Voices of Gallipoli: Henry Lewis

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Introduction

By Warren Smith - Communications @ The Gallipoli Association

I'm delighted to introduce Arthur Meek, a talented playwright from New Zealand, who continues to present his remarkable project, "Voices of Gallipoli," at this conference.

Arthur is known for his evocative storytelling and deep connection to historical narratives. His latest project, "Voices of Gallipoli," is an oral adaptation of the verbatim testimonies collected by the late Maurice Shadbolt, a renowned New Zealand novelist. These powerful testimonies were recorded from Anzac soldiers who fought at Gallipoli, capturing their experiences and emotions nearly seven decades after the events.

"Voices of Gallipoli" aims to bring these voices to life, allowing audiences to hear the raw, unfiltered accounts of the soldiers who lived through the harrowing campaign. By presenting these stories aloud, Arthur Meek ensures that the legacy of these brave individuals is preserved and honored1. The project has already gained international recognition and is has been showcased at various Anzac commemorations and events around the world.

At the Gallipoli Association's annual conference, Arthur will share excerpts from "Voices of Gallipoli," providing a poignant reminder of the human cost of war and the enduring impact of the Gallipoli campaign. His performance is expected to be a highlight of the conference, offering attendees a unique and deeply moving experience.

Arthur Meek's dedication to preserving historical narratives and his ability to bring them to life through his work make him a valuable addition to the conference. We look forward to his presentation and the opportunity to reflect on the stories of those who served at Gallipoli.

Thank you, Arthur, for your commitment to keeping the memory of the Anzac soldiers alive. We are honoured to have you with us today – over to you!

The Transcript

Henry Lewis.

Joined from Wellington. Fought for Otago Regiment.

BEGINS

I was an apprentice motor mechanic in Wellington when war broke out in 1914 and I signed up to go away.

I lost my mother when I was six and my father when I was fourteen and I was still living with my stepmother.

She didn't treat me so good, so I thought the war was a good chance to make a break and get out in the world.

Loyalty to the British Empire never had much to do with it.

It was just a matter of wanting to get away with the boys.

After I signed on I was sent down to Dunedin to boost the Otago regiment.

I had five weeks' training and sailed with the main body to Egypt in October.

It was very new and exciting.

Egypt was all hard training and crawling over desert - rough stones, not sand - with our packs and rifles.

When we were on leave we used to get in some strife with the English military police.

Australians would come to our help.

One thing we learned quick, we weren't English.

I still remember the name of every ship in the invasion fleet which took us off to war at Gallipoli.

The landing was nothing like we expected.

The sea was foaming with these Turkish shells exploding shrapnel down on us.

Luckily, no man in our boat was hit; ours was the only boat I heard of with no casualty.

I almost was.

There was a man sitting in front of me with the barrel of a machine-gun.

When our boat hit the beach and floated back this man swung round and knocked me off my seat and down to the bottom of the boat.

So I was the last man out.

By then the boat was back in deep water, up to my neck, practically over my head.

I had gear on my back and a heavy rifle which didn't make things easy.

The first thing we saw on the beach was an Australian piggybacking a mate with his leg blown off.

We were going to see a lot like that.

We shifted to the left, and found it impossible to push up there; it was sheer cliff.

So we had to make our way in the other direction, under fire from the Turks all the time.

We copped it pretty bad, losing men right and left.

I was pretty young, only twenty, and the whole thing was unrealistic to us, with our innocent minds.

We began learning to survive fast, to take what cover we could.

Within two weeks of the landing I didn't have one friend left.

I lost my best mate soon after we landed.

We were very, very close.

He was engaged to a girl in Wellington and in Egypt he used to read me her letters.

After the landing he was transferred to the engineers.

He got his gear together and set off across a little ridge to where the engineers were.

One part of the path was prone to snipers.

The last thing I said to him was, "Don't forget the sniper. Keep down as you go across there. "

I was sitting there watching him go, a lovely sunny day, and he walked upright.

Oh God, I thought, and I yelled to him, "Get down. Get down.”

