ANZAC COVE
The evolution of Anzac was as the growth of a mining settlement.
Little had been done by the Turks in their defensive preparations to
disturb the natural growth that spread from the crest of Maclagan's
Ridge almost down to the water's edge--a growth of holly bush, a kind
of furze, and an abundant carpet of grasses, wild flowers, poppies,
and anemones. Round Ari Burnu their line of shallow trenches had run
along to the Fishermen's Huts, but there were no tracks, other than
the sheep or goat track round the base of the cliffs that the farmers
might have used coming from Anafarta on to the plains below Kelid Bair
and across to the olive-groves, on the way to Maidos and the villages
along the peninsula road to Cape Helles. Anzac Beach--"Z" Beach in the
scheme of operations--was covered with coarse pebbles, occasionally
a patch of sand. Barely 20 yards wide, and 600 yards long, the hills
and cliffs began to rise steeply from it. The shore was cleft in the
centre by a gully--Bully Beef Gully--which opened into the Cove. It
was no more than a sharp ravine, very narrow, and in the days of April
and in November very moist, and wet, and sticky. It took very little
time after the dawn of day on that April Sunday morning for the point
of concentration to be fixed on in this Cove. The whole of the stores,
equipment, as well as the troops, were landed from end to end of the
beach. Somehow there was a feeling of greater security in this Cove,
but in fact it was so shallow, so accurately plotted in the enemy's
maps, that the Turks had little difficulty in bursting the shells from
one end of it to the other at their will. Luckily, the water was fairly
deep almost up to the shore. Twenty yards out one found 15 feet of
water and a stony bottom, which enabled the picket boats and pinnaces
to come close in, as it allowed barges to be drawn well up to the
beach, so that the stores could be tumbled out. Photographs, better
than word pictures, describe that beach in those first days and weeks.
Ordnance officers of both Divisions, as well as of the Army Corps,
wrestled with the problem of making order out of chaos. Once the army
was to stick, it had to stick "By God!" and not be allowed to starve,
or want for ammunition or entrenching tools.
A small stone jetty was the first work of the Engineers, and this was
rapidly followed by a jetty that the signallers, under Captain Watson
(for the Engineers had vastly more important duties that called them
away up to the gullies and the firing-line), constructed. But that
was done after the second week. The Army Medical Corps worked in a
dressing-station, just a tent with a Red Cross flying overhead. Yet it
could not be said that the Turks wilfully shelled this station, though
necessarily they must have dropped their shells round its canvas doors,
while inside it came the bullets, because of the stores that lay about,
blocking, choking the beach. Many were the experiments that were made
to distribute the supplies. Colonel Austin, Ordnance officer, 1st
Division, with his staff-sergeant, Tuckett, had attempted to erect the
piles of boxes of biscuits, as well as picks and shovels and ammunition
around Hell Spit. Promptly the Turks dropped shells right into the
middle of them, scattering the whole and killing several men. There was
nothing for it but to move back along the Cove, dig into the sides of
the cliffs, and pile the reserve stores up the main gully. On the beach
cases were stacked in the form of traverses, round which the men might
take such shelter as was afforded when the guns--Beachy Bill, from
Olive Grove, and Anafarta, from the village near Suvla--commenced their
"hates."
This beach and the cliffs overlooking it might be best described as
"The Heart of Anzac." At the foot of the gully was camped General Sir
William Birdwood--the "Soul of Anzac"--and his whole Staff in dugouts
no different from the holes the men built in the hills. A hundred feet
up the slopes on the south side was General Bridges and his Staff, and
on the other hand General Godley with the 2nd A. and N.Z. Division.
Those first quarters were only slightly varied in after-months.
General Birdwood remained always on the beach, almost at the foot
of the jetty. Here it was that one found the living pulse of the
position--the throb of life that meant the successful holding of the
acres so gallantly won, the strength that held back the Turks, while
road arteries cut into the hillsides and formed the channels down which
the best blood of the Australians and New Zealanders flowed. One cannot
help recording that constantly shells burst round the leader's dugout.
