Profit and Delight

Voices of Gallipoli: Hartley Palmer

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Voices of Gallipoli: Hartley Palmer

Stuart Devenie lends his voice to Hartley Palmer - an Anzac veteran who spoke to Maurice Shadbolt and Chris Pugsley in the 1980s.

Arthur Meek

Apr 24, 2025

Transcript

Hartley Palmer

Joined from Nelson.

Fought for Canterbury Infantry Battalion1

I was farming with my father when war began.

I had been a volunteer with the territorials and thought I was sufficiently trained to go to war.

So I enlisted.

I was the only son in the family, with eight sisters.

But I thought, well, I'm going and away I went.

I'd heard fellows talking about the South African war and the times they had there.

I thought I'd like to see what they're talking about.

The British Empire wasn't in my thoughts; I didn't know a great deal about it.

I wanted to have the trip around the world, and I thought it was a chance to have it.

And I wanted to have adventure.

You could say it was my ambition to go to war.

I'd been trained as a good rifle shot.

Sailing off to war with all the other Nelson boys made it even more of an adventure.

We had this strenuous training in Cairo and all of a sudden we were ordered to Ismalia [IS-MY-EE-LIA]

The Turks were advancing across the desert and they were going to use boats to try to get across the Suez Canal.

They tried to cross the canal right in front of the Motueka platoon of the 12th Nelson Company.

No Turk got across.

My platoon was 200 yards away and I never fired a shot.

But I could hear all the shooting a short distance away.

There was only one New Zealander killed, and that was Bill Ham, the first New Zealander to fall in battle.

We took his body from the canal and marched back to Ismalia [IS-MY-EE-LIA] and had a special burial for him.

So Gallipoli wasn't my first action.

Burials soon wouldn't be so special.

We had trouble with our boat and didn't land until well into the afternoon of April the twenty-fifth.

About five o'clock.

The wounded and the killed were lying about in all directions.

I should say a thousand or more of them.

The noise was terrific.

There was a rattle of fire on top of the hills and the wounded was coming down the hills down to the beach.

Most of them were singing out, “Have you got a cigarette?” Some couldn't walk any more.

They were falling down in pain.

I suppose I walked past thirty or forty dead.

I don't remember being frightened.

I was anxious to get up to the firing line to see what the others was doing.

I never got that far.

I was not into the main firing line, not in the first spell, not for at least a fortnight.

The Australians and New Zealanders held a semicircular position at Anzac.

We were posted to the end of the line, to the left.

The next three days we were still in the same position.

And we went out on to an outpost, just the Nelson company.

It was there, on that outpost, my first mate got killed.

That was Arty Fellows.

I don't know whose shot got him.

It could have been a Turk shot.

It could have been ours.

Arty was the first of our company to get killed.

I was about ten yards away.

I went out and saw him there, killed.

He was shot right in the head.

He never said a word.

My officer told me to search his clothes.

I'd given him some money in Cairo and the officer said if Arty still had any, I was to have it.

My mates said, "No good you looking, he's spent it."

I said, "Good luck to him."

I just found a little pocket-knife and I had it engraved when I went to England and I gave it to his mother when I returned to Nelson.

We then buried Arty in shrubs on a little hill away from everybody.

You couldn't dig a grave six feet deep, that was just impossible.

Not there.

We were lucky to get his boots under.

I placed him in the grave with the help of some of me mates and one of me other mates read a poem from the little black book we all carried and that was the last of poor little Arthur.

I covered him up and put a small cross on top of him.

It just had A.R.Fellows written on it.

That was all.

From the Nelson outpost at Anzac we were taken down to Cape Helles.

The British there was trying to take this hill called Achi Baba.

We was sent out to the left of the British position to make the Turks think we were going to attack that way.

Then in the evening we went off to the right.

We had orders to go over the top next morning as soon as British battleships had shelled Achi Baba.

I suppose the bombardment lasted a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes.

The British thought they had killed everyone but they hadn't.

The shells fell too far behind the Turkish lines.

The Turks were intact and ready for us.

As soon as the bombardment finished we were ordered over the top.

When we ran across the Daisy Patch toward the Turk line there was thousands of rifles and machine-guns trained on us.

They were across open country just 400 yards away.

We were getting shot from all directions.

It was just a mass of bullets.

The ground was hopping with bullets like it was hailing.

The Turks was all in trenches.

All you could see was their heads.

They weren't in the open at all.

They had every chance of shooting us and we couldn't shoot them as we ran.

I didn't think I'd ever get to the Turkish lines the way things were.

