‘Seemingly endless marches over the burning sands of the desert; attacks, advanced and flank guards over the monotonous ridges of sand, eternal carrying of heavy packs and ammunition with heavy punishment for the man who soothed his parched throat from his water-bottle, followed day after day. The men cursed and swore; cursed him for a martinet who kept them toiling like the coolies of the land.’
—A young infantry officer remembers Malone’s training in Egypt1
The Wellingtons detrained in the dark at Helmiah Station, marched 3 kilometres to their campsite at Zeitoun, and bivouacked without cover on the desert sand. Those who experienced that night remembered it as one of the coldest of their lives. The first day in camp, however, began as usual—reveille followed by breakfast, physical exercises, interior economy, everything all over again.
Including a company of the Ceylon Planters Rifles, Malone now had 1350 men under his command, and was told that they were likely to be in action against the Turks in less than a month. He wasted no time in reshaping the camp to his liking. Unhappy with the haphazard way in which the battalion’s tents had been pitched, he had them all pulled down and realigned ‘until every tent pole and peg stood in perfect symmetry’.
Rubbish disposal, water supply and sanitation were given the usual close attention and a ‘wet canteen’ set up where beer could be bought by the bucket and drunk in the tents. After a final showdown, Malone sacked his Quartermaster Sergeant Dallinger for insolence and put him under arrest.
Meanwhile, he observed the surrounding landscape with a soldier’s eye—flat, covered with green crops, interlaced with Arab villages and date palm groves. There were small towns with good buildings, he noted, mud houses and shrines; irrigation channels and water wheels; natives riding camels, donkeys, cows or bullocks. Again he decried the squalor and dirt of the Egyptian and Arab populations, contrasting it with the European parts of the towns, which were ‘decent and in many parts fine’. Cairo itself was utterly disapproved of—‘a vicious place, a sink of iniquity’.
The country about the camp, however, had strong links with both Egyptian antiquity and Christian tradition. Beneath the ‘fashionable’ suburb of Heliopolis lay the remains of the great and ancient ‘city of the sun’, the principal place of worship for the Egyptian sun god Ra. Nearby were the holy shrines of Mataria—the Virgin’s Spring and the Virgin’s Tree—where the Holy Family was said to have rested during the flight into Egypt.
A heap of white rock near the camp, however, had no known historical links and appeared to have no owners. Malone had the stones broken up and used as tent boundaries and edging for all roads and paths within the camp. ‘A few days later, a gentleman looking like the Sheik of Araby arrived at battalion headquarters on a donkey. He addressed himself in Arabic to Allah for advice but spoke excellent English. He said the heap of rock belonged to himself and produced documentary proof of ownership.’2
Brigade headquarters ordered the stones returned to the owner and summoned Malone to account for ‘the unauthorised destruction of certain private property’. The matter was eventually resolved by paying the ‘Sheik’ a considerable sum of money for the loss of his rock pile, upon which it finally became the property of the battalion.
Training now began in earnest—platoon, company and battalion drill, musketry, attack and defence exercises, trench digging, route marching up to 50 kilometres a day with full packs up and often in temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius. Each man carried an overcoat, blanket, waterproof sheet, water bottle and rations, plus rifle and bayonet and 150 rounds of ammunition—a total load of nearly 30 kilograms.
Infantry officer Spencer Westmacott was among the sufferers: ‘Men marched in fierce heat, beaten by hot desert winds, covered in dust from the feet of horses, wheels of gun carriages and wagons, and the boots of the infantry. And always thirst, when water was strictly rationed on the march.’3 Not one to ask his men to do anything he himself would not do, Malone marched at the head of his column rather than riding his horse.
Malone also drove his junior officers hard, requiring them to parade each morning for an extra hour’s physical drill, additional to everything else the battalion was doing. The subalterns eventually refused to turn out; Malone paraded them before him and told them that what they had done was effectively mutiny. They were warned that they risked being court-martialled and thrown out of the regiment.
