THE OLD SAYING that ‘an army marches on its stomach’ is a truism that could easily be matched by ‘an army survives on its laughter’. Military life is often difficult and dangerous and one way of coping with it is to laugh, especially about things that are not very funny at all. Anzac humour reflects the famous larrikinism and anti-authoritarianism of the digger, whether at Gallipoli, the western front, Tobruk, Kokoda or Vietnam.
Lovingly told and retold, the peppery yarns of the digger never failed to raise a laugh at the front, in the pub or at reunions after the war. While some may have lost a little of their original bite as the years have passed, these brief snippets of humour are powerful expressions of Anzac attitudes, then and now.
In the 1914–18 war, the Anzacs were notorious among British troops for indiscipline and a casual attitude towards the military in general. They tended to address officers by their first names and, of course, rarely saluted. This was beyond the understanding of the disciplinarian British army and led to many confrontations, sometimes serious, sometimes amusing. One such incident occurred in northern France at a place called Strazeele. The Australians were camped across the road from the 10th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, as recounted by Fusilier Private C. Miles.
The Colonel decided that he would have a full dress parade of the guard mounting. Well, the Aussies looked over at us amazed. The band was playing, we were all smartened up, spit and polish, on parade, and that happened every morning. We marched up and down, up and down.
The Aussies couldn’t get over it, and when we were off duty we naturally used to talk to them, go over and have a smoke with them, or meet them when we were hanging about the road or having a stroll. They kept asking us: ‘Do you like this sort of thing? All these parades, do you want to do it?’ Of course we said, ‘No, of course we don’t. We’re supposed to be on rest, and all the time we’ve got goes to posh up and turn out on parade.’ So they looked at us a bit strangely and said, ‘OK, cobbers, we’ll soon alter that for you.’
The Australians didn’t approve of it because they never polished or did anything. They had a band, but their brass instruments were all filthy. Still, they knew how to play them.
The next evening, our Sergeant-Major was taking the parade. Sergeant-Major Rowbotham, a nice man, but a stickler for discipline. He was just getting ready to bawl us all out when the Australians started with their band. They marched up and down the road outside the field, playing any old thing. There was no tune you could recognise, they were just blowing as loud as they could on their instruments. It sounded like a million cat-calls.
And poor old Sergeant Rowbotham, he couldn’t make his voice heard. It was an absolute fiasco. They never tried to mount another parade, because they could see the Aussies watching us from across the road, just ready to step in and sabotage the whole thing. So they decided that parades for mounting the guards should be washed out, and after that they just posted the guards in the ordinary way as if we were in the line.
Rivalry between Australians and the British and Americans was often played for laughs.
Two Aussies on leave from France were occupying a first-class non-smoking compartment of an English train, when an irascible old bloke blew in. The old killjoy got nasty because one of the Aussies was smoking, and without any preliminary diplomatic negotiations handed the cigar-puffer an ultimatum that he would have him removed from the compartment if he didn’t stop smoking. This annoyed the Aussie, and he counter-attacked behind a strong smoke barrage. At the next station Mr. Killjoy called a porter and read out the Aussie’s crime sheet:
‘This man is smoking in a non-smoking compartment.’ He demanded that the Aussie should be removed. The porter told the Aussie that he would either have to stop smoking or stop travelling in a non-smoker.
‘Well, I plead guilty to smoking in a non-smoker,’ said the Aussie ‘but this old nark has no kick coming against me. He’s travelling first on a second-class ticket!’
The porter demanded old Killjoy’s ticket and found that the Aussie’s statement was correct. Exit old Killjoy.
‘How did you know he was travelling wrong class?’ asked the second Aussie, later.
‘Oh, I saw the ticket sticking out of his vest pocket,’ replied the other, between puffs, ‘and it was the same colour as my own.’
Sometimes these yarns involved the ability to understand, or not, the ‘great Australian slanguage’.
THE YANK: ‘Say, Guy, how far to battle?’
AUSSIE: ‘Well sonny, I guess it’s about five kilos. Just “pencil and chalk” straight along this “frog and toad” till you come to the “romp and ramp” on the “Johnny Horner”. Then dive across that “bog orange” field till you run into a barrage. That lobs you right there. D’ye compree?’
Being able to speak the right lingo could mean the difference between life and death, as highlighted in an Australian yarn.
The weary pongo [soldier of low rank] was wending his way frigidly along the duckboards when he encountered a sentry.
‘Halt!—password?’ The weary one carefully searched his thought-box, but couldn’t recall the required word. He remembered, however, that it was the name of a place in Australia, so he began to run through all the places he knew, in the hope of striking it: ‘Bondi, Woolloomooloo, Budgaree, Wangaratta, Cootamundra, Murrumbidgee, Wagga Wagga, We—.’
‘Pass on, Digger,’ interrupted the sentry, ‘you’ve got the dinkum talk!’
The dialogue between the American and the Australian was a popular form of digger humour. Possibly because the Australian always tops the exaggerations of the American. This one was already old when it was first published in 1917.
A yankee and an Aussie were having a quiet drink in the canteen. After a while the conversation came around to the subject of wildlife. ‘Your dingo is nowhere near as savage as our coyote’, the American claimed. ‘And our cougars can outdo any of your wild beasts.’
‘Is that right?’, said the Aussie.
‘Yeah. Take our rattlesnake. It bites you and you die in under two minutes.’
‘Oh, that’s nothing’, replied the Aussie. ‘Our taipans come at you so fast you’re dead two minutes before they bite you.’
It was not only the wildlife that featured in tall tales of this type.
It was at a military hospital in England, and the convalescents were sitting in the garden chatting. The topic was cold weather. The American had the floor.
‘Wal, I reckon it was a bit cold in those French trenches this winter. But shucks! It was a heat wave compared with some of the cold snaps we get in America. Why, look here, children; I remember one day over’n New York it got so darned cold, kinder suddent like, that everybody’s whiskers freezed, and the people had ter shave themselves with dynamite. Of course the explosions shook up ther old city a trifle, but, by George Washington, some whickers got shifted! Another day a cold jerk put in without notice and freezed up all the whisky. The bartenders had to go about with axes chipping’ nobblers off the whiskey blocks. Some cold, I reckon!’
An Australian scratched his right ear with a crutch, and put in:
‘Dunno much about cold in Australia, but I ken talk heat a bit. It does warm up over there. Now, once I was humpin’ me bluey in ther bush. A heat wave came up. You could see it comin’ in the distance by ther kangaroos ’oppin’ about with their tails on fire. I picked up a bit of old fencin’ wire and lit me pipe with it. That was a sure sign too. In a few minutes that wave struck me, dealt with me, and then passed on, leavin’ me with only me pocket knife and a quart pot to go on with. Of course I was new to the bush, or I couldn’t have felt it so much. I met another bloke soon after. He was eatin’ a baked goanna he’d picked up. I sez ‘Warm, mate, eh?’ He sez, ‘Oh, it’s been just nice to-day. Reckon it’ll be fairly ’ot tomorrow.’
It was on again in the next war as well.
Overheard on Townsville beach one night in 1944—a Yank calls to an Aussie: ‘Hey, Buddy, break down the language! I’d like you to know I have a lady with me here!’
The Aussie calls back to the Yank: ‘And what the hell d’ya think I have here—a ruddy seagull?’
