STORIED STUMP.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 156, 3 July 1936, Page 5

STORIED STUMP.

GALLIPOLI MEMENTO. , RHODODENDRON BUSH. i SCREENED MACHINE GUNS. Stained dark and worn smooth by many hands, its surface closely engraved with carved initials, tlie seasoned stump of <t rhododendron bush lies now in a glass case at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, with a neat card beside it to tell a little of its story. Twenty years and more ago the leaves of the bush whose base it formed trembled to the shattering concussions of a machine gun which it screened from view of a ridge on Gallipoli. Later the bnsli was torn to shreds by enemy fire, and only the stump was left. It still had its uses, however, until one foggy morning near the end of the evacuation a New Zealand sergeant cut it off short with a meat saw to take away as a souvenir of memorable days. The souvenir hunter, Sergeant T. Maxwell, of Maramarua, Pokeno, has now sent his unique relic to the museum, and with it an account of its history. It was on the side of a trench on "Rhododendron Ridge" that the bush once grew. Once it sheltered an Australian and later a New Zealand machine gun position. Splintered to a mere stump by enemy rifle fire, it became a convenient aid to getting out of the trench "I myself used it many times to pull myself up out of the deep trench to go on night listening past," Mr. Maxwell says. "When I secured the stump as a souvenir it was quite greasy with the many Australian and New Zealand hands which must have handled it. The morning of the last day of the evacuation was a very foggy one, and all the men left were wandering about in No Man's Land looking for souvenirs under cover of the fog. I was just in the act of going over the trench by means of the stump when I suddenly realised the importance of this piece of wood. I thereupon got an old meat saw out of the cookhouse dugout and cut the stump off." Through the intervening years the stump has reminded Mr. Maxwell o strange world which seems noiv so away.