The Other Anzacs (18 page)
That began to change when she heard from Alice Martin, who was also returning to Cairo, that Montgomery had been ‘talking to her in exactly the way that he talks to me’. The next evening Montgomery asked her not to spend any more time with Harry, sparking a dilemma for Alice. ‘I have fallen in properly this time and stand to lose a good friend on either hand. However I have gone too far with [Harry] to turn him down—besides I like him too much. Still I am in a nice pickle altogether.’
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Alice did not touch her diary for a few days, but when she opened it again she wrote that ‘wonderful things’ had happened.
I am really and truly in love. I have never felt like this before for anybody. It is such a great pure love with none of the old smallness in it. I am very happy because I believe [Moffitt] loves me as much. He wants me to marry him after the war but I feel I cannot look away ahead to then but I am so happy in the present. I do not know the man or his character and I do not care, I only know that I love him wonderfully and that I am no longer interested in other men. I wonder if this is going to last. It is great. He is the only man in the world for me.
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Memories of Frank Smith and Arthur Logan in Cairo evaporated, and Eric Sexton too faded from the scene. Even her lingering feelings for Samuel Montgomery paled into insignificance. She saw him now as ‘a bit of an old woman I’m afraid’. There was just Harry, and Harry alone. She was in the grip of love.
But she watched her fellow officers closely in the mess. The colonel, she thought, was an old man with a small voice and ‘I should think no driving power’. She suspected a married captain was a ‘man who would play a fast game if allowed, he is clever but conceited’. The ship’s doctor was a Scot, aged about thirty-six, who was clever and a gentleman ‘but subject to periodic attacks of drunkenness’. The ship’s other medical officer had a ‘face like a cup of weak tea’, while the padre was a ‘gentle old chap with an insinuating smile and a real parson voice and a weak drooping moustache’. The ship’s chief engineer always reminded her ‘of a rabbit the way he sits with his head hunched up’. There was a lieutenant whom she saw as a ‘small-faced and small-souled little pig’, another was ‘vulgarity itself and utterly impossible’. Next to him at the table sat Harry Moffitt, ‘my loved one . . . Tall and good looking—with fair sunny short hair. A large head and remarkably small face, a short fair moustache and sweet merry blue eyes and a slightly prominent chin. To look lightly at him I would say—clever, cynical and a little bit conceited—but a good sport and every inch a man.’
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By the time they reached Egypt, Alice was confiding to her diary that she was ‘falling deeper and deeper in love till it is taking up all my thoughts and heart’. Harry was posted to Gallipoli, but before he left Cairo their romance flourished. They climbed a Pyramid and had tea on top before venturing inside. They explored the tombs of the Caliphs and dined together as often as they could. On the evening before Harry sailed, they went to Shepheard’s Hotel. ‘The parting was terrible for me. I knew so well what he had to go to, while he had a great glamour over it. All the time he was away my love developed more and more.’ For Alice, everything centred round Harry now. ‘I know that this is the great big love at last.’
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She also knew enough about the Dardanelles to be worried for Harry.
After two weeks on Gallipoli Harry, like thousands of his comrades, fell sick and was transported to hospital in Alexandria with mild dysentery and typhoid. Alice went to see him and found him looking thin but well. ‘Dear old beautiful Boy! I don’t think he is a very strong character. Still he has every bit of my heart.’
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Alice had found the love of her life, but the juggernaut of war moved on.
After weeks of wearying work among the injured on the
Sicilia
, Kath King had a surprise in store when she arrived in Egypt. Granted two days’ precious leave, she caught a hospital train from Alexandria to Cairo. There to greet her was her younger sister Wynne, a nurse at No. 1 Australian General Hospital, who had arrived a few weeks earlier with a group of nurse reinforcements from Australia. They had not seen each other since Kath left Sydney the previous November. It was an emotional meeting after seven eventful months. Kath booked into Shepheard’s Hotel and enjoyed the luxury of breakfast in bed. She shopped and had dinner with friends. Among them was Captain Gordon Carter’s sister Ursula.
The break was all too short. Three days later, Kath sailed with the
Sicilia
for Mudros and then Gallipoli, where there was no let-up in the stream of wounded. However, time was made for dinner with General Birdwood. It was very much Birdie’s style to include the sisters, and they, like the men, considered him a decent person. Not all the generals were so well regarded. After nine days at the Dardanelles, the
Sicilia
returned to Mudros, taking with them as a patient another British general, Aylmer Hunter-Weston, the commander of VIII Corps. Kath was responsible for his care.
Known as the Butcher of Helles, Hunter-Weston had been in command of Allied forces for the disastrous attacks on Krithia and was thought to care little for the welfare of his troops. Many of the wounded on the hospital ships owed their damaged bodies to Hunter-Weston’s recklessness. After the British 156th Brigade had been decimated at the Battle of Gully Ravine at the end of June, he reportedly said he had been ‘blooding the pups’ when he ordered an attack without artillery support. More than one man in three had been killed.
1
After the bloody and abortive battle at Achi Baba on 12 July, he was invalided for nervous exhaustion. In the view of Gallipoli commander Sir Ian Hamilton, Hunter-Weston was ‘suffering very much from his head’, and had had a ‘breakdown’.
2
Kath found him thoroughly dislikeable. ‘I have the pleasure of looking after General Hunter-Weston who is a crotchety old man, ’ she wrote.