Religion was another point of difference and potential sectarian dissension within the ranks. Personal experience stories featured frequently in trench tales. These were sometimes simple accounts of unusual and/or humorous experiences; at other times they were retellings of traditional yarns and tall stories. Often they were in all likelihood apocryphal, though nonetheless revealing for that, as in this slice of sectarian rivalry under the title ‘We’ll Have That Moment Again’.
A n R.C. Padre was tripping gaily along somewhere near supports, when he noticed a burying party just putting the finishing touches to the graves of four of their comrades. He pulled up, and finding that three of them were of his creed, asked who had read the service. ‘Some Tommy C of E Padre, sir’ was the reply. The R. C. Chaplain asked nothing more but walked straight to the graves, and, in a voice like a sergeant-major, gave the order ‘Numbers 2, 3 and 4—As you were!’—Then proceeded to re-read the burial service.
Many years after World War II ended in 1945, Mr R. F. Young of Tasmania remembered an incident that typified the predominant digger attitude to formal religious affiliations.
When I was joining the A.I.F. back in 1940, a big bushman ahead of me in the line was being asked by the Recruiting Depot Lieutenant about his name, age, and so on. When it came to his religious denomination he drawled, ‘Aw, I’m not fussy. What are you short of?’
This anecdote is from the Boer War (1899–1902) and so cannot be considered a strictly Anzac yarn. But it suggests that the attitudes of the diggers were already in formation a long time before 1915.
It was during the Boer War. He was walking down the street in a city in South Africa when he noticed a very polished and obviously very new British Army lieutenant complete with monocle and swagger stick, walking across the road.
About to cross the road from the other side was a very dirty and obviously very experienced Australian Light Horseman, complete with slouch hat, the inevitable ‘makings’ hanging from his lower lip, and a saddle over one arm.
The young lieutenant halted the Aussie, apparently with the intention of asking him what he meant by appearing in the streets in such an untidy getup.
The Aussie spat his cigarette on to the road and eyed the young officer up and down. ‘The Queensland Bushrangers,’ he answered casually. Then he lifted a saddle stirrup to one eye in imitation of the monocle, and said with a forced accent. ‘And you, my good man—what bloody regiment, may I ask, do you belong to?’
The diggers of the Great War didn’t have it all their own way when it came to British officers and monocles. One Australian unit had a posh-talking officer who wore a monocle. One morning when the men came out to parade before the officer, they all lined up with a coin in one eye. The British officer looked at them, then tossed his head upwards, sending his monocle spinning into the air, catching it in his other eye.
‘Now, which one of you bastards can do that?’, he asked in an impeccable English accent.
It is said that the diggers were so impressed they all wanted to buy the officer a drink.
If troops are not properly fed they cannot fight well, due both to physical and psychological decline. Sometimes it becomes necessary to resort to deception to improve the menu, as recounted in this tale from Gallipoli.
The ration problem on Gallipoli was at times a very real one, but probably the most trying part of it, to the troops at any rate, was that the only commodity in the ‘sweets’ line of business was apricot jam. Australians often wondered why that particular form of preserve seemed to be unlimited. The explanation was that in 1914 the English crop of ’cots was one of the heaviest on record. Thousands of tons of the fruit were jammed and canned, and some makers (can any of us ever forget Tickler, with his picture on the label?) made fortunes, though all of them didn’t deserve to. Naturally the troops, and especially the Australians, got sick of the sight of the stuff.
One dark night in November, ’15, it fell to my lot to take a fatigue party of 20 men down from ‘Q Pip’ (Quinn’s Post) to the beach. None of us knew the route we had been ordered to follow, and we got helplessly bushed until I espied a light in what turned out to be an ASC sub-depot. ‘I’ve been lookin’ for you,’ said a voice. ‘You’ll be the party for the stuff for the Jocks’ (Scottish Horse). Scenting something good, I took the risk and said that we were. Darkness aided in hiding the Aussie uniform and silence did the rest. We afterwards discovered that we had got away with over 200 jars of Keiller’s Dundee marmalade, among the best of Scotia’s products. I have often wondered what happened to the wight who issued the stuff without a murmur. But in those days one could do a lot and get away with it.
Alcohol has always featured heavily in the life and lore of soldiers. During the Great War, rum and other forms of alcohol were often issued to troops when at the front line—and greatly appreciated it was, as reflected in this World War I ditty.
The Frenchman likes his sparkling wine,
The German likes his beer,
The Tommie likes his half and half
Because it brings good cheer.
The Scotsman likes his whisky,
And Paddy likes his pot,
But the Digger has no national drink,
So he drinks the blanky lot.
Many yarns were spun around the subject of grog. This one allegedly took place in the French town of Le Havre immediately after the war’s end on 11 November 1918. The reference to the ‘8 chevaux ou 40 hommes’ (8 horses or 40 men) was a favourite World War I digger term for the very basic French rail carriages in which they were often transported. As this story tells it, four days of this form of travel put the diggers in the mood for a drink.
After the Armistice the troops were sent to Le Havre in a car deluxe of the ‘8 chevaux ou 40 hommes’ brand. The weather being cold, the food crook, and the journey taking anything up to four days, the troops arrived at their destination in a somewhat peevish mood.
Our crowd was reported to have busted open some railway trucks at Abbeville and helped themselves to cognac, and the O.C. No. 5 Company at the Australian delousing camp was deputed to intercept the train . . . and search it. He carried out his duties faithfully telling the O.C. train his orders and saying ‘I shall be back in twenty minutes with my staff and I will search thoroughly. If I find any cognac, heaven help anyone found with it.’
When the search was made the honour of the AIF was vindicated. Next morning the O.C. No. 5 found a bottle of cognac on his bunk.
The tradition of the dreadful cook is a long one, stretching back to Australia’s pioneering days. It often features in the lore of shearing; for example, in the tale of ‘Who called the cook a bastard?’. In this story, the shearers are so fed up with the appalling food their cook serves up that there is an argument in which one of them calls the cook a ‘bastard’. The cook complains to the boss, who comes into the men’s shed to find the culprit. ‘Who called the cook a bastard?’ he demands to know. ‘Who called the bastard a cook?’, comes the rapid-fire reply.
The tradition continued into the First AIF where, in a variation on the theme, a digger is being questioned by the officer in charge of his court-martial. ‘“Did you call the cook a ———?” “No”, the digger answers, “but I could kiss the ——— who did!”’
And in another incident involving bad food and bad language:
I came out of my dugout one morning attracted by a terrible outburst of Aussie slanguage in the trench. The company dag [character] was standing in about three feet of mud, holding his mess tin in front of him and gazing contemptuously at a piece of badly cooked bacon, while he made a few heated remarks concerning one known as Bolo, the babbling brook. He concluded an earnest and powerful address thus:
‘An’ if the ——— that cooked this bacon ever gets hung for bein’ a cook, the poor ——— will be innocent’.
Cooks were usually known by their rhyming slang name as ‘Babbling Brooks’, or simply ‘Babblers’.
‘What’s this the Babbling Brook has given me—tea or stew?’ asked the new hand perplexedly, as he contemplated the concoction in his Dixie.
‘It’s tea’, announced his cobber.
‘How can you tell?’ said the new hand.
