8THEDARE-DEVILANZACS
By the trouble that never will tame you,By the toil that will never withhold,Whatever the dull world name you,I know you for Hearts of Gold.Will Ogilvie.Here is no dread and no grieving;Over us hurtles the fray:Is yours a Heaven worth achieving,If it be stormed in a day?Arthur H. Adams.
By the trouble that never will tame you,By the toil that will never withhold,Whatever the dull world name you,I know you for Hearts of Gold.Will Ogilvie.Here is no dread and no grieving;Over us hurtles the fray:Is yours a Heaven worth achieving,If it be stormed in a day?Arthur H. Adams.
By the trouble that never will tame you,By the toil that will never withhold,Whatever the dull world name you,I know you for Hearts of Gold.Will Ogilvie.
By the trouble that never will tame you,
By the toil that will never withhold,
Whatever the dull world name you,
I know you for Hearts of Gold.
Will Ogilvie.
Here is no dread and no grieving;Over us hurtles the fray:Is yours a Heaven worth achieving,If it be stormed in a day?Arthur H. Adams.
Here is no dread and no grieving;
Over us hurtles the fray:
Is yours a Heaven worth achieving,
If it be stormed in a day?
Arthur H. Adams.
Onthat narrow strip of ground above Gaba Tepe, the Australians and New Zealanders have been living, at this writing, for a full six months. They have burrowed the rugged hill-sides into human warrens, and when they are not on duty in the trenches return to a manner of life that was natural to the ancient cave-dwellers before the dawn of civilisation. Here and there, between the hills, great pits that have been excavated by bursting shells are transformed into convenient bathing-places; but it has been a common thing to see parties of men come joyously down, released from the firing line, to wash the feel of dust and grime from them in the cool waters of the adjacent sea; and they have grown so accustomed to their environment that even if the enemy breaks into sudden activity they go on enjoying themselves there, indifferent to the splash of bullets round about them and the occasional whine and shriek of a shell that bursts overhead and scatters a rain of shrapnel that does not always fall harmlessly. From the tents and huts on the beach, where the stores are kept, they have made good roads up the cliffs to facilitate the labour of transport. Behind their first line of trenches they have turned the bit of territory they have won and hold so tenaciously into a queer little town of snug caverns and bomb-proof shelters, and have made all the place so peculiarly their own that somebody has beenhappily inspired to christen the district Anzac, a name formed from the initials of the force, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps; and by that name it has become officially and generally known.
The marvel is that after living and fighting in such a dreary spot for six months the men are still as high-spirited and as fertile in contriving ways to amuse their leisure as if they had never known anything better or fuller than the precarious, perilous existence on this barren patch of land. They are not only indomitably cheerful, but full of fight and enterprise, and indomitably determined to see this terrible job right through, if only the homeland will back them as efficiently as it ought to.
The foe they are holding up outnumbers them by two or three to one; and they were never sent there with any notion that they could do more than they have accomplished. They were sent there to keep as many of the Turks as possible thoroughly occupied whilst the larger part of the expeditionary force landed at Cape Hellas and fought its way up the Peninsula to join hands with them; and they have achieved this successfully, and more than this. "Anzac, in fact," as Sir Ian Hamilton has told us, "was cast to play second fiddle to Cape Hellas, a part out of harmony with the dare-devil spirit animating these warriors from the south. So it has come about that the defensive of the Australians and New Zealanders has always tended to take on the character of an attack."
Since the 28th April the French and British troops pushing in from Hellas have hurled themselves again and again against the hills and defences before the grim mountain of Achi Baba, whose great spurs, stretching from Saros Gulf across to the Dardanelles, command the whole southern section of the Peninsula; and again and again, after performing prodigies of valour, strewing the soil with the enemy's dead and capturing trenches over wide stretches of hard-fought ground, they have been forced by the avalanche of shell and machine gun fire from the mountain heights and the furious counter-attacks of irresistible numbers to relinquish their winnings and fall back stubbornly to their own positions.
AUSTRALIA'S SPLENDID CORPS OF MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN.A wounded man about to be transferred from an emergency blanket sling to the regulation stretcher.
AUSTRALIA'S SPLENDID CORPS OF MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN.A wounded man about to be transferred from an emergency blanket sling to the regulation stretcher.
