It was 8.30 a.m. before Major Jowitt appeared with the last party landed. By this time sufficient trenches of sorts to accommodate the Battalion had been completed.
While getting "D" Company into our most advanced trench, Capt. Findlay was slightly wounded by shrapnel. He was sent back to Mudros on the Whitby Abbey which had brought him across a few hours before. His first visit to Gallipoli had not been a prolonged one.
Throughout the day the enemy sprayed our trenches with occasional bursts of shrapnel. By this time we had discovered that they were officially described as "rest" trenches, and were some considerable distance behind the firing-line. So we "rested" as best we could, each man effecting such improvements to his own personal bit of cover as could be carried out unostentatiously behind the shelter of the parapet.
That afternoon Colonel Morrison and Major Jowitt, with other senior officers of the Brigade, were shown round some of the forward communication and support trenches, and had the general situation explained to them.
The night was devoted by all ranks to the improvement of our trenches and to sleep when we were satisfied with our handiwork. More rain fell, and we got very wet and smeared with that remarkably tenacious mud which only Gallipoli can produce.
The following day (4th June) parties of officers were sent forward to be shown the Eski Lines, others going up to spend an instructive night in the firing line in the Centre Sector held by the 42nd Division.
We could not but be surprised at the smallness of this cockpit in which three nations battled. From the cliff at Cape Helles to the top of the impregnable Achi Baba was only 5-1/2 miles. The distance straight across the Peninsula at the firing line was not more than 3-1/2 miles. On our flanks we were shut in by cliffs along the Aegean Sea on the left, and along the Dardanelles on our right. Every acre of ground we held was dominated by the hill in front, about 720 feet high. Our right flank and the vitally important landing places, "V" Beach and "W" Beach (Lancashire Landing), were under observation from Asia, less than three miles away at its nearest point. Somewhere across there on the Plains of Troy the Turks had at least one big gun to harass us, "Asiatic Ann" we called her, probably a gun dismantled from the Goeben. Their 6 in. guns on Achi Baba could reach any part of the Peninsula they choose.
The ground we stood on sloped gently up to the hill, pleasant arable land with here the remains of a farm and the trampled crops around it, there an olive grove and fig-trees or battered vineyard. Elsewhere was scrub and, in those early months, sweet-smelling and aromatic plants and flowers round which bees hummed and butterflies hovered in the heat.
The Peninsula was rent by three great ravines; the Gully with its precipitous banks on our left, and the Krithia and Achi Baba nullahs in the centre. In the dry season only a gentle flow of water trickled down these courses, leaving enough room for a path or even a roadway to be beaten out by which men and rations and stores could be got forward unobserved by the Turk. Their banks were honeycombed with crude dug-outs (mere scrapings in the ground with a waterproof sheet or blanket for covering) in which men sought protection from shell-fire and relief from the pitiless sun.
Monday, 5th July, was a Turkish Holy Day. Under the personal direction of Enver Pasha, or rather Enver Bey as he then was, the enemy marked the occasion by making a most determined attack. The brunt of it fell upon the 29th Division.