steamed alongside the _River Clyde_ and went ahead when she grounded.
She took the ground rather to the right of the little beach, some 400
yards from the ruins of Sedd-el-Bahr castle, before the Turks had opened
fire, but almost as she grounded, when the picket-boats with their tows
were ahead of her, only twenty or thirty yards from the beach, every
rifle and machine gun in the castle, the town above it, and in the
curved low strongly trenched hill along the bay, began a murderous fire
upon ship and boats. There was no question of their missing. They had
their target on the front and both flanks at ranges between 100 and 300
yards in clear daylight, thirty boats bunched together and crammed with
men and a good big ship. The first outbreak of fire made the bay as
white as a rapid, for the Turks fired not less than ten thousand shots a
minute for the first few minutes of that attack. Those not killed in the
boats at the first discharge jumped overboard to wade or swim ashore,
many were killed in the water, many, who were wounded, were swept away
and drowned, others, trying to swim in the fierce current, were drowned
by the weight of their equipment; but some reached the shore, and these
instantly doubled out to cut the wire entanglements, and were killed, or
dashed for the cover of a bank of sand or raised beach which runs along
the curve of the bay. Those very few who reached this cover were out of
immediate danger, but they were only a handful. The boats were destroyed
where they grounded.
Meanwhile, the men of the _River Clyde_ tried to make their bridge of
boats, by sweeping the lighters into position and mooring them between
the ship and the shore. They were killed as they worked, but others took
their places, the bridge was made, and some of the Munsters dashed along
it from the ship and fell in heaps as they ran. As a second company
followed, the moorings of the lighters broke or were shot, the men
leaped into the water and were drowned or killed, or reached the beach
and were killed, or fell wounded there, and lay under fire getting wound
after wound till they died; very, very few reached the sandbank. More
brave men jumped aboard the lighters to remake the bridge. They were
swept away or shot to pieces; the average life on those boats was some
three minutes long, but they remade the bridge, and the third company of
the Munsters doubled down to death along it under a storm of shrapnel
which scarcely a man survived. The big guns in Asia were now shelling
the _River Clyde_, and the hell of rapid fire never paused. More men
tried to land, headed by Brigadier General Napier, who was instantly
killed, with nearly all his followers. Then for long hours the remainder
stayed on board, down below in the grounded steamer, while the shots
beat on her plates with a rattling clang which never stopped. Her twelve
machine guns fired back, killing any Turk who showed, but nothing could
be done to support the few survivors of the landing, who now lay under
cover of the sandbank on the other side of the beach. It was almost
certain death to try to leave the ship, but all through the day men
leaped from her (with leave or without it) to bring water or succour to
the wounded on the boats or beach. A hundred brave men gave their lives
thus: every man there earned the Cross that day: a boy earned it by one
of the bravest deeds of the war, leaping into the sea with a rope in his
teeth to try to secure a drifting lighter.
[Illustration: The S.S. _River Clyde_, which, loaded with troops, was
run ashore on the beach, Sedd-el-Bahr. She is known familiarly as "The
Wooden Horse," in allusion to the famous and somewhat similar expedient
of the Greeks at Troy.]
The day passed thus, but at nightfall the Turks' fire paused, and the
men came ashore from the _River Clyde_, almost unharmed. They joined the
survivors on the beach and at once attacked the old fort and the village
above it. These works were strongly held by the enemy. All had been
ruined by the fire from the fleet, but in the rubble and ruin of old
masonry there were thousands of hidden riflemen backed by machine guns.
Again and again they beat off our attacks, for there was a bright moon
and they knew the ground, and our men had to attack uphill over wire and
broken earth and heaped stones in all the wreck and confusion and
strangeness of war at night in a new place. Some of the Dublins and
Munsters went astray in the ruins, and were wounded far from their
fellows and so lost. The Turks became more daring after dark; while the
light lasted they were checked by the _River Clyde's_ machine guns, but
at midnight they gathered unobserved and charged. They came right down
onto the beach, and in the darkness and moonlight much terrible and
confused fighting followed. Many were bayoneted, many shot, there was
wild firing and crying, and then the Turk attack melted away, and their
machine guns began again. When day dawned, the survivors of the landing
party were crouched under the shelter of the sandbank; they had had no
rest; most of them had been fighting all night, all had landed across
the corpses of their friends. No retreat was possible, nor was it
dreamed of, but to stay there was hopeless. Lieutenant Colonel
Doughty-Wylie gathered them together for an attack: the fleet opened a
terrific fire upon the ruins of the fort and village, and the landing
party went forward again, fighting from bush to bush and from stone to
stone, till the ruins were in their hands. Shells still fell among them,
single Turks, lurking under cover, sniped them and shot them, but the
landing had been made good, and V beach was secured to us.
