William McKenzie conducts a funeral in Gallipoli, 1915

Fighting Mac at Gallipoli

Thursday, April 21, 2016
Excerpt from associate professor Daniel Reynaud’s book on the Anzac legend

William McKenzie joined the World War I effort as a Salvation Army chaplain, but by the end of the war he had become one of the most famous Anzac heroes, affectionately nicknamed “Fighting Mac”. This is an excerpt of his story—from The Man the Anzacs Revered by Daniel Reynaud. 

Gallipoli, April 25, 1915

William McKenzie was part of the first battalion to arrive at the Gallipoli Peninsula. A fearsome but misguided attack was launched on the Turkish troops. 

Witnessing for the first time the terrible injuries inflicted by shrapnel came as a shock to many, especially those like the chaplains who spent a disproportionate amount of their time with those horribly mangled bodies. After initially being ordered to remain on board the Lake Michigan, McKenzie joined the troops ashore on May 10, 1915. He was soon engaged in burial services as ‘the bullets whistle round us by tens of thousands while the field guns drop shells each day by the thousand’.

In just 10 days, McKenzie buried about 170 men. These acts of burial were of great importance to almost all soldiers. No matter how irreligious the Anzacs might have been, “there was never indifference to the burial of the dead” and the funeral services conducted by chaplains were often as well attended as battlefield conditions permitted. Through these services, the chaplains won the deep and enduring respect of soldiers and families at home.

McKenzie had a number of narrow escapes during this early period. A bullet grazed his scalp, leaving a permanent scar—remarkably, it was to remain his only war wound. Another buzzed past his right ear and he was showered with earth by a near miss from an artillery shell. So busy was he that he didn’t have time to change his clothes for the first two weeks.

On May 19, the Turks launched a massive assault to drive the invaders back into the sea. At Lone Pine, where the 4th Battalion was, the attack began at 10.30 pm the previous evening, then resumed at 3 am. Wave after wave of Turks came from Wire Gully and moved across the Australian front line, presenting easy targets.

One 4th Battalion soldier, Corporal Alfred Mower, reported firing his rifle as fast as he could. Each time the magazine was empty he was handed another loaded one—by McKenzie, who was offering as much practical support as he could in keeping with his status as a chaplain. As usual, he was irresistibly drawn to where the action was the hottest. The Turks were mown down, leaving thousands dead and dying in No-Man’s-Land as the shattered survivors retreated to their trenches at about 5 am.

McKenzie wrote a detailed account of the battle, noting the Turks’ heavy losses and those among his own men. About 185 men in the 1st Brigade were killed, with more than 400 wounded. The 4th Battalion lost 16. With a striking combination of elation and grief, he recorded, “Our boys were in great heart, they climbed up on the trench parapets and fired with accurate and determined aim. . . . The noise and racket of the firing of big guns and rifles was terrific, and no sleep was possible. I had a very trying duty the next day, burying our own dead. I thought so much of the many sad hearts in Australia, when they know of their losses. We laid 28 in one grave all in a row.”

War is indeed hell

Over the following days, the hot sun caused the Turkish corpses to swell and burst, adding to the already sickening smell. The work was indescribably horrifying and the stench made him sick. McKenzie wrote, “I had a trying time gathering the discs off and other identification marks off them. I never had such a task and hope never shall again. War is indeed ‘Hell’ and no adequate description can picture it.”

McKenzie made his name by his sacrificial work on behalf of the soldiers on Gallipoli. At one point, his dugout “adjoined the biggest wire entanglement system opposite the enemy; it could not be farther advanced in the front line.” Putting himself at the forefront impressed the soldiers with his courage. A soldier reported, “He spares no labour or weariness of body, mind or spirit to make the dear fellows happy and comfortable as circumstances will permit.” Decades later, others recalled, “Your endurance was simply astounding, and your courage and consecrated audacity amazed the bravest of the boys.”

Servant of all

His normal routine was arduous enough, given that he worked all day, then often conducted burials for several hours at night. A typical day’s work was usually around 18 hours. Sometimes, he got no sleep because the funerals lasted till dawn. For a man of 45—even for one as robust as McKenzie—it was taxing physical work. Yet he extended himself over and over again. Wherever he could, he lent a helping hand, carrying one end of a stretcher, lugging the awkward but precious water tins tainted with the taste of their former contents of kerosene or petrol up to the trenches, or bringing other supplies on his way to the front.

