"The fog of war descended quickly and from the moment they set foot on land they were up against it."
IN THE early 1900s Australia was a fledgling nation with no real sense of identity. She won her place on the international stage by sending troops to fight and die in the First World War.
The first action they saw was on the morning of 25 April 1915, still honoured as the day Australias troops came of age. Some 16,000 men were sent into battle against the Turks at Gallipoli. On that first, decisive day the lives of these soldiers were saved by the actions of Maj-Gen Ewen Sinclair MacLagan, division commander and a Scot.
Sinclair MacLagan was born in 1868 in Edinburgh, the son of a banker. When his father died, his mother remarried an army officer - and from then on he was brought up to be a soldier.
As a British military man, he served in India and then during the Boer War, for which he received a Distinguished Service Order. After he was seriously wounded, Sinclair MacLagan was posted to Australia to help reorganise that country's military.
He was there when the Great War broke out, and joined the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) as the commander of the tough Third Brigade. They travelled first to Egypt for desert training and then on to the shores of Turkey, in the Dardanelles at Gallipoli.
Sinclair MacLagan in Gallipoli Picture: Copyright: National Museums of Scotland
The mission was to relieve the pressure on the allied Russian forces fighting in the area and to open up a supply route through the Black Sea. The British military command was very much against it, seeing the battle as a distracting sideshow. Only one of its division was sent, with the rest of the force comprised of untested Anzac troops.
As the most experienced officer it was obvious that Sinclair MacLagan and his Third would lead the assault. He regarded the campaign with little optimism.
"Sinclair MacLagan had a reputation for being pessimistic, which in war is a virtue," says Peter Burness, senior curator at the Canberra-based Australian War Museum, "and he was very pessimistic about Gallipoli. His Brigade Commander spoke to him in terms of it being an honour, whilst Sinclair MacLagan merely wondered if theyd ever meet again."
Sinclair MacLagan's address to his men before the invasion could not hide his disquiet but was unequivocal in his expectation of his men.
"You may get orders to do something which appears in your positions to be the wrong thing to do, and perhaps a mad enterprise," he said. "Do not cavil at it, but carry it out with absolute faith in your leaders, because after all we are a very small piece on the board. Some pieces have often to be sacrificed to win the game, and after all it is to win the game that we are here."
The assault began at dawn. They landed in the wrong place and had underestimated Turkish resistance. Allied boats approached in different positions from the plan, so the men could not recognise their own troops. They were wet, exhausted and faced steep, uncharted hills - not to mention Turkish guns.
In the midst of this upheaval, Sinclair MacLagan took the crucial decision to abandon the objective of taking the third hill, believing that the Turks could push them back into the sea. He re-grouped his men at the second hill, saving the lives of thousands of men.
Burness considers that Sinclair MacLagan "made the most critical decision on that first day of Gallipoli, and in the process became a central figure in establishing the whole legend of the Anzac forces."
Sinclair MacLagan and his men continued to fight with honour, as described by a soldier who wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in June of that year: "There is no doubt that the sturdy Third under Col MacLagan fought like Trojans on the Gallipoli peninsula, and covered themselves with glory."
Despite their best efforts, the Anzac forces never stood a chance. Conditions on the Gallipoli beach were atrocious. It was the middle of summer, troops had inadequate water, hygiene was bad and the men were shelled continually. After six months, during which time they had barely moved beyond their initial positions, nearly 9,000 Australians had been killed and a further 17,000 injured. The army high command decided to cut their losses and leave.
The Anzac forces were moved to France where the Australian high command began to release their British officers. Sinclair MacLagan was among the only exceptions; he was the only British officer to remain with them for the whole of the war.
"Other British generals wanted to mould them, but he didnt," says Burness, of the Australian Military Museum. "He was highly competent and the men trusted him. So the High Command were prepared to ignore the fact that he wasnt Australian and keep him."
Sinclair MacLagan, newly appointed Major General of the Fourth Division, was once again thrown into a difficult situation. Through the battles for Pozieres and Passchendaele, the Anzac forces saw horrific action. Then the Fourth was sent in to the conclusive battle against the Germans at Beaumont-Hamel. This time they were to triumph.
In March 1918, the Germans broke through the British front and the allies were in retreat. The Australians were poured in to secure the breach. Sinclair MacLagan led what is considered to be a textbook assault on the Germans, repelling their offensive.
"It was the turning point of the war," notes Alan Carswell, senior curator at the Scottish National War Museum, Edinburgh. "It is the point where the German offensive of 1918 stalls and it was the Australians and Sinclair MacLagan who turned the tide."
A decorated Sinclair MacLagan Picture: courtesy Kay Anderson
Sinclair MacLagan was highly decorated by the British, French and Americans, but it is in Australia that he was held in highest regard. Sir John Monash, Australias most senior commander, noted in an interview after the war that, "He (Sinclair MacLagan) never failed in performance and invariably contrived to do what he had urged could not be done. One could not afford to take him at his own modest estimate of himself."
He continued: "Although not Australian born, he was wholeheartedly Australian."
Kay Anderson, Sinclair MacLagan's granddaughter, thinks she knows why he was taken to the hearts of his Australian soldiers.
"He was not a man to sit behind the lines," she says. "He spent a lot of time talking to the front-line soldiers and finding out how they were. He cared deeply about his troops."
After the war Sinclair MacLagan ended his military career with the Black Watch in Scotland. Although he came out of the war alive, he did not return home unscathed. Anderson remembers a man who tried to block out the horror of what he had seen, but could not stop remembering.
"He never talked about Gallipoli and France," she says of her grandfather, who died in 1948, "but he used to shout in his sleep. I think he was dreaming about the war."
