100 YEARS AGO
Sunday, Sept. 8, 1918. “One of the most interesting lectures ever given in Saratoga Springs on the war” is given by an Australian survivor of the infamous Gallipoli invasion tonight at the Broadway Theatre.
Sergeant Alexander T. Coubrough “was one of the first twenty thousand men from Australia who answered the call of their mother country [Great Britain] for help of his country,” The Saratogian reports, “He painted vivid word pictures of the battles in which he had taken part.”
While training in Egypt, Coubrough “saw a sight that made us forget all our troubles and filled us with the desire to kill.” It was the arrival of a shipload of Armenian refugees from the Turkishruled Ottoman Empire.
“We were surprised to see that they were all either old men and women or else children,” Coubrough relates, “and we were told that the young men had been forced to walk out into the sea until they were drowned, while a worse fate had overtaken the young girls.” He also saw an elderly missionary who tried to protest against the atrocities. “The Turks had torn his eyes out with fire tongs,” the Australian explains.
Coubrough’s account of the Gallipoli battle “held the audience spellbound.” While he apparently escaped that disaster unscathed, he was wounded by Turkish troops in another encounter that saw his unit of 4,000 men reduced to 1,200. He angrily recalls getting hit and struggling not to move and get the attention of Turkish sharpshooters.
“This is the kind of an enemy we are fighting,” he says, “They would watch the wounded men on no man’s land and shoot them when their wounds made it impossible for them to keep still any longer.” Coubrough was hit four times before finally reaching safety.
Coubrough appears under the auspices of the Saratoga Springs branch of the American Red Cross. The organization is represented by Mrs. Frank Wright Baldwin, “a very charming woman” who recounts incidents “both amusing and pathetic.”
One of the amusing episodes involved an American ambulance driver. Late in a 48-hour shift, he was ordered to bring in four more wounded men, but the only wounded men he could find were two German soldiers. Shortly after loading them onto his vehicle, he picked up a wounded French soldier.
“When I had started back I began to hear fighting in back,” the driver told Baldwin, “I wouldn’t let them tear into my Lizzie to pieces so I went around in back [and] lit into them with the butt end of my rifle, and when I reached the hospital I had obeyed orders and brought in four wounded men.”