Zweibund — the Dual Alliance — Germany and Austria-Hungary united, were the core of the Central Powers, and here join hands. The bars of Germany's flag border the top left, and those of the Habsburg Austrian Empire and ruling house the bottom right.
Schulter an SchulterUntrennbar vereintin Freud und in Leid!'Shoulder to shoulderInseparably united in joy and in sorrow!
"We had to empty the dead from our trenches and drop them into the ravines too. Their bones are still there. I was on Chunuk Bair until the ninth of August. No food, no water, and the Turks were as safe as churches until they were in yards of our bayonets. In a lull in the fighting I would go and collect water bottles from our dead. You had to keep yourself going. No one else could. British troops relieved us on the ninth and were hit by enfilade fire from their own men. Gurkhas climbing Hill Q were wiped out by shellfire from a British destroyer. I remember moving downhill in the dark. There was a bloke screaming somewhere, screaming terribly. He could have been a New Zealander. He could have been a Turk. We looked for him in the dark and never found him. He just went on screaming."
Vic Nicholson was 88 years old when Maurice Shadbolt interviewed him in New Zealand in 1983. He was 20 and in the Wellington Infantry Battalion on Gallipoli and Chunuk Bair in 1915. A fortune teller in Cairo had told him he would survive the war, and he never doubted he would.Much of the language of PJ Harvey's song 'The Colour Of the Earth' from the album 'Let England Shake' is based on this interview.
Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt, pp 94, 95, copyright © 1988 Maurice Shadbolt, publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, publication date: 1988
1915-08-09, 1915, August, Chunuk Bair, New Zealand, New Zealander, Gallipoli
