Gallipoli’s futility:
A soldier’s tale
Nearly every New Zealand family has its war stories. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can open a portal back from your immediate present into that rapidly fading past and hear the voices of lost relatives. Over the past year this has happened to me.
I have a generation of historians to thank. There was suddenly a lot of interest in the 1980s in recording the memories of World War I veterans before they disappeared. My greatgrandfather, Leo Prideaux, was one of them. He was interviewed twice by professional historians as they toured the country, gathering stories.
In April 1988, as he prepared for the second of the two interviews, Leo put his account down on paper. He was 93 years old and his war story ran to six typed pages.
He was living with his second wife, Ina, in a retirement unit in O¯ po¯ tiki in the eastern Bay of Plenty. It was autumn, probably grey, possibly raining. The weather would not have prompted memories of Samoa, Egypt and Gallipoli from more than 70 years earlier but it might have evoked the mud and rain of France or London in November.
The title of his account was underlined and in capital letters: ‘‘The Great War July 28 1914/11 November 1918’’. The subhead followed: ‘‘Written by 8/2303 LM Prideaux from memory during April 1988 at the age of 93. One of the few remaining Gallipoli veterans. Enlisted 9th August 1914 – Aged 20.’’
A local paper ran his story in instalments, but there is something formal and impersonal about the narrative he put together. I have it here, scanned from a photocopy. A creative writing teacher might ask for more colour, more emotion. How did the war feel, how did it smell? To learn more, I would have to track down old interviews.
Two things prompted a desire to go deeper into the past. First, I saw a small, framed photo at my mother’s house, of two guys in uniform. Who were they? They looked like actors from a war movie.
That was Leo and his older brother Frank, who both served at Gallipoli. The odds are that it was taken in Wellington in 1914. I knew Leo only as a large, gentle man in his 80s and 90s, but this Leo looked innocent, barely out of his teens.
The second thing was a simple Google search prompted by a school project: did you have a relative in a war? A search for ‘‘Leo Prideaux’’ produced a National Library listing for two C60 cassettes in the World War I Oral History Archive in Wellington from an interview in May 1988 by historians Nicholas Boyack and Jane Tolerton.
I had the tapes loaned to a reference library in Christchurch. They were sealed in plastic. No one in our family had ever heard them.
The library supplied its own tape deck and I listened to recordings so clear they could have been made yesterday. You could hear the room. There were time slips: when Leo mentioned a recent visit from his granddaughter, he was talking about my mother. It made May 1988 seem like a week ago.
He told the story from the start. He was in Territorials camp when war broke out in August 1914. ‘‘Everybody was very excited and immediately started wondering when we could join up. I was very keen.’’
He had just turned 20, a carpenter from Taranaki who enlisted in Wellington on August 9. Five days later, he was on a boat to Samoa.
A nice start: the Samoa Expeditionary Force was sent to take over German-occupied Samoa but ‘‘we got the surprise of our lives because there was absolutely no opposition at all. We had a good time. We wandered about. The natives were very friendly.’’
Some of the group, not including Leo, went in search of Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave. Time passed slowly. Two German warships were sighted off the coast, but that is as close as the enemy came.
So far, this didn’t sound like much of a war. But after a few days back in Wellington, where he was put in the Otago Reinforcements despite having no connection to Otago, Leo was on a boat to Egypt.
‘‘How did Cairo strike you as a New Zealander?’’ Tolerton asked.
‘‘Rather a magnificent place, really,’’ Leo said.
They saw the Pyramids, they visited the infamous Wazzir district, a street lined with brothels where women solicited in every doorway.
Tolerton asked if venereal disease was a problem for the men.
‘‘Yes, it was, certainly. They would have stations where you could get a syringe to use afterwards.’’
And then Gallipoli. The Otago Reinforcements went ashore in June, more than a month after the mass landing at Anzac Cove on April 25.
