Taken all round, the Turks are by no means an army of poor physique. They may not be as well clad as our troops, but they looked healthy and well fed. A sergeant, a fine-built man, standing nearly 6 feet, who had served in the Balkan War and also the gendarmerie, when captured, accepted his fate, but showed no signs of relief that he was to be led away captive. If anything, his tone suggested that he would have liked to have gone on fighting. In this attitude he was different from the large majority of the prisoners. He never expected an attack, and the first thing that was known in the enemy trenches was a shout from the look-out. He had at once rushed to get his men out of the tunnel to line the fire-trenches, but before he could reach a position the "English," as the sergeant persisted in calling our troops, had arrived, and were jumping down on top of them. He believed that all his officers had been killed. It was Kismet, the will of Allah, that he should be taken.
After the constant boom of the guns, the tearing whistle of the shells overhead day and night, distant and near, the cracking of rifles for five days and nights, the morning of the sixth day broke so calm that the bursting of a shell on the beach broke a kind of peaceful meditation. The troops began to ask one another what had happened or was happening. If you listened very carefully the soft patter of a machine gun came from the distant hills across at Suvla Bay. The battle was evidently not ended there.
That evening (12th August) the quiet of the lines was broken by the appearance, in close proximity to our observation balloon over the shipping in Suvla Bay, of a German aeroplane. As it sailed overhead I could just hear the throbbing of the engine. It was heading south, when from the direction of the Narrows came one of our airmen. He was flying a little lower than the enemy. At first he apparently did not see the hostile machine. There was no mistaking the two types—the enemy, dark in colour, grey, with black crosses painted on the wings, and ours yellow, with red eyes on the wings. Suddenly the British turned directly towards the enemy, which promptly veered and fled towards the Turkish lines at Bogali, dropping behind the ridges. The Turkish aviator thus robbed us of the chance of witnessing a battle in the air.
What days of quiet followed the digging of new trenches on the Chunak Bair slopes, after the crest had been won and lost!
To complete this battle scene, there remains but to be told the position gained by the 4th Australian Brigade. Its line was spread along the crest of the range of hills practically where I first described them. Along the Asma Dere by hard digging they had secured a position, and from it I had an excellent view of Buyik Anafarta in flames. The warship shells had set it alight. From the extreme right on the plains round Suvla Bay grass fires were burning harmlessly. I watched, too, ambulances drawn by six-horse teams bringing in the British wounded across the dried Salt Lake. The headquarters of the Australian Brigade was on the side of a long, broad gully, which recently had been under cultivation. On my way there I had to pass up the bed of a creek filled with dead mules, which the Turkish shrapnel had slaughtered. I passed New Zealand engineers successfully sinking wells, and line after line of water-carriers. Ahead was a string of ten mules bringing ammunition and supplies. On my left, at the edge of a few acres of cropped land, was a German officers' camp. A well-built hut of branches and mud was concealed from the view of aircraft under the shady branches of a grove of olive-trees. There were several huts like this, with a slit for a window that faced out to the sea. Immediately behind was a hill, on the slope of which were tents and a number of well-made dugouts and tracks, the remains of a considerable Turkish encampment.
I followed the telephone line, hung from bush to bush, and then came to some tall scrub, in which the brigade was camped, like a party of railway surveyors in the bush, protected from the sun by bush huts and from bullets by timber taken from the enemy's shelters. As I talked to General Monash bullets pattered against the earth walls, and he opened his case and showed me the collection he was making of the "visitors" that dropped round him as he wrote and directed the working of his command. He was justly proud of the way his men had fought; of the running fight they had won; of their march of miles through unknown country, and the way they had established themselves in the heart of the enemy's stronghold.
In the trenches the men showed no sign of fatigue now, having rested for a few days. A much reduced brigade it was, but the men were watching the Turks digging on the hills and waiting their opportunity. Every few minutes would come the clatter of the machine gun from somewhere along the front. The firing-line was only a few hundred yards away, so the Staff was in the midst of the attacks. The firing of our artillery from the hills behind and the presence of our aeroplanes overhead made the men keen and zealous. They were then still ripe for any advance.
In the face of such achievements, was it to be wondered that General Hamilton, Lieut.-General Birdwood, Major-General Godley, all wrote of the men who fought these battles in terms of the highest admiration? "Whatever happens," were General Hamilton's words to General Birdwood, "you and your brave army corps have covered yourselves with glory. Make good the crest, and the achievement will rank with Quebec." Yes, it ranked alongside any of the fighting in history. It had been in turn trench fighting, bayonet charges, and fighting in the open, and everywhere the overseas troops had won. But at what cost! At Lone Pine the casualties were 2,300 killed and wounded men. From the captured trenches there were dragged 1,000 killed, Australians and Turks. They were buried in the cemetery on the side of the hill in Brown's Dip. The Army Corps in four days had lost 12,000 men killed and wounded. The British casualties on the Anzac section were 6,000 out of 10,000 troops engaged. In all 18,000 casualties for a gain of 2 miles and a position on, but not the crest of, the ridge. I have omitted the casualties of the fighting at Suvla Bay.
And the Turks! Their losses? It must be one of the satisfactions of the splendid failure that they lost nearly three to our one. Over 1,000 of the enemy perished at Lone Pine. On the 10th I saw them lying in heaps of hundreds on the bloody slopes of Chunak Bair. We had captured in all about 700 prisoners, and much material and equipment. Thousands of Turkish rifles were removed from Lone Pine, and hundreds of thousands rounds of ammunition. We took seven of their machine guns and belts of ammunition, and turned them against their own army. One hundred and thirty prisoners were taken in that section. General Monash captured over a hundred prisoners, including officers, great quantities of big gun ammunition (including fifty cases of "75" ammunition, near where the Turks had their French gun), thousands of rounds of rifle ammunition, quantities of stores. The New Zealanders took in the first attack on Old No. 3 Post 125 prisoners and some machine guns, and also a nordenfeldt. As the fighting extended to the left, further plants of ammunition were discovered in the valley.
Anzac was enlarged from barely 300 acres to about 8 square miles. A base for twenty operations was gained at Suvla Bay, and though the passage along the beach to Anzac was still a hazardous one, to the joy of many Australian dispatch riders, it provided a race through a hail of bullets along that zone. If devotion and heroism could make success, then the Army Corps had indeed covered itself with glory. But it had very substantial deeds to its credit as well. It had fought, adding fresh laurels to those won in its first fight at the landing. Weakened, worn, but by no means disheartened, it was strengthened after 20th August by the arrival of the 2nd Australian Division from Egypt, under Major-General Legge, which enabled respite from trench warfare to be enjoyed by the veteran brigades. Except for the fighting on the extreme left of our Army Corps line, where the Australians linked with the Suvla Bay forces across the Chocolate Hills, the weeks after the great battles at Anzac were calm. It was only a calm that precedes a storm.