Free The Gallipoli Letter by Keith Murdoch Page B

Aragon on to the brows of our unfortunate men. But no ice appeared next day. The navy is very good, and sent some comforts and ice across, but for the three days before my visit this ice had gone astray before it reached the hospital.
    I told you in my last letter of the necessity for canteen ships, and need not go into that now, but on the point of the general staff I must say that the work at the bases in Egypt struck me as on a par with that of the Aragon. Some day you will have to take up the case of Sir John Maxwell. He has a poor brain for his big position, and I assure you that our officers at Anzac have a poor opinion of the work of his lieutenant, General Spens [—a man broken on the continent, and therefore thought good enough to supervise the training of Australians—] [ omitted ] who is controlling our bases. The question you will have to fight out about Maxwell is this. After the last disturbance in the Whasa, when a very few of our men burnt some houses in which they had been drugged and diseased, he issued one of his famous lecturing orders, in which he referred to his regret that “even wilful murder” had been mentioned as one of the Australian crimes in Cairo. In this casual way did he blast the good name of our clean and vigorous army. I inquired as far as was possible, and could hear nothing of even a charge of wilful murder mentioned against any Australian. This order roused intense anger amongst our men. Perhaps we are too sensitive—. Our men were certainly too sensitive in their anger in the trenches when a notice was posted, I think in orders, describing how an unfortunate British Tommy had been shot at Helles at dawn for cowardice. It was almost amusing to hear our men resent this even remote connection with the Australian forces and a veiled threat of such shooting. “Such things have nothing to do with us,” they said.
    Our men feel that their reputation is too sacred to leave in the hands of Maxwell, and they much resent the sudden change in the attitude of the general staff, which regarded them as criminals in Cairo, and now lavishly calls them heroes in Gallipoli.
    You will think that all this is a sorry picture, but do not forget that the enemy has his troubles, and that we have certain signs that his morale is deteriorating. From what I saw of the Turk I am convinced that he is a brave and generous foe, and he is fighting now for dear home, with a feeling that he is winning, and that he is a better man than those opposed to him. The Turks by the way are as generous in their praise of our men as the British and French are. Certainly the Turks are positively afraid of our men, and one of their trenches—that opposite Quinn’s Post—is such a place of fear, owing to the indomitable way in which our snipers and bomb-throwers have got their men down, that Turks will not go into it unless they are made corporals. So say our Intelligence Officers. I saw many strange and remarkable instances of the humanity and courage of the Turks. Certainly his trenches are better than anything we can do, and he makes them remarkably quickly.
    One word more to-day. Do for Heaven’s sake make every effort to secure the recall of Sir James Porter, the Englishman in charge of the medical services. Our doctors are without exception furious with him. He made a shocking muddle of the first arrangements for transport of wounded, as I wrote you. The case against him there was unanswerable. But he has been left in charge, and his muddling continues. He lives on a luxurious yacht in Mudros. Oh, no Australian has the heart to tell of the fearful wreckage of life due to this man’s incompetency. That is not a wild statement. It is truth. Even now, the great bulk of the wounded are sent to Imbros before being passed on to hospitals elsewhere. This handling aggravates sickness and wounds, yet the Generals wonder why men are sent away from the peninsula with slight sickness become