Read Ebook: The Big Fight (Gallipoli to the Somme) by Fallon David

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THE BIG FIGHT

FROM AUSTRALIA TO THE FRAY

When great historians with their learned pens shall come to set forth the complete story of the most sweeping and horrible war the world has ever known, I figure they may perhaps have need of such evidence, information and material as a man like myself can give. I mean a man who has been through the red hell of the vast conflict in places where it has flamed most fiercely, a soldier who has been eye-witness of its superb heroisms, its stupendous tragedies, scientific marvels, has undergone its tense emotional and psychological experiences, bears on his body its wounds, has seen at first hand with the amazement all civilization has felt, the cowardice, bestiality, utter moral abandonment to which a nation may fall in a mad dream of the conquest of the world.

My name is David Fallon. I am of the County Mayo, Ireland. And I'd ask your pardon for a word or two by way of boasting in stating that my ancestors for a pretty-long journey back into history, have always figured in the man-sized battles of their generations. My father, a naturalist, rushed away from gentle scientific pursuits in 1870 to bear arms for France against the Prussians. And it isn't only because I'm Irish that I fought to get into this present big fight--and I did fight to get into it--but for the pertinent and additional reason that it was in France father met Mlle. Sarah Voltaire who not very long thereafter became Mrs. Fallon.

And small wonder, with my boy's mind stirred so many an evening by the exciting stories of the Franco-Prussian battles my father and mother would tell us of in the glow of the old library fireplace, that I had no trouble electing the course of my life. I left the University of Dublin to enlist in the British army. I joined a Northumberland regiment, Nov. 19, 1904, and the military examiners were not at first quite so enthusiastic about the performance as I was for I offered them no Hercules. I was then only eighteen years old, a little under medium height and slim as a whalebone. A weighing machine as far as I was concerned escaped with the small effort of marking one hundred and ten pounds. But I was sound of eye, tooth, blood and heart and so they cordially handed me my uniform--even if they did have to trim off the sleeves of the tunic a bit.

It is only fair I should say for myself that I was a rather good boy--that the temptations besetting youths in the army have never left their marks on me. Not, believe me, that I was a sanctimonious kid--a good many miles away from that. But I was lucky in having a keen love of athletics and a pride of achievement in many branches of sport. There's nothing like such a disposition to keep a boy clean and straight. Soccer, Rugby, swimming, wrestling, running--the opportunity for such games and contests was constant in the army and made me devoted to military life.

And boxing! Good heavens, the whalings I took! But by the same token, the whalings I handed out! There is no use my telling myself that just about here I should be content to hide my light under a bushel somewhat. I'll not do it. The fact is I rose to the dizzy splendor of champion featherweight of the British Army in India.

Just a few words more in order to place myself at the time when the vast war began. I saw brief, uneventful service in China, then spent years in India, took part in many of the "hills scraps," sporadic uprisings of the mountain tribes, dangerous and exciting enough encounters we regarded them then, petty memories now; stood before Lord Minto, then Viceroy, in Calcutta, 1908, and received from him the Indian Frontier medal, was promoted to sergeant-major and with the rank of staff sergeant major was detailed to the Royal Military Academy at Dunstroon, New South Wales, as instructor in athletics, general physical exercises, deportment and bayonet drill. This was my station when Germany began its brutal attack upon its neighbors.

And let me say right here that while in any event Australia would have made a sturdy response to Britain's call, what Germany can put into its long-stemmed, china-bowled pipe and "smoke it," is that were it not for the appalling, cowardly, barbarous crimes committed against the defenseless--the women and children of Belgium, there would never have been, as there has been, such tremendous outpouring of fighting men from splendid Australia; 400,000 of them out of a population of men, women and children numbering 5,000,000! All volunteers, you understand? It is the volunteer record of the war--not forgetting Canada's mighty showing of 550,000 out of a population of 7,000,000!

It was not until Germany gave atrocious evidences of her disregard of humanity, not until its army had stalked in its giant size, a red-stained, moral idiot, through little Belgium, crucifying old men and women and children to the doors of their homes, ravishing girls and women, murdering the parents who tried to protect them; not until this enormity of degeneracy had passed into the history of mankind, did Australia take fire.

I know because at the very beginning of the war I was sent out to Sydney and Melbourne as a whip for enlistment--made scores of speeches daily in halls, parks, street corners and other public places. My hearers were many and they were earnest and thoughtful but deliberate as well. Enlistments came and numerously but not with anything approaching a rush. Your prospective soldier debated a good deal with his own personal interests, before he signed up.