Each in turn was asked why he had not obeyed orders. Some were evasive, but Lieutenant Turnbull—later to command a battalion—spoke out. The orders were unfair, he said, because the junior officers of the battalion had work to do at that hour that the other ranks did not. As the first to answer truthfully, Turnbull believed that he was from then on out of favour with Malone, whose manner towards him seemed brusque and cold.
Smallpox vaccinations were now administered to all ranks, which put most of the battalion temporarily out of action with painfully swollen arms and inflamed lymph nodes. Malone tended to downplay their distress until his own turn came. ‘The doctor then saw that he received that application of vaccine to which his rank entitled him,’ noted the battalion historian with some satisfaction. After visiting 49 of his sick men in hospital, Malone went on light duties and had no more to say on the matter.
Meanwhile, trains carried thousands of ‘Bill Massey’s tourists’ into Cairo. Here the streets were thronged with people of all races, tribes and tongues. Places of amusement abounded, ranging in quality from the Shepheard’s and Continental hotels to ‘cheap and smelly cafes selling firewater guaranteed to send a man mad in as short a time as anything on earth’.4
A first-class English meal could be bought at the YMCA in the Ezbekiya Gardens, and a band from a British regiment played there on Sunday afternoons. ‘Astonished staff officers, with red tabs, gold braid, and eye-glasses found themselves rubbing shoulders with democratic but wealthy young colonials in resorts which had never been so desecrated before.’5
For the culturally curious, there were visits to the pyramids of Giza and Sakhara and their underground tombs, to mosques and ancient Coptic churches, to the Egyptian museum and its collection of antiquities. For the more sensually inclined, the bars and brothels of Cairo provided ample if risky pleasures. As Spencer Westmacott put it, the twin gods of Bacchus and Venus received their quota of worshippers from all Anzac brigades.6
Appropriately, Malone’s tastes inclined to the cultural and spiritual. On 10 December, he attended Mass in an Italian church near the docks in Alexandria and then called on the priest to practise his French. On 13 December, Malone and 600 other Catholic soldiers marched to morning Mass at Heliopolis. ‘Such strange looking people,’ he wrote, ‘all colours of brown, Egyptian, Maltese, Italians, French, Levantines and a general mixture—not a real white man or woman among them. They stared at us, some 600 stalwart men, and we at them . . .’
In the afternoon, Malone and Brigadier Earl Johnston (another Catholic) rode to Mataria to take part in the annual Egyptian pilgrimage to the shrine of the Holy Family.
Some 40,000 British, Indian and Anzac troops were now camped in Egypt and were expected to face 100,000 Turks within a month. What Malone had seen so far of British troops did not impress him. The men all seemed like boys—‘so short, small and fair’, and mostly very young. Alongside them his men seemed like giants. The British officers seemed ‘slow, and not altogether soldier-like’. By contrast, the colonial officers were mostly practical men who, he felt, took more readily to the business of soldiering.
Meanwhile, the drill and deportment of the New Zealand Infantry Brigade was expected to match the British Army’s best. ‘The battalion was very smart in those days,’ recalled infantryman O.E. Burton. ‘Buttons, belts and boots were just as fine as fine could be. Pride was taken in smart drill, but above all in the mounting of the guard . . . the High Mass, the sung Eucharest [sic] of the professional soldier.’7
On 10 December, Malone wrote again to Ida: ‘I am very well but feel the cold in the early morning. We turn out at 5.30am in the dark and only candle light. A cold bath in the open desert in the dark sounds romantic but it is not very interesting or luxurious. I have, however, bought a spirit lamp and some Bovril and have a good pannikin full after a bath and that is a luxury.’
On 18 December, Egypt was declared a British Protectorate and a regime favourable to British interests was set up under a new Sultan. Five days later, British and Anzac troops marched in force through Cairo to mark the event and demonstrate British power and authority to any nationalist elements in the Egyptian population that might be inclined to challenge it.
