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 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI
 
 Dugouts
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF A 
 NEWFOUNDLANDER WITH THE ILL- 
 FATED DARDANELLES EXPEDITION 
 
 BY 
 JOHN GALLISHAW 
 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH 
 PHOTOGRAPHS 
 
 Stf*^^^?^^ 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 197
 
 Copyright, 1916, by 
 The Century' Co. 
 
 Published, October, 1916
 
 TO 
 PROFESSOR CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND 
 
 OF ALL THAT HARVARD HAS GIVEN ME I VALUE MOST 
 THE FRIENDSHIP AND CONFIDENCE OF "COPEY"
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I Getting There 3 
 
 II There 33 
 
 III Trenches 63 
 
 IV Dugouts 93 
 
 V Waiting for the War to Cease .... 123 
 
 VI No Man's Land 141 
 
 VII Wounded 164 
 
 VIII Homeward Bound 192 
 
 IX "Feenish" . 224
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Dugouts Frontispiece 
 
 Lord Kitchener talking to some Australians at Anzac 9 
 
 Scene at Lancashire Landing, Cape Helles .... 27 
 
 Allies landing reinforcements under heavy fire of 
 Turks in Dardanelles 38 
 
 Troops at the Dardanelles leaving for the landing 
 beach 47 
 
 A remarkable view of a landing party in the Dar- 
 danelles 57 
 
 Australians in trench on Gallipoli Peninsula, using 
 the periscope 67 
 
 First line of Allies' trench zigzagging along parallel to 
 the Turkish trenches v 78 
 
 Washing day in war-time . 95 
 
 Cleaning up after coming down from the trenches at 
 Suvla 114 
 
 Landing British troops from the transports at the 
 Dardanelles under protection of the battleships . 131 
 
 Australians in the trenches consider clothes a super- 
 fluity 157
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Some of the barbed wire entanglements near Seddul 
 Bahr are still in position 175 
 
 A British battery at work on the Peninsula . . . 186 
 
 With the French at Suddul Bahr 203 
 
 Where troops landed in Dardanelles, showing Fort 
 Sed-ne-behi battered to pieces by Allied Fleet . . 213
 
 TRENCHING AT 
 GALLIPOLI
 
 The reader is hereby cautioned against regard- 
 ing this narrative as in any way official. 
 
 It is merely a record of the personal experi- 
 ences of a member of the First Newfoundland 
 Regiment, but the incidents described all actu- 
 ally occurred.
 
 TRENCHING AT 
 GALLIPOLI 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 GREAT BRITAIN is at War. " 
 The announcement came to Newfound- 
 land out of a clear sky. Confirming it, came the 
 news of the assurances of loyalty from the differ- 
 ent colonies, expressed in terms of men and equip- 
 ment. Newfoundland was not to be outdone. 
 Her population is a little more than two hun- 
 dred thousand, and her isolated position made 
 garrisons unneccessary. Her only semblance of 
 military training was her city brigades. People 
 remembered that in the Boer War a handful of 
 Newfoundlanders had enlisted in Canadian regi- 
 ments, but never before had there been any talk 
 of Newfoundland sending a contingent made up 
 entirely of her own people and representing her 
 
 3
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 as a colony. From the posting of the first no- 
 tices bearing the simple message, "Your King 
 and Country Need You," a motley crowd 
 streamed into the armory in St, John's. The 
 city brigades, composed mostly of young, beau- 
 tifully fit athletes from rowing crews, football 
 and hockey teams, enlisted in a body. Every 
 train from the interior brought lumbermen, fresh 
 from the mills and forests, husky, steel-muscled, 
 pugnacious at the most peaceful times, frankly 
 spoiling for excitement. From the outharbors 
 and fishing villages came callous-handed fisher- 
 men, with backs a little bowed from straining 
 at the oar, accustomed to a life of danger. Ev- 
 ery day there came to the armory loose- jointed, 
 easy-swinging trappers and woodsmen, simple- 
 spoken young men, who, in offering their keen- 
 ness of vision and sureness of marksmanship, 
 were volunteering their all. 
 
 It was ideal material for soldiers. In two days 
 many more than the required quota had presented 
 themselves. Only five hundred men could be pre- 
 pared in time to cross with the first contingent of 
 Canadians. Over a thousand men offered. A 
 corps of doctors asked impertinent questions 
 concerning men's ancestors, inspected teeth, 
 
 4
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 measured and pounded chests, demanded gym- 
 nastic stunts, and finally sorted out the best for 
 the first contingent. The disappointed ones 
 were consoled by news of another contingent to 
 follow in six weeks. Some men, turned down 
 for minor defects, immediately went to hospital, 
 were treated, and enlisted in the next contingent. 
 
 Seven weeks after the outbreak of war the 
 Newfoundlanders joined the flotilla containing 
 the first contingent of Canadians. Escorted by 
 cruisers and air scouts they crossed the Atlantic 
 safely and went under canvas in the mud and 
 wet of Salisbury Plain, in October, 1914. To the 
 men from the interior, rain and exposure were 
 nothing new. Hunting deer in the woods and 
 birds in the marshes means just such conditions. 
 The others soon became hardened to it. They 
 had about settled down when they w^ere sent on 
 garrison duty, first to Fort George in the north 
 of Scotland, and then to Edinburgh Castle. Ten 
 months of bayonet-fighting, physical drill, and 
 twenty-mile route marches over Scottish hills 
 molded them into trim, erect, bronzed soldiers. 
 
 In July of 1915, while the Newfoundlanders 
 were under canvas at Stob's Camp, about fifty 
 miles from Edinburgh, I was transferred to Lon- 
 
 5
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 don to keep the records of the regiment for the 
 War Office. At any other time I should have 
 welcomed the appointment. But then it looked 
 like quitting. The battalion had just received 
 orders to move to Aldershot. While we were 
 garrisoning Edinburgh Castle, word came of the 
 landing of the Australians and New Zealanders 
 at Gallipoli. At Ypres, the Canadians had just 
 then recaptured their guns and made for them- 
 selves a deathless name. The Newfoundlanders 
 felt that as colonials they had been overlooked. 
 They were not militaristic, and they hated the 
 ordinary routine of army life, but they wanted to 
 do their share. That was the spirit all through 
 the regiment. It was the spirit that possessed 
 them on the long-waited-for day at Aldershot 
 when Kitchener himself pronounced them " just 
 the men I want for the Dardanelles." 
 
 That day at Aldershot every man was given a 
 chance to go back to Newfoundland. They had 
 enlisted for one year only, and any man that 
 wished to could demand to be sent home at the 
 end of the year; and when Kitchener reviewed 
 them, ten months of that year had gone. With 
 the chance to go home in his grasp, every man of 
 the first battalion reenlisted for the duration of 
 
 6
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 the war. And it is on record to their eternal 
 honor, that during the week preceding their de- 
 parture from Aldershot, breaches of discipline 
 were unknown; for over their heads hung the 
 fear that they would be punished by being kept 
 back from active service. To break a rule that 
 week carried with it the suspicion of cowardice. 
 This was the more remarkable, because many of 
 the men were fishermen, trappers, hunters, and 
 lumbermen, who, until their enlistment had said 
 " Sir " to no man, and who gloried in the reputa- 
 tion given them by one inspecting oflScer as " the 
 most undisciplined lot he had ever seen." From 
 the day the Canadians left Salisbury Plain for 
 the trenches of Flanders, the Newfoundlanders 
 had been obsessed by one idea: they must get to 
 the front. 
 
 I was in London when I heard of the inspection 
 at Aldershot by Lord Kitchener, and of its re- 
 sults. I had expected to be able to rejoin my 
 battalion in time to go with them to the Darda- 
 nelles ; but when I applied for a transfer, I was 
 told that I should have to stay in London. I 
 tried to imagine myself explaining it to my 
 friends in No. 11 section who were soon to em- 
 bark for the Mediterranean. Apart altogether 
 
 7
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 from that, I had gone through nearly a year of 
 training, had slept on the ground in wet clothes, 
 had drilled from early morning till late after- 
 noon, and was perfectly fit. It had been pretty 
 strenuous training, and I did not want to waste 
 it in an office. 
 
 That evening I applied to the captain in charge 
 of the office for a pass to Aldershot to bid good-by 
 to my friends in the regiment. He granted it; 
 and the next morning a train whirled me through 
 pleasant English country to Aldershot. At the 
 station I met an English Tommy. 
 
 " I suppose you 're looking for the Newfound- 
 landers," he said, glancing at my shoulder badges. 
 I was still wearing the service uniform I had 
 worn in camp in Scotland, for I had not been 
 regularly attached to the office force in London. 
 
 " I '11 take you to Wellington Barracks," vol- 
 unteered the Englishman. " That 's where your 
 lot is." 
 
 We trudged through sand, on to a gravel road, 
 through the main street of the town of Aldershot, 
 and into an asphalt square, surrounded by brick 
 buildings, three storied, with iron-railed veran- 
 das. Men in khaki leaned over the veranda 
 rails, smoking and talking. A regiment was just 
 
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 GETTING THERE 
 
 swinging in tlirougli one of the gaps between the 
 lines. 
 
 " Company, at the halt, facing left, form close 
 column of platoons." Company B of the First 
 Newfoundland Regiment swung into position and 
 halted in the square just in front of their quar- 
 ters. " Company, Dismiss ! " Hands smacked 
 smartly on rifle stocks, heels clicked together, 
 and the men of B Company fell out. A gray- 
 haired, iron-mustached soldier, indelibly stamped 
 English regular, carrying a bucket of swill across 
 the square to the dump, stopped to w^atch them. 
 
 " Wonder who the new lot is? " said he to a 
 comrade lounging near. " I cawn't place their 
 bloomin' badge." 
 
 " 'Ave n't you 'eard? " said the other. " Blaw- 
 sted colonials ; Canydians, I reckon." 
 
 A tall, loose-jointed, sandy-haired youth who 
 approached the two was unmistakably a colonial ; 
 there was a certain ranginess that no amount of 
 drilling could ever entirely eradicate. 
 
 " Hello, Poppa," he greeted the gray -haired 
 one, who had now resumed his journey toward 
 the dump. " What will you answer when your 
 children say, ' Daddy, what part did you play in 
 the great war? ' " 
 
 11
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 He of the swill bucket spat contemptuously, 
 disdaining to answer. The sandy -haired youth 
 continued airily across the square and up the 
 stairs that led to his quarters. I followed him 
 up the stairs and through a door on which was 
 printed " Thirty -two men," and below, in chalk, 
 " B Company." We entered a long, bare-look- 
 ing room, down each side of which ran rows of 
 iron cots. Equipments were piled neatly on the 
 beds and on shelves above; two iron-legged, bar- 
 rack-room tables and a few benches completed 
 the furniture. At one of the tables sat two 
 young men. One of them, a massively built 
 young giant, looked up as the door opened. 
 
 " Hello, Art," he said to my conductor. 
 " You 're just the man we want. Don't you want 
 to join us in a party to go up to London? " 
 
 " No," answered Art ; " if you break leave this 
 week, you don't get to the front." 
 
 The big fellow stretched his massive frame in 
 a capacious yawn. 
 
 " I don't think we '11 ever get to the front," he 
 said. " This is n't a regiment. It 's an officers' 
 training corps. They gave out a lot more stripes 
 to-day, and one fellow got a star — made him a 
 second lieutenant. You 'd think this was the 
 
 12
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 American army ; it 's nothing but stars and 
 stripes. Soon 't will be an honor to be a private. 
 The worst of it is, they '11 come along to me and 
 say, ^What's your name and number?' The 
 only time they ever talk to me is to ask me my 
 name and number; and when I tell them, they 
 put me on crime for not calling them ' Sir,' and 
 when I don't they have me up for insolence." 
 
 Art laughed. " Cheer up, old boy," he said ; 
 " you '11 soon be at the front, and then you won't 
 have to call anybody ' Sir.' " 
 
 " What 's the latest news about the regiment? " 
 I inquired of my conductor. 
 
 " I suppose you know that the King and Lord 
 Kitchener reviewed us," he said, " and this after- 
 noon we are to be reviewed once more. It 's a 
 formality. We should leave this evening or to- 
 morrow for the front. I suppose we '11 go to 
 some seaport town and embark there." 
 
 While we were talking a bugle blew. 
 " There 's the cook-house bugle," said Art. 
 " Come along and have some dinner with us." 
 He took some tin dishes from the shelves above 
 the beds, gave me one, and we joined in the rush 
 down the stairs and across the square to the 
 cook house. 
 
 13
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 In the army, the cook house corresponds to 
 the (lining-room of civilization. B Company 
 cook house was a long, narrow, wooden build- 
 ing. On each side of a middle aisle that led to 
 the kitchen were plain Avooden tables, each ac- 
 commodating sixteen men, eight on each side. 
 When we arrived, the building was full. When 
 you are eating as the guest of the Government, 
 there is no hostess to reserve for you the choice 
 portions ; therefore it behooves you to come early. 
 In the army, if you are not there at the beginning 
 of a meal, you go hungry. Thus are inculcated 
 habits of punctuality. But if you are called and 
 the meal is not ready, you have your revenge. 
 Two hundred and sixty-two men of B Company 
 were showing their disapproval of the cooks' lack 
 of punctuality. Screeches, yells, and cat cries 
 rivaled the din of stamping feet and the bang- 
 ing of tin dishes. Occasionally the door of the 
 kitchen swung open and afforded a glimpse of 
 three sweating cooks and their group of help- 
 ers, working frenziedly. Sometimes the noise 
 stopped long enough to allow some spokesman to 
 express his opinion of the cooks, and their fitness 
 for their jobs, with that delightful simplicity and 
 charming candor that made the language of the 
 
 14
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 First Newfoundland Regiment so refreshing. 
 Loud applause served the double purpose of en- 
 couraging the speakers and drowning the reply 
 of the incensed cooks. This was a pity, because 
 the language of an army cook is worth hearing, 
 and very enlightening. Men who formerly 
 prided themselves on their profanity have lis- 
 tened, envious and subdued, awed by the origi- 
 nality and scope of a cook's vocabulary, and 
 thenceforth quit, realizing their own amateurish- 
 ness. Occasionally, though, one of the cooks, 
 stung to retort, would appear, wiping his hands 
 on his overalls, and in a few well-chosen phrases, 
 cover some of the more recent exploits of the 
 one who had angered him, or endeavor to clear 
 his own character, always in language brilliant, 
 fluent, and descriptive. 
 
 But the longest wait must come to an end, 
 and at last the door of the kitchen swung open 
 and the helpers appeared. Some mysterious 
 mess fund had been tapped, and that day dinner 
 was particularly good. First came soup, then 
 a liberal helping of roast beef, with potatoes, 
 tomatoes, and peas, followed by plum pudding. 
 B Company soon finished. In the army, dinner 
 is a thing not of ceremony, but of necessity. 
 
 15
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 I did not wait for my sandy -liaired friend ; his 
 name, I gathered, was Art Pratt. He and a 
 neighbor were adjusting a difference regarding 
 the ownership of a combination knife, fork, and 
 spoon. I found my way back to the room marked 
 " Thirty-two men." Just as I entered, I heard 
 the bugle sound the " half-hour dress." 
 
 All about the room men were busy shining 
 shoes, polishing buttons, rolling puttees, and ad- 
 justing equipments. This took time, and the 
 half hour for preparation soon passed. In the 
 square below, at the sound of the " Fall In," 
 eleven hundred men of the first battalion of the 
 First Newfoundland Regiment sprang briskly to 
 attention. After their commanding officer had 
 inspected them, the battalion formed into col- 
 umn of route. As the tail of the column swung 
 through the square, I joined in. A short march 
 along the Aldershot Road brought us to the 
 dusty parade ground. Here we were drawn up 
 in review order, to await the inspecting general. 
 When he arrived, he rode quickly through the 
 lines, then ordered the men to be formed into 
 a three-sided square. From the center of this 
 human stadium he addressed them. 
 
 " Men of the First Newfoundland Regiment," 
 
 16
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 said he, " a week ago you were reviewed by His 
 Majesty the King and by Lord Kitchener. On 
 that day, Lord Kitchener told you that you were 
 just the men he needed for the Dardanelles. I 
 have been deputed to tell you that you are to 
 embark to-night. You have come many miles to 
 help us; and when you reach the Dardanelles, 
 you will be opposed by the bravest fighters in 
 the world. It is my duty and my pleasure on 
 behalf of the British Government and of His 
 Majesty the King to thank you and to wish you 
 God-speed." 
 
