Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War

by E. C. Buley

Australian Field Artillery in Action.

It was discriminate slaughter, for each Anzac, before he fired, marked his man and made sure of him. It was no time for sentimental considerations of mercy; and besides, the Anzacs were fierce with the anger of men who had been sniped for three weeks, without too many chances of getting their own back. They had charged against positions held as their own now was, and had seen their bravest and best fall by hundreds as they drove on in the face of shrapnel and machine-gun fire. Now it was their turn, and they fired until the barrels of their rifles got too hot to be touched. "It was like killing rabbits with a stick," said one man, who was in the hottest part of the fray.

The most terrible execution of all was done by a battery of eighteen pounders, which, with a number of machine guns, had been posted and carefully masked at a spot on the Anzac line between Steel's Post and the Pimple. The fire from these guns took the Turks all unawares and tore great gaps in their ranks. This ambush was arranged by General Johnston, the officer commanding the artillery, and the spot was afterwards known to the Anzacs by the peculiar name of Johnston's Jolly.

All along the line from Quinn's Post to Courtney's the dead were piled in heaps; and still they came on. Some of them died grasping the barbed wire protections in front of the trenches, others fell dead into the very trenches themselves, only stopped by a bullet met on the parapet. They had the support of all the guns Sanders Pasha had been able to muster, and all his huge store of ammunition was expended in trying to drive those Australians into the sea. But not a man budged from his post.

From daylight till ten o'clock that morning the bombardment and the frontal attack were continued; then the Turks would have no more of it. Sullenly they fell back, and as they did so shrapnel completed the disorganization which had now begun. Soon after ten they turned and ran for their trenches, and there they sheltered for hours while the heavy cannonade continued. In the middle of the afternoon their officers made another attempt to drive them forward, but it was a half-hearted response that was elicited. Once more they faced that deadly accurate rifle fire of the men from the South, and before it they crumpled up and fled again for shelter. All night they kept up an incessant fire from their trenches, but in the morning it died away into nothingness. General Liman von Sanders had made a mistake, and the most expensive mistake yet made on the peninsula of Gallipoli. Such was the end to his boasting.

Not a Turk had entered an Anzac trench except dead Turks, not a yard of ground had been gained in any direction. And from Quinn's Post all along the line to Courtnay's, the ground was piled with the dead and dying. "Eight acres of dead bodies," estimated one literal bushman, after a close scrutiny of the field of battle through a periscope. Another essayed to count the bodies in sight from his trench, and stopped at an estimate of 4,000. At least 30,000 Turks took part in that frontal attack, and on a conservative estimate, one-third of them were put out of action. The wounded were sent back to Constantinople literally by thousands, and the sight of them spread panic and dismay far and wide through that city.

Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, who went over the lines on the following day, presents a grim picture of the slaughter wrought by the straight-shooting Australians.

"The ground presents an extraordinary sight when viewed through the trench periscopes. Two hundred yards away, and even closer in places, are the Turkish trenches, and between them and our lines the dead lie in hundreds. There are groups of twenty or thirty massed together, as if for mutual protection, some lying on their faces, some killed in the act of firing; others hung up in the barbed wire. In one place a small group actually reached our parapet, and now lie dead on it, shot at point-blank range or bayoneted. Hundreds of others lie just outside their own trenches, where they were caught by rifles and shrapnel when trying to regain them. Hundreds of wounded must have perished between the lines, for it was only on the 21st that the enemy made overtures for an armistice for burying the dead; but up to the present this has not been granted owing to the suspicious number of troops in his front trenches.

"In places the Turks made four or five separate efforts to charge home, using hand-grenades, but they all failed dismally."

"Ever alert," writes one who took part in the slaughter, "the Colonials were ready to meet the strain when it came. The sight of seemingly endless masses of the enemy advancing upon them might well have shaken the nerve of the already severely-tried troops. Our machine-guns and artillery mowed down the attackers in hundreds, but still the advancing wall swept on. On, still! Would the ranks never waste in strength? Not till the wave was at point-blank range from the nimble trigger-fingers did it break and spend itself amongst our barbed-wire entanglements. Turks were shot in the act of jumping into our trenches. Corpses lay with their heads and arms hanging over our parapets. Our fire gradually dominated the ground in front. Those who turned to fly were mowed down before they could go a dozen yards. The Germans sent their supports forward in droves. It was sickening to behold the slaughter our fire made amongst the massed battalions as they issued from concealment into open spaces.