AUSTRALIA'S SPLENDID CORPS OF MOUNTED AMBULANCE MEN.A wounded man about to be transferred from an emergency blanket sling to the regulation stretcher.
THE DARDANELLES–MEN BATHING AFTER RETURNING FROM AN ATTACK.
THE DARDANELLES–MEN BATHING AFTER RETURNING FROM AN ATTACK.
THE DARDANELLES–MEN BATHING AFTER RETURNING FROM AN ATTACK.
Between the 6th and 12th May a series of desperate attacks on the powerful, scientifically prepared fortifications before Achi Baba were repelled, but certain strategical points and some hundreds of yards of front were taken and successfully held. One such attack, which saw some of the most Homeric fighting that has been done even on this terrible peninsula, lasted almost continuously for three days ending on 8th May. The French and British forces all took part in it, and among the latter were the 2nd Australian and the New Zealand Infantry Brigades. These were at first kept in reserve, but on the evening of the 6th the Lancashire Fusiliers, who had been trapped in a wood on the left wing of the advance and suffered heavy losses from concealed machine guns, were transferred to the base, and the New Zealand Brigade was sent to replace them, with orders to go forward in the morning through the line held during the night by the 88th Brigade, and develop the attack towards Krithia.
On the 7th, Sir Ian Hamilton reports, "at 10.15 a.m. heavy fire from ships and batteries was opened on the whole front, and at 10.30 a.m. the New Zealand Brigade began to move, meeting with strenuous opposition from the enemy, who had received his reinforcements." They advanced beyond the wood, or clump of fir trees, in which the Lancashires had suffered so badly, and by 1.30 had gained about 200 yards beyond the most advanced trenches that had been occupied by the 88th Brigade. Then the French reported that they could not advance up the spur they were to storm on the right till the British had made further progress. So at 4 p.m. Sir Ian gave orders that "the whole line, reinforced by the 2nd Australian Brigade, would fix bayonets, slope arms, and move on Krithia precisely at 5.30." After a quarter of an hour of effective bombardment by the heavy artillery and the guns of the ships, the movement was promptly and vigorously carried out. It was characteristic of the alert, self-reliant spirit of all the Australasians that "some of the companies of the New Zealand regiments did not get their orders in time, but, acting on their own initiative, they pushed on as soon as the heavy howitzers ceased firing, thus making the whole advance simultaneous." Then the French swept forward and stormed the first Turkish redoubt on the ridge that faced them with a wonderful élan that was not to be baulked of its object. Decimated by shrapnel and machine guns, they were driven back, but rallied and returned to the charge with redoubled fury, were beaten back, and re-formed and dashed ahead once more, and as the darkness fell "a small supporting column of French soldiers was seen silhouetted against the sky as they charged upwards along the crest of the ridge of the Kereves Dere." Then the night closed down, and all thebattlefield and whatever was doing on it were hidden in blackest darkness.
"Not until next morning did any reliable detail come to hand of what had happened. The New Zealanders' firing line had marched over the cunningly concealed enemy's machine guns without seeing them, and these, reopening on our supports as they came up, caused them heavy losses. But the first line pressed on and arrived within a few yards of the Turkish trenches which had been holding up our advance beyond the fir wood. There they dug themselves in. The Australian Brigade had advanced through the Composite Brigade and, in spite of heavy losses from shrapnel, machine gun, and rifle fire, had progressed from 300 to 400 yards."
The result of those three days of stubborn fighting was a net gain of 600 yards on the British right, and 400 on the left and centre; and the French had captured the redoubt they had fought for so heroically as well as a considerable area of ground. In the next two days the Turks made repeated and costly efforts, harried on by their German leaders, to regain their losses; but their prodigal cannonading and reckless hand-to-hand combats were unavailing and they were everywhere repulsed. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps "strengthened their grip on Turkish soil," and on the whole, says Sir Ian, "now for the first time I felt that we had planted a fairly firm foothold upon the point of the Gallipoli Peninsula.
"The determined valour shown by these two brigades," he notes in concluding this phase of his dispatch, "the New Zealand Brigade under Brigadier-General F. E. Johnston, and the 2nd Australian Infantry Brigade under Brigadier-General the Hon. J. W. McCay, are worthy of particular praise. Their losses were correspondingly heavy, but, in spite of fierce counter-attacks by numerous fresh troops, they stuck to what they had won with admirable tenacity."