Thus it happened that his Staff officer, Captain Onslow, met his death
under tragic circumstances in July. It was a particularly hot night,
and this popular officer said he would sleep on the top of his dugout
as being cooler. The Turks commenced to shell the beach (probably in
the belief that we were that night landing men and stores, which we
were not). Captain Onslow retired within the poor and partial shelter,
emerging again after about a quarter of an hour, when he fancied the
guns had stopped. Unfortunately, it was only a lull, and the next shell
burst right on the dugout, killing him instantly.
"It is only a question of time," was a phrase current on the beach
amongst the working parties. It meant one had only to be there long
enough and the inevitable shell-burst would find its victims. Yet
considering the traffic--that the whole army of 30,000, increasing to
50,000 in July and August, as the zealous Australian Light Horsemen
(dismounted) came into action, were fed from that 600 yards strip of
beach--it was astonishing that the casualties were as low as they
were. Twenty men were killed at a shell-burst once--that was the most
horrible incident. Thousands of the heaviest shells fell harmlessly
into the water. Six hundred shells a day, at one period, fell along the
shore and around the pinnaces and lighters or amongst the slowly moving
transports. No large ships were sunk. "The beach"--and those two words
were used to include the thousands that inhabited it and the adjacent
hillsides--watched the vessels chased from anchorage to anchorage. The
army blessed their lives they were ashore; while those afloat wondered
how any were left alive after the "hottings" the beach got. But the
casualties from both Turkish enfilading batteries were never reckoned
in all at 2,000--big enough, but very little result for the molestation
that the Turks hoped to throw down on the heroes who toiled there day
and night. For most of the work was done at night, in the small hours
of the morning, when the transports under a darkened sky--the moon had
to be studied studiously on Gallipoli--could come close inshore with
100-gallon tanks, thousands of Egyptian water-tins, millions of rounds
of ammunition, and thousands of rounds of shells, scores of tons of
beef and biscuits. Bread and the little fresh meat that came ashore
were landed from the regular trawler service that arrived from Imbros
by day, via Helles.
Once a great steam pumping engine was landed. One heard it afterwards
puffing away on the beach, sending the water from the barges (filled
with water from the Nile and anchored by the pier) up to the tank
reservoirs on the side of the ridge, where began a reticulation scheme
all over Anzac to the foot of the hills, thereby certainly saving the
energy of the army expended on fatigues. How the troops blessed it!
None of that "luxury," however, in the early days; only the monotonous
grind up and down the slopes with water-cans.
You come on the Telephone Exchange of Anzac (to which led what appeared
an impossible tangle of wires) and the Post Office, on either side of
the entrance to Bully Beef Gully, opposite Watson's Landing. It is
possible to talk all over the position from here. Three or four men
are working constantly at the switches. Farther along the beach on the
right and you find the clearing stations, under Colonel Howse, V.C.,
wedged in between the hillside and the screen of boxes on the beach.
You come to Hell Spit, round which you might be chased by a machine gun
from Gaba Tepe; and beyond, the graveyard, open to shell fire. Burials
mostly have to be carried out at night, when the shelling is not so
dangerous. There was a chaplain who, with his little band of devoted
stretcher-bearers and the comrades of the fallen, was performing the
last rites at this spot, when, to his dismay, the Turks commenced
the shelling again. "Dust unto dust," repeated the chaplain, and the
bursting shell flung the newly exposed earth over the party. "Oh,
hell!" said the padre. "This is too ho-at for me! I'm aff!" And he
went. So was the spirit of war bred in the souls of the men. It was
sheer madness, the risks the troops would take on the beach when the
Turks had fired old Beachy Bill from the Olive Grove--bathing under
shell fire. But if needs must they always faced those shellings,
anxious to get back to their job--to get supplies ashore before they
were sunk, to get comrades away to comfort on the hospital ships. No
amount of shelling interrupted the daily swim for long.
So you walk north back along the beach, pondering, looking up at the
heights above Ari Burnu Point. You wonder at the men of the 3rd Brigade
who stormed it and the ridge on your right. The idealness of the Point
for machine guns to repel any landing, seems only too evident. You
pass the Army Corps headquarters--a line of dugouts, well shielded
from the sun with canvas and blankets. Above is the wireless station,
with its widespread aerials on a bare hill--deserted except for a few
casual men who had burrowed deep and took their chance--and immense
searchlights for signalling in a cavern in the hill. Near at hand,
too, is the Army Post Office, in a low wooden building, one of the
few at Anzac. Tinkerings and hammerings arise from the bomb factory,
next door almost, where the finishing touches are put to the jam-tin
bombs, originally constructed in Egypt, and to the Turkish shell cases,
converted into "surprise packets" by diligent sappers, who work day and
night to keep pace with the demand for twice any number that the Turks
might throw. Up farther on this bared hill is the corral built for the
reception of Turkish prisoners. You meet them, tired-looking, sullen
men, being marched down through the gully to the pier. Hereabouts is an
incinerator, always smoking and exploding cartridges that have fallen
into it.