Noticing that a “treacherous” section of steep hillside was problematic for the men carrying the huge tins of water or wounded men on stretchers, McKenzie spent one free night cutting steps into the track. “Wasn’t that just like him,” wrote a fellow Salvation Army chaplain, “but they could never get him to say who did the work. No wonder they all love him! He is undoubtedly a servant of all.”

From June onwards, the chaplains were able to run more frequent services. Brigadier General John Forsyth of the 2nd Brigade recalled being drawn from his dugout: “[Amid] the fierce crackle of musketry and roar of guns—along the distant trenches a battle was in progress—he heard the sound of singing. It was one of the Church’s grand old hymns. At last he left his dug-out to see where the singing was, and he beheld some thousands of men grouped along the hillside in front of Chaplain ‘Mac’, who stood below them, and under his direction the grand old hymn swelled above the roar of battle. It seemed to him that the roar of the guns went in majestic but terrible harmony with the sound of that grand old hymn.”

McKenzie wrote of several services where the atmosphere—despite the battle setting or sometimes partly because of it—was particularly moving. “[As] we sang the familiar Hymn ‘Jesus, Lover of my soul, let me to Thy bosom fly’ the strains of the grand helpful prayer wafted down and around the valley and was taken up by men on all sides, who were engaged on duty. The sentries standing on guard at the mouths of the trenches nearby with bayonets fixed likewise joined in the refrain and while we were singing ‘Plenteous grace with Thee is found’ a platoon of armed warriors marched right past us to take up their position in the support trenches and they too marched on singing “let the healing stream abound, make and keep me pure within”. Men realise as never before that the most manly thing to do is to worship and glorify God.”

His admiration and love for the men shone in all his correspondence. Their bravery and daring, fortitude under great suffering and calmness evoked his praise. He considered it an honour to be there, describing himself to [his wife] Annie as “delighted to share the discomfort including dirt, lice, sore bones, damp ground and cold nights, loss of sleep, lack of water and the rifle and shell fire with its dangers of instant and lingering death for the privileges of their association and telling them of Jesus the mighty to save.”

One 1st Battalion soldier recorded seeing him: “My first introduction to Padre McKenzie (Fighting Mac) was behind the cookhouse, where he was stripped to his pants, chatting [delousing] his shirt and he called out his score at 47 lice for the morning’s catch.”

But, by late June, McKenzie was suffering from dysentery, an affliction that decimated the Allied forces on the peninsula, brought about by hot weather, the plague of huge and aggressive flies that bred in unburied corpses, poor sanitation, little water, and a diet low in fresh vegetables and fruit.

The making of a legend

Fighting Mac began to gain a reputation among the troops as a man with a “spade in one hand and a Bible in the other.” Such was his fame that the legends surrounding him took on mythic qualities.

F A McKenzie records, “I first heard of William McKenzie in the days when the Australian troops returned to London from Gallipoli. ‘We had a Salvation Army Chaplain with us,’ one hard-bitten Australian trooper told me. ‘My! He was a big, burly fellow, and without a bit of nonsense in him! Some of the stunts he did would make your hair stand on your head. One day at Gallipoli we had to storm the stiffest part of the Turkish trenches; it was the worst bit of the whole show, and “Mac” declared he was going with us. “Boys,” he said, “I’ve preached to you and I’ve prayed with you, and do you think I’m afraid to die with you?” And he came along with us right in the front line. He had nothing but a little stick with him, and he came out of the fight without a scratch.’”

Macnaghten remembered McKenzie as being fully determined to accompany the men, duty or no duty at an Aid Post. He wrote to McKenzie in 1916, “I will never forget you when we were waiting to go over at Lone Pine—when I found you up with us, and you stated quite simply you were coming over with the boys, and I refused to allow you to come without a rifle and bayonet.” This is no rebuke, for the lead-up to this statement congratulates him on winning the Military Cross.

