THE BLIZZARD
One knows little of the times and the seasons at which the early
Gallipoli winter plays its pranks. It is fairly gymnastic in its turns
of temperature. Still, we never expected a snow-blizzard in November.
For thus spoke the official weather-god (through the _Peninsula Press_)
regarding that fair month: "November generally comes in fine, with
a lovely first ten-days or so. It, however, becomes rather sharp at
night, and there may be expected a cold snap in the second or third
week of the month. This lasts a few days, after which the weather
gets fine and warm until the end of the month. November is, in fact,
considered by many to be the most glorious month of the year." ...
Thus had it been a month to mark with a white stone. Instead, it marked
itself with white stones that were many. The halting autumn was full of
vagaries, but there was a persistent bitterness creeping in the wake of
the fitful November gales:
And all around me ev'ry bush and tree
Says autumn's here, and winter soon will be--
That snows his soft white silence over all.
We had foreseen the snow-drift no nearer than that.
But on the Sabbath morning of the 28th of November we woke to find a
Peninsula of snow, with snow-men bearing snow-rifles walking over the
snow-ridges. This was the introduction of most of us to a fall. The
nearest we had yet come to the meeting was at the "movies" which had
shown Cossacks ploughing through their native drifts for the Front.
Here was our first touch with reality in utter cold.
The Australian has a reputation for adaptability of which not even
cold can rob him. He moved about like any Esquimau. This was true,
literally; for the first time he donned his rabbit-skin jacket and
his Balaclava cap and peaked field-service. The resemblance to an
Esquimau in his bear-skin coat and hood was remarkable. His curiosity
worked complementarily to his adaptability. This was like seeing a new
country for the first time. The snow made a new world, and no excess
of cold was to keep him from examining and wandering. He sloshed about
the gullies scrutinising the flakes as they lodged on his clothes; he
climbed the ridges to see something more of the general effect. The
Englishman regarded him from the stronghold of his snowy tradition with
superior commiseration, as who should say: "This'll make the beggar
hop!" The ill-starred Egyptians, never previously out of Lower-Egypt,
literally and piteously wailed with the cold. The Australians mostly
grinned and sky-larked.
By eight o'clock he was pasting all passers-by from his store of
ammunition; and after breakfast was conducting a sort of trench-warfare
in the gullies, bombing out the glowing enemy with a new brand of
hand-grenade, pure-white.
The wind blew a gale, driving the snow like thick smoke over the turbid
Ægean. Like rain it was not: far too thick and cloudy. The towering
ridges on our east happily saved us the extreme bitterness of the
blast. But it whistled down our sheltered ravines in a gusty fashion.
The trenches had another tale to unfold. For them was no grateful ridge
shelter. The freezing gale cut like a frosty knife across the parapet,
and drove a jet of ice through the loophole, and whistled ruthlessly
down any trench it could enfilade. The "Stand-to" at 5.30 that morning
was an experience of Arctic rigour.
No sun relieved the grey, relentless day. The men slopped on through
the slush. Never had they conceived anything so cold underfoot. But
next morning the ground was frozen hard. Every footprint was filled
with ice. Where yesterday we had bogged, we progressed to-day like
windmills, with arms spread to keep a balance on the glassy and steep
inclining surface. Buckets and pans were frozen over. The bristles of
shaving-brushes were congealed into a frozen extension of the handle.
It was a valiant man who, having pounded them out into a sort of
individuality, ventured to use a razor: the blade seared like a knife
of fire.
The sun shone bravely, but could not touch the stubborn ice of the
ground. That night was, to denizens of tropical Australia, incredibly
frosty. There was no breath of air. The cold bit through six
thicknesses of blanket and lay like an encasement of ice about your
limbs beneath the covers. Few in Turkey slept two hours that night, and
those by no means consecutively.
Next morning the slush oozed out to the sun, and the whole position
was as an Australian cow-yard in the winter rains. And that's how the
glorious month of November made its _adieux_ to Gallipoli.
Yet it's an ill blizzard that blows nobody good. Recent storms had
played Old Harry with the landing of supplies at Anzac. In especial,
the water-barge had been cast high and dry on Imbros. Warfare is not
easy in a country where every pint of water consumed must be landed
under fire. Though summer was past, men must drink; salt bacon, salt
"bully," dry biscuit, are thirst-provoking; and beside that "insensible
perspiration" of which De Quincey was wont to make so much, there is
activity on the Anzac Beach, if not in the trenches: a normal activity
intermittently stimulated by the murderous shriek of shell from the
flanks.
The reserve-supply of water had been already tapped. For a week we had
been on a quarter-ration. This eked out at about half a mug of tea
per man _per diem_. You ate salt beef for the evening meal without
tea; went to bed thirsty, dreaming of the rivers of water, woke to a
breakfast of salt bacon unmitigated by tea; and entered on a burning
day--though it was winter--a day relieved only by the half-pint at
lunch, at which you crunched biscuit and jam.
Men were foregoing their precious nightly issue of rum because it
wrought a pleasant fire in the veins, and they had already had enough
of fire in the veins. Not only were you drought-stricken, but frozen
too, and that to a degree from which heating food would have saved you
in part. But there was no water for cooking the heating oatmeal waiting
to be issued, nor for the heating rice, which could not be boiled in
sea-water.
Though the blizzard came in the midst of this drought it changed all
that. Rum-jars, buckets, biscuit-tins, water-cans--yea, the very
jam-tins--were filled with snow and there was the precious potential
water. Parched and frozen throats were slaked, beards shaven, porridge
boiled, bacon and beef defied to do their worst. Removed from the fire,
it had a dusty smack. But it was water!