1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [251]
But the Turks were ferocious soldiers and they were prepared to give no quarter, for they were not only fighting in defence of their homeland, they were fighting a jihad – a holy war against the infidel – and they were filled with holy zeal. ‘Allah, Allah, Allah? they shouted as they plunged forward to attack. During their training the Anzacs, like the British, had also been urged to yell to encourage offensive spirit as they bayoneted the swinging sandbags which then represented the enemy. Now, when they were charging flesh and blood Turks, the New Zealanders dashed into a fight with a war cry shouting the words they had picked up from Egyptian vendors of hard-boiled eggs who shouted their wares round the training camp. ‘Eggs is cooked!’ they bellowed. The imprecations that spurred the Aussies on to victory varied, but their favourite expression occurred so frequently that, according to interpreters who interrogated the prisoners, the Turks who invoked Allah as they charged genuinely believed that ‘Bloody bastard!’ was an invocation to the God of the Australians. Or so ran the tale, and although it might well have been a furphy, it amused the Aussies no end.
‘Oh my, I don’t want to die,’ sang the British soldiers in France, ‘I want to go home.’ The Turkish soldiers’ philosophy was much the same. Sometimes, in quiet periods, they could be heard singing in their lines:
In Çanakkale there is a market with looking-glasses,
Mama, I am going
to meet the enemy,
And I’m so young.
In Çanakkale there is a cypress tree.
Some of us are married,
Some of us betrothed,
And I am so young.
In Çanakkale there is a pitcher full of water.
Mothers and fathers have lost
All they hoped for,
And I am so young.
In Çanakkale they have shot me.
They put me in a grave
While I was still alive,
And I am so young.
Çanakkale was the name the Turks gave to the peninsula the British knew as Gallipoli. Within a few hours, when they had captured the rugged ridges beyond and scaled the heights of Chunuk Bair the Anzacs confidently expected that the Turks would be in full flight and that shortly afterwards the peninsula itself would fall.
On the eve of the attack Divine Service was held for the men of the 1st Australian Brigade who wished to attend. The padre had some difficulty in finding a suitable spot close to the trenches and he hit eventually on a small hollow in Wire Gully near the lines in front of Lone Pine. It was lined with ammunition boxes for it had also been picked out as a suitable place in which to make a reserve dump of rifle ammunition, but there was room among them for the fifty or so men who filtered down from the line to take part. Returning with a carrying party from a laborious trek up from the beach, Sergeant Drummond of the 5th Battalion was astonished to find a service in full swing. ‘Hide me, Oh my Saviour, hide,’ they were singing, ‘‘til the storms of life are past…’ The sergeant did not mean to disrupt the service, but he had a job to do and it was impossible to do it quietly so the rest of the hymn and the prayers that followed were accompanied by the slither and thud of ammunition boxes sliding down a plank into the hollow. The padre, who was about to embark on his sermon, was not pleased and he shouted up to Drummond, ‘Are you aware that you are desecrating the first church in Gallipoli?’ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Drummond called back, ‘but the ammo’s just as necessary for tomorrow as your sermon, isn’t it?’ The padre was a reasonable man. He smiled a little sadly. ‘Unfortunately, I suppose it is,’ he admitted.
The ammunition was far from plentiful, but it had been garnered with care and now a good supply of shells was piled around gun positions, and rifle ammunition stacked behind the trenches in readiness for the battle. On the offshore islands the British troops were already embarking on the lighters