the work was doubled. Everybody who could be spared from the front
trenches went to the piers to help to land, carry inland and hide the
guns, stores, carts and animals coming ashore. The nights, though
lengthening, were still summer nights. There were seven hours of
semi-darkness in which to cover up all traces of what came ashore. The
newcomers landed at the rate of about 1,500 an hour, during the nights
of the 3rd, 4th and 5th of August. During those nights, the Australians
landed, carried inland and hid not less than one thousand tons of
shells, cartridges and food, some hundreds of horses and mules, many
guns, and two or three hundred water-carts and ammunition carts. All
night-long, for those three nights, the Australians worked like
schoolboys. Often, towards dawn, it was a race against time, but always
at dawn, the night's tally of new troops were in their billets, the new
stores were under ground and the new horses hidden. When the morning
aeroplanes came over, their observers saw nothing unusual in any part of
Anzac. The half-naked men were going up and down the gullies, the wholly
naked men were bathing in the sea, everything else was as it had always
been, nor were any transports on the coast. For those three nights
nearly all the Australians at Anzac gave up most of their sleep. They
had begun the work by digging the cover, they took a personal pride and
pleasure in playing the game of cache-cache to the end.
It is difficult to praise a feat of the kind and still more difficult to
make people understand what the work meant. Those smiling and glorious
young giants thought little of it. They loved their chiefs and they
liked the fun, and when praised for it looked away with a grin. The
labour of the task can only be felt by those who have done hard manual
work in hot climates. Digging is one of the hardest kinds of work, even
when done in a garden with a fork. When done in a trench with a pick and
shovel it is as hard work as threshing with a flail. Carrying heavy
weights over uneven ground is harder work still; and to do either of
these things on a salt-meat diet with a scanty allowance of water, is
very, very hard; but to do them at night after a hard day's work,
instead of sleeping, is hardest of all; even farm-labourers would
collapse and sailors mutiny when asked to do this last. It may be said
that no one could have done this labour, but splendid young men
splendidly encouraged to do their best. Many of these same young men who
had toiled thus almost without sleep for three days and nights, fell in
with the others and fought all through the battle.
But all this preparation was a setting of precedents and the doing of
something new to war. Never before have 25,000 men been kept buried
under an enemy's eye until the hour for the attack. Never before have
two Divisions of all arms been brought up punctually, by ship, over many
miles of sea, from different ports, to land under fire, at an appointed
time, to fulfil a great tactical scheme.
But all these difficulties were as nothing to the difficulty of making
sure that the men fighting in the blinding heat of a Gallipoli August
should have enough water to drink. Eighty tons of water a day does not
seem very much. It had only to be brought five hundred miles, which does
not seem very far, to those who in happy peace can telephone for 80 tons
of anything to be sent five hundred miles to anywhere. But in war,
weight, distance and time become terrible and tragic things, involving
the lives of armies. The water supply of that far battlefield,
indifferent as it was, at the best, was a triumph of resolve and skill
unequalled yet in war. It is said that Wellington boasted that, while
Napoleon could handle men, he, Wellington, could feed them. Our naval
officers can truly say that, while Sir Ian Hamilton can handle men, they
can give them drink.
As to the enemy before the battle, it was estimated that (apart from the
great strategical reserves within 30 or 40 miles) there were 30,000
Turks in the vital part of the battlefield, to the north of Kilid Bahr.
Twelve thousand of these were in the trenches opposite Anzac; most of
the rest in the villages two or three miles to the south and southeast
of Sari Bair. Three battalions were in the Anafarta villages, one
battalion was entrenched on Ismail Oglu Tepe; small outposts held the
two Baba hillocks on the bay, and the land north of the bay was
patrolled by mounted gendarmerie. These scattered troops on the Turk
right had guns with them; it was not known how many. The beach of Suvla
was known to be mined.
August began with calm weather. The scattered regiments of the Divisions
for Suvla, after some weeks of hard exercise ashore, were sent on board
their transports. At a little before four o'clock on the afternoon of
the 6th August, the 29th Division began the battle by an assault on the
Turk positions below Krithia.
