1915
Savige clutched his Bible, which he’d been reading, and climbed onto the small carrier Abassia at Lemnos on 5 September with the rest of 24th Battalion. Like all on board, he was nervous about the prospect of facing combat for the first time.
The vessel chugged away from the wharf in the early hours. As the craft edged closer to Gallipoli, the muffled sounds of artillery and machine-gun fire became audible. There was some nervous laughter and joking. All on board were aware that German submarines had been attacking transport ships with torpedoes. Some had been hit; others had managed evasion. Ships’ captains had learnt circuitous routes in an effort to avoid the enemy lurking beneath them.
Silence was the order of the early morning as Savige and his companions swayed down ropes from the Abassia to the waiting barges an hour before dawn. Hospital ships, their green lights burning, were an early reminder to the new arrivals of the proximity of danger – danger that could kill or maim and see them being lifted into one of these floating medical centres.
Tension mounted as the barges meandered closer to shore and artillery rained down into water not far from them. Just as disconcerting were the pings of Turkish bullets skimming the water’s surface or whistling nearby. They made Savige feel as if the Turks were already aiming at him.
Lights from flares fired from Turkish positions on the ridge were picking up the barges. The occupants were now vulnerable, and feeling it. Fear gripped every man, magnified by the inability to fire back. They were not quite sitting ducks, but they were certainly targets for stray bullets and shells.
The ridges looming above the cove became visible, not in detail but in general size and steepness. Every incoming soldier was well versed in the Gallipoli stories, some of which had already been mythologised. Daily newspaper reports, usually including sketch maps, had familiarised the fresh soldiers, and indeed the whole of Australia, with every gully, ridge, hill and post.
Savige the amateur cartographer had never lost the map reading and drawing skills gained from his Scout training and teaching. He had memorised the newspaper maps and drawn his own designs of Gallipoli. They were lodged in his head as if he had been there 10 times before. Yet he and the others were still unprepared for what they would actually see and experience.
The barges slid to the shore. The Anzacs climbed out onto the Anzac Cove sand. Many were reminded of mining camps they had seen back home. The firing from above was so intense and unending that it made each new soldier feel as if he were already in combat. It took them all some minutes to realise that the real fighting was going on in the hills beyond the cove.
The next thing they noticed in the light of dawn surprised rather than shocked them: the appearance of the Anzacs who were resting between bouts of fighting. They wore shorts and boots that contrasted embarrassingly with the novices’ own neatly pressed uniforms. The Anzacs who had held the cove were down to the basics. No time for the niceties of dress and neat iron lines. Many had dispensed also with the civility of shaving. Beards were prevalent, tanned skin the norm. Hats of all sorts seemed optional. But it was the looks on their faces that riveted Savige’s attention.
Most of them greeted the virgin fighters warmly. A few expressed the pain of their experiences. Some smiled almost with contempt, a hint to Savige and the others of what was to come.
There was also respect for the new arrivals. They were coming into an unwinnable struggle that they already knew about. They had answered the call late – some because they had been too young earlier; others, like Savige, because they had deliberated for months over the risks. They carried the sobriquet ‘The Dinkums’. They were aware of the rates of death and injury in the battles. They would have guessed from the fact that the Anzacs were stuck at the cove that the odds of winning were minimal, especially after the failures of last-ditch efforts in August to break through the Turkish lines. Therefore, volunteering to join the fray at Gallipoli meant they were either foolhardy or serious – ‘fair dinkum’ – or both.
Despite the combat stalemate, the occupants did not express pessimism. They spoke almost always in sporting analogies. The ‘game’ was only half over; they would soon ‘kick some goals’ to win. They were in a contest and would not give up until ‘victory’ was attained. This gave Savige and co. some hope that they were not on ‘mission impossible’, despite the growing cry in the newspapers for ‘something to be done’ about Gallipoli. There was not a sense of failure among the Anzacs, only the odd grumble about conditions or complaint about their British commanders.
The 24th Battalion waited less than two hours, and in the full light of a brisk but sunny morning its men were led along the beach to Rest Gully. The noise of the shells, artillery and bullets that had greeted their arrival only intensified as the day wore on.
