I was soon to find out the difference between fighting Turks and fighting Germans. The Turk will fight you like the devil, but he is a sportsman. He is incapable of the treacheries and ghoulish tricks of the German. He abhors attacking the helpless. I say this with full knowledge of the Armenian cruelties and outrages. I can only speak of my own knowledge. I am writing of how the Turks behaved in Gallipoli. Within two months—yes, less—as far as I was concerned in my capacity of lieutenant I had decided that where Germans were concerned there should be no quarter. One of my best men had been murdered because I had been deceived into showing mercy to a group of Germans in a dug-out. Germans falsely surrendering, with hands up-raised and whining cries of “Kamerad” had formed behind a small company of mine and sought to stab us in the back. Besides in these next two months I was to be an eye-witness to the truth of the many accusations that the Germans were guilty of atrocities fit to burn horror into human minds forever.

The reserve battalion of the “Oxfords and Bucks” with other battalions left Southampton on the troop-ship, Alexandria, our military destination being Rouen. There were several other troopships in our company, a brisk convoy of cruisers and destroyers and overhead a humming fleet of seaplanes. But the only thing that attacked us on the way over was sea-sickness. It is a marvel of the British Navy that no disaster has ever come upon these movements of her fighting men across the Channel.

One of the boys of my Jewish company was specially a victim of mal de mer. He had been a professional legerdemain artist in the London music halls. He said ruefully that he had never in his life brought so many things out of a hat as he had out of himself on the journey over. He said mournfully that he was anxious to fight Germans, but would have much preferred that they had come to England to get into the ring.

We landed at Havre, to an enthusiastic welcome from old men, women and children. The old men cheered us, the women wept and the children scampered about our legs, throwing kisses, and with irresistible smiles, shouted:

“Bon jour! Bon jour! Oh, bully beef! Oh, biscuits!”

If there is one thing that has rung the gong of popularity in France it is our English bully beef. And next to that our biscuits. And what could we do but share our beef and biscuits with those kids with the wonderful smiles!

Old men, women and children had all apparently learned the English slogan, “Are we down-hearted? No!” They yelled it at us both joyfully and tearfully, and we yelled back at them with vigor, “NO! NO! NO!”

Military transportation was working smoothly as oil, and without delay my own contingent and some 3,000 others were rolled along to Rouen. We were sent to camp No. 55, Infantry Base Depot, a part of the 48th division Territorials, Sixth Army Corps, Major-General Fanshaw, commanding. Other pens, infinitely greater than mine, have already depicted the devastation in pretty Belgium and beautiful little France. But the sights from the car windows stirred great waves of pity across my heart because some ten years before, practically in my boyhood, I had traveled these fair countries on a tour of military observation, and could appreciate how terrible and large had been the wounds inflicted.

Our particular camp was in Plugstreat.

I have said that it was the reports of Belgium atrocities which mainly made the motive for the great outpouring of Australian manhood into the fray. We had heard these stories and believed them. On March 16th, when we entered the village of St. Elois, I saw with my own eyes that these stories which had come to Australia were not lies. My first confrontation with the shocking facts was when in this village. We came upon a shattered convent. I cannot tell you its name because whatever inscription had been on the building was smashed in the general wreck. But the ancient archway of the entrance still stood, and on the heavy, iron-bound door was the “exhibit” in the case. It was the nude body of the Mother Superior. The villagers so identified her. She had been nailed to the door. She had been crucified. In the ruins we brought out the bodies of four nuns, unspeakably mutilated. Their bodies had been stabbed and slashed each more than one hundred times. They had gone to martyrdom resisting incredible brutes. They had fought hard, the blond hair of their assassins clutched in their dead hands.

In this same village we found a white-haired blacksmith—he must have been all of seventy years—tied to his anvil. His hands had been beaten to a pulp. They were held together by a bayonet thrust through his wrists. And on his anvil, weighted with a horseshoe, was a note in German which read:

“You will never shoe another horse belonging to our enemies.”

I was shortly afterward to kill a German on whom I found a letter evidently just written and ready for mailing wherein he told of a score of atrocities in which he had participated. He described the horrors as “great sport.”

One sprightly paragraph told of murdering four women at St. Julien while carrying out orders to loot all homes of every ornament and article of practical device containing brass, steel or copper. In this instance, as of others, he said the looting had been “great sport,” a phrase he seemed very fond of. But quite astonishingly his heart had been moved when the four women, one of whom they shot and the other three they bayoneted, had fallen on their knees and begged for mercy. He wrote that he was rather uneasy in his mind about that, but at the same time said that he had gathered from their home some very valuable and interesting “souvenirs.” Good God! “Souvenirs!”

My first contact with the Germans was at Whytecheat. I was given 80 men with instructions to take the “skyline” trench ahead. A skyline trench means just what it says—the enemy trench on the horizon. It was a night attack. It was a dangerous trench. The Warwicks had three days before taken it and then been blown to annihilation. This sort of thing was constantly happening, I was told. The British with bayonets could rout any bunch of Germans out of any trench. But at that time German artillery was far superior. As a matter of fact at that time the English batteries were given daily only six shells for each gun and barrage fire was unknown. No British gun might fire a shell without a particular objective view. There could be no general storm of shells sent at any suspected point.

