The Specialist; Patriotic Gesture; Ross Smith - A Tribute; Retreat thru Greece

Native Head by Ralph T Walker

THE SPECIALIST

"He says he has just tested his spare battery and found it unserviceable. The one he is using is almost flat. He wants to know shall he stay where he is and wait for us?"

The C.O. said something ruddy something then added, "No. Tell him I'll send up a new spare. I want him to keep ahead of us for another thirty-six hours. We won't be staying longer than it takes to get a water-test up where he is."

The corporal returned to his tent. It was then that Tregonning spoke.

"You'll need all the men here for packing up, sir. I'll get the battery to Berrigan."

"You'll . . . you? "

"Why not? I can use a compass."

"But you've only been with us five days, Tregonning. It's no picnic, the jungle I mean. You . . ."

"I can leave in ten minutes."

That was at eleven in the morning. At one in the afternoon Tregonning guessed he was pretty close to the clearing where Lieutenant Berrigan would be.

The brass-hard sun that he could see now through the thinning foliage was sweating it out and everything on the earth seemed to be sweating with it. Around him the steam rising from the mud under his feet was hot and wet and there were glistening beads all over the creepers like the sweat beads on his own burning face.

Although he was new to the outfit and new to the jungle, Tregonning had been taught enough about the fighting to keep down low as he moved in on the clearing.

He hunched himself closer to the mud and the dead stink of decayed roots was very real in his nostrils. He pushed a thin, fine hand across his forehead and thumbed back his tin hat a little. It occurred to him that, in the war's crazy picture, men who had lived in the sun and clean air had died in remote, stinking places like this. So far Tregonning knew little of death . . . of the sight of death. He had never fired a shot to kill another man. Nor had he been shot at. Yet.

Young enough to be on the right side of thirty, with lips loosely-slung and teeth white and hard where they showed between his lips, he was not gaunt but lean enough to use another stone in weight. It was easy to see the shape of his body through the khaki that stuck to him damply. In his eyes there was a deep, clean, sure honesty, or faith, perhaps. Tregonning had seen little of the war and what he had seen had been not enough to change him.

During the hellish two hours behind he had found himself thinking very deeply. He had thought of the war . . . of what makes wars . . . of man, so minute and unimportant, destroying himself. There were many questions in his head and, although he had read a lot, some of the questions he could not answer. He had wondered of God . . . of God and man . . . of God who had made man and of man who had made the frontiers that were not marked on the earth but only on the maps of man; the frontiers for which man killed man.

But now his thoughts were of more earthly and personal things. He stopped and gave all his attention to the fringe of the clearing. The lieutenant would be somewhere around here. From his shoulders he lifted the sling which carried the battery and stood up behind a tree.

"Tony," he called, "Tony Berrigan!"

There was no answer.

He called again. Nothing happened. Nothing moved, anywhere. He edged forward around the tree trunk. Then he stopped quickly.

Lieutenant Berrigan was very still and not perspiring. He was thrown flat across the mud with his legs falling in a small hollow in the mud. A bullet had split his throat apart and the blood from his throat had soaked his shirt and spilled into the red and grey mud around him. The lifeless body was the colour of cream; bloodless.

Tregonning felt something spin in his stomach. The suddenness of his discovery made him close his eyes. Behind them he caught a fleeting picture of the last time he had seen Tony Berrigan. A careless, big, talkative youngster with a tough, go-to-hell chin and the brand of smile you couldn't look away from. A kid, no more, from the fruit country along the Murray where the earth was rich and the air had a smell to it. . . . Berrigan, now . . . this tight, fixed face as dead as, nothing, in this sick, forgotten place.

Tregonning opened his eyes. He looked again at the lieutenant. His lips moved and he said something with his lips. Then, without thinking, he raised his eyes to the bald sun in that tropic sky. Was God looking? Had God seen this kid die?

