In looking over the notes and papers I have collected to aid me in the preparation of this book, memory is vigorously stirred by a clipping of an article from the Sydney Mail of October 31, 1917, written by a fellow officer who prefers to remain anonymous. He wrote well of the familiar scenes of the famous battlefield as they would appear today. Following is an extract:

“The ‘Vineyard’ has blossomed and the small green grapes cluster on the vine. The well by the fisherman’s hut has run sweet once more. The cave dwellers by Shrapnel Gully, Quinn’s Post and Courtenay’s are as quiet and still as tombs. Grass and weeds have grown over the winding paths that thread the valleys and scrape the hilltops. The sandbags of the traverses have rotted and burst, spilling their earth on the litter of these battles of yesterday. And out through the chessboard field the grave-mounds of earth that we pattered down with spade and entrenching tool have blossomed with wild flowers and green grass. The warm, tideless Ægean washes these empty beaches where once thousands of men from the Empire’s back-blocks made war as it had never been made before.

“Two years ago forty thousand men walked these paths. They slept in these dug-outs, or in the trenches, and the detonation of the guns of the warships shook loose the earth and sand above them so that it rattled down in their faces, waking them from dreams of home to an uncomfortable reality. Think of those three days two years ago! Think of the waterless fight for Chocolate Hill; of the wounded lying in the brushwood and waiting for the sweeping grass fires to reach their resting place. Men lay there unable to move; some of them not able to pull their water bottles from their web-slings! Think of them and remember them, for in all wars there was never a more gallant forlorn hope than this one.

“Lone Pine, Chocolate Hill, Sari Bair and Biyuk Anafarta were goals set far ahead. Many reached them and never came back. Lone Pine was attacked on August 6 and of all the attacks at Gallipoli, this was, perhaps, the most terrible. The Turkish trenches were supplied with head covers made of stout timber. Under these were loopholes from which the Turks fired with temporary immunity at the advance Australian battalions. The enfilade fire was terrible, but the men bodily lifted the timber beams and dropped feet first into the dark trenches beneath. By 5:47 P.M., 17 minutes after the first advance, we held the trenches. At 1:30 the same night there came a terrific counter-attack headed by scores of bombers. For seven hours the counter-attack pressed, wave on wave of Turks coming from the very parapet often to be shot and fall into the trench. One Australian brigade, only two thousand strong, carried this work in the face of an entire enemy division and held it during six days’ counter-attacks. A thousand corpses were in the trench system after the occupation and to make room for the fighting men these were stacked in piles at intervals between the traverses.

“There was one example there that will never die. The 7th Gloucester lost all their officers and senior non-commissioned officers, but they fought on, mere isolated groups of men and the privates and lance-corporal, green troops of the New Army from midday until sunset! The Lancashires, the Hampshires, Gloucesters, Australians and New Zealanders—all did men’s work in those days. None of their deeds will die, none of the names of men or regiment will ever be forgotten.”

I was in the attack of Lone Pine which carried our armies nearest to the goal of capturing the coveted strip between the Ægean and the Straits of Dardanelles. I got my first wound of the war in the winning of these timber-roofed trenches, a bayonet thrust in the darkness ripping my right hand open but doing my hand in the matter of its future usefulness no permanent injury. Reinforcements had come to us till our numbers stood at forty thousand, but with the reinforcements also came aËroplanes which later “spotted” for us the information that the Turks on the tops of the ridges outnumbered us by many thousands. They had also the support of the great guns of their forts although our battle ships had made the contests in artillery fairly even duels.

Lone Pine Hill was the most prominent ridge on our front. It was so named because the sweep of our fire had leveled a small forest so completely that only a single pine tree remained. Its foliage had been entirely blown away. There was left of it but its broken trunk and two gaunt limbs, blackened by explosions and upraised, curiously resembling the arms of a soldier in the act of surrender. We took this to be a good omen when on the afternoon of August 6th our orders came that on this night we were to mount these 500 yards of rock, stubble and moss and possess ourselves of this highest point of the enemy positions.

We felt all confident. With reinforcements of our own Anzacs had come moreover big supplies of ammunition, machine guns and additional artillery.

But also we knew the way ahead to be a hard one to travel and our aËroplane observers in their reports and photographs had shown how deeply and firmly the Turks under their German officers had fixed themselves in the trenches on the summit of Lone Pine.

Nearly all the attacks up to this time had begun in the dawn. This time the attack was ordered immediately on the fall of darkness. The strategy succeeded. There is no doubt that a night advance was a big surprise for we had made our way up along two hundred yards of ground before they suspected our coming. Then they flashed their star-shells in the sky and swept us with a howling fire. It stopped us for a time, but we pulled ourselves together and held on until our commanders were certain that the Zion Mule Corps under Colonel Paterson, the famous Jewish contingent in this action at Gallipoli, were behind us with their sturdy animals heavily laden with the bombs that we already knew to be so vital a weapon in trench-storming. They used the mules as well to bring us additional machine guns. But most of all we needed a chance to catch our breath. Our halt did not in the least mean our doubt of ability to get those trenches. It was part of good wisdom that our men should not attain the top of the ridge winded and exhausted from the climb.