First, the smell. It was overwhelming, the smell of bodies rotting and turning black in the open. ‘‘The stench of death and decay around Anzac could be detected 10 miles (16 kilometres) out to sea,’’ historian Glyn Harper writes in his book Johnny Enzed: The New Zealand Soldier in the First World War 1914-1918.
They went by night to trenches at Courtney’s Post, which has been described as ‘‘a front line post clinging to the cliff side’’.
An anecdote stood out for him. Leo and some others were ordered to shift sheets of corrugated iron from the beach using mules, but there came a point when Turkish gunfire made it too risky for the mules to go on. The men had to continue by themselves.
‘‘The mules were more valuable than we were,’’ Leo said, and laughed.
The months of June and July were stalemates and then, in August, the British made a decision to push. There was the attack on Chunuk Bair, famous for being briefly held by men from the Wellington Battalion. Leo was in the attack on Hill 60 later in August, which was almost a footnote.
Harper describes a cobbledtogether force of tired Anzacs on their last legs. He says the best description he has ever seen of Hill 60 came from British historian Robert Rhodes James, who said, ‘‘For connoisseurs of military futility, valour and incompetence, the attack on Hill 60 is in a class of its own’’. While highly critical of the decisions and tactics, Rhodes James ‘‘says the men were absolutely outstanding’’.
It was carnage. At least 236 out of about 400 New Zealanders were killed.
‘‘I remember very little [of the attack],’’ Leo told Tolerton and Boyack. ‘‘It was very shortly after
‘‘Everybody was very excited and immediately started wondering when we could join up. I was very keen.’’
Leo Prideaux
that that I was invalided off. I knew that we’d failed.’’
He had enteric fever, better known as typhoid. As they put him on a hospital ship he had what still seemed decades later to be an uncanny experience.
‘‘There was a row of chaps that had been killed, lying there, waiting to be carted away, you see. I knew one of these chaps. I recognised him. He was a chap called Dawson Webster, a solicitor in New Plymouth. And there he was. He had a bullet in his head, in his forehead. That was the end of him. He was a friend of mine.’’
But Leo saw Webster later in the records office in London. Imagine the shock to see that he had lived. ‘‘And he lived for quite a few years.’’
According to an online genealogy site, Dawson Webster was severely wounded in action at Gallipoli but returned home to marry and have three children before dying in 1928, aged 42.
Here is a story of moral character. In London, Webster would borrow money from the other guys to entertain women. He left owing Leo £3. Back in New Zealand, he tracked down Leo’s brother, got Leo’s address and posted the money.
Those are the pleasant memories of young men. Then there are the darker Gallipoli experiences. On the hospital ship back to Cairo, nearly everyone was sick with dysentery. The doctors were sick, the nurses were sick. Leo remembers that a voyage that should have taken 24 hours took eight days.
‘‘We hardly got any food or attention of any kind. Medical care on the boat was very poor.’’
In his account, he writes of weighing just 6 stone (38 kilograms), down from his usual 11 stone (70kg), by the time they got to Cairo.
As well as typhoid, ‘‘I think they were all suffering from other diseases, primarily diseases of malnutrition,’’ Harper says. ‘‘Most of them had scurvy, being on bully beef and biscuits for most of the nine months they were there.’’
When Leo heard about the evacuation of Gallipoli in December 1915, he thought it was pretty tough. This was a common response, Harper says.
‘‘They were really upset at the thought of having to leave,’’ Harper says. ‘‘They basically felt they were betraying their [dead] mates that were left behind. There were volunteers to stay.
‘‘Gallipoli will always cast a long shadow. I’ve been somewhat critical of that in the past because it seems to have obliterated the events of the Western Front.’’
For New Zealanders, the Somme, not Gallipoli, is our bloodiest military encounter of World War I. The centenary of the German Spring Offensive of 1918 came and went without any media attention, Harper notes.
But Gallipoli was the first big event of the war for New Zealanders, and was a test that the men passed.
