In perfect order, but at great speed, these veteran troops made for the height, some scrambling up the cliff, some approaching by a gradual slope on the west side. They were already nearing the summit when a mixed naval party of about 100 marines and sailors put to shore, and were of great assistance in taking two lines of trenches and working side by side with the South Wales Borderers, who were already driving the Turks down the farther slope of the ridge. Guns from the Asiatic side opened fire upon the beach, but most of the shells, striking the mud at the water’s edge, did not burst, and the Cornwallis, firing by signal from shore, silenced the battery about 10 a.m. Being urgently summoned from W Beach, and seeing that the soldiers now held the position firmly, Captain Davidson then withdrew the naval party, and steamed to his second position down the strait.[85] Colonel Casson’s battalion clung to the point they had gained for the critical forty-eight hours of the landing, thus preventing Turkish reinforcements from coming down to Seddel Bahr, and protecting the right flank of our possible advance. The post was then taken over by the French, who held it throughout the campaign, though much exposed to the Asiatic guns. This successful enterprise cost about sixty casualties, including Major Margesson, who was killed.
SEDDEL BAHR
Walking along the coast south-west from De Tott’s Battery, one rounds the two-mile arc of Morto Bay, near the middle of which the combined “Deres” or watercourses of the Krithia region run out into the strait. Across the valley, nearly a mile inland, a few lofty piles of an ancient, perhaps Byzantine, aqueduct then stood, probably at one time carrying water to a more ancient town than Seddel Bahr. Later in the campaign they were destroyed, but for some months they formed a conspicuous landmark. Along the rest of the bay the land slopes gently down to the beach, and had been laid out in gardens cypress-fringed, such as Islam loves. The gardens were now entrenched and thickly netted with barbed wire; but the bay would have afforded the finest landing-place upon the southern Peninsula, had it not been fully commanded by guns across the strait. Upon the south-west point of the bay, the old Turkish castle and fortress of Seddel Bahr, projecting boldly into the sea, guards the entrance to the strait, and, as already described, at the foot of its towers and curtain-walls are still heaped the huge round stones which the Turks once deemed sufficient to hurl at intruders beating up against the current. Behind the castle was huddled a grey stone village or small town, of the usual Turkish character, with narrow and winding alleys between secretive houses, and just beyond the point there projected a low reef of rocks round which the deep-blue water, hurrying out to the open sea, perpetually eddied.
THE RIVER CLYDE AT V BEACH
From the Seddel Bahr point the coast falls back a little into the shallow arc of a bay barely over a quarter of a mile long if one follows the sandy beach. Around the curve, the ground rises rather steeply, almost exactly in the form of a classic theatre, to which the beach would serve as orchestra and the sea as stage. This little bay, to be renowned as V Beach, ends on the western side in precipitous cliffs, round the foot of which it is possible to clamber over masses of fallen rocks, but no path leads. On the top of the cliff stood one of the most powerful of the entrance forts destroyed by the naval attack on February 19. The beach itself is narrow—about 10 yards across—and was edged by a small but perpendicular bank, not over 4 or 5 feet in height. The slopes of the theatre were at that time covered with grass, to be changed later on for dust and heavy sand. The slope measures about 200 yards from beach to summit. Along the edge of the beach ran an entanglement of the peculiarly strong barbed wire used by the Turks; a second entanglement ran round the curving slope two-thirds of the way up, and a third joined the two at right angles at the eastern end of the bay. The upper part of the semicircle was strongly entrenched and armed with pom-poms, while in the ruins of the old fortress, in the village, and in a shattered barrack on the top of the western summit, machine-guns and a multitude of snipers were concealed. Nature and man’s invention had converted the little bay into a defensive engine of manifold destruction.
THE RIVER CLYDE, “V” BEACH, AND SEDDEL BAHR, ABOUT TWO MONTHS AFTER LANDING
At daybreak the Albion opened a heavy bombardment. There was no answer. The little semicircle remained still as an empty theatre, and sanguine spirits hoped that defence had been abandoned. Transhipping rapidly from a fleet-sweeper, three companies of the 1st Dublin Fusiliers and a party of the Anson Battalion, Royal Naval Division, arranged themselves in six tows, each made up of a pinnace and four cutters, and carrying 125 men apiece. In line abreast the tows started for the shore over the glassy water, pale with morning. Except for the continuous crash of our bursting shells, not a sound came from the shore. On the right of the main party of tows loomed a large collier, called the River Clyde, but known to the classical as the “Trojan Horse,” and to the unlearned as the “Dun Cow.” She carried the 1st Munster Fusiliers, half the 2nd Hampshire Regiment, one company of the Dublin Fusiliers, and details of sappers, signallers, field ambulance, and an Anson beach-party. Commander Edward Unwin, R.N., was in charge of her, a man of eagle features and impetuous but noble personality, inclined to pour imprecations upon “the Army” while he assisted them with untiring ingenuity and a courage conspicuous even on that heroic day. His orders were to run his ship hard aground after the tows had landed their first party. A hopper alongside the collier was then to proceed under her own steam and momentum, towing a string of lighters so as to form a pontoon for the troops, who were to issue from square iron doors opening close up to the ship’s bow on the port and starboard sides. But the tow-rope attaching the lighters to the hopper fouled; the current drove the River Clyde ashore 30 yards west of the spot designed; and tows and ship touched ground almost at the same moment. The hopper ran forward with the lighters, which were secured after a short delay. The gangways dropped. Shoving each other eagerly forward, the Munster Fusiliers rushed from the opened ports.
THE V BEACH LANDING
Hardly had the first man set foot on the gangways, when the invisible enemy broke the silence with an overwhelming outburst of rifle fire, pom-poms, and machine-guns. The Munster Fusiliers of the first company fell so thick that many were suffocated or crushed by the sheer weight of the dead dropping upon them. Few if any of those eager Irishmen struggled across the lighters to the beach unwounded. In the tows, the boats were riddled with holes, and the greater number destroyed. The Dublin Fusiliers and the crews supplied by the navy were shot down either in the boats or as they leapt into the shallow water and attempted to rush across the narrow beach. A few succeeded in reaching the low and perpendicular bank of sand, and lay under its uncertain cover, unable to show a head above the top without death. The Turks had carefully marked the ranges of every point along the shore with stakes, and they fired in security from dug-outs and deep trenches, against which no naval bombardment availed.