The route led through the native quarter of the city, past crowds of mostly silent Egyptians. ‘The forest of flashing bayonets and the drivers of the transport riding high gave a sense of power that nothing could resist,’ Westmacott wrote. On their flank, long lines of the Australian Light Horse sat immobile in their saddles, their rifles resting butt on thigh at the ‘carry’. . . ‘Horses and men, each superb as one. One felt proud to be of the brotherhood.’8
Christmas dinner for the troops, their first since landing in Egypt, was an echo of a now distant homeland—roast turkey, bottled peas and plum pudding, all served in the searing heat of day. That day a contingent of New Zealanders recruited in England arrived. Malone called for three cheers for the men as they marched into camp then gave them a tongue lashing for wheeling over his new vegetable garden.
From now on a detachment of reinforcements would arrive every two months, each nearly 2000 strong. Among them was a 500-strong Maori contingent. Godley and Birdwood were impressed with their dress and bearing, Malone was not: ‘Mostly big hulking gone-in-the-knees walking men. They look soft, and, I fancy were not killed with work on the transports.’
The Maori soldiers were keen to train and eventually fight with their brother New Zealanders, but were told that they would be sent to Malta as garrison troops. With them would go over 200 venereal disease (VD) cases who were being emptied out of hospitals in Egypt to make room for the wounded of the coming military operations.
By now Godley was worried about the rate of VD among the New Zealanders. He calculated that the NZEF could lose up to 10 per cent of its troops to the disease, let alone its losses to locally supplied booze. ‘The filthy native liquor, diluted as it is with urine, makes anyone who drinks it quite mad,’ he wrote to Defence Minister Sir James Allen. ‘One can only be thankful that so few of our men do drink.’9
Godley’s solution to the VD problem, an enlightened one for the time, was to ensure that the medical officers of every battalion had a supply of ointment and syringes on hand to treat the troops returning from leave in Cairo. Malone, in private at least, violently disagreed.
To my horror, the GOC (ours) has approved certain measures for preventing certain frightful consequences of vice and so as to enable them to indulge in the vice with no fear of disease.
At present we appeal to the men’s better nature and to his morality at the same time letting him know the awful punishment of certain vice in this country. To do what is proposed is to destroy all moral restraint and lead to worse things . . . right and not expediency is the only sound rule in life.
To manage the risks, Malone preferred to give only 25 per cent of the men leave daily and only to the ‘good characters’.
The last day of 1914 was marked by an inspection of the New Zealand Division by Anzac commander General Birdwood followed by a general march-past. For Malone it was again a demonstration of the might and cohesion of the British Empire. A complete force of horse, artillery and infantry had been brought from the Antipodes and assembled in Egypt’s desert, he noted, close to the place where Napoleon’s army had defeated a greatly superior army of Turks . . . ‘Our New Zealand flag floated out proudly, may the division always do it honour.’
On 2 January, the New Zealand High Commissioner, Thomas MacKenzie, told Malone and other senior officers that the New Zealand Division would go to France in February or March—provided that it was not fighting the Turks, who could arrive, 80,000 strong, by 10 January. Malone, however, hoped that the Turks would come and that the New Zealanders would have the benefit of fighting them. ‘It would be the best training and do us a world of good.’
To Ida he confessed that he was finding his separation from her and the children hard to bear. He ‘devoured’ all her letters, he wrote, and reread them constantly. In a brown pot that had been a gift from her he had kept the lilac she had given him before his ship sailed from Wellington. It now held roses and mignonette. ‘Most lovely and sweet. The bees keep visiting it.’
Malone and his brigade commander, Brigadier Earl Johnston, now clashed for the first time. Johnston wanted the Wellington Battalion to focus on tactical schemes and manoeuvres. Malone wanted to improve the basics—in this case, the battalion’s shooting and fire control skills (musketry). ‘The Brigadier is in a hurry to rush us along at schemes and the top of the work,’ he told his diary. ‘I am determined to begin at the bottom.’