‘‘They performed exceptionally well and the fact that the campaign was a failure was through no fault of the efforts of the men. And New Zealanders, to a greater degree than Australians, do like to focus on heroic failures and this is what Gallipoli is, a heroic failure. The men tried as hard as they could but they were up against it and the campaign really had no chance of succeeding.’’
Hearing of the evacuation, Leo was struck by the detail that so many men had frostbite.
He told Tolerton and Boyack that he doubted the campaign could ever have succeeded.
‘‘The terrain was terrific. We dare not travel anywhere out in the open, you know.’’
The men put the loss ‘‘down to bad luck,’’ Leo thought. As for why it has become so important, as the standout moment of World War I for New Zealanders, he said, ‘‘Because so many people were sacrificed there’’.
In the month before the interview, he went to the Anzac Day parade at the cenotaph in
O¯ po¯ tiki in his wheelchair.
‘‘There were four of us sat in chairs that were unable to stand.’’
After recuperation in Cairo, he served in France, where he was involved in the capture of the town of Bapaume and was injured by shrapnel, before he returned to London. He was there for the armistice in November 1918, which was ‘‘just like a madhouse’’, he said.
‘‘The streets were full. All the offices were open. Windows were open. The streets were full of paper, office paper. Groups of people singing, crowds everywhere.’’
According to his military records, Leo was overseas for a total of four years and 170 days. When he came home, he returned to carpentry, got married, had two children. But it turned out he still carried his discharge papers around with him.
Then they asked openly: did he have nightmares? No.
‘‘I’ve had a pretty happy life right through,’’ he said, but he didn’t know the secret of his longevity. Then he laughed again and asked Tolerton a question: ‘‘Have you got many as old as I am?’’
‘‘We’ve got a few,’’ she said.
Jane Tolerton and Nicholas Boyack would publish a book based on a selection of their World War I interviews. The title, In the Shadow of War, came from a quote from the youngest veteran they met.
‘‘He had gone to war as a boy of 15 and arrived home before his 20th birthday,’’ they wrote. ‘‘At the age of 87 he told us he had lived in the shadow of war ever since. And yet he talked very little about it.’’
This is a theme so common as to almost be a cliche: the soldier who came home and talked to no one about what happened over there, other than his mates at the RSA. You can speculate about why. It happened on the other side of the world when travel was rare. The experiences were unimaginable in New Zealand and deeply traumatic.
Tolerton and Boyack were interviewed by RNZ in November 2015. When the issue of not talking about the war came up, Tolerton said the men would say they didn’t want to skite about it. ‘‘That’s why, in a way, we know more about the things that didn’t go well than the things that did go well. The prohibition on skiting in New Zealand.’’
Boyack remembered that they all seemed in fairly good mental shape when interviewed: ‘‘It was as if they psyched themselves up for one last big effort.’’
Boyack also had strong and insightful comments about the mass commemorations of Gallipoli, then in its centenary year. Going to Gallipoli in 2015 was like the Japanese going back to Pearl Harbour, he said.
‘‘People don’t seem to have even a basic grasp of the facts,’’ Boyack said. ‘‘We attacked the Turks. We were fighting for British imperialism. We had no reason to be involved in that war. Huge numbers of people were killed. It’s had a huge impact on the Turks, which we don’t seem to even recognise or acknowledge. It’s pretty disgusting when you get politicians treating it like a rock concert.’’
I contacted Tolerton who is back working on World War I history – her latest book is Make Her Praises Heard Afar: The Hidden History of New Zealand Women in World War I. She remembers the interviews as ‘‘exhausting, very intense’’. The schedule is at the National Library website and shows how busy it was: an interview in Rotorua on May 12, O¯ hope on May 13, Whakata¯ ne on May 14, with two more in the same city the next day, O¯ po¯ tiki on May 16, back to Rotorua on May 17 and so on. There were 85 in total, at least a third of the World War I veterans still alive at the time.
