The man who stood on a bomb.
By the time I left, the sordid monotony had begun to tell on the men. Every day officers were besieged with requests for permission to go out between the lines to locate snipers. When men were wanted for night patrol every one volunteered. Ration parties, which had formerly been a dread, were now an eagerly sought variation. Any change was welcome. The thought of being killed had lost its fear. Daily intercourse with death had robbed it of its horror. One chap had his leg blown off from standing on a bomb. Later, in hospital, he told me that he felt satisfied. He had always wondered what would happen if a man stood on a bomb; now he knew. It illustrates how the men hated the deadly sameness. Anything was better than waiting in the trenches, better than being killed without a chance to struggle.
Donnelly's post on Caribou Ridge.
The men our regiment lost, although they gladly fought a hopeless fight, have not died in vain; the foremost advance on the Suvla Bay front, Donnelly's Post on Caribou Ridge, was made by Newfoundlanders. It is called Donnelly's Post because it is here that Lieutenant Donnelly won his military cross. The hitherto nameless ridge from which the Turkish machine-guns poured their concentrated death into our trenches stands as a monument to the initiative of the Newfoundlanders. It is now Caribou Ridge as a recognition of the men who wear the deer's-head badge.
Swept by machine-guns.
From Caribou Ridge the Turks could enfilade parts of our firing-line. For weeks they had continued to pick off our men one by one. You could almost tell when your turn was coming. I know, because from Caribou Ridge came the bullet that sent me off the peninsula. The machine-guns on Caribou Ridge not only swept parts of our trench, but commanded all of the intervening ground. Several attempts had been made to rush those guns. All had failed, held up by the murderous machine-gun fire. Under cover of darkness, Lieutenant Donnelly, with only eight men, surprised the Turks in the post that now bears his name. The captured machine-gun he used to repulse constantly launched bomb and rifle attacks.
How Donnelly surprised the Turks.
Deeds of great heroism.
Just at dusk one evening Donnelly stole out to Caribou Ridge and surprised the Turks. All night the Turks strove to recover their lost ground. Darkness was the Newfoundlanders' ally. When reinforcements arrived, Donnelly's eight men were reduced to two. Dawn showed the havoc wrought by the gallant little group. The ground in front of the post was a shambles of piled-up Turkish corpses. But daylight showed something more to the credit of the Newfoundlanders than the mere taking of the ridge. It showed one of Donnelly's men, Jack Hynes, who had crawled away from his companion to a point about two hundred yards to the left. From here he had all alone kept up through the whole night a rapid fire on the enemy's flank that duped them into believing that we had men there in force. It showed Hynes purposely falling back over exposed ground to draw the enemy's attention from Sergeant Greene, who was coolly making trip after trip between the ridge and our lines, carrying a wounded man in his arms every time until all our wounded were in safety. Hynes and Greene were each given a distinguished-conduct medal. None was ever more nobly earned.
One Saturday morning near the end of October, 1915, the brigade major passed through our lines. Before we took over the trench the occupants of the firing-line threw their refuse over the parapet into the short underbrush. Since coming in we had made a dump for it. I was sent out with five men to remove the rubbish from the underbrush to the dump, and this despite the fact that a short distance to our right we had just lost two men sent over the parapet in broad daylight to pick up some cans.