HEROES ALL.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 September 1915, Page 12

HEROES ALL.

. THE WONDERFUL INDIAN. A STRANGE STUDY. (Captain C. E. W. Bean). Claba Tepe, June 18. One of the most glorious studies that one has seen since this war began is the friendship of the Indian soldier for the Australian. One does not wish to exaggerate things —I do not mean that there have been any lifelong, heart-to-heart sort of friendship going, because the fact that neither has the least idea what the other is talking about, rather interfered with that sort of relationship; but the comradeship of the Indian soldiers with the Australians and New Zealanders since they have found themselves camped together has been sufficient to call for remark. Rudyard Kipling in a story he wrote about the ''Burro mots" of the men whoso expression—always on their lip? and always in their eyes was "no fear" —speaks of solne sort of such friendship in South Africa—so perhaps there was something of the same sort there. There are not many Indians with the Australian force—just certain invahiaolc mountain gunners and some transport corps. There are more at Cape Hellas. But even here at Anzae we see enough of them to make tliem very intreseting. Their camp—a collection of dug-outs at the back of the hill, may be at first sight no more interesting than any other camp, except for the two or three lanky, fat-tailed sheep always tethered to a peg there But if you take the trouble to make enquiry you will find that this camp is really a most complicated structure —not complicated in sticks and waterproof sheets, but in minute social and religious distinctions.

THE LAST DUG-OUT. For example, at the bottom of the hill a little aside from the others is the last dug-out in their lines. Two men live there whom you, casually passing, would not distinguish from any of tho other men. Yet the others would no more touch them —except in hospital— or let their clothes brush against them than they would if these men were lepers. These men suffer from no disease —they are quiet, harmless fellows, who keep entirely to themselves—as a matter of fact, I believe they are brothers. But they belong to the class known as the sweeper class, the lowest casto of all—they are sweepers because their fathers were before them and their grandfathers before that. The others would not think of handing them food. That is thrown to them. The otlfer Indians there would not allow the white officer to hand these men their pay—it would be a scandal in their eyes that their hands should meet, and they would prevent any Australian from ' taking food from, these men's hands. One would think that men living this sort of life must be constantly feeling the humiliation of it—but that is the marvel of the East. , It has been so for a thousand years, and it will be so for anotaher thousand, and they are perfectly content. Up at the top of the camp is the 'cook-house, and the man sitting in it and looking round at you over his shoulder seems nothing different from any of the others. As a matter ,of fact, he is a Brahmin of the highest caste. Everyone of the others can eat without fear anything that comes from his hands. Almost in the same cookhouse—in one not six feet away—are the special cooks for the Mahometans.

SOME OF THE TRUEST ON EARTH. In action these soldiers take their tone very much from the white soldiers round them, above all from their own officers. They have among them some the truest men on earth. The following is one of the true stories of this war:— j It was on May 19, the day of the | most serious attack the Turks have made. The attack was spent and should have been stopped, but a few isolated waves of it continued to beat up fiercely against Quinn's Post and our centre, where the Fourth Brigade then were until nearly midday. The Turkish artillery liad given us something of a bombardment overnight, and it started again in the morning. One of the Indian mountain batteries was in action, and all except two of its complement were under cover. These two were—one of them in the back of the guns, and another, Karra Singh by name, in the communication trench leading down to the guns. The 'phone was not being used—they were passing the orders and correction? down by word of mouth. Kami Singh would hear the order shouted from above and would pass it on down below. They were waiting for a particular gun to open in order to jump down its throat in the verv sudden way these Indian mountain batteries have. 'All at once a new twoton battery opened—one that had not previously been in action against us, :,t any rate from that position.' Kami Singh was passing down his orders when an orderly from his battery walked along the trench. The orderly noticed that Kami Singh was sitting close up against the side of the trench with his head near tln> wall and his hand over his eyes am if lie had a headache. "What is the inatier. Kami Singh?" he asked. ' "Oh, it's nothing—don'tworry—l am quite able to pass messages," was the answer, and the orderly passed along on ins business. But when lis got up to his post he told a native officer.

"SHALL J. HAVE MY SIGHT," Some time later, when the business in hand was finished, they went down and had a look at Kami Singh. They found that he had been shot through both eyes. That first shot from the new guns had hit not only niin, but the other man who was cut in the trench. Kara Singh could still speak if he could not see—that was all he cared for until his job was finished. Afterward at the hospital ho saw his own doctor, the white doctor of ins battery. "Sahib," he asked, "shall I have my sight?" ''Perhaps," was the-reply, "after a time—with one eye." It is nothing, sahib," said Kami Singh, "have I not eaten your salt and taken your braed?" and never had a man more faithfully held by that high code. AXOTHEP, IXDIAX. An officer's orderly, during' the first few days, was sent up with some message to his officer, who was in an observation station up in the firing line. An observation station is always a dangerous corner if the enemy' suspects where it is, becuuse by knocking out the observer you can temporarily render useless the guns. By the time the orderly reached the station his officer had been either killed or wounded, and had been earned down to the beaeh, but nobody could explain this to the Indian. He refused to move away—insisted by signs, that liis officer must be there, and finally bad to be almost dragged down to she]- 1 t» ' " " '"" " " "" '