‘You can always tell when you’ve got tea or stew by where he puts it. If he puts it in the Dixie lid it’s stew, but if he puts it in the Dixie itself it’s tea.’
Repetition of the same offering could also cause concern.
During the advance towards the outer defences of the Hindenburg Line early in September, 1918, the supply of rations got a bit disorganized, and for three solid days the cookhouse menu was stew, made of biscuits and bully-beef, with sundry dehydrated vegetables put through the mince, and boiled with a little water. Every man who came to the cookhouse made practically the same remark: ‘Struth! Stoo again!’ Then followed a wider range of language.
It nearly drove the cook mad. On the evening of the third day a notice was chalked up outside the cookhouse: ‘It’s Stew Again! But the first insulting cow who says so will be made Fresh Meat!’
Cooks were usually considered to be less than hygienic in both their trade and their personal characteristics.
Back in the First World War days there was a company cook— we’ll call him Bill—who was probably the finest spoiler of Army rations in the whole A.I.F. He was also the greasiest trooper ever to don uniform.
‘I learnt to cook from me old mother,’ he would reminisce. ‘Every Saturday she useter boil a sheep’s head for Dad and us 14 kids; and she always cooked the head with the eyes in, as she reckoned it’d ’ave to see us through the week.’
Old Bill returned home after the armistice, sound in wind and limb, his nearest approach to a ‘Blighty’ being up at Messines in ’17, when a whizzbang shell struck him fair and square in the chest. But he was so greasy the shell merely glanced off him and killed two mules attached to the cooker.
The tradition, and the problem, continued into the next war.
The boys hated the new cook, and one of them filled his boots with pig-wash in the dead of night. The cook said nothing next day when the lads visited the cookhouse after dinner, and the jester said:
‘Well, cookie, who filled your boots with pig-wash?’
‘Dunno’, cookie said, ‘but I know who ate it.’
In another place during the same war:
‘How you liking it?’ the cook said to the new recruit eating his first camp dinner.
‘What is it?’ the new recruit said.
‘Horseflesh’, the cook said. ‘How’d you feel about that, eh?’
‘I don’t mind horseflesh’, the new recruit said, ‘but you might have taken the harness off.’
And, according to Tobruk legend:
An officer was inspecting the cooking arrangements in a darkened dugout. ‘You’ve got too many flies in here, Cookie’, he told the individual entrusted with feeding the troops.
’Ave I sir?’ came the puzzled reply—‘Ow many should I ’ave?’
Perhaps the single most detested item of army food was the biscuit, also known as a ‘tile’ or ‘hard tack’, all names suggesting the unnatural solidity of the food. There was much to be lampooned about the biscuit, as O. E. Burton of the New Zealand Medical Corps wrote on Gallipoli, the extravagance of his prose suggesting the depth of feeling towards the offending item.
BISCUITS! Army biscuits! What a volume of blessings and cursing have been uttered on the subject of biscuits—army biscuits!
What a part they take in our daily routine: the carrying of them, the eating of them, the cursing at them!
Could we find any substitute for biscuits? Surely not! It is easy to think of biscuits without any army, but of an army without biscuits—never.
Biscuits, like the poor, are always with us. Crawling from our earthly dens at the dim dawning of the day, we receive no portion of the dainties which once were ours in the long ago times of effete civilization: but, instead, we devour with eagerness—biscuits porridge. We eat our meat, not with thankfulness but with biscuits. We lengthen out the taste of jam—with biscuits. We pound them to powder. We boil them with bully. We fry them as fritters. We curse them with many and bitter cursings, and we bless them with few blessings.
Biscuits! Army biscuits! Consider the hardness of them. Remember the cracking of your plate, the breaking of this tooth, the splintering of that. Call to mind how your finest gold crown weakened, wobbled, and finally shrivelled under the terrific strain of masticating Puntley and Chalmer’s No.5’s.
Think of the aching void where once grew a goodly tooth. Think of the struggle and strain, the crushing and crunching as two molars wrestled with some rocky fragment. Think of the momentary elation during the fleeting seconds when it seemed that the molars would triumphantly blast and scrunch through every stratum of the thrice-hardened rock. Call to mind the disappointment, the agony of mind and body, as the almost victorious grinder missed its footing, slipped, and snapped hard upon its mate, while the elusive biscuit rasped and scraped upon bruised and tender gums.
Biscuits! Army biscuits! Have you, reader, ever analysed with due carefulness the taste of army biscuits? Is it the delicious succulency of ground granite or the savoury toothsomeness of powdered marble? Do we perceive a delicate flavouring of ferro-concrete with just a dash of scraped iron railings? Certainly, army biscuits, if they have a taste, have one which is peculiarly their own. The choicest dishes of civilized life, stewed or steamed, fried, frizzled, roasted or toasted, whether they be composed of meat or fish, fruit or vegetable, have not (thank Heaven!) any like taste to that of army biscuits. Army biscuits taste like nothing else on the Gallipoli Peninsula. It is a debatable question indeed whether or not they have the quality of taste. If it be granted that they possess this faculty of stimulating the peripheral extremities of a soldier’s taste-buds, then it must also be conceded that the stimulation is on the whole of an unpleasant sort. In short, that the soldier’s feeling apart from the joy, the pride, and the satisfaction at his completed achievement in transferring a whole biscuit from his outer to his inner man without undue accident or loss of teeth, is one of pain, unease and dissatisfaction.
It may seem almost incredible, wholly unbelievable indeed, but armies have marched and fought, made sieges, retired according to plan, stormed impregnable cities, toiled in weariness and painfulness, kept lonely vigils, suffered the extremes of burning heat and of freezing cold, and have, in the last extremity, bled and died, laurel-crowned and greatly triumphant, the heroes of legend and of song, all without the moral or physical, or even spiritual aid of army biscuits.
Agamemnon and the Greeks camped for ten years on the windy plains of Troy without one box of army biscuits. When Xerxes threw his pontoon bridge across the Narrows and marched 1,000,000 men into Greece, his transport included none of Teak Green and Co.’s paving-stones for the hardening of his soldiers’ hearts and the stiffening of their backs. Caesar subdued Britons, Gauls, and Germans. Before the lines of Dyrrhachium his legions lived many days on boiled grass and such-like delicacies, but they never exercised their jaws upon a rough, tough bit of—army biscuit.
Biscuits! Army biscuits! They are old friends, now, and, like all old friends, they will stand much hard wear and tear. Well glazed, they would make excellent tiles or fine flagstones. After the war they will have great scarcity value as curios, as souvenirs which one can pass on from generation to generation, souvenirs which will endure while the Empire stands. If we cannot get physical strength from army biscuits, let us at least catch the great spiritual ideal of enduring hardness, which they are so magnificently fitted to proclaim.
The seasons change. Antwerp falls, Louvain is burned, the tide of battle surges back and forth: new reputations are made, the old ones pass away; Warsaw, Lemberg, Serbia, the stern battles of Gallipoli, Hindenburg, Mackensen, each name catches our ear for a brief moment of time, and then gives way to another crowding it out; but army biscuits are abiding facts, always with us, patient, appealing, enduring. We can move to other theatres, we can change our clothes, our arms and our generals, but we must have our biscuits, army biscuits, else we are no longer an army.
