_April_ 28.--First chance of scribbling anything for three days. Been
through hell--just that. War! It wasn't war; it was just cold-blooded
butchery. How the position has been held beats me. But held it has
been--and it's going to be held--at a cost! I wonder what the price of
crêpe will rise to out in Australia and New Zealand! Here goes for a
shy at describing our amusement of the past three days.
It was dark when we left the transports off Gaba Tepe and crept in
towards the denser blackness that represented the shore. The night--or
early morning, rather--was still; everything seemed in our favor; not a
sound welled out seaward, not a light twinkled in the murk ahead. Could
it be that we had taken the Turks by surprise? Or were they simply
lying low and playing a waiting game? Soon we were to know.
On--on crept the boats loaded to the gunwales with the citizen soldiers
from the Dominions. Every jaw was set hard as agate, every eye was
fixed on the forbidding-looking heights now taking form dimly as the
east reddened and the sky became shot with lengthening spears of
greenish-yellow. Minutes passed--minutes that seemed as hours--while
ever shoreward crawled the fleet of boats, and even plainer and
gloomier loomed the frowning cliffs that dominated the Bay of Anzac.
Back of the flotilla, away to seaward, lay the British warships, their
gray hulls floating ghostlike in the first of the dawn--like couchant
lions scenting blood. A sense of protection, modified to some extent by
the stretch of intervening water and the ghostliness of their outlines,
emanated from those cruisers and battleships squatting like watch-dogs
on the chain, alert and eager. Our gaze wandered ever and anon from
the forbidding shore ahead to where those uncouth gray hulls broke the
sea-line. Would they never give tongue!
... We were close to the land. The _wouff!_ of a gentle surf breaking
on a sloping shingle beach, followed by the _soughing_ of the undertow,
came plainly to our straining ears. Back of the crescent-shaped strand,
now dimly outlined in a flatted monotint of leaden gray, rose the
darker, scrub-clothed slope, its breast seamed and gashed by _dongas_
and water-courses, that stretched to the foot of the sheer bluff whose
summit cut the sky-line 400 feet above our heads. As the minutes passed
the scene changed. Sand and shingle took form and color in the rapidly
growing half-tones. The blackness of the slope beyond merged into a
velvet green. The serrated crest of the ridge grew roseate as the first
of the sun-rays stretched forth athwart the fields of Troy and touched
it with gold-tipped fingers. A new-born day begotten of early summer
had sprung from the womb of an Eastern night--a day fraught with much
of suffering, much of mutilation and death, but surely a day that
shall live in the history of the British Empire so long as that Empire
stands....
Was it the surprise we all hoped for, after all?--the surprise that
seemed beyond the bounds of possibility. Were there _any_ Turks there
waiting to oppose us at all? And if so, where were they hidden? In
trenches cut on the beach? In the scrub? Behind the crest of the cliff?
God! were they never going to show themselves----?
_Crash! Bang! Z-z-z-z-z-ip!_ It was hell let loose--hell with the
bottom out! The whole beach belched flame and spat bullets. The scrub
behind burst forth into a sheet of fire. Maxims--maxims everywhere!
The place seemed alive with them. It was as if we had received a
blizzard of lead in our faces. The physical shock was almost more than
flesh and blood could bear. For a moment it seemed as if the whole
flotilla was doomed--a moment in which whole boatloads of brave men
were absolutely cut to pieces and mangled out of all recognition--in
which boats were blown from the water, smashed into matchwood and
riddled from stem to stern by the high explosive and shrapnel fire
that came over the crest of the cliff hot on the heels of the rifle
and machine-gun fire. Just a moment! Then the men from the bush, the
plains, and the cities of Australasia showed the stuff they were made
of. In dashed the boats--in anyhow, no matter how, so long as they
touched Turkish soil--some bow on, some stern on, some broadside.
All higgledy-piggledy, a confused mass like a huge dismembered raft
tossed on a sea that hissed and spouted as its surface was torn by the
never-ceasing rain of lead and iron.