INDIAN CHOKING. Some of us were camped down at Helles, next door to a small party of Indians. Every day-—almost every meal —they brought our cook round some, thing by way of a present—generally some of their flat biscuits —like pancakes chupatties, or other cakes. They always seemed to call the cook "brudder," and whenever our men have been camped by them this interchange of cooking materials seems to have gone on. If they could not take food back from us they would sometimes take firewood. But they are by no means so rigid in their caste regulations as they would have been before the war. As one of their officers told me, "They have fought side by side with your men, and they look upon them quite differently; they would say your men were their brothers." Any man who lived through the shrapnel during the first long afternoon upon the ridge tops, when so many a brave life was lost to Australia, will l.e very, very old indeed before he forgets the little Indian mountain battery whose | pins were the sole comfort he possessed duii-cs the greater part of a' terrible trying day. A HEAVY SHOCK.. It comes to you sometimes as a heavy shock. There is a strange callousness that grows upon a man in war-time, but some incidents do get through that callousness like a rapier-r-and I do not know exactly why. Some of us had scarcely ever looked upon death before we landed—and would rather walk round twenty miles than have to pass by a street accident, The sight of the first few wounded men brought alongside the transport in the first hours of daylight, looking so pale and still, and utterly tired, with the stained bandages round them exactly like maty a figure I have seen in the war pictures of Lady Butler —came as something of a shock—fori a quarter of an hour or so one did not like to think about it. But from the moment that we set foot on shore, when wo were into it ourselves and doing something, all sense of horror quite naturally slipped away. There were many men'lying there on the beach—comrades 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, an overcoat or a blanket over their bodies and faces. But from that moment onwards one was strangely blunted to the sight of the most dreadful wounds. -And.death, even when it occurs next door to a man, 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. NOTHING HARD-HEARTED. It is not that men become hard-heart-'ed. The man who is hit may be even the text of some grim, kindly joke-pif he were lying outside the trenches he would be brought back evein 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 thnt one of their number should die out there in pain, %ot knowing into the hands of what sort of men he might fall. But death comes to be looked on 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 you cannot treat death so seriously as when you took the suburban train every morning to youi work. DEATH'S SWIFTNESS. But sometimes for no reason that I "can give it comes as an unaccountable shock. I well remember the day that we returned from Helles. It had come as a shock—a heavy shock—in the morning to hear that our general was wounded, and was not expected to live. In the afternoon I heard the name of another officer mentioned, an officer on the Army Staff Corps, not an Australian, but one who had done very brave work for Australians. Major Villiers Stuart, the chief intelligence officer at Anzae.' He was a man whose figure one had grown accustomed to see daily walking oil' to various comers 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. 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 sketching as usual —correcting sonic valleys in the map. One of his clerks was sitting beside him with the drawing-board on both knees. Presently two shells burst somewhere over the landscape, about two hundred yards in front of them. "About time we were moving," he htui said, and he had risen to walk back, when he slipped. His companion thought he had merely fallen. But he was shot through the heart with a shrapnel pellet, A SACRED CORNER. ITe wa.s buried that night after dark in the little cemetery at a certain corner of (hi; beach. That corner with its little collection of crosses should be very sacred to Australians. All of those crosses are simple,—some of them pathetically so—just a bit of broken biscuit box nailed across another with some name scored on it in indelible pencil, save the mark—some of them arc washed out already—one of them is just the top end of ait improvised broken crutch. There arc other collections of little graves all over the hills, many of them bordered ever so neatly with brass fuse cases, or shrapnel—but his Is in the main cemetery, and after the war is over the Commonwealth might well take some steps towards its preservation. . The blue Aegean washes almost to its foot—the knoll from which the enemy did most of his execution on the beach on the first morning rises straight above it.

TO THE BOOMIXG OF pUXS. It was there that he was buried. Thev waited till dark, in order that the Turkish guns might not interfere—they were working up at that time towards the (lay of their big attack, As the.proccs--ion went along the-beach it was almost too dark to see. Out across the sea the exquisite last lights of sunset were just lading. The old vo'cauo cone was showing out dark grey against them. As we stood there amongst the frail wooden crosses we could hear the clink, clink of the mules along a. path above—you could see their dark shapes passing, with the Indians lending them. Ear out over the island behind us the new mqon was hanging'—below were the warships, like toy boats on the sea. Every now and again the backs and bent heads of the meii in that crowd would flash up as if lit up by distant red lightningthen caane the i-r-roll, r-r-roll of a warship's guns as she fired away behind us. High overhead was the constant, low, sibilant hiss of bullets, with an oecamH tyMtty|jl|lf wMjtlft *, m si|

had struck a stone or a parapet winded itself out to sea. The knocking of flu' rifles camp incessantly like the crack of a cricket bat, '

Some man passed along the path below us whistling. Suddenly the whistling stopped. Ife had heard the voice of the clergyman, and knew what this daric crowd meant. Strong grave-diggers of the Army Medical Corps, with the brown, knotted muscles of their forearm showing below the shirt sleeves of their grey flannel shirts, were bending low. You could hear the voice of the clergyman: "Now the battle is o'er. ".Tesu in Thy graoious keeping, "Leave we there Thy warrior sleeping." The strong men lift him very tenderly from the stretcher. And there we leave him to the waves ar.c! the sea breezes, amidst the little wooden crosses on that shrapnel-sivept poinfa