A LINESMAN IN GALLIPOLI
[A vivid understanding of the work which our soldiers did in Gallipoli
during the earlier stages of the operations in the Dardanelles, and of
the strange happenings which were of daily occurrence in fighting the
German-led Turks, is given by this story, which is told by Private John
Frank Gray, 5th Battalion Wiltshire Regiment.]
Everybody knows how the transport _River Clyde_, with two thousand
British soldiers packed in her, was deliberately run ashore on V
Beach, at the southern point of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Great holes
had been cut in her steel sides, to make doors through which the men
could get ashore when she was hard and fast, without embarking in
any sort of craft. Land they did, in the end, though they suffered
heavily through the Turks’ terrific fire. I did not see that famous
and wonderful performance, but I disembarked, with my regiment, close
to the transport while she was still aground. We had almost the same
experience as the troops from the _River Clyde_ had gone through. We
forced a landing, in spite of barbed wire entanglements in the water,
traps which had caught many a fine fellow and held him till the enemy’s
fire got him. It is odd to talk of wire entanglements in the sea,
grabbing and tearing you as you plunge into the water, to wade ashore;
but there they were, one more new feature in a war that has been full
of strange and devilish things. Before we landed in Gallipoli we had
experience of transport, trawler, barge and pinnace; and we were no
sooner at the end of the voyage from England than we were under deadly
fire and in the thick of it.
We went right into the firing-line, and the Turks gave us more than a
warm reception--it was hot. We were under fire all the time we were
landing, but we had the uncommon good luck to suffer no loss. As we
forced our way ashore we saw plenty of evidence of the desperate nature
of the adventure of the men of the _River Clyde_; but we were too much
absorbed in our own affairs to pay much heed to what had happened to
other fellows.
We had got ashore on July 16th at Seddul Bahr, and stayed there all
night. So that we should be as comfortable as possible we made dug-outs
in the face of the cliff. The cliff at that place is very hard, and we
had plenty of blasting to do, as well as work with pick and shovel.
My mates and I had put plenty of elbow-grease into our own particular
job, and had finished our dug-out and got into it, to be cosy for the
night. It was very much like animals going to bed. We were worn out,
and lost no time in going to sleep. I had gone off soundly and knew
nothing till I was roughly roused by some fellows shouting, “Wake up!
Wake up! Three of our chaps are buried alive!”
We did not need a second rousing. We all sprang up and rushed to a
spot not far away, where we saw that there had been a fall of earth
and rock, and we dug harder than we had ever dug before. At the end
of it, having dug to a depth of three feet, and thrown the earth and
rock away from us, we came across three poor chaps of my company who
had been buried by a fall of earth, caused by them digging too far
into the ground to give them shelter. They had undermined too much,
and the earth-roof had collapsed and crushed them. We saw at once that
there was no hope--the men looked as if they had been killed on the
spot: they must have been dead an hour--but we put them on stretchers
and the field ambulance men did all they could. But it was too late.
Next day we dug graves for them and put crosses over. There are some
fine graveyards out there, well cared for, and with barbed wire fences
to preserve them. While we were burying our comrades the Turks fired
on us continuously, and this had to serve as the last volleys over
the fallen. That solemn and tragic beginning of my experiences after
landing at Gallipoli will never fade from my mind.
Even at this early stage I noticed the extraordinary luck of war. Some
of the King’s Own Lancasters had been in the trenches for fourteen
days, and during the whole of that time they had had only twenty
casualties. They left the trenches and came right up alongside of us,
on a little bit of a mound. The Turks must have got wind that a lot of
troops were on the move, for the shrapnel came bursting over the lot
of us, especially the Lancasters, who in less than half an hour lost
more than forty men, fourteen being killed and the rest wounded. Four
or five of our own fellows were hit, so that we escaped lightly, and
were able to send our stretcher-bearers to give a hand in getting the
wounded soldiers to hospital.
