The Reverend Walter Dexter marked his second wedding anniversary somewhere off the coast of Egypt. He had left Australia five months earlier, one of twelve army chaplains charged with the spiritual care of the First AIF. Dexter remembered to jot a loving line to his wife, Dora, that day, mindful that he would tear the duplicate pages from the binding and send them back by the next mail to Australia. But when that mail might be delivered was an open question. Two days before, news of the Novian’s destination had swept through the ship’s company – Dexter, and the men who sailed with him, were destined for the Dardanelles. He scribbled excitedly in his diary:

As soon as we get outside the harbour we learn our orders. We are bound for Lemnos . . . and are to be ready to disembark 24 hours after we leave Alexandria. We are to take 48 hours provisions, and our water bottles filled for we may not be up to get food or water for three days and our landing [at Gallipoli] will probably be opposed. Anyhow we are in for the most historical event of the war and can but pray that our boys will not be found wanting.1

Dexter slept on the deck that night – or at least tried to. The Novian was crammed with men and equipment, including four pontoons purpose-built for the Landing. There were 1200 men on a cargo ship never intended to carry passengers. They competed for space in the dark, crowded hull with over three hundred horses. A brisk wind and rough sea left Dexter drenched with spray, but it was better than the suffocating heat below deck.

When the ship reached Mudros, it shared the harbour with a hundred other vessels. Dexter gazed in amazement at one of the largest armadas ever assembled in modern times; a flotilla of craft large and small would land French, British, Indian and Anzac troops on the Gallipoli peninsula.

The Landing would not take place until two weeks later, and it would be opposed. In the hazy light of the early morning, Dexter could just make out the strings of boats rushing towards the shore under tow by destroyers. Each boat was packed full of men, and the water around them ‘simply churned up by rifle fire’. Landing furthest to the north, the 7th Battalion was caught in enfilade fire; that part of the beach seemed ‘almost impregnable’ and men were cut down well before reaching the shore. By early afternoon, the boats of the 7th had made their way back, several still laden, but now with a silent cargo of dead. It was, Dexter noted, ‘our first real touch of war’ and again, mindful of history, he took a moment to record it:

They had probably been there from about 7am and no one had time, or place, to remove them. Just as they were killed so they sat in the bottom of the boat and had grown stiff in a sitting attitude. The wounds were mostly head wounds and death must have been instantaneous. One sat in the bottom with his arm over [an oar] and as the boat bumped and rocked so his head just nodded in a peculiarly inane way. One almost felt like asking him not to be so silly. Each boat had about 6 inches of water stained with blood and in one boat . . . lay another man face down. On top of these bodies were placed the stretchers that were to go ashore, [while on the destroyers] the dead and dying would be laying about their decks. [Some of the men, especially those about to land] got very sick . . . . The boys will not forget 25 April in a hurry.

Nor would Walter Dexter. Forbidden to land with the men, he passed that day and the ones to follow it tending to the wounded:

I formed a dressing station in the tween decks . . . and also dressed one part of the deck just as they lay. I wanted to bubble and cry and take them in my arms and soothe them for their nerves were all wracked as well as their actual wounds. Instead I joked with them . . . and gave them cigarettes to smoke while I pulled the hard bandages from the wounds . . . No water is used . . . for fear of septic poisoning . . . Men with part of the hand, or an arm, blown away go clean out and faint as the iodine begins to sting. In the tween decks the air is terribly fetid just like a butchers shop that has not been cleaned for a month. The smell of stale blood with perspiration is particularly trying and . . . cutting away the old bandages the nose is very often only a few inches away . . . At 11:30 pm we knocked off for the night . . . [but the] horrible smell of the blood seemed to hang to me and would not go away. I seemed to dream of blood all the time.2

I wanted to bubble and cry: Barges of the wounded towed to transports off Gallipoli. The sight of these men moved Dexter to tears. Confident of a swift victory, the Allies were woefully unprepared for such casualties and made provision for only two hospital ships within easy reach of Anzac. A02740 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

The casualties were such that Dexter’s ship was sent back to Egypt, crammed this time with the dying and wounded. A fresh breeze blew across the decks but still the smell of blood seemed to linger:

[It] never seems to pass away from us . . . one thinks it will remain with us till [my] dying day. You go to sleep with it in your nostrils, and you wake up with it. Your food seems to take on the taint and your hands, though disinfected a hundred times in the day, seem to be the same.