 This was the moment the Newfoundlanders 
 had been waiting for for nearly a year. From 
 eleven hundred throats broke forth wave upon 
 wave of cheering. Then came an instant's hush, 
 the bugle band played the general salute, and 
 the regiment presented arms. Gravely the gen- 
 eral acknowledged the compliment, spurred his 
 horse, and rode rapidly away. The regiment re- 
 formed, marched back to barracks, and dis- 
 missed. 
 
 I joined the crowd that pressed around the 
 board on which were posted the daily orders. 
 My friend Art Pratt was acting as spokes- 
 man. 
 
 17
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 " A and B Companies leave here at eight this 
 evening," he said. " C and D Companies an 
 hour later. They march to Aldershot railway 
 station, and entrain there." 
 
 I left the gi'oup around the board and walked 
 over to the office of the adjutant. He was busy 
 giving instructions about his baggage. 
 
 "Well," he said, " what do you want?" 
 
 " I want to go with the battalion this even- 
 ing, sir," I said. 
 
 He questioned me ; and when he found out all 
 the facts, told me that I could n't go. I did n't 
 wait any longer. As I went out the door, I 
 could just hear him murmur something about my 
 not having the necessary papers. But I was n't 
 thinking of papers just then. I was wondering 
 how I could get away. I vowed that if I could 
 possibly do it I would go with the battalion. I 
 was passing one of the stairways when I heard 
 some one yell, " Is that you, Corporal Galli- 
 shaw? " I turned. It was Sam Hiscock, one of 
 my old section. 
 
 " Hello, Sam," I said. " I did n't know where 
 to look for old No. 11 section. They 've all been 
 changed about since they came here." 
 
 " Come up this way," said Sam, and I fol- 
 
 18
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 lowed him up the stairs and into a room occu- 
 pied by the men of No. 11 section, my old sec- 
 tion at Stob's Camp in Scotland. 
 
 Disconsolately I told them my plight, and dis- 
 closed my plan guardedly. Sam Hiscock, faith- 
 ful and loyal to his section, voiced the sentiment. 
 " Come on with old No. 11 ; we '11 look after you. 
 All you have to do is hang around here, and 
 when we 're moving off just fall in with us, and 
 nobody '11 notice then ; 't will be dark." 
 
 " The big trouble is," I said, " I have no equip- 
 ment, no overcoat, no kit-bag; in fact, no any- 
 thing." 
 
 " You 've got a rain coat," said Pierce Power, 
 " and I 've got a belt you can have." Another 
 offered a piece of shoulder strap, and some one 
 else volunteered to show me where a pile of 
 equipments were kept in a room. I followed him 
 out to the room. In the corner a man was sit- 
 ting on the floor, smoking. He was the guard 
 over the equipments. He belonged to an Eng- 
 lish regiment, and so did the equipments. Sam 
 Hiscock engaged him in conversation for a few 
 minutes. The topic he introduced was a timely 
 one: beer. While Hiscock and the guard went 
 to the canteen to do some research work in 
 
 19
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 beverages, I took liis place guarding the equip- 
 ments. By the time the two returned I had 
 managed to acquire a passable looking kit. I 
 spent the rest of the afternoon going around 
 among my friends and telling them what I pro- 
 posed to do. At eight o'clock I joined the crowd 
 that cheered A and B Companies as they moved 
 away, in charge of the adjutant and the colonel. 
 When the major called C and D Companies to 
 attention, I fell in with my old section C Com- 
 pany. The lieutenant in charge of the platoon 
 I was with saw me, but in the dusk he could not 
 recognize my face. I was thankful for the con- 
 venient darkness ; and because it was fear of his 
 invention that caused it, I blessed the name of 
 Count Zeppelin. 
 
 " Where 's your rifle? " asked the lieutenant. 
 
 •* Have n't got one, sir," I said. 
 
 The lieutenant called the platoon sergeant. 
 " Sergeant," he snapped, " get that man a rifle." 
 The sergeant doubled back to the barracks and 
 returned with a rifle. The lieutenant moved 
 away, and I had just begun to congratulate my- 
 self, when disaster overtook me. The platoon 
 was numbered off. There was one man too many, 
 and of course I was the man. The lieutenant 
 
 20
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 did not waste any time in vain controversy. He 
 ordered me out of bis platoon. 
 
 "Where shall I go?" I asked. 
 
 "As far as I am concerned," he answered, 
 " you can go straight to hell." 
 
 I left his platoon; but when I did, I carried 
 with me the precious rifle. The sergeant, a thor- 
 ough man, had been thoughtful enough to bring 
 with it a bayonet. 
 
 The time had now come to risk everything on 
 one throw. I did. In the army, all orders from 
 the commanding officer of a regiment are trans- 
 mitted through the adjutant. I knew that both 
 the colonel and the adjutant had gone an hour 
 ago, and could not now be reached. So I walked 
 up to Captain March, the captain of D Com- 
 pany, saluted, and told him that I had been or- 
 dered to join his company. 
 
 " Ordered by whom? " he asked. 
 
 " By the Adjutant," said I, brazenly. 
 
 " I have n't had any orders about that," said 
 Captain March. 
 
 Just then. Captain O'Brien, who had been my 
 company commander in camp, came up. I think 
 he must have known what I was trying to do. 
 
 " If the Adjutant said so, it 's all right," he 
 
 21
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 said, thus leaving the burden of proof on me. 
 
 " Go ahead then," said Captain March ; " fall 
 in." 
 
 I fell in. We formed up, and swung out of 
 the square and along the road that led to the 
 station. At intervals, where a street lamp threw 
 a subdued glare, crowds cheered us; for even 
 Aldershot, clearing house of fighting forces, had 
 not yet ceased to thrill at the sight of men leav- 
 ing for the front. Half an hour after we left 
 the barracks, we were all safely stowed away in 
 the train, ten men in each of the compartment 
 coaches. Just as we were pulling out, a soldier 
 went from coach to coach, shaking hands with 
 all the men. He came to our coach, put his head 
 in through the window, and shook hands with 
 each man. I was on the inside. " Good-by, old 
 chap," he said, then gasped in astonishment. 
 The train was just beginning to move. It was 
 well under way when he recovered himself. 
 " Gallishaw," he shouted, " you 're under arrest." 
 It was the sergeant-major of the Record Office 
 I had quitted in London. 
 
 During war time in England, troop trains have 
 the right of way over all others. All night our 
 train rattled along, with only one stop. That 
 
 22
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 was at Exeter where we were given a lunch sup- 
 plied by the Mayoress and ladies of the town. 
 I spent the night under the seat; for I thought 
 the sergeant-major might telegraph to haye the 
 train searched for me. Early next morning, we 
 shunted onto a wharf in Devonport, alongside 
 the converted cruiser Megantic. Her sides were 
 already lined with soldiers ; another battalion of 
 eleven hundred men, the Warwickshire Regi- 
 ment, was aboard. As soon as our battalion had 
 detrained, I hid behind some boxes on the pier; 
 and when the last of the men were walking up 
 the gangplank. I joined them. A steward 
 handed each man a ticket, bearing the number of 
 his berth. I received one with the rest. Since I 
 was in uniform, the steward had no way of tell- 
 ing whether or not I belonged to the Newfound- 
 landers. 
 
 All that day the Megantic stayed in port, wait- 
 ing for darkness to begin the voyage. In the 
 afternoon, we pulled out into the stream; and 
 at sunset began threading our way between 
 buoys, down the tortuous channel to the open sea. 
 A couple of wicked-looking destroyers escorted 
 us out of Devonport; but as soon as we had 
 cleared the harbor, they steamed up and shot 
 
 23
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 ahead of us. The next morning they had disap- 
 peared. The first night out I ate nothing, but 
 the next day I managed to secure a ticket to the 
 dining-room. With two battalions on board, 
 there was no room on the Mcgantic for drills; 
 the only work we had was boat drill once a day. 
 Each man was assigned his place in the life- 
 boats. At the stern of the ship a big 4.7 gun 
 was mounted; and at various other points were 
 placed five or six machine guns, in preparation 
 for a possible submarine attack. In addition, 
 we depended for escape on our speed of twenty- 
 three to twenty-five knots. 
 
 During the boat drills, I stayed below with 
 the Warwickshire Regiment, or, as we called 
 them, the Warwicks. This regiment was formed 
 of men of the regular army, who had been all 
 through the first gruelling part of the campaign, 
 beginning with the retreat from Mons, to the 
 battle of the Marne. They were the remnants 
 of " French's contemptible little army." Every 
 one of them had been wounded so seriously as 
 to be unable to return to the front. Ordinarily 
 they would have been discharged, but they were 
 men whose whole lives had been spent in the 
 army. Few of them were under forty, so they 
 
 24
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 were now being sent to Khartum in the Sudan, 
 for garrison duty. At night, I came on deck. 
 In the submarine area ships showed no lights, 
 so I could go around without fear of discovery. 
 The only people I had to avoid were the officers, 
 and the caste system of the army kept them to 
 their own part of the ship. The men I knew 
 would sooner cut their tongues out than inform 
 on me. 
 
 Just before sunset of the third night out, be- 
 cause we passed several ships, we knew we were 
 approaching land. At nine o'clock, we were di- 
 rectly opposite the Rock of Gibraltar. After 
 we had left Gibraltar behind, all precautions 
 were doubled; we were now in the zone of sub- 
 marine operations. Ordinarily we steamed 
 along at eighteen or nineteen knots; but the 
 night before we fetched Malta, we zigzagged 
 through the darkness, with engines throbbing at 
 top speed, until the entire ship quivered and 
 shook, and every bolt groaned in protest. With 
 nearly three thousand lives in his care, our cap- 
 tain ran no risks. But the night passed without 
 incident. The next day, at noon, we were safe 
 in one of the fortified harbors of Malta. 
 
 After we left Malta, since I knew I could not 
 
 25
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 then be sent back to England, I reported myself 
 to the adjutant. He and the colonel were in 
 the orderly room, as the office of a regiment is 
 called. The sergeant-major in charge of the 
 orderly room had been taken ill two or three 
 days before, and the other men had been swamped 
 by the extra rush of clerical work, incident ou 
 the departure of a regiment for the front. Per- 
 haps this had a good deal to do with the lenient 
 treatment I received. The adjutant came to the 
 point at once. That is a characteristic of ad- 
 jutants. 
 
 " Gallishaw," he said, " do you w^ant to come 
 to work here? " 
 
 " Yes, sir," I answered. 
 
 " All right," he said ; " you 're posted to B 
 Company." 
 
 That night, it appeared in orders that " Lance- 
 Corporal Gallishaw has embarked with the bat- 
 talion, and is posted to B Company for pay." 
 The only comment the colonel made on the af- 
 fair was to say to the adjutant, " I 've often heard 
 of men leaving a ship when she is going on active 
 service, but I 've never heard of men stowing 
 away to get there." Thus I went to work in the 
 orderly room ; and in the orderly room I stayed 
 
 26
 
 n 
 n 
 
 P 
 a 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 p 
 c 
 
 & 
 5' 
 cp 
 
 'a 
 n 

 
 GETTING THEKE 
 
 until we arrived at Alexandria, Egypt, and en- 
 trained for Cairo. At Heliopolis, on the desert 
 near Cairo, we went into camp. There I joined 
 my company and drilled with it, and bade 
 good-by to the orderly room and all its works. 
 We stayed in Egypt only ten days or so to 
 get accustomed to the heat, and to change our 
 heavy uniforms and hats for the light-weight 
 duck uniforms and sun helmets, suitable for the 
 climate on the Peninsula of Gallipoli. The heat 
 at Heliopolis was too intense to permit of our 
 drilling very much. In the very early morning, 
 before the sun was really strong, we marched 
 out a mile across the desert, skirmished about 
 for an hour or so, and returned to camp for 
 breakfast. The rest of the day we were free. 
 Ordinarily we spent the morning sweltering in 
 our marquees, saying unprintable and uncom- 
 plimentary things about the Egyptian weather. 
 In the late afternoon and evening, we went to 
 Cairo. About a mile from where we were 
 camped, a street car line ran into the city. To 
 get to it we generally rode across the desert on 
 donkeys. Every afternoon, as soon as we had 
 finished dinner, little native boys pestered us 
 to hire donkeys. They were the same boys who 
 
 29
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 poked their heads into our marquees each morn- 
 ing and implored us to buy papers. We needed 
 no reveille in Egypt. The thing that woke us 
 was a native yelling " Eengaleesh paper, veera 
 good; veera good, veera nice; fifty thousand 
 Eengaleesh killed in the Dardanelle; veera good, 
 veera nice." 
 
 About a quarter of a mile across the desert 
 from us was a camp for convalescent Australians 
 and New Zealanders. As soon as the Austra- 
 lians found that we were colonials like them- 
 selves, they opened their hearts to us in the 
 breezy way that is characteristically Australian. 
 There is a Canadian hospital unit in Cairo. One 
 medical school from Ontario enlisted almost en 
 masse. Professors and pupils carry on work 
 and lectures in Egypt just as they did in Canada. 
 It was not an uncommon thing to see on a Cairo 
 street a group composed of an Australian, a New 
 Zealander, a Canadian, and a Newfoundlander. 
 And once we managed to rake up a South Afri- 
 can. The clean-cut, alert-looking, bronzed Aus- 
 tralians, who impressed you as having been 
 raised far from cities, made a tremendous hit 
 with the Newfoundlanders. One chap who was 
 returning home minus a leg, gave us a young 
 
 30
 
 GETTING THERE 
 
 wallaby that he had brought with him from 
 Australia. One of our boys had a small don- 
 key, not much larger than a collie dog, that he 
 bought from a native for a few shillings. The 
 men vied with each other in feeding the animals. 
 Some fellows took the kangaroo one evening, and 
 he acquired a taste for beer. The donkey's taste 
 for the same beverage was already well devel- 
 oped. After that, the two were the center of 
 convivial gatherings. The wallaby got drunk 
 faster, but the donkey generally got away with 
 more beer. When we were certain we were to 
 go to the front, a meeting was held in our mar- 
 quee. It was unanimously decided that not a 
 man was to take a cent with him — everybody 
 was to leave for the front absolutely broke — " to 
 avoid litigation among our heirs," the spokesman 
 said. The wallaby and the donkey benefited. 
 The night before we left the desert camp, they 
 were wined and dined. The next morning, the 
 kangaroo, bearing unmistakable marks of his de- 
 bauch, showed up to say good-by. We were not 
 allowed to take him with us, and he was rele- 
 gated to the Zoo in Cairo. The donkey, who had 
 been steadily mixing his drinks from four o'clock 
 the afternoon before, did not see us go. When 
 
 31
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 we moved off, he was lying unconscious under 
 one of the transport wagons. 
 
 Although we took advantage of every oppor- 
 tunity for pleasure, we had not lost sight of our 
 real object. We were grateful for a chance to 
 visit the Pyramids, and enjoyed our meeting with 
 the men from the Antipodes, but Egypt soon 
 palled. The Newfoundlanders' comment was al- 
 ways the same. " It 's some place, but it is n't 
 the front. We came to fight, not for sightsee- 
 ing." 
 
 32
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THERE 
 
 IT was with eleven hundred eager spirits that 
 I lined up on a Sunday evening early in 
 August, 1915, on the deck of a troopship, in 
 Mudros Harbor, which is the center of the his- 
 toric island of Lemnos, about fifty miles from 
 Gallipoli. Around us lay all sorts of ships, from 
 ocean leviathans to tiny launches and rowboats. 
 There were gray and black-painted troopers, 
 their rails lined with soldiers, immense four-fun- 
 neled men-o'-war, and brightly lighted, white 
 hospital ships, with their red crosses outlined in 
 electric lights. The landing officer left us in a 
 little motor boat. We watched him glide slowly 
 shoreward, where we could faintly discern 
 through the dusk the white of the tents that were 
 the headquarters for the army at Lemnos. To 
 the right of the tents, we could see the hospital 
 for wounded Australians and New Zealanders. 
 A French battleship dipped its flag as it passed, 
 and our boys sang the Marseillaise. 
 
 33
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 A mail that had come that day was being 
 sorted. While we waited, each man was served 
 with his " iron ration." This consisted of a one- 
 pound tin of pressed corn beef — the much-hated 
 and much-maligned " bully beef " — a bag of bis- 
 cuits, and a small tin that held two tubes of 
 "Oxo," with tea and sugar in specially con- 
 structed air-and-damp-proof envelopes. This 
 was an emergency ration, to be kept in case of 
 direst need, and to be used only to ward off 
 actual starvation. After that, we were given 
 our ammunition, two hundred and fifty rounds 
 to each man. 
 
 But what brought home to me most the se- 
 riousness of our venture was the solitary sheet 
 of letter paper with its envelope, that was given 
 to every man, to be used for a parting letter 
 home. For some poor chaps it was indeed the 
 last letter. Then we went over the side, and 
 aboard the destroyer that was to take us to Suvla 
 Bay. 
 