The burying alive of men and the loss of men who had spent a fortnight
in the trenches unscathed, were the things I saw when I was spending my
first night in Gallipoli, so I can very fairly say that we landed right
in the thick of it. It was a hot start, and it did not get cooler, for
on the following morning, when we were on the way to the trenches at
Achi Baba, we were under constant shrapnel fire. We crawled and crept
up as best we could, using roads, or rather tracks, which had been made
by the 29th Division. It was fearfully hot, we were heavily laden, and
there was nothing but prickly scrub and rock and stifling dust about,
and bursting shell all the time. But we forged slowly ahead, making the
best of it, and thankful when we got into one of the little ravines
which abound there, and make first-rate natural trenches--thankful
because we got shelter without having to dig for it. In this advance
some of our chaps fell, and the ravines formed their resting-places.
The graves were filled in and crosses put over to tell how the soldiers
had died. I might say here that whenever it was possible to do so, an
Army chaplain read the Burial Service; but often enough a funeral had
to take place with no chaplain near at hand.
An advance like this is a slow business. You go in single file, keeping
your heads well down, because of the stray bullets from snipers. The
Turkish snipers are dead shots--I will tell you more about them later.
At the end of our dodging and ducking and crawling in single file we
got into a support trench, and I began to breathe a bit more freely,
because I thought that here at any rate I was safe. But we had no
sooner reached the front-line trenches than the Turks started shelling
us, and very quickly I thought that the very end of me had come. There
was a tremendous crash just overhead, then a horrible rumbling, then I
was knocked down in a heap, and all I knew was that a shell had burst
in the trench and that I was buried in a mass of earth and rock. I was
bruised and stunned--so were four of my chums who were near me; but we
had had better luck than the three poor fellows who had been buried by
the fall of earth above them, and pretty soon we had worried our way
out of the heap of muck and were staring at each other--and I shall
never forget that incident, if it is only because of the stupid way in
which we stared at each other, and never said a word. We were making
tea when the shell burst, and were looking forward to a cosy meal;
but here we were, staring at each other in surprise, wondering what
the dickens the matter was, till we looked around and saw what sorry
objects we were, and that the tea gear had been scattered all over the
place. When we had got over our fright--and what’s the use of saying
that we weren’t scared?--we saw the grim humour of it, and laughed and
pulled ourselves together, thankful that we were still in the land of
the living.
That was part of our early introduction to shell fire, and we very soon
learned that you never know what sort of a trick a shell is up to.
Shells are very deceiving. You hear their peculiar and horrible whistle
and think that they are going to burst anywhere except where they do.
When we had pulled ourselves together we left our shattered trench and
went into another part of the trench, to pull round a bit and get out
of the shrapnel bombardment. But within three hours we were back again
and settled down, wondering what the coming night had in store for us.
We were in for another surprise, though at that time, of course, we did
not know it.
This surprise took the shape of an attack upon us by hand-grenades,
or bombs. It was pitch dark; but the blackness was lit up near us in
patches, caused by the explosion of the bombs. We got half a dozen of
them, and as it was clear that some Turks had crept towards us from
their firing-line, which was only about 200 yards away, we sent out a
sergeant and five or six men to hunt the bomb-throwers. You might as
well have looked for a needle in a haystack as try to find Turks who
were hiding in the darkness in the shrubs or the ravines; at any rate,
our chaps did not see or hear anything of the Turks, and they had to
come back without doing anything. There was no doubt that the Turks
had crept up to us quite close and then hurled their bombs; but we
were lucky to escape with only one man slightly wounded, though if the
bombers had had any luck we should have been blown to pieces. These
intensely dark nights were always very trying because of these attacks.
It was an immense relief when the moonlight nights came, because then
the Turks dared not try their tricks on. There was always the guard,
of course, two hours on and two hours off. This gave a great sense of
protection; but the guard work itself gave you the creeps. You were on
the rack all the time, fancying that you saw some one approaching when
as a matter of fact there was no one near. There was always the chance,
too, of being picked off by a sniper who used horrible explosive
bullets. One of our men was struck down, and when we went up to him
and removed his helmet we saw at once that an explosive bullet had
been used, for the skull was completely shattered. You could always
tell when these awful things had been used, from the appearance of the
sandbags. The bullets would strike and explode, and smash the sandbags
so badly that it took us all our time to make the damage good. You dare
not put even a periscope above the trench; if you did a sniper got a
bullet through it before you knew where you were.
