In the Line of Battle. Various

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      That is my story.

      If space permitted I might tell of Corporal Degan and his gallant band of hand-grenaders; how they bravely fought when hemmed in by the enemy; of Lieutenant Owens, who stood with an automatic pistol in each hand, cheering and swearing in the same breath, defending his comrades and destroying the Germans; of Sergeant Nobel (now a captain), who repaired a telephone-wire under an annihilating cannonade from German guns, and a score of other splendid fellows who utterly forgot themselves and their extremity, and risked their all upon the hazard of the glorious common cause.

       CHAPTER IV

      A LINESMAN IN GALLIPOLI

      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.

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