The Australian

["The bravest thing God ever made." — A British Officers opinion.]

The skies that arched his land were blue,
     His bush-born winds were warm and sweet,
And yet from earliest hours he knew
     The tides of victory and defeat;
From fierce floods thundering at his birth,
     From red droughts ravening while he played,
He learned to fear no foes on earth —
     "The bravest thing God ever made!"

The bugles of the Motherland
     Rang ceaselessly across the sea,
To call him and his lean brown hand
     To shape Imperial destiny;
He went, by youth’s grave purpose willed,
     The goal unknown, the cost unweighed,
The promise of his blood fulfilled —
     "The bravest thing God ever made!"

We know — it is our deathless pride! —
     The splendour of his first fierce blow;
How, reckless, glorious, undenied,
     He stormed those steel-lined cliffs we know!
And none who saw him scale the height
     Behind his reeking bayonet-blade
Would rob him of his title-right —
     "The bravest thing God ever made!"

Bravest, where half a world of men
     Are brave beyond all earth’s rewards,
So stoutly none shall charge again
     Till the last breaking of the swords:
Wounded or hale, won home from war,
     Or yonder by the Lone Pine laid,
Give him his due for evermore —
     "The bravest thing God ever made!"

W. H. O.

Poem: Punch, 15th December 1915
Image: Painting depicting the Battle of Polygon Wood, September 1917

The Housing of the Working Classes

Few, if any, social questions in the past few years have forced themselves so irresistibly on public attention as that of the housing of the working classes. This has been done without any of the agitation that usually accompanies political issues. The housing question is free of all colour of creed and party, and appeals for its solution to men and women of every class alike.

Down to our own day it may be said that in most countries town planning, as now understood, did not exist. Mediaeval towns grew round the citadel or stronghold, and were enclosed within walls or protected by some natural lines of defence. As they extended, with the growth of civilisation and the advance of more peaceful times, the difficulties of housing the increasing population have taxed the best energies of communities everywhere. In rural districts the peasantry in many countries are still housed in a primitive and haphazard fashion. In Ireland, until recent years, the agricultural labourer lived under deplorable conditions; but thanks to the Labourers Acts of the past 25 years a vast change has been made throughout Ireland, in providing proper housing accommodation for the rural population. The Clancy Act (1908), the last and most generous, provided 4¼ millions, and now some 50,000 dwellings have been erected as the result of this and the previous most useful measures. The State grants 36 per cent, of this fund, and the 64 per cent, falls on the rates, set against which are the rents paid by the occupiers. The repayment extends over a period of 68½ years at 3¼ per cent., which covers interest and sinking fund; the Rural Councils are thus in the happy condition of being able to borrow money at the low rate £2 1s 7d per cent. As far, therefore, as the agricultural labourer is concerned the evil conditions under which he so long existed will soon be a thing of the past.

