Baylebridge - An Anzac Muster: Prologue
The prologue to Baylebridge's 1921 book 'An Anzac Muster'
Note: Baylebridge was in England when the war broke out, and it was thus difficult to enlist in the Australian Armed Forces. Nevertheless, it is suspected that he was employed by the secret service of the British Government – he was in Egypt, its base of operations, during the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915, and he was in contact with troops there. It is possible, and even likely, that although not serving as a soldier, he was present at the Gallipoli Peninsula. An Anzac Muster was probably written about 1920, and was first printed, in England, in 1921 or 1922. It was one of the first major literary treatments, in any language, of the First World War, and quickly gained a reputation as one of the greatest works of Australian literature. Since then, however, this book, as well as his other poetic and philosophical works, have faded from public consciousness. The story’s structure is like that of The Canterbury Tales – a group of story-tellers each relate their tale, and the characters, for the most part, go unnamed. Some of the ‘avant-garde’ considered his style ‘mannered’; this was done to wed his work and its subject to the great traditions of English prose – the ‘diggers’ not as larrikins, or louts, but as great fighting men, like the many who went before them.
His work has long been out of print and is expensive or inaccessible - I have begun transcribing some of it. You can read some of his essays here: New Nationalism and Morals , and Eugenics.
The chapter following the prologue can be found here: Lone Pine: The Captain’s Tale
Prologue
OF ALL the choice regions scattered through this continent of ours, there is perhaps none more delightful, and surely there are few fairer, than the one that lies opening to the sea and looking east, at the southern extremity of Queensland. Along the north of this happy realm runs the Brisbane, having its source in the mountains to the west, and winding leisurely by margins both primeval and adorned by man, until it enters the spacious waters of Moreton Bay; on the west of it, for some seventy miles or more, towers the Great Dividing Range, lifted like a rampart between this broken area and the downs of the interior; not less inviolably, too, the Macpherson Range, linking the Great Range with the sea, and rising, above a labyrinth of spur and precipice, into a succession of tall peaks, shuts it in upon the south; and on its east (as we have already seen) lies the far-flung Pacific, now sheeted with silver and again rough and boisterous under the lash of the south-easterly gale. It is a land of far-looking hills, of fertile basins, of abundant water. Three lesser ridges, branching off from its conspicuous southern boundary, are thrown across it in broken lines running north, and parallel to each other and the coast; and through the cultivated valleys that lie between these projections, not only the southern tributaries of the Brisbane, but other streams, with the same elusiveness, bear their life-giving burdens – the Logan and the Albert traverse nearly its whole depth; and various creeks, from Pimpama to Currumbin, take their way from the foot of the outermost ridge, and, after breasting their white and wave-shivering bars, discharge themselves into the sea.
On a day in April two horsemen were riding, at a leisurely pace, along the winding and undulating roads of this happy region. As a glance at the two faces revealed, they were brothers. One, a colonel who had served in the late wars, was a moderately-proportioned but well-knit man, with the confirmed countenance of those who have been tried in many fires, and who have come through as conquerors; his eyes, small but direct in vision, were alert and searching without being aggressive; in short, his face carried that mark upon it which sealed him as being of the elect breeds. Through the skin of his clean-shaven cheeks the blood showed – he had lived generously, perhaps, in his younger ; his hair, visible beneath the broad-brimmed felt, was less reddish-brown than gray. He looked what he was – his own man. His brother, a squatter from the western plains, in many points resembled him. He was, however, of a more robust build; he discovered less, perhaps, of that confidence that seems to hold out a challenge to fate; and, though not by any means a man who would have passed unnoticed, he would, in his present company, have been noticed last. Both horsemen sat their mounts as only those can who have lived much in the saddle. Having left the rail head an hour earlier, they were now journeying to a cattle-station in a remoter part of the district, a station owned by the Colonel, to whom his brother, the man of wide spaces and many sheep, was paying a visit – for the first time after that travail that had so tried the mettle of the world, a world till that struggle came unwaking, and, in many things, unguessed.
‘So your affairs here,’ the Squatter was saying, ‘stand well with the capricious gods?’
The Colonel nodded, ‘They do,’ he replied, complacently. ‘My pastures have never looked better; and you’d be put to it to find a sick hood upon them. The twelve-months’ branding, too, was a record; and I’ve yarded more fats at Enoggera this season than for years.’