But after Belgium! The crowds I addressed took the arguments for enlistment away from me--made the talk themselves, swarmed to join. Social ranks broke completely and almost instantaneously. Everybody flocked to the army--artists, actors, lawyers, merchants, clerks, larrikins, miners and the men from the vast, open places of Australia.

Brothers are these last in every degree of character to the American and Canadian miners, ranchers, trappers, cowboys; they are big, lean, brave, boyishly chivalrous men, shy of women but adoring them, willing to play romping dog any old time to win the smile of a child or the pat of its little hand.

It must stand as one of the most picturesque features of the war--the great distances these men traveled to the centers of population to offer their services to avenge the slaughter of the helpless in Belgium and to fight for the honor, prestige and life of the Gray Mother of the Empire.

Take for instance, John Wilson, gold prospector. He came out of the wilderness, fifteen hundred miles to Sydney, to join the colors; four hundred of it on horseback, one hundred of it literally hacking his way through a dense, trackless forest of giant gum and eucalyptus trees until he got to Bourke, whence, once a fortnight, a train leaves for Sydney. Thousands and thousands of John Wilsons made their way to the cities.

And from the distant islands of the Archipelago--Samoa, Fiji, Cocos, Madras, when the news of Germany's infamy seeped into the men far in the interiors--the traders and planters in oils and nuts, the hunters of birds of paradise--they came out through the swamps, paddled their way on jungle rivers laboriously but tirelessly, determinedly to the coast and put themselves aboard the first ships obtainable. There occurred at this time a great shortage in crews for these ships, so that some were threatened with being held up for days or weeks for lack of men. Many well-to-do patriots, amply supplied with funds to meet the expense of a trip in the first cabin, signed up as stokers, seamen or deck-hands in order to expedite the journeys from the islands to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne or other coast communities where they might join the army.

And the larrikins, the hooligans, "hard guys" of the cities, gangsters, youths and men of lives abandoned to drink, drugs and other vices--Germany's unspeakable cruelty in Belgium even stung such as these out of their indifference. In the early days of enlistment we had managed to win precious few of this class to the service. The majority of them had been sullen and derisive to our appeals to join the colors.

"Wot's all this flaming war about, anywye? Blast the blooming war, I ain't got nothin' to fight about."

That had been the characteristic response.

But the piteous images of children with bleeding, severed throats, of tiny human bodies dismembered, of decent girls and women subject to the foulest acts of vicious cowardice, sent the larrikins to us seething with rage and resolved, as it was especially hard for men of this sort to resolve, to accept the strict discipline of army life for the chance to spill the blood of the horror-makers of Europe.

As to these same larrikins, if you please, I would like to set down some more. Scrubby they came to us, most of them, pallid, undersized, some of them wretchedly nervous from drinks, drugs, under-feeding, bad teeth, all manner of irregularities of life due to poverty, due to vice.

But, "by the living God that made" them, once you'd repaired them--fixed their teeth, fed them, exercised them, made bathing instead of a drunk a daily habit with them, once, in short, that you'd properly set them up and, excuse the emphasis, but they made the damnedest best soldiers of the lot.

Not that the professional men, business men, open-air men who went into the ranks were not as heroic. A hundred incidents of the splendor of bravery that men of all classes displayed crowd my memory to take swift, sharp issue with the idea. But you see the larrikin--the designation used to be one of contempt with me but is something pretty close to affection now and I should say with several other thousands of officers as well--comes to you with the devil's own experience of hard-knocks. He knows hunger, thirst, the misery of cold, of pains and aches he has no doctor to allay. And I would point out that one of these boys who has survived such conditions with a physique left good enough to get him into the army, must have started life with the flesh and blood make-up akin to the steel armor-plates and entrails of a dreadnaught. So when you take him and give him only half a brushing-up, the readiness of his response would certainly jar you. His face gets pink, his chest sticks out, the sneer he wore becomes a smile, the contemptible trickery he used to work turns to good-natured, practical jokes. He is childishly amazed to find that his comrades--the man who was a lawyer at home, or the other who was a tradesman or the very wonderful person who was a well-known feature in vaudeville and even--Gawd blime me! his captain likes him. And once he believes that--knows it and feels it then you've "got something!" The very gang training he has had when he banded with his pals to fight and cheat the law, that gang spirit with all its blind devotion is at the nod of his officer. He'll go to hell for you even when he knows there is not much or any chance of coming back, and if all of his kind, whether out of Whitechapel, the purlieus of Canadian cities or the slums of Australia who have done that very thing of going into hell and not come back, might be called on parade it would be a big procession. Yet not of grief-stricken or agonized men but they who walk with fine, clear, steady eyes, and countenances wonderfully cleansed.