But the housing conditions in the old cities and towns remain pretty much as we have always known them, a disgrace to our common humanity, to our civilisation and the century in which we live. There is no beneficent measure, such as the Clancy Act, for the Urban Councils to take advantage of, and the ratepayers are unequal to the burden of borrowing at the present rate of interest under which loans can be had. Were a full report of the housing conditions of the urban districts in Ireland possible, the number escaping censure and criticism would be few indeed. An Appendix to the Report of the recent Housing Commission in Dublin gives interesting extracts from statements submitted by certain urban authorities, who are making what efforts they can to meet the needs of the working classes. The extracts are painful reading:— "The need in Limerick is a crying one." In Waterford "there is an urgent and genuine want for the erection of suitable houses." In Arklow an outbreak of typhus in 1910 broke out in a slum district, and the medical officer "could prove justification for the levelling of 100 houses." From Clonmel the borough surveyor says – "The houses are overcrowded, old, badly constructed, badly lighted and not ventilated . . . the housing of the working classes is bad, so bad as to menace the health of the town and to call for instant remedy." Drogheda has erected 116 houses at a loss to the rates of 1¾d. in the pound, and about 800 more are required. In Dungarvan 45 have been built and 300 more are needed; the present condition of the occupied houses "as regards room, light, air and sanitary arrangements is most defective." The sub-sanitary officer's report of this town, taking street by street, is instructive; and a sad light would be thrown on the condition of Irish towns in general, if reports on them were presented in the same business like way. Kilrush, with rates at 7s. 3d. in the pound, can do nothing; and here "the housing compares favourably with the lowest slums of Dublin for insanitation"! In Mallow, notwithstanding the Council's efforts, "lanes, houses, and conditions condemned as insanitary still prevail." In Nenagh "the housing accommodation is altogether inadequate and unsuitable for the unskilled labourer, who constitutes about 90 per cent, of the working population." The report from Sligo is interesting, where the "poorer classes in the outskirts are housed under very bad conditions." The report is illustrated by half a dozen plates; and there are few towns in Ireland which could not show similar views of the low, thatched, single storeyed cottages with which we are so familiar. The particulars of these cottages indicate how, in general, every known sanitary law is violated within their disease-infected walls. But enough examples have been given to show that the cry for housing reform in the urban districts throughout Ireland is an "exceeding bitter cry." The reason urged by one and all is that, the ratepayers cannot bear the burden, as the terms of repayment is too limited, and the rate too high. The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909, which extends the repayment of loans over a period of 80 years, does not apply to Ireland. The Local Government Report for England (1913) shows how satisfactorily the Act is working, and the general advantage the local authorities are taking of it throughout the country. So active have they become, it is stated that preparations of schemes are being made in many places under the Town Planning Section of the Act, comprising tens of thousands of acres. Perhaps in a generation or two the unsightly cinder heaps and forests of chimney stacks, now never out of sight, will stand far apart from the homes of the working classes in industrial England.

The housing of the agricultural labour in Ireland under favourable conditions followed as a natural sequence to the Ashbourne and Wyndham Land Purchase Acts, and the difficulty of acquiring sites and ascertaining titles were easy in the transfer of the land. But in urban districts these are not easy matters; sites are limited, many interests may be involved, and the investigation of titles may prove a long and costly undertaking, with the necessary compensation in the ultimate purchase. Added to these is the clearing of the sites of tumbled down or condemned dwellings, so that the initial cost before the foundation of a single house is laid may prove an insuperable difficulty to a necessary housing scheme. Vacant spaces where houses once stood should be compulsorily acquired by the Urban Council, and derelict and condemned houses, which the owners refuse to rebuild or put in repair, after a period of a very few years should be similarly acquired. This may sound like "rank Socialism," as indeed the whole housing question is to some. It is quite true that to-day too much is demanded of the State, and that there is a real danger of the public being too much dry-nursed. When private enterprise can fully meet public demands the State or local authorities have no need to interfere. Few, however, would now like to go back to the days when there was no postal service; nor later still, when there was no water supply, no sanitary drainage, no general scheme of education, and other great works of public organisation of which we now reap the advantage. Such measures naturally fall to the State or local authority, although some may not be worked as economically, nor better than they would by private enterprise.

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work is an axiom that may be accepted without question. The wage to the worker should be such as to cover the expense of food, clothing and housing. The community owes him that and no less. Every advance in the price of food and other articles is followed by a rise in wages; otherwise the worker could not fully perform his daily labour through want. Private enterprise provides the food and clothing, but that it has signally failed to provide proper housing, is evident to the bodily senses in the urban districts throughout the country. If private enterprise cannot economically supply houses at rents which the worker can afford to pay out of wages, the community must either pay a wage by which he can pay an economic rent, or supply houses at a rent which he can afford to pay out of the lower rate of wages. The community are generous in the matter of jails, asylums and workhouses, which the independent minded worker does his best to take no advantage of; and within its limits medical treatment, which he is but equally pleased to dispense with if he can. Handicapped in the matter of bad housing, and so often at an extortionate rent, his work suffers from the conditions under which he lives. Bad air, bad light, over-crowding, uncleanliness and want of proper sanitary accommodation take their toll in a low standard of health of himself and his family, and the heaviest toll is taken on the children. The campaign against the "White Scourge," consumption will cease to be the great necessity it is, with the disappearance of the slum cottage and the reeking tenement in our towns and cities. The unit of the urban community – the unit of the State – is the family. Both should see to it that the family should be so housed that it may reach to its fullest and freest development, and that every member may in time give forth his best service. We have given the workman education at enormous cost; we have given him the vote and made him in a sense our master; and we house him infinitely worse than the criminal and pauper. The wonder of it is that he does not turn round and rend us. What he can do when goaded by the wild tongues of fanatical agitators, Dublin has had a bitter experience of in weeks not long gone by. But the argument of fear has no place in the plea for the proper housing of the masses. The ground upon which it is based is one of common justice and pressing necessity, and further, it will pay. No money can be better spent than in the making of competent, healthy and happy men and women for the duties of life. There is no greater waste in these islands to-day than the waste of human life. How can children grow up happy, obedient, virtuous, with all their capacities developed, when housed together in cottage styes or crowded tenements. The child's inherent right is to be made fit for citizenship, but as long as the working classes are housed as they are, this cannot be accomplished.