Former Labour cabinet minister and historian Michael Bassett funded the project.
‘‘We did it for the country,’’ Tolerton says. ‘‘We did it with enough funding to cover expenses. We were not paid to do it.’’
And what does she remember of the men? First, that they never went for the idea that New Zealand came of age at Gallipoli. She remembers having to shout that theory at one nearly deaf veteran who eventually said, ‘‘You academics, you are always trying to complicate things’’.
‘‘They didn’t get upset talking about battles,’’ Tolerton says. ‘‘If they shed a tear, it was about their father. There was one guy who had run away from home because his father was brutal to him. But when he left on the ship, his father came down and as he was telling the story, he broke up.’’
Interestingly, Boyack remembers them crying about their mothers. But other matters seemed off limits and could only be alluded to.
‘‘There was a culture of [saying] ‘he took a knock’, meaning ‘he died’. I think that part was so buried there is almost agreement you don’t talk about that. That is really deep.’’
And the legend of the New Zealand men coming home and not talking about their experiences. What was behind that?
For one thing, Tolerton says, there was widespread censorship during the war.
‘‘They came back to a country that thought they had quite a jolly time because that’s how it was spun here.’’
Second, the influenza epidemic killed 9000 people in New Zealand in two months just as the war ended, which was half the number of New Zealanders killed in the war over four years. So perhaps it was hard to come back and compare what happened over there.
Finally, Tolerton says, it was not that easy for people who stayed behind either. She heard of women who would say, ‘‘He used to talk about the war but we had a tough time too.’’
The internet has given us other ways to dig into the past. Archives New Zealand’s Archway website has digitised military records. And the National Library’s Papers Past website has put more than 100 years of old newspapers online, with both world wars covered.
War stories are a name search away. Thankfully, ‘‘Prideaux’’ is an uncommon search term. I find references to Leo, his brother Frank and a third brother, Humphrey, who served in World War I but was too young for Gallipoli. Their sisters Lucy and Avice stayed home. I remember Avice in her old age.
The papers offer a view of domestic New Zealand getting on with life while receiving and digesting news from abroad, officially sanctioned and vetted as it was. The brothers were at war while the sisters trained to be teachers.
In June 1916 the Taranaki Herald carries a column from its Eltham correspondent, noting the recent army promotion of Frank Prideaux. He is, the paper says, ‘‘a son of the well-known Eltham family of that name. The patriotism of this family is a credit to the district, three sons being at the front, and Mrs Prideaux is the hard-working secretary of the local Sewing Guild.’’
War or no war, the sewing must go on. Sister Lucy exhibits her
‘‘For connoisseurs of military futility, valour and incompetence, the attack on Hill 60 is in a class of its own’’.
British historian Robert Rhodes James
‘‘A blind, brutish and altogether inglorious campaign planned by posturing louts and orchestrated by elegant lunatics.’’
Author Maurice Shadbolt, in the introduction to his book Voices of
Gallipoli
needlework at the Waverley A&P Show at about the same time that Leo returns from Samoa. But this is news at the level of gossip. I hit paydirt in the digital pages of another vanished paper, the Otago Witness. It ran a full page of war photos in August 1915. There is a French submarine, the Gallipoli troop landing and there, down on the bottom left, two posed photos of men from the Fourth Reinforcements.
L Prideaux is one of them. There are ten men: some have pipes in their mouths, most look fairly relaxed. I check the names in Richard Stowers’ invaluable history Bloody Gallipoli, which lists details of all of the 2779 New Zealanders killed at Gallipoli – around 20 per cent of the 13,977 who served – and discover that two of the men were already dead when the photo was published. One died from enteric fever and another was killed in action. A third was killed later in August.
Harper notes in Johnny Enzed that 55 pairs of brothers were among the 2779 who died at Gallipoli. At least two sets of brothers died at Hill 60.