V
Roland put the horn to his mouth, gripped it hard and with great heart
blew it. The hills were high and the sound went very far: thirty leagues
wide they heard it echo. Charles heard it and all his comrades; so the
King said, "Our men are fighting." Count Guenes answered: "If any other
said that, I should call him a liar."
Count Roland in pain and woe and great weakness blew his horn. The
bright blood was running from his mouth and the temples of his brains
were broken. But the noise of the horn was very great. Charles heard it
as he was passing at the ports; Naimes heard it, the Franks listened to
it. So the King said, "I hear the horn of Roland; he would never sound
it if he were not fighting." Guenes answered, "There is no fighting. You
are old and white and hoary. You are like a child when you say such
things."
Count Roland's mouth was bleeding; the temples of his brain were broken.
He blew his horn in weakness and pain. Charles heard it and his Franks
heard it. So the King said: "That horn has long breath." Duke Naimes
answered, "Roland is in trouble. He is fighting, on my conscience. Arm
yourself. Cry your war-cry. Help the men of your house. You hear plainly
that Roland is in trouble."
The Emperor made sound his horns.... All the barons of the army mounted
their chargers. But what use was that? They had delayed too long. What
use was that? It was worth nothing; they had stayed too long; they could
not be in time.
Then Roland said, "Here we shall receive martyrdom, and now I know well
that we have but a moment to live. But may all be thieves who do not
sell themselves dearly first. Strike, knights, with your bright swords;
so change your deaths and lives, that sweet France be not shamed by us.
When Charles comes into this field he shall see such discipline upon the
Saracens that he shall not fail to bless us."
_The Song of Roland._
The Cape Helles attack, designed to keep the Turks to the south of Kilid
Bahr from reinforcing those near Anzac, became a very desperate
struggle. The Turk trenches there were full of men, for the Turks had
been preparing a strong attack upon ourselves, which we forestalled by a
few hours. The severe fighting lasted for a week along the whole Cape
Helles front, but it was especially bloody and terrible in the centre,
in a vineyard to the west of the Krithia road. It has often happened in
war, that some stubbornness in attack or defence has roused the same
quality in the opposer, till the honour of the armies seems pledged to
the taking or holding of one patch of ground, perhaps not vital to the
battle. It may be that in war one resolute soul can bind the excited
minds of multitudes in a kind of bloody mesmerism; but these strange
things are not studied as they should be. Near Krithia, the battle,
which began as a containing attack, a minor part of a great scheme,
became a furious week-long fight for this vineyard, a little patch of
ground "200 yards long by 100 yards broad."
From the 6th-13th of August, the fight for this vineyard never ceased.
Our Lancashire regiments won most of it at the first assault on the 6th.
For the rest of the week they held it against all that the Turks could
bring against them. It was not a battle in the military textbook sense:
it was a fight man to man, between two enemies whose blood was up. It
was a week-long cursing and killing scrimmage, the men lying down to
fire and rising up to fight with the bayonet, literally all day long,
day after day, the two sides within easy bombing distance all the time.
The Turks lost some thousands of men in their attacks upon this vineyard
after a week of fighting, they rushed it in a night attack, were soon
bombed out of it and then gave up the struggle for it. This bitter
fighting not only kept the Turks at Cape Helles from reinforcing those
at Anzac; it caused important Turk reinforcements to be sent to the
Helles sector.
