At last the Turks began to give way. They were on the run. But their
forts two and three miles away were still pouring their fire. The men
were ordered to dig in. Despite orders, however, “hundreds of our
warriors refused to stop. They charged right on through the pathways
and tunnels in the cliffs. We never saw them again. Those that were not
killed were captured by the Turks. We used to say in speaking of them
afterward that they had ‘gone on to Constantinople.’”
The Australians had proved their mettle in this terrible adventure.
Everlasting glory was theirs—soldiers so recently recruited. The
soldiers, though, were not the only ones to be elevated to higher
sacrifice in these soul-straining demands. “There was the work done by
the Australian Army Service Corps—landing a steady procession of boats
with medical and food supplies as well as ammunition, fleets on fleets
of these boats from the transports and battleships moving to shore
with the coolest regularity, with the waters around every one of them
constantly thrashed by tons of falling shells. Scores of the boats were
blown up. But the others never stopped.”
“The stretcher-bearers and the doctors we could also see working calmly
among the sand dunes, ignoring snipers’ bullets as though they had been
harmless flakes of snow. Slow and painful files of the wounded—those
who could walk or stagger along were being guided to protected places
until the coming of night might enable their removal to the hospital
ships.
“As for the dead whose countless prone bodies were strewn upon the
beach with curious pitiful inertness, so different from that of sleep
that you know instinctively it means death—there was no use then
risking live men to give the dead the attention, to award them such
decencies of care and burial as were their due. This also would be the
work of the night. Yes, and many a man as he worked over the graves
of his fallen comrades pitched into that grave, himself become a dead
man—betrayed to a sniper by the moonlight’s gleam.
“Twilight veiled the sun and then very suddenly black night came.”
[Illustration:
© _New York Herald._