PART OF THE TRUTH OF THE DARDANELLES.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 October 1915, Page 12

PART OF THE TRUTH OF THE DARDANELLES.

LIFE DAY BY DAY IN SHRAPNEL VALLEY.

AS SEEN THROUGH AN AUSTRALIAN PERISCOPE. SURF BATHING UNDER SHELL FIRE.

Six.' months ago some 20,000 Australasians made a landing on the shore of Gallipoli by charging a steep cliff in the face of the enemy. They are still entrenched on the edge of the steep cliff up which they climbed on April 25, 1915. Their position, their adventures, and what they think about it are all told in the following authentic narrative (Weekly Dispatch). On the 26th April, 1915, four Queenslanders found themselves crouching at daylight in a shallow trench on the edge of a steep cliff in the Peninsula of Gallipoli. They had dug the trench in a small clearing in the dense scrub, and all night they had fought off the Turks who came from time to time to drive them from this rough hole on the edge of eternity. Daylight brought a cessation of the attacks, and for (he first time for twentyfour hours these four men had a chance to eat and drink a little, and to look around them.

One man dragged from his pocket a small periscope, and cautiously elevating at above the ragged parapet, gazed his fill. At last he made way for a second man, grumbling as he did so, "Mighty poor stock country." The second man also looked long and silently; a bushman taking his bearings. Then he too relinquished his peep-hole, with the comment, "Take a lot o' clearin'." Number Three was a miner, and he squinted curiously at the hills, and gullies that formed the whole prospect inland. . Then hesaid, "Chuck us the entrenching tools.. I might as well try for a prospect." Last of all came the sergeant, a man of few words. He was a long time looking about him; finally he withdrew his eye, and spat lavishly in the trench. The simple eloquence of that comment needs little explanation. It meant that Australia did not think much of it; but was emphatically there to stay. A hundred years hence the traveller will probably find Australians there, trying to make the place grow things it was never intended to grow, and cursing it generously as a fine place for a white man to get out of.

Indeed the four men, moved by a common impulse as a bullet shattered the top of the periscope, shouted together, "Come out and show yourself, you heathen sniping dog. This is our country now; we've come to take it away from you."

That one survey had convinced all four of one thing, a circumstance they accepted without further comment. If they were not trained soldiers they had the bushraan's sense of locality and the perception that a life in a new country ensures for every man who has the average amount of brain.

They knew that, as long as the Turks continued to press on their front, they could never get out of that country by the same way as they came into it, even if they wanted to.

What they saw through the periscope will take a little explanation. In front of them were tjiree stiff ridges, each in succession loftier than the other. All were clad, from base to summit, in the stiff bristling scrub, no taller than a big man, that afforded impenetrable cover for a whole army of snipers. They knew something of what lay beyond the third ridge, for they had been there not twelve hours before.

Exactly a day before they had leaped out of small boats into waves shoulder high and beneath a ceaseless rain of bullets. They had charged up the forty feet of sheer cliff behind them, straight up and down, with no more foothold than a goat would absolutely require. Their bayonets were fixed and their magazines empty. They had slain the Turks in the trenches on the crest; they had chased the over one ridge after another till they arrived on a high plateau, with wide, clear spaces that made them yell to one another, "Where's the Light Horse now?" The Light Horse was far away.

They had found an army of 25,000 Turks, and had fallen back fighting desperately. Back they went from one ridge to the next till they stopped on the very edge of the sheer cliff. There they dug for shelter and stayed the night. As far as they knew they were all that was left of their original band of Mty men like themselves—men who had acted on their own and helped to make a landing for the Australian Expeditionary Force on the rocky shore of Gallipoli Peninsula. Looking to the left, in the distance was the summit of a hill a thousand feet high—the hill of Sari Bair. The ground rose to it all broken and scrubby; in the near distance was a knoll that commanded most of the country about the coast. Between them and this knoll (afterwards called Pope's Hill) serpentined a deep ravine commanded at the shoreward end by the third ridge and opening to the sea by a deep cleft in the cliff. Death Gully, the Australians called it during the first days of their stay on the peninsula, but it is marked on the war maps as Shrapnel Valley.

Up on the ridge overlooking this valley a Turkish battery was at work throwing an incessant stream of shells down the valley that burst with white clouds of smoke above the boats coming to and from the beach. Away to the right the beach on which they had landed ended in a rise of about 120 ft„ fenced at its foot with a wide entanglement of barbed wire, and entrenched from foot to summit. That was the hill of Gaba Tepe, which gave its name to the modest settlement Australasia was planting on the BUaggy scraps of the peninsula of Gallipoli. Even as the four men looked the settlement was enlarging rapidly. At the foot of the cliff behind them the narrow strip of sand was a beehive of busy men. The Australian engineers were at work cutting a road up the side of the cliff under heavy fire from well-posted field and machine-guns and a torrent of bullets from scores of hidden snipers. Prom the fleet of transports and store ships out at sea the little boats plied to and fro, each under charge of a rosycheeked midshipman. The boats laden with ammunition cases, field guns, and other heavy things made for a spit at sand running out into the sea, which gave deep water alongside. Men went to and from it at a run; every now and then one threw up his arms and fell. The bullets slapped into the water like hail from a thundercloud; the men in the boats sat and suffered in silence, But the unloading went on as though a hundred hidden snipers had not got the range of Hellfire Spit. The four men nodded in perfect agreement. If ever they turned their backs on that cliff-top, a small force with mach-ine-guns could see to it that not an .Australian ever left Gaba Tepe alive.

