So ended the most horrible night ever spent on Anzac, and thus began the dawn of that famous position.
CHAPTER XII
A TERRIBLE THREE DAYS
Dawn on the 26th came stealing over the hills beyond the Straits and snow-capped Mount Ida, showing her pink peak above the dark grim fortifications of Kelid Bahr, and along the Dardanelles Straits. Dawn awoke to hear the thundering boom of the guns from the fleet in amongst the valleys and gullies of Anzac, the rattle of muskets and the rip-rip-rip of machine guns. It spread with an echoing roar to the beach; it was taken up by the ships that lay one or two miles off the coast; it was intensified and flung back to shore again by the monster guns on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth. Down to the entrance of the Straits rolled the sound; and back from the Straits came the thundering roar as of a million kettledrums, while the fierce attacks and counter-attacks of the British pushed in on to the fortifications, and turned the Turks in terror to the foothills of Achi Baba. The enemy had abandoned their smashed guns; they had evacuated the fortifications and the village of Seddul Bahr, as the magnificent, imperishable 29th Division had managed to gain a foothold round the toe of the peninsula. Word had early been flashed up to Anzac that the landing had been a success, but had been resisted more fiercely, more terribly than even the most sanguinary expectations predicted.
It was the naval guns that took the place of the field guns, bursting shrapnel in the front of the Turkish lines, that held back the enemy charges, that decimated their men, that enabled the British and the Australian troops to effect the landing and hang on to the ridges until their trenches were deep enough, their guns landed, and the lines organized to withstand any attacks, however violent. It was artillery fire that the infantry (30,000 infantry) needed most at Anzac, and it was heavy artillery fire with a vengeance they got. As I watched the warships pumping in shells on to the hills, saw the Turks answering with the bluish white, curling clouds of shrapnel that burst over the sea and the gullies, it gave me an indication of the fury of the battle of which these were the only visible signs at long range. There was a balloon observing for the ships. The Queen Elizabeth, the Triumph, and the Bacchante, and five other warships lay off Anzac. There were three times as many off Cape Helles, with the French fleet steaming off Kum Kale. I watched the leaping tongues of fire from the warships' sides, and heard the muffled report as the smoke blew back over the decks in a yellow cloud; and before it had vanished (but many seconds later, as it had whirled miles in the air), the explosion of the shell bursting on the side of the hills and among the trenches. The wounded felt that shelling most, as they lay on the cliffs, on the shore, on the decks of the transports, with the ships firing point-blank at them. It shook them—it chilled their blood. But the men in the trenches knew that on the naval gunners depended their lives, depended their success; it was these protecting screens of fire, of huge shells, that gave them time to dig, and to settle down into what was fast becoming trench warfare. The Turks gathered battalions to battalions and flung them against the parts of our lines where the configuration of the country made them naturally weakest. The shells from the warships decimated them.
If Sunday had been the critical night for the Army Corps at Anzac, Monday and Tuesday were the critical days. Each party of men fought as a separate, desperate unit. The Turk might throw his complete reserve battalions against the right, the centre, or the left of our thinned ranks, but it was only the grit, the determination of the fighting spirit of the Australians and New Zealanders that enabled them to hold back the enemy or continue the attacks in small units led by a corporal or a junior subaltern. Reinforcements were hastily gathered, such parties as might be found in the valleys going to join the scattered regiments, or trying to find their comrades of a battalion. No counter-attack on a large scale could be ordered while such disorganization prevailed; but each section of the line sought to advance, as it was found necessary to take and straighten and strengthen the position on the second ridge, so as to eventually link up the whole line.
MACLAGAN'S RIDGE AND ANZAC BEACH ON 26TH AUGUST, SHOWING THE HILLSIDE AS YET UNINHABITED.