His eyes shifted down the sky and came to the line of high trees along the clearing. There was one tree higher than the rest and his eyes rested on its branches. It was then he saw the sniper. He saw nothing else. He had no time. He had no time to see or think or hear. All he knew was the feeling of a bullet smashing his shoulder and hurling him from his feet backwards over the stiff legs of Lieutenant Berrigan into the mud hollow.

It was a long time then, and the pain. The pain was a Catherine wheel that began in his shoulder and spun right through him, white hot. He tried to move his shoulder, but could not. He was conscious of his teeth rubbing together and the fingernails of his right hand biting into the flesh of his palm. He could not feel his left hand at all. He lowered his half open eyes, slowly. His left shoulder was smashed and bleeding and he could see the bone. He wondered if Berrigan had been able to watch the blood going from his body, watch himself dying.

Slowly, through the pain, remembrance slugged into his mind. He remembered the high tree and he knew the Jap was up there. He guessed that the Jap had sniped Tony Berrigan after the lieutenant had sent his message through to the outfit. He supposed the Jap must think him dead because apparently he had not fired again. Then he realized that the Jap might not be able to see him behind Tony's body.

He wondered how long he had been lying there. He began to think half-clearly and slid his right arm across his belly to look at his watch. It was twelve minutes after two. That meant the outfit was only about fifty minutes

away. He realized they'd walk straight in on the clearing and the first few of them would be sitting shots for the sniper.

The outfit could not afford to lose a bacteriologist or a scientist or a doctor; too much depended on their work, too many others depended on the work of these few. Tregonning was a specialist too, but he had never fired a gun to kill a man. Guns were not his business.

His face was close to Berrigan's knee where it lay on the rim of the hollow and it occurred to him that just over the rim would be Berrigan's Smith and Wesson in the holster at his hip.

If he could get his hand along Berrigan's thigh to the revolver it might be hidden from the sniper's view. He turned his body slightly in the hollow and fought the blackness that swept behind his eyes. He worked his arm to the rim of the hollow and he did not know he was sobbing through his teeth until the sound conveyed itself to his ears. These were not the sobs of a frightened man but more an outlet for the pain. As he pushed his hand along the khaki of Berrigan's pants, he waited for the report of a rifle but when his hand touched the revolver butt nothing happened-no shot, nothing; only, in the distance, a sound of men coming through the jungle.

Very slowly he turned his body until his broken shoulder was in the mud. His tin hat had fallen a yard away. That was good. If he kept his head beneath the level of Berrigan's body he'd stand a better chance. He knew that he had lost a lot of blood for, as he pressed his boots into mud behind him, it was like dragging ingots of lead through treacle. He knew there was not much time left. Before he pushed up from his feet, he looked past

Berrigan's body to the sun and, as he looked, some words passed over his lips-only a mutter, a mutter that he would not remember. Then lie was ready.

He breathed deep and held his breath as he pushed. His cheek went along the mud until it was level with Berrigan's thighs. He looked at the revolver. It was loaded. He lowered it to the mud and pressed the safety catch back. Then he lifted the thing and laid the barrel across Berrigan's groin. Then he lifted his head a little. Then he looked along the barrel until, through the salty beads on his close together lids, he found the highest tree. 

Then, when he saw the small monkey-like character tied between two -branches with a sort of basket beside him, he turned the barrel upwards. The revolver was very still as he took a slow, determined bead on the widest part of the sniper and fired. The bullet tore through the leaves and ripped into the Jap. The Jap threw back his head and yelled. He fired twice more and he knew that he had killed a man. He knew nothing else until he looked up into the atebrin-yellow face of an orderly who was pressing something against his mouth.  The C.O. was kneeling beside the orderly. Berrigan's body was still there.

"Tregonning," the C.O.'s voice was brittle. "What happened?"

He tried to speak. He could not. He looked towards the tree. The gawky, small figure was hanging between the ropes. He muttered with his lips. A quiet, low sound that might have been a delirium but was not.

