Most of the men struggled. They tried to throw off their encumbrances.
They helped one another to get rid of their knapsacks. They let go
their ammunition belts—everything but their bayonets. They knew that
even if they could make the shore there would be small hope for them
without the bayonets. All the time came that devilish fire from the
cliffs. The shore was not far off now. They swam. They were within
fifty feet of it. Then they hit against a terrible snare.
“The enemy had constructed on stakes in eight feet of water a
barbed-wire entanglement along more than two miles of the beach.” Men
ran their faces full tilt against the barbed wire’s fangs. They cursed
and moaned. They hung on to the wire, but ducked every instant, for a
scream of bullets was all around. Hundreds drowned. Hundreds were held
like netted fish in the entangling wires. Many were lost in trying to
get through that wire. But the attack went on. There was some space
between the wire and the sea bottom. They crawled through! The enemy’s
own shells smashed some of the wire. Bombing parties in battleship
launches tore more sections open.
Men did get through. They lay gasping on the beach. But bullets came
thicker. They rose. Officers tried to organize the torn forces. The
bombardment from the forts was ceaseless. The English ships roared
back with thundering fire. Machine gun fire and rifle fire from Turks,
concealed in mounds of sand and the clefts of the cliffs, were tearing
down the brave Australians—ever dauntless.
“The landing party was grotesque and wavering under the frightful
storm. Shouts, yells, screams of pain, cries of alarm merged into a
great clamor. The most heartening thing, somehow, in the darkness had
become the Australian cry of ‘Coo-ee!’—sharp and musical, in which men
had called themselves together into groups.
“There was no living on the beach. The only way out of that immediate
hell was to charge across the sands and get into the shelter of the
dunes, to fight our way to the base of the cliffs and get away from the
shells of the cliffs, and to fight a way into the enemy trenches in the
table-lands.”
Amidst the horror and confusion that reigned impossible deeds were
performed. How it was ever done no one can tell. It was terrible. But
it had to be done. Many of the English hadn’t a thing to fight with
but the cold steel of their bayonets. The warships, of course, helped
tremendously. The hills of sand and the stony cliffs were rent by
merciless fire. You could see “the bodies of the enemies, clusters of
them, spouting from the places of their concealment. Legs, arms, heads
were flying wildly in the air.”