SHRAPNEL & SEMAPHORE: A Signaller's Diary from Gallipoli
Compiled by Jan Chamberlin
New Holland, hbk, $40
Review by Ron Tyrell
Similar in format and design to Soldier Boy, an earlier New Holland publication, this volume consists mainly of a diary kept on Gallipoli by Sgt Maj Walter Leadley, who was a signaller with the Canterbury Regiment.
He landed on the morning of the first Anzac Day, surviving because of his short stature and the fact that he stepped into a concealed hole and sank beneath the surface.
His record emphasises the arduous nature of his time on the peninsula - the lack of cover, screaming shells and tearing shrapnel, snipers, enemy fire from the heights and friendly fire from artillery and naval vessels, horrendous casualties with dead unburied and wounded untended,
and for he and his fellow signallers, the difficulties of maintaining communications under intense fire.
This quote sums up the situation: "Base headquarters was severely shelled by Turkish heavy batteries, and we had forty horses killed by a couple of shells. Today ten men were killed outright by the bombardments, and eighty have been wounded. One man I saw was cut clean in two by a shell, and several shells have dropped in the vicinity of the hospital.''
Leadley ailed, for he lost his false teeth and was unable to eat solid food until they were replaced, whereupon he contracted dysentery, probably from the millions of flies, and he was evacuated by hospital ship to Malta and eventually England.
In September 1916, he was drafted to the front in France where he was badly wounded, evacuated to England and repatriated to New Zealand. Two X-ray photographs show shrapnel lodged close to his brain, which had to remain there, giving him trouble for the rest of
his life.
From 1938 he was national secretary for the Disabled Servicemen's Civil Re-establishment League and several photographs show him with distinguished visitors.
Unfortunately, the compiler is in error on pages 120-121 - those in that photograph include Governor General Viscount Galway and his wife, not the Duke of Gloucester, who visited New
Zealand in 1934-35 and did not return in 1940.
The many photographs are reproduced very successfully to convey a sense of their historic nature.
- Ron Tyrrell is a Dunedin historian.