The orderly spoke to him, and he heard the words dimly.

"Don't try and talk yet. Just relax, Padre."

Then he fainted.

DICK WORDLEY, R.A.A.F.

A PATRIOTIC GESTURE

LAWSON GLASSOP, SECOND A.I.F.

ROSS SMITH - A TRIBUTE

He was one of ourselves who had fought, together with the rest of his regiment, on the Peninsula and, upon return to Egypt, had successfully survived the test of fitness to transfer to the first squadron of the Australian Flying Corps, later to be known as No. 1. 

The most ominous words to us were the piquet's cry of "Taube over! ", confronting each man with a choice of crouching in his bivvy listening to the hateful whine of the bombs and trying to calculate as they came down the distance away of the burst, or of rolling into a funk hole which might or might not be occupied already by a few scorpions or in odd instances, an adder. It wasn't funny, although sometimes we laughed when all a bomb hit was a mule or the cookhouse. Too many graves with rough wooden crosses counted up the score which Ross Smith and his companions of No. 1 Squadron were later to repay a thousand fold. 

As the advance went on, Romani, El Arish, Rafa, Belah, Beersheba, the Plain of the Philistines, the Judean Hills, Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley, the cry went up more often, "Rings is right!" as we ungrammatically identified Ross Smith or one of his mates appearing overhead in those Palestinian skies of matchless blue. They never refused a fight, no matter what the odds. Sometimes it would be, "Four crosses, the bastards!" identifying an enemy flight by their markings, the Iron Cross, which long pre-dated Hitler's swastika. Then, "One with rings. He's hopping into the lot of 'em." We developed stiff necks craning to watch those dog-fights of almost hand-to-hand combat in the air in aircraft which today would be regarded as preposterously dangerous to fly.

The impartial history of No. 1 Squadron records the honours slightly in favour of our boys, though not without cost. Once, over Ramleh it was if memory serves correctly, we saw one of ours hop into three of theirs, shooting one down, sending another off in flames, and then jumping out as his own machine caught fire. The Flying Corps did not supply parachutes then; machines were scarcer than men, and a man did not bale out if there were a chance to salvage the crate. Three miles away from the burnt wreckage we found that boy's body. 

There were many -all too many- like him who paid the price. It was not only luck that Ross Smith was not one of them; among superb pilots this former Lighthorseman, who had been a warehouseman before the war, was exceptional. In that distinguished company he had what must have been some extra quality of coolness, audacity, and fractional-second thinking which won him as observer-gunner and pilot an M.C. and bar, a D.F.C. and two bars, and the A.F.C. We will not see his like again; the primitive conditions of pioneering in air combat will not be repeated.

• To illustrate this claim let us quote from the Official History of the Flying Corps: 
  • "The best raw material for the making of an air pilot was the accomplished horseman. The demand for good heart, good hands, and a quick eye is the same in each case. On the other hand, a safe pilot was not necessarily a good fighting airman. Besides the pilot's ordinary qualifications there was required for the fighting airman just that little more which may best be described as 'devil'. It means not so much recklessness as a nice judgment of the moment's risks while simultaneously flying and fighting; sustained courage and determination, without hot-headedness; unruffled confidence founded in perfect knowledge of his machine's capacity, estimation of the enemy's ability and assurance of his own. There was probably no better example of what a fighting pilot should be than the Australian, Ross Smith. Like many of the successful airmen of the Australian Flying Corps, Ross Smith came from the Australian Light Horse."

Even that was not all. The record shows much more. The hair's breadth of chance was often with him, as the photographic records of his machine returning drilled with bullets, and himself covered with blood and bandages, testify. Twice during 1917 he was wounded in combat, wounded in several places. A margin either way and any one of these machine-gun bullets could have been fatal. His amazing vitality and recuperative power took him back to the fight sooner than the medical officers thought possible. 