This was the worst and the bloodiest of all the landings.
_The Landing at W Beach, under Cape Tekke._
The men told off for this landing were the 1st Battalion Lancashire
Fusiliers, supported (later) by the Worcester Regiment.
The men were landed at six in the morning from ships' boats run ashore
by picket-boats. On landing, they rushed the wire entanglements, broke
through them, with heavy loss, and won to the dead ground under the
cliffs. The ships drew nearer to the beach and opened heavy fire upon
the Turks, and the landing party stormed the cliffs and won the trenches.
The Worcester Regiment having landed, attempts were made to break a way
to the right, so as to join hands with the men on V Beach. All the land
between the two beaches was heavily wired and so broken that it gave
much cover to the enemy. Many brave Worcesters went out to cut the wires
and were killed; the fire was intense, there was no getting further. The
trenches already won were secured and improved, the few available
reserves were hurried up, and by dark, when the Turks attacked, again
and again, in great force, our men were able to beat them off, and hold
on to what they had won.
_The Landing at X Beach (Sometimes called Implacable Landing), towards
Krithia._
The men told off for this landing were the 1st Royal Fusiliers, with a
working party of the Anson Battalion, R.N.D.
These men were towed ashore from H.M.S. _Implacable_ about an hour after
dawn. The ship stood close in to the beach and opened rapid fire on the
enemy trenches: under cover of this fire the men got ashore fairly
easily. On moving inland they were attacked by a great force of Turks
and checked; but they made good the ground won, and opened up
communications with the Lancashires who had landed at W Beach. This
landing was the least bloody of all.
[Illustration: Some of the barbed wire entanglements near Sedd-el-Bahr]
Of the two flank landings, that on the right, within the Straits, to the
right of Sedd-el-Bahr, got ashore without great loss and held on; that
on the left, to the left of X Beach, got ashore, fought a desperate and
bloody battle against five times its strength, and finally had to
re-embark. The men got ashore upon a cliff so steep that the Turks had
not troubled to defend it, but on landing they were unable to link up
with the men on X Beach as had been planned. They were attacked in great
force by an ever-growing Turkish army, fought all day and all through
the night in such trenches as they had been able to dig under fire, and
at last in the morning of the next day went down the cliffs and
re-embarked, most nobly covered to the end by a party from the King's
Own Scottish Borderers and the Plymouth Battalion.
During the forenoon of the 25th, a regiment of the French Corps landed
at Kum Kale, under cover of the guns of the French warships, and engaged
the enemy throughout the day and night. Their progress was held up by a
strongly entrenched force during the afternoon, and after sharp fighting
all through the night they re-embarked in the forenoon of the 26th with
some 400 Turkish prisoners. This landing of the French diverted from us
on the 25th the fire of the howitzers emplaced on the Asiatic shore. Had
these been free to fire upon us, the landings near Sedd-el-Bahr would
have been made even more hazardous than they were.
At Bulair one man, Lieutenant Freyberg, swam ashore from a Destroyer,
towing a little raft of flares. Near the shore he lit two of these
flares, then, wading onto the land, he lit others at intervals along the
coast, then he wandered inland, naked, on a personal reconnaissance, and
soon found a large Turkish army strongly entrenched. Modesty forbade
further intrusion. He went back to the beach and swam off to his
Destroyer, could not find her in the dark, and swam for several miles,
was exhausted and cramped, and was at last picked up, nearly dead. This
magnificent act of courage and endurance, done by one unarmed man, kept
a large Turkish army at Bulair during the critical hours of the landing.
"The Constantinople papers were filled with accounts of the repulse of
the great attack at Bulair." The flares deceived the Turks even more
completely than had been hoped.
