ANZAC COVE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3779, 14 April 1928, Page 4

ANZAC COVE.

A SAPPER’,S MEMORIES

Recent issues of the London Daily Telegraph have contained a Gallipoli Diary, by Mr Ashmead-Ba>t-lett, which has run through a series of issues and which has provoked quite a lot of correspondence. One of the most interesting of these letters is from Nat Savage, in Gal lopoli days a member of the Royal Engineers Signalling Corps. He says: —

“Your diarist emphasises the peculiar flavour of adventure about the expedition, and a sort of spiritual exaltation at the beginning that must have resembled the feelings of the old-time adventurers when they set out to conquer strange lands and face novel perils. The same fantastic twist gave ‘social’ life at Anzac Cove a novelty which can only be fully realised‘ by one who actually lived it. There was only a small body of English troops there, among the Australians and New Zealanders, mostly Signal men. I was a humble member of the Signal Company.

“I don’t suppose that any modern military expedition ever led such a self-contained life. There we were, marooned on a strip of desert land together, and as near such a paradox as a military democracy as it is possible to get. The generals lived amongst us, like common men, and not as the Olympians of the Western Front. We could see all their comings out and their goings in. They stood the test. General Birdwood could even abandon that without which no man is supposed capable of dignity—his clothes —and go in for his daily swinT mother-naked.

“It was remarkable how the English Staff officers seemed to adapt themselves to the,breezier Antipodean standards of behaviour. I never heard a word of adverse cri ticism against them as a class. It will perhaps be sufficient to say that they never ducked —and that is saying a lot. The most cheerful man there was Brigadier-General Leslie, the C.R.E. I don’t believe he ever had a night’s sleep without being called out from his dugout to answer the telephone several times — and that after long and gruelling days. I often called him out in the small hours of the morning to come down to the signal and he never was even snappy. It was a favourite ‘jape’ of his, when aroused, to ask, with mock anxiety, ‘ls it a lady?’ The prospects of a lady ever calling up Anzac Cove can be imagined.

“The life on the beach was a wonderful and curious spectacle. After a spell in the lines, the Aussies revelled in the'bathing, which was really glorious; It was a dangerous business. From either flank the Turks were able to rake the beach with shrapnel. On the right was the notorious “Beachy Bill,” while on the left was a battery known as ‘Anna of Anafarta.’ This latter was reputed to be composed of French seventy-fives which the Turks had bought for their previous wars. “For a considerable time these two batteries used to open up on the beach every evening at 8 o’clock sharp. In spite of this, the shore was usually crowded with bathers. As many as thirty or forty would get hit in one evening. Indeed, it was a favourite dodge for men to swim out to places where the shells had burst in order to get the fish that had been killed by the explosion, and which came to the surface. The precision fire of ‘Beachy Bill’ was marvellous, and it was a common saying that ‘Beachy’ could knock a beer bottle off the end of the jetty if it were set up for him. One of the bravest men at Anzac was a naval officer called Chater, who was the landing officer. He was a familiar figure at the end of the jetty, however hot the fire. Bales of hay were piled along to form a protecting wall on the side of the jetty but poor Chater was eventually killed at his post.

“The mules were prominent in beach life. Poor things, they did their duty well, whatever their nature may be by repute. One of them even refused to leave us after he was dead. His corpse was towed out to sea by a picket boat, but it was back again on the shore next morning, and repeatedly returned, each time in a more inflated condition. Finally it came no more.

"“There w&s u submarine scare one day. A chaplain reported that he had spied a periscope at sea. The destroyers came out like terriers to look for the sub. but could see nothing, and an aggrieved naval officer sent in a message requesting the chaplain to be more discriminating next time he saw a mules trudging along the bays with leg in the air. I am firmly convinced that it was the self-same mule having its last joke on us. “It is. difficult, from comfortable civilisation, to draw a picture of life as it was out there—the burning sun, the flies by day, and the lice by night, the shortage of water, the mules trudging along the says with the bulging water-skins, and poor ' wounded devils glad to lick the moisture that exuded, the extraordinary range of clothing and tho rich variety of character among the overseas men. Indeed, it all seems like a dream that can never be fully told. (And it never will be. Ihe vast canvas of the campaign may be roughed in by the military historian, but the petty shifts, sorrows, and mad exaltations of the common soldier cannot be wholly rescued from oblivion. Nor will the full tale of heroism ever be told. _ " “When I think of the 29th Divi-

rvjjpn, the attack on Lone Pine, the desperate ventures of English youths a! Suvla Bay, a line comes to my mind from a film which had in it something of the spirit of Gallipoli —‘Beau Gests’: ‘Nobody’ll ever know just how brave them poor soldiers was.’ ”