But all three Prideaux sons came home. As the Taranaki paper had predicted, the eldest brother went onto greater things. The obituary of Francis Prideaux CBE that ran in the Whakata¯ ne Beacon in 1979 records that he was ‘‘a wellknown and respected resident of Whakata¯ ne’’.
After serving as a Major in World War I, he started an accountancy business in Whakata¯ ne and was Paymaster-General of New Zealand Forces in the Middle East in World War II. Later in life, he was appointed commissioner of the new Bay of Plenty forestry towns of Kawerau and Murupara. For that, he got a CBE and a park in Kawerau named after him: Prideaux Park.
‘Ablind, brutish and altogether inglorious campaign planned by posturing louts and orchestrated by elegant lunatics.’’ That was author Maurice Shadbolt in full flight in what must still be the most emotive and fiery piece of New Zealand writing about Gallipoli, the introduction to his book Voices of Gallipoli in 1988.
Shadbolt was central to the renewed interest in Gallipoli. He remembered growing up in Te Ku¯ iti in the 1930s and 40s, when ‘‘it was still in grief from the Gallipoli disaster, where the names of lost sons, husbands and fathers were thick on the town war memorial’’. In 1977 he made his first trip to the Gallipoli peninsula, noted that the remains of nearly 3000 New Zealanders still resided there and thought ‘‘there is possibly no battlefield in the world more extravagantly haunted’’.
He tried to bury the bones he found but there were just too many. The rain always exposed more.
Back home he wrote a play, Once on Chunuk Bair. Then TVNZ approached him about a documentary. Shadbolt agreed if it meant he could bring in military historian Christopher Pugsley and interview surviving veterans. The rest is history: the documentary Gallipoli, the New Zealand Story
aired on the eve of Anzac Day, 1984. It is still an essential guide to the campaign, presented by a former general, Sir Leonard Thornton (it can be viewed online at NZ On Screen).
Shadbolt wrote of a tension between his anti-military approach and Thornton’s own military sympathies. But that tension makes it fascinating.
This was hardly a whitewashed account. The terrible strategic mistakes were covered, the sheer difficulty of the terrain, the slaughter. Thornton quoted an Anzac soldier: ‘‘It was hell heaped up.’’
When it came to Chunuk Bair, Thornton indulged in some fanciful what-ifs. Did the Anzacs hold the 20th century in their hands? If they had held Chunuk Bair longer and then gone further, could the war have been over sooner? World War II might never have happened. ‘‘He’s drawing a long bow,’’ Glyn Harper says.
Hill 60 was covered too, as the last push, the depressing footnote to the brief glory on Chunuk Bair.
‘‘Unfortunately, nothing had been learned and all the familiar mistakes were to be repeated,’’ Thornton said of Hill 60. ‘‘A thousand pretty sick men went into this attack. A week later, there were 365 left.’’
They charged across open ground, into Turkish fire. As a survivor said in the documentary: ‘‘We were just anybody’s mutton.’’
As Shadbolt wrote: ‘‘Hundreds of lives again went for nothing; many wounded men died slow death in burning scrub.’’
When I discovered three quotes from Leo in a book assembled from interviews for the documentary,
Remembering Gallipoli by Pugsley and Charles Ferrall, I learned that there were audio tapes in the Kippenberger Military Library at the National Army Museum in Waiouru.
Four women formed a company called Bluestockings and were commissioned to interview around 130 possible contenders for the documentary. One of the four women, Diane Musgrave, remembers it as one of the most moving experiences of her life.
‘‘The men often had not talked about what they went through to their families and in some cases they wanted to exorcise the experiences before they died,’’ Musgrave says by email. ‘‘One man I interviewed who had been on Chunuk Bair died two days after I spoke with him and was not interviewed for the TV documentary. Unfortunately the tape recorder I was using jammed and I didn’t get his story on tape but I remember sitting there holding his hand as he cried and told me his experiences.’’