 The night had been well chosen for a surprise 
 landing. There was no moon, but after a little 
 while the stars came out. Away on the port bow 
 we could see the dusky outline of land ; and once, 
 when we were about half way, an airship soared 
 
 34
 
 THERE 
 
 phantom-like out of the night, poised over us a 
 short time, then ducked out of sight. At first 
 the word ran along the line that it was a hostile 
 airship, but a few inquiries soon reassured us. 
 
 Suddenly we changed our direction. We were 
 near Cape Hellas, which is the lowest point of 
 the Peninsula of Gallipoli. Under Sir Ian Ham- 
 ilton's scheme, it was here that a decoy party 
 was to land to draw the Turks from Anzac. Si- 
 multaneously, an overwhelming force was to land 
 at Suvla Bay and at Anzac, to make a surprise 
 attack on the Turks' right flank. Presently, we 
 were going up shore past the wrecked steamer 
 River Clyde, the famous " Ship of Troy," from 
 the side of which the Australians had issued after 
 the ship had been beached ; past the shore hitherto 
 nameless, but now known as Anzac. Australian, 
 New Zealand, Army Corps, those five letters 
 stand for; but to those of us who have been on 
 Gallipoli, they stand for a great deal more : they 
 represent the achievement of the impossible. 
 They are a glorious record of sacrifice, reckless 
 devotion, and unselfish courage. To put each 
 letter there cost the men from Australasia ten 
 thousand of their best soldiers. 
 
 And so we edged our way along, fearing mines, 
 
 35
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 or, even more disastrous than mines, discovery 
 by the enemy. From the Australasians over at 
 Anzac, we could hear desultory rifle fire. Once 
 we heard the boom of some big guns that seemed 
 almost alongside the ship. Four hours it took 
 us to go fifty miles, in a destroyer that could 
 make thirty-two knots easily. By one o'clock, 
 the stars had disappeared, and for perhaps three 
 quarters of an hour we edged our way through 
 pitch darkness. We gradually slowed down, 
 until w^e had almost stopped. Something 
 scraped along our side. Somebody said it was 
 a floating mine, but it turned out to be a buoy 
 that had been put there by the navy to mark the 
 channel. Out of the gloom directly in front 
 some one hailed, and our people answered. 
 
 "Who have you on board?" we heard the 
 casual English voice say. Then came the reply 
 from our colonel : 
 
 " Newfoundlanders." 
 
 There was to me something reassuring about 
 that cool, self-contained voice out of the night. 
 It made me feel that we were being expected 
 and looked after. 
 
 " Move up those boats," I heard the English 
 voice say, and from right under our bow a naval 
 
 36
 
 i 
 
 II ' 
 
 '.( ■ y- ' 
 
 u 
 
 % 
 
 » A. 
 
 a 
 
 3 
 
 > 
 
 a 
 
 3 
 
 
 c 
 
 a 
 
 .-3 
 
 
 :v % ^ssj^ir ^ 
 
 a)
 
 THERE 
 
 launch, with a middy in charge, swerved along- 
 side. In a little while it, with its string of 
 boats, was securely fastened. 
 
 Just before we went into the boats, the -ad- 
 jutant passed me. 
 
 " Well," he said, " you 've got your wish. In 
 a few minutes you '11 be ashore. Let me know 
 how you like it when you 're there a little while." 
 
 " Yes, sir," I said. But I never had a chance 
 to tell him. The first shrapnel shell fired at the 
 Newfoundlanders burst near him, and he had 
 scarcely landed when he was taken off the Penin- 
 sula, seriously wounded. 
 
 In a short time we had all filed into the boats. 
 There was no noise, no excitement ; just now and 
 then a whispered command. I was in a tug with 
 about twenty others who formed the rear guard. 
 The wind had freshened considerably, and was 
 now blowing so hard that our unwieldy tug dared 
 not risk a landing. We came in near enough 
 to watch the other boats. About twenty yards 
 from shore they grounded. We could see the 
 boys jump over the side and wade ashore. 
 Through the half darkness we could barely dis- 
 tinguish them forming up on the beach. Soon 
 they were lost to sight. 
 
 39
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 During the Turkish summer, dawn comes 
 early. We transhipped from our tug to a 
 lighter. When it grounded on the beach, day 
 was just breaking. Daylight disclosed a steeply 
 sloping beach, scarred with ravines. The place 
 where we landed ran between sheer cliffs. A 
 short distance up the hill we could see our bat- 
 talion digging themselves in. To the left I 
 could see the boats of another battalion. Even 
 as I watched, the enemy's artillery located them. 
 It was the first shell I had ever heard. It came 
 over the hill close to me, screeching through the 
 air like an express train going over a bridge at 
 night. Just over the boat I was watching it 
 exploded. A few of the soldiers slipped quietly 
 from their seats to the bottom of the boat. At 
 first I did not realize that anybody had been hit. 
 There was no sign of anything having happened 
 out of the ordinary, no confusion. As soon as 
 the boat touched the beach, the wounded men 
 were carried by their mates up the hill to a tem- 
 porary dressing station. The first shell was the 
 beginning of a bombardment. " Beachy Bill," 
 a battery that we were to become better ac- 
 quainted with, was in excellent shape. Every 
 few minutes a shell burst close to us. Shrapnel 
 
 40
 
 THERE 
 
 bullets and fragments of shell casing forced us 
 to huddle under the baggage for protection. A 
 little to the left, some Australians were severely 
 punished. Shell after shell burst among them. 
 A regiment of Sikh troops, mule drivers, and 
 transport men were caught half way up the 
 beach. Above the din of falling shrapnel and 
 the shriek of flying shells rose the piercing 
 scream of wounded mules. The Newfound- 
 landers did not escape. That morning " Beachy 
 Bill's " gunners played no favorites. On all 
 sides the shrapnel came in a shower. Less often 
 a cloud of thick black smoke, and a hole twenty 
 feet deep showed the landing place of a high 
 explosive shell. The most amazing thing was the 
 coolness of the men. The Newfoundlanders 
 might have been practising trench digging in 
 camp in Scotland. When a man was hit, some 
 one gave him first aid, directed the stretcher 
 bearers where to find him, and resumed digging. 
 About nine, I was told off to go to the beach 
 with one man to guard the baggage. We picked 
 our way carefully, taking advantage of every bit 
 of cover. About half way down, we heard the 
 warning shriek of a shell, and threw ourselves 
 on our faces. Almost instantly we were in 
 
 41
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 the center of a perfect whirlwind of shells. 
 " Beachy Bill " had just located a lot of Aus- 
 tralians, digging themselves in about fifty yards 
 away from us. The first few shells fell short, 
 but only the first few. After that, the Turkish 
 gunners got the range, and the Australians had 
 to move, followed by the shells. As soon as we 
 were sure that the danger was over, we contin- 
 ued to the beach, and aboard the lighter that 
 contained our baggage. We had not had a 
 chance to get any breakfast before we started, 
 but the sergeant of our platoon had promised 
 to send a corporal and another man to relieve 
 us in two hours. About twelve o'clock the 
 sergeant appeared, to tell me to wait until one 
 o'clock, when I should be relieved. He brought 
 the news that the adjutant had been wounded 
 seriously in the arm and leg. At the very be- 
 ginning of the bombardment, a shell had hit him. 
 About forty of our men had been hit, the ser- 
 geant said, and the regiment was preparing to 
 change its position. He showed us the new po- 
 sition, and told us to rejoin there as soon as 
 relieved. 
 
 About a hundred yards to the right of us rose 
 a cliff that prevented our boat being seen by the 
 
 42
 
 THERE 
 
 enemy. The Turks were devoting their attention 
 to some boats landing well to the left of us. The 
 officer in charge of landing was taking advan- 
 tage of this and had a gang near us working on 
 dugouts for stores and supplies. Right under 
 the cliffs a detachment of engineers were build- 
 ing a landing as coolly as if they were at home. 
 Every fifteen or twenty minutes, to show us that 
 he was still doing business, " Beachy Bill " sent 
 over a few shells in our direction. The gunners 
 could not see us, but they wanted to warn us 
 not to presume too much. As soon as the first 
 shell landed near us, the officer in charge 
 shouted nonchalantly, " Take cover, everybody." 
 He waited until he was certain every man had 
 found a hiding place, then effaced himself. The 
 courage of the officers of the English army 
 amounts almost to foolhardiness. The men to 
 relieve us did not arrive at once, as promised. 
 The hot afternoon passed slowly. Each hour 
 was a repetition of the preceding one. " Beachy 
 Bill " was surpassing himself. From far out in 
 the bay our warships replied. 
 
 About five o'clock I espied one of the New- 
 foundland lieutenants a little way up the beach 
 in charge of a party of twenty men. I signaled 
 
 43
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 to him and he came down to our boat. The 
 party bad come to unload the baggage. When 
 I asked the lieutenant about being relieved, he 
 told me that he had sent a corporal and one 
 man down about one o'clock, and ordered me 
 back to the regiment to report to Lieutenant 
 Steele. Half way up the beach we found Lieu- 
 tenant Steele. The corporal sent down to re- 
 lieve me, he told me, had been hit by a shell just 
 after he left his dugout. The man with him 
 had not been heard from. I went back to the 
 beach, and found the man perched up on top 
 of the cliff to the right of the lighter. He had 
 been waiting there all the afternoon for the cor- 
 poral to join him. 
 
 Having solved the mystery of the failure of 
 the relief party, I returned to my platoon. Their 
 first stopping place had proved untenable. All 
 day they had been subjected to a merciless and 
 devastating shelling, and their first day of w^ar 
 had cost them sixty-five men. They were now 
 dug in in a new and safer position. They were 
 only waiting for darkness to advance to reinforce 
 the firing line that was now about four miles 
 ahead. Since to get to our firing line we had to 
 cross the dried-up bed of a salt lake, no move 
 
 44
 
 THERE 
 
 could be made in daylight. That evening we 
 received our ration of rum, and formed up si- 
 lently in a long line two deep, beside our dug- 
 outs. I fell in with my section, beside Art 
 Pratt, the sandy-haired chap I had met in Alder- 
 shot. He had been cleaning his rifle that after- 
 noon when a shell landed right in his dugout, 
 wounded the man next him, knocked the bolt of 
 the rifle out of his hand, but left him unhurt. 
 He accepted it as an omen that he would come 
 out all right, and was grinning delightedly while 
 he confided to me his narrow escape, and was as 
 happy as a schoolboy at the thought of getting 
 into action. 
 
 Under cover of darkness we moved away si- 
 lently, until we came to the border of the Salt 
 Lake. Here we extended, and crossed it in open 
 order, then through three miles of knee high, 
 prickly underbrush, to where our division was 
 entrenched. Our orders were to reinforce the 
 Irish. The Irish sadlv needed reinforcing. 
 Some of them had been on the Peninsula for 
 months. Many of them are still there. From 
 the beach to the firing line is not over four 
 miles, but it is a ghastly four miles of graveyard. 
 Everywhere along the route are small wooden 
 
 45
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 crosses, mute record of advances. Where the 
 crosses are thickest, there the fighting was fierc- 
 est; and where the fighting was fiercest, there 
 were the Irish. On every cross, besides a man's 
 name and the date of his death, is the name of 
 his regiment. No other regiments have so many 
 crosses as the Dublins and the Miinsters. And 
 where the shrapnel flew so fast that bodies man- 
 gled beyond hope of identity were buried in a 
 common grave, there ^Iso are the Dublins and 
 the Munsters ; and the cross over them reads, " In 
 Memory of Unknown Comrades." 
 
 The line on the left was held by the Twenty- 
 ninth Division; the Dublins, the Munsters, the 
 King's Own Scottish Borderers, and the New- 
 foundlanders made up the Eighty-eighth Bri- 
 gade. The Newfoundlanders were reinforce- 
 ments. From the very first day of the Gallipoli 
 campaign, the other three regiments had formed 
 part of what General Sir Ian Hamilton in his 
 report calls " The incomparable Twenty-ninth 
 Division." When the first landing was made, 
 this division, with the New Zealanders, pene- 
 trated to the top of Achi Baba, the hill that 
 commanded the Narrows. For forty -eight hours 
 the result was in doubt. The British attacked 
 
 46
 
 H 
 
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 P 
 
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 .ilK-' ^i <* ■
 
 THERE 
 
 with bayonet and bombs, were driven back, and 
 repeatedly reattacked. The New Zealanders 
 finally succeeded in reaching the top, followed 
 by the Eighty-eighth Brigade. The Irish fought 
 on the tracks of a railroad that leads into Con- 
 stantinople. At the end of forty-eight hours of 
 attacks and counter attacks, the position was 
 considered secure. The worn-out soldiers were 
 relieved and went into dugouts. Then the re- 
 lieving troops were attacked by an overwhelming 
 hostile force, and the hill was lost. A battery 
 placed on that hill could have shelled the Nar- 
 rows and opened to our ships the way to Con- 
 stantinople. The hill was never retaken. When 
 reinforcements came up it was too late. The re- 
 inforcements lost their way. In his report. Gen- 
 eral Hamilton attributes our defeat to " fatal in- 
 ertia." Just how fatal was that inertia was 
 known only to those who formed some of the 
 burial parties. 
 
 After the first forty-eight hours we 'settled 
 down to regular trench warfare. The routine 
 was four days in the trenches, eight days in rest 
 dugouts, four days in the trenches again, and so 
 forth, although three or four months later our 
 ranks were so depleted that we stayed in eight 
 
 49
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 days and rested only four. We had expected 
 four days' rest after our first trip to the firiug 
 line, but at the end of two days came word of 
 a determined advance of the enemy. We ar- 
 rived just in time to beat it off. Our trenches 
 instead of being at the top were at the foot of 
 the hill that meant so much to us. 
 
 The ground here was a series of four or five 
 hog-back ridges, about a hundred yards apart. 
 Behind these towered the hill that was our ob- 
 jective. From the nearest ridge, about seven 
 hundred yards in front of us, the Turks had all 
 that day coustantly issued in mass formation. 
 During that attack we were repaid for the havoc 
 wrought by Beachy Bill, As soon as the Turks 
 topped the crest, they were subjected to a de- 
 moralizing rain of shell from the navy and from 
 our artillery. Against the hazy blue of the sky- 
 line we could see the dark mass clearly silhou- 
 etted. Every few seconds, when a shell landed 
 in the middle of the approaching columns, the 
 sides of the column would bulge outward for an 
 instant, then close in again. Meanwhile, every 
 man in our trenches stood on the firing platform, 
 head and shoulders above the parapet, with fixed 
 bayonet and loaded rifle, waiting for the order 
 
 50
 
 THERE 
 
 to begin firing. Still the Turks came on, big, 
 black, bewhiskered six footers, reforming ranks 
 and filling up their gaps with fresh men. Now 
 they were only six hundred yards away. But 
 still there was no order to open fire. It was un- 
 canny. At five hundred yards our fire was still 
 withheld. When the order came, " At four hun- 
 dred yards, rapid fire," everybody was tingling 
 with excitement. Still the Turks came on, mag- 
 nificently determined, but it was too desperate a 
 venture. The chances against them were too 
 great, our artillery and machine gun fire too de- 
 structively accurate. Some few Turks reached 
 almost to our trenches, only to be stopped by 
 rifle bullets. " Allah ! Allah ! " yelled the Turks, 
 as they came on. A sweating, grimly happy ma- 
 chine gun sergeant was shouting to the Turkish 
 army in general, " It 's not a damn bit of good 
 to yell to Allah now." Our artillery opened huge 
 gaps in their lines, our machine guns piled them 
 dead in the ranks where they stood. Our own 
 casualties were very slight; but of the waves of 
 Turks that surged over the crest all that day, 
 only a mere shattered remnant ever straggled 
 back to their own lines. 
 
 That was the last big attack the Turks made. 
 
 51
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 From that time on, it was virtually two armies 
 in a state of siege. That was the first night the 
 Newfoimdlanders went into the trenches as a 
 unit. A and B Companies held the firing line, 
 C and D were in the support trenches. Before 
 that, they filled up gaps in the Dublins or in the 
 Munsters, or in the King's Own Scottish Bor- 
 derers. These regiments were our tutors. 
 Mostly they were composed of veterans who had 
 put in years of training in Egypt or in India. 
 The Irish were jolly, laughing men with a soft 
 brogue, and an amazing sense of humor. The 
 Scotch were dour, silent men, who wasted few 
 words. Some of the Scotchmen were young fel- 
 lows who had been recruited in Scotland after 
 war broke out. One of these chaps shared my 
 watch with me the first night. At dark, sentry 
 groups were formed, three reliefs of two men 
 each ; these two men stood with their heads over 
 the parapet watching for any movement in the 
 no man's land between the lines; that accounts 
 for the surprisingly large number of men one 
 sees wounded in the head. The Scottie and I 
 stood close enough together to carry on a con- 
 versation in whispers. It turned out that he 
 had been training in Scotland at the same camp 
 
 52
 
 THERE 
 
 where the Newfoundlanders were. He had been 
 on the Peninsula since April, and was all in 
 from dysentery and lack of food. " Nae meat/' 
 was the laconic way he expressed it. Like every 
 Scotchman since the world began, he answered 
 to the name of " Mac." He pointed out to me 
 the position of the enemy trenches. 
 