Malone argued that he was responsible for the efficiency of his battalion and knew better than Johnston what the weak places in its training were. Tactical schemes and manoeuvres were all very well, he said, but if fire control was bad, let alone the actual shooting, ‘it was no good’. Johnston insisted that Malone obey orders; Malone asked for permission to refer the matter to Godley. Johnston refused and rode away.
In the end, Johnston backed down, telling Malone that he had misunderstood the situation and that he could do what he wanted provided that some ‘battalion work’ was done. Malone felt that Johnston bore him no ill will over this episode as over the next two weeks he twice complimented him on the standard of his training. Even so, it was a foretaste of things to come.
The next day, the battalion was put through attack training according to a plan devised by Malone himself. Connected by telephone to a battery of field artillery for the first time, Malone was able to call down shrapnel fire on ‘enemy’ positions at will. ‘Cooperation between artillery and infantry,’ he concluded, ‘is the thing in successful attack.’ His studies of the military theorists and the South African and Russo-Japanese wars were beginning to pay off.
On 7 January, the Anzacs had their first experience of the khamsin, the hot dust-laden desert wind that blows across Egypt for three months of the year. Training was abandoned and the men spent the day nearly suffocating in their tents while sand driven by the wind penetrated every gap and pore.
‘We breathe it in, drink it in our tea, eat it with our bread and butter,’ wrote Hart. The cook houses were not geared for sandstorms and the troops were forced to live on dry rations and cold tea. After it was over, brass, boots and equipment had to be cleaned of yellow dust, as did ears, noses, hair and bedding.10
Godley now confirmed that the New Zealand Division would go to the Western Front when fully trained and fit, but would first intercept a Turkish army believed to be on its way to invade Egypt near the Suez Canal. The division would attack Turkish positions in the desert and cut their communications so as to make any further invasion impossible. ‘Our men are itching to get moving and fighting,’ Malone wrote that night.
Their chance came two days later. The Wellington Battalion was ordered to move to the Suez Canal to meet a 25,000-strong Turkish force that was now advancing across the Sinai Desert towards the canal. The enemy was assumed to have had a dual objective—first to capture the canal and then to support an uprising by Egyptian nationalists against British rule. The most likely places for a crossing of the canal were thought to be at Ismailia and El Kubri.
The Wellington and Otago battalions would go to El Kubri under Malone’s command to stiffen up Indian troops holding the canal at that point. The Auckland and Canterbury battalions would deploy to Ismailia. The force was to be under the overall command of Major-General Melliss VC, commander of the 3rd Indian Brigade.
The brigade cheered the news to a man, delighted at the prospect at last of a move and a fight. Wagons were loaded with food, ammunition, entrenching tools, water and medical supplies, and the troops entrained for El Kubri. At midnight on 2 February, the Wellingtons woke to the sound of heavy firing from the canal about two kilometres away from their camp. The Turks were attacking the El Kubri post in a show of force while the main assault was delivered at Toussum.
Here some 5000 Turkish troops attempted to cross the canal on aluminium rafts. Facing them were the Auckland and Canterbury battalions, supported by Indian troops and British and French warships firing from the canal. Only one raft reached the other side of the canal; the rest were destroyed by gunfire. Over 200 Turks were killed and another 700 captured, along with 90 camels carrying ammunition and supplies. Total British and dominion casualties were about 100.
In the following days, the Wellingtons came under occasional fire from snipers and during reconnaissances, but otherwise things were quiet. ‘Our fellows were very anxious to get into the scrap but we were not needed,’ Malone noted in his diary. He hoped, however, that the Turks would try again and that this time his men would be allowed to ‘go out on the flank and try and scupper them with the bayonet’.
