It was hard to make out anything in that inky blackness, even with the eyes of bushmen; but we knew that the Turks had crawled out of their trenches and that they were going to throw themselves upon us. Then two shrill blasts struck the still night, and instantly there was a fearful commotion, for the Turks hopped up from the ground and charged, yelling and firing, and making all sorts of deafening noises, amongst which we noticed a trumpeter doing his best to blow our own call of the “Officers’ Mess.” They seemed to blow anything that came along, so as to confuse us in the pitch darkness. And a startling business it was, too, to peer into the blackness and see the figures of the Turks by the light of the bursting shells and crackling rifles.
Never while I live shall I forget that fight in the first night we were ashore in Gallipoli. We did our best to see what was going on by looking through the pot-holes in the sandbags of the trenches, though at night you could look over the tops of the parapets; but it was little enough that we could make out in the darkness.
We had our magazines loaded and our bayonets fixed. The infantry alongside were in “possies,” as we called them, holes dug in the trenches to keep a man from being exposed. Two men were in each “possy,” one firing and the other loading for him, so that a constant fire was kept up. One of our fellows, terribly excited, had crawled up on to the sandbags, and there he stood, just seen in the darkness by the flashes of fire, for about ten minutes, when he was ordered down.
At this time I was a non-combatant, one of the stretcher-bearers, and I was just standing, waiting for somebody to get hit; so I could see everything that was going on. The shells were flying round all the time, making a fearful noise, and an Indian battery above us was doing good work. In a “possy” high above us were the machine-guns, and we could see even in the darkness what havoc they were causing amongst the enemy.
In the loud cries that arose I heard a Scotchman of our regiment shout, “Here comes a big Turk with a brick in his hand!”
We peered into the blackness and saw a big fine Turk crawling on the ground about five yards away, holding in his hand something that looked like a brick. The machine-guns got him just as he jumped up. The bullets fairly smothered him, and he dropped like a thousand of bricks. Later on I had a good look at him, and found that the thing he carried was not a brick but a bomb. He had no boots on, but his feet were wrapped in cloth, so that he made no sound. He had managed to get within ten paces of us.
The din quietened down as daylight came, which was about five o’clock. We looked eagerly around us to see what had been done, and noticed the dead Turks everywhere, many of them in clusters of half a dozen, just as they had been mown down by our machine-guns. Later on we learned that the number of the Turkish dead was 2000, so that the ground was fairly strewn with bodies.
We were ordered back to our trenches, where we had breakfast and a bit of rest; but at ten o’clock we were told to fall in again, as the Turks were making another charge. The enemy did come on, but rather half-heartedly, and they were repulsed without our aid. They had made a fine and brave dash in the night, as we saw. They never got into our trenches, but we were told that they had rushed in farther round, where the New Zealanders were; but they had been bayoneted straight away.
In the afternoon the Turks put up a white flag and asked for an armistice, to bury the dead.