THE GHASTLY LANDING
There was a swift, sharp lightening of the sky back of the gaunt, black
cliffs and our boats seemed thrown out of the water, thrown up into the
air by the rocking thunder of the heavy guns of the Turkish batteries
behind those cliffs. The water that had been so smooth an instant
before, that was, in fact, so treacherously smooth, as had been the
silence, was stabbed and chopped and sent into wild spume by a great
rain of shells. Blinding blasts flared as suddenly as here and there a
boat with its living load was struck and shattered. Screams and hoarse,
impulsive cries began to mingle with the explosions.
Then the cliffs and the sand dunes spat deadly fire at us. In the
darkness I could not, of course, see it all. But it would seem from
what afterward I was able to learn that not one of the pilots of the
steam tugs thought of turning back. I could not see it all and had no
time to think of much other than myself and my platoon, a very few
seconds after the bombardment from the big guns of the forts began
dropping their big shells and the hail of the machine guns sang among
us.
Surprise?
They had our range as surely as if we stood ten feet away from them.
The water was cluttered with the accurate assemblage of their shots.
Our battleships had begun an angry, heavy retort but whether their
great guns were finding the marks, of course, we couldn’t know. It
would have been a mighty comfort to us then to feel that these shots
were smashing the Turks.
There was no indication of it. Their fire became more and more and more
intense. Boat after boat was being smashed. In not more than three
minutes after the enemy began his bombardment against our landing, my
own boat went to smash. A shell struck it at the bow. It shattered
the boat and must have killed at least a dozen men. I, fortunately,
was in the stern. With my comrades I was hurled into the air and the
next realization was that I was far over my head in water and that the
first thing I must do if I was not to drown was to get rid of my heavy
knapsack.
Thank the Lord, I had been a sturdy swimmer since childhood. I can’t
begin to picture to you how many scores of my comrades, unable to swim
or weak swimmers, died then and there--how many of them with knapsacks
on their backs and guns and bayonets in their hands yet remain at the
bottom of the Ægean Sea, a curious spectacle for the fish.
I fought my way to the surface. And I clung to my gun and bayonet. I
clung to them as frantically as any drowning man is supposed to clutch
at a straw. For the only escape from drowning was to get ashore and
ashore I knew there would be small hope for me without my bayonet.
When I got to the surface other chaps were struggling all around me.
“Help each other get rid of these knapsacks,” I yelled when I got my
breath. “It’s our only chance or we’ll drown like rats.”
So we struggled about aiding one another free of these encumbrances.
We had also to let our ammunition belts go and held on only to our
guns. The shore was not far off now and we swam for it. But as we drew
near--very near--within fifty feet or so, we encountered a devilishly
ingenious snare.
The enemy had constructed on stakes in eight feet of water a
barbed-wire entanglement along more than two miles of the beach. I
was overhanding it for shore, supporting my rifle in the other when I
ran my face full tilt against the barbed wire’s fangs. Others of my
comrades did the same. They cursed and moaned. We hung on to the barbed
wire but ducking every instant for a scream of bullets was all around
us.
I can’t tell you how many of the landing boats were smashed in the
landing at Gallipoli. None I believe knows with accuracy. How many men
were drowned outright none either can exactly tell. But there were
hundreds. Nor how many men, exhausted, striving for the shore, were
caught and held like netted fish in that barbed-wire entanglement will
never be known. That scores--yes, hundreds were, I cannot doubt. Some
of the men immediately around me I know were lost in the effort to get
past it.
It was too closely netted to get through it. Some possibly floated or
were lifted over it by the roll of the surf. I know only how I made
my own way out of the trap. And that was by drawing myself down along
the barbed strands until I found a space some two feet between the
barbed-wire barrier and the sea-bottom. And I crawled through!
A few strokes after that and I was able to take to my feet and wade
out. Well, hardly that. I plunged, stumbled, fell and finally crawled
out on the bullet-spattered and shell-riven sands.
I wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the bullets or the shells.
