WITH A B.-P. SCOUT IN GALLIPOLI—ON THE TURKISH FRONTIER
A Record of the Belton Bulldogs
Told by Edmund Yerbury Priestman, Scoutmaster of the 16th (Westbourne) Sheffield Boy Scouts
These anecdotes and experiences are related in the letters written home by a scoutmaster serving as a subaltern. The author, at the outbreak of the War, officered the Boy Scouts who were guarding places of danger from spies in England. He took a commission in the 6th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, and shipped for Suvla Bay in the Dardanelles Campaign. Here this young English officer of twenty-five years of age fell in action on November 19th, 1915. His letters have been collected into a book under title "With a B.-P. Scout in Gallipoli." They form one of the few really humorous books the War has produced, with an irrepressible outburst of a youth who always saw the cheerful side of life. Some of these letters are here reproduced with courtesy of his American publishers, E. P. Dutton and Company, of New York. All rights reserved.
[12] I—STORY OF A DUGOUT UNDER JOHNNY TURK'S GUNS
Somewhere in Turkey.
I am sitting on a rolled-up valise, a sort of hold-all in a dugout on a hillside, while a weary "fatigue" party is digging more dugouts. Writing isn't easy, as I have to balance the paper on my knee, so pardon! This little hole in Europe (i.e. this dugout) appears to belong to a Second-Lieutenant Huggins—at least, that's the name of the valise—and taken all round it is quite a good hole to live in. Our life has become analogous to the life of a rabbit, and we vie with each other as to the security of our respective burrows against the little attentions paid us daily by the Turkish gunners. Mr. Huggins, so far as security goes, has done well, as his lair is dug some five feet deep and strongly built up with stone parapets. Lying at the bottom he (or the present occupier, E. Y. P.) would be fairly safe against either shrapnel or high explosive. But when he lays him down to sleep I guess Huggins will be one of the sickest soldiers on the Peninsula, for in the left-hand a party of some 1,000,000 ants are at this moment digging themselves in! Itchi koo! as the song says.
We are really reserve, resting at present, but it seems that we have to do all the dirty work for the fellows who have taken over our nice comfortable trenches, and we shan't be sorry to get back into them on Sunday next.
The great advantage of our present position is that the hill we are on runs down to the sea, and every day we can get a dip, so long as we stay here. After a week or two in the trenches we certainly need plenty of bathing, and I caught two of the minor horrors of war in my shirt yesterday. One of them (the hen-bird) won the prize offered by one of the subalterns for the biggest caught. Private Jones's boast that he had caught one "as big as a mule" failed to materialise when the time for weighing-in came. So mine (no larger than an average mouse) won easily.
At this point I will break off for a lunch of bully and biscuits.
To resume, having finished my lunch, using Mr. Huggins' valise as a table.
Away to the east, along this ridge of hills, somebody is firing machine-guns and artillery, but as I can only see the smoke of the shrapnel away up in the sky above the hilltops, I don't know whether they are our guns or Johnny Turk's. If they are his we shall soon have some over us here, as he has picked up the Hun's habit of having at least one daily "hate." Another shell has burst—nearer us this time. Yes, Johnny is out for blood, so I have moved the Huggins bundle and settled myself on the hard, cold floor of the Palace Huggins, where the shrapnel bullets will have more difficulty in finding me.
The system the gunners go on is to send an officer up a hill to a place where he can see the countryside. He observes through the 'scope where the places are that the enemy troops mostly use, paths, wells, dugouts, etc., and marks them on his map, probably numbering them points 1, 2, 3, and so on. He also has an accurate rangefinder and a telephone connecting him with the battery of guns. If he sees a party of men at a certain spot, he wires down: "Give 'em socks at point 17," or words to that effect, and we get a few shells along, while the observing officer scores the hits. Other days I rather suspect he puts all the numbers into a hat and shakes them up. Then he picks one out, and with luck the shell falls two miles away from anyone and wipes out an ant-hill with great slaughter.
He's a peculiar gentleman, old man Turk. One night when I was going my rounds in the trenches I noticed a general rush at a point where generally some of our liveliest boys want suppressing, so I listened, as everyone else seemed to be doing, and away from behind the Turks' trenches came a sound of a band, playing some real racy oriental music. We had quite a promenade concert. Coming from over the rugged top of a rocky hill and through the quiet starlit night it was quite weird, in a way, but we all enjoyed it. In France the Germans often have a bit of a concert before any big attack, but although we thought Johnny Turk might be going to do the same, no attack came off that night. We did have a mild attack once—see enclosed account[13]—but the enemy never got within very exciting distance of the section of the trench I was responsible for. Anyway, you can show this printed account round, and tell everyone that your son helped General Maxwell to hold the Turks back. What! What!