Naturally, there were numerous casualties. The 7th Munsters suffered most severely, having Captain Cullinan, Lieutenant Harper, Lieutenant Travers and 2nd-Lieutenant Bennett killed, and Major Hendricks, Captain Cooper-Key, Captain Henn and half-a-dozen subalterns wounded. In the 6th Munsters, Lieutenant J. B. Lee, a Dublin barrister, was killed on the 7th, and Major Conway, a Regular officer of the Munster Fusiliers, fell in the assault on Jephson’s Post on the 6th. Several subalterns were wounded, and there were numerous casualties among the rank and file. It was, however, fortunate that the enemy had no machine-guns, and that the thick scrub made it hard to direct their artillery fire with accuracy, or the losses would have been far heavier.
For a week the battalions held the line that they had captured, being reinforced by the 5th Inniskillings, who took over the trenches on the northern slope of the ridge looking down on to the Gulf of Saros. This flank was guarded by a destroyer, which did invaluable service by giving notice of enemy movements, by searchlight work at night, and by rendering artillery support when necessary.
The period spent in these trenches was by no means an enjoyable one, for water was very short and had to be fetched from a considerable distance away. Shade there was none, since the sun pierced vertically downwards, and the prickly scrub gave but little cover from above. The trenches had been hastily constructed in a sandy soil that crumbled and fell in at the first opportunity and required constant work at them. By day the Turkish snipers made this impossible, so the men lay, too hot and thirsty and tormented by flies to sleep, and by night they were stirred up to work again. To add to the horror of the position, the unburied bodies of those who had fallen in the previous fighting, lying in inaccessible gullies or in the midst of the scrub, began to spread around the foul, sweet, sickly odour of decay. Once smelt, this cannot be forgotten, for it clings to the nostrils, and many a man recalled how true an insight Shakespeare had into the soldier’s mind when he made Coriolanus use as his expression of supreme contempt the words:
“Whose love I prize
As the dead carcases of unburied men
That do corrupt the air.”
This, however, was only an aggravation of the situation; the real trouble was thirst. Men lied to get water, honest men stole it, some even went mad for want of it; but it was cruelly hard to obtain. Owing to some error, an insufficient supply of vessels for carrying it had arrived from Mudros, and it became necessary to send down a platoon from each company with the company’s water-bottles to the beach to fill them. It was a long and trying walk in the dark, and even when the beach was reached, water was by no means easy to obtain, since thirsty soldiers had cut holes in the hoses that filled the tanks on shore from the water-boats, and consequently much was wasted.
It had been hoped to utilise the resources of the country, but the Turks had foreseen our difficulties, and when the Engineers examined a well near Ghazi Baba, they found it surrounded by a circle of land-mines. Other wells further inland were well watched by snipers. Nor even when sufficient water was obtainable, was it easy to convey it back to the battalion. Some water-bottles leaked; others had been only half filled, or carelessly corked, while occasionally a thirsty soldier took advantage of the darkness to refresh himself from one of the bottles which he was carrying. As a result, when the bottles were distributed, there were bitter complaints from the men who found themselves presented with only a few spoonfuls of water as a supply for twenty-four hours. Tea-making, too, became difficult, since it was almost out of the question to obtain the water required in equal quantities from each man.
It soon became clear that the system of regulating the whole water supply of the unit by the water-bottle of the individual soldier was not a sound one, since the improvident consumed their day’s supply at once, and the fool who lost his water-bottle was in a hopeless position. Commanding officers and company commanders first began by pooling all water-bottles, and issuing their contents in mess-tins from time to time; while gradually they collected petrol and biscuit-tins in which to store a reserve fund. Thanks to these measures, and to the experience gained by the men, matters gradually improved.
Two events that occurred during this period gave some fillip to the spirits of the men on the ridge. The first of these was the arrival of a mail which brought not only letters and papers, but also parcels, and some of these parcels contained cake. Cake was a priceless boon in Gallipoli. Home-made and home-packed ones sometimes met with disaster and arrived in the form of crumbs, but those made by an expert, and sealed in an air-tight tin arrived safely, and were more welcome than anyone unacquainted with the ration biscuit can imagine. The ration biscuit takes various forms, some of which are small and palatable, but the type most frequently met with in Gallipoli was large and square, possessing the appearance of a dog biscuit and the consistency of a rock. It was no doubt of excellent nutritive quality, but, unfortunately, no ordinary pair of teeth was able to cope with it. Some spread jam upon it, and then licked the surface, thereby absorbing a few crumbs; others soaked it in tea (when there was any); while a few pounded it between two stones, and found that the result did not make bad porridge. After a week of this regimen, it is easily imagined how glad men were to put their teeth into something soft again.