A scratch headquarters guard of 500 men shot the tank to flames and captured or killed the brave British crew under Lieutenant D. Arnold and so allowed the staffs of three German divisions to escape; and with hurried reinforcements the dugouts were stubbornly held next day when-temporarily without artillery or tank support-our 15th and, later, 2nd Brigades attacked.

WW1 Stretcher Bearers light canvas arm band with red cross.

A German account says that the British aeroplanes before the attack flew so low that the garrison thought they would touch the ground. Some pilots, it is said, shouted "Surrender" and one threw out a note but he was shot down in flames. In desperate fighting Lieutenant Vialon of the 26th (German) Reserve Infantry Regiment thought that he had held the Australian infantry in front, and, "proud and cheerful", as he himself writes, he ran to his right flank group. 

I arrive at the precise moment when the Australians with bombs and fixed bayonets force their way into the trench." They had come from the rear! He was instantly clubbed. Amid shouts of "Hands up!" he scrambled to his feet and knocked down "with a boxing punch" the two first men he met, but then felt a tremendous blow on the upper thigh. He crawled to a rifle-pit and lay there. The attack passed on.

Half an hour later another wave of Australians came through. Vialon says he was roughly handled by them until they realized that he was wounded. On recovering from the worst fright and pain he lit the stump of a cigar. He writes: "To see this, to rip the stump from my mouth and throw it away, was- for an Australian who strolled up from the rear- the work of an instant. Then he groped in his greatcoat pocket, drew from it a big tin box, and showered me about twenty cigarettes in one shot.

This same man called up a stretcher-bearer and the two with their united strength bandaged me well, so that the loss of blood stopped." These stretcher-bearers carried him to Harbonnieres village where he rejoined his captured comrades and they "took their best pains to make our position easier for us".

Another German who stressed the kindness and "sportsmanship" of Australian stretcher-bearers and others, in and on the way to hospital, was the dying airman, Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, shot down near Lagnicourt in France in March 1917. He, too, was a sport, he said.

In the A.I.F. the body of men whom these opponents appreciated had won a quite outstanding reputation. I remember clearly the days at Anzac when it was made. In the first recruiting of the A.I.F. everyone had looked on the work of stretcher-bearers as rather suitable for men who, for some reason, disliked more than most the prospect of killing others. It may seem rather an absurd assumption nowadays, but we knew little of war; and I dare say that in the long run a good many of those who did become stretcher-bearers, even regimental ones, did volunteer for it because they were that kind of man, who deep in their hearts preferred being killed to killing (though they certainly wouldn't talk of their opinion) and that it had a good deal to do with their reputation.

At all events, although a good many boys of tender upbringing and high education did enlist in the original field ambulances as stretcher-bearers, while men outwardly indistinguishable from the rest of the Australian infantry and light horse volunteered or were picked as the regimental bearers, no one in the A.I.F. could distinguish the performance of these two classes. The reason certainly was that the stretcher-bearers, ambulance and regimental, were determined that, come what might, they would show themselves as ready to stake their lives on doing their job as were any fighting men.

They showed this from the first hours of the Landing at Anzac. In the battle which that day flowed over the ridges, where the low holly-oak scrub gave cover from height only about knee high, many companies had every stretcher-bearer killed or wounded. Wherever a wounded man was seen in the scrub or a cry went up for bearers, these men made their way, whatever the danger. Corporal J. B. Malone of the 3rd Battalion's medical detachment, hopping from shelter to shelter on MacLaurin's Hill, had three bullets through his cap, one through puttee and boot, and one through his coat, and others ripped the bottom from a bucket that he carried. He survived though most who tried similar tasks never came back. 

Three years later, when some of us revisited Gallipoli and searched the ridges to which our most advanced line managed to cling for part of that day, there. on the southern shoulder of Baby 700, far beyond the line afterwards held by our troops we found the tom remains of a field medical pannier such as our medical detachments then carried. Hardly one stretcher-bearer returned from that part of the fight.

