Australasia Triumphant!: With the Australians and New Zealanders in the Great War on Land and Sea

by Arthur St. John Adcock

To maintain anything like order in such an attack, over ground so broken into hills and gullies, and so obscured with brushwood that you could seldom see many yards before you, was impossible. Scattered groups, as Sir Ian says, went on with such headlong valour that they pushed farther across the Peninsula than had been intended, and, being unsupported, were presently compelled to retire before the onrush of Turkish reinforcements. But they fell back steadily; order was gradually evolved out of the inevitable confusion; special detachments were sent to hold critical stations, and soon the invaders were "solidified into a semicircular position, with its right about a mile north of Gaba Tepe and its left on the high ground over Fisherman's Hut."

All that day and all the next night the fighting continued with little intermission. The Turks brought up reinforcements and, before our positions could be strengthened, made a furious drive along the whole line with 20,000 men. This lasted from eleven in the morning to three in the afternoon, but was crushingly repulsed, the ships out in the Gulf helping vigorously with their guns. It was succeeded by a second attack, and, between five and six-thirty in the afternoon, by a third, both of which failed completely and left the victors in full possession of all the ground they had taken. In the night the Turks attacked again and again with increasing fury, the Australian 3rd Battalion at one point heroically repelling a deadly bayonet charge; but the morning of the 26th found our line everywhere unbroken. Our casualties had been very heavy, but the enemy had suffered far more. They had punished us with shrapnel, but many times when they had come surging forward in close formation our machine guns had decimated their ranks, and in the light of morning all the surrounding country was seen to be strewn with their dead.

Throughout the 26th and 27th April the struggle was resumed intermittently, day and night, but the enemy only shattered themselves against the Australasian front as the sea shatters itself on a rock. By now, our line had been securely entrenched, and arrangements completed for systematically bringing ammunition, water, and supplies up the difficult ground to the ridges; and on 28th-29th April the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was reinforced with four battalions of the Royal Naval Division.

Gaba Tepe itself proved to be so strongly fortified and so amazingly well protected with barbed-wire entanglements that the notion of carrying it by storm had to be abandoned, but divers dominating posts and observation stations were wrested from the Turks and added to our possessions, and by degrees the warfare settled down to occasional attacks by one side or the other and everlasting sniping. No longer daring to press an attack home, the Turks devoted much of their energy to persistent firing from caves and sheltering holes on the hill-sides, to crawling out into the scrub and, lying low in the plentiful cover of that uneven country, sniping the Australians and New Zealanders in their shelter trenches. The New Zealanders, at one section of the line, stalked a party of this kind very neatly, were on them before they could escape and gave them a lesson with the bayonet that the few survivors were not likely to forget in a hurry. When this lesson had been several times repeated, at various points, the Turks took it generally to heart, and did their sniping from a more respectful distance, or more cunningly.

THE DARDANELLES–SOLDIERS TAKING THEIR HORSES FOR A BATHE.

GENERAL BIRDWOOD, IN COMMAND OF THE AUSTRALIANS AT THE DARDANELLES.

One ingenious way of theirs was for a man to strip naked, paint himself green and sit up in a convenient tree with a stock of provisions; and as it was impossible to detect him among the leaves, and he only fired when an incautious head appeared above the trenches, he would often have a run of two or three days and do considerable damage before he could be located and disposed of. Or he would tie umbrageous branches all about his person and lie near-by in the open, looking like an innocent patch of scrub, till somebody caught the flash of his gunfire or an incautious movement betrayed him. The Australasians filled in a little time by snaking forth to hunt for these pests, and frequently caught them red-handed and shot them down, or caught them alive and brought them in with all their greenery attached to them. More than once the snipers proved to be women, who were more vicious and implacable even than the men. All the while, on the other hand, the Australasians were doing a great deal of thoroughly efficient sniping on their own account, for, as Sir Ian bears witness, "the Turkish sniper is no match for the kangaroo shooter, even at his own game."

This was the state of affairs on the 5th May, by which date the homeland troops and the French, with a Naval Brigade formed of the Plymouth and Deake battalions, and a Composite Division of the 2nd Australian and New Zealand Infantry Brigades withdrawn from the section up north, above Gaba Tepe, had established themselves impregnably right across the southern point of the Peninsula to a depth of 5,000 yards from their landing-places. There was sterner and more terrible work ahead of them, down south as well as in the north. So far they had triumphed gloriously over what seemed almost insuperable difficulties; they had won a footing on the shores of Gallipoli at two places, and had made that footing sure. There was still before them the more tremendous task of advancing on those valleys and ridges of death and attacking the powerful network of trenches that stretched in bewildering involutions from end to end of the fifty miles of the Peninsula.