To move a little ahead of that day in a then fast-approaching October when the first twenty-thousand of us sailed away to get into the big muss, I'd like to tell a little story of the only larrikin I know of who fell flatly down on his job.

They had made him, to his fierce disgust, the Lord high keeper of a carrier pigeon. He was a person who wanted to get into the fight--Anzac for Boche, yes, two Boches or three. But here he had been made custodian of the carrier pigeon. He had never had a chance at a Boche. He must trail his officer at the rear of charging men. He must have the pigeon in its little box ready, so that should the officer command, the pigeon could have a neat little message as to reinforcements or success tied to his little leg, be released from the box when he would shoot up straight as an arrow above the roar and smoke of battle and home his way to the rear, dropping into a box at the commandant's trench or dug-out station and when he dropped into the box causing a very sharp toned little bell to ring--a tone so sharp as to cut through the thunder of guns.

Well, one night on such a charge the officer missed his larrikin and not long afterward the pigeon for whom the larrikin had so long been valet, plopped into his little box at the commandant's dug-out, making the sharp gong clang incisively. The battle was roaring fearfully, but the commandant got the ring, retrieved the pigeon, slipped the little message roll off its slender leg, spread the message, swore first and then laughed.

"What is it?" his aide asked eagerly.

"I should," said the commandant, "have him arrested and shot, but I don't think I will."

"Who?"

"Why?"

"Look at the message he's sent by the pigeon."

The aide read a message written in the heat of the engagement, but with the stencil-neatness that larrikins acquire in the military schools:

"I am tired of carrying this dam bird and have gone into the fite."

No signature.

FROM AUSTRALIA TO THE FRAY

That carrier-pigeon soldier had my sympathy for I had undergone his same sensation of exasperation at the very beginning of things. This was when I heard back in August, 1914, that because of proficiency as physical instructor and drill master, it was the intention of my superiors to keep me at post at the Royal Military College at Dunstroon in New South Wales--keep me there to fit other men to go into the fight. I am no bloodthirsty demon and I am no brother to the Hun, but having been a professional soldier all my life what could you expect me to be but hopping mad when it would appear that I wasn't going to get in the greatest fight of history, when it looked as if all of the huge, smashing fight I would see would be from the side-lines? Surely that would be a great deal like asking a prize-fighter to accept a job as a dancing master!

Well, I was Irish enough to battle for what I considered my rights. I kicked strenuously. These kicks got something of sympathy from my immediate superiors and so found their way higher until finally I was in actual correspondence in the matter with Mr. Pierce, Australia's Minister of Defense. To him I set forth my case vigorously and often and if he was, perhaps, somewhat amused at my insistence he was just enough to take into consideration the good points I offered for myself, my long service, my Indian Frontier medal, and in the end, to accept my own estimate, that I would be of greater value handling men on the actual front than being school master to the rookies at home. There were among the professional soldiers, I further pointed out to him, older men as able as I in training men and who had families dependent upon them, whereas I was not then thirty years old, and possessed no close family connections who would suffer materially if I should go the way that so many splendid, brave officers and men of my country and of France had already traveled--to the hospitals, the German prison camps or those rough-and-readily builded, nobly impressive, shell-swept graveyards which had come to existence in France.

Now, perhaps, had I been clairvoyant, had I been able to see ahead what was shortly to come--the savage, awful experience in Gallipoli, the murderous, weary days and nights in Flanders and the Somme, the long suffering, the tremendous scientific ferocity of it all, well, perhaps I might not have tried so hard to bring the Minister of Defense to my way of thinking. And, yet, while ducking the appellation of hero as I would duck a Boche bomb, after all, I think that with present knowledge of what comes to a man in this great war and what can come to him, I would still have tried for my chance to play my part in the great game. What soldier worth the name would not?

At all the ports where the populace got hints of the time of sailing of the ships there were great demonstrations and likewise impromptu demonstrations of liveliest enthusiasm met us whenever we appeared parading on the streets, to say nothing of the crowds that came to cheer us at drill in our camps.

For by October, Australia had come to know how tremendous and frightful a war Germany had planned, how viciously and hatefully Germany had resolved to strike at the very life of the British Empire and Australia began to realize that if the British Empire went under, she herself would eventually have the Hun at her own throat.

It wasn't only the news of the mammoth operations which had started in Europe that brought this realization. Things had happened "at home." The German propaganda secretly, maliciously taking advantage of a democratic country's open hospitality, had effected bomb outrages, and worked insidiously to bring about strikes in the coal and iron mines and strikes on the railroads, had worked the same despicable "below the belt" tactics in the Archipelago as she has in America. And the cables were constantly bringing news of fresh, cowardly outrages upon the old, and the women and the children of Belgium!

