I had several friends in the Inniskilling Fusiliers and frequently I came across them in my journeys to and from the Gurkha lines. As a rule, they held the trenches to the right of the little brown men from Nepaul.
I always made a point, when I was anywhere near, of looking up Captain Gordon Tillie. He was now practically the only officer left of the Inniskillings who had taken part in the original landing and had, so far, escaped scot-free. I was hopeful that his luck would see him through, because he had only been married a few days before he left England for the front, and I knew his wife very well, and had promised her to look him up whenever I had an opportunity.
Just before the 29th Division went to Suvla, Gye and I paid him a visit, while he was holding the front trenches, and, sad to say, this was the last occasion on which I ever saw Gordon Tillie. He took us along that portion of the trench for which his company was responsible, and showed us the various points of interest in the Turkish line, which, at this particular place, was sometimes parallel, and sometimes almost at right angles to our trenches, and in places only a dozen yards distant. When I was leaving him he cautioned me to be careful of a certain part of the trench we should have to pass through, as he said it was exposed to the Turkish guns and they often gave it a "strafing." My parting remark to him was: "Take care they don't 'strafe' you."
Of course, shells were dropping here and there all the time from the Turkish guns, and they were paying some attention to the piece of dangerous trench which Gye and I were bound to go through, so, saying to him: "Let's make a bolt for it," we started off at our best pace, but before we got through we had to lie down in the bottom of the trench to escape a couple of shells which burst all round us and knocked to pieces the sandbag parapet protecting our heads.
Gordon Tillie's friendly warning may have saved our lives, and it is a nice thought, for, soon afterwards, the 29th Division were sent to Suvla, and there Captain Tillie was killed while gallantly leading his company up the slopes of Sari Bair—a brave soldier, as Sir Ian Hamilton testifies in his Suvla Bay Despatch.
I often made an expedition to visit a friend, only to find, when I got there, that he had perhaps been killed the day before, or else had been sent off to hospital badly wounded, and it was sad to see how one's friends gradually got thinned off. Many of them lay buried all round. One would suddenly be startled by coming across a freshly-dug grave in some sheltered little nook by the wayside and learn for the first time, from the rude cross erected over it, that one's friend lay there. But war is war, and as a shell or bullet may come at any moment and bring sudden death with it to one's self, one gets used to the idea, and somehow it does not seem so dreadful. Many of us often escaped by the merest chance. In my own case the turning aside to pluck a flower, or straying a little from the path to get a better view of a sunset, was the chance that prevented Death from finding me, because more than once I have seen a shell explode and excavate a huge hole on the exact spot where, had I not turned aside, I would undoubtedly have been standing. Yes, indeed, in those days, one often heard, sounding softly in one's ears, the faint rustle of the wings of the Angel of Death.
I do not know whether the Turks had any particular spite against my Zionists, but they certainly gave us more than our fair share of shells. One afternoon they began a bombardment and plumped a shell into a bank on which sat a Zion man, Private Scorobogaty. The explosion sent him some feet into the air, but, beyond the bruise and shock, he suffered no damage. The next shell dropped plump in the middle of our little supply of stores, within six feet of the door of our dug-out, and sent everything flying through space. A third shot plunged into the roots of a tree which stood close to our lines, by which the trumpeter of L Battery, R. H. A., was standing. He heard the shell coming, and, without any particular reason, but luckily for him, he made a dive to the right instead of to the left, and so escaped for the moment. Next afternoon at tea-time another shell came, cut the same tree clean in two, wounding the trumpeter and two other men of L Battery, who were having their tea in its shade.