A good many Anzac yarns play with the diggers’ casual attitude to war:
There was once an Australian V.C. winner who was exceptionally modest. It was only with great reluctance that he agreed to attend a ceremony at which he was to be presented with his decoration.
When it was all over, a friend asked him how he felt after such a tumultuous reception.
‘They got on my nerves,’ said the V.C. winner. ‘They made that much fuss, you’d have thought I’d won a medal in the Olympic Games.’
Queenslander, Jim Matheson had a yarn about his war:
In France during 1917, the Eighth Brigade was moving up in open formation under intense rifle fire. My Queensland mate and I were under fire for the first time. As the bullets whizzed and spatted around us, my mate said to me, ‘Didya hear that one, Jim?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘twice. Once when it passed us, and once when we passed it.’
The diggers’ favourite gambling game of two-up needed to be played, regardless of the circumstances:
Recently, one of our patrols was overdue, and I was detailed as one of a search party . . . Suddenly we saw the shadows of a number of men standing silently in the darkness. ‘Fritzes!’ said someone, and we all ducked into shell-holes. Fritz’s next flare revealed a small party, all stooping and gazing intently on the ground. Then one of them cried softly and exultantly, ‘Two heads are right!’ picked up the pennies and pocketed the winnings. It was the lost patrol. They were making their bets and tossing the coins in the darkness, and then waiting for the light from a Fritz flare to see the result.
This one was reported in the British Evening News and reprinted in the Australian Corps News Sheet in 1918 under the title ‘Taking the war calmly’.
An Australian told me this:—We were advancing, and had been going about an hour, and my platoon numbered about fifteen men. Going over a ridge we saw a pill-box. We poured machine-gun fire at it, and threw grenades too. No reply came, and we congratulated ourselves that we had no casualties.
All the time we could see smoke coming from the aperture; this worried us so we decided to charge it. We had our charge, with whoops and yells. I got to the door-way, and was met with, ‘Say, Digger, what the ——— is all the noise about?’
There stood an Australian, with a frying-pan in his hand, cooking bully beef over a fire which the Huns had left.
And, in digger lore at least, even the British Tommies recognised the bravery of their Anzac allies.
Tommy (to Australian): ‘That was a rare plucky thing you did this morning, to bring your mate in under that heavy fire.’
Australian: ‘Yairs, the blasted cow, he had all me b—— tobacco with him.’
In a much-told tale a very proper British officer addresses a group of Australians in what was the normal British army style. The Anzacs found this unacceptable and proceeded to count him out, a practice relatively common in the AIF though unthinkable in the British army. The 300 soldiers each sang out their number, ending at 300. The conclusion was the chorus ‘Out you Tommy Woodbine bastard’. The men then dispersed, some reportedly playing two-up, and leaving the outraged British officer to complain that this was an act of mutiny. But a staff sergeant, more experienced with the ways of the AIF, told him that such things were nothing remarkable and that no-one in authority in the Australian hierarchy would take such an accusation seriously.
True or not, the many yarns about officers, usually highlighting the anti-authoritarian aspect of the digger’s worldview, were legion in both world wars, as in this anecdote from the first war.
A digger is travelling on a train with two English officers. The officers are discussing their family backgrounds, relationships and pedigrees. After listening to this conversation for a while, the digger introduces himself to the officers as ‘Bluey’ Johnson . . . not married, two sons—both Majors in the British army.
Identity is the theme of another yarn from the 1914–18 war.
Two diggers on leave in London fail to salute a passing British officer. The outraged officer demands of the diggers: ‘Do you know who I am?’ One digger turns to the other and says, casually: ‘Did you hear that, Dig? He doesn’t even know who he is’.
The theme persisted into the next war:
During World War 2 a couple of diggers were on leave in Damascus. They visited a number of drinking establishments, sampling the local spirit known as ‘arrack’, a strong and fiery brew. Not surprisingly, they became lost. Unable to speak Arabic they could not get any help from the locals. Fortunately, a British general suddenly appeared in full dress uniform. ‘Hey mate’, one of the tipsy Australians called out ‘can you tell us where we are?’
The general stiffened with indignation at being addressed in such an insubordinate manner and replied frostily ‘Do you men know who I am?’
‘Cripes Bill’, said the digger turning to his mate, ‘this bloke’s worse off than us. We mightn’t know where we are but the poor bugger doesn’t know who he is!’
This one allegedly took place on a footpath in Tel Aviv during October 1942:
An older English colonel and a younger American major were deep in discussion about the war. Four young Australian soldiers, fairly intoxicated, came along towards them, divided into pairs, passed the officers and went unsteadily on their way.
‘Who in the blazes are that golddarned rabble?’ asked the American major.
‘They’re Orstralians’, replied the English colonel.
‘And whose side are they on?’
‘Ours Major, they are our allies’, said the Colonel.
‘But dammit, they didn’t salute us’, bleated the Major.
The Colonel admitted that this was so. ‘But at least they had the decency to walk around us. If it had been their fathers from the last war, they would have walked right over us.’
The same egalitarian tone is heard in many other digger yarns. The two diggers who fool the sentry into believing that they are leaving camp rather than returning to it late by facing the other way is just one of many. Often these are tinged with anti-British sentiment.
Saw a digger on leave in London walk past a young officer without slinging a salute. On being pulled up and asked didn’t he know whom he had passed, Dig said that the face was familiar but that he could not place him.
‘I’m an officer in His Majesty’s Imperial Army’ exploded the ’Sir’, ‘and entitled to a salute!’
‘Oh, garn, you little b——!’ says the Dig, and walked on.
Coming across an Aussie sergeant shortly afterwards, the officer unfolded his tale, repeating the Digger’s last blessing.
‘But you’re not one, are you?’ mildly asked the sergeant.
‘Certainly not!’ exploded the officer.
‘Well, go back and tell him that he is a blinking liar,’ drawled the sergeant.
It was not only British or American officers who were the butt of digger yarns, as in this one from the western front.
Digger Jones (of the 1st Div. ASC) was washing down his two donks, in a shell hole at Fleureaux, about fifty yards from the old duckboard track, where the mud and slush was about two feet deep, in 1916. Having cleaned and groomed one down, he led him back and stood him on the duckboard track. A Staff Officer dressed in white corduroys, glittering spurs and polished leggings wending his way to battalion headquarters, was annoyed to find a mule blocking his pathway. Approaching the mule he gave it a heavy shove, forcing it back into the slush, much to the annoyance of Digger Jones. ‘Here, what the h—— do you think you’re doing?’ he yelled indignantly.
‘What do you mean by blocking the track with your confounded mule?’ said the officer. ‘I’ll have you arrested for this. What is your name and number?’
Digger Jones surveyed the ground between them, and then replied: ‘You come over and get it.’
On another occasion:
General Braithwaite, known more or less affectionately to New Zealanders as ‘Bill the Bight’, was taking his Brigade up into the line when one of those inevitable hold-ups occurred at a crossroad. This caused a halt of the Brigade alongside an Aussie battery wagon lines. Bill rode up on his charger as natural as ever (that is, he was fuming!), and roared out, ‘De-lay, de-lay! What is the meaning of this de-lay?’ To which the Aussie’s greasy cook took it upon himself to answer, ‘It’s French for milk, you silly old basket.’