Meanwhile, armed patrol boats passed up and down the canal in daylight hours, and the warship HMS Himalaya swept the desert with its searchlights at night. Passengers on ships passing through the canal cheered the troops and threw tins of cigarettes, tobacco and other goods into the canal for them to swim out and retrieve.
Waiting passively for the Turkish onslaught, however, was not to Malone’s taste. He wanted General Melliss, as commander of the canal defences, to ‘lash out a bit’ and told him so. ‘It is deadly to my mind to allow the Turks to concentrate day by day, and bit by bit, a big force,’ he wrote. ‘We ought to go and smash up the bits as they come along, debouching from the high country.’
The Wellingtons were not to get the chance. A week later, aerial reconnaissance confirmed that the main Turkish force was now 50 kilometres into the desert and in full retreat. On 7 February, Private William Ham died of his wounds, the only New Zealand casualty from the Suez Canal action. ‘New Zealand’s 1st on the Roll of Honour, in the Cause of the Age’, was Malone’s diary entry that night.
The defeat of the Turks at the canal took much of the excitement out of life for Malone’s men, but there was to be no slackening of vigilance or effort. Troops stood to arms at dawn, guards paraded and patrols went out each day, and there was still plenty of digging to do. But with no leave to Suez or anywhere else, discipline problems began to surface. On 12 February, a drunken sentry was arrested for firing off live ammunition at random. On pay night, six men broke camp and went into a nearby town. A picket arrested them and they got ten days’ detention at Abbasia military prison.
Entertainment for the troops helped somewhat to relieve the boredom. On 15 February, Malone put his Taranaki Company to work organising a concert for all units holding the line at El Kubri. Lit by a searchlight from the warship HMS Ocean, a cast of Wellingtons, Lancashire territorials, Gurkhas and British seamen put on a show of songs and recitals, Maori haka, boxing and wrestling. The cheers of the 500-strong audience of soldiers and sailors made it a night to remember.
A successful action by a Gurkha regiment provided a brief distraction. The Gurkhas landed near Tor on the Red Sea, marched 16 kilometres by night, and in a dawn attack killed 60 of the enemy and captured another 100. ‘The prisoners were of all ages,’ wrote one of Malone’s officers, ‘from boys of 14 to old men of 60. Their weapons were equally as varied and ineffective as themselves, old swords and obsolete single loading rifles. Many had neither arms nor equipment.’11 Experiences like these and the easy repulse of the Turkish attack on the canal would give the Anzacs a dangerously false impression of the fighting qualities of their enemy.
At the end of February, the New Zealand Infantry Brigade returned to their camp at Zeitoun and to more hard desert training. On 3 March, 16,000 soldiers of the newly formed Australian and New Zealand Army Corps were sent on one of their toughest days in the field so far—a twelve-hour march across the desert for an all-arms attack training exercise. As the last battalion in the brigade, the Wellingtons marched under a continuous dust storm kicked up by the boots of the leading formations. Over a hundred men fell out of the ranks through exhaustion.
Another exercise involving Russell’s mounted rifles brigade and the Australian Light Horse left Malone distinctly unimpressed. ‘It was a poor show and neither of the Brigadiers in my opinion seem to have a sound knowledge of their work,’ he wrote. ‘I was not astonished because I have long since found that very few officers have a real knowledge of military principles.’
Malone may have spoken too soon. A night attack by the Wellingtons on two hills known as ‘The Virgin’s Breasts’ was a shambles. Two of his men finally took the position alone and Malone himself was taken prisoner. If their commanding officer was not amused, his soldiers were delighted.
The tough desert training, however, was producing results. Godley—usually very sparing with praise—had already told his officers that the New Zealand Division was set to become the best in the British Army. Malone himself considered the New Zealand Infantry Brigade to be the best in the newly formed ANZAC Corps. More training, however, was needed if it was to be fully battle ready: ‘The whole is a very fine body of men, but soldiers are not made under our circumstances in six months.’
