Our landing party was grotesque and wavering under the frightful storm. Shouts, yells, screams of pain, cries of alarm merged into a great clamor. The most heartening thing, somehow, in the darkness had become the Australian cry of “Coo-ee!”—sharp and musical, in which men had called themselves together into groups. When the dawn came I was able to find twelve of the sixty men of my command.
There was no living on the beach. The only way out of that immediate hell was to charge across the sands and get into the shelter of the dunes, to fight our way to the base of the cliffs and get away from the shells of the cliffs, and to fight our way into enemy trenches in the table-lands and rout the snipers from their lairs.
Don’t ask me how we did it. I am only prepared to describe how myself and my dozen men accomplished it. I wasn’t, you see, exactly on a sight-seeing party.
In my little group of twelve who had been tossed into the ocean and made their way through the wave-submerged barbed wire we didn’t have a thing to fight with but the cold steel of our bayonets. Our ammunition belts had perforce been abandoned with our knapsacks and were at the bottom of the Ægean.
But His Majesty’s warships were giving us a lot of aid. Their great guns were turned off the distant Turkish forts for a while and their lighter armament was also brought under full play and together they swept the dunes and cliffs above us with a merciless fire. Actually we saw the bodies of our enemies, clusters of them, spouting from the places of their concealment, saw legs, arms and heads flying wildly in the air.
But back of me along the mile and more of beach there was a terrible litter of our own dead. And every minute somewhere near me a man was going down.
We got up those sand ridges any old way—by digging in our bayonets like Alpine staffs, clawing with our free hands, scrambling with toe-holds and fighting up on all fours.
We had just gained a knoll of sand and bush and taken protection behind it for a minute’s breathing when one of my men, one of those sturdy cattlemen who had made their way out of the wilderness to get into the war for civilization, went down with a bullet in his leg.
“Nothing much,” he said, as I bent over him to examine the wound, “and don’t stop for me. Go on and come back for me later or maybe the Red Cross lads will find me. A little thing like this isn’t going to——”
He was smiling as he talked, but suddenly his head fell back, his smile widening into a horrible grin. A bullet had taken him in the neck. He was done for.