DAILY LIFE AT ANZAC
From notes written down by myself in the middle of that July, I take the following description:
“So here the Anzacs live, practising the whole art of war. Amid dust and innumerable flies, from the mouths of little caves cut in the face of the cliffs, they look over miles of sea to the precipitous peaks of Samothrace and the grey mountains of Imbros. Up and down the steep and narrow paths, the Colonials arduously toil, like ants which bear the burdens of their race. Uniforms are seldom of the regulation type. Usually they consist of bare skin dyed to a deep reddish copper by the sun, tattooed decorations (a girl, a ship, a dragon), and a covering that can hardly be described even as ‘shorts,’ being much shorter. Every kind of store and arm has to be dragged or ‘humped’ up these ant-hills of cliff, and deposited at the proper hole or gallery. Food, water, cartridges, shells, building timber, guns, medical stores—up the tracks all must go, and down them the wounded come.
“So the practice of the simple life proceeds, with greater simplicity than any Garden Suburb can boast, and the domestic virtues which constitute the whole art of war are exercised with a fortitude rarely maintained upon the domestic hearth.”
July 23 was the anniversary of the “constitution” proclaimed by the Young Turks in 1908, and it was expected that the enemy would celebrate the dawn by another attack. Being then at Anzac, I made the following notes, which are here included as giving some idea of usual daily life upon the outer lines:
“Reinforcements were known to be arriving, or perhaps arrived, across the Narrows—100,000 men, as reported. It was Ramazan, and the sacred moon, three-quarters full, gave light for climbing the precipitous yellow cliffs. By eleven I was at the highest point. Through deeply cut saps and ‘communications,’ the work of Australian miners, the way runs in winding labyrinth. Though the depth of our three-mile position measures no more than three-quarters of a mile from the shore to the farthest point inland (not counting by the measurement of cliff and valley surface, but straight through the air), the length of sap and trench runs to much over a hundred miles. The point I reached had served as a machine-gun emplacement, but that evening it was watched by a Sikh sentry who stood in the shadow, silent as the shadow. Mounted on the firing-step I looked over the sandbag parapet upon a peculiar scene.
“Far on my right lay the sea, white with the pathway of the setting moon. Up from the shore ran the lines of our position. Close outside the lines, north, south, and east, the Turks stood hidden in their trenches—25,000 to 35,000 of them, as estimates say. All the time they kept up a casual rifle-fire. Some six miles away, in the centre of the Peninsula south, I could see the long and steep position of Kilid Bahr plateau, where the Turks drill new troops daily, and three or four miles farther still away rose the dangerously gentle slopes and low, flat summit of Achi Baba. Beyond it gleamed the sudden flashes of Turkish and British guns defending or assaulting the sand-blown point of land between Krithia and Cape Helles. Sometimes, too, a warship’s searchlight shot a brilliant ray across the view.
“At one o’clock the moon set in a deep red haze over the sea. But nothing happened. The enemy merely kept up a casual fire upon our sandbags, shaking the sand down upon my face as I lay on a kind of shelf beside the parapet. Then suddenly, just on the stroke of two (about midnight in London), an amazing disturbance arose.
A TURKISH OUTBURST
“Every Turk who held a rifle or commanded a machine-gun began to fire as fast as he could. From every point in their lines arose such a din of rifle-fire as I have seldom heard even at the crisis of a great engagement. It was one continuous blaze and rattle. From a gap in the parapet I could see the sharp tongues of flame flashing all along the edges, like a belt of jewels. Minute followed minute, and still the incalculable din continued. Now and again one of our guns flung up a shell which burst like a firework into brilliant stars, as though to ask, ‘What on earth is the matter with you?’ Now and again another gun threw a larger shell which came lumbering up Shrapnel Gully with a leisurely note, to burst crashing among the enemy’s trenches. And still the roar of rifles and machine-guns went on incessantly, and still nothing occurred. Suddenly, after just a quarter of an hour, the tumult ceased, with as little reason as it had begun.