GALLOPING INTO CARNAGE

ON SATURDAY, 100 years on from the Gallipoli landings, we published the newly found memoirs of Royal Engineers signaller Norman Woodcock. Here, in the concluding instalment of his incredible story, he recalls how, unlike so many others, he survived life o

THE AVERAGE lifespan of a horse at Gallipoli was one day. When I left England in early 1915, my mounted unit had 76 horses, and after three months of fighting we had nine left. The others were all killed. These horses were our best friends, and it was heartbreaking. My beloved Timbuc was one of the survivors, by sheer luck. During one bombardment, the horse standing next to him was hit by a blast and reduced to blood and guts. Horrors like that became a daily occurrence.

We quickly realised that horses were not suited to this kind of warfare. Anything that stood out against the horizon was a clear target. We were in dugouts and could fall flat when the shells came over, but our horses could not. They trembled and whimpered amid the bombardment. If there was nothing we could do for wounded horses, we had to shoot them, and what a dreadful task that was. We dug huge pits to bury the dead animals, and found that two horses would not drag a dead one unless we put hoods over their heads.

What made me angry was that these beautiful creatures had no business being at the front, and were of little real use. The Army should have been investing in motor vehicles instead of wasting huge resources, shipping horses with their foodstuff and keepers across the world to fight.

One brigadier-general seemed to sum up the stupidity of the officer class at Gallipoli. Once we had made the beachhead secure, he set up his HQ, and, as a signaller, one of my duties was to make sure his field telephone was working.

On many nights, I was summoned to repair it, because the general would yank out the connection and hurl the apparatus from the dugout. These fits of temper were caused, I was told, because the fool had never bothered to learn how to use a telephone properly.

Sometimes, I couldn’t hold my tongue. One officer criticised a working party, telling them that they were not working in accordance with the training manual. I replied that the book was useless: it had been out of date since 1914.

He angrily threatened to have me courtmartialled — and I asked if he knew the proper procedure even for that! Nothing came of it all.

I was not alone in my intense dislike for officers. What they failed to realise was that we were not regulars: we were Territorial Army, often with brains that were better than any general’s.

Many of my comrades in civilian life weree scientists and teachers.

One morning, as I watched a division of Territorials coming ashore at W Beach — now known as Lancashire Landing — I fell into conversation with a man who told me their r time in Egypt had been spoiled by an excess of drill and discipline.

The divisional adjutant, a regular r serving officer, seemed to despise the Territorials, and had made himselff highly unpopular by handing out all sorts of punishments. The men were muttering that he would be the first to be killed, when they got ‘up the line’.

Next day, I was in the signals office when casualty reports came in from their section, assaulting the Turkish village stronghold of Krithia. One off those killed was the adjutant. I wondered who had done it.

As signallers, we wore blue-andwhite armbands wherever we were, which allowed us to go anywhere without hindrance. On days when I was the lineman, my role was to mend breaks to the communication cables — what we called a ‘line dis’ or a disconnection between us and the observations stations. A ‘line dis’ was usually caused by shell damage.

Cable-laying in trenches was dangerous work. If we stood up, we were easyy targets, but also the Turks would lob in homemade bombs. These were filled with nails or pieces of metal, and the fuse hung out like a white cord. If we could see the cord, we knew how much time we had before it went off.

If it was a longish cord, we’d throw it back. We kept a blanket to throw over bombs that were about to explode: the blast would throw it up in the air. organisation for burying the dead. Only when the smell and the flies became a nuisance was anything done.

Some of the dead were burned, but mostly they were just put in old trenches and covered over. Like everything about this campaign, it was all incompetence and muddle.

Diseases of every kind were rampant. Dysentery and typhoid swept through the ranks, and the sickness was impossible to shake off — men either died or went to the hospital, where they would probably die anyway.

The best medicine was J. Collis Browne’s, which we had sent from home. It was a blend of laudanum, which was 10 per cent opium, with cannabis and chloroform. It cured diarrhoea — and not surprisingly it also relieved other pains, especially toothache.

There was a genuine camaraderie between us soldiers. We might hate the officers, but we looked after each other. When parcels arrived for mates who had been killed, we shared the contents out. One mother continued to send us packages from home, even after her own son was killed, asking us to share them between his pals.

During one battle, I looked across the bay, where the Navy’s big guns were firing towards the Turkish trenches. The sea around the tip of the peninsula was full of ships of all kinds: destroyers, battleships, transports and hospital ships. It was quite a picture.

The enemy were replying fiercely, for they always had more ammunition than us, and the ground and sea was dotted by bursting shells. The rattle of machine-guns punctuated the steady crackle of rifle fire.

Suddenly, the command rang out: a signal line was down. I ran out of the dugout, scanning the ground to spot the break, and falling flat when a shell burst. It was vital to fix this quickly: the observation point was the only link between land and sea forces. On t his particular day, I couldn’t find a break, and eventually arrived panting at the observation station. A