You come to two more gullies before you reach the northern point of the Cove. Up one is the New Zealand Headquarters, bunched—huddled, in fact—on the side of the ravine, with the terrace in front, on which the leaders sit and yarn in the spare moments, watching the shells burst on the beach, the warships racing about from harbour to harbour, destroyers nosing slowly into the flanks of the position, aeroplanes skimming away to the Turkish lines. In the next and last gully there are many scores of placid mules, munching away, waiting for their work at sunset. You reach the Point (Ari Burnu), a flat, rounded, rather sharp bend, and you find yourself amongst a great many mule-wagons, standing in the sand, and before you a 2-mile sweep of yellow beach (Ocean Beach) that bends round to Suvla Bay. There rises up from the shore a mass of knolls and hills, the under features of the Sari Bair ridge, with the Salt Lake (the salt sparkles in the sun) drying at their base. Immediately in the foreground, and to the left, are the abrupt terminations of the Sari Bair ridge: Sphinx Rock and the brown, clayey, bare slopes of Plugge's Plateau, the whole hillside so mouldered away with the lashing of the Mediterranean storms, that the shells which burst on it bring tumbling to the gullies below vast falls of earth, until it appears that the whole hill could easily be blown away. Away up higher, beyond, is the battle-line; its spent bullets come flopping about you, splashing up the water, flicking up the sand. They are never so spent that they won't penetrate your flesh or bones and stick.
BRIGADIER-GENERAL MONASH'S HEADQUARTERS, REST GULLY.
SPHINX ROCK AND THE ENTRANCE TO REST GULLY.
To face p. 172.
Hastily you turn into a sap, and all that wonderful broad expanse of beach and hills is lost. For by day the Ocean Beach is impracticable, and at night, only by taking a risk, which the Indian muleteers do, can the nearest portion of it be used, thus relieving the pressure of traffic in the great communication-way. What a task to dig this sap miles out into the enemy's territory, the only link with the strong, but isolated, posts (beyond Fishermen's Huts) held in turn by parties of New Zealanders, Maoris, and Light Horsemen, under Lieut.-Colonel Bauchop! It is deep, broad—7 feet broad—hot, dusty, but safe. You may leave it just as you reach the Ari Burnu Point, and, passing through a gap in the hills and down a gully, regain the Cove. Just round the Point you may look in at the Ordnance Stores, indicated by a dirty blue-and-white flag, ragged and torn with shot and shell. That flag was brought ashore by Colonel Austin, and was the only army flag ever flown at Anzac.
Surely there is a smithy? A clanging sound of blows on an anvil makes cheerful noise after the frenzied burst of shells. The workshops are protected with huge thicknesses of stores; guns of all descriptions are being made and remade here. Farther along are the medical stores, and you find a spacious dugout, lined with lints and ointments, bandages, splints, stretchers, and disinfectants. Hospital supplies were never short at Anzac. Gurkha, Maori, Englishman, Australian, New Zealander passes you on the beach. You may meet them all together, talking. You may see them only in their respective groups with their own kin. It all reminds you of an anthill. There are men—not hurrying, but going in all directions—stopping to talk every dozen paces, and then going on or turning back, apparently without motive, without reason. There are some that march alone and never halt. But the whole trend of traffic is from the hills and to the hills. Outward they go loaded, and return empty-handed for more.