The Big Fight (Gallipoli to the Somme). David Fallon
There was a swift, sharp lightening of the sky back of the gaunt, black cliffs and our boats seemed thrown out of the water, thrown up into the air by the rocking thunder of the heavy guns of the Turkish batteries behind those cliffs. The water that had been so smooth an instant before, that was, in fact, so treacherously smooth, as had been the silence, was stabbed and chopped and sent into wild spume by a great rain of shells. Blinding blasts flared as suddenly as here and there a boat with its living load was struck and shattered. Screams and hoarse, impulsive cries began to mingle with the explosions.
Then the cliffs and the sand dunes spat deadly fire at us. In the darkness I could not, of course, see it all. But it would seem from what afterward I was able to learn that not one of the pilots of the steam tugs thought of turning back. I could not see it all and had no time to think of much other than myself and my platoon, a very few seconds after the bombardment from the big guns of the forts began dropping their big shells and the hail of the machine guns sang among us.
Surprise?
They had our range as surely as if we stood ten feet away from them. The water was cluttered with the accurate assemblage of their shots. Our battleships had begun an angry, heavy retort but whether their great guns were finding the marks, of course, we couldn’t know. It would have been a mighty comfort to us then to feel that these shots were smashing the Turks.
There was no indication of it. Their fire became more and more and more intense. Boat after boat was being smashed. In not more than three minutes after the enemy began his bombardment against our landing, my own boat went to smash. A shell struck it at the bow. It shattered the boat and must have killed at least a dozen men. I, fortunately, was in the stern. With my comrades I was hurled into the air and the next realization was that I was far over my head in water and that the first thing I must do if I was not to drown was to get rid of my heavy knapsack.
Thank the Lord, I had been a sturdy swimmer since childhood. I can’t begin to picture to you how many scores of my comrades, unable to swim or weak swimmers, died then and there—how many of them with knapsacks on their backs and guns and bayonets in their hands yet remain at the bottom of the Ægean Sea, a curious spectacle for the fish.
I fought my way to the surface. And I clung to my gun and bayonet. I clung to them as frantically as any drowning man is supposed to clutch at a straw. For the only escape from drowning was to get ashore and ashore I knew there would be small hope for me without my bayonet.
When I got to the surface other chaps were struggling all around me.
“Help each other get rid of these knapsacks,” I yelled when I got my breath. “It’s our only chance or we’ll drown like rats.”
So we struggled about aiding one another free of these encumbrances. We had also to let our ammunition belts go and held on only to our guns. The shore was not far off now and we swam for it. But as we drew near—very near—within fifty feet or so, we encountered a devilishly ingenious snare.
The enemy had constructed on stakes in eight feet of water a barbed-wire entanglement along more than two miles of the beach. I was overhanding it for shore, supporting my rifle in the other when I ran my face full tilt against the barbed wire’s fangs. Others of my comrades did the same. They cursed and moaned. We hung on to the barbed wire but ducking every instant for a scream of bullets was all around us.
I can’t tell you how many of the landing boats were smashed in the landing at Gallipoli. None I believe knows with accuracy. How many men were drowned outright none either can exactly tell. But there were hundreds. Nor how many men, exhausted, striving for the shore, were caught and held like netted fish in that barbed-wire entanglement will never be known. That scores—yes, hundreds were, I cannot doubt. Some of the men immediately around me I know were lost in the effort to get past it.
It was too closely netted to get through it. Some possibly floated or were lifted over it by the roll of the surf. I know only how I made my own way out of the trap. And that was by drawing myself down along the barbed strands until I found a space some two feet between the barbed-wire barrier and the sea-bottom. And I crawled through!
A few strokes after that and I was able to take to my feet and wade out. Well, hardly that. I plunged, stumbled, fell and finally crawled out on the bullet-spattered and shell-riven sands.
I wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the bullets or the shells. Honestly, I was too exhausted. Had there been an enemy to meet me as I flopped on the sands the worst I could have done to him by way of resistance would have been to pat him on the cheek. If that much. I just flopped and panted and panted. And as my breath came slowly, very slowly back to normal I was astonished to find that my rifle and bayonet were still clutched in my hand.
Fortunately, the enemy’s own shells smashed their cunning, barbed-wire, under-sea entanglement and such sections of it as were not ripped in that fashion were made harmless by plucky bombing parties in battleship launches.
I didn’t lay very long gasping on the beach for the music of the bullets made me realize grimly enough that I wasn’t out surfing. I staggered to my feet and began to take general notice. The boats that survived had spilled their men into the surf and the men, huddling and scared, had nevertheless carried on. They were fast crowding the strip of beach. Officers were snapping out commands—heroically holding their presence of mind and organizing their men. Organizing, that is, what they could find of them, or any men, for that matter, that they could find around them.
All these things had now become visible in the dawn—the sudden dawn of the East. You must understand that the bombardment was ceaseless from the forts, the guns of all our ships roaring back at them the while. But it was the machine-gun fire and the rifle fire from the Turks concealed among the sand dunes and the clefts of the cliffs that were tearing our men down. Sometimes the big shells smashed holes in the beach and sent up great clouds of sands that settled blindingly down upon us.
Our landing party was grotesque and wavering under the frightful storm. Shouts, yells, screams of pain, cries of alarm merged into a great clamor. The most heartening thing, somehow, in the darkness had become the Australian cry of “Coo-ee!”—sharp and musical, in which men had called themselves together into groups. When the dawn came I was able to find twelve of the sixty men of my command.
There was no living on the beach. The only way out of that immediate hell was to charge across the sands and get into the shelter of the dunes, to fight our way to the base of the cliffs and get away from the shells of the cliffs, and to fight our way into enemy trenches in the table-lands and rout the snipers from their lairs.
Don’t ask me how we did it. I am only prepared to describe how myself and my dozen men accomplished it. I wasn’t, you see, exactly on a sight-seeing party.
In my little group of twelve who had been tossed into the ocean and made their way through the wave-submerged barbed wire we didn’t have a thing to fight with but the cold steel of our bayonets. Our ammunition belts had perforce been abandoned with our knapsacks and were at the bottom of the Ægean.
But His Majesty’s warships were giving us a lot of aid. Their great guns were turned off the distant Turkish forts for a while and their lighter armament was also brought under full play and together they swept the dunes and cliffs above us with a merciless fire. Actually we saw the bodies of our enemies, clusters of them, spouting from the places of their concealment, saw legs, arms and heads flying wildly in the air.
But back of me along the mile and more of beach there was a terrible litter of our own dead. And every minute somewhere near me a man was going down.
We got up those sand ridges any old way—by digging in our bayonets like Alpine staffs, clawing with our free hands, scrambling with toe-holds and fighting up on all fours.
We had just gained a knoll of sand and bush and taken protection behind it for a minute’s breathing when one of my men, one of those sturdy cattlemen who had made their way out of the wilderness to get into the war for civilization, went down with a bullet