Prices were then discussed; their firmness was commented upon; and speculations were hazarded as to when slaughtering would overtake production, and make returns still higher.
‘And the Herefords – what news of them?’ the Squatter went on. For the Colonel’s stud had a reputation not only in his own State; it was known throughout the continent.
The Colonel turned an expressive eye upon his questioner; to him, a world without Herefords would have been a less interesting world.
‘I had some trouble when I returned,’ he said; ‘but that, I hope, is now done with. Those Herefords,’ he continued, after thinking awhile, ‘have made many friends for me.’
A question next followed about the horse-breeding operations, a profitable side-line; and the Squatter learnt that his companion had a serviceable lot embarked for India. In short, taking one item with another, the Colonel’s affairs did seem to stand as his words had confessed.
As the travellers pursued their journey, many a sight by the way gladdened them, many, a prospect opened bravely before them. Rich scrub-lands – bearing tall and often valuable timber, among which the smooth-fleshed gum, the ironbark in its stout sheath, and the spreading box stood conspicuous – here lay virgin awaiting the axe and plough of the settler. There a marsh would be skirted, fringed with picturesque tea-trees, and nourishing, in the adjoining thicket, a graceful sisterhood of bangalows, straight-spiring and tufted with green plumes. Or perhaps the horsemen would cross some water-way; it would wind past silently – a thread of silver inlaid upon its bed of dark loam, with a heron standing on one leg beside its shallows, and with its level margins verdant with arrowroot or young corn. Looking up these water-ways, the travellers could sometimes glimpse the outlines of the blue and distant hills that begot them. Or, ascending some rise, they would wheel their horses, and see, under the high-lifted skies, and stretched before them in a superb panorama, the splendours about them fall away into rolling, thick-wooded, and multi-coloured upland, dotted with windy habitations, and patched with banana-groves; they would mark this in turn decline into valleys brown with grass; and would catch, in the far distance, where the heavy greens of the closer forests receded into blue, the broken line of the Pacific.
The horsemen had gone some distance when their talk, having exhausted other themes, returned to one that had already engaged them.
‘How it falls with you,’ the Squatter said, in a perplexed tone, ‘I don’t know, but what badly hits me is the problem of employing labour. That, nowadays, is the sore that will not heal.’
The Colonel said nothing for some moments. Then, when his silence had prepared the way, he replied, quietly:
‘Shall I tell you how I manage? Though I nurse no loafer, I take considerable pains, as they perhaps guess, to treat my men well; and I find they are worth more to me than the Board allots them. Indeed, I go further. I have adopted a system under which, if any of them cares to exchange the freedom of the working poor’ – here the Colonel smiled modestly – ‘for the cares and embarrassments of the working rich, that plucky may make a safe beginning. Many of them,’ he added, seeing no enthusiasm in his companion, ‘or rather most of them, have a Turk or two to their credit.’
‘What a system is that?’ the Squatter questioned – in spite of some doubts, he was not uninterested; and the Colonel went on:
‘You have often told me that my run is too good for beef. Perhaps it is. However, since I feel that God made this spot for me, since I am too old now to learn a new trade, and since mutton, though more profitable, is in any case too civil a business for my fancy, I am compromising with your scruples and mine. Anticipating the Government’ – here the Colonel smiled again – ‘I am settling portions of my holding with embryonic sheep-kings – those ambitious trouble-hunters I spoke of.’
The Squatter, who hoped in due time to see what had been achieved thus, fell into thought. The Colonel saw what was troubling his companion. However, he had no great desire to make converts: the diverse opinion, he held, kept the world moving; and he believed, too, that all decent men – and his brother was certainly such a man – might well be allowed to settle these matters with the law and their own conscience. And even those who could escape one, could hardly hope to escape both, of these sticklers. Moreover, this difference of opinion about labour – could it not, without too large a stretching of conceit, be quickly explained? His brother, through no fault of his own, had missed the common experiences of a soul-shaking campaign; he himself had not.
As they read the evidence of Earth’s goodness there, the Squatter wondered little at his brother’s reluctance to leave a district that was at once so fruitful and of such delight – at his thinking this ‘the spot God had made for him’.
