We halted crouching behind the rocks and knolls, gasping at first, for only about five minutes. Then we started to cover the rest of the climb and give the Turks and their German commanders “what for.”
The Turkish trenches, it must be understood, were built in the hillside and their timber-roofs slanted toward us. These roofs were honeycombed with loop-holes from which their fire snarled at us as we came. Its first effect was deadly, but there was no wavering. Against the geysers of bullets these covered trenches were throwing up we simply went to work with our trench knives and bayonets, used them as crowbars and ripped the timbers loose. We blew the timbers into the air as well with bombs although many of our men were disabled, being wounded by big flying splinters in the process. We dropped right in on top of the Turks and fought them hand to hand in their own dug-outs. It was fast fighting and we swiftly overwhelmed them. I recall to the reader as accurate the statement of the writer in the Sydney Mail that we captured Lone Pine Ridge in seventeen minutes of direct attack.
The Turks fell completely away from Lone Pine Ridge and retreated fully a mile across a shallow valley and on to another ridge where we knew from our aëroplane scouts they had another strong position. In the judgment of our commanders we must be content to hold the elevation, the next advance, if it were to be undertaken, would have to be with the aid of tremendous artillery force in the taking of the great Dardenelles forts themselves.
From 6 o’clock in the evening of August 6th until half-past one the following morning you might have supposed that the Turkish soldier was a phantom for all we ever saw of him. But the batteries of the big forts never let up. For six weeks they were to hold us under a fire night and day. It wasn’t exactly continuous, but you never could tell when it would open up and never a day or night passed that did not find us under attack.
At half-past one o’clock in the morning of August 7th the Turks came back, seeking to regain the Lone Pine position. They fought us fiercely. They stormed their way against terrific machine-gun fire to the very brink of our trenches. Sometimes they got into the very trenches themselves and our men found them hard fighters in hand to hand struggles and, not like the Germans as we were to discover later, cowards under the rip and stab of cold steel.
They were tireless in attack. We sent back waves of them, but other waves came on. They, too, had their battle songs, or I should say song. It was always the same tune they sang in swooping at us, a curious whining refrain that would suddenly end in a high note of ferocity or anticipated triumph.
There was a man at the end of the trench that we had taken who did not belong to my battalion, but who had jumped into the trench suddenly with a whole box of bombs in his arms and who before he got finished with that night’s work had won the Victoria Cross. I saw him in the thick of a fight passing out bombs with splendid strength and swiftness. Besides as I kept watching him he was tireless. He stopped rush after rush of battle-mad Turks as they tried to force their way into our dug-outs. Noting his effectiveness, I gave orders to keep him well supplied with bombs. I ordered two men behind him for relief, but he kept constantly shouting back that he was feeling fine and able to carry on. In the morning that particular fight was over and around the section of the trench where this man fought we counted forty-seven Turkish dead. He wasn’t scratched. My memory is playing me badly at the moment and I can’t give his name. He was, however, sufficiently recognized in the official dispatches which in naming him identified him as a famous cricket player of Australia. His bowling arm had certainly done noble work that night. Without the tireless stream of bombs we kept in the air at the enemy I am not sure that we could have held on to our particular section of the trench.
Official dispatches have told how we hung on to these advanced trenches from August until October, how the Turk was kept in subjection in so far as the territory we had so vigorously acquired. We settled down in the sandstone hills and grimly endured through these months an intolerably monotonous life.
We almost welcomed the blizzard that struck us in the latter part of October because of the change it gave us, that is to say, we welcomed it the first day when the snow covered the ridges and thousands of British soldiers turned into rollicking boys. We snowballed each other, we mixed our jam with the clean white snow, called it sherbet and gobbled it, improvised skis out of the bottoms of barrels and shot over the ridges like human darts, built snow Germans and snow Turks and knocked them over and one company created the greatest attraction by building a big snow Kaiser which we bayoneted to pieces with great shouts of laughter.
But we had to pay for this fun in the succeeding weeks in which the trenches remained frozen and the air bit into us cruelly. It was a big change from the blazing heat of the summer climate on the peninsula to the arctic weather that swept so suddenly down. And many new crosses were erected in the hillside cemeteries over the graves of men who died of pneumonia. Thousands were tortured by pneumonia and the minor infliction of frost-bite.