And the soldier who took the sergeant major’s suggestion too seriously:
Sergeant Major to a Private who has missed eleven shots out of twelve: ‘What, eleven misses; good heavens, man, go around the corner and shoot yourself.’
Hearing a shot around the corner, the Sergeant Major rushes around, to be confronted by the bad shot—
‘Sorry, sir, another miss,’ the Private murmurs.
This problem also continued into World War II:
In Whitehall recently an English Major-General stopped a non-saluting Aussie, and demanded to know who he was.
‘I’m a kind of Aussie soldier’, was the reply.
Said the officer: ‘Well, I’m a kind of major-general and you owe me a salute.’
Said the Aussie: ‘Okay, brother, I’ll give you a kind of salute.’
And he did.
A sergeant major is calling the role at parade:
‘Johnson!’
‘Yair,’ drawled Johnson ‘Simpson!’
‘’Ere.’
‘Jackson!’
‘She’s sweet.’
‘Smith!’
‘Here, sir.’
‘Crawler!’ shouted the platoon.
An opposite form of this situation is the well-travelled tale about the officer who is expecting an inspection from the top brass. He assembles his men to brief them and when he has finished tells them, ‘And whatever you do, for Christ’s sake don’t call me Alf ’.
A certain Australian sergeant major during World War I gave his commands in a most unorthodox manner:
‘Slope arms—you, too!’
‘Present arms—you, too!’
‘Forward march—you, too!’
After the parade one day, a young lieutenant approached the sar’major and asked him the reason for his unusual commands.
‘Well, sir,’ he replied, ‘it’s like this. Those men are a tough mob. Every time I give an order I know they’re going to abuse me, so I get in first.’
On Gallipoli and at the western front, the Anzacs created a whole cycle of yarns about a character known as ‘Birdie’. In reality, this was General Birdwood, commanding officer on Gallipoli, who earned the deep respect of ordinary Australian and New Zealand soldiers. This was something particularly difficult to achieve given their problems with military authority, and was based on Birdwood’s concern for the wellbeing of his men and his willingness to appear at the front line when necessary. General Sir Ian Hamilton, overall commander of the campaign and effectively Birdwood’s boss, generously summed up the man’s impressive reputation, calling him ‘the soul of Anzac’, and stated ‘Not for one single day has he ever quitted his post. Cheery and full of human sympathy, he has spent many hours of each twenty-four inspiring the defenders of the front trenches, and if he does not know every soldier in his force, at least every soldier in the force believes he is known to his chief ’.
In the many stories about him, Birdie is portrayed as a good bloke who understands the attitudes of his men and is prepared to bend the rules to accommodate them, especially those related to military rank, as in this favourite Birdie story.
General Birdwood is talking to an English staff officer outside the Australian Imperial Force headquarters in Horseferry Road, London. The staff officer is amazed and annoyed Australian soldiers passing by do not bother to salute the general. ‘I say, why don’t you make your men salute you?’
‘What!’ exclaims Birdwood. ‘Do you think I want to start a brawl in the heart of London!’
And at Gallipoli:
Birdwood was nearing a dangerous gap in a sap on Gallipoli when the sentry called out: ‘Duck, Birdie; you’d better ——— well duck!’ ‘What did you do?’ asked the outraged generals to whom Birdwood told the story. ‘Do? Why, I ——— well ducked!’
As well, there is the Gallipoli reinforcement who mistakes the general for a cook, again because he is not wearing his badges of rank.
A new reinforcement was going to Rest Gully when he got away from his track and, seeing a soldier studying a paper, went up to him and said: ‘Can you tell me the way to my crowd?’ The reinforcement has failed to recognise General Birdwood who replies ‘You’d better go and ask the cook just there.’
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ answered the reinstoushment. ‘I thought you were the cook.’
Birdwood maintained his good image with the diggers on the western front:
We were holding a nice, quiet sector of the line at le Touquet, when General Birdwood decided to pay our Brigade a visit. To me fell the job of conducting his party. On arrival at the reserve lines, Birdy decided to pay the ‘Gas Alarm post’ a visit. The sentry was a reinforcement, and failed to either salute Birdie or notice the party, so the General decided to have a little yarn, and the following dialogue took place:
Birdie: ‘Do you know me, son?’
Dig: ‘No. Don’t want to!’
Birdie: ‘Been in France long?’
Dig: ‘Too blanky long.’
Birdie: ‘Do you know that I am General Birdwood?’
Dig (very surprised): ‘Go on! I ’ave heard of you. Shake hands!’
The brass hats nearly fainted, but to Birdie’s everlasting credit let it be recorded that he shook hands heartily.
A favourite Anzac yarn of both world wars is usually known as ‘The Scrap’ or ‘The Piece of Paper’. In its World War I version it appeared in The Anzac Records Gazette of November 1915 in this form and under the title ‘Anzacalities’.
The Australian soldier in a well-known hospital in Egypt developed a habit of picking up every bit of paper he could find. A Medical Board decided he was harmless and might be better for a trip to Australia. On the trip to Australia he still continued the practice and on arrival there he was again boarded and the Board decided he was too eccentric for active service. On receiving his discharge he looked at it closely and remarked with a dry smile. ‘Thanks! That is the piece of paper I have been looking for.’
By 1942, the story had been updated and was much more elaborate, as in a version by Sergeant F. Oliver-Seakins that was published in a number of places, an indication of its popularity.
Sandy was a popular figure in his unit, always cheerful and high-spirited. But once, when he got back from leave, he told his mates he’d met a ‘beaut Sheila’ and was anxious to get out of the Army to marry her. As many others were similarly placed little notice was taken of Sandy when he ‘got down in the dumps’ occasionally.
One evening he was out with two friends taking a stroll when he saw a piece of paper on the ground ahead of him. He ran forward, picked it up, scrutinized it carefully, and threw it away again, sadly shaking his head. His mates asked him whether he’d expected to find a fiver, but he only said, ‘It isn’t what I’m looking for.’
As time went on Sandy became the talk of the section. Every time he saw a piece of paper he picked it up and looked at it carefully; but he always shook his head and threw it away, saying sadly, ‘That’s not what I’m looking for.’
It began to be rumoured that Sandy was ‘troppo’. The orderly sergeant thought he might need a break from his usual routine, so he placed him on pioneer fatigue. But one of Sandy’s new jobs was to empty the orderly room wastepaper basket.
His ‘disease’ now really manifested itself. He closely studied each piece of paper in every basket he emptied. And, as usual, the paper wasn’t what he was looking for.
Everyone was now thoroughly worried about Sandy.
The climax came when the section was on parade for an inspection by some visiting brass. The Colonel was highly pleased with his tour and was just about to compliment the Major when Sandy stepped forward three paces, picked up a piece of paper that had floated down to the ground in front of him, looked at it sadly and then returned smartly to his place in the ranks.
Later, Sandy was paraded before the Major, who nonplussed at his behaviour, told the orderly sergeant to take him to the Medical Officer.
In the M.O.’s tent Sandy’s first action was to pick up a couple of sheets of paper from the table and examine them, putting them back down with a shake of his head. The M.O. couldn’t get much out of Sandy. All he would say was that he hadn’t found what he was looking for.
