Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War

by E. C. Buley

One man who fought in that dark inferno told me a moving experience of its mysterious horrors. He found himself alone, a man with whom he had been engaged in a fierce hand-to-hand fight having suddenly fled into the encompassing darkness. The Anzac straightened himself, and after taking breath advanced, dully noting that he was treading on the bodies of the dead. He was brought to a standstill by the sound of hurrying feet and had time to shrink behind the angle of a traverse when a body of six Turks came running by.

As they passed him crouching there, he made a lunge with his bayonet, and a yell told him he had found his mark. Freeing his weapon he discharged his magazine at the invisible backs of the retreating foe. It was a dangerous experiment, for in another second he realized that three of them had turned back and were attacking him with their bayonets. How long that struggle in the semi-darkness lasted he could not say; it seemed ages, though it could only have been of a few seconds' duration.

As he fought he shouted lustily, back to wall, and striving to anticipate each move of his adversaries. His shouts brought him timely help, and in another second he was stooping over the dead bodies of his recent assailants, who had been dispatched by quick shots from an officer's revolver.

A Battery of Australian Field Artillery going into Action.

From both sides more men came to mingle in the fight, and the passages became choked with dead and dying men. They fought there in the darkness with the corpses piled three deep under their feet. It had been said that the Turks would not resist the bayonet, but here in the darkness many Australians died of bayonet wounds, and were clubbed to death by the desperate men they had taken in front and rear. Finally, the Turks were driven out of the underground trenches and an attack was delivered upon the positions behind them.

Here again the Turks stood up to their enemies, and fought with the bayonet. They had little option, for those who tried to flee through the open were caught by fire from well-posted machine-guns, and mown down in scores. Some hundreds of them were driven into incompleted saps of their own digging, and forced to surrender.

The trenches were so cumbered with the dead that they were piled up shoulder high, and held in place by ropes, so that a passage might be kept clear on the other side of the trench. All the horrors of modern explosives helped to make that fight more hideous; the rending of deadly bombs in confined places, the rattle of machine-guns that cut off from desperate men the last hopes of retreat. Men who lived through that fight will preserve to their dying day a new estimate of the horror of war under such conditions. It was possibly the fiercest hand-to-hand fight even in the history of the Great War.

Eventually every Turk was cleared out of the Lone Pine trenches, but the position was still a most precarious one. The approach to the position was swept by heavy artillery and machine-gun fire from the enemy, so that the supporting battalions lost heavily in charging to the help of the first bold stormers of the position. From the gloom of the underground trenches over 1,000 dead bodies of friend and foe were dragged, and as a counter-attack was developing these were hastily piled in a parapet to help the defence of the position.

The 1st Battalion (N. S. Wales), and the 7th (Victoria), which had been in reserve, were now brought forward. It was time, for by seven in the evening the Turkish attack was at its height. They came in dense masses armed with an abundance of bombs, and fought as no Turk had ever fought before in the experience of the Anzacs. All night the attack was maintained, but the Anzacs meant to hold what they had got. A section of a trench was lost here and there, owing to the showers of bombs which the Turks lavished on their former position. But always the men of Anzac recovered what they had lost.