Disease arises from over-crowding, dirt and insanitation. The drink habit follows from bad housing with equal certainty in many cases. We cannot wait for good habits to arise out of bad before we properly house the working classes. If every public-house in Ireland were closed tomorrow, and general total abstinence prevailed, the housing question remains for solution. The urban dweller has equal claims with the agricultural labourer for proper housing conditions, and these claims, in all fairness to the service he renders, must be met without delay.

John Cooke, M.A.

From the Church of Ireland Gazette, 29th May 1914.

Images taken from the Dublin Housing Enquiry 1914: 
Top – Dickson's Lane, off Robert Street, off Marrowbone Lane (Dublin 1914)
Middle – Storey's Buildings, off Taylor's Lane, off Marrowbone Lane (Dublin 1914)

Housing and Morals – Dublin 1914

The Housing Committee of the Dublin Corporation has issued a statement, with a memorandum by the chairman, in reply to the recent report of the Departmental Commission on the housing of the workers in Dublin. It is not a very hopeful document. Since no effective machinery exists, or is likely at present to come into existence, for restraining the Corporation from dealing as it likes with the question, it goes far to destroy the fair promise of reform that came into view with the Departmental Commission's report. One of the most important of the recommendations, it will be remembered, was the gradual clearance of the slum areas and the erection of cottages in the healthy outskirts of the city. The Corporation, apparently, will have none of this. It insists that its present housing policy is the best and most practical in the present circumstances. That policy is one of tinkering with existing slums, of pulling down tenements here and there to erect new ones on the same or similar sites — in a word, of dealing with the question piecemeal.

The Corporation is reluctant to look economic facts in the face. It asserts that the main cause of the social evils of Dublin is the dire poverty of the greater part of the working classes. This is true enough. But it is a simple waste of words to say that "If work and wages were plentiful and ample the solution of the housing question would be simple." Of course it would; but work and wages are not plentiful and ample, and, as long as Dublin is a city of little manufacturing enterprise, so that the larger portion of the working classes are unskilled labourers, work and wages are not going to be plentiful and ample. If nothing is to be done until these conditions are altered, nothing will be done until long after the children of the tenement-dwellers of to-day have grown up and died in the appalling surroundings that now exist. It is regarded by the Corporation as unjust that the casual labourer should be removed to a healthy habitation in the outskirts of the city, because this would make him live at a distance from his chances of employment, and add to his expense and labour.

It does not seem to occur to these critics that, even if this consideration were wholly true — which it certainly is not — what the labourer and his family would gain in health, comfort, and cleanliness by their translation to the suburbs would more than recompense them for any incidental inconvenience. A secondary objection is raised to the proposed removal of the slum-dwellers to the suburbs. It is asked whether the small traders who cater for the wants of the workers must also migrate and open new shops, which might conceivably put them to more expense than they could afford. The plaintive dilemma is suggested that they must move or starve. It is more fair to ask, must the honest worker suffer so that the parasitic middleman may be protected? As a whole, the rejoinder of the Housing Committee displays a sad lack of imagination and vision.

