Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War

by E. C. Buley

The loss of the crest of Sari Bair was the turning point in the fight for the Dardanelles. The whole of the Turkish forces were thrown into action at this point. The plan of attack had been designed so that a portion at least of these defensive forces should be held up by the advance of the troops which had landed at Suvla Bay. But the advance of those troops was delayed, for reasons which do not rightly come within the scope of this book, and therefore the bulk of the defending forces could be concentrated in one desperate and successful effort to drive back the invaders.

But the defenders paid dearly for their success. The slope up which the New Zealanders had advanced with such painful effort, and over which the victorious Turks were now pouring in dense masses, was ranged by the Anzac artillery, by the guns of the warships and by the Indian Mountain batteries. Their fire was all concentrated upon these serried masses of the enemy, and great gaps were torn in their ranks as they swept over the hill-top.

Even deadlier was the work of the New Zealand machine-gun section, directed by the famous Major Wallingford, D.S.O. A whole book could be written of the feats which the New Zealanders ascribe to this remarkable soldier, "The human machine-gun" as they call him. His quick eye for a tactical advantage had grasped the probability of a rush of Turks over the crest of Sari Bair, and his ten guns were posted to take the fullest advantage of the materialization of that surmise.

In the slaughter that followed those ten guns consumed 16,000 rounds of ammunition, and the claim made of 5,000 hits is probably a conservative estimate. But our own losses had been very heavy. Of the 37,000 men under General Birdwood's command on August 6, 12,000 were out of action on the evening of August 10. Of these quite one half were New Zealanders. Gloriously had they fought. Their silent charges in the dark will for ever remain as the high-water mark of restrained courage and enterprise. Their wounded showed the same qualities of silent endurance and devotion to their fellows.

The New Zealand wounded had an experience that is an epic of suffering. Only the supreme fortitude with which it was endured impels me to give some account of the days and nights spent by over four hundred of these heroes in a place which they have christened the Valley of Torment. It was placed on the rugged side of Sari Bair, a deep depression in the hillside. On one side of it a mountain wall rose in a perpendicular cliff that would have defied a mountain goat to climb it. On the other rose the steep declivity of Rhododendron Ridge. Below, the valley opened out upon a flat plateau, so swept by the guns of both sides that no living thing could exist for one moment upon its flat, clear surface.

The only way in and out of the valley was from above, where the New Zealanders were fighting like possessed beings for the foothold they had won on the crest of Sari Bair. And to this valley the stretcher-bearers had carried the men who had fallen in the fight, a sad little group of wounded men whose numbers were hourly increasing. There, too, crawled those who were less severely injured. And there the unwounded soldiers carried their stricken mates for shelter from the hail of bullets, while the fight lasted.

As the wounded men came in, a devoted band of Red Cross men lent them what aid they could. There was no doctor nearer than the dressing station on the beach, but these Red Cross workers stayed their wounds with bandages, tying tourniquets round limbs to check the flow of arterial blood, and making tortured men as easy as circumstances would permit.

The approach to this valley was so dangerous that no one might come to it by daylight. There was no water there, until one man, less severely wounded than some of his comrades, dug into a moist spot far down the valley, and chanced on a spring that yielded a thin trickle of brackish water.