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S00682 Title: Warrant Officer 2 Nicholas L ORAL HISTORY RECORDING ACCESSION NUMBER: S00682 TITLE: WARRANT OFFICER 2 NICHOLAS L CURTAIN, 3RD LIGHT HORSE REGIMENT INTERVIEWEE: WARRANT OFFICER 2 NICHOLAS L CURTAIN INTERVIEWER: DOUGLAS WYATT SUMMARY: Nicholas L Curtain as a sergeant, 3rd Light Horse Regiment, Middle East, 1914-1918 and later a Warrant Officer 2 of the Volunteer Defence Corps, Tasmania, 1939-1945. DATE RECORDED: JUNE 1989 RECORDING LOCATION: BRIDGEWATER, TASMANIA TRANSCRIBER: SUSAN SOAMES TRANSCRIPTION DATE: FEBRUARY 1990 START OF TAPE ONE - SIDE A That's me up there in the middle. Right. They'd never heard of the 3rd Light Horse then. And they're my two sisters. They went on the ship before me, and two more - I had four sisters then. Right. And they were in the nursing corps were they? Yes. The Australian Nursing Service. When we crossed the canal - pretty bad photos - this was a tremendous mistake by the leaders. Now I don't know which one was leading, but that's the way he laid out the 3rd Light Horse, close together like that, see, in troops. Is that when you got bombed? Ah. Here's what it looked like about two hours after it was over. Some of those horses was found 40 miles over at Port Said. Were they? Yes. Broken legs; some were gathered up; some wasn't hurt. They were never caught like that again. No. I found a photo in the War Memorial showing the first bomb. There. Yeah. What do think of that. Well, they had different names, of course, then. We called the aeroplanes in those days [talls]. Ah, is that right? Yes. I've got a poem here which I'll give you. This was written by a trooper of the 3rd Light Horse and it was published in Kiora Cooee which was a magazine put out in 1918. Yes. And there's also a toast here to the 3rd Light Horse Regiment. Can you read that all right? Yes, oh yes, with me glasses on. This bottom one. 1 Yes, yes, I can see it. There's the good old regiment, 'To comrades it contains. Their loyalty and chivalry each troop of tossing manes. The squadrons surging through the night and rout the Turks xxx. Through Egypt desert, silenced for when the raiders were along. Here's to the brave old regiment whose colour is black and white'. We used to say, 'red and white looked a sight' - that was one of the other regiments. Something else looked a sight, but 'black and white's the colour'. 'Would rally round the motherhood to suckle her in need ... Here's the grand old regiment - ah! - to the whole brigade. From Anzac to Australia may your glory never fade. The boys were proud tonight beside a gallant first and second. To comrades now beyond control; brave hearts whose death has beckoned.' Yes, very nice. You can keep that. Good. Thank you very much. And that's the one about the Taubes, you were saying - that other one. Oh, yes, the Taubes. Now they were called Taubes and my word, through being too inquisitive the Taubes nearly got me. I was with a chap named [Allwright] on an outpost and I said, 'Hello, Taubes over there - look there's one'. And he said, 'They're fighting one of ours'. Ours had a big circle you know, the English ones, we had none at the time. And we thought our fellow was on top. They were going round in a circle and we could hear the different kinds of bullets, you know, t-t-t, d-d-d - different rifles - different guns they had in their planes. Presently one pulled out smoke and he was coming down and we thought it was the German. So we said we would be first there to see if there was any souvenirs. And we got right down and all of a sudden - he was on the ground - all the sand chopped up among us. It was our bloke that was downed and poor old Bob [Allwright] who has gone now, he was shot through the hand - crippled his hand. That's why we sent him down and he got a job towards the end of the war helping the great Australian lady that ran a canteen at, er ... on the canal - I forget the name - where we used to cross - because he had a crippled hand. That was sticking your beak in where you shouldn't. Yes, Taubes, the old Taubes. I found some photos while I was at Canberra. You might be interested in these. They're all 3rd Light Horse. They're only photocopies - they're not very clear. Yeah, 3rd Light Horse. (Interjections) You see, early every morning, or before it was just daylight, we had signallers and he was sent to well out on top of a hill to communicate back to brigade if they could hear the Taubes 2 coming and the command was, 'Stand to your horses', in our regiment. Well, then we divided like that, one troop went up there, and one troop went over there, and one troop went there with a gap of about 20 feet between us, so as if a bomb fell on us the damage would be slight. So that's where they get their, 'Stand to your horses'. Boiling the billy on the desert near [Nesbit] in Palestine after a hard day's ride xxx. That bloke there might be Sergeant Cook. Yes, maybe. It looks a bit like him. Yes. That's the old hat we ... That band he's got on is really a militia band but a lot of them were dug up and some of them wore them. They didn't wear any plumes in their hats there I noticed. No. The only people that wore plumes were the Queenslanders - they were the only ones. Oh, were they. They were the only ones, except the commander-in-chief. Old Major General Chauvel - he had great big plumes. Some of them had some other little thing. But they were plumes. Yes, there's the old black and white. Now that big man there, he looks like a man from round St Marys way named French. I don't know if he was or not. That bloke there was Arthur Herbert Davies. Oh yes. That's the same photo actually. I just wrote it on there. He could have been a South Australian. Yes, the billy was a jam tin as a rule. Yes. Yes, there's the old packs. Now, you know, it was estimated that when we packed the horse up - we had to move in the night to say 30 miles to be at a certain point the next day for some certain action - that he had 25 stone on him, because these men would all weight about 12 stone - I weighed about 11 stone myself I think then - and then that great big hard military saddle and a blanket and a ground sheet that they were always allowed to take, and a bandolier full of ammunition around the horses' neck and two round ours, like that. Get your cuppa. Yes, it's marvellous how they can, but mind you, we were never allowed to do any more than walk unless we was in action and then get out, because the horses were taken, after they'd delivered us to where we had to go to security, and No. 3 in every section of four stopped with them as horse holders. If we had to move again we had to all return as quick as we could and they called up the horse holders and away we went again. These are all of Tasmanians or South Australians. That's 3 a machine gunner. Yeah. I saw that at the War Memorial as a black and white movie film. Yeah, that's a machine gun. It says here, 'The 3rd Light Horse Regiment'. Yes. 'The Australian 3rd Light Horse. New men in action at somewhere in Palestine, December 31st.' That's the same thing. Oh yes, I can still remember all those little towns. Of course, there's hundreds of them that you couldn't remember. Yes. That's a sniper. On our maps - those of us that had possession of a map - at places like [Gretina] - that was a place - there was only a bunch of wild date trees. There was no house; there was a well; but it was known as [Argetina] on the map. They were called a hod weren't they? Yes. It would be in a place where the natives drew water and one thing and another - Old [Gretina]. [Buralab] was another place. The first place we come that had a population at all was [Elarish] - that's about the boundary between Egypt and Palestine. And then, of course, as we went on we come to the Palestinian towns. Richon was a beautiful, pretty little town where they grew all these oranges and things. Then, of course, we eventually ... Jerusalem, [Gerger]. No, [Gerger] was out on the other front, I'm on the wrong name there. And then the Turks didn't defend Jerusalem or Bethlehem. They fell back, did they? Yeah, they evacuated, they left it. Was that because it was a holy city? Well, they say the Kaiser - the German Kaiser - built a lot of what we call old Jerusalem, and then the Palestinian people built the rest called new Jerusalem. Well now, they didn't bomb it but I'll tell you what they had in there.
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