One part of this document is more or less irrelevant, and, indeed, tiresome. This is the part where the chairman finds that the references in the Commission's report to immorality in Dublin "left a bad taste in his mouth." The Commissioners are told that this is dangerous ground, and that they should have been more careful when they trod it. It is not true to say that their report conveyed the impression that the tenement houses in Dublin generally are "haunts of vice." It did say that the dense overcrowding and congestion, and the almost entire absence of any decent privacy, necessarily and inevitably conduced to immorality; and this is perfectly true. The Corporation apologists go on to develop a general brief for the morality of Dublin. We are told that the figures submitted by the police of "crimes against morals" are very small, that the morality of the Irish people is extraordinary, that it is proverbial throughout the world, and much more to the same effect.

A vast amount of sickly cant is, and always has been, talked about the astonishing virtue of the Irish race. When it is intended to apply to Dublin such talk is really ludicrous. Whether the housing question has little or much to do with it, the fact remains that Dublin has been severely criticised.

The attempt to "vindicate the good name of Dublin" by calling in aid the police statistics of "crimes against morals" is not convincing. Everybody knows that the police are grossly lax in their duties in this connection. The remedy for this state of affairs may lie in various directions, but it certainly does not lie in the direction of shutting one's eyes to facts, and saying that Dublin is a paragon of virtue among cities. The people who say that it is demand evidence to the contrary. One wonders whether business or pleasure has never taken them through the chief thoroughfares of the city just after nightfall.

The Church of Ireland Gazette, 29th May 1914.


Images: Blackpitts, Dublin, 1914 (top) and other images from the Dublin Housing Enquiry 1914.

The Bastille

Very few places have been so much misrepresented as the Bastille, the King’s Paris prison-house torn down in the early days of the French Revolution. It was not a place in which exceptional cruelties were practised, nor where prisoners were confined in loathsome dungeons, or left to perish in underground cells. In a history which stretches over four centuries and a half there are, of course, lamentable pages, though there are pages almost as lamentable in the annals of the Tower of London. Instances of individual oppression, cases of prisoners overlooked, victims of harsh discipline and unrelenting despotism, meet us. Torture, here as elsewhere, was resorted to in the effort to wring out the truth from atrocious criminals. But such examples of severity and oppression are not proportionately more numerous in the Bastille than in other prisons.

Yet, though more accurate knowledge has dispelled many fables respecting confinement in the Bastille, public sentiment did not err in identifying it with the absolute government of the French monarchy. The Bastille was in truth the citadel of despotism. However benevolent or indulgent its discipline, it was pre-eminently the King’s prison-house. To it were sent those whom he desired to withdraw from the jurisdiction of Parliament, and in it any man might be confined without right of gaol delivery at the King’s pleasure, or that of his ministers. A simple lettre de cachet — they were signed in blank and could be filled in with any name as required — was sufficient warrant for sending any Frenchman to the prison.

The secrecy of the arrest and its attendant circumstances lent an attendant terror. It was generally after dark when prisoners were taken to the Bastille, the carriage being sometimes driven by a circuitous route in order to conceal its destination. On arrival at the gates the draw-bridges were let down, and the guard through which the newcomer passed hid their faces in their hands as he was conducted before the Governor. Even the scrupulous examination of the Royal warrant increased the sense of solemn mystery, which was also fostered by the exactness of the inventory drawn up of the prisoner’s effects, the rigorous search of his person, and the severe examination of the prisoner on oath, which preceded his introduction to his solitary cell. With criminals the most common form of ministerial direction to the Governor was that he should permit no living soul to have communication with the newcomer, and that all use of pens, ink, and paper should be denied him. Even when permission to take exercise in the courtyard was granted, the prisoner was compelled instantly to hide in a recess every time that another person, though only a passing servant, entered the yard.. Add to this that those detained in the Bastille were frequently arrested under feigned names, and the mystery which enclosed them became impenetrable.

