Crooked Mick goes to war

This marks a turn-around, because Stewart the Sandgroper nudged me at just the right time, so I pulled this (and the other 85,000 words that go with it) off the back burner, and I am now pitching it to publishers. Remember, this is part of something far bigger.

My mate, Baron Munchausen, asked me why there were no women in the story, and I assured him that there were women on the Speeewah. He says I have to prove it, so I told him about Smiling Annie's Snake Circus.

This tale, apparently written by a thumbnail dipped in tar, was in among Cruciform’s papers, stuck to the bottom of one of the tin boxes. It is in plain English, but clearly escaped the eyes of the security people who vetted the papers. This single plain English account confirms what Cruciform’s coded notebooks tell us, that Mick and Cruciform were working together during the war.

Crooked Mick was quite old when World War I broke out, so he had to dye his hair in order to join up. He joined the Light Horse, but kept on breaking the horses he was given, and the army wouldn’t let him bring in his own horse. He even broke a few heavy horses they let him try, but he was so strong, they asked him to be their farrier, and he agreed, knowing that once he got to the front he could do some good.

When the Brass decided to send the Light Horse to invade Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, the lads had to leave their horses behind, so Mick should have stayed in Egypt with the horses, but he hid in the hold until it was too late to send him back. Then when two of the motorboats that were supposed to tow the troops to shore broke down, Mick jumped into the water and swam to the beach, towing five longboats.

That was how he came to be one of the first ashore when the ANZAC troops landed. Once across the beach, Mick set to work digging trenches and tunnelling under the enemy’s trenches, but unfortunately, he was soon being given orders by an English officer who wasn’t very bright.

“Dig there”, the Pommy would say, pointing at the ground, and Mick would take off in a tunnel going north, never stopping to question the order he was given. You can still see some of these tunnels: they went under the enemy lines and mostly came out on the opposite shore of the peninsula. If the Poms had paid attention, they could’ve gone through those tunnels and attacked the enemy from the rear.

After a while, Mick realised that this digging wasn’t achieving anything, so he started doing things his mates thought might be useful for the war effort. One of his best tricks was throwing dead donkeys with devastating accuracy at the Turkish officers, in their bunkers, half a mile behind the lines.

The result was that their high command promptly told the Turkish soldiers to stop shooting at Simpson and his donkeys, because every dead donkey was being used to wipe out some of the Top Brass. After that time, it was only those Turks who hated officers who fired at Simpson’s donkeys.

Mick dug most of the trenches for our blokes, and chucked all his spoil into the Turks’ trenches for good measure, which got the Turks really cranky, and then he found out about jam tin bombs. That got the Turks seriously upset, because Mick could throw further than they could, and he used all his cricketing skills to drop them into a trench every time. These jam tins had a fuse, the explosive out of twenty bullets, and any old scrap iron or rocks that came to hand. Somebody told me he also used nitrogum, and that we’re not supposed to mention that, but I will.

Mick might have won the war for us, if he’d been allowed, but the Poms kept being stupid. The Turks brought in this big field piece, just to try and get him, and Mick and his mates had no ammo left, as they’d used it all to make jam tin bombs. All they had was a pile of lead bullets from the cartridges. So Mick opens fire with those, against the field gun.

I know, of course, you can’t shoot bits of lead. You need the stuff that goes bang, and that was all used up, but Mick wasn’t shooting the bullets, he was throwing them.

Now you might say that still wouldn’t do much against a field gun, but that’s if you fight fair, as the Poms call it. Mick was belting the bullets down the barrel of that field gun so hard that they wedged at the far end. That made a sort of blockage so the next time the Turks fired the gun, it jammed the round in the barrel and the gun blew up. Our blokes thought it was a great joke, and started collecting more ammo so Mick could spike the other guns. That was when the Poms bought into it.

Some Pommy brass hat said Mick’s activities were unsporting, because the guns were sitting targets. Anyhow, one of our blokes decked him, and Mick said he’d better stop then and there, or some of the diggers’d get into trouble. So Mick dug through quietly into the Turks’ trenches and dumped the unconscious officer there, then backfilled the tunnel, but the Turks were fussy.

A discerning Turkish soldier called Mehmet thought this was no better than littering, and he brought the officer back across No Man’s Land and dropped him on our side. The Turks thought this was so funny, they erected a statue to commemorate it, but in the 1950s, there was nearly a diplomatic incident, and with the help of Lord Casey, they made up a cover story. Don’t believe it.

The Respect to Mehmetçik Memorial (Turkish: Mehmetçiğe Saygı Anıtı).

The officer was never the same again, but Mick’s company named him Puddles, and kept him as a pet. Some people reckon he later became Jacko the Hatter, on the Speewah, but Jacko seems to be a bit brighter than that officer.