You come to two more gullies before you reach the northern point of
the Cove. Up one is the New Zealand Headquarters, bunched--huddled,
in fact--on the side of the ravine, with the terrace in front, on
which the leaders sit and yarn in the spare moments, watching the
shells burst on the beach, the warships racing about from harbour to
harbour, destroyers nosing slowly into the flanks of the position,
aeroplanes skimming away to the Turkish lines. In the next and last
gully there are many scores of placid mules, munching away, waiting
for their work at sunset. You reach the Point (Ari Burnu), a flat,
rounded, rather sharp bend, and you find yourself amongst a great many
mule-wagons, standing in the sand, and before you a 2-mile sweep of
yellow beach (Ocean Beach) that bends round to Suvla Bay. There rises
up from the shore a mass of knolls and hills, the under features of
the Sari Bair ridge, with the Salt Lake (the salt sparkles in the sun)
drying at their base. Immediately in the foreground, and to the left,
are the abrupt terminations of the Sari Bair ridge: Sphinx Rock and the
brown, clayey, bare slopes of Plugge's Plateau, the whole hillside so
mouldered away with the lashing of the Mediterranean storms, that the
shells which burst on it bring tumbling to the gullies below vast falls
of earth, until it appears that the whole hill could easily be blown
away. Away up higher, beyond, is the battle-line; its spent bullets
come flopping about you, splashing up the water, flicking up the sand.
They are never so spent that they won't penetrate your flesh or bones
and stick.
[Illustration: BRIGADIER-GENERAL MONASH'S HEADQUARTERS, REST GULLY.]
[Illustration: SPHINX ROCK AND THE ENTRANCE TO REST GULLY.
To face p. 172.]
Hastily you turn into a sap, and all that wonderful broad expanse of
beach and hills is lost. For by day the Ocean Beach is impracticable,
and at night, only by taking a risk, which the Indian muleteers do,
can the nearest portion of it be used, thus relieving the pressure of
traffic in the great communication-way. What a task to dig this sap
miles out into the enemy's territory, the only link with the strong,
but isolated, posts (beyond Fishermen's Huts) held in turn by parties
of New Zealanders, Maoris, and Light Horsemen, under Lieut.-Colonel
Bauchop! It is deep, broad--7 feet broad--hot, dusty, but safe. You may
leave it just as you reach the Ari Burnu Point, and, passing through
a gap in the hills and down a gully, regain the Cove. Just round the
Point you may look in at the Ordnance Stores, indicated by a dirty
blue-and-white flag, ragged and torn with shot and shell. That flag was
brought ashore by Colonel Austin, and was the only army flag ever flown
at Anzac.
Surely there is a smithy? A clanging sound of blows on an anvil makes
cheerful noise after the frenzied burst of shells. The workshops are
protected with huge thicknesses of stores; guns of all descriptions are
being made and remade here. Farther along are the medical stores, and
you find a spacious dugout, lined with lints and ointments, bandages,
splints, stretchers, and disinfectants. Hospital supplies were never
short at Anzac. Gurkha, Maori, Englishman, Australian, New Zealander
passes you on the beach. You may meet them all together, talking. You
may see them only in their respective groups with their own kin. It all
reminds you of an anthill. There are men--not hurrying, but going in
all directions--stopping to talk every dozen paces, and then going on
or turning back, apparently without motive, without reason. There are
some that march alone and never halt. But the whole trend of traffic
is from the hills and to the hills. Outward they go loaded, and return
empty-handed for more.