He had qualities above those even of a great fighter pilot, a sense of 'terrain, a faculty of leadership, an unaffected and sunny personality, a gift of humour, which led him and others into many off-duty pranks on occasions. These, combined with his tact, probably led Major "Dicky" Williams, C.O. of the squadron as he then was, to select Ross Smith for seconding to assist Lawrence of Arabia with air support for the Arab mercenaries-"the Sheriff's men" we called them-over on the other side of the Dead Sea. On several occasions he carried Lawrence as passenger over the enemy lines for a look-see.

In the early and crucial stages of Allenby's big final attack in 1918 intelligence reports indicated that a force of eleven German aircraft were constantly harassing the never reliable Arab tribesmen. Two machines from No. 1 Squadron, one piloted by Ross Smith, located the drome from which they were operating, and with a combination of bombing attack on those lined on the field, and air combat against those which took off, destroyed or disabled them all. "Thus", comments the squadron history, "within three days two of our machines had succeeded in completely exterminating this detachment o the German Flying Corps. 

From this onwards, the Sheriffian forces were able to carry out their plans without molestation from the air." (If inadequate credit is herein paid to Smith's companion, it is unintentional and merely because this is our tribute to "Hadji", by which nickname Ross Smith was known in the squadron - why, nobody seems to know.) Lawrence admitted in his later writings that before the arrival of the Australian machines the Arabs were on the point of deserting because of the frequent air attacks made on them by the Germans.

Ross Smith thereafter was made pilot of the big Handley-Page, the only "big" aircraft on that front, although of course a midget by comparison with the Flying Fortresses with which the R.A.A.F. boys later became familiar. Yet its record was unique. At first IV used to freight aviation spirit and spares forward, then on the morning of the big advance it landed a bomb which destroyed in one hit Liman von Sanders's main telephone exchange, so that from then on, in the critical days, his armies on the Dead Sea end of the front did not know the debacle that was being enacted on the Plains of Sharon, Esdraelon, Megiddo, and the Valley of Jezreel. Ross Smith wrought havoc on the enemy in those days. The lines of bomb craters in Jenin and elsewhere indicated that he had been on the targets ahead as the Light Horse rode in to round up the Turks, who surrendered by thousands. The sight of the Handley-Page overhead was a talisman of final victory to the mounted divisions under Chauvel. Much later we learned who the pilot was.

Its grimmest assignment followed after it had bombed and scaled the northern end of the long pass through the mountains on the Balata-Ferweh road, the only way of escape for the retreating Turkish army. By this time the Royal Flying Corps had gained undisputed mastery of the air over Palestine and Syria. The chivalry was gone from the war. The horrible job of destroying an army which could not fight back and would not surrender had still to be performed. After No. 1 Squadron had finished with five thousand Turks in that pass from which there was no escape for them, all that remained was the "nine miles of dead", as the headlines of history called it. It was a sickening sight as we cleared the way and rode through to round up the enemy reserves. To Ross Smith and his companions, whose sworn duty it was to destroy the enemy, it was a most hateful job.

Perhaps that was why, after the Armistice, these airmen, seeking escape from something they wished to efface from their minds, became remarkable for their frivolity and temperamental pranks. Among them was "Hadji". No. 1 Squadron had returned to its base at Haifa. The main German Flying Corps base had been at Jenin. A souvenir-hunting Australian pilot, landing there one day, found hidden in caves two dumps which the Light Horse, passing through, had missed - although they had found considerable supplies. 

One was a dump of aviation spirit, the other a very large quantity of Weinberg 1904 champagne; the Hun never stinted himself in the way of comforts. For a few days the pilots of No. 1 Squadron were busy on "official" flights to Jenin, returning with cockpits loaded with bubbly. Then Ross Smith sought to improve on the service. With two companions he conspired to requisition a captured railway truck, fitting it with a X60 h.p. Beardmore aero engine, propeller and all. At a top speed of 40 m.p.h. he adapted aviation to rail transport, driving that crazy vehicle along the light railway line to Jenin, bamboozling a Bengal Lancer who was patrolling the line, bluffing a railway transport officer, and bribing a Lighthorseman who was guarding the dump. 