Religion now came briefly into view in the form of a new Catholic chaplain, Father Richards, and disputes over what form battalion church services should take. Malone didn’t like the cut of Father Richards: ‘Looks more like a commercial traveller or actor than a priest and is a bit fat looking.’ Decisions on religious services had been left to battalion commanders, and Malone had ordered separate services for each denomination. Every man, Catholic or Protestant, he argued, should have the right to attend the service of his choice.
The Wesleyan minister, Major Luxford, objected and claimed the right to hold combined services. According to Luxford, Malone complained bitterly about the historic persecution of Roman Catholics and refused to reconsider his decision. Whether the persecution issue played any part in Malone’s decision is unknown, but he had little respect for Luxford’s competence as an army chaplain. ‘He is quite unsuited to his job,’ Malone wrote. ‘I am going to keep him up to his regimental work. He runs about too much to Cairo and everywhere, except our own lines.’
Much to his pleasure, Ida had now written to say that she would come to England to nurse any of her family wounded in the fighting in France, where the New Zealanders expected to be finally deployed. At this stage, she planned to bring only her youngest daughter Molly and stepdaughter Norah, leaving the two boys, Barney and Denis, behind at boarding school in Nelson.
Meanwhile, the immediate temptations of the flesh were ruthlessly ignored. After dinner at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, Malone was taken to the Palmariam dance hall—‘a place where people sit and drink and smoke and get up as the spirit moves them to dance with ladies of doubtful character’. The dancing was chaste enough, he noted, but there was ‘an undercurrent of impropriety about the whole thing’.
Dinner with Anzac commander General Birdwood was more to Malone’s taste. He found Birdwood genial and affable with no hint of pretentiousness or conceit. Birdwood felt that the New Zealanders had improved enormously as a result of their training; Malone did not entirely agree, and on being asked his opinion gave it in full.
By now the New Zealand officers had been told that they were likely to embark for parts unnamed sometime between 15 and 22 March, and that they would be in line with British troops who had already seen action on the Western Front. ‘Rumour has it that we all go to Cyprus,’ Malone recorded that night, ‘and then join other troops in readiness to land in Turkey or Greece, take Constantinople, settle the Turks, then go up to Austria through Servia [Serbia], Vienna and then on to Germany!’
On 6 March, Malone and his senior officers were invited to a ball at Cairo’s Continental Hotel—‘a gay scene in which officers of all arms and countries in scarlet, blue and gold danced with the elite of the city and its visitors’. As a student of the Duke of Wellington’s campaigns against the French, Malone may have noted an interesting historical parallel—the glittering ball hosted by the Duchess of Richmond in Brussels on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, exactly 100 years before.
The next day delivered a brief but poignant reminder of lost moments with his family. Malone was invited to afternoon tea with an expatriate French woman and her infant daughter. The little girl was about the same age as his own five-year-old Molly—‘very fair, fluffy and shy. She speaks French so sweetly and is a very modest, sweet little soul . . . How I wished I had Mater and Molly especially here even for the couple of hours I had. Joy to come.’
March 10 was a day of brigade manoeuvres. The Wellington Battalion performed with distinction and was congratulated for its efforts by Brigadier Johnston. ‘My men are splendid,’ wrote Malone that night. ‘Twenty miles tramping across the hot and dusty desert and attack. Yet they marched into camp as though they had done nothing. I am very proud of them. They are a long, long way ahead of the other battalions.’
The demeanour of his officers, however, was causing Malone some concern. After a particularly tough night exercise, he wrote: ‘They are a bit too glum to my fancy and appeared as though they thought they were being a bit badly done by. Still they did their work and the spirit of the men in keeping on digging was splendid, evidence I am pleased to think of good discipline.’
Training on 11 March proved troublesome. Malone’s horse Billy misbehaved to the point of being almost unmanageable—snorting, cavorting and eventually bolting with his rider along the road beside the former Khedive of Egypt’s palace. The problem was camels—Billy hated them and they were constantly passing by as he and Malone rode along.
