June 19th
We gave way at a part of our line last night, but regained the ground later in the early morning, and our line is still intact, and as we were. We lost heavily, but Turkish losses were enormous.
Captain Usher, my Staff Captain, was killed this early morning in the trenches by shrapnel, and I feel his loss awfully. He was always so charming to me. It’s the “good-uns” that go, as Wilkie Bard says. I am sure this war is too terrible to last long; it is simply wholesale butchery, and humanity will cry out against it soon.
At 11.30 an exceptionally heavy shell came over from Asia (a high explosive) and fairly shook the earth. Two minutes after, two more came, and every living soul rushed for cover. Then for three hours they pasted us: over they came, one after the other, with terrific shrieks and deafening explosions, throwing chunks of hot jagged-edged metal whizzing in all directions. All the mules and horses, as far as possible, were got under cover, and men rushed to their dugouts. Carver, Way, Davy, Foley, Phillips, and I were under cover of the cliff in our “bivvy,” which cannot be called a dugout, as it is simply a wide platform cut in and built up on the side of the cliff and in the line of fire, between the 60-pounder battery, twenty-five yards to our west, and the Asiatic battery. The 60-pounders soon opened fire, and then a duel began; and after one or two have pitched first over our “bivvy” into the sea, and one or two just short, we get nervy and decide to quit. Phillips and Davy made the first dash down the cliff, and the others said they would wait for the next shell. It came shrieking along, burst, and I got up and made a dart down the slope. I was down to the bottom of that cliff in thirty seconds, and found myself with the Divisional Ammunition Column people, and all amongst boxes of high explosive. Ammunition Column Officers are there, but I begin to think it would have been safer up in the “bivvy,” where the others still were, for they did not follow me. After a lull in the firing, I went up to the cliff, and half-way up they popped off again, and I was fortunate in finding a very safe dugout belonging to Major Horton, and he invited me in with Major Huskisson, Major Shorto, Poole, and Weatherall. And while shells still come over, first bursting on the beach, then in the sea, then on the top of our cliff, and then on the high ground on the back of the beach, we have lunch.