There came a time, not infrequent, when placid twilights fell on Anzac,
when even the intermittent crack of rifles or the occasional burst of
a bomb passed almost unnoticed. The wicked "psing" of bullets passing
overhead on their way to the water went unheeded. A solemn stillness
filled the air. Yes, quiet as a mining camp on the seashore, far away
from war's turmoil, the beach nearly always rested with the sinking of
the sun behind the massed hills of Samothrace--the island refuge of
ancient oracles; its departing rays lit the sky in golden shadows, that
mingled with blue the orange and green tints in the sky. Deeper shades
darkened the island of Imbros and cast into silhouette the warships,
waiting and watching till the aeroplanes sailing overhead should
transmit their observations, which meant targets, for the bombardment
of new enemy positions. The warships lay, like inert monsters, on a
shimmering sea. Sunsets on Gallipoli took away the sting of battle. The
shore parties, their most arduous labours still to come, watched the
twilight in a state of suspended animation. Five o'clock was the hour
for the commencement of bathing. It usually was, too, the signal for a
Turkish "hate" of ten minutes or more, to banish the bathers. Any who
could be spared stripped off their remaining few clothes, clambered
aboard barges, or dived from the end of the pier, and washed off the
sweat of a sweltering day in the clear waters; for Anzac was for five
months as warm a corner as any in the Ægean. Generals, orderlies,
intelligence officers, men who had been toiling round the firing-line
from dewy dawn, plunged in, spluttering an interchange of scraps of
gossip of this position and that, and news from the outside world
that seemed almost lost to those on this battlefield. You carefully
placed your clothes, ready to dodge along the pier back to comparative
safety, behind high stacks of stores, as the first shrieking shell came
hurtling over from Olive Grove. "Old Beachy Bill snarling again," was
the only comment, and once the little "hate" had ceased, back again for
the last dive.
Then sometimes out of the stillness would sound a gong--a beaten
shell-case--bidding the officers to an evening meal; or the
high-pitched voice of Captain Chaytor, the naval officer in command on
the beach--as brave a fellow as ever stepped. The Navy took no more
notice of shells than they did of Army orders--they were under "the
Admiral." Still the co-operation between the two services was never
marred by serious obstructions.
"Last boat for Imbros," announced the naval officer. He might have said
"Last boat for the shore." Gripping handbags or kitbags, there was
usually a party waiting, and they dodged out now from behind shelters
or from dugouts. They were off to one or other of the bases on duty,
and the trawler or destroyer was waiting offshore for the pinnace to
come alongside.
"Picket boat ahoy! Where are you from?" Again the naval officer is
speaking.
The voice of a midshipman, suitably pitched and full-throated, replies,
"_London_, sir."
"I did not ask where you were born. Where are you from?"
"_London_, sir."
Then the naval officer remembers his evening aboard the battleship
_London_, and orders the panting craft alongside. The shells begin to
fall. He gives sharp orders through his megaphone, and pinnaces begin
backing out from the shore, scattering in all directions till they are
half a mile from the beach, and have become almost impossible targets
for any gunners. The Turks desist. On the beach bathing is promptly
resumed.
General Birdwood rarely ever missed his evening dip. He bathed amongst
his men, shedding off rank with his uniform, which led more than once
to amusing incidents. One day the canvas pipe of the water-barge fell
from the pier into the sea, and an irate man on the barge, seeing some
one near it, cursed him, and asked him if he would "---- well lend a
fellow a ---- hand to get the ---- thing up." General Birdwood--for
it was he--delights to relate the story himself, and how he hastily
commenced to pull the pipe into place, when a sergeant dashed up and
offered to relieve him, in the midst of abusive directions from the
bargee, who, unconscious of the signals from the sergeant and of the
vacant staring of all around, urged on his General to more strenuous
and more successful efforts. Did it endear the General less to the men?
Rather not. A quiet, very firm, but very friendly man was this leader
of the Australians, who understood their character admirably.
On another occasion, when returning to his dugout over the top of
the hill where rested the bomb factory, he accidentally stood on the
roof of a dugout, and stones and earth began to fall on the occupant
beneath. "Quick, quick!" said General Birdwood, knowing his men; "let
me get away from this! I would rather face half a dozen Turks than that
Australian when he comes out!"