Nor was the popular imagination less inflamed by the significant silence observed by those who were released from the cells of the Royal prison. In obedience to the King’s order every one on leaving had to sign a solemn obligation to speak to no one about the prisoners or anything else in the Bastille which might have come to his knowledge. When a death occurred it was carefully hushed up, the funeral obsequies were performed by night, and the burial frequently registered under an assumed name. No stranger was allowed to visit the place — a rule to which but one exception is recorded, even Peter the Great being refused admission. Men spoke of it with bated breath, as of a forbidden topic, until it passed into a proverb that it was safer to be silent than to talk of the Bastille.

Financiers and prisoners; dissipated nobles and dissolute women; duellists and insubordinate officers; forgers, coiners, quacks, sorcerers; miscreants of every shade in the original meaning of that baleful epithet, from the fanatic assertor that the Pope was Anti-Christ to the incautious champion who exaggerated by a hair’s breadth the proper recognition of Papal authority; libellers and librarians, the authors and publishers of writings touching on a long list of forbidden subjects, sacred and secular; a sprinkling of madmen and swarms of spies — all, one time or other, were immured in its towers. The vindictive influence of Madame de Pompadour and the crime of spilling one drop of the sacred blood of an annointed king are amply illustrated in the imprisonment of Latude and the brutal tortures inflicted on Damiens. Whilst the milder rule of Louis XVI. brought out into strong relief by the courteous treatment of Cardinal de Rohan under suspicion of complicity in the affair of the Diamond Necklace, is more strikingly established by the empty chambers of the Bastille, in which only seven prisoners were confined at the moment of its fall.

Ecclesiastical offenders, Protestant and Jansenist — he is the Puritan of French Roman Catholicism — crowded the Bastille to excess in the reign of Louis XIV. and his immediate successor. No class of prisoners was treated with such cruelty as the Huguenot sufferers, for conscience sake. No mercy was ever extended to a French Protestant, a Huguenot. The terrors of perpetual imprisonment or the galleys were aggravated by the ceaseless importunity of priests desirous of winning Royal favour by their conversion. Amidst the hundreds of their names entered on the depositions, but few are known to earthly fame. For the offence of Jansenism, De Lacy is the most illustrious of those committed to the Bastille, within whose walls he contentedly pursued his translation of the Bible into French during his long confinement. But the prosecution of his faith was no less vigilant than that of Protestantism. Batches sometimes of two dozen or more persons were dealt with collectively, and all the machinery of the secret police was set in motion to hunt out the printers, publishers, and distributors of this Puritanism within Roman Catholicism.

The Huguenot nobility had deserted their faith almost to a man, or with the wealthier of the Protestant business people had emigrated to foreign lands. It is of the obscure crowd — the not many noble, not many mighty, not many wise after the flesh—that the heroic bands of Huguenot martyrs were formed. The number incarcerated between 1685 and 1700 alone surpasses belief and will never be fully known. For twenty-five years, Cardel, a Reformed minister of blameless life and highly esteemed, was detained in captivity from which death alone released him. When the prison discipline was relaxed in favour of others, nothing save significant hints of increased severity to the Huguenots occurs in the Minister’s instructions to the Governor of the Bastille. Living, their only hope of indulgence was conditional on their consent to receive a confessor; dying, they were buried like dogs anywhere in the casemates or the garden. Their bodies were buried in outward disgrace, but their example of obedience to conscience liveth for evermore.



This article appeared in the Church of Ireland Gazette, 13th March 1914.

Back from Gallipoli

Back from far Gallipoli, back from the Dardanelles,
Back from the roar of booming guns, and scream of flying shells.
Back from the very gates of death, back to the dear homeland.
Our wounded boys are coming, and they’ll need a helping hand.

They’ll tell of reckless courage, and of deeds of valor done.
Of feats of brilliant daring, and of lasting glory won;
Of comrades lying still and grim (brush the swift tear aside),
And learn how gallantly they fought, how splendidly they died.

We’ll see them live it o’er again, as thrilling tales they tell.
The landing at Gallipoli, the storms of shot and shell;
The white-hot fierce excitement, the shrapnel wound, the pain,
Of weary days that followed — thank God! 'twas not in vain.

And we who hear, let us not fail in our appointed task.
Nay, — in our blessed privilege to help them, lest they ask.
Maimed and crippled, was it worth it, shall we let our heroes rue
The great and glorious sacrifice they made for me and you?

