The Wicked Boy (29 page)

Over the last three months of 1914
Robert trained in a series of camps
in south-eastern Australia, taking part in parades, drills, route marches, physical jerks for up to sixteen hours a day. He was taught to turn in formation, to stand to attention, to form fours. In the absence of uniform, he and his fellow soldiers drilled in shirtsleeves or singlets, dungarees and white hats. They slept twenty-three to a ten-man tent. The diet, everywhere, was meat stew, bread and jam.

Robert was assigned to the 13th Battalion
, which was composed mostly of men from New South Wales and was one of four battalions in the 4th Infantry Brigade. Though the men of the 13th were a various lot – among them accountants and labourers, bushmen and clergymen – they gained a reputation as sturdy, independent types; strapping country lads with a breezy disdain for authority. In the ‘Battalion of Big Men', Robert cut a slight figure: he weighed a little over eleven stone and his chest measured thirty-four inches, the minimum required in the early days of the war. He needed spectacles to correct the vision in his left eye. At thirty-two, he was older than most of his comrades; but, having spent so long in Broadmoor, he was also far less worldly. He had acquired a reserved, educated manner among the gentleman lunatics of Block 2. He knew little of drink or money, and in two decades had barely spoken to a woman.

When the uniform for the extra troops arrived, Robert was issued with boots, puttees, cord breeches, a grey collarless shirt made of Merino wool, a loose khaki jacket and a felt ‘slouch' hat, its brim turned up on one side. Each tip of the jacket collar was adorned with a badge of a rising sun, the emblem of the AIF.

In October, the 13th Battalion formed a military band. Since there were no official bands in the AIF, the unit had to obtain its own instruments and sheet music and to draw musicians from the ranks. The 13th was lucky: a Miss Margaret Harris of Sydney donated the instruments and the commanders were able to find good performers among the troops.
Robert was one of about twenty-eight men selected
from the 900-odd in the battalion. He was provided with a cornet, the instrument that usually carried the main melody in a military band piece; it could produce a rich, mellow sound, warmer, rounder and more lyrical than the piercing bright notes of the trumpet.

On 22 December
the band marched through Melbourne
at the head of the 13th and played the battalion on to the HMAT
Ulysses
, the flagship of a fleet carrying some 12,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers to war.
During the six-week voyage
to the training camps in Egypt, the band rehearsed daily. On the troop deck or in the officers' mess each evening, it played ragtime tunes, British army staples such as ‘It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary' and waltzes such as ‘Dancing by the Moon' and ‘Pink Lady'. A favourite number was ‘Australia Will Be There', a new song that both promised the nation's allegiance to Britain and asserted its independent identity. The bandmaster had arranged for the music to be printed just before the
Ulysses
sailed, and the battalion band popularised the anthem throughout the AIF.

‘Our band is improving wonderfully,' Private Byron Hobson of the 13th Battalion confided to his diary. ‘The band played on our troop deck last night,' he wrote on New Year's Eve, ‘and we had a fine time ragging and dancing. . . I have never heard such a hell of a noise before.'

The regime on the
Ulysses
was relaxed and the atmosphere irreverent. The soldiers wore dungarees, padded about barefoot, sunbathed, read books, played cards and chess. To while away the days at sea, the 13th and the 14th, a sister battalion raised in Queensland, held a bun-eating competition, a cricket match (won by Robert's battalion team) and a blind boxing match (a bloody affair, also won by the 13th). Yet the passage was slow and the diet of stew monotonous, and though Robert was used to a circumscribed life some of his companions rebelled against the constraints. When the ship docked near Colombo in mid-January a group of men (mostly of the 14th Battalion) escaped into town on small craft, got deliriously drunk and ran naked through the streets, mauling women. Back on board the ship, the language became so blue as the weeks passed that the minister warned the troops that they would be ostracised from polite society if they persisted in using the ‘Australian adjective' (bloody). In another sermon, he reflected aloud on how Man lived from moment to moment, not knowing what the next day would bring – ‘Stew!' hollered the congregation.

Even the music had started to grate on some. ‘I only realised tonight what getting too much of a good thing meant,' reported the nineteen-year-old Private Eric Susman on 25 January, after a very hot afternoon on the Red Sea. ‘We have all been interested in our brass band, and have listened to it day by day, and have appreciated its continuing proficiency. But now, the continual blare is becoming boring and nerve-racking. We get too much of it, too many marches and “patriotic selections”. Anything for a comic opera selection, or a tango dance played by a string band!'

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 waiting 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.