And let me say right here that while in any event Australia would have made a sturdy response to Britain’s call, what Germany can put into its long-stemmed, china-bowled pipe and “smoke it,” is that were it not for the appalling, cowardly, barbarous crimes committed against the defenseless—the women and children of Belgium, there would never have been, as there has been, such tremendous outpouring of fighting men from splendid Australia; 400,000 of them out of a population of men, women and children numbering 5,000,000! All volunteers, you understand? It is the volunteer record of the war—not forgetting Canada’s mighty showing of 550,000 out of a population of 7,000,000!
It was not until Germany gave atrocious evidences of her disregard of humanity, not until its army had stalked in its giant size, a red-stained, moral idiot, through little Belgium, crucifying old men and women and children to the doors of their homes, ravishing girls and women, murdering the parents who tried to protect them; not until this enormity of degeneracy had passed into the history of mankind, did Australia take fire.
I know because at the very beginning of the war I was sent out to Sydney and Melbourne as a whip for enlistment—made scores of speeches daily in halls, parks, street corners and other public places. My hearers were many and they were earnest and thoughtful but deliberate as well. Enlistments came and numerously but not with anything approaching a rush. Your prospective soldier debated a good deal with his own personal interests, before he signed up.
But after Belgium! The crowds I addressed took the arguments for enlistment away from me—made the talk themselves, swarmed to join. Social ranks broke completely and almost instantaneously. Everybody flocked to the army—artists, actors, lawyers, merchants, clerks, larrikins, miners and the men from the vast, open places of Australia.
“British blood is calling British blood”
Brothers are these last in every degree of character to the American and Canadian miners, ranchers, trappers, cowboys; they are big, lean, brave, boyishly chivalrous men, shy of women but adoring them, willing to play romping dog any old time to win the smile of a child or the pat of its little hand.
It must stand as one of the most picturesque features of the war—the great distances these men traveled to the centers of population to offer their services to avenge the slaughter of the helpless in Belgium and to fight for the honor, prestige and life of the Gray Mother of the Empire.
Take for instance, John Wilson, gold prospector. He came out of the wilderness, fifteen hundred miles to Sydney, to join the colors; four hundred of it on horseback, one hundred of it literally hacking his way through a dense, trackless forest of giant gum and eucalyptus trees until he got to Bourke, whence, once a fortnight, a train leaves for Sydney. Thousands and thousands of John Wilsons made their way to the cities.
And from the distant islands of the Archipelago—Samoa, Fiji, Cocos, Madras, when the news of Germany’s infamy seeped into the men far in the interiors—the traders and planters in oils and nuts, the hunters of birds of paradise—they came out through the swamps, paddled their way on jungle rivers laboriously but tirelessly, determinedly to the coast and put themselves aboard the first ships obtainable. There occurred at this time a great shortage in crews for these ships, so that some were threatened with being held up for days or weeks for lack of men. Many well-to-do patriots, amply supplied with funds to meet the expense of a trip in the first cabin, signed up as stokers, seamen or deck-hands in order to expedite the journeys from the islands to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne or other coast communities where they might join the army.
And the larrikins, the hooligans, “hard guys” of the cities, gangsters, youths and men of lives abandoned to drink, drugs and other vices—Germany’s unspeakable cruelty in Belgium even stung such as these out of their indifference. In the early days of enlistment we had managed to win precious few of this class to the service. The majority of them had been sullen and derisive to our appeals to join the colors.
“Wot’s all this flaming war about, anywye? Blast the blooming war, I ain’t got nothin’ to fight about.”
That had been the characteristic response.
But the piteous images of children with bleeding, severed throats, of tiny human bodies dismembered, of decent girls and women subject to the foulest acts of vicious cowardice, sent the larrikins to us seething with rage and resolved, as it was especially hard for men of this sort to resolve, to accept the strict discipline of army life for the chance to spill the blood of the horror-makers of Europe.
As to these same larrikins, if you please, I would like to set down some more. Scrubby they came to us, most of them, pallid, undersized, some of them wretchedly nervous from drinks, drugs, under-feeding, bad teeth, all manner of irregularities of life due to poverty, due to vice.
But, “by the living God that made” them, once you’d repaired them—fixed their teeth, fed them, exercised them, made bathing instead of a drunk a daily habit with them, once, in short, that you’d properly set them up and, excuse the emphasis, but they made the damnedest best soldiers of the lot.
Not that the professional men, business men, open-air men who went into the ranks were not as heroic. A hundred incidents of the splendor of bravery that men of all classes displayed crowd my memory to take swift, sharp issue with the idea. But you see the larrikin—the designation used to be one of contempt with me but is something pretty close to affection now and I should say with several other thousands of officers as well—comes to you with the devil’s own experience of hard-knocks. He knows hunger, thirst, the misery of cold, of pains and aches he has no doctor to allay. And I would point out that one of these boys who has survived such conditions with a physique left good enough to get him into the army, must have started life with the flesh and blood make-up akin to the steel armor-plates and entrails of a dreadnaught. So when you take him and give him only half a brushing-up, the readiness of his response would (may I borrow the expression of an Ally?) certainly jar you. His face gets pink, his chest sticks out, the sneer he wore becomes a smile, the contemptible trickery he used to work turns to good-natured, practical jokes. He is childishly amazed to find that his comrades—the man who was a lawyer at home, or the other who was a tradesman or the very wonderful person who was a well-known feature in vaudeville and even—Gawd blime me! his captain likes him. And once he believes that—knows it and feels it then (another draft on an Ally) you’ve “got something!” The very gang training he has had when he banded with his pals to fight and cheat the law, that gang spirit with all its blind devotion is at the nod of his officer. He’ll go to hell for you even when he knows there is not much or any chance of coming back, and if all of his kind, whether out of Whitechapel, the purlieus of Canadian cities or the slums of Australia who have done that very thing of going into hell and not come back, might be called on parade it would be a big procession. Yet not of grief-stricken or agonized men but they who walk with fine, clear, steady eyes, and countenances wonderfully cleansed.
To move a little ahead of that day in a then fast-approaching October when the first twenty-thousand of us sailed away to get into the big muss, I’d like to tell a little story of the only larrikin I know of who fell flatly down on his job.
They had made him, to his fierce disgust, the Lord high keeper of a carrier pigeon. He was a person who wanted to get into the fight—Anzac for Boche, yes, two Boches or three. But here he had been made custodian of the carrier pigeon. He had never had a chance at a Boche. He must trail his officer at the rear of charging men. He must have the pigeon in its little box ready, so that should the officer command, the pigeon could have a neat little message as to reinforcements or success tied to his little leg, be released from the box when he would shoot up straight as an arrow above the roar and smoke of battle and home his way to the rear, dropping into a box at the commandant’s trench or dug-out