Too late.

He was hit in the side.

The bullet went right into his heart and he just said, “Oh God” and dropped.

For me that was the worst incident of the whole campaign, seeing my mate shot like that.

I almost cried.

Without him I felt very lonely.

I felt even lonelier after our bloody mongrel of a general, Godley, put the Otagos into that hopeless attack on the second of May.

Godley was never any use to us.

Our colonel argued against the attack, knowing we weren't up to it, but Godley overruled him.

We were exhausted, no sleep at all, and marched off our feet and pushed up at night into a deeply entrenched Turk position we called the Chessboard because of the square dugouts all down the slope.

We had to haul ourselves toward them on ropes.

I was way up on the left.

I saw this little sergeant major, a Pommy I didn't like much, hiding behind me; he planned to keep me in front of him.

I thought bugger you, left him to it, and climbed onto higher ground.

From there I could see the Turks moving.

The moon hadn't come up, the top of the ridge was all scrub, but I could just see the Turks crouched down, coming down, creeping toward us.

To me it looked like some ruse.

I sung out to the blokes below, I said, "Keep down. Don't get up here. "

But of course some of them didn't hear and the moment they got up that whole ridge where the Turks were became a row of fire.

Every Turk opened fire on the Otago blokes who got up.

They threw hand grenades too.

It was our introduction to hand grenades that night.

We never knew the things existed.

While all this was going on, it was deadly.

Most of the Otagos died straight away.

Some of them just caught alight.

The noise was terrific.

You couldn't hear yourself speak.

The Turkish fire was hitting a ridge to our rear and echoing back this way and that and we didn't know whether we had Turks behind us too or where they were.

A bloke from another company dropped beside me and we yelled in each other's ears about what we were going to do.

I said, well, throw away your gear and hang on to your rifle and we will gallop back as fast as we can.

I said, if you get hit keep going if you can.

Anyway we jumped back and found a safe posy, and we heard someone coming up to us.

We had nothing in our magazines, on account of it having supposed to have been a silent night attack, and we loaded fast in case he was a Turk.

This bloke screamed, "Don't shoot. Don't shoot."

It was an Otago captain.

He'd been hiding, sitting back safe, and hadn't come through with us.

I was tempted to shoot the bugger.

When we took a tally next morning, after that attack, we only had eighty fit men left in our regiment.

Eighty out of maybe 1200.

That was what the first eight days of the campaign cost us.

The rest of us thought we didn't have long to live either, and that we better make the best of things while we could.

With every mate of mine gone to snipers, shells and shrapnel I felt very lonely among these thousands of men on the Gallipoli peninsula.

I was the only one left of all the men I had trained with.

The war went on, though.

When the Turks made their big attack later in May you didn't have time to think about dead mates.

You just had to hope you had enough ammunition to keep popping it into the Turks.

I never thought nothing about killing Turks.

Some say they were fine fellows, but I just thought they were a pack of bastards.

They weren't the clean fighters they got cracked up to be.

We knew they killed prisoners.

They just kept coming at us.

If any got up to our trench, we had to hop out and bayonet them back.

Otherwise we just fired point blank into the mass.

Our rifles got red hot, and some of them jammed.

The bottom of our trench was ankle deep in spent shells.

I don't know how long it lasted.

It seemed many hours, but perhaps it was only two.

I was black with bruises from the recoil of my rifle.

There were bodies lying out in the hot sun, 3000 Turks in one particular acre.

They swelled up to a tremendous size and turned black.

Some had been there since the landing.

Our fellows didn't seem to swell up to the same size.

If we tried an advance, sometimes you could find yourself having to shelter behind the bodies and bullets would hit into them.

The pong would be asphyxiating.

There was this armistice to clear the dead.

Some of the bodies, you couldn't manhandle them.

They were so rotten they were falling to pieces.

The swollen ones, you just had to put a pick into them, to let out the gas, drag them to a trench and roll them in.

But the smell never went.

That smell was with you all the time on Gallipoli.

Bodies were never cleared again.