 " It 's just aboot fower hundred yairds," he 
 said, " but you '11 no get a chance to fire ; there 's 
 wurrkin' pairties oot the nicht." Then as an 
 afterthought, he added gloomily, " There 's no 
 chance of your gettin' hit either." 
 
 " Why," I asked him in astonishment, " you 
 don't want to get hit, do you? " 
 
 Mac looking at me pityingly. " Man," he 
 burst out, " when ye 're here as long as I 've been 
 here, ye '11 be prayin' fer a ' Blighty one.' " 
 
 Blighty is the Tommies' nickname for London, 
 and a " Blighty one " is a wound that 's serious 
 enough to cause your return to London. 
 
 For a few minutes Mac continued looking over 
 the parapet. Without turning his head, he said 
 to me : " I '11 gie ye five poond, if ye '11 shoot me 
 through the airm or the fut." When a Scotch- 
 man who is getting only a shilling a day offers 
 you five pounds, it is for something very desir- 
 
 53
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 able. Before I had a chance to take him up on 
 this handsome offer, my attention was attracted 
 by the appearance of a light just a little in front 
 of where Mac had said the enemy trench was 
 located. I grabbed my gun excitedly. 
 
 " Dinna fire, lad," cautioned Mac. " We have 
 a wurrkin' pairty oot just in front. Ye would na 
 hit anything if ye did. 'T is only wastin' bul- 
 lets to fire at night." 
 
 For almost an hour I continued to watch the 
 light as it moved about. It was a party of 
 Turks, Mac explained, seeking their dead for 
 burial. When I was relieved for a couple of 
 hours' sleep they were still there. 
 
 Just where I was posted, the trench was trav- 
 ersed ; that is, from the parapet there ran at right 
 angles, for about six feet, a barricade of sand- 
 bags, that formed the upright line of a figure T. 
 The angle made by this traverse gave some pro- 
 tection from the wind that swept through the 
 trench. Here I spread my blanket. The night 
 was bitterly cold, and I shivered for lack of an 
 overcoat. In coming away hurriedly from Lon- 
 don, I did not take an overcoat with me. In 
 Egypt, it had never occurred to me that I should 
 need one in Gallipoli ; and the chance to get one 
 
 54
 
 THERE 
 
 I had lost. But I was too weary to let even the 
 cold keep me awake. In a few minutes I was 
 as sound asleep as if I had been far from all 
 thought of war or trenches. 
 
 It seemed to me that I had just got to sleep 
 when I was awakened by a hand shaking my 
 shoulder roughly, and by a voice shouting, 
 " Stand to, laddie." It was Mac. I jumped to 
 my feet, rubbing my eyes. 
 
 " What 's the matter? " I asked. 
 
 " Nothing 's the matter," said Mac. " Every 
 morning at daybreak ye stand to airms for an 
 hour." 
 
 I looked along the trench. Every man stood 
 on the firing platform with his bayonet fixed. 
 Daybreak and just about sunset are the times 
 attacks are most likely to take place. At those 
 times the greatest precautions are taken. Dawn 
 was just purpling the range of hills directly in 
 front when word came, " Day duties commence." 
 Periscopes were served out, and placed about 
 ten feet apart along the trench. These are plain 
 oblong tubes of tin, three by six inches, about 
 two feet high. They contain an arrangement of 
 double mirrors, one at the top, and one at the 
 bottom. The top mirror slants backward, and 
 
 55
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 reflects objects in front of it. The one at the 
 bottom slants forward, and reflects the image 
 caught by the top mirror. In the daytime, by 
 using a periscope, a sentry can keep his head be- 
 low the top of the parapet, while he watches the 
 ground in front. Sometimes, however, a bullet 
 strikes one of the mirrors, and the splintered 
 glass blinds the sentry. It is not an uncommon 
 thing to see a man go to the hospital with his face 
 badly lacerated by periscope glass. 
 
 During the daytime, the men who were not 
 watching worked at different " fatigues." Para- 
 pets had to be fixed up, trenches deepened, drains 
 and dumps dug, and bomb-proof shelters had to 
 be constructed for the officers. Every few min- 
 utes the Turkish batteries opened fire on us, but 
 with very poor success. The navy and our land 
 batteries replied, with what effect we could not 
 tell. Once or twice I put my head up higher 
 than the parapet. Each time I did, I heard the 
 ping of a bullet, as it whizzed past my ear. Once 
 a sniper put five at me in rapid succession. 
 Every one was within a few inches of me, but 
 fortunately on the outside of the parapet. Just 
 before landing in Egypt, we had been served out 
 with large W'hite helmets to protect us from the 
 
 56
 
 e 
 p 
 
 c 
 
 P 
 
 B 
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 P 
 
 p 
 
 p 
 
 p 
 
 'k* * 
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 THERE 
 
 sun. It did not take us very long to discover 
 that on the Peninsula of Gallipoli these were 
 veritable death traps. Against the landscape 
 they loomed as large as tents ; they were simply 
 invitations to the enemy snipers. We soon dis- 
 carded them for our service caps. The hot sun 
 of a Turkish summer bored down on us, adding 
 to the torment of parched throats and tongues. 
 We were suffering very much from lack of water. 
 The first night we went into the firing line we 
 were issued about a pint of water for each man. 
 It was a week before we got a fresh supply. We 
 had not yet had time to get properly organized, 
 and our only food was hard biscuits, apricot jam, 
 and bully beef; a pretty good ration under 
 ordinary conditions, but, without water, most un- 
 palatable. The flies, too, bothered us inces- 
 santly. As soon as a man spread some jam on 
 his biscuits, the flies swarmed upon it, and be- 
 fore he could get it to his mouth it was black 
 with the pests. 
 
 These were not the only drawbacks. Directly 
 in front of our trenches lay a lot of corpses, 
 Turks who had been killed in the last attack. 
 In front of the line of about two hundred yards 
 held by B Company there were six or seven hun- 
 
 59
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 dred of them. We could not get out to bury 
 them, nor could we afford to allow the enemy to 
 do so. There they stayed, and some of the hordes 
 of flies that continually hovered about them, with 
 every change of wind, swept down into our 
 trenches, carrying to our food the germs of dys- 
 entery, enteric, and all the foul diseases that 
 threaten men in the tropics. 
 
 After two days of this life, we were relieved 
 and moved back about two miles to the reserve 
 dugouts for a rest, to get something to eat, and 
 depopulate our underwear; for the trenches 
 where we slept harbored not only rats but ver- 
 min and all manner of things foul. 
 
 The regiment that relieved us was an English 
 regiment, the Essex. They were some of 
 " Kitchener's Army." We stood down off the 
 parapet, and the Englishmen took our places. 
 Then with our entire equipment on our backs 
 we started our hegira. We had about four 
 miles to go, two down through the front line 
 trenches, then two more through winding, nar- 
 row communication trenches, almost to the edge 
 of the Salt Lake. Here in the partial shelter 
 afforded by a small hill were our dugouts. In 
 Gallipoli there was no attempt at the ambitious 
 
 60
 
 THERE 
 
 dugout one hears of on the Western front. Our 
 dugouts resembled more nearly than anything 
 else newly made graves. Usually one sought a 
 large rock and made a dugout at the foot of it. 
 The soil of the Peninsula lent itself readily to 
 dugout construction. It is a moist, spongy clay, 
 of the consistency of thick mortar. A pickax 
 turns up large chunks of it; these are placed 
 around the sides. A few hours' sun dries out 
 the moisture, and leaves them as hard and solid 
 as concrete. 
 
 While we had been in the firing line, another 
 regiment had made some dugouts. There were 
 four rows of them, one for each company, B 
 Company's were nearest the beach. We filed 
 slowly down the line, until we came to the end. 
 A dugout was assigned to every two men. I 
 shared one with a chap named Stenlake. We 
 spread our blankets, put our packs under our 
 heads, and for the first time for a week, took off 
 our boots. Before going to sleep, Stenlake and I 
 chatted for a while. When war broke out, he 
 told me, he had been a missionary in Newfound- 
 land. He offered as chaplain, and was accepted 
 and given a commission as captain. Later some 
 difficulty arose. The regiment was made up of 
 
 61
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 three or four different denominations, about 
 equally divided. Each one wanted its own chap- 
 Iain, which was expensive; so they decided to 
 have no chaplain. Stenlake immediately re- 
 signed his commission, and enlisted as a private. 
 Our whisperings were interrupted by a voice 
 from the next dugout. " You had better get to 
 sleep as soon as you can, boys ; you have a hard 
 day before you, to-morrow." It was Mr. Nunns, 
 the lieutenant in command of our platoon. 
 Casting aside all caste prejudice, he was sleep- 
 ing in the midst of his men, in the first dug- 
 out he had found empty. He could have detailed 
 some men to build him an elaborate dugout, but 
 he preferred to be with his " boys." The Eng- 
 lish officers of the old school claim that this sort 
 of thing hurts discipline. If they had seen the 
 prompt and cheerful way in which No. 8 platoon 
 obeyed Mr. Nunns' orders, they would have been 
 enlightened. 
 
 62
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 SOMEBODY has said that a change of occu- 
 pation is a rest. Whoever sent us into 
 dugouts for a rest, evidently had this definition 
 in mind. After breakfast the first morning we 
 were ordered out for digging fatigue just behind 
 the firing line. In this there was one consola- 
 tion. We did not have to carry our packs. 
 Each man took his rifle and either a pick or a 
 shovel. Communication trenches had to be dug 
 to avoid long tramps through the firing line ; and 
 connecting trenches had to be made between the 
 existing communication trenches. While we 
 were in dugouts we had eight hours of this work 
 out of every twenty-four ; four hours in the day- 
 time and four at night. 
 
 The second day in dugouts when we came back 
 from our morning's digging, we found some new 
 arrivals making some dugouts about two hun- 
 
 63
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 dred yards behind our lines. They were Terri- 
 torials, who correspond to the militia in the 
 United States. " The London Terriers," they 
 called themselves. Mostly they were young fel- 
 lows from eighteen to twenty-two years old. 
 They had landed only that morning and were in 
 splendid condition, and very eager for the com- 
 ing of evening when they were to go to the fir- 
 ing line. The ground they had selected was 
 sheltered from observation by the little ridge near 
 our line of dugouts ; but some of our men in mov- 
 ing about attracted the attention of the Turkish 
 artillery observer. Instantly half a dozen shells 
 came over the ridge, past our line, and bang! 
 right in the midst of the Londons, working fear- 
 ful destruction. Every ten or fifteen minutes 
 after that, the Turks sent over some shells. 
 Some regiments are lucky, others seem to walk 
 into destruction everywhere they turn. The 
 shells fired at the Newfoundlanders landed in the 
 Londons. About two minutes' walk from our 
 dugouts our cooks had built a fire and were pre- 
 paring meals. A number of our men passed 
 continually between our line and the cooks'. 
 Not one of them was even scratched. The only 
 two of the Londons who ventured there were 
 
 64
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 hit; one fellow was killed instantly, the other, 
 seriously wounded through the lungs, lay moan- 
 ing where he had fallen. It was just dusk, and 
 nobody knew he had been hit until one of our 
 men, coming down, heard his hoarse whispering 
 request to " get a doctor, for God's sake get a 
 doctor." While somebody ran for the doctor, 
 our stretcher bearers responded to the all too fa- 
 miliar shout, " Stretcher bearers at the double," 
 but by the time they reached him he was beyond 
 all need of doctor or stretcher bearers. Before 
 the London Terriers even saw the firing line, 
 they lost over two hundred men. They simply 
 could not escape the Turkish shells. The enemy 
 had a habit of sending over one shell, then wait- 
 ing just a minute or less, and following it with 
 another. The first shell generally wounded two 
 or three men; the second one was sent over to 
 catch the stretcher bearers and the comrades 
 who hastened to aid those who were hit. Be- 
 fore they had completed their dugouts, the shrap- 
 nel caught them in the open; after they were 
 dug in, it buried them alive. Never did a regi- 
 ment leave dugouts with so much joy as did the 
 London Terriers when they entered the trenches 
 for the first time. Ordinarily a man is much 
 
 65
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 safer in the firing line than in rest dugouts. 
 Trenches are so constructed that even when a 
 shell drops right in the traverse where men are, 
 only half a dozen or so suffer. In open or 
 slightly protected ground where the dugouts are, 
 the burst of a shrapnel shell covers an area 
 twenty-five by two hundred yards in extent. 
 
 A shell can be heard coming. Experts claim 
 to identify the caliber of a gun by the sound the 
 shell makes. Few live long enough to become 
 such experts. In Gallipoli the average length of 
 life was three weeks. In dugouts we always ate 
 our meals, such as they were, to the accompani- 
 ment of " Turkish Delight," the Newfound- 
 landers' name for shrapnel. We had become ac- 
 customed to rifle bullets. When you hear the 
 zing of a spent bullet or the sharp crack of an 
 explosive, you know it has passed you. The one 
 that hits you, you never hear. At first we 
 dodged at the sound of a passing bullet, but soon 
 we came actually to believe the superstition that 
 a bullet would not hit a man unless it had on 
 it his regimental number and his name. Then, 
 too, a bullet leaves a clean wound, and a man 
 hit by it drops out quietly. The shrapnel makes 
 nasty, jagged, hideous wounds, the horrible recol- 
 
 66
 
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 Cr CO 
 
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 V 
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 3 
 
 re 
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 3" 
 
 t3 
 
 DO 
 
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 5' 
 
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 4(^'.
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 lection of whicli lingers for days in the minds 
 of those who see them. It is little wonder that 
 we preferred the firing line. 
 
 Every afternoon from just behind our line of 
 dugouts an aeroplane buzzed up. At the tre- 
 mendous height it looked like an immense blue- 
 bottle fly. We always knew when it was two 
 o'clock. Promptly at that hour every afternoon 
 it winged its way over us and beyond to the 
 Turkish trenches. At first the enemy's aero- 
 planes came out to meet ours, but a few en- 
 counters with our men soon convinced them of 
 the futility of such attempts. After that, they 
 relied on their artillery. In the air all around 
 the tiny speck we could see white puffs of smoke 
 that showed where their shrapnel was explod- 
 ing. Sometimes those puffs were perilously 
 close to it ; at such times our hearts were in our 
 mouths. Everybody in the trench craned his 
 neck to see. When our aeroplane manoeuvered 
 clear, you could hear a sigh of relief from every 
 man. 
 
 After about the eighth day in dugouts we were 
 ordered back to the firing line. We had to take 
 over a part of the trench near Anafarta Village. 
 In this vicinity the Fifth Norfolks, a company 
 
 69
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 formed of men from the King's estate at Sand- 
 ringbam, had charged into the woods, about two 
 hundred and fifty strong, and had been com- 
 pletely lost sight of. This was the most com- 
 fortable trench we had yet been in. It had been 
 taken over from the Turks, and when we faced 
 toward them we had to build another firing plat- 
 form. This left their firing platform for us to 
 sleep on. After the cramped, narrow trenches 
 of the first couple of weeks, this roomy trench 
 was very pleasant. On both sides of the trench 
 were some trees that threw a grateful shade in 
 the daytime. Along the edge grew little bushes 
 that bore luscious blackberries, but to attempt to 
 get them was courting death. Nevertheless, the 
 Newfoundlanders secured a good many. Best 
 of all though was the " Block House Well." For 
 the first time we had a plenitude of water. But 
 by this time conditions had begun to tell on the 
 men. Each morning more and more men re- 
 ported for sick parade. They were beginning to 
 feel the enervating effect of the climate, and of 
 the lack of water and proper food. While we 
 were intrenched near the block house, the men 
 were sickening so fast that in our platoon we 
 had not enough men to form the sentry groups. 
 
