St John's Cathedral, Brisbane and the Anzac Legend

Accordingly, the troopers continued to stage routine activities on the beach, including intermittent firing of rifles and artillery, to offset any impression by Turkish observers that a full-scale evacuation was under way. Others were digging up the hardened floors of their trenches so when they slipped away that night to the evacuation barges the noise of their boots would be muffled by the soft earth. Empty sandbags and scraps of blanket with which to wrap the men’s boots were being collected, again with the intention of muffling their sound on departure. Still other soldiers were setting up rifles with delayed timing devices that would make them fire shortly after the Anzacs had departed the beaches, further reinforcing the impression that the Australians and New Zealanders were still in the fight rather than withdrawing completely. Maxwell had taken to the war a flag which he had used in 1903 to commemorate the centenary of European settlement in Victoria, at a spot where now stands the town of Sorrento near Port Phillip.

Maxwell packed his flag in his kit bag for the Front and then used it in the course of his chaplaincy duties throughout the Gallipoli campaign. There is a tradition that, among other purposes, he used it as an altar cloth for Holy Communion (Eucharist) services (although no actual record of this exists). On 19 December, Maxwell had the flag with him at Anzac Cove while he was helping to evacuate the sick and wounded and record the names of Anzacs buried at Hell Spit Cemetery, one of 20 gravesites established by the Anzacs on the peninsula. At about 1.30 that afternoon he was returning from the cemetery and was carrying the flag with him when he and the flag were fired on three times by Beachy Bill. ‘Beachy Bill’ was the nickname given by the Anzacs to a battery of Turkish guns located at a position just a few kilometres inland south of Anzac Cove. Fromthere the enemyhada clear vantage point of sections of the beach. Throughout the campaign Beachy Bill’s gunners fired at will onto the beach, inflicting more than 1000 casualties.

Transport mules lie dead in a trench at Anzac Cove, killed by shrapnel from Beachy Bill, a Turkish gun battery on the heights at the southern end of the Cove.

State Library of Queensland

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