The men call these bombs ‘the hissing death’, for the hiss and splutter of the lighted fuse.

For three days and nights we stood face to face hurling these bombs at each other or charging with fixed bayonets. All the while both sides were sending down a veritable hailstorm of rifle and machine-gun fire. Furthermore, when the enemy were not attacking they bombarded us with a constant barrage of artillery shells. There was not even five seconds of continuous silence in the three days of fighting and we were exhausted to the point of collapse, the men taking turns to sleep although the fighting was raging around them.

Even this had its problems, the dead were everywhere, the Turks’ and our own. We had no time to remove them from the trenches and no possibility of burying them, they were piled four or five deep in our own trench and even higher in others. Throwing them over the side meant we were unsighted, unable to look over them from the rifle platforms as they piled up in front of the trenches.

If a man, too exhausted to lift his rifle, needed a spell there was little choice but to sit on a dead man. My men slept with the dead as mattresses.

The stench of bodies rotting in the sun was unbearable. We managed to find six gas protectors to help with the smell, and these were shared, an hour at a time, to bring relief from the terrible smell. By the third day of fighting there were more dead than alive and I had lost thirty men in my platoon and every single one of Numbers Cooligan’s ‘brothers’ had joined him in death. As each died beside me I prayed that I would be next. Now I shall have to drink out Private Wayne ‘Numbers’ Cooligan’s twenty quid on my own. I hope to stay drunk for a month if it will help just a little to kill the terrible sadness which consumes me.

Wordy Smith is also dead and I am still too numb to mourn him and them beyond crying in my sleep. I shall try, for the sake of their parents, to tell you how each of them lost his life, though I have not the strength to do so today and will try again tomorrow.

10th January

I shall begin today with the statistics of Lone Pine. On the ninth of August the Turks had had enough. Or perhaps they realised that the main threat to them was the British who had landed at Suvla Bay. We did not know this and fought as if the war must end right where we stood, as if it was our own persona! responsibility. We had killed six thousand of them in the three days of fighting and we had lost two thousand three hundred dead and wounded. Our own dead lay thickly spread on Lone Pine where, when the burial parties came to fetch them, the maggots dropping from their bodies were gathered in bucketfuls.

Lone Pine was thought to have had the bloodiest hand-to-hand fighting of the war and continued for three days. But on the day following our attack on the Turkish trenches several skirmishes to the north also occurred which, in their own way, were every bit as tragic.

I was not there, of course, still being occupied at Lone Pine, but I have heard about them from some who were, those precious few who lived. I must assure you there is not the slightest exaggeration in any of the details.

The 8th and 10th Light Horse regiments were called upon to take a position known as The Nek, a ridge about fifty yards wide at the Anzac front line and thirty yards or so at the Turkish trenches, so that any bayonet charge from our lines would have the effect of forcing troops into a bottleneck, concentrating their numbers for the Turkish machine guns and rifles. Our trenches and those of the Turks were only twenty yards apart, not much deeper than the average suburban backyard. Five Turkish machine guns covered the ground between them, not to mention the Turks in their own trenches armed with rifles.

The Light Horse were new troops on the peninsula with no old hands among them. This was their first great battle and, like us, they were anxious to make their mark. They told themselves they must prove their mettle and show they could fight as well as their countrymen whom they had watched from the heights to the north as we mounted the attack on Lone Pine the evening before. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed they stood, four lines of one hundred and fifty men each were to attack at two-minute intervals, their objective the Turkish trenches immediately to their front and the maze of trenches and saps on Baby 700 directly behind the Turkish front line. These trenches to the immediate rear of the Turkish front line were critical to their own attack and were lined with machine guns capable of halting the Australians in their tracks. The idea was for the artillery to pound the Turkish front line and their trenches behind it mercilessly to the very moment of the charge by the Light Horse. In this way the Turks would not be able to get into position before our troops were in among them with their bayonets. Timing was everything, the artillery would halt at four-thirty and at the same moment our men would be over and running.

At 4.23 the artillery stopped, seven minutes short. Three minutes that would cost us countless dead. Seven minutes in which the Turks could get into position, two deep, in their front trenches with their rifles ready, fire a few bursts from their machine guns to clear them and then simply wait for us to come.