Gladly, unreservedly, unfaltering, unafraid.
They offered all (how many the supremest price have paid),
For King, and Home, and Empire, for the sacred cause of Right,
To keep our flag unsullied, and to keep our honour bright.

Freely as on Gallipoli, they paid the price in blood,
Let us unstintingly pour forth our gifts of gratitude;
And gloriously as they upheld Australia’s honour there.
In offerings of thanksgiving, let us uphold it here.

Author Unknown

Poem: Ballymena Observer, 29th October 1915
Drawing: North Beach on the evening of 5th November 1915 by Major LFS Hore.

A Prayer for the New Year

Let me be a little kinder,
Let me be a little blinder
To the faults of those about me;
Let me praise a little more;
Let me be, when I am weary,
Just a little bit more cheery—
Let me serve a little better
Those that I am striving for.

Let me be a little braver
When temptation bids me waver,
Let me strive a little harder
To be all that I should be;
Let me be a little meeker
With the brother who is weaker,
Let me think more of my neighbour
And a little less of me.

Let me be a little sweeter—
Make my life a bit completer,
By doing what I should do
Every minute of the day.
Let me toil without complaining,
Not a humble task disdaining;
Let me face the summons calmly
When death beckons me away.

Reprinted from The Witness, 21st January 1916.

Good-Bye to Abdul

EARLY in December, 1915, it was stated in the House of Lords that a well-known General had recommended the evacuation of the British and French armies on Gallipoli. The statement was an extraordinary one to make public at such a time, and the soldiers were furious. But on second thoughts we said to ourselves: “Well, the Turks will never think we are going to abandon the expedition, because if we were we should not be such damned fools as to say so.” Even the Germans were misled into that idea.

The Berliner Tageblatt stated that the Dardanelles undertaking would have been abandoned long ago if it were as easy to get out of the jaws of the lion as to get into them.

Yet in a few weeks’ time we were off the Peninsula and enjoying our Christmas dinner far away from Gallipoli. The beast had been disappointed of his prey at Anzac. The jaws of the Turko-German lion had snapped ; but they had snapped a little too late. The story of how the enemy was outwitted is a fascinatingly interesting one; but it cannot even yet be told in detail. The joke of the whole thing, apparently, was that the Turks, instead of thinking we were evacuating, thought we were landing three new divisions to make another attack. But whatever happened, there can be not the least doubt that the Turkish commander was left lamenting the fact that he had at least failed to scupper our rearguard, and that he did not even capture one solitary machine gun.

The great thing from our point of view was to make it appear from day to day as if events were running their ordinary course. The cleverness and the resource with which this was accomplished will one day pass into history in detail. The final operation orders were a model of clear thinking and organization from the main principles down to the smallest detail of the Great Adventure. One and all, from the highest commands down to the privates in the trenches, carried them out with a loyal cooperation and enthusiasm worthy of the best traditions of our race. To a non-combatant on the Peninsula carefully watching events from day to day the position appeared to bristle with difficulties, some of which it seemed almost hopeless to surmount. To such an extent was this the case that the final triumphant success, when it did come, was a little difficult of realization.

Towards the close of the Great Adventure the humorists got to work, and it was no uncommon sight to see a comfortable dug-out bearing the notice — A Louer. Many of the men left messages for Abdul — “A Merry Christmas” and “Good wishes for the New Year.” One gunnery officer gathered together all the bottles he could find and piled them outside the mess. “The Turk,” he said, “will think our last strafe was the result of a great carousal.” One battery away on the right left its mess-table set with bully beef, a bottle of whisky, and some other odds and ends, “With compliments to the commander of ‘Beachy Bill.’” On the table in another dug-out there was left a gramophone, wound up and with the needle on the record ready to give out the tune. The air was “The Turkish Patrol.”

In our mess, however sad or serious we might be inwardly, we managed at least to maintain a cheerful exterior, extending mock sympathy to the “die-hards,” and chaffing each other as to the various capacities that we should presently be appearing in at Constantinople.

