“Help each other get rid of these knapsacks,” I yelled when I got my breath. “It’s our only chance or we’ll drown like rats.”
So we struggled about aiding one another free of these encumbrances. We had also to let our ammunition belts go and held on only to our guns. The shore was not far off now and we swam for it. But as we drew near—very near—within fifty feet or so, we encountered a devilishly ingenious snare.
The enemy had constructed on stakes in eight feet of water a barbed-wire entanglement along more than two miles of the beach. I was overhanding it for shore, supporting my rifle in the other when I ran my face full tilt against the barbed wire’s fangs. Others of my comrades did the same. They cursed and moaned. We hung on to the barbed wire but ducking every instant for a scream of bullets was all around us.
I can’t tell you how many of the landing boats were smashed in the landing at Gallipoli. None I believe knows with accuracy. How many men were drowned outright none either can exactly tell. But there were hundreds. Nor how many men, exhausted, striving for the shore, were caught and held like netted fish in that barbed-wire entanglement will never be known. That scores—yes, hundreds were, I cannot doubt. Some of the men immediately around me I know were lost in the effort to get past it.
It was too closely netted to get through it. Some possibly floated or were lifted over it by the roll of the surf. I know only how I made my own way out of the trap. And that was by drawing myself down along the barbed strands until I found a space some two feet between the barbed-wire barrier and the sea-bottom. And I crawled through!
A few strokes after that and I was able to take to my feet and wade out. Well, hardly that. I plunged, stumbled, fell and finally crawled out on the bullet-spattered and shell-riven sands.
I wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the bullets or the shells. Honestly, I was too exhausted. Had there been an enemy to meet me as I flopped on the sands the worst I could have done to him by way of resistance would have been to pat him on the cheek. If that much. I just flopped and panted and panted. And as my breath came slowly, very slowly back to normal I was astonished to find that my rifle and bayonet were still clutched in my hand.
Fortunately, the enemy’s own shells smashed their cunning, barbed-wire, under-sea entanglement and such sections of it as were not ripped in that fashion were made harmless by plucky bombing parties in battleship launches.
I didn’t lay very long gasping on the beach for the music of the bullets made me realize grimly enough that I wasn’t out surfing. I staggered to my feet and began to take general notice. The boats that survived had spilled their men into the surf and the men, huddling and scared, had nevertheless carried on. They were fast crowding the strip of beach. Officers were snapping out commands—heroically holding their presence of mind and organizing their men. Organizing, that is, what they could find of them, or any men, for that matter, that they could find around them.
All these things had now become visible in the dawn—the sudden dawn of the East. You must understand that the bombardment was ceaseless from the forts, the guns of all our ships roaring back at them the while. But it was the machine-gun fire and the rifle fire from the Turks concealed among the sand dunes and the clefts of the cliffs that were tearing our men down. Sometimes the big shells smashed holes in the beach and sent up great clouds of sands that settled blindingly down upon us.