7th Australian Brigade (Colonel J. Burston)—
25th, 26th, 27th, and 28th Battalions.
[212] The Tenth (Irish) Division, p. 197.
[213] The Tenth (Irish) Division, p. 199.
[214] One of the transports (the Southland), conveying a battalion of the 2nd Australian Division, was torpedoed on September 2, thirty-one miles from Mudros. The firemen took to the boats, but the engineers kept sufficient head of steam to work the pumps and electric light. Finding she was filling only slowly, they called for soldier volunteers to help with the stoking, and in an hour got steam up to the blowing-off point. The destroyer Racoon, which had come alongside, was then able to supply practised stokers, and they, with the engineers, stoked the boilers into Mudros harbour.
[215] “It was not entirely an easy matter to assimilate these reinforcements. As a rule, a draft is a comparatively small body of men which easily adopts the character of the unit in which it is merged. In Gallipoli, however, units had been so much reduced in strength that in some cases the draft was stronger than the battalion that it joined, while it almost invariably increased the strength of what was left of the original unit to half as much again. As a result, after two or three drafts had arrived, the old battalions had been swamped.”—The Tenth (Irish) Division, p. 235.
[216] The Tenth (Irish) Division, p. 229. The 54th Brigade remained in Egypt.
[217] During this period of comparative inaction, it was announced that Flight-Lieutenant Edmonds in a seaplane sank a Turkish transport full of reinforcements with a heavy bomb, and that a submarine sank a transport of 11-inch guns in the Sea of Marmora (September 7).—The “Times” History of the War, Part 84, p. 211.
[218] The full speech is quoted in Nelson’s History of the War, by Colonel John Buchan, vol. xi. p. 18.
[219] See Sir Charles Monro’s dispatch on the Dardanelles evacuation.
[220] The further history of the 10th Division (which I visited once more among the mountains beyond Lake Doiran), as well as of the whole Salonika campaign up to summer 1917, is told in The Story of the Salonika Army, by my colleague, Mr. G. Ward Price.