And there was in this broad continent, as he well knew – and not least so to those who called it home – a multitude of such Elysiums. Would not his own, too, have made glad the heart of any earth-lover? – those remote plains where the horizons lie always on the farther side of space, where the atmosphere is a rarefaction of nectar, where a kind of Providence has sown grass that the wool-raiser might reap gold. Across the eye of his mind the fairness of it flashed now. His holding there covered not hundreds, but thousands of square miles – the extent of an English county. The fences upon it would have girdled medieval towns enough! And it was good carrying country, too, country for clean flocks and high lambings. Being a true sheep man, for him the best beauty lay there. He remembered now those quiet flocks feeding across the pastures – that sea of patient heads, as their owners stood neck to rump in the mustering yards, and waited for the shears. And good was it not to look thankfully along a full board, and hear the music of the machines as a hundred blades raced across the quivering flesh, and robbed it of its riches? He pictured the amazed army just off the shears, and saw again, as the sun dropped west, how the yards had put off their earlier gray for the near-white of evening He brought to mind, too, the receding wool-waggons, those leviathans groaning under their dead-weight of bales, and lurching on after the great-footed teams – the picture, it may be, that pleased him best; for he knew then that he had mastered Fate for another season, and could prepare with confidence for the next.The two men, as they rode on, were perhaps thinking the same thought – that, whatever its other bounties might mean, the untroubled loveliness of Earth was a rich possession. The Colonel, at least, had been so thinking; for, turning to his companion, he said, feelingly:
‘After that hell called battle, this prospect, to such eyes as mine, is like Heaven itself. Looking upon all this peace, who would believe that so much chaos, that so much hate, had been busy in the world, and so recently?’
‘We have much to thank God for,’ the Squatter answered. ‘And yet,’ he continued, as the thought suggested another, ‘only those who have known that hell, I suppose, can savour this peace just in the way you must.’
As he marked the beauty of the world about him, the Colonel thought of the great company who had known that hell, and who would lie for ever now in the abyss of it. They alas, would savour nothing of this peace – this peace they had so dearly paid for – this peace that had the sun, and the beneficence of Earth, and the stout hearts of comrades in it. Peace of a kind, as many would remind him, they had come by – the peace of non-existence; but was that a peace worthy the name? This peace had warmth in it, theirs but the frigidity of death. The Colonel, in his heart, remembered these things; but there were no fit words for them, and he said nothing.
The Squatter, who had been following another line of thought, broke the silence.
‘I have one deep regret,’ he said. ‘After being so nearly employed in that business, I regret much that circumstance was against this. For it gave men, or most men, their one chance to be the thing their conscience tells them they are. If that accurst bale,’ he went on dejectedly, ‘hadn’t splintered my knee, and compelled me to accept a soft job at home, I might now have been better pleased with myself.’
‘And yet,’ the Colonel answered, reverting here to what had been his former thought on it, ‘Providence might have known best. Many a good man went and returned not. If it was good to go, you need yet tax yourself in nothing: it was not bad to remain without dishonour.’
These words of the Colonel’s, though sincere enough, did not comfort his companion much. The Squatter’s regret was a real one. He was assuredly not of those who live within their own circumscriptions, who understand nothing beyond these. But he was aware, too, that the Colonel knew this.
‘That,’ he laughed heavily, ‘is a poor plaster for such sores. However,’ he went on, making the best of it, ‘since I know nothing of your experiences at first hand, I shall hope to learn so much the more of them – mark you this – at second. I’ll promise myself to know, when you’ve done with me, at least as much about your Gallipoli as some did who got much closer though not quite to it, and who, happily, are still with us.’
The Colonel in turn smiled. Though there was much in that battle-ground past the power of words, there was much not so. And, after considering his brother’s pleasantry, it struck the Colonel that he might easily provide for him enough entertainment of that kind.
‘Indeed,’ he replied, ‘if that would please you, we’ll no doubt manage well enough. As I’ve told you, most of my men are fellows who took their rifles across; and a number of them, though their tongues are rough often, can yet twist a yarn. Some of these,’ he continued, warming to the suggestion, ‘when we’ve considered how, we’ll set wagging.’
