Just before 5.30 the guns suddenly stopped. The officers passed the word, “Prepare to go over.” Next second the Brigade-Major blew his whistle. Whistles sounded all along the trench. The 150 clambered over the sandbags without a word. There was no cheering. With eyes fixed upon the low white line of loopholed parapet in front, the heavily laden men trotted and stumbled forward across that open patch of heath, rugged with pitfalls, fragments of shell, and wire. The Turkish guns, sighted for our trenches, could not range upon them, and in the first rush few fell. In less than a minute from the start, nearly all had reached that white and loopholed line, and, with sharpened bayonets raised, were prepared to burst through the entanglements and leap into the trench below. They burst the entanglement, but there was no visible trench below. The whole trench was thickly roofed with heavy baulks of fir timber, railway sleepers, branches of trees, earth, and rocks. The trench was one prolonged, impenetrable dug-out, loophooled along the front line like a subterranean castle.
Some of the advanced party ran forward over the solid roof, reached the open second line of trenches, reached the communication trenches up which the Turks were crowding, and fired into the thick of the enemy wherever they found them. They sprang down separately into the midst of them, and fought single-handed with bayonet and bombs, spreading terror and confusion before they died. But the majority scattered out in line along the face of the first parapet, as though along a curb, peering and poking for an entrance, while the Turks poured bullets upwards upon them through loopholes and imperceptible apertures. Some of our men fired back through the loopholes; some, in groups, with desperate strength, wrenched up the heavy beams and tore the roof open; some discovered narrow man-holes left in the covering for the exit and entrance of “listeners” at night. Wherever a sufficient opening was made or found, a man wriggled feet foremost down through it, helpless and exposed until he dropped into the thick of foes scarcely visible in the cavernous obscurity. It took fifteen minutes for all the men standing exposed in the open to get down.
Close upon the heels of the advanced party, the main bodies of the three battalions had followed, leaving only their reserves. Before twenty minutes had passed, the reserves also went forward. Within a few minutes of the start, the Turkish guns had the range of the open ground, and swept it from end to end with a cross-fire of machine-guns and low-bursting shrapnel. At the same time, Turkish 6-in. howitzers continued to fling their crunching shells sheer into the emplacements of the Anzac guns, drawn right up among the parapets of the firing line. So thick was the air with shrieking missiles of death that it seemed impossible to live unsheltered. Yet as soon as the gun parapets were shattered, they were rebuilt, and across that deadly open space of heath, now thickly strewn with lumps of khaki marked with white, group after group of companies steadily ran forward, and the wounded—only the wounded—came staggering or crawling back. Along the foot of that first white parapet the dead lay in line, and here, as at the landing on W Beach, eager watchers in our trenches asked each other what the men were doing there.
FIGHTING IN THE TRENCHES
Fifty minutes from the start, the 1st Battalion was sent up to reinforce and consolidate, but the blind struggle for life or death continued in the trenches. No one will ever fully describe what happened in those twisting galleries and passages and pits, for neither actors nor witnesses of the deeds survived. Crowded in places so tightly together that they could hardly use their rifles, in other places hidden singly in dark corners, or lurking in groups behind angles of traverses, the unhappy Anatolians, Syrians, and peasants from the Asiatic shores awaited and repelled the fiery and tumultuous onset with unyielding persistence. Rifles were fired at scorching range; bayonet clashed with bayonet, and plunged into the softness of living bodies full of blood; bomb-thrower flung his bomb into the face of bomb-thrower flinging at him. It was like a battle of infuriated beasts tearing each other to death in the narrow confines of a pit. The bottom of the trenches was soon so thick with the dead and dying that Australians and Turks alike trampled upon bodies without discrimination of race, and the sides of the trenches no longer sheltered from fire the heads of those who still fought on.
Where all displayed a reckless disregard of life beyond the imagination of peace, it is hard to select conspicuous courage. But one may mention Major Fullerton, an army surgeon, who stumbled through the rain of fire across the open ground, and stayed for six hours dressing the wounded in the midst of the fighting; also Captain J. W. Bean, who went to and fro under the terrifying shell-fire which crumbled up the parapets of our former line, and attended to the wounded till he fell wounded himself. Of the calm gallantry of some signallers, his brother, Captain C. E. W. Bean, the correspondent, made mention in some notes which he jotted down hour by hour on that wild evening and night, until he himself fell wounded also; at 7 p.m. he wrote:
“Presently two men come racing back carrying a reel between them. One drops suddenly out of sight below the scrub; the other, who overran him, drops in also; they had hit a concealed pit in our front line of trenches. They were signallers, and carried a telephone at least five times across that space, but the line was generally cut by shrapnel.
“I can see a few bayonets sticking out from the Turkish trench immediately to the north” (probably Johnston’s Jolly). “A report comes along that Turks have been seen massing for a counter-attack.... Messengers say the head-cover of the Turkish trench consisted of beams 9 inches by 4 inches.”
At 7.30. “Messages sent back from all commanders in the captured trenches say the position is satisfactory. Seventy Turkish prisoners are awaiting an opportunity to be sent across. We have taken three trenches, about 200 to 300 yards ahead. Fire is quietening, although shells are still falling thick.”[156]
TURKISH COUNTER-ATTACKS