There is a "beach" story, too--all stories originated on the beach--far
too characteristic to go unrecorded, of an Australian "pinching" extra
water from the water barge one very still evening, when he was caught
by the naval officer on duty, who, in the pure English of the Navy,
demanded, "What are you doing thar, sir?" and up to the dugouts on the
hillside floated the prompt reply, "Getting some ---- wart-ar, sir."
But night has fallen and the beach wakens to its greatest degree of
activity. Long since have efforts to load and land stores, to take
ammunition to the firing-line, been abandoned by day. The Turkish
observation at Gaba Tepe stopped that. All the hillside glows with
twinkling lights; the sound of laughter or stern commands floats down
from the higher steppes of the hills on to the beach. There is a fine
dust rising from the strand as the traffic increases and becomes an
endless stream of men, of mules, of wagons. Somewhere offshore--you
know that it must be about 400 yards--there come voices across the
waters as the barges are loaded and the steam pinnaces tug them to
the shore. They are lashed to the narrow piers, where the waves lap
their sides. Parties quickly board them to unload the food that is the
life of the army, and the munitions which are its strength. There are
heavier goods, too, to bring ashore, sometimes needing large parties to
handle. There are rifles and machine guns, there are picks and shovels,
iron plates for loopholes. Wood, too, forms not the least strain placed
on the transport.
So it goes on night after night, this constant stream of material to
keep the army efficient, ready for any attack, ready, too, for any
offensive. The trawlers have sneaked close into the Cove. The Turkish
gunners, as if seeing this, begin to shell the beach. The work in the
Cove stops abruptly. Men come scrambling from the pier and the boats to
seek the shelter of dugouts and the great piles of stores. The shells
fall harmlessly in the water (unless they destroy a barge of flour).
When the bombardment ceases the routine is resumed. From Gaba Tepe the
Turks could not see into the heart of Anzac, but their guns easily
reached the distance, measured exactly. Opposite the pier-heads the men
congregate. You find it difficult to push your way amongst the Indian
mule-carts, to reach the canvas water-sheet and the tanks from which
the men are getting supplies. The traffic divides. One section goes
north to the No. 2 and No. 3 outposts, 2 miles away, out through the
long sap: the dust from the shore is almost choking as you reach the
sap, for the strings of mules pass and repass almost endlessly. The
other branch of the traffic goes south (along the beach too) in front
of the hospitals round Hell Spit, and then, striking one of many paths,
is diverted along the right flank of the firing-line. No long line of
sap to protect you here, and always a chance of a dropping bullet.
Only when the moon rises above the horizon and the pine ridges and
then above the battle front is it time for the beach to rest. Higher
and higher it mounts, until at midnight it is slanting towards the
entrance to the Dardanelles. One by one the lights have gone out and
cooks' fires have ceased to flicker. On either flank two long arms of
light, that broaden as they reach the hill, start from the sides of
the destroyers. They were staring into the Turkish hills and gullies.
Behind them the gunners watch all night for movements in the enemy's
ranks, and the guns boom at the slightest stir. After the alarms of the
night and the bursts of rapid fire, the dawn brings another lull over
Anzac, when the constant rattle of muskets in the firing-line a mile
away over the ridges and the swish and t-tzing of the little messengers
of death as they pass out to sea, are like to be forgotten or accepted
as part of the curious life of Anzac. But the work never quite ceases,
and morning finds tired officers giving the last directions before they
turn into their dugouts and escape the morning "hate" that the Turks
with the first flush of dawn begin to throw over the beach and amongst
the lingering, dawdling trawlers and transports that have drifted
inshore. The shells follow the ships till they regain the circle of
safety, some 2 miles from land. "Keep your distance, and we won't worry
you," say the Turks.
It is exciting to watch the steamers dodging the shells just as the sun
first casts a glitter on the blue Ægean. But they have accomplished
all they need, and till the arrival of the daily trawlers from Imbros,
Mudros, and Cape Helles, there is no need for worry. So the workers
take a morning dip and turn in, while the men on the pinnaces are
rocked to sleep as they lie wallowing offshore, and the pump begins its
monotonous clanking.
On rugged cliffs and amongst bristling bush the heart of Anzac began to
palpitate with power and life. With roads and terraces was the hillside
cut in May and stripped of its bush. The throb of the heart was the
pulse of the army, its storehouse and its life; but the shore of the
Cove was dyed to the murmuring waters' edge with the blood of the men
that made it.