The idea was sedulously cultivated that the men were going into rest camps; but the intelligence of the colonial troops was too keen to permit of the continuance of this deception. A query to the O.C. Artillery as to when his second lot of guns were going into the “rest camp” elicited only a smile, and a suggestion that the guns were getting tired was an insult that rankled but could not be replied to.

In the dug-outs, in the trenches, and in the artillery observation posts various kindly messages, and even presents of food, were left for our gallant foes. One New Zealand artillery officer, whose skull was laid bare by a shell that came through the roof of his observation post, left a message for the Turkish gunners to say that the shell “did not get him.” That same officer carried on till his gun was withdrawn and safely placed on board an outgoing ship.

But underlying all this fun and frolic that is so well-recognized a trait of British character in the presence of extreme danger, there was a deeper feeling of sadness that we should be leaving, without a further struggle, the ground so dearly won — the ilex-covered valleys and hills, gained and held with the life's blood of so many of the noblest and best of New Zealand's and Australia’s sons. Somewhat poetically one of the New Zealand soldiers put this phase of thought to his Battalion Commander: “I hope, sir,” he said,” that those fellows who lie buried along the Dere will be soundly sleeping and not hear us as we march away.” The idea that his dead comrades might think the living were forsaking them seemed to have made a deep impression on his mind.

"The End of a Very Gallant Adventure" is the title given to his work by the naval officer from whose sketch the above diagrammatic drawing has been made. The whole movement was carried out so skilfully and secretly on the night of January 8th and 9th that the Turkish troops had little idea of what was actually taking place. The casualties on the British side were reported to be negligible. Drawn by S. Begg.

The spirit of the men towards the close was splendid. As the last days drew near the suspense grew greater. Did the Turks know that we were evacuating? Would they attack at the last moment our attenuated lines? These were questions that were ever uppermost in our minds; but even up to the last day we had a supreme confidence in our ability to repel any Turkish attack that might be launched upon us. The New Zealand General — now in command of the Army Corps — finally took all ranks into his confidence, and issued an order expressing his trust in their discretion and their high soldierly qualities to carry out a task the success of which would largely depend upon their individual efforts. In the case of an attack he expressed himself confident that the men who had to their credit such deeds as the original landing at Anzac, the repulse of the big Turkish attack on May 18, the capture of Lone Pine, the Apex, and Hill 60, would hold their ground with the same valour and steadfastness as heretofore, however small in numbers they might be. The splendid spirit of the men at the finish showed that this confidence was not misplaced.

On the Friday I went into the firing line on the Apex — the highest ground won in all the fighting — and found the New Zealanders, who still occupied that post of honour, tumbling over one another to be the last to leave. The Colonel commanding one battalion called for thirty volunteers from two companies. Every man in each company volunteered. Men were coming to their commanders and begging that they might be allowed to be in the last lot to go.

“Do let me stay,” said one man. “I was in the landing, and I should like to be one of the last to leave.”

It was just the same with the Australians—they all wanted to be in the “Diehards.” “Have you many volunteers for the ‘Die-hards’?” I asked one commander.

“Every mother’s son of them wants to be a ‘Diehard’!” he rephed.

And this, mind you, was at a time when we thought that most of the “Diehards ” would, for a certainty, be either killed, wounded, or taken prisoner — at a time when a little jumpiness and hesitation might very well have been expected. In one position on the left, when the last lot assembled at the cookhouse, it was found that there were two missing. One had gone back to the firing line for his pipe, the other for something he had left behind in his bivouac!

With such excellent organization on the part of the staff, and such brave and loyal co-operation and sang-froid on the part of the officers and men in the trenches, it is perhaps, after all, not to be wondered at that the Turks were busy shelling the vacant trenches and the deserted beaches a day after men, mules, and guns were already well across the Gulf of Saros, in the language of the official dispatch, “to be employed elsewhere.” They had triumphantly succeeded in one of the most difficult of operations — in a feat that is unique in the annals of warfare.

From Light and Shade in War by Captain Malcolm Ross and Noel Ross, 1916.

Image top: Limbers lined up on the track leading to north beach, where guns are being taken off prior to the evacuation.