Meanwhile, General Melliss had written to Birdwood commending ‘the conduct, discipline and excellent soldierly spirit’ of the Wellington and Otago battalions during the defence of the Suez Canal. Malone, their commanding officer, was described by Melliss as ‘an excellent soldier and disciplinarian’ who would make a good brigadier.12
According to his diary, Malone was told by Melliss that if the emergency had continued, he would have been given command of the five redoubts on the east bank of the canal, and in recognition of this extra responsibility promoted to the rank of brigadier. ‘It would have been a grand change, though of course a greater responsibility. If the Turks do come on again, Genl Melliss will ask for us specially as reinforcements.’
Some days later, all units marched out into the desert for inspection by Sir Henry MacMahon, the British High Commissioner, and General Sir John Maxwell, commander of the British armed forces in Egypt. The troops had no sooner assembled than a swarm of locusts passed over, obscuring the sun. The men slashed at them with their rifles, killing thousands, but making no impression on the swarm. A strong wind then blew a cloud of dust over the infantry as each battalion marched past.
The troops considered that morning easily the worst they had experienced in Egypt so far, but on 22 March they paraded again before their generals. The dust was ‘something awful—thicker than smoke in a bush fire near the saluting point’.13
In spite of it all, Malone wanted to be nowhere else. On 24 March, he wrote to his cousin, the nun Sister Teresa Vasey, about his relief at being free of his law practice: ‘I was very sick of churning away in it. If I get through the war all right, I doubt if I shall go back to my law profession. I am better suited where I now am.’
By now the New Zealanders were tired of the relentless training and were thirsting for action. ‘Sight-seeing, even in the most wonderful land on earth, was not what they had come for. Pleasures commenced to pall, and training became tiresome. The glamour was wearing off from this land of sand and sin . . . Birdwood’s 30,000 were spoiling for a fight. There was bravery in the air.’14
Their day was not far off. In London, the War Council was making plans for a campaign that would break the military deadlock on the Western Front by opening a second front against Germany’s ally Turkey in the east. Under this plan a combined British and French naval force would break through the Dardanelles Strait into the Sea of Marmara to threaten the Turkish capital Constantinople. Panicked by this show of force, the Turkish Government was expected to capitulate and withdraw from its alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Turkey’s surrender would, it was reasoned, open a supply route through the Black Sea, allowing military supplies to reach the Russian armies fighting the Germans and Austrians in the east, and Russian wheat to be shipped to the west. Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania would be encouraged by Allied successes to join the Entente, and Russia, by a secret agreement with the British Government, would take control of Armenia and Constantinople.
Elements of the British Cabinet had even more ambitious plans. It was envisaged that once the British Navy was in control of the Sea of Marmara, it could link up with the Russian Navy in the Black Sea and make a combined assault up the Danube into the heart of Austria-Hungary. An alliance with Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania would allow the Allies to throw an army against the Austrian flank, relieving pressure on the Russians and giving them time to re-equip their forces.
The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill—‘a romantic in strategy and enthusiast for military adventures’—originally wanted 50,000 Russian troops to be brought by sea to attack the Turks on the Gallipoli peninsula. ‘The price to be paid in taking Gallipoli would no doubt be high,’ he wrote to Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, but there would be no more war with Turkey. ‘A good army of 50,000 men and sea power—that is the end of the Turkish menace.’15
In January 1915, the Russians asked the British Government to send a force to the Dardanelles to take the pressure off their troops who were fighting the Turks in the Caucasus. It was agreed that once the Dardanelles had been forced and access gained to the Sea of Marmara, the Russians would, if possible, advance by land and sea against Constantinople.
