The Great Adventure Begins
“And now the men had assembled on the decks as soft-footedly as they might. They had gathered in the darkness into orderly rows like big companies of phantoms. The ship’s crews worked as spectrally and nearly as silently as the lowering of ladders and the launching of the boats would permit. Small steamboats, each with a swerving tail made up of barges and small boats, panted alongside the transports and battleships. With wonderful precision and swiftness the great ships spawned hundreds on hundreds of smaller craft, thousands on thousands of men, crowding the waters with them for as far as you could make out whichever way you looked in the faint moonlight.”
Of a sudden, the moon dipped and blinked out behind the cliffs. There was a sigh of relief. “God bless that damned old moon.” A moment before there had been just enough light to see the battleships coming on slowly in the rear with the obvious purpose of covering the attack. “Then you couldn’t see a blessed thing. The green waters had turned to ink. You only knew your comrades were with you in the same boat by the press of their swaying bodies against your shoulders and your ribs.”
They were within two hundred yards of the shore.
“Shouldn’t wonder,” whispered some one, “if we’re to surprise them after all.”
“Then suddenly out of that weird darkness, that curious silence that had been disturbed only by the rapid, half-choked panting of the steam tugs, the surge of the water against the sides of the barges, the whispers, the occasional smothered laughs—all soft sounds—there came hell—veritable hell if ever hell comes to men on earth! And it came with a tremendous roar!”
Captain Dave Fanlon was not an observer at the time. He was a participant. He gives a most thrilling account of the ghastly landing:
“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.”
The Turks had the range as surely as if they were only ten feet away from the Australians. The English battleships began an angry, heavy retort. Whether they found their mark among the Turks or not, it seemed to make no difference. The enemy fire became more and more intense. Boat after boat was being smashed. Scores and scores of men, unable to swim, or weak swimmers, died right there.