While these operations were securing our hold upon the extreme end of
the Peninsula, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps were making
good their landing on the Ægean coast, to the north of Gaba Tepe. They
sailed from Mudros on the 24th, arrived off the coast of the Peninsula
at about half-past one on the morning of the 25th, and there under a
setting moon, in calm weather, they went on board the boats which were
to take them ashore. At about half-past three the tows left the ships
and proceeded in darkness to the coast.
Gaba or Kaba Tepe is a steep cliff or promontory about 70 feet high with
a whitish nose and something the look of a blunt-nosed torpedo or
porpoise. It is a forbidding-looking snout of land, covered with scrub
where it is not too steep for roots to hold, and washed by deep water.
About a mile to the north of it there is a possible landing place, and
north of that again a long and narrow strip of beach between two little
headlands. This latter beach cannot be seen from Gaba Tepe. The ground
above these beaches is exceedingly steep sandy cliff, broken by two
great gulleys or ravines, which run inland. All the ground, except in
one patch in the southern ravine, where there is a sort of meadow of
grass, is densely covered with scrub, mostly between two and three feet
high. Inland from the beach, the land of the Peninsula rises in steep,
broken hills and spurs, with clumps of pine upon them, and dense
undergrowths of scrub. The men selected for this landing were the 3rd
Brigade of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, followed and
supported by the 1st and 2nd Brigades.
The place selected for the landing was the southern beach and nearer of
the two to Gaba Tepe. This, like the other landing places near Cape
Helles, was strongly defended, and most difficult of approach. Large
forces of Turks were entrenched there, well prepared. But in the
darkness of the early morning after the moon had set the tows stood a
little further to the north than they should have done, perhaps because
some high ground to their left made a convenient steering mark against
the stars. They headed in towards the northern beach between the two
little headlands, where the Turks were not expecting them. However, they
were soon seen and very heavy independent rifle fire was concentrated on
them. As they neared the beach "about one battalion of Turks" doubled
along the land to intercept them. These men came from nearer Gaba Tepe,
firing as they ran, into the mass of the boats at short range. A great
many men were killed in the boats, but the dead men's oars were taken by
survivors, and the boats forced into the shingle. The men jumped out,
waded ashore, charged the enemy with the bayonet, and broke the Turk
attack to pieces. The Turks scattered and were pursued, and now the
steep scrub-covered cliffs became the scene of the most desperate
fighting.
The scattered Turks dropped into the scrub and disappeared. Hidden all
over the rough cliffs, under every kind of cover, they sniped the beach
or ambushed the little parties of the 3rd Brigade who had rushed the
landing. All over the broken hills there were isolated fights to the
death, men falling into gullies and being bayoneted, sudden duels, point
blank, where men crawling through the scrub met each other and life went
to the quicker finger, heroic deaths, where some half section which had
lost touch were caught by ten times their strength and charged and died.
No man of our side knew that cracked and fissured jungle. Men broke
through it on to machine guns, or showed up on a crest and were blown to
pieces, or leaped down from it into some sap or trench, to catch the
bombs flung at them and hurl them at the thrower. Going as they did, up
cliffs, through scrub, over ground which would have broken the alignment
of the Tenth Legion, they passed many hidden Turks, who were thus left
to shoot them in the back or to fire down at the boats, from perhaps
only fifty yards away. It was only just light, theirs was the first
British survey of that wild country; only now, as it showed up clear,
could they realise its difficulty. They pressed on up the hill. They
dropped and fired and died; they drove the Turks back, they flung their
packs away, wormed through the bush and stalked the snipers from the
flash. As they went, the words of their song supported them, the ribald
and proud chorus of "Australia will be there," which the men on the
torpedoed _Southland_ sang, as they fell in, expecting death. Presently,
as it grew lighter, the Turks' big howitzers began shelling the beach,
and their field guns, well-hidden, opened on the transports now busy
disembarking the 1st and 2nd Brigades. They forced the transports to
stand further out to sea, and shelled the tows, as they came in, with
shrapnel and high explosive. As the boats drew near the shore every gun
on Gaba Tepe took them in flank and the snipers concentrated on them
from the shore. More and more Turks were coming up at the double to stop
the attack up the hill. The fighting in the scrub grew fiercer; shells
burst continually upon the beach, boats were sunk, men were killed in
the water. The boatmen and beach working-parties were the unsung heroes
of that landing. The boatmen came in with the tows, under fire, waited
with them under intense and concentrated fire of every kind, until they
were unloaded, and then shoved off, and put slowly back for more, and
then came back again. The beach parties were wading to and from that
shell-smitten beach all day, unloading, carrying ashore and sorting the
munitions and necessaries for many thousands of men. They worked in a
strip of beach and sea from 500 yards long by 40 broad, and the fire
directed on that strip was such that every box brought ashore had one or
more shells and not less than fifty bullets directed at it before it was
flung upon the sand. More men came in and went on up the hill in
support; but as yet there were no guns ashore, and the Turks' fire
became intenser. By ten o'clock the Turks had had time to bring up
enough men from their prepared positions to hold up the advance.