Less than an hour after the 29th Division began the containing battle at
Krithia, the Australians at Anzac began theirs. This, the attack on the
Turk fort at Lone Pine, in the southern half of the Anzac front, was
designed to keep large bodies of Turks from reinforcing their right, on
Sari Bair, where the decisive blow was to be struck. It was a secondary
operation, not the main thrust, but it was in itself important, since to
those at Anzac, the hill of Lone Pine was the gate into the narrowest
part of the Peninsula, and through that gate, as the Turks very well
knew, a rush might be made from Anzac upon Maidos and the Narrows. Such
a thrust from Lone Pine, turning all the Turkish works on the range of
Sari Bair, was what the Turks expected and feared from us. They had
shewn us as much, quite plainly, all through the summer. Any movement,
feint, or demonstration against Lone Pine, brought up their reserves at
once. It was the sensitive spot on their not too strong left wing. If we
won through there, we had their main water supply as an immediate prize
and no other position in front of us from which we could be held. Any
strong attack there was therefore certain to contain fully half a
division of the enemy.
The hill of Lone or Lonesome Pine is a little plateau less than 400 feet
high running N.W. S.E. and measuring perhaps 250 yards long by 200
across. On its southwestern side it drops down in gullies to a col or
ridge, known as Pine Ridge, which gradually declines away to the low
ground near Gaba Tepe. On its northeastern side it joins the high ground
known as Johnston's Jolly, which was, alas, neither jolly nor
Johnston's, but a strong part of the Turk position.
We already held a little of the Lone Pine Plateau; our trenches bulged
out into it in a convexity or salient known as The Pimple, but the Turks
held the greater part, and their trenches curved out the other way, in a
mouth, concavity or trap opening towards The Pimple as though ready to
swallow it. The opposing lines of trenches ran from north to south
across the plateau, with from 50 to 100 yards between them. Both to the
north and south of the plateau are deep gullies. Just beyond these
gullies Turk trenches were so placed that the machine guns in them could
sweep the whole plateau. The space between the Australian and Turk lines
was fairly level hilltop, covered with thyme and short scrub.
For some days before the 6th August the warships had been shelling the
Turk position on Lone Pine to knock away the barbed wire in front of it.
On the 5th, the Australian brigade, told off for the attack, sharpened
bayonets and prepared their distinguishing marks of white bands for the
left arms and white patches for the backs of their right shoulders. In
the afternoon of the 6th the shelling by the ships became more intense;
at half-past four it quickened to a very heavy fire; at exactly
half-past five it stopped suddenly, "the three short whistle blasts
sounded and were taken up along the line, our men cleared the parapet,"
in two waves on a front of about 160 yards, "and attacked with vigour."
The hill top over which they charged was in a night of smoke and dust
from the explosions of the shells, and into that night, already singing
with enemy bullets, the Australians disappeared. They had not gone
twenty yards before all that dark and blazing hill top was filled with
explosion and flying missiles from every enemy gun. One speaks of a hail
of bullets, but no hail is like fire, no hail in a form of death crying
aloud a note of death, no hail screams as it strikes a stone, or stops a
strong man in his stride. Across that kind of hail the Australians
charged on Lone Pine. "It was a grim kind of steeplechase," said one,
"but we meant to get to Koja Dere." They reached the crumpled wire of
the entanglement, and got through it to the parapet of the Turk trench,
where they were held up. Those behind them at The Pimple, peering
through the darkness, to see if any had survived the rush, saw figures
on the parados of the enemy's trench, and wondered what was happening.
They sent forward the third wave, with one full company carrying picks
and shovels, to make good what was won. The men of this third wave found
what was happening.
The Turkish front line trench was not, like most trenches, an open ditch
into which men could jump, but covered over along nearly all its length
with blinders and beams of pinewood, heaped with sandbags, and in some
places with a couple of feet of earth. Under this cover the Turks fired
at our men through loopholes, often with their rifles touching their
victims. Most of the Australians, after heaving in vain to get these
blinders up, under a fire that grew hotter every instant, crossed them,
got into the open communication trenches in the rear of the Turk line,
and attacked through them; but some, working together, hove up a blinder
or two, and down the gaps so made those brave men dropped themselves, to
a bayonet fight like a rat fight in a sewer, with an enemy whom they
could hardly see, in a narrow dark gash in the earth where they were, at
first, as one to five or seven to ten.