Gyppo labourers were conscripted to load thirty four cases of wine for the squadron and a 44-gallon drum of petrol on the truck. Then Ross Smith opened the throttle for home. But the vehicle would go only one way; it could not be reversed. So he set blithely off in the wrong direction until he could bail up a Tommy transport waggon, ply him with talk, "tonic" and Turkish paper money, until he agreed to transfer the loot to the truck. They were late home for tea, but who cared? The air-propelled truck was left on the line. The rest of the biography is well known. 

A pioneering flight in the Handley-Page from Cairo to Delhi gave Ross Smith the idea of a flight to Melbourne "to see the Cup run", an idea from which developed the historic London-Melbourne flight, which won Ross, his brother Keith, and Sergeants J. M. Bennett and W. H. Shiers world fame and a reward of £10,000 from the Commonwealth Government. From that success he became an entrepreneur in civil aviation, but could not be tied to a managerial desk. Accompanied by Bennett, while testing a newly-designed aircraft in England, he crashed to an airman's death. In his twenty-nine years he had lived many lives. Nothing now can add to or detract from the lustre of his record.

CRAYTON BURNS, FIRST A.I.F.

RETREAT THROUGH GREECE

The main road to Athens winds over the foothills, rising, up and down, twisting right and left, passing under precipice and above cliff, through magnificent forest land. Within my own memory the last two professional brigands were shot there. One of them, Yangoulas, reigned like a king and bought his popularity in the mountain villages by using part of his ransoms to buy dowries for the village girls. Then for twenty years, until the German invasion of 1941, only the monks of St Luke's monastery, shepherds and goatherds, or climbers on their way to the top, were to be found on the slopes.

With the mountain behind them, the retreating Australians would have fallen back on Elasson, with little enough memorable except its five-thousand-foot elevation. Yet it too had beginnings so far back in history as to be mentioned by Homer, and there was a Bronze Age city there once, which seems to have lasted on to the end of the fifth century B.C.

At the end of Olympus, and before the famous Mt Ossa rises up (the Pelion piled on Ossa of the classics), cutting between the two mountains is the lovely six-mile Vale of Tempe, that fertile gap between the rocks which the ancients believed the sea-god Poseidon had dug, and associated with prehistoric earthquakes and inundations; and on which they built their legends of Otus and Ephialtes attacking the home of the gods, heaving rocks on rocks, and finally piling Ossa on Olympus and Pelion on Ossa in an attempt to conquer. A truly lovely vale, carrying the eye continually up to the gorges and cliffs, then down to the level where the traveller himself is wandering, and along the banks of a stream rippling from end to end of the valley, under the leafy fountains of ancient plane-trees. The early cult of Apollo developed in this vale, and in one of the valleys off it is to be found the god's sanctuary where he was purified after the murder of Python.

The continuing retreat passed across the wide plains embracing the big town of Larissa, and on through the richest provinces of Greece. Crumbling remains of old Turkish battlements are still to be examined in Larissa; but otherwise it is much like an ordinary Greek town, though old enough in foundation, for Hippocrates spent years of his life there, dying there eventually in 370 B.C., about ninety years old. Nor is his the only connection with antiquity - what of the ruins of that temple on the ancient citadel? Many tired Australian troops of 1941 passed through the neighbouring Wood of the Nymphs, and turned their wet foreheads to breezes blowing off Olympus and Ossa.