They were there to stay; no going back. They knew it; their way out lay in front of them. Another look to the front revealed Borne of the detail of this great Australasian adventure. The boys from the bush were out stalking snipers. Two Australians to one sniper was the measure allowed, and it was long odds that one of the Australians, fell. But the other got the sniper; always. Like Indians they crawled through the scrub, approaching the spot where they had marked him from the right and left. Then a simultaneous rush over the bit of clearing that always circled his particular thicket. .Sometimes the Turk was so rattled that he missed the man he fired at; then both came on him at once with the bayonet. Very few surrendered in time; a grim business. At the foot of the second ridge a party of Australians could be seen with a machine-gun, out to try to silence a Turkish battery that was playing havoc with the unloading operations. The men lay flat on the ground, each with a little heap of earth in front of him, thrown up from the shallow hoi;; he had dug as a primitive protection. A young officer cautiously lifted his head and raised his field-glasses, then he crumpled into a limp heap. A sniper had him. That o/licer lay two days and a night in the scrub with a broken thigh. Tor sixteen hours he was so close to a Turkish machine gun section that he could have touched the en;'iny by stretching out his hand. But the scrub was so dense that they never discovered him; eventually they were driven off and lie was brought in. That is the kind of country over which tiie Australians are fighting. Up and down the valley of death toiled the bearers, with their burdens of wounded and dead. Every serpentine twist of that valley brought them to an arm, down which a murderous fire was pouring. Manv died at their work Df Mercy; the rest worked on for fortyeight hours without rest, till the stretcher handles slipped from their nerveless grip and thev fell and slept where they lay.

Thee thing the four men saw in little kinpinn snatches trough the periscope; a sudden rustling in the scrub made them snatch up their rifles. The head of their company officer, very hot with crawling through scrub and sprinting across clearings, appeared and demanded to know what they were at. "Sole survivors of a platoon of the th Battalion," explained the sergeant; "now waiting for something to turn up. Been fighting Turks all night." Briefly they v.t!« tiid that they were the fourth band of ''sole survivors" within a 'couple of hundred yards; to stay where they were till further orders, and keep a sharp look-out. Then the officer crawled off on his task of "collecting stragglers." During the next two days a wonderful transformation was effected on the cliff top. From north to south the Australian trenches swept in a semicircle, all properly protected with barbed-wire and parapet, all manned by soldiers who knew they were there to stay. On the extreme left the trenches faced north, running along a ridge called Walker's Ridge, after the Australian general second in command. The line ran between the sea and the knoll that lies at the foot of Sari Bair, and is called Pope's Hill, because of a curious adventure which befell Colonel Pope, of Western Australia.

A German spy, speaking perfect Australian, had summoned Captain McDonald and Lieutenant Elston to a rendezvous with the colonel on the slope of this hill. Then he found the colonel and made a similar appointment for him. The unsuspecting officers reached the place first and fell into the hands of a band of Turks concealed there. They saw their colonel coming over the ridge and shouted a warning. Without hesitation he jumped, thirty feet or more down, as a shower of bullets swept the place where he had stood. He landed on a patch of soft sand and escaped unhurt.

Behind Pope's Hill the Turkish trenches occupy a high ridge which partly commands the little bay through Shrapnel Valley. They tried hard in those early days to extend the line beyond the hill so as to eommand the bay from the other (northern) side of the hill, but were kept in check by the guns of the warships. In order' to occupy Pope's Hill, and so eommand the situation an Australasian attack was made on May 2. Between 700 and 800 men were lost in little over an hour. Pope's Hill is still in the no-man's land between the trenches'. One day one side or the other will batter it out of existence with high-explosive shells, and win a great advantage. The Australians hope it will be their side,

The Australian line crosses "Shrapnel Valley with a high protection of sandbags, and twists sharply to the south away from the Turkish trenches. That corner is red with the blood of Turk and Southern Briton—the Bloody Angle, the Australians call it. At Quinn's Post the trenches are only twenty yards from the Turkish line, and from there to Courtenay's Post, where Lance-Corporal Jacka won the Victoria Cross, there has been incessant fighting for three months. From Courtenay's Rost the line swings south-west through McLaurin Hill, where died a great Australian barrister and the citizen soldier Colonel McLaurin, to Point Rosenthal, on the coast, opposite the hill of Gaba Tepe. This hill of Gaba Tepe, though only 120 ft. high, continued to be a thorn in the flesh for the Australians through the first days of their occupation. Henee on May 4 an attempt was made to capture it, which, writes Sir lan Hamilton in despatches, "was unsuccessful, the barbed wire here being something beyond belief." Meanwhile, somewhere in Egypt, an Important section of the Australasian forces was clinking its spurs and blaspheming against the noble animal which is supposed to be a minor deity in the Land of the Happy Smile. The Light Horse, some 'thousands in number, had been left behind—and the Light Horse was furious. "I wish I had never Been a horse' was the burden of its complaint. When the first Australian wounded arrived at Alexandria the Light Horse could bear it no longer. As one man it volunteered for infantry service. Riding breeches and kit were left behind, with 12,000 of the best horses that ever came from Australasia; and the Light Horse practised infantry drill in bands of four wherever they could find space on the decks of the transports. They came at a convenient time, for not a man had been relieved from the trendies since the landing was made. Now the tired Australians had time for a little spell and to invent a new amusement—surf bathing on Brighton Beach. Do not think that the name is a delicate compliment to that Sussex city which is said to have all the advantages of London with the sea thrown in. Many of these Australians had never heard of it.