All along the line they had dug themselves in securely, and remained immovable. The Turks threw away thousands of men in fruitless assaults on the new positions; occasionally the British or the French by sudden rushes captured here and there an enemy trench and scored small local successes, but more and more the fighting became a matter of reconnaissance, of sapping and mining, till by the first week of June both sides had settled down to the dogged conditions of siege warfare.
During these same weeks the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Anzac, between Gaba Tepe and Saribair, had held their little half-moon of conquered land with its 1,100 yards of diameter, and were not to be ousted from any part of it by intrepid massed attacks or by a constant shelling of their trenches and the beach beyond, often with as many as over 1,000 shells in an hour. How many bayonet charges succeeded these merciless bombardments, how many fierce night-attacks boiled over from the enemy trenches, which were everywhere within twenty and thirty yards of the Anzac front, to be unfailingly dammed all along the line and hurled back broken, decimated, defeated, I have given up trying to count. Over and over again, when the Anzacs hurled the Turks back in this fashion they swarmed out of their defences, chased the flying foe, leaped after him into his own trenches, drove him out of them and kept him out till he brought up a continuous stream of reinforcements and by sheer weight of numbers forced the Australians and New Zealanders to give up their new possessions and withdraw once more to their old ones.
The fiercest, most sanguinary fighting went on round about such advanced positions as Pope's, Courtney's, and Quinn's Posts–especially about the last, which was won and lost and went on changing hands at frequent intervals until it was finally taken by the Anzacs, and strengthened and strongly garrisoned and permanently retained. On 9th May the Turkish trenches in front of Quinn's were carried at the point of the bayonet, but at dawn next morning the enemy came hurtling back in such multitudes that the Anzacs had to retire to the Post, and stubbornly repel a hot attack upon that. Day after day the same sort of thing continued with little cessation, here and at all sections of the line. Between the attacks there were endless bomb-throwing, tempests of shells from big guns and howitzers, sniping, withering outbursts of machine gun fire, subtle sapping and mining, in which now one side, then the other successfully blew up trenches, and, dashing for the breach, made grim onslaughts that had to be held off and beaten and cleared out of the way before the shattered defences could be repaired. In our second and third and fourth line trenches the men might sit in dug-outs and bomb-proof shelters and yarn and play cards or write letters or sleep as comfortable under the roaring, whistling hail of shells and bullets and almost as safe as if they were at home; but some of the foremost trenches were little more than giant gullies on the verge of steep precipices, andif they more or less commanded the enemy's positions in the valley, they were in turn commanded more or less by the enemy's guns and trenches on higher ridges farther in-shore.
The stories of individual heroism and self-sacrifice–of the carrying of wounded comrades in under fire, of scouts crawling out on exposed heights and calmly completing their observations after they had been discovered and become targets for hundreds of rifles, of the bringing of supplies of food and ammunition to the firing line over hills and bare plateaus that were swept by the enemy's guns–these are numberless. There were bombing parties who went out unobtrusively at twilight or at dawn to raid an apparently inaccessible trench on the opposite hill-side and silence a troublesome gun, and as often as not they succeeded, though few of them returned to tell the tale; there was a doughty little remnant of Anzac heroes who fought and slew terribly and had to be shot or bayoneted to the last man before the Turks could get back into a trench that had been newly wrested from them. And there is a story of an unnamed New Zealander that stands out even amidst the splendour of the rest. This man, during an attack in force, found himself isolated and cut off from his friends. He was on a high, bald promontory, and the Turks were swarming on all sides of him. Escape was impossible; he had been wounded and left behind, overlooked by his comrades when they were compelled to retire; and there seemed nothing for it but surrender. The full strength of the reinforced Turks was unknown to our commanders, but from his lofty eminence the New Zealander could see the oncoming hordes flooding the lower levels, and proceeded to take careful observations. And a chief scout of the New Zealanders who, from the distance, had detected the solitary figure aloft there was suddenly amazed to see the man begin signalling with his arms; he was signalling information as to the position and numbers of the Turks. How many shots reached their mark in him nobody will know; twice he fell, but each time he regained his feet to semaphore with his arms and continue his message. "The last shot disabled one arm," says the scout, "yet the dying man raised himself and completed the message before he dropped dead." If one started to repeat such stories one would never know where to end, and there is the less need for me to make the attempt since I hear that the best of them are now being gathered into a book of their own by another hand.
