And the girls! There were nurses on board. I shook hands with them all and talked to half a dozen of them. One was a very sweet little thing—an angel! I longed for a broken arm or leg, so that I might stay there.... Come, shade of brave old Sir Walter, and help me here.
O, woman! In our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made;
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!
But they are all angels, ministering angels, tending the sick and wounded, whispering sweet words into the ears of brave men who lie there, suffering tortures of mind and body, but never uttering a complaint.
There were several doctors on board, and quite a lot of officers and men, some wounded, others sick and broken down with the stress of the last few weeks. Several of our brigade were among them. Heroes all.
Yes, I felt that if anything happened to me I should like to be taken aboard that hospital ship. But nothing had happened to me worth recording—only a few narrow escapes such as we all have in war time. I never felt better in my life. My appetite was of the best. My tongue had no coat of fur upon it. I had no excuse for remaining. I commandeered a few sheets of paper and some envelopes (precious things!). I went in and had a BATH—none of your ordinary swims, with one eye on the shrapnel and the other on the shore, but a real bath with soap and fresh water—and then I said good-bye to the nurses, good-bye to the doctors and the men, and went back from this heaven on the water to that hell upon the earth.
It WAS hell! All war is hell, as General Sherman said. And there never was one that better deserved the name than this one. Oh, God! I have stood on Braund's Hill admiring the sunset views, when the islands of the Ægean Sea seem to be floating on the edge of a gorgeous canvas of shimmering gold, and I have stood on other hills and watched the dawn-blush and the rising sun, and I have said to myself, What a blot upon God's beauties is war!... And then I have taken up my rifle and gone forth to kill men! Every prospect pleases and only the enemy is vile. Oh, these shifting scenes and changing moods!
On the other side were forty thousand Turks (we are told) watching for the opportunity to kill us. Our mission was to get to Constantinople; theirs to drive us into the sea. We were "dug in"; they were "dug in." If we found it a long, long way to Constantinople, they were finding it's a long way to the sea, which is much nearer as the crow flies. They shivered at the sound of our land guns; they heard the broadsides of our ships; they watched the Queen Elizabeth fire her 15-inch gun; the shells landing on the sides of the hills, tossing hundreds of tons of earth and rock high into the air, so that when the smoke cleared away they would not know those hills; and they trembled, as all men who have seen have trembled at the fury of the monstrous gun!
But they fought on. Every yard of ground won cost us dear. I have seen our boys fall like ninepins before a hail of bullets. I have heard the cry "Lie low" in an advance, and every man has fallen flat upon the ground to escape certain destruction; and I have heard that other pitiful cry, time and time again, of "Stretcher-bearers wanted!" Once the men lay prone for four hours in the midst of the scrub, with the air full of bursting shells and rifle and machine-gun fire passing just over them. I do not wonder that some men lost their nerve during those terrible hours.
But never yet did Australian officer call upon his men to take a position, no matter how impossible the feat, and find them wanting. "Impossible!" There was no such word in their vocabulary. Nothing was impossible to them—until they died. Colonel McCay, Brigadier in Command of the Second Infantry Brigade, spoke the truth when he said: "The way, the cheerful, splendid way, they face death and pain is simply glorious, and if no Australian ever fought again, April 25, April 26 and May 8 specially mark them as warriors. On the eighth of May I said in effect to them (my own brigade), 'Come and die,' and they came with a cheer and a laugh. They are simply magnificent."