Couldn’t Stop Them
Thro’ Turkish Shells and Barbed-Wired Sea They Landed at Gallipoli
Twenty transports of Australians under General Birdwood, arriving at Gallipoli. In any circumstances, landing through rough seas and narrow beaches, under defiant cliffs and then climbing those cliffs is not nerve soothing for either impatient commanders or restless soldiers. But in war time with cannon belching at you—well, it costs.
It was planned to surprise the Turks—those surprisingly straight-shooting Turks, with their infernal German guns and German officers. The men tried to hope, but it was really absurd to think the enemy would be surprised. In January the Allied troops had tried to force the Dardanelles. That had been sufficient warning. The enemy would not be caught napping only a few months later. Even the most hopeful of the men set about writing the letters which might contain their very last wishes, fears, bequests, expressions of love. Then the gloom passed and jokes and laughter came.
At about two o’clock in the morning they dropped anchor. Each man stood at parade on the decks, and each was ordered to look to his supplies—a rifle, a bayonet, 150 rounds of ammunition, three days’ rations, a first-aid kit. It was weird contemplating this stretch of the Ægean and that bit of coast so soon to be washed by blood.
Captain David Fanlon in his story of The Big Fight says: “The long procession of transports and their grim battleship escorts had stolen up in the night, a widely spread yet organized, concrete group of slowly-moving, black, gloomy monsters. Every light aboard each ship had been ordered out. Not even the pin-head flame of a cigarette might show on any deck.
“The only light we had was the faint green gleam that filtered over the smooth waters from a moon that had begun to wane and had, indeed, at this hour of three in the morning, nearly fallen behind the ragged jaw of the black cliffs.”
That moon may have been very picturesque, but the men on those boats hated it, feared it, wished it in—any place but in the heaven above them. Its beam might act as a spotlight on the surprise attack. It looked like the evil eye of the enemy.
“I wonder,” said some one, “what that old green eye of a moon is looking at back of those dark, old cliffs? I wonder if he sees the big guns drowsing and the garrisons asleep or——”
“What he’s seeing,” came a grumbling answer, “is the heathen blighters getting ready to bang hell out of us!”