But they knew a Brighton near Melbourne, where the cliffs rise so abruptly from the strip of beach that only a sturdy and bold youngster can scramble up them. Surf bathing means diving through the breakers. You have to dive deep, and just at the right time, or a great Pacific roller -will pick you us and

dash you on the hard sand with a nasty bang. There were no rollers at Gaba Tepe, but there were shrapnel shells, So the way of surf bathing was this. One fellow with a quick ear, a good eye, and a loud voice, called the game. A hundred or more stripped and dashed into the water, swimming out to a tempting spot for the Turkish artillery men. Presently, "Duck" would yell the scout, as he heard the whine of a sharpney shell. Down went all heads, and up al heels, to disappear under the water as a spray of shrapnel bullets tore over the spot that, concealed them. The game was played to a gallery, for every man on the shipping who could get hold of a pair of glasses was waiting to see someone hit. Before that game started the British sailors had admired these quaint Australians, but afterwards they loved them.

In those days began the inevitable Australian argument which is still going on. Of course these men had no training in the theory of war; but many had been their own generals in life, planning how to meet circumstances as novel as those they are now facing, and to circumvent difficulties as real and formidable in their' way as the difficulties of the cliff top at Gaba Tepe. Their theories and conclusions are possibly valueless to the expert, but they are not without their special interest to the puzzled Man in the Street.

The Australians were divided into two camps in their great argument. The optimist said that they had not been set down on that cliff edge for no purpose. Twenty thousand men, backed by the guns of the warships, had sufficed to gain a foothold on that steep cliff edge at a great cost in life. That was only a preliminary step. Soon 100,000 of Kitchener's men would come with big guns and high explosives and blast a way through the defiles down to Maidos, while the army of all the nations, from the south of the peninsula, would simultaneously storm the high plateau of Kilid Bahr. Then the Narrows would be at the mercy of the fleets of the Allies.

''Why," said the optimists, "that is what we are here for."

The pessimists declared that the whole Turkish army, nearly a million strong, was being mustered'to the defence of Gallipoli peninsula. They pointed out, what was apparent to every Australian, that the trenches around them were getting fuller of Turks every day. One day, said the pessimists, Sanders Pasha will come here with 100,000 men and all the big guns he can muster. He will smother our trenches with high oxplosives, and the rest of us can stay with our backs to the edge of this cliff and see who are the best men, But it will be a five-to-one-against chance. The first point in the argument was soon scored. Four thousand men were taken away from Gaba Tepfe in trawlers to participate with French, Senegalese, Gurkhas, Sikhs, Punjabis, and all sorts of Britons in the attaok on Krithia, made on May 8.

They had charged up the slopes of Krithia with the British 88th and the Naval Division—glorious comrades for Australasians. They had raced the world for 700 yards up an open hillside and got there first. Where they got was an open patch of ground, ploughed by shell and bullets, and, disdaining to go back, they threw themselves down on the ground and dug in where they lay. There they stayed until ordered back. They returned to Gaba Tepe a few days later, to remark that it was child's play to the landing and the cliff climb. The great argument was resumed, and it was conceded that the pessimists had scored one. There were 1,500 fewer men for the defence of Gaba Tepe. Gaba Tepe, they considered, was their job, and they had started with too few men for it, not too many. Every man took a personal pride in doing that job well, and it is to be feared that some uninformed criticism was directed upon an operation which had weakened their chance of finishing it in style. They even dragged the question of the Australian Navy into the argument. That navy, 'built against the wish of the Admiralty, and contrary to the advice of experts, had cleared the Germans out of the Pacific in three/months, annexed 100,000 square miles of' German territory, and gobbled up all the German shipping in the South Seas without the loss of a single merchant ship in Australasian waters. Incidentally it had sunk the Emden. Ignoring the broad fact that the naval battle for the Empire must be fought in the North Sea, those Australians said that if they had done as New Zealand did at the advice of Britain, and sent their warships to fight with the New Zealand in the North Sea, Sydney and Wellington would have been'bombarded, as Bombay was bombarded.

On such narrow and uninformed lines was the great Australian argument conducted. _ Presently another point was scored in the argument. It had farreaching effects in Australia and New Zealand. Everybody knows why those places are now raising an array of 300,000 men for service abroad; equivalent, in proportion to population, to 2,500,000 from this country. The broad reason is familiar to all.