Through all that thunderous storm of conflict, the incessantattacking and counter-attacking, our losses were appallingly heavy, but those of the Turks exceeded them enormously. A diary found on a dead Turkish officer showed that in the stern engagement on the 10th May alone, two Ottoman regiments lost 3,000 in killed and wounded. They had been mown down and bayoneted in tens of thousands round Anzac and in the titanic struggle at the southern end of the Peninsula, but they had been so reinforced that their power had increased rather than diminished; and so by degrees at both places the opposing forces fought each other to something of a standstill. All the Turkish boasts that they would fling the invaders into the sea proved futile; all our attempts to advance beyond the territory on which we were immovably established proved equally unavailing; and by degrees things at Anzac as well as between Cape Hellas and Achi Baba settled down to that condition of siege warfare.
It was not a condition that suited the temperaments of these active, energetic fellows; they were not the sort to find much satisfaction in systematically peppering the other side with lead and wearing them down from behind the safe shelter of barricades; but they were practical enough to see that for the time there was no other effective course open to them, and, with occasional sudden sallies into the midst of the enemy, when they killed a few and captured a few and gathered in some guns, they grimly suited themselves to a state of things that did not suit them, and made the best of it.
The Turks knew enough of them by now to have a wholesome respect for their fighting qualities, and seemed contented to shell them occasionally from a distance or let them alone, so long as they did not come out and make trouble. And the fact that this was the hottest period of the year may have helped to reconcile the Anzacs to the necessity of going slow for a while. The blazing heat, indeed, was more intolerable than the fire of the Turks, and to cope with it they discarded one garment after another until, at length, they were to be seen on duty or amusing themselves, when they were not lying cool in holes and shelters, dressed in nothing but a pair of breeches cut down to "shorts" which did not nearly reach to their knees. Some, with a lingering sense of propriety, or tender feet, retained their boots and socks, but others abandoned even these. Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, who saw them, says, "I suppose that since the dervishes made their last charge at Omdurman no such naked army has ever been seen in the field."
It must have puzzled the Turks considerably to find themselves confronted by trenches filled with apparently naked warriors, and to ascertain, when they came to the test, that these naked warriors were as tough and as full of ginger as the men in khaki who had mysteriously vanished. Possibly they suspected this was a new wild race of secretly landed reinforcements from some remote end of the British Empire, especially after a few weeks, when the skins of the Anzacs had become so tanned and burnt by the sun that they were as dark as the Maoris. And of the Maoris the Turks had all along had suspicions, even when that contingent was clothed in full khaki. For they have weird war-cries and a weird dance of their own, and to hear and see these mysteries in operation is calculated to disquiet those who are not accustomed to them. On special occasions, after the General had been addressing them and complimenting them on their fighting ability, or when they had caught a rumour of the joyous possibility that they would quit the monotonous trenches and move out against the enemy to-morrow, they liked to indulge in this dance by way of expressing the intensity of their satisfaction. An officer of the New Zealand contingent described the dance inThe Timesin the following terms:
"The Maoris, officers and privates, lined up. With protruding tongues and a rhythmic slapping of hands on thighs and chests, with a deep concerted 'a-a-ah,' ending abruptly, they began the Maori haka–the war dance. Shrill and high the leader intoned the solo parts, and the chorus crashed out. As the dancers became more animated the beat of their feet echoed through the gullies of Gallipoli. The leader now declaimed fiercely, now his voice sank to an eerie whisper, still perfectly audible, and as he crouched low to the ground so the men behind him posed. Suddenly, after a concerted crash of voices, the chant ended with a sibilant hiss, a stamp of the right foot, and the detonation of palms slapping the high ground."
From their trenches, less than a hundred yards away, the Turks could not see the dancers, for the dancers knew better than to show themselves, but they must have heard the strange, rhythmic stamping of their feet and their startling outcries, and you get a notion of what they must have thought of them from a passage which the same New Zealand officer quotes from a Constantinople newspaper of about that date in which the Ottoman journalist remarks that he is still without information as to the compositionof the enemy's forces, but has reason to believe that they consist of black men from Africa and Australia, and "thus the Straits for the first time in history have had to endure attacks by cannibals." So it is worth adding that though the Maoris delight, as they should, in keeping up the old customs of their race, theirs is a contingent of as gallant and chivalrous men as any in the British millions, and the leader in that particular war dance was a highly educated gentleman who has the distinction of being an M.A. and an LL.D.
