A Naval Venture: The War Story of an Armoured Cruiser

by T. T. Jeans

"Good luck!" they sang out after him.

Almost directly after this, the order came for the "Ansons" and the beach party to fall back to the beach. "That finishes soldiering; now we've got to be labourers," the men grumbled as they straggled down the gully, helping any wounded they met on the way.

And now they saw that horrible line of dead, lying at the water's edge, with the sea lapping round their legs and bodies, and the men hanging over the rows of barbed wire.

"It's rotten. It spoils all the fun," said the Lamp-post, as he stepped across the body of a very finely-made man lying face downwards in the sand, one hand still gripping his rifle, and the fingers of the other still dug into the sand. "Look at those bits of firewood in the straps of his pack. Poor chap! He'll never want them to cook his food with. It's rather rotten, isn't it?"

"Don't be an ass," Bubbles said comfortingly. He wasn't much of a philosopher, and these sights did not affect him.

It was now about half-past nine, and by this time a large number of boats, full of stores, had wedged themselves among the rocks—farther along, where the beach party had landed—and the crews were throwing them out, shoving off, and going back for more. Army Service Corps men were already taking charge of them and taking them higher up the beach; the Sappers were already busy building a pier with casks and pontoons; and among all this hustle and bustle, the wounded sat or lay huddled up against the foot of the cliffs, waiting whilst the army doctors went from one to the other. The first thing that the Lamp-post and Bubbles had to do was to drive six stakes into the beach whilst six buoys were being moored, some sixty yards out, in the sea, and then stretch hawsers from each stake to its opposite buoy—as you have read before. That took a good hour, and when the big lighters came hauling themselves into these rope "gangways" they and their men had to unload them.

Whenever there was not a boat to unload, there were wounded men to carry down to the empty boats. They were not idle for a moment, and all the time stray bullets were falling on the beach and occasionally wounding some of the men there. One of the Lamp-post's "section" got a bullet in his side and had to be sent off to the Achates, but no other of the beach party was hit that day. However, they were all much too busy to worry about, or even notice, these bullets, and never had a "stand easy" until about two o'clock, when they watched the shells from the Albion and Cornwallis bursting round Hill 138, beyond the lighthouse ridge, and listened to the Swiftsure's shells screaming overhead again to burst in front of the advancing Worcesters. They hastily munched a bit of biscuit and tore off a bit of bully beef, had a pull at their nearly empty water-bottles; but more lighters coming in, crammed with stores, they went on with their work. Much heavy firing went on, stray bullets flipped about in all directions, and by half-past three they heard that the Worcesters had captured the hill; and, half an hour later still, had to help the wounded who streamed back down the gully from that gallant little assault.

The Orphan brought them in a barricoe of water about this time, but that the wounded drank. Fortunately, a water lighter was brought ashore and beached shortly afterwards, and the Sappers pumped the water into a canvas tank they set up at the water's edge, so they didn't really want for long. It was rather unpleasant to go and get it, because you had to pass along and step across those dead men lying there. There was no time to move these, and they lay where they had fallen, when scrambling out of the boats, all that day and all the night, until next morning.

After the Worcesters captured Hill 138, there was very little firing for some time. Later on, before sunset, the beach party had the joy of helping to run two field-guns out of horse-boats, and helped to haul them up the gully with hook-ropes—hauling them almost as high as the trench they had occupied in the early morning, then hurrying back for their limbers.

"What a thing to remember!" the Lamp-post said, patting the tarpaulin-covered gun, and panting with the exertion of hauling it up the steep gully. "Fancy helping with the very first gun to land!"