We halted crouching behind the rocks and knolls, gasping at first, for only about five minutes. Then we started to cover the rest of the climb and give the Turks and their German commanders “what for.”

The Turkish trenches, it must be understood, were built in the hillside and their timber-roofs slanted toward us. These roofs were honeycombed with loop-holes from which their fire snarled at us as we came. Its first effect was deadly, but there was no wavering. Against the geysers of bullets these covered trenches were throwing up we simply went to work with our trench knives and bayonets, used them as crowbars and ripped the timbers loose. We blew the timbers into the air as well with bombs although many of our men were disabled, being wounded by big flying splinters in the process. We dropped right in on top of the Turks and fought them hand to hand in their own dug-outs. It was fast fighting and we swiftly overwhelmed them. I recall to the reader as accurate the statement of the writer in the Sydney Mail that we captured Lone Pine Ridge in seventeen minutes of direct attack.

The Turks fell completely away from Lone Pine Ridge and retreated fully a mile across a shallow valley and on to another ridge where we knew from our aËroplane scouts they had another strong position. In the judgment of our commanders we must be content to hold the elevation, the next advance, if it were to be undertaken, would have to be with the aid of tremendous artillery force in the taking of the great Dardenelles forts themselves.

From 6 o’clock in the evening of August 6th until half-past one the following morning you might have supposed that the Turkish soldier was a phantom for all we ever saw of him. But the batteries of the big forts never let up. For six weeks they were to hold us under a fire night and day. It wasn’t exactly continuous, but you never could tell when it would open up and never a day or night passed that did not find us under attack.

At half-past one o’clock in the morning of August 7th the Turks came back, seeking to regain the Lone Pine position. They fought us fiercely. They stormed their way against terrific machine-gun fire to the very brink of our trenches. Sometimes they got into the very trenches themselves and our men found them hard fighters in hand to hand struggles and, not like the Germans as we were to discover later, cowards under the rip and stab of cold steel.

They were tireless in attack. We sent back waves of them, but other waves came on. They, too, had their battle songs, or I should say song. It was always the same tune they sang in swooping at us, a curious whining refrain that would suddenly end in a high note of ferocity or anticipated triumph.

There was a man at the end of the trench that we had taken who did not belong to my battalion, but who had jumped into the trench suddenly with a whole box of bombs in his arms and who before he got finished with that night’s work had won the Victoria Cross. I saw him in the thick of a fight passing out bombs with splendid strength and swiftness. Besides as I kept watching him he was tireless. He stopped rush after rush of battle-mad Turks as they tried to force their way into our dug-outs. Noting his effectiveness, I gave orders to keep him well supplied with bombs. I ordered two men behind him for relief, but he kept constantly shouting back that he was feeling fine and able to carry on. In the morning that particular fight was over and around the section of the trench where this man fought we counted forty-seven Turkish dead. He wasn’t scratched. My memory is playing me badly at the moment and I can’t give his name. He was, however, sufficiently recognized in the official dispatches which in naming him identified him as a famous cricket player of Australia. His bowling arm had certainly done noble work that night. Without the tireless stream of bombs we kept in the air at the enemy I am not sure that we could have held on to our particular section of the trench.

Official dispatches have told how we hung on to these advanced trenches from August until October, how the Turk was kept in subjection in so far as the territory we had so vigorously acquired. We settled down in the sandstone hills and grimly endured through these months an intolerably monotonous life.

We almost welcomed the blizzard that struck us in the latter part of October because of the change it gave us, that is to say, we welcomed it the first day when the snow covered the ridges and thousands of British soldiers turned into rollicking boys. We snowballed each other, we mixed our jam with the clean white snow, called it sherbet and gobbled it, improvised skis out of the bottoms of barrels and shot over the ridges like human darts, built snow Germans and snow Turks and knocked them over and one company created the greatest attraction by building a big snow Kaiser which we bayoneted to pieces with great shouts of laughter. But we had to pay for this fun in the succeeding weeks in which the trenches remained frozen and the air bit into us cruelly. It was a big change from the blazing heat of the summer climate on the peninsula to the arctic weather that swept so suddenly down. And many new crosses were erected in the hillside cemeteries over the graves of men who died of pneumonia. Thousands were tortured by pneumonia and the minor infliction of frost-bite.

Long ago water had become too precious a thing to be used for shaving and our men had become as whiskery as the Turks. One fellow one morning looking through his trench periscope caught a reflection of himself in its mirror. He had grown a foot and one-half of black whiskers, but hadn’t realized the change it would make in his appearance. So he let a yell out of him to give us the alarm that the Turks were at our trench. But his own magnificent growth of black whiskers had deceived him.