‘Acute neurosis.’ Was the M.O.’s verdict. He recommended that Sandy be sent down to have his case examined by a medical board. This was arranged and Sandy went south.
In due course the board considered his case. Obviously acute neurosis. It was agreed that Sandy should be discharged medically unfit.
As the Officer at the G.D.D. [Genearl Details Depot] handed Sandy his discharge certificate, he remarked with a grin, for he’d heard all about Sandy’s case. ‘Hang on to THAT bit of paper, won’t you!’
‘By cripes I will!’ said Sandy, laughing as he folded up the form and put it in his pocket. ‘That’s the bit of paper I’ve been looking for!’
Those things that amused the diggers do not necessarily amuse everyone, though this story shows how the Anzacs dealt with the impositions of officialdom in a characteristically straightforward manner.
About the end of March, 1918, when the wilting flower of England’s Fifth Army was doing a marathon for home and mother, pursued by the beastly Bosche, the heads broadcasted one hateful word throughout the A.I.F.
‘Be Mobile!’ was the official edict. Every five minutes, it seemed, some bird of brass-hat plumage would flutter in gasping as if he’d brought the news from Ghent. Then, he’d cast an eagle eye over the collective water-bottle and the blancoed bandolier, and swoop off to some other harassed unit twittering, ‘Be Mobile!’
After the first few days the whole place came a hot-bed of mobility. Everyone from the boss to the last bandsman wore a mobile look. ‘Are you mobile?’ became a form of greeting. The very stew we ate seemed to have a mobile flavour. Such a positive nightmare did the word become that many a brave soldier shuddered at its sound.
After the first few days the only living soul in our unit that couldn’t be quite called mobile was Baldy, the mule, whose fairy footsteps were usually guided by Blackie Crayton. Blackie himself was sufficiently mobile to pass muster. As a combination, however, he and Baldy delayed every ‘mobile’ exercise, and held up every ‘mobile’ route march.
‘Can’t you make the mule more mobile, Crayton?’ the Sergeant-Major used to roar.
Late one night on the way up to Ypres Sector, Baldy who had been respectably mobile for the greater part of the day, suddenly became immobile. Baldy just stubbed his toes, so to speak, in the pave and stopped dead. Blackie was at his wit’s end. A desperately cold night, another three or four kilometres to get to the prepared billets and a hot meal, and Baldy reneging!
For nearly two hours Blackie, wet through and finished, struggled— coaxing, bullying, blaspheming and getting madder every minute. His frantic efforts proving futile—the jibbing animal never budged an inch—Blackie went absolutely berserk.
‘You bald faced atrocity!’ he howled. ‘I’ll lay a shade of odds THIS’LL shift you, you ——— that’s what you are!’ With which solemn incantation he placed a couple of Mills’ [small bombs] beneath the noble beast, and fled. By the time he reached safety, the bombs had made their presence felt, and Baldy shifted according to forecast.
The first person the fed-up Blackie met as he trudged along wearily into the village was our dear old friend and soul-mate, the Sergeant-Major.
‘Where’s that cranky mule?’ he questioned. The almost hysterical Blackie stood silent for fully thirty seconds before he responded.
‘Baldy?’ queried Blackie in tense tones. ‘Baldy? Baldy is mobile. Mobile at last. In fact, he’s so blanky mobile that he’ll be on the move from now till the Resurrection, pulling himself together and collecting his scattered remains. Baldy’s gone to his long home. An’ it’s so darned long he’ll never reach it. Yes! Take it from me, Baldy’s more blinkin’ mobile than any of us! Now, tell me where’s the mobile cook-house?’
They come in all shapes and sizes, with many different names, from ‘Happy Henry’ to ‘The Section Dope’. What they all have in common is the ability to raise a laugh, whether through their wit or their stupidity. Here are just a few of the many ‘character’ yarns that diggers have enjoyed telling one another.
Our prize Section Dope was trying to put the hard word on the Quarter Bloke for a tin of butter.
‘But I gave you a large tin of butter the day before yesterday,’ said the QM testily. ‘You don’t want to make it too hot!’
‘You didn’t give me a large tin of butter, it was a small tin.’
‘You dopey cow, I gave you a large tin of butter and a small tin of axle grease.’
‘Cripes! Then I’ve eaten the ruddy axle grease and put the butter on the axles!’
‘Dopey’ in our unit didn’t seem to have any liking for soldiering, so one day I asked him why he had joined up.
‘Well, you see, a cobber stole five pounds from me and ran away with my wife. There was nothing else to do but enlist.’
‘That was certainly tough luck,’ I sympathised.
‘Yair, it was every penny I had.’
As soon as it became known in the battalion that Andy had been a kangaroo shooter before the commencement of war in 1914, a sergeant put it to him that he was the right man to do a bit of sniping. Andy declined without thanks.
‘Why?’ snarled the sergeant.
‘I just don’t like it, that’s why. I’ve shot kangaroos, wallabies, dingoes and brumbies, an’ I ain’t goin’ to finish up with men—at least, not sniped men, anyhow.’
The sergeant seethed, but Andy was adamant. Sniping a kangaroo, he maintained, was a different thing from sniping a man.
‘Well,’ blew up the sergeant, ‘if you’re THAT finicky, I’ll go over and ask Fritz to hop!’
They called him Happy Henry. He was one of those grim humorous Australians who could no more resist joking about anything than he could resist accepting a cigarette. A friend remarked that his dial was hard enough to dent a railway pie at half a mile.
Happy Henry was well into the Somme scrap, and got out of it with a lump on each side of his head like young coconuts. He could hang his tin hat on either. He told the boys about it in the camp afterwards. He said:—‘I’d just sent a Hun over the Never Never with the sunning end of me bayonet, when another Fritz weighin’ about ’alf a ton swung the butt of his rifle against me block. Me head gave out a musical G. sharp, and as I made a smack at ’im I sez, ‘If yer do that agen, cobber, I’ll be rude.’ I missed him, and he swung agen and got me a clout on the other side of the block. His rifle smashed to pieces and of course I fixed ’im then. Y’see that was where ’e made the mistake.’
‘How mistake?’ asked somebody.
‘Well, he should ’ave lobbed me on the same place twice!’
Sandy was attached to our unit, 1 Div., 1st A.I.F. Like most diggers from the outback he had unorthodox ways of doing things. One day we were on parade for inspection by the Colonel. Sandy was in the front rank and was highly conspicuous by having several buttons of his tunic undone. When the Colonel reached him he stopped, bug-eyed, his pink face rapidly taking on a purplish hue. His hand shot out to point to the buttons left undone, Sandy seized the Colonel by the hand and nearly shook it off. The old boy glared at him. ‘I don’t know you, my man,’ he roared.
‘Sorry, mate,’ said Sandy, ‘I thought you was an old shearer bloke I knew out the back of bloody Bourke.’
The Australian platoon was under heavy Japanese frontal attack.
The commander yelled out, ‘Fire at will!’
‘Cripes,’ growled Chiller, ‘if you can pick Will outa that mob, you’re a better man than I am!’
‘Yes, Nugget, I tell you it was cold,’ said one of the ‘Diamond Dinks,’ [old hands] trying to impress an open-eyed ‘reinstoushment’ with his experiences of the winter on the Somme, ‘as cold as the gaze of the Quarter Bloke when yer put the hard word on him for a new Aussie tunic! Struth! I tell you at Bazentin it freezed so hard that you couldn’t blow a candle out! Y’ad ter knock the flame off with a stick!’