The sun now, descending leisurely, was well down the sky. During the brief period of their journey it had furnished the travellers with many splendours. The light blue rondure of noon, flecked at intervals with handfuls of white cloud, and paling a little towards the sea, had first been filled, and in an hour, with heavy opaque masses, blown over the southern rampart, and catching their dark skits upon its taller spurs. The horsemen had watched the great shadows move across the landscape, and had more than once marked, in the nearer distance, and against the background of the middle hills, the long shafts of silver that hung there, and that told of rain travelling across the land. The sodden cloud, then, before a newly-springing north-easter, had in turn receded. The wind had hurried it to other skies, or perhaps dispersed it; and the skies above the watchers had opened in miracles of freshness, here seen immaculate, and there laid with panellings of pearl. These high spectacles, ever changing, the travellers had observed with no small delight.
But if, in those late interactions of sun, and impressionable earth, and cloud, they had seen many splendours, none surely had been more splendid than the sight that before them now slowly unfolded itself. The apex of the heavens was a glory of translucent blue, where cloud hung touched with fire; purple masses were heaped on the horizon west; and behind this oblivion the sun, shooting it through at intervals, and blurring its edges into gold, kept its obscure state. As this mass lifted it gave place to a multiplicity of greens, warmer in their descending planes, and pierced by the upthrust of the light below. The great orb now, above the purple of the far hills, sank in a sea of rose – contrasting sharply with the deep greens about the worshippers. Soon, then, in a movement imperceptible to the eye, it had dropped beneath those limits too; and at once – as if by the magnificent gesture of some deity – that portion of the heavens was blazoned with a broad half-circle of gold. Then this in turn passed, and the riot of colour seemed at an end. But, as if by an afterthought, the horizons suddenly woke again: washings of rose showed everywhere; the dead sky to seaward flushed bravely; and the ranges west were a wide sheet of living fire. Then, finally, this also faded: the life and colour died momently from the day – till its loveliness was but a memory; and the crickets, a few dilatory locusts, and a frog or two, in a medley of drowsy and intermittent notes, sang its requiem.
Having come now to a part covered by the recent rains, the horsemen were splashing through the pools gathered upon the road there. The tall stems of the gums were bright with moisture; the water-courses were musical with their heavier burdens. The Colonel, as if he expected the appearance of someone, kept a sharp eye on the track in front of them. They had already passed the entrance to the run; beyond the next rise lay the homestead.
And, indeed, as if to make good the Colonel’s expectation, a horseman, before they had gone another hundred yards, swept over the crest, cantered up to them, and wheel his horse into the cavalcade. The Colonel gripped the new-comer’s hand, and turned to his brother.
‘This,’ he said heartily, ‘is the Captain – a title more than well earned, believe me. Here sir, sits a good warden – a brave spinner too, of the yarns you have a mind for. In brief,’ he added, as a thought struck him, ‘he shall be among those requisitioned.’
The newcomer – as the Squatter observed later – a man of dark complexion, must have stood six feet or more. Everything about him, in limb, form, and feature, suggested length; and his perfectly erect carriage perhaps heightened this quaint effect of elongation. Nevertheless, one saw no hint of weakness there. His impartial glance, warmed occasionally by a sense of humour, marked him as a person to be trusted. The Colonel addressed him as a friend.
A number of dogs had employed the same speed as the Captain; and these staunch servitors too, the Colonel now called by name. As they leapt to his knee, he caught playfully at their glad muzzles, and drove them off again.
‘You shall learn,’ he said, turning to the Squatter, ‘what blood went to the making of these beauties.’ Like every stock-breeder, he could contrive an epic out of pedigrees.
Another ten minutes, passed quickly in animated speech, was sufficient to bring them to the homestead itself. Standing in the uncertain light, it could be made out as a low but solid structure of stone; its one storey, built with many gables, was spread over a great width of ground; it had spacious vine-trellised verandahs about it, and was everywhere long-eaved. Through its brightly lit windows one glimpsed the suggestion – no false one – of an unconstrained hospitality, of a luxury not refined out of homeliness. Its doors, never closed, were approached gladly and left with regret. Though it was now a bachelor’s headquarters – for the Colonel had lost his wife some years previously – everything there was well ordered. In short, it spoke throughout of those who had planned it. This friendly abode, then, the two travellers, having left their horses with the Captain, now entered. They washed and supped, exchanged the rest of their immediate news over some choice liquor and a pipe, and before twelve had struck retired.