 70
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 The noncommissioned officers had to take their 
 place on the parapet, and the ordinary work of 
 the noncoms, changing sentries, waking reliefs, 
 and detailing working parties had to be done 
 by the commissioned officers. Just about an 
 hour before my turn to watch, I was suddenly 
 stricken by the fever that lurks on the Peninsula. 
 In the army, no man is sick unless so pronounced 
 by the medical officer. Each morning at nine 
 there is a sick parade. A man taken ill after 
 that has to wait until the next morning, and is 
 officially fit for duty. My turn came at eleven 
 o'clock at night. The man I was to relieve was 
 Frank Lind. He went on at nine. When eleven 
 o'clock came, I was burning up with fever. Lind 
 would not hear of my being roused to relieve him, 
 but continued on the parapet until one o'clock, 
 although in that part of the trench snipers had 
 been doing a lot of execution. Then he rested 
 for a couple of hours and at three o'clock re- 
 sumed his place on the parapet for the remainder 
 of the night. At daybreak he was still there. I 
 slept all through the night, exhausted by the 
 fever, and it was not till a few days after that 
 some one else told me what Lind had done. 
 From him I heard no mention of it. Whenever 
 
 71
 
 TKENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 somebody says that war serves only to bring out 
 the worst in a man I think of Frank Lind. The 
 fever that had weakened me so, continued all 
 that day. I reported for sick parade and was 
 given a day olf duty. The next day I was given 
 light duty, and the following day the fever left 
 me and that night I was fit for duty again, and 
 was sent out to a detached post about halfway 
 between us and the enemy. The detached post 
 was an abandoned house about twenty feet 
 square. All the doors and windows had been 
 torn out, and now it was nothing but the merest 
 skeleton of a house. We had been there about 
 three hours when there occurred something most 
 extraordinary and unaccountable. It was a 
 pitch dark night, and working parties were out 
 from both sides. Ordinarily there would have 
 been no firing. Suddenly from away on the 
 right where the Australians were, began the 
 sharp crackling of rapid fire. A boy pulling a 
 wooden stick along an iron park railing makes 
 almost the same sound. The crackling swept 
 down the line right past the trench directly be- 
 hind us and away on to the left. The Turks, 
 fearing an attack, replied. Between the two 
 
 72
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 fires we were caught. There were eight of us 
 in the blockhouse. Only two of us came from 
 No. 8 platoon, Art Pratt, my sandy-haired friend 
 of Aldershot days, and I. The sergeant in 
 charge was from another platoon. When the 
 rapid fire began, he became melodramatic. He 
 had the responsibility of seven other men's lives, 
 and the thing that seemed rather comic to us was 
 probably very serious to him. There was noth- 
 ing the matter, though, with the way in which he 
 handled the situation. There were eight open- 
 ings in the house for the missing doors and win- 
 dows. At each window^ he placed a man, and 
 stood at the door himself, then ordered us to fill 
 our magazines and fix our bayonets. But psy- 
 chologically he made a mistake. He turned to 
 me and said, 
 
 " Corporal, we 're in a pretty tight place. We 
 may have to sell our lives dearly. I want every 
 man to stand by me. Will you stand by me? " 
 
 When the thing had started I had just expe- 
 rienced a pleasant tingle of excitement, but at 
 this view of the situation I felt a little serious. 
 Before I had a chance to reply Art Pratt relieved 
 the situation by shouting, 
 
 73
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 "Did YOU say stand by you? I'll stand by 
 this window and I '11 bayonet the first damn Turk 
 I see." 
 
 There was a general laugh and the moment of 
 tension passed. In a few minutes the exchange 
 of rapid fire died down as suddenly as it had 
 started. The rest of the night passed unevent- 
 fully. Just before daybreak we returned to our 
 platoons. 
 
 We never found out the reason for the sudden 
 exchange of rapid fire. Some Australians away 
 on the right had started it. Everybody had 
 joined in, as the firing ran along the line of 
 trenches. As soon as the officers began an in- 
 vestigation it was stopped. 
 
 It seems to me that most of the time we were 
 in the blockhouse trench we spent our nights out 
 between the lines. Most of our work was done at 
 night. When we wished to advance our line, Ave 
 sent forward a platoon of men the desired dis- 
 tance. Every man carried with him three empty 
 sandbags and his intrenching tool. Temporary 
 protection is secured at short notice by having 
 every man dig a hole in the ground that is large 
 and deep enough to allow liim to lie flat in it. 
 The intrenching tool is a miniature pickax, one 
 
 74
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 end of which resembles a large bladed hoe with 
 a sharpened and tempered edge. The pick end 
 is used to loosen hard material and to break up 
 large lumps; the other end is used as a shovel 
 to throw up the dirt. When used in this fash- 
 ion the wooden handle is laid aside, the pick end 
 becomes a handle, and the intrenching tool is 
 used in the same manner as a trowel. The whole 
 instrument is not over a foot long, and is car- 
 ried in the equipment. 
 
 Lying on our stomachs, our rifles close at hand, 
 we dug furiously. First we loosened up enough 
 earth in front of our heads to fill a sandbag. 
 This sandbag we placed beside our heads on the 
 side nearest the enemy. Out in no man's land 
 with bullets from rifle and machine guns patter- 
 ing about us, we did fast work. As soon as we 
 had filled the second and third sandbags we 
 placed them on top of the first. In Gallipoli 
 every other military necessity was subordinated 
 to concealment. Often we could complete a 
 trench and occupy it before the enemy knew of 
 it. In the daytime our aeroplanes kept their 
 aerial observers from coming out to find any 
 work we had done during the night. Sometimes 
 while we were digging, the Turks surprised us 
 
 75
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 by sending up star shells. They burst like 
 rockets high overhead. Everything was out- 
 lined in a strange, uncanny light that gave the 
 effect of stage fire. At first, when a man saw a 
 star shell, he dropped flat on his face ; but after a 
 good many men had been riddled by bullets, we 
 saw our mistake. The sudden, blinding glare 
 makes it impossible to identify objects before the 
 light fades. Star shells show only movement. 
 The first stir between the lines becomes the tar- 
 get for both sides. So, after that, even when a 
 man was standing upright, he simply stood still. 
 After the block-house trench, our next move 
 was to a part of the firing line that I have never 
 been able to identify. It was very close to the 
 Turks, and in this spot we lost a large number 
 of men. From one point, a narrow sap or rough 
 trench ran out at right angles very close to the 
 Turkish position. It may have been twenty-five 
 or thirty yards away. To hold this sap was 
 very important ; if the Turks took it, it gave them 
 a commanding position. About twenty men 
 were in it all the time, four or five of them bomb 
 throwers. The men holding this sap at the time 
 we were there were the Irish, the Dublin Fusi- 
 
 76
 
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 TRENCHES 
 
 liers or, as we knew them, the Dubs. The Turks 
 made several attempts to take it, but were re- 
 pulsed. When our men were not on sentry duty, 
 several of them spent their rest hours out in this 
 sap, talking to the Dubs. The Dubs were inter- 
 esting talkers. They had been in the thing from 
 the beginning, and spoke of the landings with 
 laughter and a fierce joy of slaughter. 
 Most of them had been on the Western front 
 before coming to GalliiDoli. From the Turkish 
 trenches directly in front of this sap, the enemy 
 signaled the effect of our shots. They used the 
 same signals that we used in target practice, 
 waving a stick back and forth to indicate outers, 
 inners, magpies, and bull's-eyes. Whoever did 
 it, had a sense of humor; because as soon as he 
 became tired, he took down the stick for an in- 
 stant, then raised it again and waved it back 
 and forth derisively, with a large red German 
 sausage on the end of it. This did not seem to 
 bear out very well the tales that the enemy was 
 slowly starving to death. Prisoners who sur- 
 rendered from time to time told us that at any 
 moment the entire Turkish army might surren- 
 der, as they were very short of food. One thing 
 
 79
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 we did know: the Turks felt the lack of shoes; 
 out between the lines we found numbers of our 
 dead with the boots cut off. 
 
 While we were in this place the Turks dug to 
 within ten or twelve yards of us before they were 
 discovered. One of the Dublins saw them first. 
 He seized some bombs, and jumped out, shout- 
 ing, " Look at Johnny Turrk. Let 's bomb him 
 to hell out of it." But Johnny Turk was obsti- 
 nate; he stayed where he was in spite of our 
 bombs. One of our fellows, the big chap whom I 
 had heard at Aldershot complaining about being 
 asked for his name and number, had crawled into 
 the sap. He made his way through the smoke 
 and dirt to the end of the sap where only a few 
 yards separated him from the Turks. In one 
 item of armament the British beat the Turks. 
 We use bombs that explode three seconds after 
 they are thrown; the Turks' don't explode for 
 five seconds. The difference of only two seconds 
 seems slight, but that day in the sap-head it was 
 of great importance. For a short while the sup- 
 jjly of bombs for our side ran out. The man who 
 was trying to get the cover off a box of them 
 found dififlculty in doing it. The men in the sap- 
 head were without bombs. Meanwhile the Turks 
 
 80
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 kept up an uninterrupted throwing of bombs. 
 Most of tliem landed in the sap. The big New- 
 foundlander who had crawled out looking for 
 excitement found it. As soon as the supply of 
 bombs ran out, instead of getting back into 
 safety, he stood his ground. The first bomb that 
 came over dropped close to him. He was swear- 
 ing softly, and his face was glowing with pleas- 
 ure. He bent down coolly, picked up the bomb 
 and threw it back over the parapet at the Turks 
 w^ho had sent it. With our bombs he could not 
 have done it, but the extra two seconds were just 
 enough. Five or six of the bombs came in and 
 were treated in the same way, before our supply 
 was resumed. A brigade officer, who had come 
 out into the sap, stood gazing awe-struck at the 
 big Newfoundlander. Open-mouthed, with mon- 
 ocle in hand, the officer was the picture of amaze- 
 ment. At last he spoke, wdth that slow^, imper- 
 sonal English drawl : 
 
 " I say, my man, what is your name and num- 
 ber." 
 
 The look on the Newfoundlander's face was a 
 study. He knew he should not have come out 
 into that sap, and every time that question had 
 been shot at him before it had meant a repri- 
 
 81
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 mand. At last he shrugged his shoulders, then 
 with a resigned expression, answered the officer 
 in a fashion not entirely confined to Newfound- 
 landers — by asking a question: "What in hell 
 have I done now? " 
 
 Without a word the officer turned on his heel 
 and left the sap. The big fellow waited until 
 he felt the officer was well out of sight, then de- 
 parted for his proper place in the trench. One 
 of the Dubs looking after him, said to me : 
 
 " There 's a man that would have been recom- 
 mended for a Distinguished Conduct Medal if 
 he 'd answered that officer right." 
 
 That Irishman was a man of wide experience. 
 
 " I 've been seventeen years in the army, and 
 I 've been in every war that England fought in 
 that time," said he, " and I '11 tell you now, the 
 real Distinguished Conduct Medal men and the 
 real V. C. heroes never get them. They 're under 
 the ground." Coming from the man it did, this 
 expression of opinion was interesting, for he was 
 Cooke, the man who had been given a Distin- 
 guished Conduct Medal for his work on the West- 
 ern front. Since coming to the Peninsula he 
 had been acting as a sharpshooter, and had been 
 recommended for the V. C, the Victoria Cross, 
 
 82
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 whicli is the highest reward for valor in the Brit- 
 ish army. He was only waiting then, for word 
 to go to London, to get the cross pinned on by 
 the King, 
 
 " There 's one man on this Peninsula,'- contin- 
 ued Cooke, " who 's won the V. C. fifty times 
 over ; that 's the donkey-man." 
 
 The man Cooke meant was an Australian, a 
 stretcher-bearer. His real name was Simpson, 
 but nobody ever called him that. Because he 
 was of Irish descent, the Australians, who dearly 
 love nicknames, called him Murphy, or, Moriarty, 
 or Dooley, or whatever Irish name first occurred 
 to them. More generally, though, he was called 
 the Man with the Donkey, and by this name he 
 was known all over the Peninsula. In the early 
 days, the Anzacs had captured some booty from 
 the Turks and in it were some donkeys. It was 
 in the strenuous time when men lay in all sorts 
 of inaccessible places, dying and sorely wounded, 
 Simpson in those days seemed everywhere. As 
 soon as he heard of the capture he went down, 
 looked appraisingly over the donkeys, and com- 
 mandeered two of them. On one donkey he 
 painted F. A. No. 1, and on the other, F. A. No. 
 2 ; F. A. being his abbreviation for Field Ambu- 
 
 83
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 lance. Day and night after that Simpson could 
 be seen going about among the wounded, here giv- 
 ing a man first aid, there loosening the equip- 
 ment and making easier the last few minutes for 
 some poor fellow too far gone to need any medical 
 care. The wounded men who could not walk or 
 limp down to the dressing station he carried 
 down, one on each of the donkeys and one on his 
 back or in his arms. He talked to the donkeys as 
 they plodded slowly along, in a strange mixture 
 of English, Arabic profanity, and Australian 
 slang. Many an Australian or New Zealander 
 who has never heard of Simpson remembers 
 gratefully the attentions of a strangely gentle 
 man who drove before him two small gray don- 
 keys each of which carried a wounded soldier. 
 In Australia long after this war is over men will 
 thrill at the mention of the Man wdth the Don- 
 key. I agreed with Cooke that this man had won 
 the V. C. fifty times over. 
 
 Cooke was going out that night, he told me, 
 to stay for three or four days, sniping, between 
 the lines. As soon as he came back he expected 
 to go to London. 
 
 " Before I go out," he said, " I '11 show you a 
 
 84
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 good place where you can get a shot at Abdul 
 Pasha." 
 
 I followed Cooke out through the sap and up 
 the trench a little way to where it turned sharply 
 to avoid a large boulder. Just in front of this 
 boulder was some short, prickly underbrush. 
 Cooke parted the bushes cautiously with his 
 hand, and motioned me to come closer, I did 
 and through the opening he pointed out the en- 
 emy trench about four hundred yards away, and 
 about thirty yards in front of it a little clump of 
 bushes. 
 
 " Just in front of those bushes," said Cooke, 
 " there 's a sniper's dugout. Keep your eyes 
 open to-morrow and you ought to get some of 
 them." 
 
 I noted the place for the next day, and walked 
 down to the sap with Cooke. There I shook 
 hands with him, wished him good luck, and re- 
 turned to my platoon. 
 
 That night I had to go out on listening patrol 
 between the lines. At one o'clock my turn came. 
 An Irish sergeant came along the trench for me 
 to guide me out to the listening post. I went 
 with him a short distance along the trench, 
 
 85 
 
 ^
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 picked up four others, then with a shoulder from 
 a comrade, we got over the parapet. The listen- 
 ing post was about a hundred yards away. We 
 had gone only a few yards when we heard firing 
 coming from that direction, first one shot fol- 
 lowed by twenty or thirty in quick succession, 
 then silence. A man stumbled out of the dark- 
 ness immediately in front of us. He was pant- 
 ing and excited. It was a messenger from the 
 corporal that we were going to relieve. He had 
 been walking along without the least suspicion 
 of danger when he had run full tilt into a party 
 of fifteen or sixteen of the enemy. He had 
 dropped down immediately and yelled to one of 
 his men to go back to the trench with word. We 
 followed the panting messenger to the post. The 
 enemy had now disappeared. We opened rapid 
 fire in the direction in which they had gone. 
 Evidently it was right, for in a few seconds they 
 returned it, wounding one man. For about five 
 minutes we kept up firing, with what success we 
 could not tell, but at any rate we had the satis- 
 faction of driving off a superior force. Those 
 two hours straining through the darkness were 
 not particularly pleasant. I did not know what 
 moment or from what direction the enemy might 
 
 86
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 come, and I knew that if he did come it would be 
 in force. Apparently the whole thing was un- 
 planned, because during the remainder of my two 
 hours, although I peered unceasingly in all direc- 
 tions, I could see nothing, nor could I hear the 
 slightest sound. Evidently Johnny Turk was 
 willing to let well enough alone. That night 
 when I returned to the trench I was told that the 
 next night at dark we were to go into dugouts. 
 
 Ordinarily the thought of dugouts was dis- 
 tasteful, but it seemed years since I had taken 
 my boots off. Our platoon had lost heavily, 
 mostly from disease. All the novelty had worn 
 off the trench life. Instead of six noncoms, there 
 were only three. Each of us was doing the work 
 of two men. Our ration had been the eternal 
 bully beef, biscuit, and jam. Our cooks did their 
 best to make it palatable by cooking the beef in 
 stew with some desiccated vegetables, but these 
 were hard and tasteless. Most of us had got to 
 the stage where the very sight of jam made us 
 sick. That night, looking down through the ra- 
 vine, I saw, winking and blinking cheerfully, the 
 only light that brightened the Stygian darkness, 
 the Eed Cross of the hospital ships. I have won- 
 dered since if the entrance to heaven is illumi- 
 
 87
 
 tke:nching at gallipoli 
 
 nated with an electric Red Cross. There was not 
 a man in the whole battalion who was really fit. 
 Most of them had had a touch of one or more of 
 the prevalent diseases. 
 
