The words of ‘Fighting Mac’ make 11 November a day worth remembering
- deansimpson7
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
BY BARRY GITTINS
The idea of a minute’s silence at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month is not practised in many places throughout Australia these days.
Non-observance of that minute would have been unthinkable even three or four decades ago, when generations were closer to the passed-down stories of death and horrific losses.
William McKenzie, a Salvation Army officer better known and loved as ‘Fighting Mac’, was writing home from Gallipoli 110 years ago when he recorded “the most awful sight I have ever witnessed” – his description of a field of dead bodies that he and other personnel were identifying and burying at Gallipoli.
If we didn’t know the truth of the events of World War One – the veracity long attested to by absent seats at family tables, plaques on cenotaphs, and lifelong wounds in loved ones’ hearts – we may be tempted to believe it was a horrible fantasy.
In the early arm-wrestling on the Turkish peninsula, according to Jonathan King’s Gallipoli Diaries, the Allied forces invading Turkey’s Dardanelles were up against it – the British medical authorities at Cape Helles recorded that 100,000 casualties had been evacuated from the 29th Division in the first few months.
Chaplain Major William McKenzie MC’s journal relates that the beach was a “hot shop” of shrapnel shells and bullets flying overhead when he disembarked that first day.
“I had a very narrow squeak,” he wrote, when “I got covered with earth [and] I threw myself on the road for safety. A number of shells fell near us ...
“I camped with the ‘Div.’ at the dressing station to be near to the wounded etc. I slept none the first night, as a fusillade of bullets flew over our heads the whole night and kept us a great row. I improved my ‘dugout’ next day tho’ it was very damp and uncomfortable. However, the sun got over it next day and so the third night I slept soundly.
“It was pleasing to be able to get the Colonel’s body the first night I was in the firing line and we buried him at 9 p.m. in an exposed position. For safety I had to kneel in a crouching position to conduct the burial. He had been dead a fortnight. I had to perform a number of burials that day, as indeed every day.
“It is a trying job, as the smell is awful. A number of these men are unidentified – somebody’s sons…”
One day a truce was called for and honoured; the day McKenzie and his mates spent burying the dead: it was, he declared, “the most awful sight I have ever witnessed”.
“Thousands lay dead along the front; many more than we had anticipated ... the smell was terrible, it turned me sick ... I buried Turks and Australians in the same trench and read the same burial service over them ... some had been dead a month.
“I had a trying time getting the discs and other identification marks off them. I never had such a task and hope I never shall again.”
Sadly, it was far from the last time that Fighting Mac had to bury the fallen.
The campaign to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula, assault Constantinople and weaken the Ottoman Empire was a costly failure. Total casualties during the Gallipoli campaign were more than 141,000 for the Allies, while the Turks suffered some 250,000 men killed or wounded.
Remembrance Day marks this conflict out in red. It includes all other conflicts in which Australian and New Zealand men and women have served, died, been wounded and in some way scarred for the entirety of their lives.
Lest we forget.
