Private Martin John Troy 16th Battalion.
‘In the unromantic Australian official history the only mention of Troy is that of a private soldier of the name, born in the severely unclassical location of Geraldton, Western Australia. He happened to be the only survivor of a desperate action in a gully adjacent to Dead Man’s Ridge known as Bloody Angle, where he was knocked senseless by a bomb, and in this fearsome vicinity awoke to find himself among the dying and the dead.
‘I believe that the middle-aged Australian whom Mr Compton Mackenzie met in Alexandria soon after the first landings put the campaign in a more general perspective from the point of view of a contemporary. He reported that all he knew was that he jumped out of a bloody boat in the dark and before he had walked five bloody yards he had copped a bloody bullet in his foot and had been pushed back to bloody Alexandria almost before he bloody well knew he had left it. (Major John North, Gallipoli: The Fading Vision p. 19)
That was pretty much what happened to Martin Troy – except that he spent the rest of the war in Turkish prison camps. Read the rest of this entry »