Honestly, I was too exhausted. Had there been an enemy to meet me as
I flopped on the sands the worst I could have done to him by way of
resistance would have been to pat him on the cheek. If that much. I
just flopped and panted and panted. And as my breath came slowly,
very slowly back to normal I was astonished to find that my rifle and
bayonet were still clutched in my hand.
Fortunately, the enemy’s own shells smashed their cunning, barbed-wire,
under-sea entanglement and such sections of it as were not ripped in
that fashion were made harmless by plucky bombing parties in battleship
launches.
I didn’t lay very long gasping on the beach for the music of the
bullets made me realize grimly enough that I wasn’t out surfing. I
staggered to my feet and began to take general notice. The boats that
survived had spilled their men into the surf and the men, huddling and
scared, had nevertheless carried on. They were fast crowding the strip
of beach. Officers were snapping out commands--heroically holding their
presence of mind and organizing their men. Organizing, that is, what
they could find of them, or any men, for that matter, that they could
find around them.
All these things had now become visible in the dawn--the sudden dawn of
the East. You must understand that the bombardment was ceaseless from
the forts, the guns of all our ships roaring back at them the while.
But it was the machine-gun fire and the rifle fire from the Turks
concealed among the sand dunes and the clefts of the cliffs that were
tearing our men down. Sometimes the big shells smashed holes in the
beach and sent up great clouds of sands that settled blindingly down
upon us.
Our 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. When the dawn came I was able
to find twelve of the sixty men of my command.
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 our way into enemy trenches in the
table-lands and rout the snipers from their lairs.
Don’t ask me how we did it. I am only prepared to describe how myself
and my dozen men accomplished it. I wasn’t, you see, exactly on a
sight-seeing party.
In my little group of twelve who had been tossed into the ocean and
made their way through the wave-submerged barbed wire we didn’t have a
thing to fight with but the cold steel of our bayonets. Our ammunition
belts had perforce been abandoned with our knapsacks and were at the
bottom of the Ægean.
But His Majesty’s warships were giving us a lot of aid. Their great
guns were turned off the distant Turkish forts for a while and their
lighter armament was also brought under full play and together they
swept the dunes and cliffs above us with a merciless fire. Actually
we saw the bodies of our enemies, clusters of them, spouting from the
places of their concealment, saw legs, arms and heads flying wildly in
the air.
But back of me along the mile and more of beach there was a terrible
litter of our own dead. And every minute somewhere near me a man was
going down.
We got up those sand ridges any old way--by digging in our bayonets
like Alpine staffs, clawing with our free hands, scrambling with
toe-holds and fighting up on all fours.
We had just gained a knoll of sand and bush and taken protection behind
it for a minute’s breathing when one of my men, one of those sturdy
cattlemen who had made their way out of the wilderness to get into the
war for civilization, went down with a bullet in his leg.
“Nothing much,” he said, as I bent over him to examine the wound, “and
don’t stop for me. Go on and come back for me later or maybe the Red
Cross lads will find me. A little thing like this isn’t going to----”
He was smiling as he talked, but suddenly his head fell back, his smile
widening into a horrible grin. A bullet had taken him in the neck. He
was done for.
Of course, and luckily, there were only a few of our thousands that had
been blown out of their boats and most of the lusty fighters of the
landing force had their ammunition in hand. They were going after the
Turks with rifle volleys of deadly accuracy.
Having come alive through the terrible ordeal of that shell and bullet
strand of open beach, the Australians and New Zealands were fired to
the highest fighting pitch. Companies of them sang as they climbed
and pushed and struggled along--sang or rather yelled snatches of all
manner of songs though they didn’t sound much like songs. More like
strange, sustained savage war cries.
There was no staying the impetuosity of some of them.