Savige consulted his maps. To his left was Plugge’s Plateau, to his right Shrapnel Gully. Looking up over his glasses, he could see The Sphinx, the yellow edifice that looked like its Egyptian inspiration. Next to it, he could distinguish the cliffs of Russell’s Top, which was connected to the steep-sided Plugge’s Plateau by The Razor’s Edge, a narrow, sharp ridge.
Savige was even more aware than most that all these points had been tackled by the Anzacs in deadly fights. The worst of all had been those at The Nek, at the far end of Russell’s Top. A month earlier, troopers from the Light Horse had been slaughtered at The Nek in a futile attempt to break through a bank of 24 machine guns firing so close by that they sheared off limbs, on a battlefield no bigger than two tennis courts. The literally decimated regiments were the prime instance of the Gallipoli madness, the dark side of the legend.
Savige’s battalion set up camp in Rest Gully and Shrapnel Gully, the latter fortunately not at that moment living up to its name. The Turks had recently switched their artillery to aim in other directions. The next day, the new troops would be directed through Monash Valley to three of the more notorious posts at the cove: Courtney’s, Quinn’s and Steele’s.
Savige cleaned his rifle with care that first night. He looked up to see the gun flashes coming from the hill known as Baby 700: the nemesis of the Anzacs, bristling with Turkish defences and snipers. The Turks had a clear line of fire down into Monash Valley, the big ravine through which the Anzacs had to pass to reach the posts further inland. The path had been sandbagged since early May, the first month of the invaders’ occupation of the modest beachhead. If Anzacs hugged the sandbags and obeyed instructions about the path to take, they were less likely to be killed or injured. They were ordered always to move briskly, and not to linger to take a cigarette or even a quick drink from a water bottle.
All were reminded of the fate of the Commander of 1st Division, Major General William Bridges, who had been shot while demonstrating a certain bravado in having a casual smoke on the wrong side of the sandbags. A Turkish marksman had made it Bridges’s last cigarette with a hit to his thigh. He had bled to death on a hospital ship and the incident had lowered the morale of the force for several weeks. His demise had been followed by the deaths of thousands of others, some of them unlucky, while others had taken unnecessary risks in the trenches and elsewhere.
Enemy snipers were the scourge of Gallipoli. They had never been eliminated, although Anzac counter-marksmen had done well and at times limited the effectiveness of their Turkish opposites. This had led to changes in position and elevation in the hills and ridges above the cove. Still the enemy dead-eye Dicks were never quelled.
When Savige arrived there had just been a spate of killings that had pushed the numbers of victims up above the average. His commanders reminded him that it was likely he would be called upon to use his skills to destroy the sharp-shooters. There was no avoiding his reputation as one of the best shots ever to represent his country. The question was, could he display his capacities under the pressure of possible exposure and vulnerability?
It had been a leap too far for some good shots, who had turned out to be more sportsmen than assassins. There was no disgrace in this. It was tough enough to take shots, no matter how protected. It was a sliver of courage more to have the steadiness under this pressure to strike a tiny target, perhaps just a forehead, through a gap between rocks or bags up to 100 metres away. And there was a third element. Killing from the trenches was one thing. It was pot luck more often than not. Striking a human target needed a certain additional makeup. Savige the fervent Christian believed that taking a life was a sin. His ‘success’ as a sniper would have to leap that hurdle as well. It was certain to touch him, no matter how he attempted to hide it, or how much he convinced himself that he was doing God’s will.
He did not have the cold-blooded mentality of New Zealander Lieutenant Grace of the Wellington Battalion, or the lesser-known Billy Sing, a Chinese Australian of 5th Light Horse regiment. Both were expert snipers. In May and June they had countered the Turkish snipers with sizeable kill tallies. Sing in particular struck often, and would become the most effective assassin on Gallipoli, with 302 victims by the campaign’s end.
There was always need to be vigilant, and Anzac marksmen were again needed now. Murder from the hills was as permanent a part of the environment as the Anzacs’ dry, acerbic humour, and they were both captured in the most telling poetic reflection ever penned on Gallipoli. In Songs of a Campaign, which Savige knew by heart, Leon Gellert wrote:
‘That reminds me of a yarn,’ he said,
And everybody turned his head;
He had a thousand yarns inside his head,
They waited for him, ready with their mirth
And creeping smiles – then suddenly turned pale,
Grew still, and gazed upon the earth.
