“The ‘Vineyard’ has blossomed and the small green grapes cluster on the vine. The well by the fisherman’s hut has run sweet once more. The cave dwellers by Shrapnel Gully, Quinn’s Post and Courtenay’s are as quiet and still as tombs. Grass and weeds have grown over the winding paths that thread the valleys and scrape the hilltops. The sandbags of the traverses have rotted and burst, spilling their earth on the litter of these battles of yesterday. And out through the chessboard field the grave-mounds of earth that we pattered down with spade and entrenching tool have blossomed with wild flowers and green grass. The warm, tideless Ægean washes these empty beaches where once thousands of men from the Empire’s back-blocks made war as it had never been made before.
“Two years ago forty thousand men walked these paths. They slept in these dug-outs, or in the trenches, and the detonation of the guns of the warships shook loose the earth and sand above them so that it rattled down in their faces, waking them from dreams of home to an uncomfortable reality. Think of those three days two years ago! Think of the waterless fight for Chocolate Hill; of the wounded lying in the brushwood and waiting for the sweeping grass fires to reach their resting place. Men lay there unable to move; some of them not able to pull their water bottles from their web-slings! Think of them and remember them, for in all wars there was never a more gallant forlorn hope than this one.
“Lone Pine, Chocolate Hill, Sari Bair and Biyuk Anafarta were goals set far ahead. Many reached them and never came back. Lone Pine was attacked on August 6 and of all the attacks at Gallipoli, this was, perhaps, the most terrible. The Turkish trenches were supplied with head covers made of stout timber. Under these were loopholes from which the Turks fired with temporary immunity at the advance Australian battalions. The enfilade fire was terrible, but the men bodily lifted the timber beams and dropped feet first into the dark trenches beneath. By 5:47 P. M., 17 minutes after the first advance, we held the trenches. At 1:30 the same night there came a terrific counter-attack headed by scores of bombers. For seven hours the counter-attack pressed, wave on wave of Turks coming from the very parapet often to be shot and fall into the trench. One Australian brigade, only two thousand strong, carried this work in the face of an entire enemy division and held it during six days’ counter-attacks. A thousand corpses were in the trench system after the occupation and to make room for the fighting men these were stacked in piles at intervals between the traverses.
“There was one example there that will never die. The 7th Gloucester lost all their officers and senior non-commissioned officers, but they fought on, mere isolated groups of men and the privates and lance-corporal, green troops of the New Army from midday until sunset! The Lancashires, the Hampshires, Gloucesters, Australians and New Zealanders—all did men’s work in those days. None of their deeds will die, none of the names of men or regiment will ever be forgotten.”
I was in the attack of Lone Pine which carried our armies nearest to the goal of capturing the coveted strip between the Ægean and the Straits of Dardanelles. I got my first wound of the war in the winning of these timber-roofed trenches, a bayonet thrust in the darkness ripping my right hand open but doing my hand in the matter of its future usefulness no permanent injury.
Reinforcements had come to us till our numbers stood at forty thousand, but with the reinforcements also came aëroplanes which later “spotted” for us the information that the Turks on the tops of the ridges outnumbered us by many thousands. They had also the support of the great guns of their forts although our battle ships had made the contests in artillery fairly even duels.
Lone Pine Hill was the most prominent ridge on our front. It was so named because the sweep of our fire had leveled a small forest so completely that only a single pine tree remained. Its foliage had been entirely blown away. There was left of it but its broken trunk and two gaunt limbs, blackened by explosions and upraised, curiously resembling the arms of a soldier in the act of surrender. We took this to be a good omen when on the afternoon of August 6th our orders came that on this night we were to mount these 500 yards of rock, stubble and moss and possess ourselves of this highest point of the enemy positions.
We felt all confident. With reinforcements of our own Anzacs had come moreover big supplies of ammunition, machine guns and additional artillery.
But also we knew the way ahead to be a hard one to travel and our aëroplane observers in their reports and photographs had shown how deeply and firmly the Turks under their German officers had fixed themselves in the trenches on the summit of Lone Pine.
Nearly all the attacks up to this time had begun in the dawn. This time the attack was ordered immediately on the fall of darkness. The strategy succeeded. There is no doubt that a night advance was a big surprise for we had made our way up along two hundred yards of ground before they suspected our coming. Then they flashed their star-shells in the sky and swept us with a howling fire. It stopped us for a time, but we pulled ourselves together and held on until our commanders were certain that the Zion Mule Corps under Colonel Paterson, the famous Jewish contingent in this action at Gallipoli, were behind us with their sturdy animals heavily laden with the bombs that we already knew to be so vital a weapon in trench-storming. They used the mules as well to bring us additional machine guns. But most of all we needed a chance to catch our breath. Our halt did not in the least mean our doubt of ability to get those trenches. It was part of good wisdom that our men should not attain the top of the ridge winded and exhausted from the climb.