A Christmas Quiet between Campaigns

Having caught up again with my grandfather’s Artillery corps activities 100 years ago, I see that Christmas and New Year were spent at Zeitoun camp in Egypt, following the evacuation from Anzac Cove in early December 1915. You don’t hear much about the evacuation these days – certainly no special commemorations like we’ve seen for the disastrous Anzac landing and the battle for Chunuk Bair. But here’s what the official New Zealand Artillery in the Field, 1914-18 war record said at the time:

The evacuation of the New Zealand Field Artillery, and the other batteries attached to the Division, extended over little more than a week. Orders to evacuate the guns were issued on December 10th, and the evacuation began the following night, when one section of guns from each New Zealand Battery was sent away. In many cases the guns had to be manhandled for a considerable distance, across trenches and broken ground, before they could be got on to ground where they could be limbered up and taken to the beach by the teams, but these difficulties were made light of in the determination that the New Zealand Brigades should leave none of their guns behind when Anzac was evacuated. ...

The final stages of the evacuation were carried out with methodical quietness, and exactly according to the time-table which had been laid down. It was a trying and anxious time for the whole Army Corps, but for none so much as the small garrison which held Anzac during the last twenty-four hours, and whose lives may be literally said to have hung by a thread. Everything possible was done in order to create the appearance of normal activity, and even to encourage the enemy in the belief that fresh troops were being landed by night.

Later, the official record reports:

The evacuation of Anzac having been a gradual process extending over more than a week, units arrived back in Egypt distributed on different transports, and in no particular order. On arrival at Alexandria some parties proceeded to Zeitoun, and others to Moascar. At this latter place, which was merely a railway siding a mile from Ismailia, on the banks of the Suez Canal, advance parties were proceeding with the establishment of a big camp where the Division was to be once more concentrated under canvas. With the arrival of the Infantry Brigades, the artillerymen with their horses and guns, other Divisional troops, and the Supply and Transport services, the camp took on an air of bustle and animation, and the men gradually settled down again to the routine of training.

Te Ara has this short video clip of Zeitoun camp from the time, where my grandfather was exactly a hundred years ago, though his war record shows he moved to Moascar camp on 24 January 1916. The location of each camp is shown on the map below.

A prayer for peace: preserve us from degeneration, disaster and war

Convinced that violence to deal with violence only begets more violence, that root causes of injustice and hatred need to be identified and healed; remembering also that Jesus told us to pray for our enemies, and that "all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" (Matt 26:52), I wish to share this prayer associated with a relatively little-known devotion to Mary as 'the Lady of All Nations'. This is associated with apparitions of Mary in Amsterdam from 1945-1959, accepted by the Church as being of supernatural origin.

In revealing the prayer to Ida Peerdeman, Our Lady said the prayer was purposely kept short and simple, 'so that every person may manage to say it, even in this modern and speed-mad world.' Significantly, when so many countries are wracked by war, distress or turmoil, it asks for 'the Holy Spirit to live in the hearts of all nations, that they may be preserved from degeneration, disaster and war'.

The prayer in full:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Father,
send now your Spirit over the earth.
Let the Holy Spirit live in the hearts of all nations,
that they may be preserved from degeneration, disaster and war.
May the Lady of All Nations, the Blessed Virgin Mary, be our advocate.
Amen.

Read more ...

A chance for peace - it was good enough for Eisenhower

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. - Dwight D Eisenhower.

Those were the words I held up today in the rain to honour Armistice Day - when 'the war to end all wars' ended. Most people probably wondered what on earth we were on about. Hard to believe these words were spoken by an American President at the height of the Cold War, who had been WWII general.

He spoke them after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, when he felt there was an opportunity to nip the Cold War in the bud. It prompted him to give a speech that would be titled “The Chance for Peace”, against the counsel of then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The speech went onto say: "Now, there could be another road before us—the road of disarmament. What does this mean? It means for everybody in the world: bread, butter, clothes, homes, hospitals, schools—all the good and necessary things for decent living."

Similar could be said today of climate change and our addiction to carbon. Whether we see it or not, there is another road that lies before us.

Read more about the context from Robert Schlesinger.

Arrival in Alexandria

Continuing the journey of my grandfather in the Field Artillery with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, I have come to the point where the flotilla receives unexpected news while crossing the Red Sea that they would disembark in Egypt, rather than Europe:

Most of the men had firmly believed that they were on their way to England, and would ultimately go from there to France, and they parted with their illusions regretfully, but once it had been definitely stated that the voyage would end at Egypt they were quick to realise the cogency of the reasons which probably lay behind this decision. At Suez, where the leading transports anchored for an hour or two, detailed disembarkation orders were brought out to the flagship, the Canal pilots were taken aboard, and the Maunganui led the way into the Canal. A powerful electric light was installed in the bows of each, boat so that they might feel their way along the narrow channel in the darkness.
Of the town of Suez little could be seen—a glimpse of the palm-shaded water-front, a glimmer of lights, and then the boats were in the Canal with the low banks on either hand so close at times that it seemed almost possible to leap ashore from the decks. ... The soldiers clustered up forward and silently watched the canal-banks slip by like the unfolding of a cinematograph film; but, late at night a heavy fog enveloped everything, and the leading boats anchored till the morning in the Bitter Lake. Proceeding by day, the entrenchments and fortified posts skirting the canal, with their garrisons of English and Indian troops, provided a first impression of the seriousness attached to the Turkish threat to the precious waterway, and of the elaborate preparations being made for its defence.

http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/nzef-egypt-1914-16-map,
(Ministry for Culture and Heritage)

(The Ottomans did attack the Canal just a few months later in February 2015). However, at this point, the NZEF were due to disembark at Alexandria on the Mediterranean northern shores of Egypt:

The city was in sight at dawn [on 3 December], and very soon after breakfast the transports had berthed, and men and horses and stores were pouring out on to the wharves. The Force was to be encamped on the outskirts of Cairo, so there was still a train journey of almost 150 miles before its travels would for the time being be over. Once the batteries had marched their horses down the big ramps, and slung their guns and stores up from the holds, they had to set to and pack them into the long troop trains which were in waiting to carry them off to their new home on the edge of the great desert.

