Twenty transports of Australians under General Birdwood, arriving at
Gallipoli. In any circumstances, landing through rough seas and narrow
beaches, under defiant cliffs and then climbing those cliffs is not
nerve soothing for either impatient commanders or restless soldiers.
But in war time with cannon belching at you—well, it costs.
It was planned to surprise the Turks—those surprisingly
straight-shooting Turks, with their infernal German guns and German
officers. The men tried to hope, but it was really absurd to think
the enemy would be surprised. In January the Allied troops had tried
to force the Dardanelles. That had been sufficient warning. The enemy
would not be caught napping only a few months later. Even the most
hopeful of the men set about writing the letters which might contain
their very last wishes, fears, bequests, expressions of love. Then the
gloom passed and jokes and laughter came.
At about two o’clock in the morning they dropped anchor. Each man stood
at parade on the decks, and each was ordered to look to his supplies—a
rifle, a bayonet, 150 rounds of ammunition, three days’ rations, a
first-aid kit. It was weird contemplating this stretch of the Ægean and
that bit of coast so soon to be washed by blood.
Captain David Fanlon in his story of _The Big Fight_ says: “The long
procession of transports and their grim battleship escorts had stolen
up in the night, a widely spread yet organized, concrete group of
slowly-moving, black, gloomy monsters. Every light aboard each ship had
been ordered out. Not even the pin-head flame of a cigarette might show
on any deck.
“The only light we had was the faint green gleam that filtered over the
smooth waters from a moon that had begun to wane and had, indeed, at
this hour of three in the morning, nearly fallen behind the ragged jaw
of the black cliffs.”
That moon may have been very picturesque, but the men on those boats
hated it, feared it, wished it in—any place but in the heaven above
them. Its beam might act as a spotlight on the surprise attack. It
looked like the evil _eye_ of the _enemy_.
“I wonder,” said some one, “what that old green eye of a moon is
looking at back of those dark, old cliffs? I wonder if he sees the big
guns drowsing and the garrisons asleep or——”
“What he’s seeing,” came a grumbling answer, “is the heathen blighters
getting ready to bang hell out of us!”