‘The Unofficial History of the AIF’
Smith’s Weekly began publication on 1 March 1919. It was a weekly Sydney broadsheet, the creation of its long-time editor Claude McKay and cabin boy turned millionaire Sir James Joynton Smith. From the beginning, the paper was aggressively nationalistic and very much on the side of the returned soldiers. It was quickly dubbed ‘the diggers’ Bible’. At first, the paper did very well. But by 1939 circulation had fallen to 80 000, though World War II led to a revival in which sales reached 300 000.
The paper’s historian and one-time staffer, George Blaikie, wrote that ‘Smith’s’ created ‘what was generally called “The Smith’s Weekly Soldier”. And there was a very curious phenomenon associated with this figure. It looked completely different when viewed from different angles’. One of these angles provided the classic view of the digger as: ‘. . . an undisciplined larrikin who would not button his tunic, delighted in insulting his officers and dodging his proper duties, and made a virtue out of going AWL [absent without leave] and resisting Military Police’.
Smith’s encouraged the submission of ‘pars’ or paragraphs and ‘gags’ from its predominantly digger readers. These became a regular feature of the paper under the title ‘The Unofficial History of the AIF’. The column ran most weeks throughout the 1920s, carrying a mix of personal experience stories, reminiscence and yarns. On 14 February 1925, for instance, the column carried the story of twin brothers who received exactly the same wound on the same day. The 28 March edition printed the yarn about the digger who was not worried about the dangers of trench warfare unless a shell had his regimental number on its base. A few days later the soldier was lucky to escape extinction as a ‘dud’ dropped near him. Upon examining the base of the defective shell the soldier discovered that it indeed bore his regimental number.
But the most popular story that Smith’s ever published appeared under the heading ‘The Most Amazing Story of the War’. For the readers of the newspaper, this yarn about the toughness of the digger was hilarious.
Here is told the amazing fact of a Digger who, to all intents and purposes, had passed into eternity; who returned from the brink of the grave into which he was being rolled. It is the closest thing to a resurrection from the dead in the 1942 years that have passed since the first Christmas.
It is related by a member of Smith’s editorial staff who is an officer of the A.I.F. Names quoted are those who played parts in this real life drama, and are not fictitious.
THE MOST AMAZING STORY OF THE WAR !
Just before Christmas 1942, there wasn’t any peace and goodwill round Sanananda [PNG, then New Guinea] way. There was mud, heat, mosquitoes, hate, and the strong sweet, smell of death.
‘A’ Company, Thirty-six Bn. Attached to the Seventh Division, A.I.F., had attacked an unsuspectedly strong Nip position just forward of Kessel’s. A well-placed Woodpecker and two LMGs [machine guns] had driven our boys back with heavy casualties. Seven men were posted missing, and as the withdrawal had been for only a couple of hundred yards there was little hope for them.
Three days later a corporal of ‘A’ Company volunteered to make a lone patrol into the Nip lines to locate the Woodpecker and LMGs. He couldn’t find them, but he returned with information that an Australian body was lying in a Jap slit trench under the corpses of two very High Nips. Accompanied by a stretcher bearer he went out and carried the body back to his own perimeter.
Padre N. G. Anderson, chaplain of the Thirty-Sixth Bn., formerly Presbyterian minister at Moruya, New South Wales, was asked to perform burial rites. He ordered his batman to prepare a grave inside the wire. The grave was almost ready when the Padre arrived. The body lay beside it. No dead man is a pleasant sight after the jungle heat and the flies has worked on him. The one beside the grave was unusually horrible. The head was swollen to almost twice normal size. The eyes, wide open, stared fixedly. The body, clad only in tattered green shirt, was thin as a wafer and grey as dawn light.
Padre Anderson felt under the shirt for the identity discs that should have been on the chest. There was none. Placing a hand under the hip, the Padre rolled the body on to its stomach. As he did so he had a queer sensation that all life had not gone out of it.
‘Do you think this man is really dead?’ he asked his batman who was busy digging.
‘Looks as if you’re going troppo, too, Padre,’ the sweating batman commented.
Still the Padre was not satisfied. He sent for the battalion M.O., Captain W. J. Pullen. The doctor took one look at the grey still form and shook his head. However, he placed his stethoscope against his shirt.
‘Good God,’ he shouted, ‘the heart’s still beating.’ Hurriedly the body was carried from the graveside to the company first aid post. After half an hour the soldier had been cleaned up and his main wound located—a bullet had entered his right ear and stopped at the base of his skull. He was given a few hours at most to live.
Nothing more could be done for him. A small group stood beside the stretcher discussing his identity. He certainly wasn’t a member of ‘A’ Company. General opinion was that he was from Seventh Division Cavalry.
In the middle of the discussion a tiny voice squeaked, ‘I’m one of you!’
Everyone spun around. The body still lay stiff and grey. The glazed eyes still stared into space, but the lips were moving very, very, slightly.
‘What’s your name?’ asked the Padre.
‘Gordon!’
That was the name of one of the ‘A’ Company men posted missing after the attack three days earlier.
‘What’s your number?’
The squeaky voice whispered an NX [AIF identification number] number. It was Gordon’s number.
But Gordon had weighed more than thirteen stone, and this man wasn’t more than eight. Several men from Gordon’s Company were called in and also his company commander. All agreed the man was not Gordon. The voice squeaked out the nicknames of numerous members of ‘A’ company while the eyes still focused on the canvas roof of the tent.
‘What happened to you?’ the man was asked.
‘I went in with the attack. Then I remember coming to consciousness with Nips tearing off my boots and pants. They ripped off my steel hat and hurt my head. I groaned and they bashed me with the helmet until I passed out again. The second time I came to I was alone and very thirsty. There was a Nip slit trench near by. I crawled to it hoping there was water in the bottom and fell in. I was so weak I couldn’t get out. A 25-pounder barrage from our guns came over and shells fell around me. Then came a mortar barrage. Two Nips jumped into the trench on top of me. A mortar bomb hit the lip of the slit and killed them both. Their bodies saved me.’
‘So you know where the machine guns are?’
‘They were moved this morning.’
‘In which direction were they taken?’
‘How was my body lying when I was discovered?’
‘Head north, feet south.’
‘The guns were taken west. The Nips stepped across my slit trench from right to left.’
The voice stopped. For the first time the eyes closed. Obviously death was near. Next morning the Digger’s heart was stronger then ever. He was moved back to an advanced dressing station where he was again placed to one side to die quietly. His heart beat even more strongly.
From the ADS he was sent back to a main dressing station where the bullet was removed from the base of his skull. Within a few days he was recovering rapidly, and soon after he was evacuated to the mainland.
Eighteen months later, in Martin Place, Sydney, Padre Anderson met the man he set out to bury on the Sanananda Trail. ‘The body’ was thirteen stone again and perfect in all respects except for a deafness in the right ear.
‘Did you know I almost buried you?’ asked the Padre.
‘Know it! I heard every word you said to the gravedigger.
I couldn’t speak then but I wasn’t worried. I only hoped you’d get it over quick. Then the things the flies put on me wouldn’t worry me any more. Guess it was the merriest Christmas I ever had!’