We lived so long in these trenches that were so much like rabbit warrens that we had got to calling ourselves rabbits and one disconsolate man of mine that I found sitting in the trench one day and asked of him what might be the cause of his deep dejection answered:

“I am waiting for my ears to get longer and my tail to sprout.”

I come now to a day in November, to be exact the 25th. This was to be a historic event for us Anzacs and will doubtless rank as a historic event of the war. It was the visit of Lord Kitchener to Anzac as we now call the two miles of Gallipoli strip we held. I am not in a position to make the statement authoritatively, but I think his coming was a complete surprise to the commandants. It certainly was to the rank and file. He arrived on a man-o’-warsman. Of course, great honors were paid him. The Turks were no longer active and the commanders had no hesitation in assembling fully ten thousand men on the beach to stand in review before the great leader. I was fortunately among them. I had, when in service in India (1906–1911), been a participant in the famous Kitchener maneuvers.

I naturally looked at him searchingly to note what changes might have been wrought by the war and its responsibilities. He did look older as he stood before us—much older. He was a little stooped, but in the stride of his long lean figure he was as vigorous as I had ever seen him. And his eyes were keen and full of light and strength as he stood before us. It wasn’t until days later that positive orders came when we learned officially that Gallipoli was to be evacuated. But he practically told us that fact that day. For a brief talk to the army followed his visit and inspection of three hours of the front trenches, his own observations with glasses from certain places of vantage, a submission to his consideration of all the aËro-photographs that had been taken of the Turkish positions and strength and a long conference with the supreme commandant of the period, Sir Charles Monro.

I will try to repeat Lord Kitchener’s words to us as literally, as accurately as memory will serve. He said:

“The King and your country appreciate most deeply the great work you have done. To have effected a landing on this hostile shore and to have held it as splendidly as you have done is in itself a great triumph for British arms. I regret that the necessities of our armies, in conformation to other plans drawn, may not permit you to remain to complete this noble success.”

And so Kitchener left us. His visit was not longer than twenty-four hours—in fact, the man-o’-warsman that brought him into Anzac Cove slipped away in the darkness, sometime before dawn.

But from that day we knew that all the perils and hardships we had endured in the fight for Gallipoli were to be crossed out in the record of results of the war. There began from November 26th a silent, secretive movement to effect our evacuation.

It must go down in history that this was most subtly done. If the Turks had ever suspected that we were thinking of withdrawing, they might have in the last two weeks of the evacuation, at least, swooped down and slaughtered the third of the force which was actually left on the Gallipoli strip. We used countless schemes of deception. To be specific we would send away boat loads of a thousand men in the night, but in the daylight land boat loads of a hundred to fool the Turkish observers into believing we were landing new forces. In the same way we would transport thousands of boxes of bombs and cartridges out of the trenches and the harbor in the night to the battle ships and in the daylight land from our barges, steamboats, pinnaces and launches, thousands and thousands of empty boxes that had contained the ammunition.

As we also withdrew our effects from the front-line trenches, our engineers displayed the greatest activity in making of all these trenches and barbed-wire entanglements the most ingenious of mechanical man-traps. Any force of Turks which attempted to swoop down the ridges against our slowly departing brigades would confront explosions of mines wonderfully camouflaged along the goat paths that were the only roads to have passed through the barbed-wire barriers and in and over deserted trenches would have set ablaze other deadly outbursts of explosions. We also had set cunningly placed rifles on our outposts which would have been set off by any prowling Turkish scout, kill him in all probability and at the same time give us an alarm.

We were not without our expressions of sentiment in abandoning Gallipoli for which we had fought so hard. We went among the rocks and heather and gathered wattle, otherwise known as memosa which is a sort of holly whose berries are yellow. It is the winter flower of the Gallipoli peninsula. We fashioned these into thousands of wreaths and in the very last days of our departure placed them on the graves of our dead.

And frankly we had no great resentment against the Turk. He had been a hard fighter but always a fair one. He had always battled as man against man. Somehow, his German officers had never been able to make him, if they tried, the barbarous, underhand, contemptible fighter into which I was soon to learn they could develop their own German soldier. As a matter of fact, we left friendly signs behind. One placard read: “Au revoir—Brother Turk. Hope to see you again.” Another placard read: “To long Whiskers.”

One dug-out showed a placard announcing: “Anzac Villa—To Let for the Season. Beautiful Sandy Beach all to Yourself. Splendid sea view. Home comforts. Lots of pleasure and excitement.”

Since Gallipoli German propagandists, with an idea of humiliating England in the world’s opinion, have spread reports that if the British forces had held out a month longer we would have triumphed on the peninsula—that the Turks were on the verge of surrender.

Such reports are childish in their palpable falsity. As a matter of fact we were less than 40,000 men against 500,000. Against the great guns of the Turkish fort we had only in like artillery the great guns of our battle ships. And the battle ships were being menaced by submarines. It is only for me to set down that the great Kitchener going thoroughly over the situation forced the evacuation that was so masterfully managed.