The state of siege lasted for some two months, and I have not spoken to any man who endured it and was prepared to say that he wished it had been longer.
"I was fed up with it," said a bronzed giant, convalescing from his wounds in London, with whom I foregathered by chance in a railway carriage. "We were sick of sitting in our holes potting an odd Turk when he bobbed his head up. We wanted to be getting ahead. The boys down by Hellas had got a tough job, too, but we just prayed that they might make a big push up and we might be ordered to go out and cut a way through to meet them. It was no fun, living like rabbits and doing nothing, or next to nothing, and when I was hit by accident while I was fooling around, having a dip at Hell Spit, I wasn't sorry to get out of it for a change. I should have been, though, if I'd known we were in for a real, good scrap a few days later."
That was a pretty general feeling, he said; the inactivity, the sameness of the trench fighting, the sense of being cooped up within narrow limits and not given a chance to do anything, was infinitely boring. Everybody was impatient to be moving, and would sooner have gone on at all risks than have stopped there strategically marking time. Moreover, there was a shortage of tobacco and of the smaller luxuries of civilisation that might have helped to make that dull period of waiting endurable. You get a vivid glimpse of this in the report of Mr. W. Jessop, who went out in charge of a mission from the Y.M.C.A., which has done such magnificent service in looking after the welfare of the troops in all the fighting areas, with comforts for the men at the Dardanelles.
"It was pathetic," he says, "to see the eagerness with which the men viewed our preparations and the way they came about the tent.... I looked up two batteries of artillery I had been told about, and took with me several pounds of Havelock tobacco and some pipes. To the first of these men I came across I held up a tin of the tobacco and asked him if it was a friend of his(Havelock is Australian tobacco, and very popular in the Colonies). His eyes glistened, and then he said, 'It's all I have' (holding up a sovereign), 'but if you will give me a pipe with it I shall be glad to exchange, as I have not had a smoke for three weeks.' When I told him the pipe and tobacco were his for nothing, he was greatly touched. I went round to about fifty of these men and made similar gifts."
But such minor inconveniences would not have worried them if it had not been for the wearisome waiting for something to happen; and when the word went round that a new British force was to make a surprise landing higher up the gulf at Suvla Bay, and that the Anzacs were to create a diversion and keep the Turks fully occupied whilst it was done, there was no more grousing; it was exactly what they wanted.
The unquenchable ardour of the men was of a piece with the splendid spirit of brotherhood and good comradeship that prevailed among all ranks. It could not well have been otherwise, led by such officers as they had and under a commander so gallant and so genially considerate of them as General Birdwood, who from the outset, as Sir Ian Hamilton testifies, "has been the soul of Anzac. Not for one single day has he ever quitted his post. Cheery and full of human sympathy, he has spent many hours of each twenty-four inspiring the defenders of the front trenches, and if he does not know every soldier in his force, at least every soldier believes he is known to his chief." He was invariably under fire with his troops, and wounded in one engagement had his wound dressed on the field and refused to retire. No wonder his men are devoted to him, and that when you mention his name to any among those who are here, invalided home, they answer you with the warmest enthusiasm.
In preparation for the new movement fresh British and Indian troops had been landed at Anzac under cover of darkness two nights in succession. The Turks were aware of this; they had shelled the transports and the beach unstintedly, but so deftly were the landing parties handled by the naval service that the landings were successfully carried out with only two casualties. On the 6th August the British at Cape Helles commenced a heavy and continuous bombardment of the Turkish positions round Krithia, below the Achi Baba heights; at the same time the Anzacs got busy with guns and howitzers along the whole of their front to discourage the enemy from dispatching reinforcements in any direction.
HEROES FROM THE DARDANELLES. Wounded from the Dardanelles, leaving the hospital train in Egypt.
HEROES FROM THE DARDANELLES. Wounded from the Dardanelles, leaving the hospital train in Egypt.
HEROES FROM THE DARDANELLES. Wounded from the Dardanelles, leaving the hospital train in Egypt.