It was necessary for my commanders to know what was beyond that first-line trench, what there might be in machine-gun and “pill-box” emplacements, how strong a force might meet a general charge of our special contingent.

As a trained soldier, I was therefore detailed to make this raid. No Man’s Land at this junction of the fighting line was fully 500 yards wide.

The Germans had so effectually blasted all other attacks on the skyline trench, and our artillery had been so weak in its retorts that the enemy figured themselves secure. No star-shells were glaring over No Man’s Land as we made our way across. But we were cautious. It took us all of three hours, starting at midnight, before we came to the first line of enemy barbed-wire. We nipped it down successfully and still without discovery went through the second wire barrier.

But by this time the Germans were awake. They started everything they had at us in the way of rifle- and machine-gun fire, but the only men of my company who hesitated were the ten who were shot down. We got at them with the bayonet and they didn’t like it. In less than fifteen minutes we had turned them out of the trench. And the second trench.

Then I was to have my first encounter with the rottenness of German degeneracy. In the second trench captured, we heard voices in a dug-out and I called to know who were down there—how many.

The answer came up:

“Six German wounded.”

I believed them.

I detailed Platoon Sergeant O’Harper to go into the trench and see what could be done for the wounded.

I got a shock right afterward. It was O’Harper’s cry:

“The damned dogs have stabbed me!”

So ten of us followed O’Harper into the dug-out and “cleaned up.” There were nine Germans down there and none of them had a scratch until we got at them.

I am afraid I ceased thinking of Germans as human beings from that time. I may as well frankly admit that through all my experiences in trench fighting since then, my habit became that of calling into a dug-out:

“How many men are down there?”

If the answer came (let us say) “Six,” we would throw three bombs into the dug-out and call:

“Here—share these among you.”

All my bombers had instructions to do the same.

We didn’t hold that trench very long. I don’t think it was more than an hour. Information regarding the attack had been sent back to the German artillery and the two trenches we had captured were sent heaving into the air. My men were slaughtered all around me. But their sacrifice was not in vain because I had been able to judge and estimate for the information of my commanders the lay-out and strength of that particular position. I had sent a messenger back with my report and rough sketches. I hoped to hold the trench until reinforcements might come at dawn. But it was useless for the rest of us (I was afterward to find out that only twenty-five were left of my original eighty) to remain in the face of certain death.

I ordered a retreat. German star-shells were making day out of night in No Man’s Land so we got together and dug in about one hundred and fifty feet from the trench whence we had fled. We camouflaged ourselves with corpses only too readily at hand.

I sent back another messenger and secured reinforcements of three machine-gun companies and two hundred men. I hated the idea of giving up those two trenches. When daylight came, we were given another German “treat.” Above the wreck of the skyline trench bayonets stuck up and on them were the severed heads, with horrible smiles under their English caps, of twenty of my men.

When we saw that we all of us went into a blind rage. We swept across a narrow strip and charged the Germans right and left. They hate the bayonet. They will march shoulder to shoulder with astounding doggedness against the most withering fire. But the cold steel is not for Hans.

We drove them out in less than ten minutes. But they had other “things” to show us in those trenches as to the treatment put upon our men. We found four of our boys crucified to the doors of dug-outs and we found others of our dead whose corpses had been horribly and obscenely outraged.

I never heard of a German after that who got any mercy from the Oxfords and Bucks.

We had to give those trenches up. The Germans’ big guns came after us within half an hour and our own artillery had nothing with which to reply. But we stayed there long enough to take the heads of our boys off the bayonets, their bodies down from the doors and to give them burial as best we might. Also under a demoniac fire, stretcher bearers took away a small, smashed soldier I had fallen over in a shell-hole at the close approach to the German trench the night before. When I fell over him he moved and I grabbed him by the throat, not knowing whether he was friend or enemy. However, there was no resistance and I instinctively felt that I had in my hands a weak and wounded man. I let go his throat and he gasped:

“Warwick!”

He was only a little chap, scarcely twenty, and was all broken up. He had a broken arm, both legs had been broken and several of his ribs. He had been caught in the fall of a great upheaval of earth and stone shot forth by one of the German two-hundred-pound shells, but had managed to crawl out into the air and wriggle his way to a shell-hole. In this shell-hole he had lain for nearly four days. His emergency ration had sustained him, but he was mad with thirst and pitifully unnerved. He threw his arms around my neck like a child and begged me not to leave him. I gave him drink. I had to lie to him, telling him that I was going back to send for an ambulance when in reality I had to “carry on” with my men. I left my emergency rations with him. And I was particular to make a mental picture of the location of the shell-hole in which the boy had found shelter and the following day was able to send him stretcher bearers. You get a particular interest in such cases and I am glad to be able to say this lad went safely to “Blighty” and lived.