Our little fortress or “sangar” could be likened to a cauldron for it was constantly surrounded by fire—the bursting, flaming shells, and the pepper of snipers’ bullets like the sharp bubbling of boiling water to “carry on” the likeness of a cauldron. Down on the beach at the first ridge of rocky embankment the engineers had most bravely under a frightful fire blasted great dug-outs for the establishment of headquarters, a hospital, and the first station for the storing of supplies.

There never was an instant’s cessation of the storm of Turkish shells from the batteries back of the cliffs, but other little companies like my own had gained a foot-hold on the first ridge and held on desperately.

Something like organization was coming out of the chaos. My men were showing no signs of panic. I dispatched two messengers back to the beach to report my position, the number of men still with me, and to secure food and ammunition. These men in common with other messengers sent from similar small strongholds on the ridge, had a most dangerous duty to perform. They ran the gamut of intense fire. Many of them were killed. But my men successfully returned. They came laden with bully beef, biscuits and jam. Our emergency rations had disappeared hours before and we were brisk enough in opening the boxes and tins and strengthening ourselves with bully beef, biscuits and jam.

The organization at headquarters went on with remarkable efficiency considering the stormy environment. I soon received a reinforcement which brought my reduced company of twelve men up to my original quota of sixty.

In the protection of night relays of messengers worked briskly in bringing to us rifles and ammunition to complete our supplies. Not that these messengers had any easy pathway. The storm of shrapnel was ceaseless and it was a bright night. We were as grateful for the ammunition as for the food because, as I have already told, all the men of my detachment had been blown into the water and in the saving of their own lives had necessarily abandoned their cartridge belts.

The Turks were still firmly holding a ridge some eighty feet above us from which throughout the night they kept up a playful attack of machine guns, and their snipers were tireless. My men were so annoyed at these attentions that I had some difficulty in restraining them from making sorties. One of the men recklessly stuck his head above the rocky wall of the “sangar” and queried:

“Where are the Turks?”

“Over there,” I said, with a nod toward the ridge.

“Don’t they ever show themselves?” he demanded indignantly.

“Put your head down, get down, you chump, or you’ll never live to see one of them,” I told him.

Another time a sniper’s bullet ricochetted around the rocky wall of the “sangar.” “What’s that?” demanded one of my men.

“A ricochet,” I replied.

“Don’t we use them, too?” asked this guileless rookie.

Fortunately for us the Turks on the ridge above were not possessed of bombs. They tried to make up for this deficiency by hurling at us huge chunks of rock that had been smashed by our battle-ship attack from the face of their sandstone cliffs.

We made them a better retort. We took our bully beef tins and jam tins and tobacco tins, loaded them with broken stones and cordite taken from our rifle cartridges, and messengers were dispatched to return with other forms of explosives and fuses to aid us in the completion of these amateur weapons of war. We lighted them from our cigarette ends and hurled them in whatever direction a Turk had betrayed his presence. Sometimes they would explode prematurely and not a few of the bombers of that night had their faces blown away.

Dawn found us still in possession of the first ridge. While we remained there inactive and before any order had been given to indicate that we were to assault the upper ridge, there came an order which aroused my wonder and opposition. It was to “Fix bayonets!”

Obedience to this order all along our position brought about a startling betrayal of the whereabouts of the entire force, for the sunshine glittered brilliantly on the steel blades and fairly telegraphed the location of all our quotas to the enemy above.

I knew there must be some mistake and cried to my men, “Unfix bayonets! Who the hell gave that order?”

I never found out, but I have very definite suspicion. I am certain it was a false order circulated by spies, which we were subsequently to discover were among us.

It is a fact that the German spy system even invaded the very personnel of the British army. My platoon sergeant, Merrifield, summarily accounted for one of these spies. This was some weeks later, at the attack at Lone Pine. We had won the position and we were consolidating, improving upon the trenches and the strongholds which we had captured when the order come down from the left, “Retire! to the first line.”

I shouted “Stick where you are! Who gave that damned order?”

I sent up Merrifield to make inquiries and as he was making his way along the line asking the men where the order had come from, it was pointed out to him that a man on the left started the order. Merrifield went up to him and asked who gave that order to retire. This man replied “Lieutenant Wilhelm.” We had seen enough of spy work since we left Australia and Merrifield, rushing up, faced Wilhelm. He did not stop to question him. He read in the man’s countenance the appearance of a Teuton, the broad face, high cheek-bones and broad neck. And Merrifield took long chances but was too enraged to consider that. “You damned square-head,” he shouted, and with the utterance of the words killed the lieutenant with his bayonet. Wilhelm’s attempted treachery not only cost him his life, but did not gain its end, for the order never got any farther. On examining his person, we found letters, photographs and a signal code, all going to show that however recklessly he had acted, Merrifield had made no mistake.

The night of the second day found us in positions higher up among the sandy table lands and ridges and dug into positions that we were to hold for a few weeks waiting for reinforcements, which were coming up from Egypt.

The Turkish snipers occupied a great deal of our attention all this time and they were a cunning lot. They were adepts in the art of camouflage—an art which was new to battlefields at this time. Their favorite method of deception was to paint their bodies green, to shroud their heads with the natural foliage of the country, moss and holly-bush twigs. With this arrangement they could conceal themselves as neatly and completely as snakes in the grass. They not only hid in the shrubbery, but successfully concealed themselves in the stunted trees that grew among the rocky crevices. The cliffs themselves gave them a tremendous advantage. In this they had drilled shooting boxes—holes in all manner of secret recesses large enough to hold their bodies.