During the siege of Tobruk in 1941, the ‘Rats’ were assailed with propaganda leaflets dropped from enemy planes. Addressed to ‘Aussies’, the sheets pointed out that Germany and her allies were closing in and that the ‘offensive from Egypt to relieve you [is] totally smashed’. The sheet went on to claim ‘You cannot escape. Our dive bombers are waiting to sink your transports’ and, finally ‘SURRENDER!’.
The diggers thought the Germans had it all wrong. After finding a hygienic use for the propaganda sheets they wrote their own version of what the enemy should have said if they really wanted the Rats to surrender.
AUSSIES
We have been trying to get you out of your ‘rat holes’ for the past three months, and we’re getting a bit fed up with it. Every one of your chaps we get costs us about ten, and it’s getting a bit thick.
Do you think that’s fair? Play the game, you cads! Come out and give yourselves up. The German beer is the best in the world, and we have millions of gallons of it here. And if you can’t stand our Sauerkraut, we’ll give you steak and eggs any time you want them.
We look after our prisoners very well, and every Aussie is supplied with a Batwoman; this is on the instructions of the great and farsighted Fuhrer, who hopes in time to improve the fighting quality of the German race.
Our prison camp is the most luxurious in the world—two-up schools every night, coursing every Wednesday, trots on Monday afternoons, and the gee-gees every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
It’s all yours, if you....
PLEASE, PLEASE LET US TAKE TOBRUK
So famous were the Rats after the siege that they became the subjects of impersonation. This ditty displays the same resilient sense of humour.
In all the Aussie papers
That have chanced to pass my way,
It seems that every Digger
Returning home must say,
That he’s a gun-scarred warrior
Who went through Greece and Crete
Who saw the show in Syria,
And braved the desert’s heat.
They never missed a battle,
They were always in the ruck.
And there’s not a man among them
Who wasn’t in Tobruk.
Well, they can have the limelight,
Though some have got it free.
But if they’re the veterans of Tobruk
THEN WHO THE HELL ARE WE?
The Vietnam War generated its fair share of digger humour, including this exaggerated parody of a biblical parable.
And it came to pass, that there cometh one which bore on his shoulder, three stars, who spaketh; saying; ‘Bring unto me the Sergeant Major.’
And there cometh one who bore on his arm a golden crown. Then he of the three stars saith unto him of the golden crown; ‘Tomorrow at the ninth hour, parade before me one hundred men and all that is theirs.’
And the one of the golden crown answered, saying, ‘Lord it is done.’
And behold! On the morrow, at the ninth hour, there did parade before him of the three stars, one hundred men, with all that they did have, as had been promised him. Then cometh others which bore on their shoulders two stars and yet others who bore one star. These were called ‘Subbies’, which being translated from the Latin meaneth ‘Small Fry’ or ‘Little Potatoes’. Then he of the golden crown, standing before the one hundred men, cried out with a loud voice, and did cause them to become pillars of stone.
And behold! There cometh one which was called ‘Quartermaster.’ This man held great power, for he belonged to that tribe which said; ‘These men must purchase from us.’ Thus did they wax fat in the land! And, passing amongst one hundred men, he did say unto this man and unto that man; ‘Where is this thing,’ and ‘Where is that thing.’
And they all had save one which was called. ‘Spudus Murphy’, and he lacked. Then he, the one which was called Quartermaster, saith unto him; ‘Friend, where are thy drawers woollen long and thy boots ankle, pair of one?’ And Spudus Murphy answered saying; ‘Lord, on the third day of the week, I did thirst and had not the wherewithal to satisfy my thirst, for I had not received my reward. And I did take my drawers woollen long and my boots ankle pair of one, unto mine uncle of the tribe of “Love”, and did say unto him “How many pieces of silver for these things?” And he saith unto me, “Seven” And I saith unto him; “Give to me that I may thirst not.” And he did trade with me. Then I took the pieces of silver unto the abode of him that sold wine and did say unto him; “Give me to drink that I may thirst not.” And he gave me, and I knew no more until the fourth day of the week.’
Then he of the three stars waxed exceeding wrath, and calling two men. He placed one to the East, and one to the West of Spudus Murphy and, turning sharply on his left heel and right toe, he was led away and cast unto the prison.
And on the morrow, he was brought before one which bore on his shoulder a crown and a star, showing him to be above all men! This one was called CO, which, being translated, meaneth; ‘Putter up of the wind.’ And he saith unto Spudus Murphy; ‘What are these things that I hear concerning thee? Sayest thou aught?’
Then Spudus Murphy related to him how that he had exchanged his drawers woollen long and his boots ankle pair of one, for silver for wine. Then he that was called CO, waxed exceeding wrath, and his anger was kindled against Spudus Murphy, and he saith unto him. ‘Why has thou broken the laws which I have made? Knowest not that thou has sinned? Now because thou has done this thing, thou shalt be punished. Twenty and eight days shall thou labour.’
Then was Spudus Murphy led away to a place where he would hear the tick of the clock, but could not tell the passage of time. And the name of that place was ‘The House of Glass.’ And he was in that place twenty and eight days.
So my friends, be not as the one, but rather as the ninety and nine. Where thou thirsteth and has not the wherewithal to satisfy thy thirst, wait until the day of reward; then shall the joy be increased a thousand fold.
And now may the blessing of that great Saint, The Regimental Paymaster, be amongst you, now and always.
The trials and tribulations of the long-suffering air force wife were graphically described in this bittersweet account from the Vietnam War years.
An Air Force wife is mainly a girl. But there are times, such as when her husband is away and she is mowing the lawn or fixing a flat tyre on a youngster’s bike, that she begins to suspect she is also a boy.
She usually comes in three sizes: petite, plump or pregnant. During the early years of her marriage it is often hard to determine which size is her normal one.
She has babies all over the world and measures time in terms of places as other women do in years. ‘It was at Amberley that we all had the mumps . . . in Butterworth Dan was promoted.’
At least one of her babies was born or a posting was accomplished while she was alone. This causes her to suspect a secret pact between her husband and the Air Force providing for a man to be overseas or on temporary duty at such times as these.
An Air Force wife is international. She may be a Wagga farm girl, a South Australian nurse, a Victorian typist or Queensland meter maid. When discussing service problems they all speak the same language.
She can be a great actress. To heart broken children at parting time, she gives an Academy Award performance: ‘Melbourne is going to be such fun! I hear they have Australian Rules Football and briquettes and trams!’ But her heart is breaking with theirs. She wonders if this is worth the sacrifice.
An ideal Air Force wife has the patience of an angel, the flexibility of putty, the wisdom of a scholar and the stamina of a horse. If she dislikes money, it helps. She is sentimental, carrying her memories with her in an old footlocker.
One might say she is married to a bigamist, because she shares her husband with a demanding entity called ‘duty’. When duty calls, she becomes no. 2 wife. Until she accepts this fact her life can be miserable.
She is above all a woman who married an airman who offered her the permanency of a gypsy, the miseries of loneliness, the frustration of conformity, and the security of love. Sitting on her packing boxes with squabbling children nearby, she is sometimes willing to chuck it all in until she hears that firm step and cheerful voice of the lug who gave her all this. Then she is happy to be . . . his Air Force wife.