CHAPTER XVII
ANZAC COVE

The evolution of Anzac was as the growth of a mining settlement. Little had been done by the Turks in their defensive preparations to disturb the natural growth that spread from the crest of Maclagan's Ridge almost down to the water's edge—a growth of holly bush, a kind of furze, and an abundant carpet of grasses, wild flowers, poppies, and anemones. Round Ari Burnu their line of shallow trenches had run along to the Fishermen's Huts, but there were no tracks, other than the sheep or goat track round the base of the cliffs that the farmers might have used coming from Anafarta on to the plains below Kelid Bair and across to the olive-groves, on the way to Maidos and the villages along the peninsula road to Cape Helles. Anzac Beach—"Z" Beach in the scheme of operations—was covered with coarse pebbles, occasionally a patch of sand. Barely 20 yards wide, and 600 yards long, the hills and cliffs began to rise steeply from it. The shore was cleft in the centre by a gully—Bully Beef Gully—which opened into the Cove. It was no more than a sharp ravine, very narrow, and in the days of April and in November very moist, and wet, and sticky. It took very little time after the dawn of day on that April Sunday morning for the point of concentration to be fixed on in this Cove. The whole of the stores, equipment, as well as the troops, were landed from end to end of the beach. Somehow there was a feeling of greater security in this Cove, but in fact it was so shallow, so accurately plotted in the enemy's maps, that the Turks had little difficulty in bursting the shells from one end of it to the other at their will. Luckily, the water was fairly deep almost up to the shore. Twenty yards out one found 15 feet of water and a stony bottom, which enabled the picket boats and pinnaces to come close in, as it allowed barges to be drawn well up to the beach, so that the stores could be tumbled out. Photographs, better than word pictures, describe that beach in those first days and weeks. Ordnance officers of both Divisions, as well as of the Army Corps, wrestled with the problem of making order out of chaos. Once the army was to stick, it had to stick "By God!" and not be allowed to starve, or want for ammunition or entrenching tools.

A small stone jetty was the first work of the Engineers, and this was rapidly followed by a jetty that the signallers, under Captain Watson (for the Engineers had vastly more important duties that called them away up to the gullies and the firing-line), constructed. But that was done after the second week. The Army Medical Corps worked in a dressing-station, just a tent with a Red Cross flying overhead. Yet it could not be said that the Turks wilfully shelled this station, though necessarily they must have dropped their shells round its canvas doors, while inside it came the bullets, because of the stores that lay about, blocking, choking the beach. Many were the experiments that were made to distribute the supplies. Colonel Austin, Ordnance officer, 1st Division, with his staff-sergeant, Tuckett, had attempted to erect the piles of boxes of biscuits, as well as picks and shovels and ammunition around Hell Spit. Promptly the Turks dropped shells right into the middle of them, scattering the whole and killing several men. There was nothing for it but to move back along the Cove, dig into the sides of the cliffs, and pile the reserve stores up the main gully. On the beach cases were stacked in the form of traverses, round which the men might take such shelter as was afforded when the guns—Beachy Bill, from Olive Grove, and Anafarta, from the village near Suvla—commenced their "hates."

This beach and the cliffs overlooking it might be best described as "The Heart of Anzac." At the foot of the gully was camped General Sir William Birdwood—the "Soul of Anzac"—and his whole Staff in dugouts no different from the holes the men built in the hills. A hundred feet up the slopes on the south side was General Bridges and his Staff, and on the other hand General Godley with the 2nd A. and N.Z. Division. Those first quarters were only slightly varied in after-months. General Birdwood remained always on the beach, almost at the foot of the jetty. Here it was that one found the living pulse of the position—the throb of life that meant the successful holding of the acres so gallantly won, the strength that held back the Turks, while road arteries cut into the hillsides and formed the channels down which the best blood of the Australians and New Zealanders flowed. One cannot help recording that constantly shells burst round the leader's dugout. Thus it happened that his Staff officer, Captain Onslow, met his death under tragic circumstances in July. It was a particularly hot night, and this popular officer said he would sleep on the top of his dugout as being cooler. The Turks commenced to shell the beach (probably in the belief that we were that night landing men and stores, which we were not). Captain Onslow retired within the poor and partial shelter, emerging again after about a quarter of an hour, when he fancied the guns had stopped. Unfortunately, it was only a lull, and the next shell burst right on the dugout, killing him instantly.

