THE BLIZZARD

One knows little of the times and the seasons at which the early Gallipoli winter plays its pranks. It is fairly gymnastic in its turns of temperature. Still, we never expected a snow-blizzard in November. For thus spoke the official weather-god (through the Peninsula Press) regarding that fair month: "November generally comes in fine, with a lovely first ten-days or so. It, however, becomes rather sharp at night, and there may be expected a cold snap in the second or third week of the month. This lasts a few days, after which the weather gets fine and warm until the end of the month. November is, in fact, considered by many to be the most glorious month of the year." ...

Thus had it been a month to mark with a white stone. Instead, it marked itself with white stones that were many. The halting autumn was full of vagaries, but there was a persistent bitterness creeping in the wake of the fitful November gales:

And all around me ev'ry bush and tree
Says autumn's here, and winter soon will be—
That snows his soft white silence over all.

We had foreseen the snow-drift no nearer than that.

But on the Sabbath morning of the 28th of November we woke to find a Peninsula of snow, with snow-men bearing snow-rifles walking over the snow-ridges. This was the introduction of most of us to a fall. The nearest we had yet come to the meeting was at the "movies" which had shown Cossacks ploughing through their native drifts for the Front. Here was our first touch with reality in utter cold.

The Australian has a reputation for adaptability of which not even cold can rob him. He moved about like any Esquimau. This was true, literally; for the first time he donned his rabbit-skin jacket and his Balaclava cap and peaked field-service. The resemblance to an Esquimau in his bear-skin coat and hood was remarkable. His curiosity worked complementarily to his adaptability. This was like seeing a new country for the first time. The snow made a new world, and no excess of cold was to keep him from examining and wandering. He sloshed about the gullies scrutinising the flakes as they lodged on his clothes; he climbed the ridges to see something more of the general effect. The Englishman regarded him from the stronghold of his snowy tradition with superior commiseration, as who should say: "This'll make the beggar hop!" The ill-starred Egyptians, never previously out of Lower-Egypt, literally and piteously wailed with the cold. The Australians mostly grinned and sky-larked.

By eight o'clock he was pasting all passers-by from his store of ammunition; and after breakfast was conducting a sort of trench-warfare in the gullies, bombing out the glowing enemy with a new brand of hand-grenade, pure-white.

The wind blew a gale, driving the snow like thick smoke over the turbid Ægean. Like rain it was not: far too thick and cloudy. The towering ridges on our east happily saved us the extreme bitterness of the blast. But it whistled down our sheltered ravines in a gusty fashion.

The trenches had another tale to unfold. For them was no grateful ridge shelter. The freezing gale cut like a frosty knife across the parapet, and drove a jet of ice through the loophole, and whistled ruthlessly down any trench it could enfilade. The "Stand-to" at 5.30 that morning was an experience of Arctic rigour.

No sun relieved the grey, relentless day. The men slopped on through the slush. Never had they conceived anything so cold underfoot. But next morning the ground was frozen hard. Every footprint was filled with ice. Where yesterday we had bogged, we progressed to-day like windmills, with arms spread to keep a balance on the glassy and steep inclining surface. Buckets and pans were frozen over. The bristles of shaving-brushes were congealed into a frozen extension of the handle. It was a valiant man who, having pounded them out into a sort of individuality, ventured to use a razor: the blade seared like a knife of fire.

The sun shone bravely, but could not touch the stubborn ice of the ground. That night was, to denizens of tropical Australia, incredibly frosty. There was no breath of air. The cold bit through six thicknesses of blanket and lay like an encasement of ice about your limbs beneath the covers. Few in Turkey slept two hours that night, and those by no means consecutively.

Next morning the slush oozed out to the sun, and the whole position was as an Australian cow-yard in the winter rains. And that's how the glorious month of November made its adieux to Gallipoli.

Yet it's an ill blizzard that blows nobody good. Recent storms had played Old Harry with the landing of supplies at Anzac. In especial, the water-barge had been cast high and dry on Imbros. Warfare is not easy in a country where every pint of water consumed must be landed under fire. Though summer was past, men must drink; salt bacon, salt "bully," dry biscuit, are thirst-provoking; and beside that "insensible perspiration" of which De Quincey was wont to make so much, there is activity on the Anzac Beach, if not in the trenches: a normal activity intermittently stimulated by the murderous shriek of shell from the flanks.

The reserve-supply of water had been already tapped. For a week we had been on a quarter-ration. This eked out at about half a mug of tea per man per diem. You ate salt beef for the evening meal without tea; went to bed thirsty, dreaming of the rivers of water, woke to a breakfast of salt bacon unmitigated by tea; and entered on a burning day—though it was winter—a day relieved only by the half-pint at lunch, at which you crunched biscuit and jam.

Men were foregoing their precious nightly issue of rum because it wrought a pleasant fire in the veins, and they had already had enough of fire in the veins. Not only were you drought-stricken, but frozen too, and that to a degree from which heating food would have saved you in part. But there was no water for cooking the heating oatmeal waiting to be issued, nor for the heating rice, which could not be boiled in sea-water.

Though the blizzard came in the midst of this drought it changed all that. Rum-jars, buckets, biscuit-tins, water-cans—yea, the very jam-tins—were filled with snow and there was the precious potential water. Parched and frozen throats were slaked, beards shaven, porridge boiled, bacon and beef defied to do their worst. Removed from the fire, it had a dusty smack. But it was water!