THE CALLIPOLI FIGHTING.

Colonist, Volume LVII, Issue 13825, 21 July 1915, Page 2

THE CALLIPOLI FIGHTING.

TURKISH SNIPERS AND THEIR

WAYS

(By Malcolm-Ross, Official War Corre-' spondent with the New Zealand Forces.)

May 26

One met with frequent stories of wouifln sji'ipers in the Turkish lines, bub it was always' difficult to get firsthand information about them. A wounded Australian whom I met yesterday gave mo an instance that had come xinder his notice. These particular snipers—and no doubt many others also —had' silencers on their Mauser rifles. The advancing party therefore heard only the ping of the bullet near them, and a sound like the crack of a whip. On this particular occasion they located a sniper close at hand, and went to look for him. There was another "ping!" and one of the men fell dead. Suddenly, the party camo upon two snipers, who hold up their rifles in token of surrender. Their rifles were taken from thorn, their hands tied behind their backs, and they were marched down to the- beach. They were wearing the uniforms of dead Australian .soldiers, and they had about 2000 rounds of ammunition near them, and enough iood to last a fortnight. A doctor who examined -them.at headquarters found that they were both women! On the following day those Australians had to cross a gully on their righi- flank, and there thov found five of their dead comrades, stripped of all tluir clothing even to the boots. The- 'man who told mo this incident h:ul been in the thick of the fightang for the fust fortnight, and on more than one occasion he paw tho. German ofiiccrs driving on. the Turks A\ith revolver ami sword. PENSISTENT BRAVERY. Thn same man did not wish to say much about his own exploits. He, however, gave tho following instances of heroic action by others that had come unrlor his notice. One soldier working a machine g"n was hit by übullet lhat just grazed his intestines. H^ cmithrued to work the gun. Then si- -.bullet-;got -.him ■• in" ■ the d'ifcht>--arm J . which was disabled; but ho commenced' to lire with his left -hand. A- ftmrth.l bullet got him fair in the forehead.-

My informant did not even know the ' man's name. He had brought his Maxim up in a charge into tho firing line through the open. It was a ecun of the 10th Battalion. 'v"Our sergeant," continued the narrator, "was wounded twice, but went on calmly giving orders. First of all, his binoculars were knocked out of his hand by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel. Thon Iks got a slight wound along tho temple. Someone suggested that ho should get out of the firing line to receive first aid, bu h{* replied, 'No; I'll carry on as long as I can; I want to get even with the beggars.' They again urged him to get out, but he merely laughed and said it would be all right. Ten yards farther on he was shot through the spine,, and in half an hour he was dead. lie was a machine gun. sergeant belonging- to the 4th Battalion." < HORSES LEFT BEHIND. The New Zealand mounted men have left their horses behind them and have gone to the front as infantry. "By jove, they will go into it heart end soul," said a wounded man to me this afternoon. "Why?" I asked. "Because," lift replied, "of the way our chaps hayo been treated." There is, of course,' always a kind of natural enmity between the horseman and the foot slogger. The mounted men used to look down on _ the infjantry, and jokingly refer to them as "beetlecrushers.'' And in Egypt the mounted men certainly had the best end of the stick in so far kas the training went. The infantry had to go through a very severe ordeal indeed. Along tiie Heliopolis-Suez road, they did many a weary mile under the hot Egyptian sun. Sometimes they did routemarches of 20 miles. One day they did 25 miles by the map over soft desert sand with packs, rifles, and equipment weighing 'between 601b and TOlb' Some days they thought they would never last- it out. They thought it absolute hell. But they never complained, and somehow they always managed to do it. They would come back in the evening, with eyebrows and eyelashes and such hair as was uncovered 3 bsolutely white. They were the weirdest looking soldiers imaginable. But they stuck it out. They took it as part of tho game.

A TOUGH JOB. ft seems certain now that the Navy 1 could never have forced the Dardanelles without an adequate landing force. The little force they themselves were able to land at first was rather badly cut up. among the killed being Anthony Wilding, the famous lawn tennis champion from New Zealand. Even with the co-operation of naval and military forces tno capture of the Dardanelles is a tough job. Such united action in the recent operations seems on the whole to have been very effective. One instance of splendid cooperation was told me by an eyewitness. The warships off the coast were concentrating a very heavy firo on one particular section of the Turkish trendies, the idea being that when Uhu bombardment ceased the colonials ; were to storm th© trenches at the point of the bayonet. For threequarters of an hour shell after shell was poured into the Turks, our men advancing by short rushes till they got close up." At the critical moment the warships and our field guns suddenly ceased firing, and the colonials launched their attack across the lately shellswept ground, and with the bayonet soon finished'most of the Turks that remained alive. This was an ideal attack, th* co-operation being perfect. The 'ships had been shelling over our ( men at a range of over 4000 yards. The signalling in such a case would probably have been done by big nag wa^ino-. The three wireless stations erected by the Australians were most valuable. The operators worked calmly amoncr the wounded, with the shrapnel bursting over them. The heliograph was also used, but more useful still were the searchlights of -warships, which could Morse effectively for milos even in daylight. The helw is more secret, but its scope is more limited, for at a distance ot about two miles its radius is only a few yards wide. Visual signalling was largely done away with, because whenever a man stood up to signal he would be shot. Often messages were conveyed down the Hne by word of mouth, one section yelling them out to another till they reached their destination.

TTjR-KISH TRICKS. Tho German training and leadership has undoubtedly made a vast difference to the Turkish Army. The Turks are up to all the German tricks, 'but our men soon dropped to most of them, and took such measures as were possible to counteract them. Such Turks as shammed wounded in tho taken trenches and then fired at the backs of our men after they had passed, or on our wounded at close quarters, got short shiit. The Turkish guns wero well concealed, and some of their snipers even had their faces paintied green, air 3 hold or tied n green branch in front of their heads as a screen. After a time some of our men adopted the-

branch idea- of screening themselves when they were stalking the snipers, and it was a pathetic sight sometimes, during the advance, to see a New Zealander or an Australian lying dead with little bunches of box or holly stuck through his cap. "It had a sort of 'Christmassy' effect," said one of the wounded. Often, added this man, you would see a bush moving slowly along quite near you. You knew at once that you had tovfire right

into the centre- .eft. that. At other times you would se© a Turkish face and a pair of eyes throxigh the greenery, and then it was a question of who got his. shot or his bayonet in quickest. During the first day or two's fighting the Turkish fire positions were cleverly screened, -arid'■'bur men saw very little of them. Neither did they see many of the enemy, except.when the latter made occasional rushes to change to another position.