Scattered parties of our men who had gone too far in the scrub, were cut
off and killed, for there was no thought of surrender in those
marvellous young men; they were the flower of this world's manhood, and
died as they had lived, owning no master on this earth. More and more
Turks came up with big and field artillery, and now our attack had to
hold on to what it had won, against more than twice its numbers. We had
won a rough bow of ground, in which the beach represented the bow
string, the beach near Gaba Tepe the south end, and the hovel known as
Fisherman's Hut the north. Against this position, held by at most 8,000
of our men, who had had no rest and had fought hard since dawn, under
every kind of fire in a savage rough country unknown to them, came an
overwhelming army of Turks to drive them into the sea. For four hours
the Turks attacked and again attacked, with a terrific fire of artillery
and waves of men in succession. They came fresh, from superior
positions, with many guns, to break a disorganised line of breathless
men not yet dug in. The guns of the ships opened on them, and the
scattered units in the scrub rolled them back again and again by rifle
and machine gun fire, and by charge after counter charge. More of the
Army Corps landed to meet the Turks, the fire upon the beach never
slackened, and they came ashore across corpses and wrecked boats and a
path like a road in hell with ruin and blasts and burning. They went up
the cliff to their fellows under an ever-growing fire, that lit the
scrub and burned the wounded and the dead. Darkness came, but there was
no rest nor lull. Wave after wave of Turks came out of the night, crying
the proclamation of their faith; others stole up in the dark through the
scrub and shot or stabbed and crept back, or were seen and stalked and
killed. Flares went up, to light with their blue and ghastly glare the
wild glens peopled by the enemy. Men worked at the digging-in till they
dropped asleep upon the soil, and more Turks charged and they woke and
fired and again dug. It was cruelly cold after the sun had gone, but
there was no chance of warmth or proper food; to dig-in and beat back
the Turk or die was all that men could think of. In the darkness, among
the blasts of the shells, men scrambled up and down the pathless cliffs
bringing up tins of water and boxes of cartridges, hauling up guns and
shells, and bringing down the wounded. The beach was heaped with
wounded, placed as close under the cliff as might be, in such yard or so
of dead ground as the cliffs gave. The doctors worked among them and
shells fell among them and doctors and wounded were blown to pieces, and
the survivors sang their song of "Australia will be there," and cheered
the newcomers still landing on the beach. Sometimes our fire seemed to
cease and then the Turk shells filled the night with their scream and
blast and the pattering of their fragments. With all the fury and the
crying of the shells, and the shouts and cries and cursing on the beach,
the rattle of the small arms and the cheers and defiance up the hill,
and the roar of the great guns far away, at sea, or in the olive groves,
the night seemed in travail of a new age. All the blackness was shot
with little spurts of fire, and streaks of fire, and malignant bursts of
fire, and arcs and glows and crawling snakes of fire, and the moon rose,
and looked down upon it all. In the fiercer hours of that night shells
fell in that contested mile of ground and on the beach beyond it at the
rate of one a second, and the air whimpered with passing bullets, or
fluttered with the rush of the big shells, or struck the head of the
passer like a moving wall with the shock of the explosion. All through
the night, the Turks attacked, and in the early hours their fire of
shrapnel became so hellish that the Australians soon had not men enough
left to hold the line. Orders were given to fall back to a shorter line,
but in the darkness, uproar and confusion, with many sections refusing
to fall back, others falling back and losing touch, others losing their
way in gully or precipice, and shrapnel hailing on all, as it had hailed
for hours, the falling back was mistaken by some for an order to
re-embark. Many men who had lost their officers and non-commissioned
officers fell back to the beach, where the confusion of wounded men,
boxes of stores, field dressing stations, corpses and the litter and the
waste of battle, had already blocked the going. The shells bursting in
this clutter made the beach, in the words of an eye-witness, "like
bloody hell and nothing else." But at this breaking of the wave of
victory, this panting moment in the race, when some of the runners had
lost their first wind, encouragement reached our men: a message came to
the beach from Sir Ian Hamilton, to say that help was coming, and that
an Australian submarine had entered the Narrows and had sunk a Turkish
transport off Chanak.