It was all tremendously exciting, and there was never a chance of being
dull or downhearted. The system of trenches was amazing, turning and
twisting everywhere in the most wonderful manner. We made the most of
these complications, too, by naming the trenches Oxford Street, Regent
Street, and so on, with Clapham Junction and the like for important
junctions of trenches. These names, which were chalked up or put on
boards, were most useful in helping you to find your way about, and
sometimes very amusing misunderstandings arose.
“Do you know where Oxford Circus is?” a chap asked me one day.
“Rather!” I told him, proud to throw light on his ignorance, and I
began to tell him, till he cut me short by snapping that he wasn’t
talking about London, but the trenches. We got many a good laugh
out of these little misunderstandings; for out at the front you are
always ready to make the most of the smallest joke. You needed all
the cheerfulness you could get, too, because of the awful sights that
constantly met you and the endless peril you were in. I shall never
forget one of the very first things my eyes saw in those opening
days of my campaigning in Gallipoli. We got to the spot at Achi Baba
where the Munsters and the Dublin Fusiliers, during a gallant advance,
had been enfiladed by machine-gun fire and literally mown down. From
the trench we had occupied we could see the men lying just as they
had fallen, while trying to take cover. There they were, on the open
ground, absolutely riddled with bullets, and with their packs on, and
their rifles and bayonets and everything else. They had been lying
there for about a fortnight, because it was impossible to do anything
in the way of burying them, owing to the enemy’s incessant fire and
sniping.
Things hereabouts were particularly horrible. We went into a Turkish
trench that had been taken, and started to make a fire-trench. We
pulled away the old sandbags and dug away at the parapet with our
picks. There was a horrible stench, but we were used to smells and
did not take much notice of it till we found that the picks had a lot
of foul stuff on them which we could not account for; but we soon
discovered that the parapet was composed of the dead bodies of Turks
which had been piled up and just covered with earth, the sandbags being
placed on the top of the wall of corpses.
In this same trench there was a well which had been covered with
planks. Naturally enough we began to explore it, not that we expected
to get anything to drink from it, and when we had removed the planks we
found that the well, which we calculated was ten or twelve feet deep,
had a lot of dead Turks in it. We counted six of them, and had enough
of the job, so we put the planks back, and felt that our curiosity had
been satisfied.
When we had been there four or five days and were getting used to the
appearance of the country, we saw a Turk just peeping over the top of
a little mound, with his rifle pointing towards us and in the attitude
of firing. We felt sure that we had caught a sniper, and two or three
shots were promptly fired. The Turk was still there, and it was clear
that he had been shot. Later on we were able to get near him, and then
we saw that he was black with flies and had been shot through the eye
while sniping; but not shot by us, because when we shook him his head
fell off, showing that he had been dead for some time. We saw another
Turk who was sitting against a tree. We went up and found that he, too,
was dead. He looked a mere skeleton; but he was swathed in clothing
and equipment in the most extraordinary fashion. His trousers were all
rags, and his tunic was all patches of differently coloured cloths; he
had three shirts and two belts on, and we wondered how he had stuck so
many clothes in such stifling weather.
I had an exciting adventure one day--a bit too exciting to be
altogether pleasant. I and another chap had been sent out to an
artillery position which was called Clapham Junction Station, to get
some corrugated iron. We had a long way--two and a half miles--to go,
and it was necessary to keep to the cover of the trenches whenever we
could do so. We were able to do that for most of the way, going through
the very trenches which had been dug by the poor chaps of the Munsters
and Dublin Fusiliers who had fallen. We got to the end of our journey,
quite near the French lines, and then started back with our corrugated
iron. Burdened in this way, we found that one of the trenches was too
narrow for us to get along, and we were forced to make our way across
open country for about 500 yards. As soon as we left the shelter of the
trench the sun shone on our galvanised metal and gave the Turks a good
target. We promptly had three or four shells bursting near us, and we
lost no time in doubling over the open ground, staggering along with
the iron sheets, and thankful when we were under shelter again, with
a farewell shell or two to show us what a narrow squeak we had had. I
picked up one of these shells, which had not burst, and kept it a long
time, meaning to bring it home as a souvenir, but I found it a nuisance
and had to throw it away.