The firmness of Australia's premier, the effectiveness of Australia's police in its cities and of the Government's secret agents as well soon began securely to tie these same hands of the promoters of German frightfulness. But the people by this time had been worked to a towering rage and as we started away in our troopships, great crowds in the cities were riotously asserting their resentment. They wrecked scores of German shops, battered them into ruins and put them to the torch.

With none of us knowing that Gallipoli was ahead we settled down to make our ocean voyage. Where--we didn't know at the time it was to take us, but we did make it as enjoyable as might be in crowded bunks and where we were forever touching elbows on the jammed decks. Men never sailed on an expedition of war in better spirits and greater confidence. The regular soldiers and amateur soldiers were about evenly divided, but the amateurs were swiftly coming into line in physical fitness and expertness in drill. Still there were some funny incidents due to the novelty of the life that many of our men were leading. As for instance, a little deck sentry, whom I approached one day and who looked at me and said: "Are you an officer?"

"Can't you tell that from my uniform?" I said, nodding toward the sergeant-major's chevrons on my arm.

"Well, then," he said, suiting the action of the word, "I suppose I will have to chuck you a blooming salute."

We got together for all kinds of athletic fun--wrestling, potato and wheel-barrow races, running races, but principally the sport was boxing. Then there were serious-minded men who liked the sports all right, but organized a sort of debating society. There were no lack of interesting principals for this organization. There were professors from the Australian universities, Captain Knyvett for example, who had been the professor of psychology at the University of Brisbane, and there were scores of his class. The debating club discussed everything from Sanskrit to how to fry an egg or bayonet a Boche.

Bill was all laughter and excitement when he was hauled aboard, enthusiastically claiming to have won his bet, which was promptly paid, but then Bill did some prompt paying. This was in the way of entering on a six-months' sentence in the brig, which held him for weeks also in the guard house when our division got to Egypt.

One of the boys composed a parody on "Tipperary" to celebrate the event, which we sang with greatest vim and vigor all the way to Gallipoli and afterward. It was worded this way:

We had a short stop and walk around Colombo and then at Suez. Four days later found us in an even stranger environment for Australians. We had landed at Cairo--the first Australian Expeditionary force, part of General Birdwood's Division which besides our contingent, comprised the 29th English Division . The Zion Mule Corps, a detachment of French troops, four regiments of Ghurkas, several native Indian regiments and the Indian Supply and Transport corps. Although no efforts were made to put up barracks or permanent buildings, it was soon evident that we were to be kept in our Egyptian camp for some period of time. The magnitude of the commissary arrangements, the settlements of the regiments into a general plan of a large and permanent encampment, made this only too plain. We had all been hoping and cheering for our advent to France. At this time we were, as I believe, merely held by Lord Kitchener to further our training. For the conquest of Gallipoli--that red hell of disaster--was not in the books of our commanders.

German propaganda of the foulest and most awful sort swiftly made its appearance at Cairo. German agents we were afterward to learn, had gone among the women of the port, and advised them for their own protection to submit to inoculations that would armor them against the advent of the great thousands of soldiers. They were told the Australians would of a certainty spread a strange and deadly plague. In reality these agents inoculated the women with the most awful disease, and in this way laid a plot of destruction against our forces, which I am sorry to say met with some degree of success before the discovery of the infernal plan.

Moreover, German propagandists had corrupted countless of the proprietors of the small resorts where liquor and gambling were to be found, had instilled all the inhabitants and keepers of bazaars in the native village of Cairo with ideas of secret assassination of our men for gain. Also after the arrival of our soldiers these insidious workers did all they could to promote an enmity between the natives and the Anzacs. The result of this campaign was nearly as sinister as that of the inoculation of the women. Our men on leave were drugged and secretly murdered, their bodies made away with, with a skill that defeated all efforts at tracing the crimes. It is a fact that at least two hundred and fifty of the first division of Anzacs encamped at Cairo never returned to their regiments, and no trace of what had befallen them, which doubtless was most sinister, has ever come to our exact knowledge to this very day. So thoroughly had the natives been instilled with an enmity toward us that the atmosphere and conditions between us became intolerable. The natives assumed a surly and insulting aspect toward us, and we in turn, I presume, swaggered and frowned and treated them with growing sharpness. With the full extent of the villainy that had been plotted and achieved against us in the matter of afflicting hundreds of our men with horrible disease and of assassinating fully two hundred and fifty others, there came a night when resentment burst forth among a large company of the Anzacs and took the shape of a fierce, violent and deadly reprisal.

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