Read Online Gallipoli by Peter Fitzsimons - Free Book Online

for Kapitän Kuhiken, it means Volle Fahrt voraus! Full speed ahead!
    Briefly, the two men struggle for control of the engine-room telegraph, as they shout at each other. Finally, though, it is Robinson – and, more importantly, the thought of what the next shell amidships might do to them – that wins over Kapitän Kuhiken, and he ceases the struggle.
    It is with great satisfaction to those in Fort Nepean that Pfalz now turns and moves towards Queenscliff before returning to the examination anchorage, where a naval boarding party arrive. The vessel returns to Williamstown under guard and it remains under watch for the night before the ship is officially interned. Meanwhile, its crew are placed under arrest … essentially for being German.
    Of course, not all foreigners in Melbourne town are treated so grimly on this auspicious day. For, see there! There is that well-known operatic singer M. Eugene Ossipoff. Laughing, joking, two men lift his – heaaave! – hefty form onto their shoulders and march down the street with him as a crowd of a thousand swells around. Compliments to La France ! We’re all in this together and must stick together!
    There are cheers for the King and for the government, and then everyone sings the national anthem.
    When they get to Flinders Street, however, M. Ossipoff begs off, shouting, ‘I think you are mistaken. You are calling me a Frenchman; I am a Russian.’ 33
    Close enough!
    Early in the afternoon of this same day, 5 August 1914, Lieutenant-Commander Dacre Stoker is just settling down to lunch in the Garden Island Officers’ Mess when a high-ranking fellow officer walks in and announces, ‘Gentlemen, war was declared on Germany at midnight, English time.’ 34
    In the stunned silence that follows, the officer rises to the occasion and fills the void with a very suave, ‘Waiter, a gin and bitters, please.’ 35
    Stoker is gutted, completely gutted. A war. A war ? Great Britain is at war, and here he is, stuck on the other side of the world, in Australia? Why, oh why, has he, as a polo-playing Irishman, been so bone-headed as to accept a commission in Australia to command one of their two new, state-of-the art submarines manufactured at the Vickers Armstrong works in Lancashire – AE1 and AE2 – when something like this could happen? It is so unfair!
    When he had arrived here in Sydney ten weeks earlier, there had been no clue that a war could break out, and in the company of the Commander of the AE1 , Lieutenant Thomas Besant – a softly spoken and highly educated man, beloved by his men – he had had fun.
    Back in England, there had been a view abroad, at least in certain sections, that submarines are ‘underhanded, underwater and damned un-English’, 36 but no such view is apparent in Australia, where they and their 35-man crews, about half of whom are Australian, had been loved from the first.
    But now, his comeuppance – they are stuck in Australia, while the war has broken out in Europe. ‘The prospect of our ever getting a chance at the enemy seemed utterly remote,’ Stoker would record, ‘whilst our brethren in the North Sea would, in our imagination, be banging their torpedoes into Dreadnoughts and things every odd hour of the day. We cursed the moment in which we had been lent to the Australian navy. Our self-pity was extreme.’ 37
    In fact, however, Stoker appears to be one of the few people in Australia not absolutely delighted with the news. From that very morning, even before war had been declared, so many men had been laying siege to military establishments such as Victoria Barracks in Sydney and Victoria Barracks in Melbourne – seeking to join up, so as not to miss out – that special staff had had to be put on to take down their names.
    Many of the volunteers are members of the South African Soldiers’ Association – veterans of the Boer War – eager to give it