3
Among those brought out from Gallipoli on the
Gascon
just a few days earlier was Gordon Carter’s younger brother, Sapper Edward Carter. He had joined the 1st Field Company Engineers, which arrived at Gallipoli in early June. Gordon was ‘glad to see the lad’, but their time together was to be short, as Edward was shot in the left leg and foot on 12 July. In a letter two days later to his parents, Gordon assured them that the injuries were ‘nothing very serious’, but Edward’s condition worsened and he was sent to Malta. He had become dangerously ill with tetanus, and died on 23 July. When Kath arrived in Malta five days later, Edward had already been buried. Death was commonplace now, but this death, unbeknown to Kath, would have a personal connection for her.
Kath returned to Mudros and Anzac Cove in preparation for the August offensive that was set to begin on the 6th with assaults by the Australians at Lone Pine and the New Zealanders at the heights of Chunuk Bair. From there it was hoped a break through the Turkish lines towards the Dardanelles would end the stalemated campaign. But casualties were horrific. When it was all over four days later, the Australians had lost eighty officers and 2197 men, the New Zealanders had lost 852 men and the Turks around 6000. Thousands more were wounded. Seven Australians and one New Zealander were awarded the Victoria Cross.
On the first day of the offensive, the
Sicilia
began taking on the wounded at 1:30 p.m., and within fourteen hours the ship’s cranes had lifted more than 1000 men on board. At the nearby island of Imbros, 400 were transferred to another ship for the voyage to Mudros. Later that day, the
Sicilia
returned to Anzac Cove and took on yet more wounded, keeping Kath ‘frightfully busy’. The firing was continuous, extending into the next day and night, when the
Sicilia
took its cargo of wounded to Mudros. Kath returned to Alexandria and joined the
Grantully Castle
to care for wounded troops heading for England.
The evacuation of the wounded from this offensive, although more carefully planned than that of the Anzac landings, ran into major problems. Of the twenty-eight hospital ships now doing service in the Mediterranean, three were always anchored off Gallipoli. But barges were slow to remove men waiting on the beaches at night. Each dawn revealed large numbers of wounded still lying half exposed among the sand hills. The congestion worsened. By the third day, about 2000 wounded lay in extreme heat, awaiting nightfall.
Among those evacuated was Gordon Carter, who was suffering from severe exhaustion after Lone Pine. As the SS
Canada
carried his group to Alexandria on 10 August, he relived the assault. ‘Passed a restless night fighting Turks all the time. Had a good clean up, shave etc. I am very weak and seem to have hardly any flesh on me—no wonder the bullets miss me. I shall try to get a good holiday so as to be properly built up before I return again. The strain of this last action has been worse than I expected.’
4
Gordon may have been worn out, but he hadn’t lost his dry humour and inner strength. He would need it.
Gordon was admitted to No. 1 Australian General Hospital in Cairo, where he was reunited with his sister Ursula. Neither yet knew that Edward was dead. When the news reached Ursula on 15 August, she immediately told Gordon. ‘It came as a great shock to both of us, ’ Gordon wrote.
5
Debilitated himself, he took the news hard, writing in his diary that, ‘being among so many deaths etc. makes it perhaps harder . . . It is very noticeable to me the small amount of feeling of sentiment I have for anything—nothing astonishes me—and I don’t feel glad or sorry about anything—it seems like being a sort of human machine. It appears to be a mental deafness—so to speak—my brain seems dull to all sentiment i.e. does not reflect any feelings.’
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A medical board decided that Gordon needed two months’ rest and recuperation. Kath King, having returned from her voyage to England, met up with him again. They had dinner and ‘a bonser drive’, and Gordon presented her with a huge box of sweets. While it felt just like old times, their experiences and the death of Gordon’s brother had touched them in ways that neither could have imagined in their first days together just a few months earlier.
The brief interlude lifted their spirits, giving both something to hold on to. But next day Kath left for Lemnos and the sobering reality of the war. ‘About 11 a.m. a German submarine followed us and we are now going full steam ahead.’
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The Mediterranean and the Aegean were alive with enemy subs.
In mid-July Elsie Eglinton joined the
Galeka
, which, swathed in brilliant bands of green electric lamps and with a blazing lamp in the centre, stood out at night as a ‘painted hospital ship’. The men ashore thought it looked like a Venetian fete. Elsie felt safer on the
Galeka
because it could travel with all lights on. But after only ten days on board she was transferred to the transport
Ionian
—which had to travel in semi-darkness.
With so many ships sailing the Mediterranean at night with their lights out, the risk of collision was high. Sailing from Lemnos after a night when several patients died, the
Ionian
came close to grief. Elsie learned that ‘our ship was nearly put down at 2 a.m.’ The
Ionian
was headed straight for a blacked-out troop transport, ‘and as we got almost face to face, the other ship saw us and put full lights on and just managed to glide past the side of us’.
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As the voyage continued, Elsie was in for another shock, which she described in a letter to her mother.
The
Ionian
is infested with rats just now and the flies are dreadful, it’s quite difficult to eat a meal. I’m sure we must get an occasional one in our mouth at times, I mean a fly, not a rat, it’s horrible to think you are digesting flies, isn’t it? Last night I was lying quietly reading in my berth, my life belt hangs above my bed, a large rat sprang off it right on to my book and its tail swept across my face, it’s a wonder you didn’t hear my scream. We are used to meeting them in the corridors.
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