 Stenlake, the young clergyman, who had been 
 my dugout mate, was scarcely able to drag him- 
 self about the trench. And by this time we had 
 the weather to contend with. It was nearing 
 the middle of October, and the rainy season 
 was almost upon us. Occasionally the sky dark- 
 ened up to a heavy grayness that seemed to cover 
 everything as Avith a pall. Following this came 
 heavy, sudden squalls that swept through the 
 trenches, drenching everything, and tearing 
 blankets and equipments w4th them. Although 
 the sun still continued to bore down unremit- 
 tingly in the daytime, the nights had become bit- 
 terly cold, and to the tropical diseases were 
 added rheumatism and pneumonia. On the men 
 from Newfoundland the climate was especially 
 telling. We had ceased to wonder at the crowd 
 of men who reported sick each morning, and 
 simply marveled that the number was not 
 greater. 
 
 All over the Peninsula disease had become 
 epidemic until the clearing stations and the 
 
 88
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 beaclies were choked with sick. The time we 
 should have been sleeping was spent in digging, 
 but still the men worked uncomplainingly. 
 Some, too game to quit, would not report to the 
 doctor, working on courageously until they 
 dropped, although down in the bay beckoned the 
 Red Cross of the hospital ship, with its assurance 
 of cleanliness, rest, and safety. By sickness and 
 snipers' bullets w^e were losing thirty men a day. 
 Nobody in the front line trenches or on the shell- 
 swept area behind ever expected to leave the 
 Peninsula alive. Their one hope was to get off 
 wounded. Every night men leaving the trenches 
 to bring up rations from the beach shook hands 
 wdth their comrades. From every ration party 
 of twenty men we always counted on losing two. 
 Those who were wounded were looked on as 
 lucky. The best thing we could wish a man was 
 a " cushy wound," one that would not prove fatal, 
 or a " Blighty one." But no one wanted to quit. 
 Men hung on till the last minute. Often it was 
 not till a man dropped exhausted that we learned 
 from his comrades that he had not eaten for 
 days. The only men in my platoon who seemed 
 to be nearly fit were Art Pratt, and a young chap 
 named Hayes. Art seemed to be enjoying the 
 
 89
 
 TEENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 life tliorougbly. He went about the trench, 
 cheerfully, grinning and whistling, putting heart 
 into the others. Whenever there was any spe- 
 cially dangerous work to be done. Art always vol- 
 unteered. He spent more time out between the 
 lines than in the trench. Whenever a specially 
 reliable, cool man was needed, Art was selected. 
 Young Hayes was a small chap who had been in 
 my platoon at Stob's Camp in Scotland. He had 
 made a record for being absent from parade, and 
 was always in trouble for minor offenses. I took 
 him in hand and did my best to keep him out of 
 trouble. Out in the trenches he remembered it, 
 and followed me around like a shadow. When- 
 ever I was sent in charge of a fatigue party he 
 always volunteered. The men all did their best 
 to make the work of the noncoms easy. As a 
 study in the effects of colonial discipline it would 
 have been enlightening for some of the English 
 officers. The men called their corporals and ser- 
 geants. Jack, or Bill, or Mac, but there never 
 was the slightest question about obeying an or- 
 der. Everybody knew that everybody else was 
 overworked and underfed, and every man tried 
 to give as little trouble as possible. Such con- 
 duct from the Newfoundlanders was astonishing, 
 
 90
 
 TRENCHES 
 
 as in training tliey simply loved to make trouble 
 for the noncoms, and the most unenviable job in 
 the regiment was that of corporal or sergeant. 
 Such were the conditions the next afternoon 
 when we moved from the firing trench to rest near 
 some dugouts that had been forsaken by the 
 Royal Scots. They had been relieved, some said, 
 to go to the island of Imbros, about fifteen miles 
 away, for a rest. At Imbros, rumor said, you 
 could buy, in the canteen, eggs and butter, and 
 other heavenly things that we had almost forgot- 
 ten the taste of. At Imbros, too, you were free 
 from shell fire, and drilled every day just as you 
 did in training. It was whispered, too, but 
 scornfully discredited, that Imbros boasted 
 shower baths, and ovens for the disinfecting of 
 clothing. Others claimed that the Royal Scots 
 had been withdrawn from the Peninsula and 
 were going to the Western front. They were the 
 first regiment to leave of the Twenty-ninth Di- 
 vision. The whole division was to be withdrawn 
 gradually. The Tw^enty-ninth w^as our division, 
 and we were to go with it to England. We were 
 to winter in Scotland and after we had been 
 recruited up to full strength were to go to France 
 in the spring. An examination of the empty 
 
 91
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 dugouts strengthened this belief. Blankets, rub- 
 ber sheets, belts, pieces of equipment, and even 
 overcoats were lying around. In one of the dug- 
 outs I found a copy of the Odyssey, and half a 
 dozen other books. A few dugouts away I came 
 upon one of our fellows gazing regretfully upon 
 an empty whisky bottle. As I approached him, 
 I overheard him murmur abstractedly, " My fa- 
 vorite brand too, my favorite brand." I passed 
 on without interrupting him. It was too sacred 
 a moment. 
 
 92
 
 CHAPTER ly 
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 THE afternoon sun poured down steadily on 
 little groups of men preparing dugouts for 
 habitation. I had a good many details to attend 
 to before I could look about for a suitable place 
 for a dugout. Men had to be told off for differ- 
 ent fatigues. Men for pick and shovel work 
 that night were placed in sections so that each 
 group would get as much sleep as possible. All 
 the available dugouts had been taken up by the 
 first comers. The location here was particu- 
 larly well suited for dugouts. A mule path to 
 the beach ran along the bottom of a narrow ra- 
 vine. On one side of the path the ground 
 shelved gradually up till it merged into a plain, 
 covered with long grass, overgrown and neg- 
 lected. On the other side, a ridge sloped up 
 sharply and formed a natural protection before 
 it also merged into a " gorse " covered plateau. 
 Small evergreen bushes served the double pur- 
 pose of hiding our movements from the enemy 
 
 93
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 and affording some shade from the broiling sun. 
 At the foot of the ridge we made our line of 
 dugouts. The angle of the ridge was so steep 
 that an enemy shell could not possibly drop on 
 our dugouts. A little further away some of A 
 Company's dugouts were in the danger zone. 
 After much hunting, I found a likely looking 
 place. It was about seven feet square, and where 
 I planned to put the head of my dugout a large 
 boulder squatted. It was so eminently suitable 
 that I wondered that no one else had preempted 
 it. I took off my equipment, threw my coat on 
 the ground, and began digging. It was soft 
 ground and gave easily. 
 
 A short distance away, I could see Art Pratt, 
 digging. He was finding it hard work to make 
 any impression. He saw me, stopped to mop 
 his brow, and grinned cheerfully. 
 
 " You should take soft ground like this, Art," 
 I yelled. 
 
 " I 've gone so far now," said Art, " that it 's 
 too late to change," and we resumed our work. 
 
 After a few more minutes' digging, my pick 
 struck something that felt like the root of a tree, 
 but I knew there was no tree on that God-for- 
 saken spot large enough to send out big roots. 
 
 94
 
 Washing day in war-time
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 I disentangled the pick and dug a little more, 
 only to find the same obstruction. I took my 
 small intrenching tool, scraped away the dirt I 
 had dug, and began cleaning away near the base 
 of a big boulder. There were no roots there, 
 and gradually I worked away from it. I took 
 my pick again, and at the first blow it stuck. 
 Without trying to disengage it I began straining 
 at it. In a few seconds it began to give, and I 
 withdrew it. Clinging to it was part of a Turk- 
 ish uniform, from which dangled and rattled the 
 dried-up bones of a skeleton. Nauseated, I hur- 
 riedly filled in the place, and threw myself on 
 the ground, physically sick. While I was lying 
 there one of our men came along, searching for 
 a place to bestow himself. He gazed inquir- 
 ingly at the ground I had just filled in. 
 
 "Is there anybody here?" he asked me, in- 
 dicating the place with a pick-ax. 
 
 " Yes," I said, with feeling, " there is." 
 
 " It looks to me," he said, " as if some one be- 
 gan digging and then found a better place. If 
 he don't come back soon I '11 take it." 
 
 For about fifteen minutes he stood there, and 
 I lay regarding him silently. At last he spoke 
 again. 
 
 97
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 " I think I '11 go ahead," he said. " Possession 
 is nine points of the law, and the fellow has n't 
 been here to claim it." 
 
 " I would n't if I were you," I said. " That 
 fellow 's been there a hell of a long while." 
 
 I left him there digging, and crawled away to 
 a safe distance. In a few minutes he passed me. 
 
 " Why did n't you tell me? " he demanded, re- 
 proachfully. 
 
 " Because half of the company saw me digging 
 there and did n't tell me," I said. 
 
 I was prospecting around for another place 
 when Art Pratt hailed me. " Why don't you 
 come with me," he said, " instead of digging an- 
 other place? " 
 
 I went to where he was and looked at the 
 dugout. It was n't very wide, and I said so. 
 Together we began widening and deepening the 
 dugout, until it was big enough for the two of 
 us. It was grueling work, but by supper time 
 it was done. The night before, a fatigue party 
 had gone down to the beach and hauled up a big 
 field kitchen. Our cooks had made some tea, 
 and we had been issued some loaves of bread. 
 Art unrolled a large piece of cloth, with all the 
 pomp and ceremony of a man unveiling a mouu- 
 
 98
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 ment. He did it slowly and carefully. There 
 was a glitter in his eyes that one associates with 
 an artist exhibiting his masterpiece. He gave 
 a triumphant switch to the last fold and held 
 toward me a large joiece of fresh juicy steak. 
 
 " Beefsteak ! " I gasped. " Sacred beefsteak ! 
 Where did you get it?" 
 
 Art leaned toward me mysteriously. " Of- 
 ficers' mess/' he whispered. 
 
 " I 've got salt and pepper," I said, " but how 
 are you going to cook it ? " 
 
 " I don't know," said Art, '' but I 'm going up 
 to the field kitchen ; there 's some condensed milk 
 that I may be able to get hold of to spread on our 
 bread." 
 
 While Art was gone, I strolled down the ra- 
 vine a little way to where some of the Royal En- 
 gineers were quartered. The Eoyal Engineers 
 are the men who are looked on in training as a 
 noncombatant force, with safe jobs. In war- 
 time they do no fighting, but their safe jobs con- 
 sist of such harmless work as fixing up barbed 
 wire in front of the parapet and setting mines 
 under the enemy's trenches. For a rest they are 
 allowed to conduct parties to listening posts and 
 to give the lines for advance saps. Sometimes 
 
 99
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 thej make loopholes in the parapet, or bolster 
 up some redoubt that is being shelled to pieces. 
 The Turks were sending over their compliments 
 just as I came abreast of the Engineers' lines. 
 One of the engineers was sifting some gravel 
 w^hen the first shell landed. He dropped the 
 sieve, and turned a back somersault into some 
 gorse-bushes just behind him. The sieve rolled 
 down, swayed from side to side, and settled close 
 to my head, in the depression where I was con- 
 scientiously emulating an ostrich. I gathered 
 it to my bosom tenderly and began crawling 
 away. From behind a boulder I heard the engi- 
 neer bemoaning to an officer the loss of his sieve, 
 and he described in detail how a huge shell had 
 blown it out of his hands. Joyfully I returned 
 to Art with my prize. 
 
 " What 's that for? " said Art. 
 
 " Turn it upside down," I said, " and it 's a 
 steak broiler." 
 
 " Where did you get it? " said Art, 
 
 I told him, and related how the engineer had 
 explained it to his officer. 
 
 Up at the field kitchen a group was standing 
 around. 
 
 " What 's the excitement? " I asked Art. 
 
 100
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 " Those fellows are a crowd of thieves," an- 
 swered Art, virtuously. " They 're looking about 
 to see what they can steal. I was up there a few 
 minutes ago and saw a can of condensed milk 
 lying on the shaft of the field kitchen. They 
 were watching me too closely to give me a chance, 
 but you might be able to get away with it." 
 
 The two of us strolled up slowly to where Hebe 
 Wheeler, the creative artist who did our cooking, 
 was holding forth to a critical audience. 
 
 " It 's all very well to talk about giving you 
 things to eat, but I can't cook pancakes without 
 baking powder. You can't get blood out of a 
 turnip. I 'd give you the stuff if I got it to cook, 
 but I don't get it, do I, Corporal? " said Hebe, ap- 
 pealing to me. 
 
 I moved over and stood wath my back to the 
 shaft on which rested the tin of condensed milk. 
 
 " No, Hebe," I said, " you don't get the things ; 
 and when you do get them, this crowd steals them 
 on you." 
 
 " By God," said Hebe, " that 's got to be put 
 a stop to. I '11 report the next man I find steal- 
 ing anything from the cookhouse." 
 
 I put my hand cautiously behind my back, un- 
 til I felt my fingers close on the tin of milk. 
 
 101
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 " You let me know, Hebe," I said, as I slipped the 
 tin into the roomy pocket of my riding breeches, 
 " and I '11 make out a crime sheet against the 
 first man whose name you give." I stayed about 
 ten minutes longer talking to Hebe, and then 
 returned to my dugout. Art had finished broil- 
 ing the piece of steak, and we began our supper. 
 I put my hand in my breeches' pocket to get the 
 milk. Instead of grasping the tin, my fingers 
 closed on a sticky, gluey mass. The tin had been 
 opened when I took it and I had it in my pocket 
 upside down. About half of it had oozed over 
 my pocket. Art was just pouring the remainder 
 on some bread when some one lifted the rubber 
 sheet and stuck his head into our dugout. It 
 was the enraged Hebe Wheeler. As soon as he 
 had missed his precious milk he had made a 
 thorough investigation of all the dugouts. He 
 looked at Art accusingly, 
 
 " Come in, Hebe," I said pleasantly. " We 
 don't see you very often." 
 
 Hebe paid no attention to my invitation, but 
 glared at Art. 
 
 " I 've caught you with the goods on," he said. 
 " Give me back that milk, or I '11 report you to 
 the platoon officer." 
 
 102
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 " You can report me to Lord Kitchener if you 
 like," said Art, calmly, as he drained the can; 
 " but this milk stays right here." 
 
 Hebe disappeared, breathing vengeance. 
 
 After supper that night a crowd sat around the 
 dying embers of one of the fires. This was one 
 of the first positions we had been in where there 
 w^as cover suflficient to warrant fires being 
 lighted. A mail had been distributed that day, 
 and the men exchanged items of news and 
 swapped gossip. There were men there from all 
 parts of Newfoundland. They spoke in at least 
 thirty different accents. Any one who made a 
 study of it could tell easily from each man's ac- 
 cent the district he came from. Much of the 
 mail was intimate, and necessitated private peru- 
 sal, but much more was of interest to others. 
 It was interesting to hear a man yell to a friend 
 who came from his same " bay " that another 
 man had enlisted from Eobinson's, making up 
 eighteen of the nineteen men of fighting age in 
 the place. Sometimes the new^s was that " Half 
 has volunteered, and Hed was turned down by 
 the doctor." 
 
 This from some resident of the northern parts 
 where the fog is not, and where aspirates are of 
 
 103
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 little consequence. This news gives rise to the 
 opinion that "that's the hend o' Half." This 
 with much discussion and ominous shaking of 
 the head. Sometimes a friend of the absent 
 " Half " would tell of Half's exploit of stealing 
 a trolley from the Reid Newfoundland Railway 
 Company and going twenty miles to see a girl. 
 Sometimes the hero was a married man. Then 
 it was opined that his conjugal relations w^ere 
 not happy, and the reason he enlisted was that 
 "he had heard something." All these opinions 
 and suggestions were voiced with that beautiful 
 freedom from restraint so characteristic of the 
 ordinary conversation of the members of our reg- 
 iment. Much was made of the arrival of a mail. 
 It did not happen often, and the letters that came 
 were three or four months old. " As cold wa- 
 ters to a thirsty soul," says Solomon, " so is good 
 news from a far country." The Newfoundland- 
 ers in that barren, scorched country caught eag- 
 erly at every shred of news from that distant 
 Northern country that they loved enough to risk 
 their lives for. With such a setting it is little 
 wonder that tlie talk was much of home. Be- 
 hind the persiflage of the talk there was a poign- 
 ant longing for those dark, cool forests of pine 
 
 104
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 where the caribou roam, and the broad-bosomed 
 lakes and rivers that were the highways for the 
 monsters of the Northern forests on their jour- 
 ney to the mills. The lumbermen of Notre Dame 
 Bay and Green Bay told fearsome and wondrous 
 tales of driving and swamping, of teaming and 
 landing, until one almost heard the blows of the 
 ax, the " gee " and " haw " of the teamsters, and 
 smelt the pungent odor of new-cut pine. The 
 Reid Newfoundland Railway, the single narrow 
 gage road that twists a picturesque trail across 
 the Island, had given largely of its personnel to- 
 ward the making of the regiment. Firemen and 
 engineers, brakemen and conductors, talked 
 reminiscently of forced runs to catch expresses 
 with freight and accommodation trains. There 
 is an interesting tale of two drivers who blew 
 their whistles in the Morse code, and kept up 
 communication with each other, until a girl 
 learned the code and broke up the friendship. 
 A steamship fireman contributed his quota with 
 a story of laboring through mountainous seas 
 against furious tides when the stokers' utmost 
 efforts served only to keep steamers from losing 
 way. By comparison with the homeland, Tur- 
 key suffered much; and the things they said 
 
 105
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 about Gallipoli were lamentable. From the 
 gloom on the other side of the fire a voice chanted 
 softly, " It 's a long, long way to Tipperary, It 's 
 a long way to go." Gradually all joined in. 
 After Tijjperary, came many marching songs. 
 "Are we downhearted? NO," with every one 
 booming out the " No." " Boys in Khaki, Boys 
 in Blue," and at last their own song; to the tune 
 of " There is a tavern in the town." 
 