But we did not permit them to pot us wholly undisturbed. Many of our men made night expeditions that silenced forever our hidden hunters. One of my bush men came back from such an expedition with a startling souvenir. It was nothing less than a head of one of the Turkish snipers—the face of the ghastly object painted green, twigs enmeshed in the hair and sticking out of the ears.

But after a while we were to meet the Turk and find him not such a bad fellow. I asked the prisoners we captured why they were fighting. They said, they didn’t know what they were fighting for, but they just wanted to have a fight. A rejoinder which an Irishman like myself could appreciate. In a conversation with an educated Turk I asked him why they allowed the Germans to be the master. He replied that the Germans had for the last forty years over-run his country and taken over the direction of the civil, the military and the naval affairs of his nation, and they were so strong, dealt with the Turks with such an iron hand, that there was no commencing a mutiny. It had been tried and proved a fiasco.

During the months of July and August when the sun was very hot and the ground very dry, and the flies and the mosquitoes were everywhere, water became scarce, for it was a waterless land we were on. The Turkish prisoners, so friendly did they become with us, went back to their own lines and brought us water. We sent others back to try and persuade their kind to come over and give themselves up. We fed them well, gave them the best that we had, and made jolly good fellows of them, as they were indeed. They had given us a good fight and we appreciate a good fighter. Though they went back to their own lines they would always return and brought us frequently gourds of fresh water. The water that we got ourselves was coming from Murdos and Lemnos Islands. It was brackish and it stunk. We were only allowed one pint per man a day, a stingy ration under a tropic sun. The Turks said they brought us water because when wounded Turks lay gasping for water, we had given them of our own.

Then the time came when we were getting an extra supply of jam, and there were only two kinds of jam issued—plum and an apple and apricot combination. Of course, that set us all grumbling, soldier-like, because we didn’t get strawberry. One day one of the men hit upon the idea of exchanging this jam with wine with which the French soldiers over Suvla Bay way were liberally supplied. This exchange went on for about a fortnight, and there were happy times in the trenches. Then the French got fed up with this sameness of jam and our stocks dropped below zero. So we had to look out for another customer. One of our boys hit upon the idea of exchanging the jam with the Turks. During the day we put up our articles of exchange—jam and bully beef on bayonets and held them up in prominent positions on the front line trenches. And we waited anxiously as to what was going to happen, and lo! at night we heard and saw the Turks crawling through the brushwood and scrub, growling and muttering to themselves as their whiskers were caught on the twigs of the bushes. When they reached the front-line trenches they took off the articles of exchange and put in their place wines, cigarettes and Turkish “delight,” as we always called the tobacco. That showed us that they didn’t want war and we knew we didn’t want war, but the Germans wanted it and as long as they wanted it we had to keep going.

Likewise we had other experiences that were not all grim, but they were exciting. For instance, our bathing parties on the beach. We didn’t have to bother with bathing suits or summer-resort regulations, but we had the novelty of bathing to the accompaniment of shell fire. When we saw shells diving we dived to get out of the way.

Gallipoli at this period of the year was a frying pan. Men found their uniforms intolerable. We cut our trousers into “knickers,” abandoned our tunics, and did all our fighting in bare knees and shirt sleeves. Our enemies got a wrong impression from this. Turkish prisoners told us that the report among them was we were falling so short of supplies that we were cutting our trousers in two to make double the number of pairs. The idea of our poverty of supplies was further strengthened by the fact that many of our men abandoned shirts entirely and moved about like savages with bronzed bodies naked of all covering save the knickers and their socks and boots. Our aspect and the fact that our men went after them practically always with a bayonet, won for us from the Turk the respectful sobriquet of the “White Ghurkas,” the Ghurkas being famous for their fondness and expertness in the use of the knife.

Not to give the reader too happy an impression of affairs as they stood with us in Gallipoli after the night of our desperate landing, it might be well to note here that of our original landing force of 20,000 there had been at least 5,000 casualties among us. The night of the landing in the storm from the Turkish forts, the cliff batteries, the machine guns and the snipers, and also the drownings, fully 3,000 men had been killed or wounded. In the intermittent fighting of the following weeks preceding the attacks on Lone Pine and Chocolate Hill, the work of the sharp-shooters, added to that of many small engagements, had further depleted our numbers 2,000 more at least. We had held our own under these harrowing circumstances from the last of April until August when the second division of 20,000 new Anzacs came to join us.

In the fleet of transports that bore the fresh contingent of Australians and New Zealanders, was the Southland, she who was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. The men who arrived told us a most interesting story of the experience of the Southland and the 1,300 troops aboard her. It will be recalled that after being torpedoed the Southland had a remarkably long life. She was kept afloat for hours until beached on a rocky strand. The descriptions we got of the behavior of the Anzacs and her crew were thrilling in the courage, cheerfulness and display of humor on the part of hundreds of Britishers, who had no way of knowing at what moment the wounded ship might plunge to the bottom of the sea. One of the things they did was to hold an impromptu auction sale of the crippled Southland. Bids for the great boat, whose cost had been a half million, started at a shilling and while she was being battered on the sand and rocks, rose to the majestic sum of one pound. She was knocked down at that price to an Anzac, who later, in all hopefulness, was to file his claim of ownership with the marine registry at London. He announced his intention after the war of taking the Southland back home with him to make of it an Australian bungalow.

The Southland they told us landed with her nose high in the air, and there was rivalry as to who should be the last to leave the ship. Men scrambled up the steeply slanting deck, clinging to rails, cabin doors, and any other object offering hand- or foot-hold. There were big bathing parties around the wreck, before the men were picked up by the launches and barges from the other transports and battle ships. In the first of the shock from the torpedo and when all were in expectancy of the Southland’s going down, the men assembled on the decks and bravely set up the Australian song composed by a British naval officer, which had become dear to them: