When at last we started for the Dardanelles, we of the Light Horse Brigade had (as you know) to leave our horses behind, and the cook's cart stopped too. But George came along all right. Despite the activities of the submarines we reached Gallipoli in safety, and witnessed the allied warships pounding away at the Turkish defences. Historic Troy was on our right; before us the entrance to the Dardanelles; and on the left, firmly established on Helles, was the great Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, making its first halt on the road to Constantinople. But we had to go further north, a mile beyond Gaba Tepe, where the Australians—particularly the 3rd Infantry Brigade—had performed such deeds of valour that Dargai, Colenso, and Magersfontein were declared by old soldiers to have been a mere picnic in contrast.
We landed amid a hail of shrapnel. Transhipping from the transports, we crowded into launches and sweepers and barges. These little boats, heavily laden with khaki freight, made straight for Anzac Cove. Fair targets for Tommy Turk, of course; so the guns of the Olive Grove Battery sent us anything but peaceful messages. Plug-plong went the shells into the water. Zip-zip hissed the bullets all round us. But, marvellous to relate, not a man was hit. Next day some infantry reinforcements, landing in the same place and manner, sustained forty casualties. That's the luck of the game—the fortune of war. We landed everything satisfactorily.
George brought up the rear, with his pots and dixies. It is because of George that I recapitulate.
In a long, straggling khaki line ("Column o' lumps," said the brigade major) we meandered past Casualty Point and Hell Spit, and up to our bivouac in Shrapnel Valley. Snipers on the hill up beyond Quinn's Post sent long-range shots at random down the track. Shells burst over our heads, and the leaden pellets spattered over the landscape. It would take too long to recount half the miraculous escapes some of our chaps had. Our artillery worked overtime, and the row was deafening. But our gunners could not silence the elusive cannon in the Olive Grove. After a time, wherein the minutes seemed like hours, we reached the camp site, and started to dig in feverishly. We burrowed like rabbits. Picks, shovels and bayonets made the earth fly till we had scratched a precarious shelter from the blast. Like troglodytes we snuggled into the dug-outs, waiting for the bombardment to cease.
But George went on with his cooking.
Major-General W. T. Bridges.
Next day we changed our quarters. The German artillerymen were too attentive. We had sustained a few casualties, so we sought a more retired spot under the lee of the hill. For the first time since we had landed we were able to look about us. There was a lull in the cannonade, though the musketry fusillade proceeded merrily. We saw the long line of Australian and New Zealand trenches whence the Turks had been driven in rout the night before, leaving 3,000 dead to mar the landscape. We heard too, definitely, for the first time of the good Australians who on this inhospitable shore had given their lives for King and Empire—General Bridges, Colonel MacLaurin, Lieutenant-Colonel Braund, Lieutenant-Colonel Onslow Thompson, Sergeant Larkin (who used to sit on the opposite side to Colonel Braund in the New South Wales Parliament, but found in war the leveller that makes us all one party), and hundreds of others. Looking up to the precipitous cliffs above, we marvelled anew at the reckless daring of our infantry comrades who had scaled those heights in the face of rifle, machine-gun and shrapnel.