[CHAPTER XI]
THE STORY OF LONE PINE
The 1st Brigade of Australian Infantry, from the State of New South Wales, and led by General Smyth, had the honour of opening the ball. They were massed on the right of the Anzac line, in trenches that ran along a salient known as The Pimple. It was on the seaward edge of a heath-covered plateau, on the shoreward edge of which, almost among the formidable series of Turkish earthworks, stood one little solitary pine tree. Lone Pine plateau was a no-man's land, an open expanse swept by the fire from innumerable trenches.
From its south-western edge, held so strongly by the Turks on that afternoon of August 6, a dim view could be obtained of the forts at Chanak, across the Dardanelles. It not only commanded one of the main Turkish sources of water supply, but was, as Sir Ian Hamilton points out, "a distinct step on the way across to Maidos."
The preparation of the Turkish position had been elaborated for three months. Their trenches were protected by a network of that thick barbed wire that resists all but the very largest, sharpest and most powerful cutters. The trenches had been designed to enfilade one another, and artillery and machine-guns had been posted on heights in the background to cover the approach across the open plateau. Such was the position which the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Battalions of the 1st Brigade were asked to charge on the evening of August 6.
The affair opened with a heavy bombardment of the Turkish position from the warships and monitors, which lasted for an hour. Then, punctually at 5.30, the whistle for the charge was sounded, and the men sprang over the parapet, and rushed across the plateau.
As they left their trenches, the enemy rifle fire rang out, and the burden was rapidly taken up by machine-guns here and there. But the charging Australians ate up the distance, and were soon among the barbed wire and at the very loopholes of the parapet. Then the observers saw a strange thing. The men stopped as if puzzled; many of them ran hither and thither as though in search for something.
The reason soon became clear, for men stooped and tore up from the earth huge planks of timber. The trenches had been roofed over with heavy sleepers of timber, on which earth had been cast, thus constituting a shell-proof defence, and one which could only be entered from the rear save by such expedients as the men of the 1st Brigade now adopted. Some of them stopped and tore up the sleepers which roofed in the foremost trenches, others charged on over the roofs to the communication trenches which afforded an exit to the Turks. These took the Turks in the rear; while the others, making holes for themselves through the roofing, dropped down into the darkness where the Turks were waiting for them.
The enemy, taken in front and rear, put up such a fight as the Australasian forces had never before experienced on the peninsula of Gallipoli. In the dark and fetid trenches men fought hand to hand, with bayonets and clubbed rifles, with bombs or knives or anything that came to hand. The Turks had the advantage of knowing every turn and twist of the rabbit warren which they had constructed, and fought as desperate men in the 150 yards of darkness over which these underground trenches extended.