...A Squadron’s turn came. We tumbled down the ladders and packed tightly all over the tiny steamer’s deck. Our kit felt massive, everything felt like haste, even the small steamer looked excited and puffy. Some men were rather quiet, but the majority laughed and joked. I wish I was good humoured. I swore when a big fellow tramped on my toe.
We moved off for the shore all ears to the pop, pop, pop of rifle-shots. Smoke fairly belched from the toy funnel: I suppose the sweating devils below were shoving the coal into her.
Nothing happened until we got closer inshore and the bushes on the hillsides began to take shape. Then whizzz, then ping, ping, ping, ping. By jove, rifle-bullets! Whizz-zz, smack! and a shrill receding whistle as the bullet ricocheted off the water.
We opened our eyes rather inquiringly, two or three laughed—then we all laughed. I know I felt a queer, excited warming at the stomach too. What if one of the damned things smacked into a man before he had a chance!
After that, we listened for the whizz-zz and laughed as the bullet would strike the funnel or smack off the water alongside. They were stray bullets perhaps, but they were straying uncomfortably close.
Our steamer pulled up with a grunt and rattle close inshore as two launches raced out to meet us. Men tumbled aboard and the packed launches raced for the beach, the busy captain roaring to us to get below because the shrapnel would be here any moment!
He had hardly closed his mouth when something came tearing in a shriek through the air and—bang! Bullets burst on the water, clattered on the sides of the boat, screeched through the funnel. How we tumbled down below! How we tried to pack into that little black hole—as if there were room!
There came another screaming whine bursting into a splitting bang! another shower of bullets and hissing of lead-sprayed water.
Someone laughed loudly. Lots of us laughed, some smiled, some shouted derisively advising the far-away Turks where to aim. But they sent seven well-aimed shells right around us and in that very short time the captain had up-anchored and we cleared right out for the horizon. Presently we crept in again, and anchored and went while the going was good. Were jolly glad to step on shore among huge stacks of ammunition and stores. Men were bathing—so strange it seemed that men were dying too. Men were toiling among the heavy stacks of stores, men trudged all over that tiny beach in ragged, clay-stained uniforms, their familiar Australian faces cheerful and grimy under sprouting beards.
Pock marking the first steep hillside were scores of dugouts, like rough black kennels. A few Indian soldiers were loading ammunition on mules. Zigzag tracks were cut along the big hillside. Close inshore were over-turned boats, all shell-smashed, relics of the Landing. We glanced at the sinister bumpy of sandbags that is the dressing-shed. A long line of wounded were lying on the ground waiting their turn. The doctors looked busy; they appeared awfully workmanlike. One of our fools had to make a joke of course as we hurried past. He called to us that he could see one of the doctors and an orderly cutting off a man’s arm.
We climbed up the steep hill path, joking with the toil stained warriors who were cooking their evening meal, or toiling at the ammunition boxes, or lying like tired brown men about their tiny dugouts. Then we filed through a trench that led to the back of the hill and came out in a gloomy, narrow valley all tortuous and fissured as it wound through a sort of basin at the bottom of the big, sombre hills. We now faced many hills gutted with gorges, overshadowed a mile farther ahead by a flat rampart of cliffy peaks. An occasional shrapnel-shell screamed overhead. The whizz, zip, zip, zip of bullets became definite and unfriendly.
And so we climbed the back of the big hill that faces the sea. We are digging holes to get in out of the way of the shrapnel. Quite close one of our hidden Australian guns replies to the Turks and makes a monstrous row. The steep hills are covered with a dense, prickly shrub.
...We have just been called to arms. I suppose we are going into the trenches.
2
SHRAPNEL GULLY,
GALLIPOLI.
May—The regiment has been all night under fire. Rifle-fire started suddenly. In one minute we could not hear ourselves speak. Came a hoarse whisper: “Fill magazines!” We jammed in the clips. My fingers tingled as the empty clips grated out of the magazine. Another hoarse whisper, and we fled down the shadowed ravines that gouge our big hill.
Then ugh-ugh bang! Shrapnel burst above us in an instantaneous black-grey cloud of smoke: bushes around bent as if under a hail-storm. We scrambled on a little faster, instinctively ducking our heads from the storm. Again came that long-drawn scream to apparently split with its own velocity—bang!—and hail whipped the bushes around. We crouched low as we slithered down the ravines, grasping any handy bush, steading ourselves with our rifle-butts, slipping and sometimes falling to scramble sheepishly up to the instant joke. The sun was sinking: it was a creepy feeling among those black hills: we did not seem to know what was happening: we were hurrying somewhere to kill men and be killed. Our own battery answered the Turks. The rifle-fire grew to a roar that drowned the voice of the man beside me. I felt as a stone-age man might feel if volcanoes all around him suddenly spat fire and roared. Doctor Dods in front suddenly fell on his knees. I caught my breath—it would be awful if the doctor were the first man killed! But he got up again and scrambled on. He did this several times. Instinctively I understood. The doctor had been to the South African war! The next time he ducked, I ducked. When he scrambled up, I followed suit—so did others, a sort of automatic ducking all along the line. Thus we quickly learnt the best, the quickest chance of dodging shrapnel. We had to. Immediately that scream came tearing directly overhead we would duck down flat. The doctor glanced around and we laughed. He is a long man and very soldierly, but has no dignity at all when he flops down so. He screwed up his face and winked over his shoulder. Then we all rushed forward again and burst through the bushes that lined a little road meandering through the hills. We were in the little valley again, with the big black hills enveloping us. They call it Shrapnel Gully.
It got coldly dark. If a man were home he’d be just at the sliprails letting go his horse before he went in to tea. Or a city man would he pushing open the garden gate. Bang! bang! whizz whizz, zip, zip, zip, zip, bang! zip, zipp, bang! bang! bang!—Hell’s orchestra, with additions, as the shrapnel burst in vicious balls of flame within the hollow basin: on the sides of the hills: above the hills-—everywhere! We dashed up that narrow “Road,” five hundred of us. Whizz, whizz, bang! then rrr-rrr-rr-rrr in a rattling stutter, tut—tut—tut tuttuttuttuttuttut, zip, zip, ping, zip, smack, zip! Bullets, machinegun and rifle, whined down from over the big hill before us, not all aimed directly at us, seemingly a chronic shower flying over the tops of the infantry trenches to rain down the gully. Harry Begourie stood absolutely still in front of me, his hand to his head, the blood hurrying down his right cheek. The doctor led him away. We ran on. “Halt!”
We all crouched by the roadside, among the bushes, by something solid, or in a sheltering hole. A man near me sighed in the darkness as he found a shallow dugout. For an hour we lived there, clinging to cold mother earth, an invisible regiment whispering among the bushes; a rustle when a man cautiously lifted himself to shift his bayonet more comfortably from under his belly.
Overhead screamed the big shells from our own guns, travelling towards the Turks and they were shrilled in chorus by the Turkish shells as they criss-crossed down into us. The shells made hell’s row in the dark and when exploding close dazzled our eyes with sheets of flame. Jagged fragments screamed into the bushes or struck rocks and screeched piercingly away. My body was alertly passive, but the mind was curiously thinking, “So this is War!” The rifle-bullets in the bushes were the devil. With the night they seemed to lose a lot of their nasty threatening force. They just chirped among the bushes like busy canaries. One landed under my nose with a gentle squeak, but the flying gravel stung my lips viciously. One tore the heel clean off Burns’s boot; the force swung his leg around. He laughed and called out to the invisible quartermaster for a “new