The state of siege lasted for some two months, and I have not spoken to any man who endured it and was prepared to say that he wished it had been longer.
"I was fed up with it," said a bronzed giant, convalescing from his wounds in London, with whom I foregathered by chance in a railway carriage. "We were sick of sitting in our holes potting an odd Turk when he bobbed his head up. We wanted to be getting ahead. The boys down by Hellas had got a tough job, too, but we just prayed that they might make a big push up and we might be ordered to go out and cut a way through to meet them. It was no fun, living like rabbits and doing nothing, or next to nothing, and when I was hit by accident while I was fooling around, having a dip at Hell Spit, I wasn't sorry to get out of it for a change. I should have been, though, if I'd known we were in for a real, good scrap a few days later."
That was a pretty general feeling, he said; the inactivity, the sameness of the trench fighting, the sense of being cooped up within narrow limits and not given a chance to do anything, was infinitely boring. Everybody was impatient to be moving, and would sooner have gone on at all risks than have stopped there strategically marking time. Moreover, there was a shortage of tobacco and of the smaller luxuries of civilisation that might have helped to make that dull period of waiting endurable. You get a vivid glimpse of this in the report of Mr. W. Jessop, who went out in charge of a mission from the Y.M.C.A., which has done such magnificent service in looking after the welfare of the troops in all the fighting areas, with comforts for the men at the Dardanelles.
"It was pathetic," he says, "to see the eagerness with which the men viewed our preparations and the way they came about the tent.... I looked up two batteries of artillery I had been told about, and took with me several pounds of Havelock tobacco and some pipes. To the first of these men I came across I held up a tin of the tobacco and asked him if it was a friend of his (Havelock is Australian tobacco, and very popular in the Colonies). His eyes glistened, and then he said, 'It's all I have' (holding up a sovereign), 'but if you will give me a pipe with it I shall be glad to exchange, as I have not had a smoke for three weeks.' When I told him the pipe and tobacco were his for nothing, he was greatly touched. I went round to about fifty of these men and made similar gifts."
But such minor inconveniences would not have worried them if it had not been for the wearisome waiting for something to happen; and when the word went round that a new British force was to make a surprise landing higher up the gulf at Suvla Bay, and that the Anzacs were to create a diversion and keep the Turks fully occupied whilst it was done, there was no more grousing; it was exactly what they wanted.
The unquenchable ardour of the men was of a piece with the splendid spirit of brotherhood and good comradeship that prevailed among all ranks. It could not well have been otherwise, led by such officers as they had and under a commander so gallant and so genially considerate of them as General Birdwood, who from the outset, as Sir Ian Hamilton testifies, "has been the soul of Anzac. Not for one single day has he ever quitted his post. Cheery and full of human sympathy, he has spent many hours of each twenty-four inspiring the defenders of the front trenches, and if he does not know every soldier in his force, at least every soldier believes he is known to his chief." He was invariably under fire with his troops, and wounded in one engagement had his wound dressed on the field and refused to retire. No wonder his men are devoted to him, and that when you mention his name to any among those who are here, invalided home, they answer you with the warmest enthusiasm.
In preparation for the new movement fresh British and Indian troops had been landed at Anzac under cover of darkness two nights in succession. The Turks were aware of this; they had shelled the transports and the beach unstintedly, but so deftly were the landing parties handled by the naval service that the landings were successfully carried out with only two casualties. On the 6th August the British at Cape Helles commenced a heavy and continuous bombardment of the Turkish positions round Krithia, below the Achi Baba heights; at the same time the Anzacs got busy with guns and howitzers along the whole of their front to discourage the enemy from dispatching reinforcements in any direction.
HEROES FROM THE DARDANELLES. Wounded from the Dardanelles, leaving the hospital train in Egypt.
