THE “LAST DITCHERS”

New Zealand Tablet, 14 November 1918, Page 23

THE “LAST DITCHERS”

In a descriptive article on the withdrawal from Gallipoli, by Major C. E. Andrews, N.Z. Staff Corps, in the current number of Quick March , appears the following;—“So soon as the men heard what was afoot there was a rush to be included in what they were pleased to call the ‘last ditchers.’ Men appealed to me on the grounds of long service and short service. Men argued that as they had been right through the piece they had a right to a part in the closing scene. Others, recently arrived, claimed that they were entitled to their share in a ‘stunt.’ One poor chap, as Irish as the shamrock, stuck me up in the trenches one night, and asked in a hoarse whisper if it were true that we were leaving, He told me that his two mates were dead. ‘One is out there,’ he said, indicating Sari Bahi’, ‘and I have hoped for the day when we would again go forward, and I would be able to give him decent burial.’ ‘I know where I left him,’ he added miserably. ‘Faith, I could find him in the dark.’ Larry, the other, had been killed only a few days before, and was buried in the little cemetery down the ‘dere.’ ‘You’ll keep me to the last, Major, that my poor chums will know that I did not leave them until I was forced to, and,’ he added softly, ‘May the good Lord grant that Larry sleeps sound in the dere as I pass him by for ever.’ Larry’s mate was one of the very last. . . . For the last 15 minutes only four officers, with 16 men, remained; and these were so scattered that we had to depend on individual timing for final withdrawal, which we dare not announce by signal. Each man had a watch on his wrist, and these had been carefully synchronised at 1 o’clock. Some of them took some synchronising, too, and my friend the Irishman would have been there yet if a neighbor had not passed his way and collected him. They argued the point about the time all the way down to the pier.”