We were constantly seeing strange sights and learning how cunning the
Turks were. One morning I saw some Australians bring in a Turk who was
wearing one of our uniforms. The tunics had white patches on them,
so that our artillery could distinguish us, and it was one of these
that the fellow wore. He had no doubt taken it from a dead British
soldier, and so dressed, he had joined a party of Australians who
were drawing water at a well. He kept his mouth shut, and might have
gone undiscovered, but he and an Australian began quarrelling, then
fighting, and that gave him away, because he could not speak English.
They shot him, as a spy, the following morning.
At the same place--I am now speaking of W Beach, where we were
resting--we saw a Turkish sniper on the top of a hill. We sent out
two or three times to try and get him, but failed; but at last he was
caught while robbing one of our fellows who was dead. The sniper had
shot him, and now he was out for plunder. When we had this sniper in
hand we found that we had got hold of a very dangerous customer, a man
who had done a lot of mischief amongst our fellows. He had gone about
his sniping in a very business-like way, and had established himself
in a spot which commanded points which had to be continually passed by
our stretcher-bearers and working parties. A good many of the R.A.M.C.
chaps were hit, and it was curious that most of the wounds were about
the knee. We discovered that these wounds were the result of the
sniper’s low firing--he was very near the ground and had pretty nearly
complete control of this particular spot. Our fellows used to double
round it for all they were worth, but they were not fast enough to
dodge the Turk’s bullets. When we examined his dug-out we found three
rifles fixed on tripods, which were always trained on the spots where
our fellows had to pass. In addition to that he had a machine-gun, and
this he used for firing on our men when he knew that it was meal-time
and that they were in clusters. It was a great relief when his account
was settled.
Aircraft fighting has developed enormously during the war, and I saw an
exciting fight between three of our aeroplanes and two of the Turks. We
had got a bit used to aeroplanes, for a Taube had swooped over us and
dropped a chance bomb which blew up the quartermaster’s stores. Three
bombs fell about a hundred yards away, and I noticed that the noise
they made when they came through the air was just like the whistle of
a railway engine. In the fight I am talking about our fellows brought
down one of the Turkish machines, and they made a hard chase after
the other, but it got away. It was a really thrilling fight, and our
chaps got tremendously excited over it. We had been warned of an attack
from the air by three blasts on a whistle, and that was the signal to
take shelter and to cover up the guns with tarpaulins, to hide them.
During these attacks you are supposed never to look up, but the fight
was so splendid and our chaps got so excited that the warning was
forgotten in many cases, and chaps were peeping over the parapets and
some were actually standing up on the parapets. Poor fellows! Turkish
snipers spotted them and got three with their bullets. I was only about
a hundred yards away when they were killed. Their loss, which was a
lesson to all of us, cast quite a gloom over our victory in the air.
After being in the trenches at Achi Baba for sixteen days we went
back to Lemnos, a big naval base about four and a half hours’ distant
by transport. We were supposed to have a week’s rest, but we were at
Lemnos only three days. At the end of that time we went back to the
Peninsula and landed at Anzac, and went straight up to the firing-line,
which had been made at Chunuk Bahr--and our regiment got absolutely cut
up. It was one of the things that _will_ happen in a war like this.
We had gone up into the trenches and nothing much happened while we
were there. After our spell in the trenches we were taken up into a
gulley for twenty-four hours’ rest and sleep. We were in high spirits
at the prospect of such a change, and we took our equipment off and
made a few dug-outs and got into them and settled down, and very
comfortable and contented we were. But our rest and peace were smashed
at dawn on the following morning, when we were thrown into confusion
by a heavy Turkish attack. The Turks had advanced into the firing-line
on the opposite side of the hill. There were plenty of them and they
had machine-guns, while we were quite helpless, having no rifles nor
equipment--indeed, many of us had not even our jackets on, as we were
taking it easy.
