Saturday, October 2, 1915. No. 2 Outpost. This morning General Godley, Colonel Artillery Johnson and I went round to see the guns, all across the Anafarta plain. Yesterday they had been shelling a good deal and had killed some Gurkhas.... We trudged about in the open, the Turkish hills in a semicircle round us. We kept about fifty yards apart.... I thought it very risky for the General; however, nothing happened. Have been meeting various school acquaintances these days....
Sunday, October 3, 1915. The General and Charlie B. went to Suvla. I lunched with S. B. and H. Woods. We played chess. A good deal of shelling. A fair number hit....
Monday, October 4, 1915. Changed my dugout this morning with an infinity of trouble, I didn’t like doing it; it involved men standing on the roof, and if one of them had been hit I should have felt responsible. However, we did it all right. I stole some corrugated iron, and am well off. This morning the Turks had a fierce demonstration. The bullets kicked up the dust at the mouth of the gully. Colonel Artillery Johnson just missed being hit, but only one man struck. They shelled us with big stuff that came over tired and groaning, bursting with a beastly noise and torrents of smoke. General C. lunched. He said people sent curiously inappropriate stores sometimes. In the middle of the summer they had sent us here mufflers and cardigan jackets, and two thousand swagger canes. These were now at Mudros. Chauvel has taken over command while the General is sick. He borrowed all my novels.
Tuesday, October 5, 1915. General C.O. turned up. He said we are going to attack through Macedonia. Heaven help us! Bulgaria has been given twenty-four hours’ ultimatum by Russia.
Went into Anzac, to go by boat to Suvla. Met C., who was at W—— (my private school). He said there was no boat. I went on and played chess, coming back through one of the most beautiful evenings we have had, the sea a lake of gold and the sky a lake of fire; but C. and I agreed we would not go back to Anzac or to W——, if we could help it.
Wednesday, October 6, 1915. I was going into Suvla with Hastings, but in the morning a Turkish deserter, Ahmed Ali, came in. He promised to show us two machine-guns, which he did (one German, immovable, and the other Turkish, movable), and seven guns which he had collected; this he failed to do, and also to produce three more comrades by firing a Turkish rifle as a signal.
In the afternoon I had a signal from S. B. to say he was leaving, sick, for Egypt. I walked in to see, and found he had gastritis....
Thursday, October 7, 1915. N.Z. and A. H.Q. This morning we went up with Ahmed Ali, and lay waiting for the Turkish deserters until after six. One Turkish rifle shot, a thicker sound than ours, was fired at Kidd’s Post, but no Turks came. Ahmed Ali was distressed. The dawn was fine; clouds of fire all over the sky.
The Turkish deserters and prisoners were put through a number of inquisitions. There was first of all the local officer, who had captured the Turk and was creditably anxious to anticipate the discoveries of the Intelligence. Then there was G.H.Q., intensely jealous of its privileges, and then Divisional H.Q., waiting rather sourly for the final examination of the exhausted Turks.
The Turkish private soldiers, being Moslems, were inspired rather with the theocratic ideals of comradeship than by the esprit de corps of nationality, and spoke freely. They were always well treated, and this probably loosened their tongues, but Ahmed Ali was more voluble than the majority of his comrades, and I append information which he supplied as an illustration of our examinations and their results. The two sides of Turkish character were very difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, we were faced in the trenches by the stubborn and courageous Anatolian peasant, who fought to the last gasp; on the other hand, in our dugouts we had a friendly prisoner, who would overwhelm us with information. “The fact is you are just a bit above our trenches. If only you can get your fire rather lower, you will be right into them, and here exactly is the dugout of our Captain, Riza Kiazim Bey, a poor, good man. You miss him all the time. If you will take the line of that pine-tree, you will get him.”