CHAPTER X
A NIGHT UP THE GULLY RAVINE
Feeling greatly refreshed after my breakfast with O'Hara, I went to select a suitable place for our camp, or rather bivouac, for, of course, we had no tents. Finding a snug little valley which stood back a couple of hundred yards from W Beach and which ran up under the protection of a rise in the ground, which gave us some slight cover from the Turks, I put all hands on to prepare and level the ground for the horse and mule lines.
We had been rushed to the trenches in such haste with the ammunition and supplies that we had been unable to bring any rope with which to tether the mules, so, seeing some ship's rope lying on the beach, I asked the naval officer in charge to let me have it for my lines. He not only did this, but lent me some of his men as well to carry it up to my little camp, where they helped me to fix it in the ground. I am sorry to say I forget this officer's name, as he was most helpful to me in many ways, and I never had to appeal in vain to him, or, as a matter of fact, to any other naval officer for assistance.
Throughout the day there was more than enough to do. The ground had to be levelled off, so as to make comfortable the mule and horse lines. Ropes had to be pegged down and the ends of them buried in the ground, tied round sacks filled with clay, drains trenched out, and the larger stones thrown out of the way. Then the mules had to be fed and watered, and I feared the latter was going to be a difficult and dangerous business, for the only water discovered so far came under Turkish fire. Luckily for me, however, one of my men, Schoub, my farrier sergeant, discovered a deep well carefully hidden at the corner of a demolished building, standing at the head of the little valley where we were camped. I feared that it might have been poisoned, so to solve my doubts I went to the Provost Marshal, and borrowed from him one of the captured Turkish prisoners. I felt sure that a Turk coming from these parts would know the natural taste of the water, so I took him with me to the well and asked him to drink. He was rather loth to do this at first, but at last, with a little persuasion, he took a sip in his mouth, rolled it for a moment on his tongue, then, nodding approval, drank freely of the water. As he survived the ordeal, I thought it was all right to go ahead with the mules, and later on we used the well ourselves, for it was excellent water.
All day long parties were coming and going between V and W Beaches; forage, water tins, supplies, etc.—everything had to be brought to us on our pack mules, and the day was all too short to do the many things that landing in a new country in time of warfare makes necessary. Not much time was wasted over the cooking of food; biscuits, jam, cheese, tinned beef, required no fires; only a little tea was boiled in our hastily-made camp kitchens. The only fuel to be had was obtained by breaking up some of our old packing-cases; the Turks had cleared off everything—not a man, woman, child or beast was left on the place—but this did not worry us, as we were always able to rustle for ourselves.
Before dark that night we began to load up another big convoy of munitions and supplies for the trenches.
This proved to be one of the most weird nights of many that we have spent tramping up and down the peninsula.