There was quite a stampede for the time being, and some one passed the
order, “Every man for himself!” It was a mistake, I am certain, but it
added immensely to the confusion. That awful alarm caused some of our
unarmed chaps to make a bolt for it, the result of temporary panic;
and now came one of those splendid bits of work which are the pride of
every regiment, and which no one can do better than British soldiers.
The adjutant, Captain Belcher, rallied about seventy of the men. He
pulled them together, put heart of grace into them, and shouted to
them to get their rifles and bayonets and follow him. There is nothing
like an heroic example at such a time. The little band rallied round
the adjutant, and with wild cheers and a gallant rush they hurled
themselves upon the Turks, and such was the suddenness and fury of
their attack that the Turks bolted like children--and big hefty chaps
they were--with our fellows, some of them almost as small as dwarfs,
tearing after them with the bayonet. In this furious affair one of our
men got wounded and could not walk. The adjutant picked him up and
began to carry him away. As he did so the Turks opened fire on him with
a machine-gun, and he must have been riddled--I never saw anything more
of him. At the same time Lieutenant Ratcliffe, who had been wounded,
was being carried off on a stretcher. He seemed to think that the
chance of escape was hopeless, and so he said to his bearers, “Put me
down and look after yourselves, boys. I shall be all right.” It was a
hard thing to do, but the men obeyed, and all of us who could do so got
away from that fatal spot, which we were far too weak to hold, in spite
of the success of the adjutant’s rally, and at last we got back to the
beach.
It was then that we compared notes and heard of what had happened in
various places, and the roll having been called we supposed that every
man who could escape had reached the beach. But two nights afterwards
we formed a search party, and went back up the hill and were lucky
enough to find and bring back with us about a dozen poor fellows who
had been lying all that time on the battlefield. From this rescue we
supposed that there must be other men alive at the top of the hill;
but there was no chance of reaching them in the daytime, and we could
not go at night, for the searchlights from our own warships swept the
hillside and lit it up so brilliantly that any search party would
have been shown up to the snipers. So we did no more, and soon we
were forgetting; for we were hard at work on fatigue, helping the
Engineers to build a new firing-line, a trench about 1400 yards long.
Then happened a thing so strange that it seemed beyond belief, like
men rising from the dead. Fifteen days had passed since the fight,
and no one dreamed that there could possibly be survivors, yet there
appeared at the beach headquarters two terribly worn and haggard men,
Lance-Corporal A. G. Scott of my company, and Private R. Humphries,
another of our chaps. We were amazed to see them, and far more amazed
to hear their story, which was that they and Private W. J. Head had
been up in the hill for fifteen days and nights, unable to get away,
and living on the biscuits and water that they had taken from the
haversacks and bottles of dead men. The Turks, they said, used to pass
them and shake hands with them, but would never give them any food
or water. The three used to grope about in the daytime to get food
and drink, and the Turks sniped at them whenever they got the chance.
Head was quite unable to escape, having had two bad wounds. Scott and
Humphries, desperate at last, crawled away and managed to reach our
regimental headquarters and tell their wonderful story, and it was no
sooner heard than a search party was organised, and, with Scott and
Humphries as guides, went back to the old fighting-place--a slow and
dangerous job. On the first night they found nothing, but on the next
night the relieving party came across three fellows and brought them
down. Head was amongst them--he had been out getting more biscuits and
water, and while doing so his right arm was smashed by a machine-gun
which was trained on him. The body of the poor lieutenant was found,
with several bayonet wounds, and he, like all the other officers who
fell, had been completely stripped by plunderers. The bodies had not a
thing on them.
The survivors of those awful days and nights on the hillside--from
August 10th to August 26th--had such a welcome as can be given only to
those who return when they have been given up as lost, and Scott and
Head and Humphries have been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
There have been some extraordinary incidents in this war, but not many
are stranger than this adventure of this little band of men for what
must have seemed an endless fortnight, and none that will stand out
more finely in the annals of the Wiltshires.