And yet amid the brutality of war a man of God could still find tenderness and compassion:

[The men] do not seem to feel for themselves, only for their chums. When the shrapnel was flying around the boats amongst those hit was a young fellow who was shot somewhere in the body. Alongside him was one of those hard-case bushman that one would never suspect . . . . of feeling for anything or anybody. He was also in awful pain but as the young fellow alongside him was groaning and writhing in his agony the hard-case, as he could not speak, just stroked the other one’s arms as a sign of his sympathy . . . and tried to soothe him as a father with his boy. Oh God the cruelty of war.3

The cruelty of war: A glimpse of the burial of the dead during the armistice in May 1915. Dexter took this photograph through one of the steel loopholes protecting the trenches. The chaos of no-man’s-land with its broken terrain and twisted barbed wire is all too apparent. J04970 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

In his time at Gallipoli, Dexter acted as the father of his men. He was the first chaplain to land and the last to leave, tending his boys as best he could amid the squalor and carnage of the peninsula. His diary remains one of the most eloquent testimonies of the campaign; graphic descriptions of the fighting interspersed with almost lyrical passages describing wildflowers and sunsets, ‘picturesque’ valleys ablaze with shrapnel, the song of the skylark heard alongside exploding shells. Dexter comforted the living and buried hundreds of the dead, especially during the armistice called in May:

One of the most eloquent testimonies of the campaign: A description of the pyramids before sunrise. Dexter’s eye for beauty in the landscape made the horrific conditions at Gallipoli more bearable. He had travelled extensively through the Near East prior to his arrival in Egypt. A Master Mariner before the war, Dexter had even ferried pilgrims to Mecca and professed a deep respect for Islam. Diary of Chaplain W.E. Dexter, 15 December 1914, PR00248 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

Amongst this awful mass of dead Turks were some of our boys who had been killed on the first and second days fight and had lain there since. Many of the missing could now be classed as dead, the bodies were horrible to look at being black and swelled up stretching out the clothing and in many cases when they were touched falling to pieces.4

This awful mass of dead: Dexter’s photograph of the burials in May 1915. A carpet of dead stretched all the way from the Chessboard in the north to Bolton’s Ridge in the south. Dexter took this photograph surreptitiously – photography breached the conditions of the armistice. H03947 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

By June, the peninsula was one long graveyard, the trenches of the living often carved through the bodies of the dead. Dexter’s own dugout looked out on ‘two little crosses made of twigs and not as thick as a pencil’. ‘I see them as I write,’ he jotted in his diary, ‘not 30 feet away’ and swept by gunfire. Men marked the final resting places of the fallen as best they could – a line of stones laid on the heaped earth, a name scratched on a beaten jam tin. Dexter seemed to see the ‘pathetic little crosses’ everywhere; ‘there is no gully or hilltop free from graves’.5 Then came the August Offensive and a new spree of killing. As the trenches of Lone Pine filled with bodies and maggots, Dexter and the chaplains who worked beside him buried ‘miles of dead’.6

When the time came to evacuate in December, leaving behind the dead was one of the hardest tasks the Anzacs faced. ‘I hope they don’t hear us marching down the deres,’ one man grumbled to his mates.7 Dexter spent his last days on the peninsula ‘searching the hills and gullies seeking isolated graves’, carefully marking their location on the sketches and maps that line the pages of his diary. 8 He began the task of turning the landscape itself into a memorial:

I went up to the gullies and through the cemetery scattering silver wattle seed. If we are to leave here I intend that a bit of Australia shall be here . . . I suggested to the general that a letter should be left for the commander of the Turks asking that our graves should be respected.9

I intend that a bit of Australia shall be left here: Walter Dexter at Gallipoli. The crest in the background marks the second ridge, the edge of the Anzac firing line. The proximity of the trenches was a dramatic contrast to Dexter’s later service in France, though even he contrived to get as close as he could to the men charged to his care. Dexter had served as a soldier himself in South Africa, and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. He knew better than most ‘the cruelty of war’. J05400 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

In time, Dexter knew Anzac would become a place of pilgrimage. But the freezing winters of Gallipoli killed all the wattle he planted, and far from respecting our graves those ‘pathetic little crosses’ were burnt for firewood.

Dexter himself went on to serve in France and Belgium. He was awarded the Military Cross for ‘zeal and devotion to duty’, visiting front-line troops and tending to the stricken and wounded ‘regardless of personal risk’.10 Right to the end, the fighting parson shared the hardships of his flock. Walter Dexter, like many of the men he served with, failed as a soldier settler. His death in 1950 was hastened by the gas he was exposed to during the war.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This account is based on Dexter’s service dossier NAA: B2455, DEXTER W E and extensive diaries AWM PR00248. For a compelling introduction to the war service of AIF chaplains see Michael McKernan, Padre: Australian Chaplains in Gallipoli and France (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986). The authors also acknowledge the Dexter family. The Dexter Papers form the basis of a special exhibition in the National Anzac Centre in Albany. For an exemplary reading of narratives of war (and one that informs all this book) see Bill Gammage, The Broken Years (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974).

1 Diary, 6 April 1915, Papers of Chaplain WE Dexter, AWM 92/0176.

2 Diary 26 April 1915, ibid.

3 Diary 28 April 1915, ibid.

4 Diary, 24 May 1915, ibid.

5 Diary, 12, 14 June 1915, ibid.

6 Diary, 11 August 1915, ibid.

7 Unidentified Anzac cited in Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian soldiers and the Great War (Ringwood: Penguin, 1975), p. 110.

8 Diary, 5 November 1915, Papers of Chaplain W.E. Dexter, AWM 92/0176.

9 Diary, 16 December 1915, ibid.

10 Citation for Military Cross, B2455; DEXTER W.