They heard no tale. No further word was said.
And with his fun,
Half-leaning on his gun,
They left him – dead.1
Savige was daily expecting the order for him to climb up into a sniper’s nest and perpetrate brutal retribution on any enemy, jester or otherwise.
***
On 6 September, 24th Battalion carefully trudged the 800 metres to Quinn’s Post, regarded as the most vital and dangerous forward position on Gallipoli. The fighting had not stopped there in the five months of the campaign. The Turks attacked it daily, aware that if the Anzacs softened their defence, there would be a chance to flood down and push the invaders back into Monash Valley.
Four days later, on 10 September, the battalion was shifted down to the far-right Anzac position at Lone Pine. It was named after one lonely pine that had been shot away during the bloody battle there a month earlier, when the Anzacs had prevailed at great cost. The position was the closest to the Turkish trenches, which were in some cases just 15 metres away.
The 24th’s role here was defensive. The Turks were unlikely to try another thrust like the one the previous month. Instead, they had mined the area under 23rd and 24th Battalions and were digging ever closer and planning to explode some of the mines. They hoped to cause such destruction that they could then push through the shattered Anzac defences.
One mine exploded at nearby Tubb’s Corner, causing injuries but no deaths. The two battalions were shaken, but the enemy could not break through.
Savige wrote a pleasant letter home to Lilian saying that ‘I thought I would be quite jumpy’, but that the ‘hot’ area was ‘the same as going down to South Yarra’. But Lilian would have realised that this could hardly be the case. The newspapers were now reporting the struggle on Gallipoli more openly, and many reporters were hinting that it was a lost cause after the failure to break out of the cove in early August.
The shells made Savige ‘feel a bit queer and the bombs [thrown into the trenches] are crook’. Yet he told Lilian not to ‘worry unnecessarily. I feel sure of coming out [alive].’ Savige was trying to convey confidence, though he didn’t help his cause by describing a new weapon that the Turks were hurling at them, consisting of a shell case attached to a broom handle. ‘If it strikes home it makes a terrible mess,’ he told her, yet it was ‘sport’ dodging them.2
Savige spared her the account of Anzacs who had lost limbs because of these awkward missiles. Yet Lilian had enough imagination to understand that trench life was not as joyful as Savige was making out.
***
On 11 September, another attempt by the Turks to blow up the Anzac defences with mines caused the battalions to act. Sappers (combat engineers) blew in an enemy tunnel and the Anzacs attacked in a fearsome battle, before an underground sandbag barricade was erected.
‘We were so close to them now,’ Savige noted to Lilian, ‘we could hear Johnnie Turk changing clothes, and even his mind.’3
He continued to be buoyant of spirit, and wrote to Lilian that he was in fine fettle both physically and mentally. It was what she would want to read, but in truth he was not bothered by the deprivations and enjoyed the few ‘benefits’. He and his fellow battalion members were regularly rotated down to the sandy beach for a swim or even a game of cricket; a sentry perched on a ridge high above them would sound the alarm if the Turks fired their artillery. Savige remained upbeat and unfazed by the conditions, and his attitude was infectious. For all around him and under his charge, Savige exemplified the adage that he was the type of ‘bloke you’d like to have in the trenches next to you’.
The expected tap on the shoulder came on 19 September, when the battalion commander told Savige he would be promoted to company sergeant major, which would be made official within a month. In almost the same breath, Savige was asked if he would do a stint on Sniper’s Ridge.
‘We’re having a bit of bother from Turkish snipers from Baby 700 through Mortar Ridge and down to just north of us,’ the commander said. ‘Would you be willing to stay on Sniper’s Ridge for a few days? You can take any observer you like.’
This was the toughest of assignments. Savige knew that his promotion depended on his agreeing to the challenge. He said yes, and asked for his mate Mick Sunderland, whom he had befriended on the ship from Australia, to be his partner in the dangerous assignment.
‘Mick’s an excellent shot himself,’ Savige remarked; ‘makes him a very good spotter.’4