There was a machine-gun trained across where I was.

There were five chaps killed in front of me.

One, two, three, four, five, as quick as that.

I went down too.

I thought it was no good going through that machine-gun fire just to get killed and I ducked down and lay as flat as I could.

With my entrenching tool in one hand I tried to dig in and all of a sudden I got a bash under the entrenching tool with a bullet.

It just missed me arm.

I felt the shock of the dirt.

I put me entrenching tool over me brains and another bullet came straight at me.

That bullet went down.

I played dead in the hot sun until dark.

Then I made my way back into the olive groves.

Sixty of our company was lost.

I managed to meet one of me old mates.

He'd been shot in the foot and I helped him back to the doctor.

That was what the Daisy Patch was.

Playing dead with entrenching tool over me brains and helping me wounded mate back to the doctor.

It was a silly thing ever to think about.

We knew very, very little about what we were supposed to be doing.

We hadn't a hope of doing anything to the Turks at all.

Not with the few men we had.

We hadn't a chance to take Achi Baba in daylight.

We couldn't advance into thirty or forty thousand Turk rifles.

It was a bad act for any general.

I suppose I mean Sir lan Hamilton.

He was in charge at Cape Helles.

We couldn't blame General Godley for the Daisy Patch.

He was still up at Anzac.

We were angry to think we'd lost so many men with no gain.

We never won any country at all.

So we went back to Anzac.

At first we were huddled under the place we called the Sphinx.

My officer said to me, "I'm ill. I've got to get away. Will you help me down to the beach?"

I took him down there and when I got back my company was gone.

I didn't know where they'd gone to.

I had to go on my own to find my company.

I walked over a hill and while I walked along I was getting sniped at by a Turk about four or five hundred yards away.

I didn't know where I was.

I was alone in strange country with this sniper.

Finally I got down into a gully and saw a New Zealander I knew.

I said, "Where's my company?' "Oh," he said, "up there. Up those steps you can see far away in the distance."

So I went up those steps far away in the distance and that was how I found my company.

They had taken over Quinn's Post.

When I got into the trenches at Quinn's I found we were less than twenty yards off the Turk trenches.

Between our trenches and theirs were about fifteen or twenty bodies.

They were there for the whole time I was in Quinn's Post, about six weeks.

The stink was worst at night.

You can guess how we lived.

The biggest item living at Quinn's was trying to get a bit of sleep in the racket.

You were lucky to get two hours of it.

You couldn't sleep because of the flies.

Flies, they flew in and out of your mouth like a hive of bees, and over the top of you.

You couldn't drink your tea or stew a bit of food without the flies pouring down.

Every bush you touched buzzed with flies.

You couldn't see the open latrines for flies, flies thicker than anything you ever seen.

We fought the flies harder than we fought the Turks.

When I looked out my periscope all I could see was a heap of flies, not bodies, between us and the Turks.

The flies were just about four inches deep over the bodies, that's what you looked at.

Above the bodies was the Turk sandbags.

You could see that their sandbags were all loopholes.

They had iron loopholes.

We had no iron loopholes, so they had superior fire, with proper loopholes to shoot through.

We had to make a loophole out of a sandbag and if you showed yourself they could shoot you through the corner of a sandbag.

I don't know that I ever shot a Turk outright.

If I shot them I shot them through loopholes.

I shot at a Turk 700 yards away once, and he dropped.

A lot of others fired at the same time, so I don't know if it was my shot.

But I wouldn't have liked my shot fired at me.

My old rifle didn't tell lies.

I could put seven shots out of ten into the bull's eye.

There were night raids from Quinn's Post.

A hundred of us went across.

When we advanced a bullet fired from the Turks struck a dead body and rotting flesh flew up over me front, from me chest down to me puttees [PUTT-EEZ].

I had to wait until the attack had quietened down to get meself clean.

Stink wasn't in it when a dead body had been disturbed.

One day I had a chance to go down to the beach.

I hadn't had a swim in weeks.

The lice was driving me mad.

I took all me clothes off and threw them in the tide and I said to the lice, "Now you stop there, you buggers, till tomorrow morning. You stop there until I go back to the trenches tomorrow."

I thought they would drown but by God they'd fattened.

I pulled on my shirt to dry it out as I walked back up to the trenches, and they were suddenly crawling all over me body again.

They said, "We haven't had a feed for twenty-four hours, what are you trying to do to us?”

By God they was big.

Nobody knows what lice and flies are about until they have to stand up and swing their arms about and swear like we did on Gallipoli.