Gallipoli Diary

by John Graham Gillam

May 29th.

A beautiful day, but there are no battleships lying off, and but one or two Supply ships. The absence of shipping makes a great contrast to the busy scenes amongst the Fleet and transports of a week ago, and their absence has a depressing effect on us all.

Several destroyers are patrolling up and down the coast, and from Asia to Imbros. All is quiet on the front. But reinforcements steadily arrive, and a continued steady stream of ordnance stores and supplies is unloaded from the Supply ships into lighters, which are then towed by small tugs to the piers, alongside which they are made fast. There the stores are taken over by R.E., Ordnance, or Supply Officers, who with groups of labourers unload them from the lighters on to the piers. Greek labour then handles the stores along the piers to the beach, where they are dumped on the sand. Then officers with clerks check the stores with the figures stated on their vouchers, and Greeks load on to wagons and mule-carts, which then drive off up the newly made steep roads of the beach to the R.E. park, just half-way up the beach, to the Ordnance depot on the cliff to the right of the beach looking inland, or to the rapidly growing Main Supply depot, which will soon make a splendid target for the Turkish gunners, on the high ground at the back of the beach. At times we find that the Main Supply depot is unable to satisfy all our indents, and in consequence we have to go down on to the beach and draw from the piles of supplies which have accumulated there faster than it has been found possible to cart them away. But never on any occasion do we find that our indents have to be refused from both the Main Supply depot and the beach. For the A.S.C. out here, where there are difficulties that have never been experienced before in previous campaigns—such as transporting by sea from Southampton or Alexandria, over a sea rapidly becoming infested with submarines; unloading into lighters off shore in a rough sea, with the lighters bumping and tossing roughly against the ships’ sides; towing the lighters alongside flimsy piers, always under a constant work of construction or repair; and finally the arduous work of man-handling from the lighters to the beach, carting from the beach to the Main depot and thence to trenches, guns, and camps, with a daily ration of Turkish shells to dodge—are organizing the feeding of the men in the trenches, the man at the gun, and we behind, punctiliously as our troops are fed in France. Whatever unforeseen difficulty arises, breakfast and the succeeding daily meals are always ready at the scheduled hours for General and private, officers’ chargers and mules. One hitch, and our Army here may have to go on half rations or no food at all.

“An army moves on its stomach.” True, we are not moving; but if our stomachs are not regularly and wisely fed, we shall rapidly have to move, and then in the opposite way to our objective.

The A.S.C. officer who was at dinner at Ritchie’s the other night is with me on the beach, and, as I walk with him to the Main Supply depot, he contrasts the circumstances here with those in France under which the A.S.C works. Pointing to the pier and the stacks of supplies on the beach, he says, “There you have your Havre and base.” The wagons, limbers, and mule-carts are, he tells me, the equivalent of the railway Supply pack-trains running every day from Havre to the various railheads behind the lines. We arrive at the Main Supply depot, and he says: “We are now at one of these railheads, but hardly ever does a railhead in France get shelled, and never one of them regularly and continually, as this one will be when these stacks of biscuits grow a bit higher.” Pointing to our Divisional depot of four little dumps, one for each of our groups, just three hundred yards away from us, he says: “There is your refilling point, usually two miles or more from railhead, and then seldom under shell fire.” In our case we are actually behind railhead. An officer on duty at the Main Supply depot who has been up to Anzac, as the landing of the Australians up the coast is now called, joins in our conversation, and tells us that actually on the beach at Anzac spent bullets continually fly over from the enemy trenches, adding, “Fancy spent bullets flying round the depot at Havre!”

I ride up to Brigade H.Q. in the afternoon and have tea, and am called on to supply them with the latest beach rumours, which I glean each morning from our dump and from our Naval officers on shore.

Coming back, just in front of Pink Farm I stop at the mess of the Royal Scots, who are in a trench camp. Their mess is very well dug in, and I am surprised how comfortable it has been made. They are very hospitable, and have an overflowing larder of unheard-of luxuries in this land of bare necessity. Old Steel, the Q.M., is there, and presses “Turkish delight” on to me. As we sit talking, shrapnel whizzes over and bursts behind us fifty yards to our left, trying to get “L” Battery. I hear the account of the part the Royal Scots had taken in the last little scrap, and am told that one of their sergeants, who was a man of good position in Edinburgh in civil life, was found dead, lying with a semicircle of five dead Turks around him, their heads smashed in with the butt-end of his rifle. He must have come of a fighting stock, yet never anticipated he would end his life on the battlefield.

May 30th.

I am on duty at 6 a.m. at the Main Supply depot drawing the day’s supplies to our Divisional dump. Each of the four Supply Officers takes it in turn, so that the duty falls to me once in four days. It is a lovely fresh morning, and after signing for the supplies I light a cigarette and stroll back to my “bivvy” feeling ready for breakfast.

I meet Milward on the way, who now lives in a tent near the depot. He was our Naval Landing Officer on the Dongola on April 25th, and is now one of the Naval Landing Officers on the beach. He tells me that he is about to go back to join his original ship, somewhere in the North Sea; that he does not want to go a bit, and this side of the war is far more interesting. He also says that the piers are going to be constructed so as to be proof against the bad weather that will come in the winter. Ships will be sunk to form breakwaters. “The winter?” I exclaim. “Heavens! we shall be in Constantinople long before then; Achi will be ours by June 30th, and then we have them at our mercy.”