In the course of the day that followed – which the brothers spent in looking over the stud, in discussing the Colonel’s various improvement, and in other ways as pleasant – the talk turned again to the recent war, to the experience of the men who had served in it, and, incidentally, to the tales promised by the courteous host.
‘Today,’ said the Colonel, who had now considered the matter, ‘is Friday. Tomorrow night is an off night. Shall we muster our reporting stock then, those chroniclers with the right brand upon them, and hear what they can tell of it?’
The Squatter found this suggestion a good one.
‘Do,’ he replied eagerly. ‘I am looking forward to that pleasure.’
‘If, then,’ continued the Colonel, ‘it turn out to be such, we’ll set apart that off night, for as long as you remain with us, for this business of tale-telling.’ And to this arrangement his brother gladly assented.
By the appointed time the Colonel, true to his promise, had selected the men he held sufficient for his design; and, as all who cared to hear might do so, the tellers were assured of an audience that would, in one connection at least, put them upon their mettle. The spot chosen for the entertainment was a small gully, not a great distance off. Rough with stone, and faced lightly with undergrowth, it seemed to the Colonel a fine background for the matter to be presented. Overhead extended the same sky, with many of the same stars in it, that had covered them at Anzac; the night, fresh after the recent rains, was not unlike some they had known on the peninsula in the gentler season. The surroundings generally – and not less so in the doubtful light – agreeably suggested a ravine under the buttresses of Sari. The Colonel, accompanied by his brother, from whom nothing was expected thus, viewed the preparations with interest. Large dip-lamps the willing vanguard had placed at intervals among the stones; and seats, not without comfort, they had improvised from the timber a hand. As trimmings to the chief banquet, a huge cheese, and a multitude of small loaves, baked for the occasion, were set ready upon the tables; a keg of beer, with mugs for all, the helpers had place in a convenient position; and plugs of the more favoured tobaccos were stacked within reach. In short, if the scene was to represent Anzac, it was Anzac in state.As the men mustered on this position, the Colonel, with appropriate words, pointed out a number of them to his guest; the tellers he presented with an easy formality.
‘This,’ he said, motioning the first forward, ‘is the Pilot – not the pilot of ships, mark you – the sky-pilot. Thus he started, and the name sticks. Though he has changed his coat, he has not changed his colour – as you’ll find.’
The Pilot, a man of small build, with a rough-skinned face, shaped like an inverted pear, and redeemed by its large and sincere eyes, took the Squatter’s hand.
‘Since God employs men in all coats,’ he said modestly, ‘the cut matters little. The Colonel knows it – none better.’
He stepped aside; and another came forward.‘And this,’ the host, with a smile, continued, ‘is Hoppy Joe. Joe, let me tell you, is a piece of ironbark that has learned to think.’ Then pulling his brows together sharply, the Colonel added, with a simulated frown: ‘There’s some salt in the rogue, too.’
The Squatter, as he gripped the broad and bony fist of the man who had limped up, could conceive of him easily in the parts mentioned. He was tall and big-boned; upon his long neck stood a head that looked perhaps too small for it. His face was of a square cast – for all soft flesh had left the abrupt jaws – and was shaded by the roots of a dark scrub, in its growing seasons intractable as wire. His eyes were small, but not without some suggestion of thought.
Hearing the Colonel’s words, Hoppy Joe grinned.
‘It’s a tree with half its roots gone,’ he said, ‘but, while it stands, it’s the Colonel’s’.The next to come forward was Monoculus. The Colonel, who had supplied this nickname, had a little hesitated between it and another; for, being both a giant and of one eye – the Turks had spoilt one – Monoculus was Cyclopean too. His great head was covered with a shock of sandy hair. Among the tellers, this man alone carried a beard.
‘Monoculus,’ said the Colonel, with no hint that he regretted it, ‘though he can pull with the best teams, is an unbroken colt yet.’ And about Monoculus there was, indeed, something primitive and untamed that lent colour, in part at least, to these words of the host’s.The Ram, a big-knuckled man, now followed. A fringe of reddish hair, turning to gray, and close-cropped, had receded to within an inch or so of his capacious neck; with his hat off, he recalled certain pictures of medieval monks, full-fleshed, mirthful, and with veins that had as much brine in them as blood. Plainly, he would care more for a smutty jest than a clean one.