There was just that one armistice.

It was a smell you can never lose.

I can still smell it.

Our dead, the ones we could recover, were carried down at night to a sort of morgue down behind Courtney's Post.

After men got killed we carried them down there at night where they would be laid out to be identified before burial.

Passing there, you would look for faces you knew.

And you thought, well, one day I'll be there too.

Afterwards they would be carried off again and buried at the foot of a gully prone to Turk shellfire.

There was one colonel blown out of his grave three times.

After the Turks attacked, dysentery did.

I was lucky.

I was the other way; I had constipation.

But other fellows got to the stage where they were just passing green slime.

The lining of their stomachs was passing out through their bowels.

They should have been sent off the peninsula quickly.

Doctors didn't excuse them duty.

These men just had to keep going.

They were so weak some of them just fell into the latrines and died there.

They didn't have the energy to duck snipers and didn't care.

I saw fellows commit suicide.

Below Courtney's Post the path to the latrines was covered by snipers.

You had to crouch low as you went along it.

I saw men literally stand up and walk through upright so they would be hit by a sniper.

The food wasn't worth living for, if you could call it food.

It certainly didn't do much to keep us alive.

It was just bully beef and dog biscuits, which we made into a stew, with jam if we could get it, mixed up with flies.

It was more a kind of porridge.

Or a soup.

After about three months we got mouldy bread from Egypt, one loaf to two men.

We could just eat the crusts.

At the same time, we began learning what it was all about.

We heard the name Winston Churchill from the sailor boys who were bringing our stores ashore and taking our casualties out to the hospital ships.

Those sailors called Churchill pretty horrible names, and told us he was responsible for the whole deal.

First by failing with the navy, and then putting us onto the peninsula with the Turks prepared for us.

We were soon blaming Churchill for all the thousands of lives lost.

We never were free of Turk shelling.

It wasn't even safe to swim in Anzac Cove at midnight.

The big gun was always shelling from Anafarta [AN-AH-FART-AH] - Farting Annie, we called it.

When the shells started falling we would hide among biscuit tins and packing cases stacked on the beach.

If it wasn't shells bleeding us, it was lice.

The foot of our trenches were alive with lice.

We'd cut our shorts back to give them nowhere to breed - they laid their eggs in the seams - and try and scrape them off our flesh with our fingernails.

They'd be red with our blood.

I was smothered in septic sores, especially around the crutch.

Doctors would give us iodine, but they soon ran out of it.

In the end they gave us nothing.

I caught a shell toward the end of July, and was buried in a trench, and dragged out by my feet.

There were no visible signs of injury, but my back was hurt and I learned later that my heart had been affected in the explosion, and that I might only have six months to live.

Meanwhile I just kept on.

I got smacked again when the big push began in August, on the seventh, up towards Chunuk Bair [CHOO-NIK BARE].

I was one of fourteen men picked to work ahead to cut barbed wire.

The next day I was the only one of the fourteen left alive.

I was hit in the hand.

I had my wound dressed down on the beach and was taken off Gallipoli by hospital ship.

Finally I was sent home to New Zealand.

I got sick to death of people when I got home after Gallipoli.

People seemed so stupid, so smug and lucky, asking their silly questions.

They had no idea of what we'd been through.

No idea at all.

They began making Gallipoli - my months there - seem unreal.

I chased after quite a number of jobs, but no one would give me employment.

I would go for an interview, and everything seemed satisfactory until they saw my discharge saying I was no longer fit for active service.

They would say, "Well, we'll let you know” and they didn't let me know.

Men like me were rejected as junk by people in business.

I don't like to think about Gallipoli now, not any more than I have to.

But most of it I can never forget.

ENDS.

I'd like to thank the Gallipoli Association for their seminal involvement in this project.

This is the third year in a row I've presented a voice at the conference. There are 12 voices in all. I hope I get to present them all over the next decade or so.

The GA's support has opened doors throughout New Zealand and as far afield as Antarctica for these voices to be spoken out loud.

They do great work.

Here's a fantastic video they helped make happen.