 And when those Newfoundlanders start to yell, start to yell, 
 Oh, Kaiser Bill, you '11 wish you were iu hell, were in hell ; 
 For they '11 hang you high to your Potsdam palace wall, 
 You 're a damn poor Kaiser, after all. 
 
 The singing died down slowly. The talk turned 
 to the trenches and the chances of victory, and 
 by degrees to personal impressions. 
 
 " I 'd like to know," said one chap, " why we 
 all enlisted." 
 
 " When I enlisted," said a man with an 
 accent reminiscent of the Placentia Bay, " I 
 thought there 'd be lots of fun, but with weather 
 like this, and nothing fit to eat, there 's not much 
 poetry or romance in war any more." 
 
 " Right for you, my son," said another ; " your 
 King and Country need you, but the trouble is 
 to make your King and Country feed you." 
 
 106
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 " Don't you wish you were in London now, 
 Gal?" said one cliap, turning to me. "You'd 
 have a nice bed to sleep in, and could eat any- 
 where you liked." 
 
 " Well," I said, " enough people tried to per- 
 suade me to stop. One fellow told me that the 
 more brains a man had, the farther away he was 
 from the firing-line. He 'd been to the front too. 
 I think," I added, " that General Sherman had 
 the right idea." 
 
 " I wish you fellows would shut up and go to 
 sleep," said a querulous voice from a nearby dug- 
 out. 
 
 " You don't know what you 're talking about. 
 Gal; General Sherman was an optimist." 
 
 " It does n't do any good to talk about it now," 
 said Art Pratt, in a matter of fact voice. " Some 
 of you enlisted so full of love of country that 
 there was patriotism running down your chin, 
 and some of you enlisted because you w^ere dis- 
 appointed in love, but the most of you enlisted 
 for love of adventure, and you 're getting it." 
 
 Again the querulous subterranean voice inter- 
 rupted : " Go to sleep, you fellows — there 's 
 none of you knows what you 're talking about. 
 There 's only one reason any of us enlisted, and 
 
 107
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 that 's pure, low down, unmitigated ignorance." 
 Amid general laughter the class in applied psy- 
 chology broke up, and distributed themselves in 
 their various dugouts. 
 
 Halfway down to my dugout, I was arrested 
 by the sound of scuffling, much blowing and puff- 
 ing, and finally the satisfied grunt that I knew 
 proceeded from Hebe Wheeler. 
 
 " I 've got a spy," he yelled. " Here 's a bloody 
 Turk." 
 
 " Turk nothing," said a disgusted voice. 
 " Don't you know a man from your own com- 
 pany?" 
 
 Hebe relinquished his hold on his captive and 
 subsided, grumbling. The other arose, shook 
 himself, and went his way, voicing his opinion 
 of people who built their dugouts flush with the 
 ground. 
 
 " What do you think of the news from the 
 Western front? " said Art, when I located him. 
 
 "What is it? "I asked. 
 
 " The enemy are on the run at the Western 
 front. The British have taken four lines of Ger- 
 man trenches for a distance of over five miles in 
 the vicinity of Loos. The bulletin board at 
 
 108
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 Brigade headquarters says that they have cap- 
 tured several large guns, a number of machine 
 guns, and seventeen thousand unwounded 
 prisoners. If they can keep this up long enough 
 for the Turks to realize that it is hopeless to ex- 
 pect any help from that quarter, Abdul Pasha 
 will soon give in." 
 
 We were talking about Abdul Pasha's sur- 
 rendering when we dropped off to sleep. We 
 must have been asleep about two hours when the 
 insistent, crackling sound of rapid fire, momen- 
 tarily increasing in volume, brought us to our 
 feet. Away up on the right, where the Austra- 
 lians were, the sky was a red glare from the flash- 
 ing of many rifles. Against this, we could see 
 the occasional flare of different colored rockets 
 that gave the warships their signals for shelling. 
 Very soon one of our officers appeared. 
 
 " Stand to arms for the Newfoundlanders," he 
 said. 
 
 "What is it?" I asked. 
 
 *' The Australians are advancing," he an- 
 swered. " We '11 go up as reinforcements if 
 we 're needed. Tell your men to put on their 
 ammunition belts, and have their rifles ready. 
 
 109
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 They need n't put on their packs ; but keep them 
 near them so that they can slip them on if we 
 get the order to move away." 
 
 I went about among the men of my section, 
 passing along the word. Everybody was tin- 
 gling with excitement. Nobody kncAV just what 
 was about to happen ; but every one thought that 
 whatever it was it would prove interesting. For 
 about half an hour the rapid fire kept up, then by 
 degrees died down. 
 
 " Did you see that last rocket? " said a man 
 near me ; " that means they 've done it. A red 
 rocket means that the navy is to fire, a green to 
 continue firing, and a white one means that 
 we 've won.'' 
 
 In a few minutes Mr. Nunns walked toward 
 us. " You can put your equipments off, and turn 
 in again," he said, " nothing doing to-night." 
 
 " What is all the excitement? " I asked. 
 
 " Oh, it 's the Anzacs again," he said ; " when 
 they heard of the advance at Loos, they went over 
 across, and surprised the Turks. They 've taken 
 two lines of trenches. They did it without any 
 orders — just wanted to celebrate the good 
 news.'' 
 
 I was awakened the next morning by the sound 
 
 110
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 of a whizz-bang flying over our dugout. Johnny 
 Turk was sending us his best respects. I shook 
 Art, who was sleeping heavily. 
 
 " Get up, Art," I said. I might as well have 
 spoken to a stone wall. I tried again. Putting 
 my mouth to his ear, I shouted, " Stand to. Art. 
 Stand to." 
 
 Art turned over, sleeping. " I '11 stand three 
 if you like, but don't disturb me," he muttered, 
 and relapsed into coma. 
 
 In a few minutes, two or three more shells 
 came along. They were well over the ridge be- 
 hind us, but were landing almost in the midst of 
 another line of dugouts. I stood gazing at them 
 for a little while. A man passed me running 
 madly. " Come on," he gasped, " and yell for 
 the stretcher." I followed him without further 
 question. " It 's all right," he said, slowing up 
 just before we came to the line of dugouts that 
 had just been shelled. " Thej 've got him all 
 right." We continued toward a group that 
 crowded about a stretcher. A man was lying on 
 it, with his head raised on a haversack. He 
 rolled his eyes slowly and surveyed the group. 
 " What the hell is the matter? " he said dazedly; 
 then felt himself over gingerly for wounds. Ap- 
 
 111
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 parently lie could find none. " What hit me? '* 
 he asked, appealing to a grinning Red Cross man. 
 
 " Nothing," said the other, " except about a 
 ton of earth. It 's a lucky thing some one saw 
 you. That last shell buried you alive." 
 
 The whistle of a coming shell dispersed the 
 grinning spectators. I went back to my dugout, 
 and found Art busily toasting some bread over 
 the sieve that I had commandeered the day before. 
 
 " What was the excitement? " he asked. 
 
 " Charlie Renouf," I said, " was buried alive.'' 
 
 " Heavens," said Art, " he 's the postman ; we 
 can't afford to lose him. That reminds me that 
 I 've got to write some letters." 
 
 After we had finished breakfast, Art produced 
 some writing paper and an indelible pencil. I 
 did not have any writing paper, but I contributed 
 a supply of service postcards, that bear such 
 meager information as " I am quite well," " I am 
 sick," " I am wounded," " I am in hospital and 
 doing well," " I am in hospital and expect to be 
 discharged soon," " I have not heard from you 
 for a long time," " I have had no letter from you 
 
 since ," " I have your letter of ," " I 
 
 have received your parcel of ," and a space 
 
 for the date and the signature. When a man 
 
 112
 
 3 
 <J1 
 
 V 
 
 ja 
 o 
 a 
 
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 DUGOUTS 
 
 writes home from the front, he crosses out all 
 but the sentences he wants read, puts in the date, 
 and adds his signature. This is the ordinary 
 means of communication. About once a week a 
 man is allowed to write some letters; but these 
 are censored by his platoon officer, who seals 
 them, and signs his name as a record of their 
 having been passed by him. Sometimes the cen- 
 sor at the base opens a few of them. Perhaps 
 once a fortnight a few privileged characters are 
 given large blue envelopes, that have printed in 
 the corner: 
 
 Note. — 
 Correspondence in this envelope need not be censored 
 
 Regimentally. The contents are liable to examination at 
 
 the Base. 
 
 The following Certificate must be signed by the writer : 
 / certify on my honour that the contents of this envelope 
 
 refer to nothng but private and family matters. 
 
 Signature 
 
 (Name only) 
 
 While we were writing, the orderly sergeant, 
 that dread of loafers, who appoints all details 
 for fatigue work, bore down upon our dugout. 
 " Two men from you. Corporal Gallishaw," he 
 said, " for bomb throwers. Give me their names 
 as soon as you can. They 're for practice this 
 afternoon." 
 
 115
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 " One here, right away," said Art, " and put 
 Lew O'Dea down for the other." 
 
 Lew O'Dea was a character. He was in the 
 next dugout to me. The first day on the Penin- 
 sula, his rifle had stuck full of sand, and some 
 one had stolen his tin canteen for cooking food. 
 He immediately formed himself into an anti- 
 poverty society of one thereafter, and went 
 around like a walking arsenal. I never saw him 
 with fewer than three rifles, usually he carried 
 half a dozen. He always kept two or three of 
 them spotlessly clean; so that no matter when 
 rifle inspection came, he always had at least one 
 to show. He had been a little late in getting his 
 rifle clean once and was determined not to be 
 caught any more. His equipment always con- 
 tained a varied assortment of canteens, seven or 
 eight gas masks, and his dugout was luxurious 
 with rubber sheets and blankets. " I inherited 
 them," he always answered, whenever anybody 
 questioned him about them. With ammunition 
 for his several rifles, when he started for the 
 trenches in full marching order, he carried a load 
 that a mule need by no means have been ashamed 
 of. 
 
 " Do you want to go on bomb throwing detail 
 
 116
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 this afternoon? " I called to O'Dea across the top 
 of the dugout. 
 
 " Sure," he answered ; " does a swim want to 
 duck?" 
 
 " Fine," I said ; " report here at two o'clock." 
 At two o'clock, accompanied by an offlcer and 
 a sergeant, we went down the road a little way 
 to where some Australians were conducting a 
 class in bomb throwing. A brown-faced chap 
 from Sydney showed me the difference between 
 bombs that you explode by lighting a match, 
 bombs that are started by pulling out a plug, 
 and the dinky little three-second " cricket balls " 
 that explode by pressing a spring. I asked him 
 about the attack the night before. He told me 
 that they had been for some time waiting for 
 a chance to make a local advance that would 
 capture an important redoubt in the Turkish 
 line. Every night at exactly nine o'clock, the 
 Navy had thrown a searchlight on the part 
 of the line the Anzacs wanted to capture. For 
 ten minutes they kept up heavy firing. Then, 
 after a ten minutes' interval of darkness and 
 suspended firing, they began a second illumina- 
 tion and bombardment, commencing always at 
 twenty minutes past nine, and ending precisely 
 
 117
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 at half past. After a little while, the enemy, 
 knowing just the exact minute the bombardment 
 was to begin, took the first beam of the search- 
 light as a hint to clear out. But the night before, 
 a crowd of eager Australians had crept softly 
 along in the shadow made doubly dark by the 
 glare of the searchlight, the noise of their advance 
 covered by the sound of the bombardment. As 
 soon as the bombardment ceased and the search- 
 light's beam was succeeded by darkness, they 
 poured into the Turkish position. They had taken 
 the astonished Turks completely by surprise. 
 
 " We did n't expect to make the attack for an- 
 other week," said the Australian ; " but as soon 
 as our boys heard that we w^ere winning in 
 France, they thought they 'd better start some- 
 thing. There has n't been any excitement over 
 our way now for a long time," he said. " I 'm 
 about fed up on this waiting around the 
 trenches." He fingered one of the little cricket- 
 ball bombs caressingly. " Think of it," he said ; 
 " all you do is press that little spring, and three 
 seconds after you 're a casualty." 
 
 " Pressing that little spring," said I, " is my 
 idea of nothing to do, unless you 're a particu- 
 larly fast sprinter." 
 
 118
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 '' By the Lord Harry, Newfoundland," said 
 the Australian, with a peculiar, excited glint in 
 his eye, " that 's an inspiration." 
 
 "What's an inspiration?" I asked, in bewil- 
 derment. 
 
 The Australian stretched himself on the 
 ground beside me, resting his chin in his cupped 
 hands. " When I was in Sydney," he said 
 slowly and thoughtfully, " I did a hundred yards 
 in ten seconds easily. Now if I can get in a 
 traverse that 's only eight or nine yards long, and 
 press the spring of one of those little cricket 
 balls, I ought to be able to get out on the other 
 side of the traverse before it explodes." 
 
 Art and Lew O'Dea passed along just then and 
 I jumped up to go with them. " Don't forget to 
 look for me if you 're over around the Fifteenth 
 Australians," said the Australian. "Ask for 
 White George." 
 
 " I won't forget," I said, as I hurried away to 
 join the others. 
 
 We were about half way to our dugouts when 
 we passed a string of our men carrying about 
 twenty mail bags. It was the second instalment 
 of a lot of mail that had been landed the day be- 
 fore. We followed the sweating carriers up the 
 
 119
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 road to the quarter-master sergeant's dugout, 
 and waited around humbly while that autocrat 
 leisurely sorted out the mail, making remarks 
 about each letter and waiting after each remark 
 for the applause he felt it deserved. With mad- 
 dening deliberation he scanned each address. 
 " Corporal W. P. Costello." '' He 's at the base," 
 some one answered. Corporal Costello's letter 
 was put aside. " Private George Butler." 
 Private Butler, on the edge of the crowd, pushed 
 and elbowed his way toward the quarter-master 
 sergeant. "Here you are; letter for Butler." 
 The august Q. M. S. placed the letter beside his 
 elbow. " Wait till the lot 's sorted, and you '11 
 get them all together." Private Butler, with ill- 
 restrained impatience, resumed his place on the 
 outside. After the letters, the parcels had to be 
 sorted. Some enterprising person at the base 
 had opened a lot of them. One fellow received 
 a large box of cigarettes that he would have en- 
 joyed smoking if the man at the base had not 
 seen them first. Art Pratt drew a lot of mail, 
 including a parcel, intact except for the contents. 
 A diligent search in a box a foot square failed to 
 locate anything more than a pair of socks, which 
 Art presented to me with his compliments. 
 
 120
 
 DUGOUTS 
 
 Some papers, two months old, with some casualty 
 lists of the First Newfoundland Regiment, had 
 no address; the wrapper had gone before, some- 
 where between Newfoundland and the Darda- 
 nelles. Everybody claimed the papers. Vari- 
 ous proofs were offered to show the ownership. 
 One fellow knew by the way they were rolled 
 up that they were from his family. Another, 
 more original than the rest, was certain they 
 were his, because he had written for papers of 
 those dates, in order to see the announcement 
 of the casualty of a friend. It was pointed out 
 derisively that a letter written after that cas- 
 ualty had occurred would only then have reached 
 Newfoundland; and to get a lot of papers in 
 reply would be a physical impossibility. The 
 claimant, in no wise abashed, suggested that lots 
 be drawn. This was pooh-poohed. At last, to 
 avoid discussion, the quarter-master sergeant 
 took the papers himself, and put them in his 
 greatcoat. " I '11 distribute them after I 've 
 read them," he announced, and pulled the rubber 
 sheet across the top of his dugout, as a delicate 
 hint that the interview was finished. The crowd 
 slowly melted away. I received one letter, and 
 was sitting on the edge of my dugout reading it 
 
 121
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 when one of our men passing along, yelled to 
 me. " Hey," lie said, " you come from the 
 United States, don't you?" 
 