That day they built the tradition that still worked in the Second A.I.F. I remember just after the arrival of a salvo of Turkish shrapnel on an exposed crest, hearing the call "stretcher bearers" nearby, and then seeing two men stroll down, one with stretcher on shoulder and pipe in mouth, walking full height when everyone else crouched in shelter from the next salvo or dashed from cover to cover. As the two passed every man watched and respected them. Such things happened everywhere. High up on Walker's Ridge on our left flank, overlooking North Beach, Australians and New Zealanders gazed down on three or four stranded boats that had come ashore far beyond the flank and had been shot to pieces by Turks on the heights nearby. Next day it was seen that some men in the boats, previously believed to be dead, had changed their position. It seemed clear that some were still living. At intervals all that day,  men on the warships and infantry on the heights saw stretcher-bearers, principally two of the 2nd Battalion (S. F. Carpenter and E. A. Roberts) make that dangerous journey along the beach to the boats and back with bullets kicking the sand about them.

His work continued until the great Turkish attack on 19 May when Anzac was shelled with more guns and more ammunition. He usually called for breakfast at the water-guard over the well in the valley. This morning breakfast was not ready, but he said cheerily: "Never mind. Get me a good dinner when I come back." He did not come back. 

As he was returning with two patients a burst of shrapnel pierced his heart, and wounded anew each of his patients. That quiet bravery was one of the stretcher-bearer's regular attributes. 

It was perhaps never seen more clearly than in another ambulance bearer, G. T. Hill, in private life an accountant and captain of a swimming club. He and another bearer were carrying a patient round the exposed slope of Hell Spit at the southern end of the Beach when a shrapnel shell burst above them and the pellets spattered the earth around them. 

One bearer was seen by watchers on the Beach to stumble, but the two carried on and presently deposited their patient beside the others at the casualty clearing station by the shore. Hill walked to a heap of stretchers and quietly sat there. Presently he fell over. They found that a pellet had pierced his breast-bone. He died before he could be taken to the hospital ship.

The tradition of stretcher-bearers established at the Landing at Anzac was outstanding, yet, as the great historian of the Australian Medical Services, Colonel Graham Butler, says, "the moral status . . . of the regimental bearers steadily rose during the war". Until the First Battle of the Somme many battalions had used their bandsmen as stretcher-bearers. After that battle this system generally was abandoned. For one thing after such battles the band was too badly needed for cheering up the troops! A battle like Pozieres sometimes made a clean sweep of the regimental bearers. Also, on its side, the work of the bearers was too important to be left to unselected men; they were now specially selected "for their physique and guts".

They needed both to stand up to a trial like that of Pozieres and the terrible winter that followed it. On Pozières crest, a reeking desert of bombarded shell craters, the stretcher-bearers and runners were the only ones who were regularly expected to move through the barrages which, after each of twenty successive fights, cut off the front line from the rear. Most men who went through that battle will recall the little parties of four or five men with a stretcher who would come, erect, winding their way across that wilderness, amid the shell bursts, with the leader holding a stick with a white rag-the handiest substitute for a red cross flag. 

That flag would usually prevent the German snipers from shooting, but nothing could stop the barrages, even when, as often at Bullecourt, the artillery observers must plainly have seen that the traffic at the moment was that of stretcher bearers. At the Anzac Landing a big stretcher bearer, T. Blackburn, Lancashire-born, had said to his mates in a hot burst of shelling: "It's no good dropping the stretcher now-if we're going to be hit we shall be bit, walking or crouching!" So they went proudly erect at Pozieres, Passchendaele and Messines too, throughout the war.

And the Light Horse stretcher-bearers charged mounted with their regiments at Beersheba in Palestine. As Colonel Butler reminds us, the bearers had important medical functions besides the prompt carriage of the wounded for the earliest possible treatment. Theirs were the first measures to prevent or alleviate shock. It was in coolly going about his work when the charging Light Horse swept over the Turkish trenches and dismounted men were still fighting about the earthworks, that "Tlbby" Cotter, the famous fast bowler, was shot by a Turk at close range.

You won't find our stretcher-bearers of 1914-18 among the Victoria Cross winners, though there are many among the D.C.Ms (whom I, for one, hold every bit as high). After some magnificent work by A. L. Carson, J. Paul and others at Bullecourt, the reason why no Victoria Crosses were given for medical service became clear-some high authority had misunderstood a ruling in the matter. The mistake continued through the war. But I think that, on the whole, the stretcher-bearers won the award they would most have coveted -the highest place in the estimate of all their comrades.