HEROES OF THE DARDANELLES.
HEROES OF THE DARDANELLES.
HEROES OF THE DARDANELLES.
During the night of the 6th a vast array of transports, accompanied by warships, destroyers, and smaller craft, passed quietly up the Gulf of Saros and glided into Suvla Bay, six or seven miles north of Anzac Cove. All along the other side of the Dardanelles, from Kum Kale to Chanak, and at Anzac and in the southern extremity of Gallipoli, the Turks were either under attack or on the alert and expecting it. But here, at Suvla Bay, they were anticipating no danger, and hundreds of small boats had rushed the invading force safely ashore before they were aware of their coming. An observation post was taken by surprise; its garrison of fifty surrendered, and the British had marched six miles inland and it was getting on towards evening before an enemy force came into view hastening forward to oppose the advance. The Turks had been warned of what had happened, and before next morning had swiftly concentrated as many as 70,000 men to bar the way. All night there were numerous spasmodic and furious local fights for points of vantage, and all night the two forces were rapidly throwing out barbed-wire entanglements and digging themselves in, and as soon as the day came the battle developed in deadliest earnest.
Both sides were well supplied with artillery, and all day the merciless struggle raged with growing fury; in repeated attacks and counter-attacks first the Turkish, then the British lines swayed this way and that, but always straightened out again and could at no point be broken through. A dozen times the Turks flung themselves forward in dense masses, and when they shattered and came thundering in over and past the wire entanglements, the British leaped from their trenches to meet them and fell upon them with spades and bayonets till they fled panic-stricken, leaving their dead and wounded heaped about the ground.
The enemy had the advantage in position; they were on the higher levels, and they were superior in numbers; but when night fell again over the field of carnage, if the British had made no further advance they still held every inch of their line, and they passed the night in entrenching it more firmly.
The plan of campaign was for one section of the force to push on straight across the Peninsula whilst another section moved to the south-east towards Anzac, whence the Australians and New Zealanders were to fight a way up and join them.
The Anzacs carried out their part of this arrangement with a dash and daring that were irresistible. They had been reinforcedby a brigade of Gurkhas and by regiments of our new armies, and it was resolved to make a beginning by sending the First Australian Infantry Brigade to attack the Lone Pine plateau. "The Third Brigade," writes Captain C. E. W. Bean, the Official Press Representative with the Australian forces there, "had immortalised itself on the day of the landing–they were the miners' brigade from Broken Hill and the gold-fields and Queensland and Tasmania. The Second Brigade–the Victorians–had made their wonderful charge at Helles, when for a quarter of an hour they went straight as a die for 1,000 yards across country as bare as the palm of your hand, in the face of shrapnel and withering rifle fire. Now, at last, it was the chance of the First Brigade–the men from New South Wales."
The officers' whistles shrilled the signal, and in a moment the First Brigade was out and making a bee line for the low, scrub-covered hill on which the Turks were entrenched; but when they came to the trenches they found them stoutly roofed with logs and timbers, and spread out scattered along them looking for a way in, fired at through loopholes and by machine guns, and pelted with shrapnel from a battery in the rear. But they were not there to be beaten. Here and there along the roof man-holes had been left; some of the Anzacs dropped recklessly down these small openings ("like burglars through a sky-light," says Mr. Bean) on to the Turks below; others by sheer force of muscle tore up logs or planks to make an entry and flung themselves in and clubbed their rifles or got to work with their bayonets, and after a short, sharp fight the enemy either lay dead in their burrow or were in full flight up their communication trenches. Other of the Australians had run right on over the roof of logs and as swiftly captured the second trench and thence poured on into the communication trenches to stop the fleeing Turks or give chase and shoot them as they fled.
In other parts of the field the battle was spreading mightily and the Australians and New Zealanders, with the Gurkhas and their new comrades from the homeland, were carrying all before them. The Maoris and New Zealand Mounted Rifles, fighting afoot, cleared the foot-hills with the bayonet, and soon over all the lower hills, in the rugged gullies and ravines and up the sides of the Anafarta height, the fighting became general, gathering tempestuously in sound and fury.
