WITH THE AUSTRALIANS AND NEW ZEALANDERS IN THE GREAT WAR ON LAND AND SEA BY A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK WITH 36 ILLUSTRATIONS LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LTD., 4 STATIONERS' HALL CT., E.C. Copyright First published, January 1916 LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LTD., 4 STATIONERS' HALL CT., E.C. Copyright First published, January 1916...

It is too soon to attempt the telling at large and in detail of all that has been done by Australia and New Zealand in the Great War. There is much that has, for military reasons, not yet been revealed; and what has been told has come to us from various sources in more or less fragmentary fashion, so that one must read several accounts of the same event in order to get anything of an adequate idea of it. All I have done here is to collate such documents as are available and gather together a con

All things considered, you cannot help sympathising a little with Germany's outcry against the deceptive character of the British Empire. When an eminent physician has carefully diagnosed a patient's complaint and pronounced, quite emphatically, that he cannot possibly survive for more than a very brief period, it is up to that patient to fade away within the time limit prescribed for him. Otherwise, he must not expect his doctor to be pleased, or to express any but uncomplimentary opinions conc

Whilst the new armies were still training, the fleet of Australia put to sea, joined the New Zealand fleet, and together they proceeded to co-operate with the British naval forces in sweeping the Pacific for German merchantmen, and hunting down the few elusive German cruisers that were prowling the seas thereabouts in search of prey. Three of these cruisers in particular, the Gneisenau , the Scharnhorst , and the Emden , were dodging all pursuit, successfully capturing and sinking British and Fr

When we are all at peace again–when the Great War is a thing of yesterday and tales of its thousand fights have passed into the history and folk-lore of the nations that took part in it–then, I think, perhaps Germany may be glad to forget about the hundreds of women and children slaughtered by her runaway warships in bombarding defenceless English coast towns without warning, by her midnight Zeppelins with bombs that were dropped on peaceful villages and unfortified towns, by the torpedoes fired

With Australasia, as with the motherland, the first honours of war fell to the fleet; and whilst the fleet was gathering them in, recruiting for the armies continued briskly through August, September, October, with intervals of suspension because the recruits kept offering themselves in such numbers and so much faster than they could possibly be equipped. By September the New Zealand Maoris refused to be left out of it any longer, and applied for permission to raise and supply a separate corps o

But there were to be another two months of waiting yet–of waiting and tireless preparation, before any fighting was to come their way. And this delay had the best of good reasons behind it. For one thing it would not have been wise to bring the fighting men of Australia and New Zealand straight out of their own summer to face the rigours of a northern winter in England, or in France; and for another, Lord Kitchener has a habit–a very disconcerting habit for his enemies and some of his self-impor

The hotels and bazaars of Cairo buzzed through the last days of December and the early half of January with portentous and growing rumours of a powerful Turkish force that was making ready for an overwhelming attack on Egypt. Men who went out on a day's leave from the camps at Maadi, at Sertun, or Menai came back from the city and spread the glad tidings that at last there was a possibility of their having something to do. It was all the flying talk of more or less irresponsible gossipers, to be

When the full story of the Great War comes, at last, to be written, no part of it will thrill our children or our children's children more, or make them prouder of their race, than the chapters which shall tell of how men of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and India fought stubbornly side by side, and side by side with our gallant French allies, on those hills and plains of Gallipoli. All the country thereabouts has been dedicated to war and romance from time immemoria

On that narrow strip of ground above Gaba Tepe, the Australians and New Zealanders have been living, at this writing, for a full six months. They have burrowed the rugged hill-sides into human warrens, and when they are not on duty in the trenches return to a manner of life that was natural to the ancient cave-dwellers before the dawn of civilisation. Here and there, between the hills, great pits that have been excavated by bursting shells are transformed into convenient bathing-places; but it h

It is so easy to be wise after the event that I don't suppose many of us are much impressed by the aggressive wisdom of those critics in our midst who are still noisily telling us of the naval and military blunders made in the inception and development of the Dardanelles campaign and with what beautiful simplicity they might all have been avoided. One has no patience with such chatter and no use for such cheap sagacity. You cannot remedy any errors by wasting time in learned talk about them; the