Behind the myth

McKenzie recounted his own experiences in letters to Annie, revealing the real man behind the legend: “I was there in it all, the trenches were the most awful sight I have ever witnessed. Hundreds of dead Turks and these intermingled with Australia’s sons lay in tiers deep in some trenches. The dead on top of the wounded and what a terrible struggle to get the wounded out.”

His diary recorded, “My experiences of getting the wounded out of the trenches over the dead and wounded underneath the dead was sickening. The burials in the tunnels within the trenches too was nerve wracking, as also was the recovery of the dead in the open as the Turkish guns were very busy by day and sometimes by night.”

McKenzie’s work during and immediately after the battle was of a draining intensity. He wrote: “When this work was done, I buried in all something like 450 men killed. . . . These burials cover a period of three weeks, when the smell of the bodies after the first four days was overpowering, and frequently I had to leave the graves to retch from the effects of the smell. The burials in Brown’s Dip by day were frequently performed under shell fire. Several occasions men were hit and some killed.”

McKenzie said he found four dead Australians on their knees. They had been gravely wounded and knelt to pray as they died.

One example of his tragic work was the story of burying Private James McGregor, a 3rd Battalion soldier who had sought him out before the battle through his mother’s urging. McGregor was “labouring under great emotion and possessing all the religious reticence of the typical Scot, he was reluctant to reveal his true religious feelings.” With tears in his eyes, he eventually asked McKenzie, “I want to be on the side of Jesus but I don’t know how to get there.” McKenzie prayed with him and he accepted Christ, telling McKenzie how happy he was and how happy his mother would be about the news. McKenzie found his body at Lone Pine and buried him. A letter in his pocket to his mother told of his conversion, which McKenzie forwarded to her as a partial consolation in her grief. McKenzie also made the effort to meet her on a later visit to Scotland.

Humour in the trenches

McKenzie’s energy, charisma and care for moral welfare had first brought him widespread attention in Egypt in the months before the Gallipoli landings, but it was on the peninsula that his reputation was secured and that legends accrued around his name. He had several qualities that won the undying love of the soldiers. His physical capacity for punishingly hard work on their behalf was a foundation stone, embodying the key mythic elements of physical prowess as the marker of manliness of pre-war Australian society. His unrelenting cheerfulness was also important. A study of British Anglican Great War chaplains observed that “What the army really appears to have valued was a chaplain who was infectiously cheerful and optimistic and who made the morale of the men his primary concern.”

The testimony of Archie Barwick of the 1st Battalion, among many, shows how true this was of McKenzie: “No matter how hot the day was you would see Mac among the boys cheering and cracking jokes with them, and he would go down to the beach and help the boys carry up the rations, hard work it was too, he rarely had his coat on. That man was almost worshipped by the boys. He was attached to the 4th Battalion, and many and many a time he buried our chaps under fire. He was always merry and bright and never downhearted and I don’t think he was off the peninsula the whole time; he’s a man I would take off my hat to and there’s not many I would do that to.”

Adapted with permission by War Cry (New Zealand), published by the Salvation Army in New Zealand. Excerpt from The Man the Anzacs Revered, published by Signs Publishing in 2015.

The Man the Anzacs Revered

Associate Professor Daniel Reynaud’s The Man the Anzacs Revered is the most comprehensive and accurate biography of William “Fighting Mac” McKenzie. Purchase the book at Adventist Book Centres, Koorong or hopeshop.com.

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An Avondale academic’s biography of an Anzac chaplain worshipped by soldiers despite being a wowser is now in its second printing.

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Daniel Reynaud
Author

Daniel Reynaud

Professor Daniel Reynaud is Assistant Dean (Learning and Teaching) in the Faculty of Arts, Nursing and Theology at Avondale University College. His main research interests lie in the challenging aspects of Anzac mythology, especially in cinema and on religion, where the notion of the secularity of the Anzacs has reached dogmatic proportions. Previous publications include Celluloid Anzacs (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007), The Man the Anzacs Revered: William “Fighting Mac” McKenzie (Signs Publishing, 2015), Anzac Spirituality (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018) and The Anzacs, Religion and God (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019). Reynaud has written, and appeared in, seven documentaries about the Anzacs and religion. He has also worked with the National Film and Sound Archive in the recovery and partial reconstruction of several silent films, including The Hero of the Dardanelles (1915), Australia’s first Gallipoli movie.