For four days and nights it continued with little intermission–desperateand bloody fighting, much of it, with bayonets and clubbed rifles; and steadily the combined force of Anzacs, English, and Indians forced their way up the steep slopes towards the ridge that was pouring a blasting hail of lead and fire down upon them perpetually. Trench after trench on the savagely contested ascent was taken and left behind, choked with Turkish dead. Generals and colonels, armed with rifles, fought shoulder to shoulder with their men, and many of them, including General Baldwin, who through the nightmare of those four days of carnage fought heroically beside his men, were killed; but by the evening of the 10th August, though the formidable heights of Anafarta, which had been stormed with almost incredible heroism by the Australians, the New Zealanders, and some English regiments, for lack of support, could not be held, all the lower ground on the western side was in our possession, and the army from Anzac Cove had triumphantly linked up with the troops that had landed at Suvla Bay.
Here they dug themselves in; a lull of exhaustion fell over the contending armies, and the British profited by the interval to consolidate their greatly extended lines and secure their communications.
The original purpose of the Suvla Bay landing had been to strike right across the Peninsula at that point, cut the Turks off from their supplies, so that they would be compelled to abandon or weaken the defences of Achi Baba and thus make it possible for the British and French at Helles to drive a path over that impregnable mountain and sweep up the length of Gallipoli and crush the enemy between our northern and southern forces. The scheme is said to have failed through the blundering of one officer at Suvla, who should have rushed his corps promptly and straightway through and seized certain dominating heights before the Turks were aware of the surprise attack and could rally to make any effective resistance.
We are still very much in the dark about the details of this enterprise. All we know is that whatever blundering there may have been in the higher command, the men of all ranks and all regiments met every demand that was made upon them with the most unflinching steadiness and acquitted themselves with a valour and efficiency that no troops in the world could excel. "The Anzac Corps fought like lions," says Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, "and accomplished a feat of arms, in climbing those heights, almost without a parallel.... It was a combat of giants in a giant country, and if one point stands out more than another it is the marvelloushardihood, tenacity, and reckless courage shown by the Australians and New Zealanders."
This magnificent tribute is amply confirmed by the special order that was issued by Sir Ian Hamilton whilst the great battle was still unfinished:
"The Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, desires formally to record the fine feat of arms achieved by the troops under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood during the battle of Sari Bair. The fervent desire of all ranks to close with the enemy, the impetuosity of their onset, and the steadfast valour with which they maintained the long struggle, these will surely make appeal to their fellow-countrymen all over the world. The gallant capture of the almost impregnable Lone Pine trenches by the Australian Division, and the equally gallant defence of the position against repeated counter-attacks, are exploits which will live in history. The determined assaults carried out from other parts of the Australian Division's line were also of inestimable service to the whole force, preventing as they did the movement of large bodies of reinforcements to the northern flank.
"The troops under the command of Major-General Sir A. J. Godley, and particularly the New Zealand and Australian Division, were called upon to carry out one of the most difficult military operations that have ever been attempted–a night march and assault by several columns in intricate mountainous country, strongly entrenched, and held by a numerous and determined enemy. Their brilliant conduct during this operation and the success they achieved have won for them a reputation as soldiers of whom any country must be proud. To the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, therefore, and to those who were associated with that famous corps in the battle of Sari Bair–the Maoris, Sikhs, Gurkhas, and the new troops of the Divisions from the Old Country–Sir Ian Hamilton tenders his appreciation of their efforts, his admiration of their gallantry, and his thanks for their achievements. It is an honour to command a force which numbers such men as these in its ranks, and it is the Commander-in-Chief's high privilege to acknowledge that honour."
There was memorable fighting again above Helles on the 21st August, when a Yeomanry corps, in action for the first time, delivered a determined assault on the hill known as Hill 70, charging right up to the summit without a halt, and chasing the Turks down the other side. But the enemy clung on to onestrongly fortified knoll, and in the night enfiladed the victors with such a deadly fire from artillery and machine guns that they were forced to abandon their hard-won position, and by daylight had withdrawn to their own lines.
Since then, there, as on the seven-mile front from Anzac to Suvla Bay, the war has resolved itself again into steady trench fighting and a state of siege. Since then, too, there has been a change in the command, and General Sir C. C. Monro has succeeded Sir Ian Hamilton, who has returned home, honoured with the goodwill and admiration of troops whose confidence in him is unshakable; and in these latter days of October the next step in the Dardanelles expedition is still a matter of rumour and conjecture.