More and more men dropped down or rushed in from the rear; the Turks so
penned in, fought hard, but could not beat back the attack. They
surrendered and were disarmed. The survivors were at least as many as
their captors, who had too much to do at that time to send them to the
rear, even if there had been a safe road by which to send them. They
were jammed up there in the trenches with the Australians, packed man to
man, suffering from their friends' fire and getting in the way.
[Illustration: Inside an Australian trench, showing a man using a
periscope rifle and another man keeping watch by means of a periscope]
The first thing to be done was to block up the communication trenches
against the Turkish counter attack. Every man carried a couple of
sandbags, and with these, breastworks and walls were built. Their work
was done in a narrow dark sweltering tunnel, heaped with corpses and
wounded and crowded with prisoners who might at any moment have risen.
Already the Turks had begun their counter attacks. At every other moment
a little rush of Turks came up the communication trenches, flung their
bombs in the workers' faces, and were bayoneted as they threw. The
trenches curved and zigzagged in the earth; the men in one section could
neither see nor hear what the men in the nearest sections were doing.
What went on under the ground there in the making good of those trenches
will never be known. From half-past five till midnight every section of
the line was searched by bombs and bullets, by stink pots, and sticks of
dynamite, by gas-bombs and a falling tumult of shell and shrapnel, which
only ceased to let some rush of Turks attack, with knives, grenades and
bayonets, hand to hand and body to body in a blackness like the darkness
of a mine. At midnight the wounded were lying all over the trenches, the
enemy dead were so thick that our men had to walk on them, and bombs
were falling in such numbers that every foot in those galleries was
stuck with human flesh. No man slept that night. At half-past seven next
morning (the 7th) a small quantity of bread and tea was rushed across
the plateau to the fighters, who had more than earned their breakfast.
Turk shell had by this time blown up some of the head-cover and some of
the new communication trenches were still only a few feet deep. A
Colonel passing along one of them told an officer that his section of
the trench was too shallow. Half-an-hour later, in passing back, he
found the officer and three men blown to pieces by a shell; in a few
minutes more he was himself killed. At noon the bombing became so severe
that some sections of the line were held only by one or two wounded men.
At one o'clock the enemy attacked furiously with bomb and bayonet, in
great force. They came on in a mass, in wave after wave, shoulder to
shoulder, heads down, shouting the name of God. They rushed across the
plateau, jumped into the trenches and were mixed up with our men in a
hand-to-hand fight, which lasted for five hours. Not many of them could
join in the fight at one time, and not many of them went back to the
Turk lines; but they killed many of our men, and when their last assault
failed our prize was very weakly held. At half-past seven the survivors
received a cheering (and truthful) message from the Brigadier "that no
fighters can surpass Australians," and almost with the message came
another Turk assault begun by bomb and shell and rifle fire, and
followed by savage rushes with the bayonet, one of which got in, and did
much slaughter. No man slept that night; the fight hardly slackened all
through the night; at dawn the dead were lying three deep in every part
of the line. Bombs fell every minute in some section of the line, and
where the wide Turk trenches had been blasted open they were very
destructive. The men were "extremely tired but determined to hold on."
They did hold on.
They held on for the next five days and nights, till Lone Pine was ours
past question. For those five days and nights the fight for Lone Pine
was one long personal scrimmage in the midst of explosion. For those
five days and nights the Australians lived and ate and slept in that
gallery of the mine of death, in a half darkness lit by great glares, in
filth, heat and corpses, among rotting and dying and mutilated men, with
death blasting at the doors only a few feet away, and intense and bloody
fighting, hand to hand, with bombs, bayonets and knives, for hours
together by night and day. When the Turks gave up the struggle the dead
were five to the yard in that line or works; they were heaped in a kind
of double wall all along the sides of the trench: most of them were
bodies of Turks, but among them were one quarter of the total force
which ran out from The Pimple on the evening of the 6th.
Like the fight for the vineyard near Krithia, this fight for Lone Pine
kept large numbers of Turks from the vital part of the battlefield.
