THE NATURE OF MAN.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPEOTATOR.1 SIR,—My soldier son at Anzac writes the enclosed to my sailor son in the North Fleet. It is so delightful as to the nature of the Australian man that I incline to think you may count it worthy of a place in the Spectator. It is just because no German would have thought of what the noble Australians at once thought of that God Almighty will strafe them.—I am, Sir, &c.,
yesterday
y at Anzac. You may remember that in my last letter 1 mentionod a point on our left front whore I said the Turks and Australians had a friendly pow-wow on the parapet of a Turkish trench at one of our sapheads. There mutual invitations had been exchanged to ' come in' and kind treatment promised. The incident bore fruit. One of the Turks has oome in and surrendered, while of a second this is the tale.
Late one afternoon on our extreme right a man was seen coming from the Turkish lines and moving furtively through the scrub behind the beach half a mile ahead of us. He was making for the hundred. yard gap which separates the extreme right-hand end of our firing lino from the sea. The Turks had once tried to rush this point at night, but they never tried it after, for the machine guns trained on this open space loft little living. There is nothing to prevent one or two men making their way through this gap on a dark night, or even swimming round it ; hut this particular Turk was certainly not as wily as his race usually prove themselves, seeing he attempted the passage before night had sot in. The Australian watchers on the plateau of Lonesome Pine looked on with interest, wondering what his purpose might be. Suddenly a shot rang out—a Turkish rifle shot--and the man fell wounded. There ho lay in the open beside the sea beach and bound up his wound and nursed his pains—a pathetic figure ; a piece of human wreckage east up by the storm and wrath, not of God, but Man. On one side lay the Army of his friends from which he was an outcast; on another a chivalrous and not implacable foe ; beside him the Army of Allah, the loud- sounding sea.' To which of the three should he turn in his extreme trouble ? Surely to the neutral force of Nature. Only in the deeps of the Aegean his pangs would find their release and his mind eternal peace. Slowly he dragged himself, one leg quite shattered, toward the water-side, while the red sun drooped m the sky and the shadows of Imbros in the west came longer across the waters. So night fell on their hapless enemy and on the watchers on Lonesome Pine. Little was said, but the same• thought was in the mind of each. After a few brief moments a party of gallant Australians from the back-blocks,' set out on a most dangerous exploit—to rescue this unknown foe I Making their way along the shore through the darkness and silence, they came upon their quest actually at the very margin of the sand and sea, while at the same moment that they wore raising him up a second party of men from the Turkish lines loomed through the darkness. Shots were exchanged and the foe driven off, and in a few minutes the little party and the rescued man had returned to safety.
Why did these Australians do this ? I think it was the old p]iilo. sopher Epictetus who all the centuries ago supplied the answer. 'They did it,' he said after an experience rather similar, 'not for the Man, but for the Nature of Man.'
Anzac, October 16th."
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