This word of victory, coming to men who thought for the moment that their efforts had been made in vain, had the effect of a fresh brigade. The men rallied back up the hill; bearing the news to the firing-line, the new, constricted line was made good, and the rest of the night was never anything but continued victory to those weary ones in the scrub. But 24 hours of continual battle exhausts men, and by dawn the Turks, knowing the weariness of our men, resolved to beat them down into the sea. When the sun was well in our men's eyes they attacked again, with not less than twice our entire strength of fresh men, and with an overwhelming superiority in field artillery. Something in the Turk commander and the knowledge that a success there would bring our men across the peninsula within a day, made the Turks more desperate enemies there than elsewhere. They came at us with a determination which might have triumphed against other troops. As they came on they opened a terrific fire of shrapnel upon our position, pouring in such a hail that months afterwards one could see their round shrapnel bullets stuck in bare patches of ground, or in earth thrown up from the trenches, as thickly as plums in a pudding. Their multitudes of men pressed through the scrub as skirmishers, and sniped at every moving thing; for they were on higher ground and could see over most of our position, and every man we had was under direct fire for hours of each day. As the attack developed, the promised help arrived, our warships stood in and opened on the Turks with every gun that would bear. Some kept down the guns of Gaba Tepe, others searched the line of the Turk advance, till the hills over which they came were swathed with yellow smoke and dust, the white clouds of shrapnel, and the drifting darkness of conflagration. All the scrub was in a blaze before them, but they pressed on, falling in heaps and lines; and their guns dropped a never-ceasing rain of shells on trenches, beach and shipping. The landing of stores and ammunition never ceased during the battle. The work of the beach-parties in that scene of burning and massacre was beyond all praise: so was the work of the fatigue parties who passed up and down the hill with water, ammunition and food, or dug sheltered roads to the trenches; so was the work of the Medical Service, who got the wounded out of cuts in the earth, so narrow and so twisted that there was no using a stretcher and men had to be carried on stretcher bearers' backs or on improvised chairs made out of packing cases.
At a little before noon the Turk attack reached its height in a blaze and uproar of fire, and the swaying forward of their multitudes. The guns of the warships swept them from flank to flank with every engine of death: they died by hundreds, and the attack withered as it came. Our men saw the enemy fade and slacken and halt; then with their cheer they charged him and beat him home, seized new ground from him, and dug themselves in in front of him. All through the day there was fighting up and down the line, partial attacks, and never-ceasing shell-fire, but no other great attack, the Turks had suffered too much. At night their snipers came out in the scrub and shot at anything they could see, and all night long their men dragged up field guns and piles of shrapnel, and worked at the trenches which were to contain ours. When day dawned, they opened with shrapnel upon the beach, with a feu de barrage designed to stop all landing of men and stores. They whipped the bay with shrapnel bullets. Where their fire was concentrated, the water was lashed as with hail all day long; but the boats passed through it, and men worked in it, building jetties for the boats to land at, using a big Turk shell as a pile driver: when they got too hot they bathed in it, for no fire shook those men. It was said, that when a big shell was coming, men of other races would go into their dugouts, but that these men paused only to call it a bastard and then went on with their work.
By the night of the second day, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps had won and fortified their position. Men writing or reporting on service about them referred to them as the A.N.Z.A.C., and these letters soon came to mean the place in which they were, un-named till then, probably, save by some rough Turkish place-name, but now likely to be printed on all English maps, with the other names, of Brighton Beach and Hell Spit, which mark a great passage of arms.
III
King Marsilies parted his army: ten columns he kept by him, and the other ten rode in to fight. The Franks said: "God, what ruin we shall have here. What will become of the twelve Peers?" The Archbishop Turpin answered first: "Good knights, you are the friends of God; to-day you will be crowned and flowered, resting in the holy flowers of Paradise, where no coward will ever come."
The Franks answered: "We will not fail. If it be God's will, we will not murmur. We will fight against our enemies: we are few men, but well-hardened."
They spurred forward to fight the pagans. The Franks and Saracens are mingled.
The Song of Roland.
This early fighting, which lasted from dawn on the 25th April till noon on the following day, won us a footing, not more than that, on the Peninsula; it settled the German brag that we should never be able to land. We had landed upon, had taken, and were holding the whole of the southwestern extremity of the Peninsula and a strip of the Ægean coast, in the face of an army never less than twice our strength, strongly entrenched and well supplied. We had lost very heavily in the attack, our men were weary from the exceedingly severe service of the landing, but the morrow began the second passage in the campaign, the advance from the sea, before the Turks should have recovered.