The options finally settled on by the British and French high commands were either a combined attack by naval and ground forces—the latter landing first on the Gallipoli peninsula and destroying the Turkish forts—or a thrust through the Dardanelles by the fleet alone. The demand for troops on the Western Front ruled out the use of ground forces, and on 7 February a combined French and British fleet bombarded the outer forts protecting the Dardanelles.
On 18 March, the attack was renewed and this time with disastrous results. Turkish mines and shore gunfire put a third of the fleet out of action, sinking three old battleships, crippling three others, and drowning 700 British and French sailors. Acting alone, the British and French navies had failed; the soldiers would now have to finish the job.
The two naval attacks, however, had forewarned the Turks and they had rapidly built up their coastal defences. Trenches were dug and redoubts built, field guns and howitzers ranged on likely landing places, and barbed wire spread along vulnerable beaches. Any landing force could now expect stiff resistance.
On 28 March Malone took four days’ leave, which he spent visiting the Egyptian temples at Luxor, accompanied by Major Temperley, brigade major of the New Zealand Infantry Brigade. ‘Crossed the Nile, then by donkey to the temple of Queen Hetetu, a beautiful piece of work. Then to the tomb of Queen Nefertari, 2nd wife of Rameses II or III. Then to the temple of Medmet Habi.’ The day’s touring done, Malone wrote to Ida asking her to spend a second honeymoon with him after the war was over—floating down the Nile on a large riverboat.
On 29 March, 20,000 troops of the newly formed Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) paraded before its commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton, the last before leaving Egypt for the Dardanelles. Men and horses were in peak condition; equipment glittered and shone in the sun, while through the dust storm created by the mounted men marched the long-suffering infantry, their mouths, noses and ears clogged with dust.
The last hurrah was the so-called Battle of the Wazzir, which began when the Anzacs were granted final leave to Cairo. About 4 p.m. a riot broke out in the brothel quarter, most likely over VD-infected women and the price of ‘filthy native liquors’. Grog shops were looted, furniture thrown out of the high windows and set on fire. When the fire engines arrived, the rioters tipped them over and cut the hoses. Egyptian police trying to disperse them were pelted with bottles, sticks and stones. Revolvers were fired into the crowd wounding five men.
A squadron of cavalry, aided by pickets from the Australian and New Zealand camps, finally restored order, but nearly a hundred men from the Wellington Battalion alone were now either under open arrest, in the guard tent, or still missing. Whatever Malone’s thoughts about this major breach of battalion discipline, he kept them to himself. ‘If they had burnt the quarter to the ground it would have been a good thing’ was the only entry in his diary that night.
On 7 April—three days before leaving Egypt—Malone took his battalion on a final, 22-kilometre, march into the desert in full battle array. It was a feat of endurance for all hands, he conceded, but march discipline was excellent. ‘I was very pleased and am so proud of the regiment.’ The men in the front line had a much different view: ‘All [the] men call Colonel Malone a rotter,’ recalled Private William Hampton.16
The MEF commanders now confirmed that the Allies would be landing on Turkish territory and that heavy fighting was expected. ‘Deo Volente [God willing],’ wrote Malone, ‘we shall come out of it all right. Then for a big flank attack on the Austrians and Germans via Servia [Serbia]. Perhaps the Greeks, Italians, Bulgarians and Romanians will join in. If they [do] what a polyglot lot we shall be.’
On 8 April, the Maori contingent left for Malta and garrison duty. All leave was stopped and troops warned of a move in a few days. As a last act, Malone visited the graves of three of his men who had died of pneumonia or other causes during the battalion’s training in Egypt. He took photographs and arranged to have them sent back to their relatives in New Zealand.
At dawn on Saturday, 10 April, Malone led the Taranaki and Ruahine companies of his battalion out of Zeitoun camp to entrain for Alexandria, where they would embark for the Allied base on the Mediterranean island of Lemnos. ‘Silently they marched out of camp, no cheering, no bands playing . . . Sternly, as on a grim business, they pushed forward into the darkness of the night.’17