"The enemy lines must have been poor cover, and I was glad we had the bulk of the guns on our side. All this shell fire should have been a covering roof to our advance, but the Turk it appears was not skulking as he ought.
"The B's came by in support and occupied an empty trench. They were laughing and joking, but it was a husky kind of fun, and there was no gladness in it, for everyone knew that we were in for a bloody day. One of them tripped upon a telegraph wire. 'Not wounded yet!' a pal cried. Just then another stumbled to an invisible stroke and did not rise. A man ahead was singing nervously, 'That's not the girl I saw you with at Brighton.'
"I went on to the next trench where a sergeant showed me his bandolier. A sharp-nosed bullet had gone through three rounds of ammunition and stuck in the fourth, during the last rush forward.
"I could conceive of the impulse that carried one over those last two hundred yards—but as an impulse of a lifetime; to most of my friends this kind of thing was becoming their daily bread. The men I was with were mostly a new draft. I could see they were afraid, but they were brave. Word was passed along to advance to the next bit of cover.
"The bombardment had ceased. The rifle and Maxim fire ahead was continuous, like hail on a corrugated roof of iron. The B's would soon be in it. I listened eagerly for some intermission, but it did not relax or recede, and I knew that the Turks must be holding on. The bullets became thicker—an ironic whistle, a sucking noise, a gluck like a snipe leaving mud, the squeal and rattle of shrapnel.
"I found the brigade headquarters. We had got into the Turkish trenches, the general told me, but by that time we were sadly thin, and we had been bombed out. At noon the rain came down, putting the crown upon depression. All day and all night it poured, and one thought of the wounded, shivering in the cold and mud, waiting for help. At night they were brought in on slow, jolting transport carts."
The writer met a boy, the only officer of his regiment who had come out of the trenches alive and unwounded, and who had a bullet through his pocket and another through his helmet. He was in a dazed state of wonder at finding himself still alive.
"It was a miracle that anyone had lived through that fire in the attack and retreat, but the boy had been in the Turkish trenches and held them for an hour and a quarter. Oddments of other regiments had got through, two British and two Indian. I saw their dead being carried out during the truce of the next day."
The boy officer's regiment had been the first to penetrate the enemy's trenches. As he dropped into the trench a comrade next to him was struck in the back of the head and dropped forward on his shoulder. "I saw eight bayonets and rifles all pointing to me," said the boy officer describing his experiences. "I saw the men's faces, and I was desperately scared. I expected to go down in the next two yards. I felt the lead in my stomach. I thought I was done for. I don't know why they didn't fire. They must have been frightened by my sudden appearance. I let off my revolver at them and it kicked up an awful lot of dust."
The British troops that had charged the Turkish trenches were not supplied with bombs, but the enemy were well equipped with them. Consequently the British were gradually driven down the trench from traverse to traverse, in the direction of the river, where they encountered another bombing party that was coming up a trench at right angles. The British were placed in a desperate position, being jammed in densely between these attacks, and literally squeezed over the parapet. In evacuating the trench they were subjected to a deadly fire in which they lost more men than in the attack.