The other three women were Liz Greenslade, Colleen Hodge and Julienne Stretton. Greenslade is still active in World War I history through the Salute Wairoa project in Hawkes Bay, which will be dedicated in June 2018. ‘‘From this small district, 970 veterans served, including 220 Ma¯ ori Pioneers and 10 nurses,’’ she says by email.
One of the four women talked to Leo in 1982. The interview has been digitised by the National Army Museum, which meant I could listen on a defence computer in a quiet backroom of the Air Force Museum of New Zealand.
As the sound file starts up, there is Leo again, even more familiar now, speaking from six years earlier than before.
Why did he decide to enlist, the interviewer asked.
‘‘After I bit of excitement, I suppose.’’
Was there a feeling of patriotism?
‘‘No, I wouldn’t say that, because we didn’t think about that sort of thing much at that age. It came on so suddenly, really.’’ Was Gallipoli what he expected? ‘‘Gallipoli? Well, hardly.’’ Samoa had been ‘‘just drill and fighting the mosquitoes. You can’t compare them, really. We landed on Gallipoli without any trouble, except a few shells from the shore onto the boats. We were taken ashore and at that time, they had trenches pretty well everywhere. You couldn’t walk out in the open because of the danger of being shot. You were in trenches all the time.’’
They slept in their clothes, wherever they could. They built barriers out of corrugated iron and ‘‘any rubbish’’ to keep Turkish grenades out of the trenches. Grenades occasionally made it over, but not often, and ‘‘any bugger that stood up, he was just asking for trouble.
‘‘I remember one chap hopped up to have a look over and he was dead straight away. The snipers were terrible there. You just had to poke a rifle up and they would shoot the end off it, no trouble at all. Some wonderful shots. You never see the snipers, they’re very well hidden.’’
He told the story of the corrugated iron and the mules who were more valuable than men. He talked of the poor quality food: the ‘‘stringy and tasteless’’ beef, the biscuits that were so hard ‘‘chaps used to write their home address on them and post them’’.
When they were not on the front line, they were tunnelling under it to to set explosives. ‘‘You could crawl in and drag a sandbag of earth out. It was that small. At the head of this tunnel, you could hear the Turks doing the same thing. That was our rest period, doing that.’’
They were covered in lice and they were filthy. Water was issued for drinking, shaving and washing. If you wanted to get clean, you took the risk of swimming in the sea.
‘‘It was a highly dangerous position because the Turks could shell the sea but they couldn’t shell us when we were in the trenches. We used to make pretty hurried exits out of the water, I can tell you.’’
And what about Hill 60? His memory of it was more detailed in 1982 than in 1988.
‘‘There was a big advance in August. They took us a considerable distance along at night time – a mile, might have been two or three miles, through scrub and trenches. When it came to daylight, they made us all get out of sight and stay out of sight all day.
‘‘The next day we came to what they called Hill 60. That’s where the fight was. I was getting pretty sick by that time. I didn’t last very long there. It was pretty well held and they couldn’t get very near ...’’ Can he describe the battle?
‘‘I really don’t think I can,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s a long time ago and things are pretty hazy now.’’
When asked for his strongest lasting memory of Gallipoli, he told the mysterious story of his friend Dawson Webster, who seemed to have been killed but wasn’t. The dead man who reappeared in London.
You must have thought you were seeing a ghost, the interviewer said.
‘‘It was very hard to understand, really. He lived for quite a few years. I thought he was finished.’’
I’ve been thinking about why the strangeness of that moment seems to sum up the war experience for him. Why he mentioned it twice in interviews but not in his typed, more official seeming account.
It is haunting of course but it is more than that. It is as though war is where the utterly impossible can happen, beyond the normal boundaries of cause and effect. There is horror and unspeakable carnage but there is also inexplicable luck, almost bordering on miraculous. And none of it is very easy to explain.
Leo Prideaux died peacefully in 1989. Is his war story extraordinary? Yes. I think they all are.