When we had gained the upper ridges under the very face of the cliffs
and a furious mêlée it was till we got there, orders flew from the lips
of the officers for the men to stop and “dig in.” The ragged sandstone
cliffs were pierced by hundreds of tortuous pathways and there was no
telling what traps might lie in these crevices and mazes. The enemy
had already given evidence that in tunnels in the cliffs were located
batteries from which had come the most withering of fires until the
warships’ guns got after them. But beyond the face of the cliffs it was
foolhardy for any officer to lead his men against an enemy save one in
full retreat. And although it was evident by this time that we had the
Turks on the run, it was equally evident to our officers that their
commanders had been so confident in the frightfulness of the fire upon
the landing parties and the impediments of barbed wire they had planted
in the ocean, that they had not massed a strong force in the sand dunes
on the face of the hills. The probability of a much stronger force back
of the cliffs practically amounted to a certainty.
And although we had the Turks on the run, their forts two and three
miles away were still pouring their fire without an instant’s let-up on
the beach and for half a mile or more into the water.
But, in spite of orders, 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.”
My little band, now numbering eleven, I brought together on a shelf
near the face of the cliffs and we tried to dig in. But we had only our
bayonets for implements and the ground was a hard, brittle admixture
of sand and stone. So, instead, I ordered them to gather a sufficient
number of the chunks of rock that had been shattered from the face of
the cliffs by the battleship’s big guns and we constructed a horseshoe
shaped retreat--one that would protect us against an enfilade. In this
we esconced ourselves and looked from time to time on the bombardment,
going as furiously as ever between the warships and the distant forts
with an occasional vicious spurting exchange between our light land
batteries which we had got ashore in the face of everything, and the
hidden batteries that still held on among the cliffs. But mostly we
snuggled with heads well down below the walls of our little forts for
the bullets of snipers were pinging all around us. And you can imagine
they had made things damned merry for us while we were doing our bit
of architecture. The Turks at the time must have been pretty well
demoralized for let me tell you that, in ordinary circumstances, the
Turk is altogether too accurate a shot. As it was, there was only one
member of my little crowd who got hurt--a Melbourne boy who had two
fingers ripped off his left hand as he was shoving a big, ragged chunk
of sandstone in place on the fortress wall.
Just as we had settled down to hold out until nightfall should take
from us the uncomfortable job of being targets for snipers, I was
startled by a big, horny-handed man in my company, a fellow with a
cave-man’s face and wicked eye. He had suddenly started blubbering.
Before any of us could stop him, he jumped to his feet, showed himself
head and shoulders above our baby fortress’ walls, and shook his fist
fiercely in the general direction of the Turks. Their snipers answered
him with a furious spitfire of bullets. We dragged him down and I
demanded:
“What the devil’s got into you, anyhow? Want to get us all killed?”
“The little admiral!” he roared back at me in fury. “I was thinking it
was those dogs and their guns killed that kid--I tried to get to him
when the barge blew up. Plucky little devil! He was hanging on to the
stern and yelling orders to us to be ‘Steady’ and ‘Hold on.’ And then
another shell hit the damn’ thing and he was gone.” He tried to get up
again, but we held him down. “The damn’ kid-killing bunch of dogs!” he
yelled.
But there were other hearts, yes, thousands and thousands of hearts as
staunch as the “little admiral’s” in that red day of horror. There was
the work done by the Australian Army Service Corps--landing a steady
procession of boats loaded 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 only
where there was a chance of rescue of the men flung from the shattered
boats.
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 strewn upon the beach with
curious pitiful inertness so different from that of sleep, that you
know instinctively 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 with many a man as he worked over the graves of his fallen
comrades pitching 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.
Well, we had done the thing, done what many men of authority had
thought it would be impossible for us to do, what Lord Kitchener was
afterward to describe as one of the most brilliant feats of bravery
and soldiering of the war. We had effected a landing at Gallipoli.
Perilously we were to hold our place on this narrow little peninsula,
this back door of the Dardenelles, for months to come.
But at what a price! And through what suffering and horror!
Out of the 20,000 men who landed at Gallipoli by my own observation and
all report, I do not think that 1,000 are alive today!