‘In the Ram,’ the host said, with mock solemnity, ‘we have a hot favourite – alas, often too hot! The laurel here,’ he added, turning to the Squatter, ‘by a paradox beyond me, he divides with the Pilot.’‘And this,’ the Colonel went on again, as another teller stepped up, ‘is the Crow. The crow, sir, though no fastidious bird, is still and not seldom a useful one. If he does not improve the picture’ – here the Colonel lifted his brows in a gesture of resignation – ‘he will at least help, perhaps, to complete it.’
The Crow, who, like his yoke-fellow in the unsavoury, had grinned at these admissive words of the Colonel’s, was the Ram’s antithesis – in bulk, at least. There was a smoothness about him that suggested his feathered namesake. His lips, like the Ram’s, were sensual, but in a different way.‘And now,’ continued the Colonel, with a flourish, ‘come our two stars – the Sergeant, who will no doubt instruct us in much, and our intrepid Ink-Finger. Brothers in exile are these, devotees who have been admitted to the same mystery – the mystery of the quill.’
Both men came forward confidently, and in turn took the hand the guest offered them. Though both tall, there was a decided difference in their appearance. The Sergeant’s face, though full-featured, was sharpened somewhat by a projecting nose and palate, and had something of that expression found in the rodent family. He wore his tawny hair long. His frank eyes, not wanting in a suggestion of humour, spoke him a better man than at first glance he looked.
‘The Colonel,’ he said, not without a good imitation of the Colonel’s manner, ‘does us too much honour. However, since he has been kind enough to hint his approval, we’ll do our best to merit at least some portion of it.’ And to these words, Ink-Finger, though perhaps with less effect, added a few that expressed the same belief and intention.As the Squatter turned to Ink-Finger, he saw a man of another make-up. Ink-Finger, to quote the local jest, was a colt by Toothpick out of Split, the marvel being that such a scantling of flesh and bone could take man’s shape at all. From his thatch of black hair to his foot, his every part seemed to have length without breadth (he outdid the Captain thus): there seemed more lines and angles in this star, indeed, than in any advanced problem of the geometrists. His eyes, small and bright, were a little shifty.
The Colonel, having now introduced all the tellers to their guest – the Captain was already known to him – addressed them in these words.
‘You shall each,’ he said, ‘tell one tale – so that none may want time for it, and all be in turn heard – a short one. And, so that the telling may proceed smoothly and in order, from this bunch let each pull a straw.’ The bunch, here, the Colonel held up. ‘Who pulls the shortest straw,’ he continued, ‘shall tell first – who pulls longest, last. The rest shall tell early or late as they pull short straws or long.’
But this, it was soon apparent, neither the tellers nor the audience thought sufficient.
‘What!’ broke in Hoppy Joe, with a wry mouth, ‘and bury you, Colonel? Not on your life! We’ll want all our weight now.’
With this the Sergeant agreed, and with the same warmth.
‘Let the Colonel tell first,’ he said, voicing the desire, indeed, of all present. ‘Over there he led; he should lead here.’
The Colonel, however, though quite willing to enter the arena too, declined the honour of the suggested precedence. Had they not faced the foe, he reminded them, without any thought of first or last? They had. In the same way, therefore, they would face their friends. Another straw was added to the bunch; this the host held out to the tellers; and each pulled his piece. The single straw that remained – his own – was the longest.
The pulls now were compared; and the order to be observed the Colonel declared thus.
‘The Captain,’ he said, addressing the company, ‘takes the first tale, and the Ram the second; the Pilot takes the third, and Monoculus the fourth tale; the fifth tale is Hoppy Joe’s; the Sergeant takes the sixth; the Crow takes the seventh, and the eighth is Ink-Finger’s. The last,’ he added, more pleased about it than his listeners, ‘is mine.’
This result, so that none should doubt his place later, the Colonel then scratched – using his knife for it – upon a sheet of soft bark; and this board he set up where it could be read plainly by everyone.
‘We are now fairly installed,’ he concluded, in a complacent tone. ‘Since we all have our turn, let each be prepared for it. And let us not forget this – that the best matter we know at first hand, and the best words for it are the plainest.’
The following chapter can be read here: Lone Pine: The Captain’s Tale