THE STRAIN

In the second week of October, 1915, the Army at Cape Helles was reinforced by dismounted Yeomanry from East and West Kent, Surrey and Sussex, and by some Royal Fusilier Territorial units from Malta, who were lent to the Royal Naval Division. Many West Kent officers and N.C.O.'s were for a time attached to the Battalion, and proved admirable comrades. The 42nd Division received some scanty drafts on the 23rd October. These came from the 3rd line units at Codford on Salisbury Plain, and were of excellent quality. Our draft was under Lieutenant C.S. Wood, a very able signaller.

I noted on the 21st October that of the 300 men of the Battalion then in the field, nearly 100 were on detached jobs—signallers, machine gunners and details attached to various headquarters.

The result of the shrinkage in strength was a great strain upon the survivors. "We never sleep," the Battalion's motto, was adopted grudgingly as a rule of life. The necessities of the firing line required vigilance by day and night, and the long frontages allotted to the various units of the 42nd Division entailed broken nights and laborious days for all. The men's physique became lowered. Septic sores were general; bad eyes, not infrequent; jaundice of a type indicating para-typhoid was common; amoebic dysentery very prevalent. Loss of health meant loss of vigour. Limited to one bottle of water a day for all purposes, and perpetually a prey to flies, heat, diarrhoea and want of rest, the soldier had a trying time. Rations of a type welcome in a northern climate were unpalatable in Turkey. In July and August we were liberally supplied with vegetables and raisins, and with much-prized golden syrup for our porridge; but the latter luxury then disappeared, while for several months our only vegetables were onions, which do not appeal to every palate. Jams, even when the pots were adorned with pictures of one Sir Joseph Paxton, had very diminishing attractions. The only strawberry jam we ever had on the Peninsula came to us in tins, from which the labels had been stripped by some kindly act of Providence. In the expedition's early days our men had been able to exchange English jams for dainties procurable by the French and Senegalese, but the monotonous and indefinable "plum and apple" of the later summer killed the trade and extinguished all foreign admiration of British jam-making. Only the flies were fascinated.

Our East Lancashire Territorials did all that was possible to relieve the strain. We had a most able medical officer in Captain J.J. Hummel, of Glasgow, who had temporarily succeeded Captain J.F. Farrow (our own veteran M.O.) in July, but indeed all the units were happy in their doctors, and emetine in dysentery cases was a gift of gold. Nor could a Brigade have had a more gallant and untiring padre than Captain E.T. Kerby. He and Captain Farrow both won the Military Cross. Kerby must have said the burial service over the graves of nearly a thousand Manchesters on Gallipoli.

The food difficulty we met by encouraging unofficial imports. The kindness of all at home was beyond praise. Consignments of comforts were well regulated by Major H.G. Davies, who had charge of the Manchester depot, but many came direct from innumerable friends and national and local organisations. One mother of two boys of the Battalion who had lost their lives wrote to me, while sending parcels for their surviving comrades: "I dare say that life is dreary for them, poor lads. God in His mercy has been so very merciful in that my Darlings have been spared so much. My prayers will follow you throughout, praying for the success of the whole of Our Battalion, and that you may all be spared to come safely home to the fond hearts waiting."

England need never despair while she has such mothers.

The great glory of the East Lancashire Division during the long-drawn days of October and November was, however, the temper of its men. The spiritual exaltation, that all races feel at the outbreak of war and in the hour of battle, disappears under the pressure of the daily grind. Then, in his divine good-nature, the British Tommy comes into his own. Nothing dims his cheerfulness and humour. A chorus starting with: "We are the M.G." proclaimed the jollity of our Machine Gun Section and the ingenuity of Sergeant W. Harrison. A Machine Gun Corps of the larger type, organised under the energetic command of Captain Hayes, was a thing of the future. A long list of singers and performers—Hartnett, Mort, Addison (of ragtime celebrity), Wheelton, Holbrook, Hoyle, Clavering, Shields—adorned the programmes of our concerts. Other men like Tabbron and F.E.H. Barratt were notably cheery souls in the lines. The handful of surviving officers—Higham, Chadwick, Whitley, Douglas—with a few excellent attached officers—J. Baker and J.W. Barrett of the Somersets, and F.W. Woodward of the Sherwood Foresters—were untiring promoters of the men's well-being.

Their wants were so modest. Old magazines and football editions of Saturday evening papers, published a month or two earlier in England, sufficed for their literary appetites. Lancashire boys are not brought up to read; the Sentry writers were exceptional. When I once came upon a man reading the Golden Treasury, in Hardship Avenue, I knew he could not be a Manchester man. He was not. He came from the Isle of Man, and had joined our reserves at Southport. I found about half-a-dozen men who could enjoy The Times broadsheets. I am afraid John Bull was much more popular.

It was pleasant indeed to stroll along the narrow trenches and see how staunchly the men forgot their privations. Towards evening little parties would go, heavy-laden, into long forward saps that the engineers had thrown forward from Inniskilling Inch, to pass the night in cuttings called "T-heads," which were ultimately to be connected together and form a new trench closer to the enemy. They looked out from these lonely places in the midst of No Man's Land upon scattered heaps of corpses, and in their front upon the well-built Turkish trenches, substantially wired in and full of cleverly disguised loopholes. Two sentries were placed in each "T-head." The man on watch was exposed to oblique fire from all directions, as both British and Turkish lines curved to right and left, while the constant sound of Turkish picks at work suggested the proximity of mines. The sap that ran back to the fire trench was very narrow, and ended in a low tunnel under our parapet. It was therefore hard to bring wounded in from the "T-head." I remember one poor fellow in A Company called Renshaw being badly wounded in the head one night, and being dragged back through the tunnel with infinite difficulty.