When the sun set upon this battle at Lone Pine on that first evening of
the 6th of August, many thousands of brave men fell in for the main
battle, which was to strew their glorious bodies in the chasms of the
Sari Bair, where none but the crows would ever find them. They fell in
at the appointed places in four columns, two to guard the flanks, two to
attack. One attacking column, guarded and helped by the column on its
right, was to move up the Chailak and Sazli Beit Deres, to the storm of
Chunuk Bair, the other attacking column, guarded and helped by the
column on its left, was to move up the Aghyl Dere to the storm of Sari's
peak of Koja Chemen Tepe. The outermost, left, guarding column (though
it did not know it) was to link up with the force soon to land at Suvla.
They were going upon a night attack in a country known to be a
wilderness with neither water nor way in it. They had neither light nor
guide, nor any exact knowledge of where the darkness would burst into a
blaze from the Turk fire. Many armies have gone out into the darkness of
a night adventure, but what army has gone out like this, from the hiding
places on a beach to the heart of unknown hills, to wander up crags
under fire, to storm a fortress in the dawn? Even in Manchuria, there
were roads and the traces and the comforts of man. In this savagery,
there was nothing, but the certainty of desolation, where the wounded
would lie until they died and the dead be never buried.
Until this campaign, the storm of Badajos was the most desperate duty
ever given to British soldiers. The men in the forlorn hope of that
storm marched to their position to the sound of fifes "which filled the
heart with a melting sweetness" and tuned that rough company to a kind
of sacred devotion. No music played away the brave men from Anzac. They
answered to their names in the dark, and moved off to take position for
what they had to do. Men of many races were banded together there. There
were Australians, English, Indians, Maoris and New Zealanders, made one
by devotion to a cause, and all willing to die that so their comrades
might see the dawn make a steel streak of the Hellespont from the peaked
hill now black against the stars. Soon they had turned their back on
friendly little Anzac and the lights in the gullies and were stepping
out with the sea upon their left and the hills of their destiny upon
their right, and the shells, starlights and battle of Lone Pine far away
behind them. Before 9 A.M. the Right Covering Column (of New Zealanders)
was in position ready to open up the Sazli Beit and Chailak Deres, to
their brothers who were to storm Chunuk. Half an hour later, cunningly
backed by the guns of the destroyer _Colne_, they rushed the Turk
position, routed the garrison and its supports, and took the fort known
as Old No. 3 Post. It was an immensely strong position, protected by
barbed wire, shielded by shell-proof head cover, and mined in front
"with 28 mines electrically connected to a first-rate firing apparatus
within." Sed nisi Dominus.
This success opened up the Sazli Dere for nearly half of its length.
Inland from Old No. 3 Post, and some 700 yards from it is a crag or
precipice which looks like a round table, with a top projecting beyond
its legs. This crag, known to our men as Table Top, is a hill which few
would climb for pleasure. Nearly all the last 100 feet of the peak is
precipice, such as no mountaineer would willingly climb without clear
daylight and every possible precaution. It is a sort of skull of rock
fallen down upon its body of rock, and the great rocky ribs heave out
with gullies between them. The table-top, or plateau-summit, was
strongly entrenched and held by the Turks, whose communication trenches
ran down the back of the hill to Rhododendron Spur.
While their comrades were rushing Old No. 3 Post, a party of New
Zealanders marched to storm this natural fortress. The muscular part of
the feat may be likened to the climbing of the Welsh Glyddyrs, the Irish
Lurig, or the craggier parts of the American Palisades, in a moonless
midnight, under a load of not less than thirty pounds. But the muscular
effort was made much greater by the roughness of the unknown approaches,
which led over glidders of loose stones into the densest of short,
thick, intensely thorny scrub. The New Zealanders advanced under fire
through this scrub, went up the rocks in a spirit which no crag could
daunt, reached the Table-top, rushed the Turk trenches, killed some
Turks of the garrison and captured the rest with all their stores.
This success opened up the remainder of the Sazli Beit Dere.