"It is only a question of time," was a phrase current on the beach amongst the working parties. It meant one had only to be there long enough and the inevitable shell-burst would find its victims. Yet considering the traffic—that the whole army of 30,000, increasing to 50,000 in July and August, as the zealous Australian Light Horsemen (dismounted) came into action, were fed from that 600 yards strip of beach—it was astonishing that the casualties were as low as they were. Twenty men were killed at a shell-burst once—that was the most horrible incident. Thousands of the heaviest shells fell harmlessly into the water. Six hundred shells a day, at one period, fell along the shore and around the pinnaces and lighters or amongst the slowly moving transports. No large ships were sunk. "The beach"—and those two words were used to include the thousands that inhabited it and the adjacent hillsides—watched the vessels chased from anchorage to anchorage. The army blessed their lives they were ashore; while those afloat wondered how any were left alive after the "hottings" the beach got. But the casualties from both Turkish enfilading batteries were never reckoned in all at 2,000—big enough, but very little result for the molestation that the Turks hoped to throw down on the heroes who toiled there day and night. For most of the work was done at night, in the small hours of the morning, when the transports under a darkened sky—the moon had to be studied studiously on Gallipoli—could come close inshore with 100-gallon tanks, thousands of Egyptian water-tins, millions of rounds of ammunition, and thousands of rounds of shells, scores of tons of beef and biscuits. Bread and the little fresh meat that came ashore were landed from the regular trawler service that arrived from Imbros by day, via Helles.

Once a great steam pumping engine was landed. One heard it afterwards puffing away on the beach, sending the water from the barges (filled with water from the Nile and anchored by the pier) up to the tank reservoirs on the side of the ridge, where began a reticulation scheme all over Anzac to the foot of the hills, thereby certainly saving the energy of the army expended on fatigues. How the troops blessed it! None of that "luxury," however, in the early days; only the monotonous grind up and down the slopes with water-cans.

You come on the Telephone Exchange of Anzac (to which led what appeared an impossible tangle of wires) and the Post Office, on either side of the entrance to Bully Beef Gully, opposite Watson's Landing. It is possible to talk all over the position from here. Three or four men are working constantly at the switches. Farther along the beach on the right and you find the clearing stations, under Colonel Howse, V.C., wedged in between the hillside and the screen of boxes on the beach. You come to Hell Spit, round which you might be chased by a machine gun from Gaba Tepe; and beyond, the graveyard, open to shell fire. Burials mostly have to be carried out at night, when the shelling is not so dangerous. There was a chaplain who, with his little band of devoted stretcher-bearers and the comrades of the fallen, was performing the last rites at this spot, when, to his dismay, the Turks commenced the shelling again. "Dust unto dust," repeated the chaplain, and the bursting shell flung the newly exposed earth over the party. "Oh, hell!" said the padre. "This is too ho-at for me! I'm aff!" And he went. So was the spirit of war bred in the souls of the men. It was sheer madness, the risks the troops would take on the beach when the Turks had fired old Beachy Bill from the Olive Grove—bathing under shell fire. But if needs must they always faced those shellings, anxious to get back to their job—to get supplies ashore before they were sunk, to get comrades away to comfort on the hospital ships. No amount of shelling interrupted the daily swim for long.

So you walk north back along the beach, pondering, looking up at the heights above Ari Burnu Point. You wonder at the men of the 3rd Brigade who stormed it and the ridge on your right. The idealness of the Point for machine guns to repel any landing, seems only too evident. You pass the Army Corps headquarters—a line of dugouts, well shielded from the sun with canvas and blankets. Above is the wireless station, with its widespread aerials on a bare hill—deserted except for a few casual men who had burrowed deep and took their chance—and immense searchlights for signalling in a cavern in the hill. Near at hand, too, is the Army Post Office, in a low wooden building, one of the few at Anzac. Tinkerings and hammerings arise from the bomb factory, next door almost, where the finishing touches are put to the jam-tin bombs, originally constructed in Egypt, and to the Turkish shell cases, converted into "surprise packets" by diligent sappers, who work day and night to keep pace with the demand for twice any number that the Turks might throw. Up farther on this bared hill is the corral built for the reception of Turkish prisoners. You meet them, tired-looking, sullen men, being marched down through the gully to the pier. Hereabouts is an incinerator, always smoking and exploding cartridges that have fallen into it.