CHAPTER XXVII. THE DEPARTURE
Now came a period of utter stagnation
It was a deadlock.
We held the bay, the plain of Anafarta, the Salt Lake, the Kislar Dagh and Kapanja Sirt in a horse-shoe.
The Turks held the heights of Sari Bair, Anafarta village, and the hills beyond “Jefferson's Post” in a semicircle enclosing us. Nothing happened. We shelled and they shelled—every day. Snipers sniped and men got killed; but there was no further advance. Things had remained at a standstill since the first week of the landing.
Rumours floated from one unit to another:
“We were going to make a great attack on the 28th”—always a fixed date; “the Italians were landing troops to help the Australians at Anzac”—every possible absurdity was noised abroad.
Hawk was on Chocolate Hill with our advanced dressing station. I was on “C” Beach, Lala Baba, with the remainder of the ambulance. I had lost all my officers by sickness and wounds, and I was now the last of the original N.C.O.'s of “A” Section. Except for the swimming and my own observations of tracks and birds and natural history generally, this was a desperately uninteresting period.
Orders to pack up ready for a move came suddenly. It was now late in September. The wet season was just beginning. The storm-clouds were coming up over the hills in great masses of rolling banks, black and forbidding. It grew colder at night, and a cold wind sprang up during the day.