The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
An Australian Hero
scattered in No Man's Land. Gammage tells us of the Australian soldier, shot
through the arm, staying for seven days with his wounded mate in No Man's
Land at Fromelles, scavenging food and water from the dead at night while
slowly dragging him to safety. But mateship did more than bind the
common soldiers to one another. It also bound the common man to the
strategies of control exercised by the officer class. Gammage notes that what
he calls "a kind of mateship" practised by the officers vis a vis their troops
"was a chief cause for the effectiveness of the Australians in battle."
So far from home mates were all most Australians had. Gammage cono
eludes, "and they became the AIF's greatest cohesive influence, discouraging
shirking, and lifting men above and beyond the call of duty."
As might be expected, then, mateship was central to the film Gallipoh and
I asked Sid if he had seen the film as it had just been released and was
attracting a lot of comment. But he hadn't and seemed totally disinterested.
It turned out that he had volunteered and been sent to the Middle Hast en
route to Gallipoli but had remained in Hgypt to care for the horses. He was
a country boy from Queensland and a skilled horseman. Perhaps he was a
figure in the mind's eye of Australia's celebrated bush-poet. A. B. Patterson,
of "The Man from Snowy River" fame who also cared for the army's horses
in Egypt and wrote a ballad for Kia Ora Coo-ee, a monthly magazine of the
Anzacs in the Middle East in 1918, about the 'rankless, thankless man/ who
hustles the Army's mules.'
You'll see a vision among the dust like a man and mule combined—
Its the kind of thing you must take on trust for its outlines aren't
defined,
A thing that whirls like a spinning top and props like a three-legged
stool,
And you find its a long-legged Queensland boy convincing an army
mule . . .
with the stanza ending.
It's a rough-house game and thankless game, and it isn't a game for a
fool.
For an army's fate and a nation's fame may turn on an army mule.
I asked Sid what he did after that and he told me he went to France as an
infantryman. A big battle was about to begin, an immense push forward by
the allies in which huge numbers of men would die and be wounded. In his
book on Gallipoli, the Australian Alan Moorehead describes the rhythm of
combat and mood there as one of depression and irritability when combat
was at a low ebb, and the men fighting with one another or even paying
money in order to be in the thick of combat, the bayonet charges or
whatever, when such was at hand. 35 But Sid's tale was somewhat different.
Amid the bursting shells he and his mate replaced the lead in their .303
cartridges with German shrapnel. Waiting until some stretcher bearers were
close by, Sid fired at point-blank range into his mate's thigh. Their plan was
that then his mate would fire into his and then the stretcher bearers would
come running and take them to hospital and hence out of the war—hardly
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