Farther south, near Lamia, the country grows richer. The two large freshwater lakes are said to be the only remains of an inland sea, and who today knows if the local legend of the deluge of Deucalion is a folk memory of some great upheaval which brought about a vast local movement of waters? Mountains rise, plains spread, forests wave and corn-lands bow in the breeze. Tobacco is raised and dried, and in the autumn the olives ripen on the trees. Herds of black buffalo and other cattle pasture with flocks of sheep and goats through this ample land, which can be as attractive to the sportsman as to the farmer, for partridges and hares abound, and wolves and boars roam the forests. Wildfowl rise in clouds in the winter, and British soldiers stationed there since the war have had bags

that they were still talking about the following season. There seems to have been a civilization here in Neolithic times, and why not in so fair a land which, ever since, has continued attracting invaders who may have given birth to so many of the classic legends round Lamia?

In this abundance, as already in scarcer places, the moving Australians experienced Greek hospitality; ate the white cheese and good black bread, tasted the thyme honey, began with the white raki and ended with the red wine. Many of those villagers who assembled from nowhere to put a table before a tired soldier had relatives in Sydney or Melbourne doing fabulously well in the caf6 business, and were immeasurably surprised to hear that you, an Australian, did not know them. The poorest Greek cottager has something for the stranger-a thimbleful of raki, a spoonful of roseleaf jam, a marble-sized cup of black coffee, and a glass of cold water to wash it all down. And when there is time, a tomato or cucumber salad from the garden. For a lively interest in and sympathy towards strangers is a national characteristic that the Greeks of old have handed down to the Greeks of today.

And again south, to that four miles of undying fame, the Pass of Thermopylae, where in 48o B.C., according to old historians, the Spartan king Leonidas and his handful of soldiers turned at bay in a final delaying action against the Persians, who greatly outnumbered them. When the action was over he had delayed that host, and had been overcome only by a turning movement. In addition he won for himself and his bodyguard of three hundred the everlasting lines:

• "Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passest by, 
  • That here obedient to their laws we lie."

For he had delayed the Persians at the cost of his own life, and the lives of every one of his three hundred Lacedaemonians. And some two thousand and four hundred years later, New Zealand troops, falling back beside the Australians in 1941 and coming to that pass, fought a similar type of action, delaying the advancing Germans for three days. But by then the features of the place had greatly changed: the sea had receded from the foot of the mountains and there is a wide level space instead of the ancient "pass".

Finally, down through the Peloponnese to the embarkation beaches of Argos and Nauplion, two more towns weary with history. Argos goes back to the Bronze Age, and still shows traces of that period. Homer, perhaps a thousand years before Christ, spoke of Argos as the kingdom of Diomede, one of Agamemnon's vassals in the Trojan War: the war against the now-buried city of Troy which lies across the straits from Gallipoli, only a short distance from the beaches of Anzac. After the passing of the Bronze Age, Argos continued a city of importance in ancient Greece, as the centre of the worship of the goddess Hera and the birthplace of sculptors, the greatest of whom was Polyclitus. 

There are remains still to uncover and puzzle out, for a man with the time to give, but he is not likely to be an Australian soldier in retreat from a German army, looking for a British cruiser to carry him away. An ancient theatre is there, classical fortifications with sixth century B.C. masonry, a couple of ancient temples, the remains of an early Byzantine church, and a fine castle built by Greeks.

And Nauplion, glowing with the colours of medieval history created by Franks, Venetians and Turks in their struggles to be on top. A cathedral, a mosque, a fortress, a twelfth century monastery, and so much else to be examined; but not by footsore men looking out to sea for rescuing warships.

Some day a few of those Australian troops must return to Greece with a suitcase instead of a pack, and a camera instead of a rifle. Those country towns and villages will still be there and the cafe' on the public square with tables and chairs set outside under the plane-trees. They will hardly have time to call for bread and sheep cheese and to try the wine before one or two of the local inhabitants will stroll up, and in ten minutes a group will be exchanging yams of the long 1941 retreat, and the visitors will promise to look up, immediately they get back to Australia, some uncle or cousin with a surname ending in "ides" or "opolous", who is doing so well in a Sydney oyster bar or a flounder business in Melbourne.

SYDNEY LOCH, FIRST A.I.F.

"Listen, will you stop coasting on these flamin' hills!"

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