BURYING THE DEAD

Otago Witness, Issue 3212, 6 October 1915, Page 83

BURYING THE DEAD

SOUND OF BIG GUNS MARKS LAST RITES. SIMPLE WOODEN CROSSES. (Urom Captain 0. E. Bean, Official Press Correspondent with the Australian Expeditionary Force.) Copyright. —New Zealand Rights Secured by the Otago Witness. GABA TEPE, June 18. It comes to you sometimes as a heavy Bhock that a strange callousness grows upon a man in warfare, but some incidents get through that callousness like a rapier. The sight of the first few wounded men brought alongside the transport in the first hours of daylight, locking so pale and still, and utterly tired, with the stained bandages around them, came as something ot a shock. For a quarter of an hour or so one did not like to think, about it. SENSE OF HORROR GOES. But from the moment that we set foot on shore, when we were into it ourselves and doing something, all sense of horror naturally slipped away. There were many men lying there on the beach. I hey had carried them aside, and, with the reverence that a British soldier will always show to the dead if he can do so, had wrapped tire overcoat or a blanket over their bodies and faces. But from that moment onward one was strangely blunted to the eight of the most dreadful wounds, and death, even when it occurred next door to a man. It seems to have little or no effect on him after a while. He will do little more than turn his head for a moment, and then go on with his business. It is not that men become hard-hearted. The man who is hit may be even the text of some grim, kindly joke. If he were lying outside the trenches wounded he would be brought back, even though it cost man after man his life to do it. They would, many of them, go through wounds and death a score of times rather than that one of their number should have the anxiety of dying out there in pain, and not knowing into the hands of what sort of man he might fall. DEATH BECOMES FAMILIAR.

But death comes to be looked on as' a little thing of small account, and of everyday occurrence. After all, every man knows that he risks his life constantly, that it is pure chance, the erratic flight of a shrapnel pellet, that he is not lying where that dead comrade is. Under such circumstances, yon cannot treat death quite as seriously as when you took the suburban tram every morning to your work. But sometimes, for no reason that I can give, it does come as an unaccountable shock. I well remember the day that we returned from Helles. It had come as a heavy shock in the morning to hear that our general (Major-general Sir William Bridges) was wounded,' and was not expected to live. In the afternoon I heard the name of another officer mentioned, an officer of the army corps staff, not an Australian, but one who had done very brave work for Australians, Major Yilliers'Stuart, the Chief Intelligence Officer at Anzac. He was a man whose figure one had grown accustomed to see daily walking off to various corners of the position, sketching and working out his map, a British officer of the very best type, unassuming, quiet, considerate, and, like most officers. British and Australian, without the knowledge of what fear is. SKETCH CUT SHORT.

I heard someone mention his name, and the next moment someone was saying that he had been killed about an hour before. He had been out sketching as usual, correcting some valleys in the map. One of his clerks was sitting beside him with the drawing-board on both knees. Presently two shells burst somewhere down over the landscape about 200 yards in front of them. “About time we were moving,” he had said, and he had just risen to walk back when he slipped to his knees. His companion thought he had merely fallen, but he was shot through the heart with a shrapnel pellet. He was buried that night after dark in the little cemetery at a certain corner of the beach. That shoulder with its little collection of crosses should be very sacred to Australians. All of these crosses are simple, some of them pathetically so, a bit of broken biscuit box nailed across another with some name scored on it in indelible pencil. Some of them are washed out already. One of them is just the top end of an improvised broken crutch. There are other collections of little craves all over the hills, manv of them bordered ever so neatly with brass fuse cases or shrapnel. AU ST HAHI A ! S DEAD.

Eut this is the main cemetery, and after the war is over the commonwealth might well take some steps towards its preservation. The blue /ttgean washes almost to its foot. The knoli from which the enemy did most of his execution on the beach on the first morning rises straight above it. It was there that he was buried. They waited until dark in order that the Turkish guns might not interfere. They were working up at that time towards the day of their big attack. As the procession went along the beach it was almost too dark to see out across the sea. Far out oyer the island behind us the new moon was hanging on the sea, and below floated the warships like toy boats on the sea. Every now and again the backs and bent heads of the men in that crowd would flash up as if lit by a distant red lightning. Then came the roll of a warship’s guns as she fired away behind v,S. ■ High overhead was the constant, low sibilant hiss of bullets, with an occasional high dropping whistle as some ricochet that had Struck a stone or a parapet far above whirled itself out to sea. The knockino- of

the rifles came incessantly, like the crack of a cricket bat. Some man passed along the path bclow whistling. The whistling stopped when he heard the voice of the clergyman and knew what this dark crowd meant. Strong gravediggers of the Army Medical Corps were bending low. You could hear the voice of the clergyman :

Now the labourer’s task is o’er, Now the battle day is past, Now upon the farther shore Lands the voyager at last.

Father, in Thy gracious keeping. Leave we now thy warrior sleeping,

The strong men lift him very tenderly from the stretcher. Ihe body is lowered into the grave, and the congregation files past. And there we leave hira_ to the waves and the sea breezes, amidst the little wooden crosses on that shrapnelswept point.