HEROES OF THE DARDANELLES.
During the night of the 6th a vast array of transports, accompanied by warships, destroyers, and smaller craft, passed quietly up the Gulf of Saros and glided into Suvla Bay, six or seven miles north of Anzac Cove. All along the other side of the Dardanelles, from Kum Kale to Chanak, and at Anzac and in the southern extremity of Gallipoli, the Turks were either under attack or on the alert and expecting it. But here, at Suvla Bay, they were anticipating no danger, and hundreds of small boats had rushed the invading force safely ashore before they were aware of their coming. An observation post was taken by surprise; its garrison of fifty surrendered, and the British had marched six miles inland and it was getting on towards evening before an enemy force came into view hastening forward to oppose the advance. The Turks had been warned of what had happened, and before next morning had swiftly concentrated as many as 70,000 men to bar the way. All night there were numerous spasmodic and furious local fights for points of vantage, and all night the two forces were rapidly throwing out barbed-wire entanglements and digging themselves in, and as soon as the day came the battle developed in deadliest earnest.
Both sides were well supplied with artillery, and all day the merciless struggle raged with growing fury; in repeated attacks and counter-attacks first the Turkish, then the British lines swayed this way and that, but always straightened out again and could at no point be broken through. A dozen times the Turks flung themselves forward in dense masses, and when they shattered and came thundering in over and past the wire entanglements, the British leaped from their trenches to meet them and fell upon them with spades and bayonets till they fled panic-stricken, leaving their dead and wounded heaped about the ground.
The enemy had the advantage in position; they were on the higher levels, and they were superior in numbers; but when night fell again over the field of carnage, if the British had made no further advance they still held every inch of their line, and they passed the night in entrenching it more firmly.
The plan of campaign was for one section of the force to push on straight across the Peninsula whilst another section moved to the south-east towards Anzac, whence the Australians and New Zealanders were to fight a way up and join them.
The Anzacs carried out their part of this arrangement with a dash and daring that were irresistible. They had been reinforced by a brigade of Gurkhas and by regiments of our new armies, and it was resolved to make a beginning by sending the First Australian Infantry Brigade to attack the Lone Pine plateau. "The Third Brigade," writes Captain C. E. W. Bean, the Official Press Representative with the Australian forces there, "had immortalised itself on the day of the landing–they were the miners' brigade from Broken Hill and the gold-fields and Queensland and Tasmania. The Second Brigade–the Victorians–had made their wonderful charge at Helles, when for a quarter of an hour they went straight as a die for 1,000 yards across country as bare as the palm of your hand, in the face of shrapnel and withering rifle fire. Now, at last, it was the chance of the First Brigade–the men from New South Wales."
The officers' whistles shrilled the signal, and in a moment the First Brigade was out and making a bee line for the low, scrub-covered hill on which the Turks were entrenched; but when they came to the trenches they found them stoutly roofed with logs and timbers, and spread out scattered along them looking for a way in, fired at through loopholes and by machine guns, and pelted with shrapnel from a battery in the rear. But they were not there to be beaten. Here and there along the roof man-holes had been left; some of the Anzacs dropped recklessly down these small openings ("like burglars through a sky-light," says Mr. Bean) on to the Turks below; others by sheer force of muscle tore up logs or planks to make an entry and flung themselves in and clubbed their rifles or got to work with their bayonets, and after a short, sharp fight the enemy either lay dead in their burrow or were in full flight up their communication trenches. Other of the Australians had run right on over the roof of logs and as swiftly captured the second trench and thence poured on into the communication trenches to stop the fleeing Turks or give chase and shoot them as they fled.
In other parts of the field the battle was spreading mightily and the Australians and New Zealanders, with the Gurkhas and their new comrades from the homeland, were carrying all before them. The Maoris and New Zealand Mounted Rifles, fighting afoot, cleared the foot-hills with the bayonet, and soon over all the lower hills, in the rugged gullies and ravines and up the sides of the Anafarta height, the fighting became general, gathering tempestuously in sound and fury.
For four days and nights it continued with little intermission–desperate and bloody fighting, much of it, with bayonets and clubbed rifles; and steadily the combined force of Anzacs, English, and Indians forced their way up the steep slopes towards the ridge that was pouring a blasting hail of lead and fire down upon them perpetually. Trench after trench on the savagely contested ascent was taken and left behind, choked with Turkish dead. Generals and colonels, armed with rifles, fought shoulder to shoulder with their men, and many of them, including General Baldwin, who through the nightmare of those four days of carnage fought heroically beside his men, were killed; but by the evening of the 10th August, though the formidable heights of Anafarta, which had been stormed with almost incredible heroism by the Australians, the New Zealanders, and some English regiments, for lack of support, could not be held, all the lower ground on the western side was in our possession, and the army from Anzac Cove had triumphantly linked up with the troops that had landed at Suvla Bay.