One of Mick’s tunnels was later filled with explosives. There was this Australian scientist bloke called Henry Cruciform, who had made this top-secret explosive out of eucalyptus oil, called nitrogum, and they put barrels and barrels of the stuff into Mick’s tunnel, then backfilled the hole with rocks and stuff.

Once it was ready, they lit a long fuse, and went a long way back. The idea was that the explosion would cave in the Turkish trenches, but the tunnel had gone too deep into solid rock. Instead, all of the rocks that were packed into the hole got blasted out of the tunnel, and went heading off through the stratosphere in the direction of France.

Now there are lots of people who claim they shot down the Red Baron, but if you check the official histories, you will see that Manfred von Richthofen was shot down just an hour after they set off the charge in Mick’s tunnel. What’s more, if you look at the available pictures of the Red Baron’s plane, and examine the wreckage carefully, you can see jagged tears going down through the plane from above: it was Mick’s tunnel, powered by nitrogum and working like a giant gun, that really shot the Red Baron down.

Mick’s time there ended when he drove another tunnel back to the landing beach, so the Anzacs could carry food and ammunition up in safety. Just as he was about to break through the rock at the beach end, he tapped into a spring, and got soaking wet, which washed the dye out of his hair, and he stepped out into the sun with all the dye running out of his rapidly whitening hair.

The brass hats were embarrassed, and they had him sent back home so they could avoid admitting that an old man had been winning the war for them. They used the feeble excuse that he had been eating the rations for five companies — which shows how bad their accounting was, as Mick used to eat that much before he sat down to breakfast.

So in the end, Crooked Mick spent the rest of the war helping this Henry Cruciform bloke, the man who had invented the nitrogum, who was working on forms of psychological warfare. But that was after he got back to Australia: on the way home, Crooked Mick refused to give up fighting.

First there was the German torpedo that was heading for the hospital ship he was travelling on, as they were sailing across the Indian Ocean. Mick saw this torpedo coming and dived into the water, trying to stop it. He was feeling a bit weakened as he was only getting rations for five men, and he was pushed backwards by the torpedo, towards the ship.

I forgot to mention that Mick’s dog had been with him, right through the Gallipoli campaign, and had personally captured twenty Turks before the Poms interfered. They reckoned it was unsporting to point your dog at the enemy trenches and say “Fetch!”. Anyhow, Mick’s dog was there, and he jumps in to help, and between them, they flipped the torpedo over, just as it was about to hit the ship, and it went back to the German submarine, sinking it.

Well Mick was hauled back on deck, and his dog too, and the officers said they’d pretend they hadn’t seen the dog, and that Mick might even get a medal for his brave deed, but that he shouldn’t go diving in the water any more. The next day, though, there was another torpedo, and this time, Mick picked up a lifeboat, and threw it at the torpedo, destroying it. He was about to wipe out the submarine with a second smaller life boat, but he was told to stop, and the submarine got away.

The day after that, it was back again, following the ship with just its periscope showing, so Mick went down to the engine room and borrowed a few spare bits of ironmongery and chucked them at the periscope. He missed the first two throws, but the third shot was with a fly wheel that had a crack in it, and he threw it like a discus.

The fly wheel skipped over the surface and ripped off the periscope, which left a big hole that flooded the submarine and forcing it to the surface, where it was captured by the frigate that was convoying them. Mick was treated like a hero, and given a free run of the galley, which is what they call a kitchen on a ship.

They were close to Fremantle in Western Australia when a third submarine tried to have a go at sinking them, and strictly against orders, Mick dived in once more, pulled faces down the periscope, which made them surface to see what was wrong, and then he threw all of the crew overboard, ripped four plates off the hull to sink the submarine, and swam back to the ship, leaving his dog to round up the prisoners and bring them in.

He might have got away with disobeying orders, but the ship was still going full ahead when he caught up with her, and as he approached the stern, his head came in contact with the ship’s screw, which shattered, leaving the ship stranded off the coast with no form of propulsion. “There’ll be no more going into the galley for you, you one-man galley plunderer!” bristled the captain, who had just realised that not only were they stranded, but that Mick had eaten just about all the food. Anyhow, Mick just grinned, and said that was the answer.

He went down to the engine room, kicked one of the riveted steel plates off each of the ship’s sides, and used two oars, made from the lengths of steel rail the ship was carrying as deck cargo, lashed on the steel plates to make oars and rowed the ship in against the tide.

So in the end, the captain agreed to let bygones be bygones, and they hushed the whole matter up, so Mick wouldn’t get into trouble for disobeying orders. Mind you, they say that scientist bloke Cruciform was on board, and he used his influence to make sure Mick’s name was kept out of the papers by telling Billy Hughes to send out a D notice.

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This story and the related ones all have the tag Crooked Mick on them. Use that to find the rest.