Caught in Barbed-Wire Nets
Most of the men struggled. They tried to throw off their encumbrances. They helped one another to get rid of their knapsacks. They let go their ammunition belts—everything but their bayonets. They knew that even if they could make the shore there would be small hope for them without the bayonets. All the time came that devilish fire from the cliffs. The shore was not far off now. They swam. They were within fifty feet of it. Then they hit against a terrible snare.
“The enemy had constructed on stakes in eight feet of water a barbed-wire entanglement along more than two miles of the beach.” Men ran their faces full tilt against the barbed wire’s fangs. They cursed and moaned. They hung on to the wire, but ducked every instant, for a scream of bullets was all around. Hundreds drowned. Hundreds were held like netted fish in the entangling wires. Many were lost in trying to get through that wire. But the attack went on. There was some space between the wire and the sea bottom. They crawled through! The enemy’s own shells smashed some of the wire. Bombing parties in battleship launches tore more sections open.
Men did get through. They lay gasping on the beach. But bullets came thicker. They rose. Officers tried to organize the torn forces. The bombardment from the forts was ceaseless. The English ships roared back with thundering fire. Machine gun fire and rifle fire from Turks, concealed in mounds of sand and the clefts of the cliffs, were tearing down the brave Australians—ever dauntless.
“The 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.
“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 a way into the enemy trenches in the table-lands.”
Amidst the horror and confusion that reigned impossible deeds were performed. How it was ever done no one can tell. It was terrible. But it had to be done. Many of the English hadn’t a thing to fight with but the cold steel of their bayonets. The warships, of course, helped tremendously. The hills of sand and the stony cliffs were rent by merciless fire. You could see “the bodies of the enemies, clusters of them, spouting from the places of their concealment. Legs, arms, heads were flying wildly in the air.”