The Turks were quick to pick up targets. One morning at our bivouac on Geoghegan's Bluff, we noticed half-a-dozen mules stray from Gully Ravine to the moor on the summit of its southerly side, perhaps a thousand yards from the enemy's front line. We saw them shot, one by one, within a minute. As the Turks enjoyed the possession of higher ground everywhere from first to last, their power of observation was necessarily greater than ours, and no corner of Cape Helles was exempt from shell fire. It pursued us even in our bathing places.

The course of life on Gallipoli was, however, so monotonous that men became callous to all dangers. They carried on the long day's routine and the numberless little jobs included in the term "trench duties," as if nothing else mattered. Such tasks are familiar to-day to so many millions of Europeans that they need no description. Gas masks, sprinklers and gongs were ready for use in every trench, but were happily not needed.

Our men represented every Lancashire type, from the master builder to the barrister's clerk, from the wheelwright to the calico printer, from the railway carter to the commercial traveller. You would find together in one traverse Sergeant J.V.H. Hogan, a well-read ex-Socialist devotee of Union Chapel debates and old political opponent of my own, and another sergeant, whose name I cannot now recall, but who had been the petty officer of a South American liner sunk by the Karlsruhe in the early days of the War. Then we had famous footballers in Sergeants Pearson and Bamber. The Territorial origin of the Battalion was, indeed, a never-failing source of strength. Officers and men came from the same place, enjoyed the same interests and possessed the same outlook. It was pleasant to see in the trenches, faces familiar in my own suburb of Fallowfield, and to chat with hundreds of men whose lives had touched mine in days of peace.

The worth and capacity of these men were not peculiar to our unit, but were common to the Manchester Brigade and the whole Division. One battalion contained expert miners. Another battalion, at this time commanded by Major (afterwards Lieutenant-Colonel) C.L. Worthington, had lost enormously in their valiant battles. One of their captains—R.H. Bedford—helped in our history lectures. Another battalion, under Lieutenant-Colonel MacCarthy Morrogh, with Major H.C.F. Mandley as Second in Command and Captain E. Horsfall as Adjutant, were our constant neighbours and allies. With the Lancashire Fusiliers and East Lancashires, and with the admirably run A.S.C. and R.A.M.C. we enjoyed a slighter but no less hearty friendship.

The best relief from the long strain of the trenches was a bathe in the sea, but any diversion while in rear of the firing line was exhilarating. We used to gather on the moors that lay between Geoghegan's Bluff and Bruce's Ravine, Turkish cartridge boxes made by the Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken at Karlsruhe and labelled with inscriptions in German and Turkish, innumerable spent Turkish cartridges, abandoned MÄuser rifles, Turkish bandoliers (stamped with the English name "Warner's") and all the usual fascinating dÉbris of battle.

company

C COMPANY, THE BRITISH CAMEL COMPANY, KHARTUM.On the 19th October I made a special expedition, with Captain C.E. Higham, to the southern sector of the area, where the French had held the line ever since their move from Kum Kale to the Peninsula. We walked to beautiful Morto Bay, with its graceful curve from the headland called De Tott's Battery. The ruins on this point, carried by the South Wales Borderers on the 25th April, stood out clear-cut against the bright blue of the Dardanelles and the fainter grey of the Asiatic coast beyond. We went on past French and Senegalese dug-outs to Sedd-el-Bahr, a village and fort wrecked by our naval guns in the first days of the campaign. The country was open and dotted with the remains of vineyards. North of Sedd-el-Bahr was the well-tended French graveyard, more prettily kept than our own cemetery above Lancashire Landing. Here sleep many hundred soldiers, "morts sur le champs d'honneur," their kÉpis on the crosses, and their graves adorned by flowers. The Jews and Senegalese had their own separate plots.

Sedd-el-Bahr appeared to be but a collection of outer walls and broken pillars, posts and fountains, some of archaic design. On the beach below, the River Clyde recalled the glory of the landing of the Dublins, Hampshires and Munsters. We struggled back to our bivouac in the teeth of a dusty, warm wind, to be inoculated with emetine and to rest by the white coast road, while we watched our monitors riding between Cape Helles and Imbros, and landing shells in the Turkish trenches on the slopes of Achi Baba. On such an occasion Ross Bain would arrive from marketing among the Greeks on Tenedos with some greatly valued potatoes, and then all our troubles would be forgotten.

When rain came, the joy of living was hard to attain. During all our time on Gallipoli I remember but one or two occasions when we were fortunate enough to secure timber or some corrugated iron to roof our dug-outs. Normally we had only our mackintosh sheets. Rain turned the thick dust to a brown morass, and the little mule carts struggling past the swampy curve of Geoghegan's Bluff could hardly clamber up the Gully Ravine. It was choked with mud.

Then the sun would come out and the flies returned in their myriads to plague us. They blackened every jam-pot and clustered thickly round the mouths and eyes of sleeping soldiers. The trenches became dry and dusty. Detached legs or feet or arms of the dead would protrude from the parapet, as the soil around them fell away. Smells became all-pervading. We would seek refuge in the dug-outs, that looked out upon a crowded graveyard from the sloping incline by Border Barricade. Then would come the time for another inoculation with emetine, and we would join the long line of men waiting, stripped to the waist, for Captain Hummel's needle. We prayed that it might be effective, and that we should be spared the curse of dysentery and long nights of misery in and about the fly-infested latrines.