There was so much to be seen and done in the three months I spent in
the Near East that it is not easy to describe everything, and I must
now mention only one or two things more. Very clearly in my mind stands
out our attack on Chocolate Hill, after the warships had bombarded
it for three days. We watched the naval guns at work, and saw the
terrible havoc they caused--many a Turk we saw flying up in the air
when the shells burst. When we advanced over Salt Lake we had to cross
a hayfield, under a very heavy fire. The bursting shrapnel knocked many
a fellow down, and we could not stop to help them or pick them up--and
that was terribly hard on us, for the hayfield had taken fire and it
meant that a lot of helpless men were burned alive. I saw one poor
chap, a Yeoman, struck by shrapnel. This made him completely helpless
for the time, and the fire got at him and burnt half his left leg off;
but I am thankful to say that he managed, by a truly desperate effort,
to crawl away, and he got out of it at the finish. We were in the
advance, and as the field was catching fire just as we got out of it,
we escaped the worst, which was to be caught in the middle, so that
even those who were fit and could make a rush were badly burned and
suffering intensely before they could get clear of the horrible ring of
fire.
I can tell you of an extraordinary incident that happened in the
Chocolate Hill attack to a man of the South Wales Borderers. In the
second bayonet charge he drove his steel into a Turk--and it broke. Off
he dashed without his bayonet, and rushed with his chums to the next
trench, where he plumped into a Turk who was crawling through a hole.
Knowing that his broken bayonet was useless, he clubbed his rifle and
let the Turk have the butt. The blow smashed the butt clean off, and
the Borderer tumbled down. The Turk, who was not much hurt, sprang
back from his hole, and jumped to his feet with the Englishman fairly
at his mercy. Luckily for the Borderer a pal rushed up and saved him
by settling the Turk. It was an extraordinary thing that the Borderer
first broke his bayonet and then bashed his butt, which came off as
clean as a whistle.
Another thing that happened was this: An officer was wounded and fell.
One of the men of his regiment heard the report that the officer was
missing. “I’ll go and find him,” he said, and off he went. After an
hour’s search he found the officer and asked him if he could walk.
“No,” the officer told him, so the man picked him up and started to
carry him--a hard and dangerous job. While the officer was being
carried he was wounded again, a bullet striking him. “Put me down,” he
ordered, “and look after yourself.” “No, sir,” said the man; “if you’re
game, I am.” And game he was, too, for he got him safely away, and the
officer, to show his gratitude, made the man a present of his revolver
and a silver flask. When the soldier rejoined his regiment they took
the revolver away; but he kept the flask as a memento, carefully
wrapped up in all sorts of things, very proud of the gift from the
officer, who had said, “I shall never forget you!” The officer was
mortally wounded, and died before they could get him into the hospital
ship.
It was round Chocolate Hill that we made our queerest find of
all--women snipers. There was a kind of blockhouse which had been
a farmhouse, and it had a very fine well, which had some very fine
water--a precious thing. There was a big run on the well, and a lot of
fellows were shot by snipers who could not be traced, till a fellow in
a Welsh regiment swore that he could see some one moving in some trees
not very far away. A machine-gun was brought up, and fifty rounds or so
were fired into the trees, which dropped some very rare fruit--four men
Turks and one woman Turk, all snipers. When we went up we found that
they were almost naked, and had their faces and hands and bodies and
rifles painted green to match the trees. And there they roosted, like
evil birds, potting at our chaps whenever they got the chance, which
was pretty often. This was such a good haul that firing was directed on
all the trees, and more snipers were brought down, including several
women. Some of the women wore trousers, like the men, and some had a
kind of full grey-coloured skirt. They were as thin as rats, and looked
as if they had had nothing to eat for months. I think there were six or
seven women snipers caught in the trees, and it is said that the Turks
have women in the trenches; but I don’t know if that is true. I saw one
woman sniper who had been caught by the New Zealanders. I don’t know
what was done with her; but as the men came back they told us they had
bagged her in a dug-out, where she had a machine-gun and a rifle, and
that she seemed to have been doing a very good business in sniping.
Dysentery knocked me out in the end, and after spending a fortnight in
hospital at Malta I had “H.S.B.”--hospital-ship berth--put opposite to
my name. I came home in a hospital ship, a foreigner, which made me
thankful when I landed at Southampton and entered a good old English
hospital train bound for Manchester.