I know you for Hearts of Gold.
Will Ogilvie.
Here is no dread and no grieving;
Over us hurtles the fray:
Is yours a Heaven worth achieving,
If it be stormed in a day?
Arthur H. Adams.
On that narrow strip of ground above Gaba Tepe, the Australians and New Zealanders have been living, at this writing, for a full six months. They have burrowed the rugged hill-sides into human warrens, and when they are not on duty in the trenches return to a manner of life that was natural to the ancient cave-dwellers before the dawn of civilisation. Here and there, between the hills, great pits that have been excavated by bursting shells are transformed into convenient bathing-places; but it has been a common thing to see parties of men come joyously down, released from the firing line, to wash the feel of dust and grime from them in the cool waters of the adjacent sea; and they have grown so accustomed to their environment that even if the enemy breaks into sudden activity they go on enjoying themselves there, indifferent to the splash of bullets round about them and the occasional whine and shriek of a shell that bursts overhead and scatters a rain of shrapnel that does not always fall harmlessly. From the tents and huts on the beach, where the stores are kept, they have made good roads up the cliffs to facilitate the labour of transport. Behind their first line of trenches they have turned the bit of territory they have won and hold so tenaciously into a queer little town of snug caverns and bomb-proof shelters, and have made all the place so peculiarly their own that somebody has been happily inspired to christen the district Anzac, a name formed from the initials of the force, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps; and by that name it has become officially and generally known.
The marvel is that after living and fighting in such a dreary spot for six months the men are still as high-spirited and as fertile in contriving ways to amuse their leisure as if they had never known anything better or fuller than the precarious, perilous existence on this barren patch of land. They are not only indomitably cheerful, but full of fight and enterprise, and indomitably determined to see this terrible job right through, if only the homeland will back them as efficiently as it ought to.
The foe they are holding up outnumbers them by two or three to one; and they were never sent there with any notion that they could do more than they have accomplished. They were sent there to keep as many of the Turks as possible thoroughly occupied whilst the larger part of the expeditionary force landed at Cape Hellas and fought its way up the Peninsula to join hands with them; and they have achieved this successfully, and more than this. "Anzac, in fact," as Sir Ian Hamilton has told us, "was cast to play second fiddle to Cape Hellas, a part out of harmony with the dare-devil spirit animating these warriors from the south. So it has come about that the defensive of the Australians and New Zealanders has always tended to take on the character of an attack."