SHRAPNEL BURSTING OVER THE PIERS AT ANZAC FROM SHELLS FIRED BY "BEACHY BILL."
View taken looking towards Hell Spit.
BULLY BEEF GULLY, WITH PLUGGE'S PLATEAU ABOVE.
On the right, along the hillside, was 1st Australian Divisional Headquarters. Coral for Turkish prisoners on the left, with water tanks for reticulation scheme of Anzac, above.
To face p. 122.
Two separate manœvres were tried by the Turks to break our line. They tried them both at once. One was an attempt to drive in our right flank and get round by the beach to the heart of the position. This they failed to do, as the knolls were so strongly held (the 2nd Battalion had been specially thrown on to the extreme right flank to guard against this); while the fire from the warships, especially the Queen Elizabeth, was far too accurate and bloody, so that the enemy dared not show themselves on those exposed slopes and in the gullies, easily raked either by direct or indirect fire from the warships, officers spotting, as I have said, from the trenches. The other attempt, a separate and even sterner battle, was the stabs that the Turks made at the highest point of the arc of our semicircular position—or at the apex, as it has been termed—near the head of Monash Gully. Our trenches were down in the gully. They were overlooked by the Turks. Shrapnel fell over them constantly and for long periods at a time. On the edges of the main ridge the position grew more and more perilous. Only for the gallant defence of Quinn's and Pope's Hills nothing could have stopped the wedge that the Turks sought to make being driven in. An officer of the 14th Battalion seized the point known as Quinn's Post, a knoll on the side of the ridge, and held on like grim death with his gallant men. I venture to say that had the Turks, rallying their numbers, succeeded in dislodging this little band of heroes from their position on this knoll, who must then have been dashed to their doom in the Shrapnel Gully, they would have gained their purpose and that great and important artery would have been commanded by Turkish fire. On Wednesday Major Quinn took it over and held it, and the post from that time on bore his name.