First blood

It is both strange and sobering to read more than 100 years after the fact, in words that sound quite fresh, of the first death and the first encounter with the enemy of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force - en route to their destination in Egypt. I can do no better than to quote directly from New Zealand Artillery in the Field 1914-1918 to relay the first unexpected loss:

Early on Monday morning, October 25th, a signal went round the fleet that a private of the New Zealand Medical Corps had died the previous night on board the Ruapehu [one of the troopships]; and the intelligence of this first death came almost as a shock to men who had thought only for that side of war that promised excitement and adventure, that stirs the blood and fires the imagination, and little for that other side on which lay its tragedy and suffering and death. In the afternoon an impressive burial service was held. At 3 p.m. the Ruapehu moved up to the centre of the two divisions, and the troops on every transport were paraded facing inwards. Five minutes later all engines were stopped, and the convoy rode motionless on the water while a brief funeral service was held on every ship, and the body was committed to the deep. The customary volleys were fired on the Ruapehu, and the Last Post sounded; the Ruapehu hauled her ensign close up, and the convoy proceded on its way. The service was very brief, but the circumstances invested it with an impressiveness that was not lost on the thousands who paid their tribute of respect to the dead.

A couple of weeks later, after the New Zealand fleet had been joined by the Australians, one of the Australian cruisers serving as an escort was called away to engage with a 'strange warship' that had entered the harbour in the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The Australian cruiser Sydney took on and ultimately defeated the German raider Emden, which had been trying to disable the radio station on the Cocos.

However great the pride with which the Australians viewed the honours which had fallen to their young Navy, it was fully shared by every New Zealander, and the official congratulations of the Force were duly offered to the Sydney on the results of the Australian Navy's first engagement. The Sydney had two men killed and thirteen wounded, but the list of killed and wounded on the battered Emden ran into big figures.

According to Wikipedia, under the rather grand title of "Battle of the Cocos", the Emden lost 134 men, and had 69 wounded. More than 150 were taken captive, but the shore party of 50 commandeered a schooner and escaped ultimately to Constantinople (Istanbul).

Close to home

Today at the dinner table, our youngest child asked why in World War One and all the other wars did all those men go out to kill each other? I tried to explain, as simply as possible, that the reasons were complex and even historians can’t agree. World War One stemmed in part from agreements different countries had to protect others if another nation attacked them; and so things kind of spiralled out of control when two smaller countries attacked each other. Then she pressed us as to why the individual men went out to kill each other. I told her some felt they were fighting a great evil, or felt it was their job to fight for their country if it went to war – the “my country, right or wrong” mentality.

What I would give to know what was in my grandfather’s mind as he enlisted then sailed off to war in 1914.

He actually joined the Army long before, in January 1913 as a driver in the Artillery, and received initial training in Wellington for three months before returning south to serve with the Army in Dunedin and Invercargill. From what I can make out from the records, it seemed he was with the Invercargill Field Artillery at the outbreak of war. He probably spent time in further training at Palmerston North, before members of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force trooped down to Wellington.

“An official farewell was tendered to the units which embarked in Wellington, at a big parade held in Newtown Park on September 24th,” says the official history New Zealand Artillery in the Field 1914-1918. “Great crowds assembled in the Park to witness the parade, and afterwards lined the streets and cheered the soldiers as they marched down to the wharves. The transports backed out from the wharves before dark, and anchored in the stream ... ready to sail with the dawn”. However, two of the escort ships were delayed from Auckland, and it was decided not to sail without a sufficiently powerful protective convoy.

So, the following day, they all disembarked, “the Artillery with their horses and vehicles marched out to the Lower Hutt Racecourse, and went into camp.” All those years ago, Grandad was less than a kilometre from where I now live. It was three weeks before the troopships departed – with less of a fanfare. The Expeditionary Force, my grandfather among them, finally set sail from Wellington under convoy in the early morning of October 16th – “the sky was cloudless, and only the soft early morning mists obscured the first rays of the sun.”

How the guns were starved

During a visit to my uncle’s on the weekend, I finally learnt how my grandfather Sydney Williams earned his Military Medal. I won’t share details now – it seems premature, and if I leave it a while, that may induce you to come back some time to find out.

Tonight, instead, I turn to the next installment – ‘How the guns were starved’ – of the official 1922 history of the New Zealand Field Artillery. The author, while saying it was ‘unnecessary and inadvisable’ to deal with the overall events leading up to the Gallipoli campaign, felt it necessary to cover the shortcomings that affected the Artillery. Namely, the out-of-date and inadequate guns, and a severe lack of ammunition– usually limited to two rounds a day.

After several urgent requests by the Commander of the Australian Field Artillery for some more powerful naval guns, on 11 July 2015 (100 years ago) ‘one very old and much-worn gun arrived’, though its usefulness turned out to be very limited. At the same time, an ‘absolutely reliable’ source had informed the British that the Turks were having to economise on ammunition for the next three weeks, however, there seemed to be no let-up in their bombardment.

Later in July, reinforcements arrived, resulting in a reorganisation of the Artillery Batteries into two Brigades. I learned today that my grandfather’s commanding officer was Major F G Hume, in charge of 2^nd Battery in the 2^nd Brigade.