This word of victory, coming to men who thought for the moment that
their efforts had been made in vain, had the effect of a fresh brigade.
The men rallied back up the hill; bearing the news to the firing-line,
the new, constricted line was made good, and the rest of the night was
never anything but continued victory to those weary ones in the scrub.
But 24 hours of continual battle exhausts men, and by dawn the Turks,
knowing the weariness of our men, resolved to beat them down into the
sea. When the sun was well in our men's eyes they attacked again, with
not less than twice our entire strength of fresh men, and with an
overwhelming superiority in field artillery. Something in the Turk
commander and the knowledge that a success there would bring our men
across the peninsula within a day, made the Turks more desperate enemies
there than elsewhere. They came at us with a determination which might
have triumphed against other troops. As they came on they opened a
terrific fire of shrapnel upon our position, pouring in such a hail that
months afterwards one could see their round shrapnel bullets stuck in
bare patches of ground, or in earth thrown up from the trenches, as
thickly as plums in a pudding. Their multitudes of men pressed through
the scrub as skirmishers, and sniped at every moving thing; for they
were on higher ground and could see over most of our position, and every
man we had was under direct fire for hours of each day. As the attack
developed, the promised help arrived, our warships stood in and opened
on the Turks with every gun that would bear. Some kept down the guns of
Gaba Tepe, others searched the line of the Turk advance, till the hills
over which they came were swathed with yellow smoke and dust, the white
clouds of shrapnel, and the drifting darkness of conflagration. All the
scrub was in a blaze before them, but they pressed on, falling in heaps
and lines; and their guns dropped a never-ceasing rain of shells on
trenches, beach and shipping. The landing of stores and ammunition never
ceased during the battle. The work of the beach-parties in that scene of
burning and massacre was beyond all praise: so was the work of the
fatigue parties who passed up and down the hill with water, ammunition
and food, or dug sheltered roads to the trenches; so was the work of the
Medical Service, who got the wounded out of cuts in the earth, so narrow
and so twisted that there was no using a stretcher and men had to be
carried on stretcher bearers' backs or on improvised chairs made out of
packing cases.
At a little before noon the Turk attack reached its height in a blaze
and uproar of fire, and the swaying forward of their multitudes. The
guns of the warships swept them from flank to flank with every engine of
death: they died by hundreds, and the attack withered as it came. Our
men saw the enemy fade and slacken and halt; then with their cheer they
charged him and beat him home, seized new ground from him, and dug
themselves in in front of him. All through the day there was fighting up
and down the line, partial attacks, and never-ceasing shell-fire, but no
other great attack, the Turks had suffered too much. At night their
snipers came out in the scrub and shot at anything they could see, and
all night long their men dragged up field guns and piles of shrapnel,
and worked at the trenches which were to contain ours. When day dawned,
they opened with shrapnel upon the beach, with a _feu de barrage_
designed to stop all landing of men and stores. They whipped the bay
with shrapnel bullets. Where their fire was concentrated, the water was
lashed as with hail all day long; but the boats passed through it, and
men worked in it, building jetties for the boats to land at, using a big
Turk shell as a pile driver: when they got too hot they bathed in it,
for no fire shook those men. It was said, that when a big shell was
coming, men of other races would go into their dugouts, but that these
men paused only to call it a bastard and then went on with their work.