Australia in Arms. Phillip F. E. Schuler
at length they grew weary of the play and subsided as fine artillery horses as ever dragged guns
Into the jaws of death,
Into the mouth of Hell.
THE STAFF OF THE FIRST AUSTRALIAN DIVISION AT MENA CAMP.
To face p. 22.
All around the hills were green still. Each day they were covered with lines of moving troops. Infantry passed the guns on the road, and Light Horse passed the infantry and wheeled in through the same break in the panelled fence. The Commandant, Colonel Wallace, inspected the units in the making, so did the Brigadiers and the General himself or his representative. Then the State Governor, Sir Arthur Stanley, took a part, and the Governor-General spent an afternoon at the camp and reviewed the whole of the troops. The people flocked in thousands on holidays and Sundays to see their soldier sons. The camp each night was full of visitors till dusk, for those few precious hours permitted after the day's duties were done when family ties might be drawn close just a little longer. Every train and tram was filled with bands of soldiers; the traffic on the roads showed its quota of khaki. Bands turned the people's thoughts to war with their martial music, as they woke the troops with their persistent beating in the early morning.
What it was in Melbourne, so in every State capital of the Commonwealth, where the camps lay scattered on the outskirts of the suburbs. Each State trained its own men for a common interest for the First Division, and in each State the method, like the routine, was the same.
The time was approaching for departure. Camps were closed to the public. All leave was stopped. Nobody knew the date of going, and yet everybody knew it and chafed under the wait. But before the men went they showed "the metal of their pasture." In one never-to-be-forgotten glistening line they swept through the centres of the cities, marching from end to end. What once had been a heavy day—the march out to camp—they made light of now; and while the Light Horse headed the columns, the horses prancing and dancing to the drums, the guns rumbled heavily with much rattling after the even infantry lines. And still it was not farewell. Those tender partings were said in the quiet of the hearth. It could only be taken as the cities' greetings and tributes to the pioneers—those men of the 1st Australian Division—who went quietly, silently, without farewells to the waiting transports in the bright mid-October sunlight—train after train load of them—down to the wharves.
And the people who watched them go were a few hundreds.
CHAPTER II
THE ASSEMBLY
While it was general knowledge that the First Australian Contingent was about to leave its native shores—26th September—no exact date was mentioned as the day of departure. For one very sound reason. The German cruisers had not been rounded up and some of them were still known to be cruising in Australian waters. They could be heard talking in the loud, high-pitched Telefunken code, but the messages were not always readable, lucky as had been the capture early in the war of a code-book from a German merchant ship in New Guinea waters. The newspapers were prohibited by very strict censorship from giving any hint of the embarkation of troops, of striking camps, or of anything that could be communicated to the enemy likely to give him an idea of the position of the Convoy that was now hurrying from the northern capitals—from, indeed, all the capital cities—to the rendezvous, King George's Sound, Albany. That rendezvous, for months kept an absolute official secret, was, nevertheless, on the lips of every second person, though never named publicly. It was apparent that the military authorities had an uncomfortable feeling that though they had blocked the use of private wireless installations, messages were leaving Australia. I will say nothing here of the various scares and rumours and diligent searches made upon perfectly harmless old professors and others engaged in peaceful fishing expeditions along the coastal towns; that lies without the sphere of this book. It seemed almost callous that the troops going so far across two oceans, the first great Australian army that had been sent to fight for the Mother Country, should be allowed to slip away uncheered, unspoken of. For even the final scenes in Melbourne, where there were some four or five thousand people to see the Orvieto, the Flagship of the Convoy, depart, formed an impromptu gathering, and for days before great liners, with two thousand troops aboard, had been slipping away from their moorings with only a fluttering of a few handkerchiefs to send them off. Still, the troops had crowded into the rigging and sang while the bands played them off to "Tipperary." In every port it was alike. How much more touching was the leaving of the Flagship, when the crowd broke the barriers and rushed the pier, overwhelming the scanty military guards and forcing back Ministers of the Crown and men of State who had gone aboard to wish Major-General Bridges success with the Division. It was unmilitary, but it was magnificent, this sudden welling up of the spirit of the people and the burst of enthusiasm that knew no barriers. Ribbons were cast aboard and made the last links with the shore. Never shall I for one (and there were hundreds on board in whose throat a lump arose) forget the sudden quiet on ship and shore as the band played the National Anthem when the liner slowly moved from the pier out into the channel; and then the majestic notes of other anthems weaved into one brave throbbing melody that sent the blood pulsing through the brain.
Britons never, never will be slaves
blared the bugles, and the drums rattled and thumped the bars with odd emphasis till the ribbons had snapped and the watchers on the pier became a blurred impressionist picture, and even the yachts and steamboats could no longer keep pace with the steamer as she swung her nose to the harbour heads.
All this was, let me repeat, in striking contrast to the manner in which the ships in Sydney Harbour, in Hobart, in Port Augusta, and from other capitals had pulled out into the stream at dusk or in the early hours of the cold September mornings and hastened away to the rendezvous. Before the final departure I have just described on the afternoon of 21st October there had been a false alarm and interrupted start. The reasons for this delay are certainly worth recording. The Flagship was to have left Melbourne—the last of the Convoy from Eastern waters—on 29th September. That is to say, by the end of the month all the details of the Division had been completed, and were embarked or ready for embarkation. Indeed, some had actually started, and a number of transports left the northern harbours and had to anchor in Port Phillip Bay, where the troops were disembarked altogether or each day for a fortnight or more. For the reasons of this we have to extend our view to New Zealand. It was not generally known at the time that a contingent of 10,000 men from the sister Dominion were to form portion of the Convoy, and that two ships from New Zealand had already left port, when a hasty message from the Fleet drove them back. Now it became the Navy's job, once the men were on the ships, to be responsible for their safety—the safety of 30,000 lives. It had been arranged that the New Zealand transports should be escorted across the Southern Ocean to Bass Straits by the little cruiser Pioneer—sister ship of the Pegasus, later to come into prominence—and another small cruiser, as being sufficient protection in view of the line of warships and destroyers patrolling the strategic line north of Australia, curving down to the New Zealand coast. The German cruisers, admittedly frightened of an encounter with the Australia, had been successfully eluding that battle-cruiser for weeks, and were skulking amongst the islands of the Pacific destroying certain trading and wireless stations, and apparently waiting for an opportunity to strike at the Convoy. One scare was, therefore, sufficient. The Dominion Government refused to dispatch the troops without adequate escort, and in consequence all the programme was thrown out of gear, and the Minotaur—flagship of the escort—went herself with the Encounter and the two original cruisers to New Zealand and brought across the whole Maoriland Contingent. The alteration in the plans resulted in a delay of three weeks, for the warships had to coal again before proceeding across the Indian