 " Yes," I said ; " what do you want to know 
 that for? " 
 
 " I 've got something here," he said, stopping, 
 " that comes from there too." He dived into his 
 pocket, and produced a medley of articles. 
 From these he selected a small paper-wrapped 
 parcel. 
 
 "What's that? "I said. 
 
 " It 's chewing gum," he answered ; " real 
 American chewing gum like the girls chew in 
 the subway in New York." He unwrapped it, 
 selected a piece, placed it in his mouth, and began 
 chewing it with elaborated enjoyment. After a 
 few minutes, he came nearer. " By golly," he 
 said, with an exaggerated nasal drawl, " it 's 
 good gum, I '11 soon begin to feel like a bloom- 
 ing Yank. I 'm talking like a Yank already. 
 Don't you wish you had some of this? " 
 
 " I '11 make you a sporting offer," I answered. 
 " I '11 fight you for the rest of what you 've got." 
 
 " No, you won't," he answered nasally ; " it 's 
 made me feel exactly like a Yank ; I 'm too proud 
 to fight." 
 
 122
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 WAITING FOR THE WAR TO CEASE 
 
 WE were still in dugouts when Art Pratt 
 woke me one morning with a vicious kick, 
 to show me my boots lying outside of the dugout, 
 filled with rain water. All the night before it 
 had poured steadily, but now it was clearing 
 nicely. The Island of Imbros, fifteen miles 
 away, that seemed to draw a great deal nearer 
 before every rainstorm, had retreated to its nor- 
 mal position. The sky was still gray, but it was 
 the leaden gray of a Turkish autumn day. From 
 Suvla Bay the wind blew keen and piercing. I 
 salved the boots from the rain puddle, emptied 
 them, dried them out as best I could with my 
 puttees, and put them on. Art, in his own 
 inimitable way, said unprintable things about a 
 rifle that had been left outside, and that now 
 necessitated laborious cleaning, in time for rifle 
 inspection. All through breakfast, Lew O'Dea 
 elaborated on the much-quoted remarks of the 
 
 123
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 Governor of North Carolina to the Governor of 
 South Carolina. Rum had not been issued as 
 per schedule the evening before. Art began a 
 maliciously fabricated story of a conversation he 
 had heard in which a senior oflBcer had stated 
 that now that the cold weather had come, there 
 would be no more rum. Just then, some one 
 shouted, to " Look up in the sky," From the 
 direction of the trenches a dark cloud was com- 
 ing rapidly toward us. (A few nights before, 
 while we were in trenches, w^e had been ordered 
 to put on our gas masks; for, a little to the 
 right of us, the Turks had turned the poison gas 
 on the Gurkhas. ) At first, the dark mass in the 
 sky appeared to some to be poison gas. They 
 immediately dived for their gas masks. As it 
 came nearer, however, we were able to distin- 
 guish that it was not a cloud, but a huge flock 
 of wild geese, beginning their southern migra- 
 tion. O'Dea selected a rifle from his collection, 
 loaded it, and waited till the geese were almost 
 directly overhead; then, amid derisive cheering, 
 he fired ten rounds at them. They were much 
 too high in air for a successful shot, even if he 
 had used gunshot; but even after they were al- 
 most over Imbros Island, Lew continued firing. 
 
 124
 
 WAITING 
 
 When an officer, arrived, demanding sarcasti- 
 cally if Lew O'Dea would n't sooner send some 
 written invitations to the Turks to shell us, he 
 subsided, and began cleaning his artillery. Un- 
 til then, we had been wearing thin khaki duck 
 uniforms with short pants that made us look 
 like boy scouts. We had found these rather cool 
 at night ; but in the hot days w^e preferred them 
 to the heavy khaki drill uniforms that w^ere kept 
 in kit bags at the beach. I had landed without 
 a kit bag, and the change of uniform I kept in 
 the pack I carried on my back. A little while 
 before, I had put on the heavy uniform and 
 thrown away the light weight one. On the Pe- 
 ninsula, when you have to w^alk with all your 
 possessions on your back, each additional ounce 
 counts for much. As soon as we found that it 
 was impossible to get water to wash or shave in, 
 we threw away our towels and soap. A few kept 
 their razors. The only thing I hung on to was 
 my tooth brush — not for its legitimate purpose, 
 but to clean the sand and grit out of my rifle. 
 
 " Go over and ask Mr. Nunns," said Art to 
 me, while w^e were cleaning our rifles, " if he '11 
 give us a pass to go down to the beach to find my 
 kit bag. 1 11 finish cleaning your rifle while you 
 
 125
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 go over." I banded tlie rifle to Art, and went 
 over to look for Mr. Nunns. When I found him 
 he was censoring some letters. 
 
 " You 'd better wait till this afternoon, before 
 going," he said. " I want you to take twenty 
 men and carry up ten boxes of ammunition to 
 the firing line, where A Company are. They 're 
 coming out to-morrow night and we 're to relieve 
 them. He gave me a pass, and I took it over to 
 Art. 
 
 " You can go down this morning if you like," 
 I said, " or you can wait till I get back from this 
 ammunition detail." 
 
 " If you 're not later than two o'clock," said 
 Art, " I '11 wait for you." 
 
 I found the detail of twenty men for ammuni- 
 tion-carrying waiting for me near the field 
 kitchen. We crawled cautiously along some 
 open ground, past the quarter-master's dugout 
 and the dugouts that were dignified by the name 
 of orderly room, where the colonel and adjutant 
 conducted the clerical business of the battalion, 
 issued daily orders, and sentenced defaulters. 
 " Napoleon knew what was what," said the man 
 near me, as he wriggled along, " when he said 
 that an army fights on its stomach. I 've been 
 
 126
 
 WAITING 
 
 on my stomach half the time since I 've been in 
 Gallipoli." We straightened up when we came 
 to the communication trench that gave us cover 
 from snipers. Ordinarily we walked upright 
 when we were behind the lines, but for a few 
 days past enemy snipers had T3een extraordi- 
 narily active. The Turkish snipers were the 
 most effective part of their organization. Each 
 sniper was armed with a rifle with telescopic 
 sights. With a rifle so equipped, a good shot can 
 hit a man at seven hundred yards, just as easily 
 as the ordinary soldier can shoot at one hun- 
 dred. 
 
 The ten boxes of ammunition were very heavy, 
 and the heat of the day necessitated a great many 
 rests, before we reached the part of the line held 
 by A Company. A Company had been losing 
 heavily for a day or two because of snipers. A 
 couple of the men were talking about it when 
 I came along. 
 
 " I don't see," one of them was saying, " how 
 they can get us at night." 
 
 " It 's this way," explained the other. " The 
 cigarette makers send their snipers out some- 
 time at night. Instead of going back that night 
 they stay out for a week, or longer. All the ra- 
 
 127
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 tion Johnny Turk needs is a swallow of water, 
 some onions, or olives, and a biscuit or two." 
 
 " How is it," I asked, " we don't see them in 
 the daytime?" 
 
 " It 's this way," said the A Company man. 
 "He paints himself, his rifle, and his clothes 
 green. Then he twists some twigs and branches 
 around him and kids you he 's a tree." 
 
 " The way they do in this part of the trench," 
 said another man who had been listening to the 
 conversation, " is to work in pairs. They get a 
 dugout somewhere where they can get a pretty 
 good view of our trenches. They see where we 
 move about most, and aim their machine gun at 
 the top of the parapet. Then they clamp it 
 down. At night when the sentries are posted, 
 they simply press the trigger, and there are some 
 more casualties." 
 
 " You 've got to hand it to Johnny Turk, just 
 the same," said the first man. " One of them 
 will stand up in his dugout in broad daylight, 
 exposed from his waist up, and give you a chance 
 to pot him, so that his mate can get you. We 
 used to lose men that way first. As soon as we 
 aimed, the second sniper turned his machine gun 
 on us and got our man. Now we 've found a 
 
 128
 
 WAITING 
 
 better way. We stick a helmet up on top of a 
 rifle just above the parapet, and fire from an- 
 other part of the trench." 
 
 " We 've been having trouble with them down 
 In dugouts," I said. " Some of the fellows say 
 it 's stray bullets, but it seems to me that they 're 
 going too fast to be spent. You can tell a bullet 
 that 's spent by the sound." 
 
 One of the A Company sergeants who had been 
 listening to discussion joined in. " It 's snipers 
 all right," he said. " It 's easy enough for a 
 German oflflcer to get into our trenches. Men 
 are coming in all the time from working parties, 
 and night patrols, and the engineers go back and 
 forth every hour or so fixing up the barb wire. 
 Only a little while ago they found one fellow. 
 He had stripped a uniform from one of our dead, 
 dressed himself in it, and walked up to our para- 
 pet one night. The sentry did n't know the dif- 
 ference, because the other fellow spoke good Eng- 
 lish, so he let him pass. All they have to do is 
 say ' What ho,' or, ' Where 's the Dublin's sec- 
 tion of trench? ' They can get by all right." 
 
 The officer to whom I had delivered the am- 
 munition sent word that it had been checked and 
 that we could return to our company. We were 
 
 129
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 only a short distance down the communication 
 trench when a party of officers came along. We 
 drew a little to one side, and stopped to let them 
 pass. Not one of them was under the rank of 
 lieutenant-colonel, and one of them was a gen- 
 eral. He was a rather tall, spare man, with a 
 drooping brown mustache. He was most unlike 
 the usual type of gruff, surly general officers in 
 charge. His eyes had a kindly, friend-of-the- 
 family sort of twinkle. His type was more like 
 a superintendent of construction, or a kindly old 
 family physician. " Look at the ribbons on the 
 old boy's chest," said the man near me. " He 's 
 got enough medals to make a keel for a battle- 
 ship." In the British army, those who have seen 
 previous service wear on the breast of their 
 tunics the ribbons for each campaign. The gen- 
 eral halted his red-tabbed staff where we stood. 
 
 "Are you Newfoundlanders, Corporal?" he 
 said to me. 
 
 " Yes, sir," I answered. 
 
 " They 've made it pretty warm for you since 
 you 've been here," he added, with a smile. 
 " Your men are most efficient trench diggers. If 
 I had an army like them, we 'd dig our way to 
 Constantinople." With that he passed on with 
 
 130
 
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 WAITING 
 
 a smile. A pompous-looking sergeant brought 
 up the rear of the general's escort. 
 
 " Who was that, that just spoke to us, Ser- 
 geant?" I asked. 
 
 The sergeant surveyed me contemptuously. 
 " Is it possible that you don't know 'im. 'E 's 
 General Sir Ian Hamilton, General Commander- 
 in-Chief of the Mediterranean Force, 'e is." 
 
 General Sir Ian Hamilton has won the un- 
 questioned devotion of the First Newfoundland 
 Regiment. Many times after that, he visited the 
 front line trenches and stopped to exchange a 
 few words with men here and there. It is a cu- 
 rious thing that while the young subaltern lieu- 
 tenants held themselves very much aloof, the 
 senior officers chatted amiably with our men. 
 The Newfoundlanders, democratic to the core, 
 hated anything that in the least savored of 
 " side," and they admired the courage of a gen- 
 eral officer who took his chances in the firing 
 line. 
 
 Art was waiting for me when I reached the 
 dugout after my ammunition fatigue. I accom- 
 panied him down the mule path that led along 
 the edge of the Salt Lake to West Beach, where 
 we had made our landing the first night. The 
 
 133
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 place looked very different now. Under the 
 shelter of the beetling cliffs, the engineers had 
 constrncted dugouts of all sorts. The beach was 
 piled high with boxes of beef, biscuits, jam, lime 
 juice, and rum. At the top of the hill, a tem- 
 porary dressing station for the wounded had been 
 built; and nearer the beach was a clearing sta- 
 tion, from which the wounded were taken by 
 motor ambulance to the hospital ship. At dif- 
 ferent points along the beach, piers had been 
 built for the landing of supplies and troops, and 
 for the loading of wounded into lighters to be 
 taken to the hospital ships waiting out in deeper 
 w^ater. The Australians had put up a wire fence 
 around a part of beach and used it for a grave- 
 yard. We found the man in charge of the kit 
 bags of the Newfoundlanders, and after much 
 search located Art's bag, and took out the stuff 
 we wanted. On the way back, in a little ravine 
 just on the edge of the Salt Lake, we came upon 
 two horsemen. They were General Hamilton 
 and his aide. The general returned our salute 
 smilingly. 
 
 "Who is it?" said Art. 
 
 '* It 's Sir Ian Hamilton," I said. " Does n't 
 
 134
 
 WAITING 
 
 he look like the sort of man it would be wise to 
 confide in? " 
 
 " Yes, he does," said Art. " Evidently he has 
 confidence in our troops' ability to hold their 
 own/' added Art. " The Turks have four lines of 
 trenches to fall back on ; we have only one firing- 
 line." 
 
 There was the same group around the field 
 kitchen when we arrived back at our lines. They 
 were swapping yarns and telling stories with a 
 lurid intermixture of profanity and a liberal 
 sprinkling of trench slang. To me, one of the 
 most interesting side lights of the war is the 
 slang that forms a great part of the vocabulary 
 of the trenches. Early morning tea, when we 
 got it, was "gun-fire." A Turk was never a 
 Turk. He was a Turkey, Abdul Pasha, or a 
 cigarette maker. A regiment is a " mob." A 
 psychologist would have been interested to see 
 that nobody ever spoke of a comrade as having 
 died or been killed, but had " gone west." All 
 the time I was at the front, I never heard one 
 of our men say that another had been killed. A 
 man who was killed in our regiment had " lost 
 his can," although this referred most particu- 
 
 135
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 larly to men shot through the head. Ordinarily 
 a dead man was called a " washout " ; or it was 
 said that he had " copped it." The caution to 
 keep your head down always came, " Keep your 
 napper down low." To get wounded with one of 
 our own bullets was to get a " dose of three-o 
 three." The bullet has a diameter of three-hun- 
 dred-and-three thousandths of an inch. 
 
 Mr. Nunus came toward the group, looking 
 for Stenlake. It was Sunday afternoon, and he 
 thought it would be well to have a service. Sten- 
 lake was found, and a crowd trailed after him 
 to an empty dugout, where he gathered them 
 about him and began. It was a simple, sincere 
 service. Out there in that barren country, it 
 seemed a strange thing to see those rough men 
 gathered about Stenlake while he read a passage 
 or led a hymn. But it was most impressive. 
 The service was almost over, and Stenlake was 
 offering a final prayer, when the Turkish batter- 
 ies opened fire. Ordinarily at the first sound of 
 a shell, men dived for shelter; but gathered 
 around that dugout, where a single shell could 
 have wrought awful havoc, not a man stirred. 
 They stayed motionless, heads bowed reverently, 
 until Stenlake had finished. Then quietly they 
 
 136
 
 WAITING 
 
 dispersed. As a lesson in faith it was most il- 
 luminating. 
 
 It was strange to see week by week the psy- 
 chological change that had come over the men. 
 Most of all I noticed it in the songs they sang. 
 At first the songs had been of a boisterous char- 
 acter, that foretold direful things that would 
 happen to the Kaiser and his family " As we go 
 marching through Germany." These had all 
 given place to songs that voiced to some extent 
 the longing for home that possessed these volun- 
 tary exiles. " I want to go back to Michigan " 
 was a favorite. Perhaps even more so was 
 " The little gray home in the West." " Tipper- 
 ary " was still in demand, not because of the 
 lilt of a march that it held, but for the pathetic 
 little touch of " my heart 's right there," and 
 perhaps for the reference to "the sweetest girl 
 I know." 
 
 Perhaps it may have been the effect of Sten- 
 lake's service, or it may have been the news that 
 we were to go into the firing line the next day, 
 that made the men seek their dugouts early that 
 Sunday evening. But there was something 
 heavy in the air that night. For almost a week 
 we had been comparatively safe in dugouts. To- 
 
 137
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 morrow we were again to go into the firing line 
 and wait imi^otentlj while our number was re- 
 duced gradually but pitilessly. The hopeless- 
 ness of the thing seemed clearer that evening 
 than any other time we had been there. Simp- 
 son, " the Man with the Donkeys," had been 
 killed that day. After a whole summer in which 
 he seemed to be impervious to bullets, a stray 
 bullet had caught him in the heart on his way 
 down Shrapnel Valley with a consignment of 
 wounded. Simpson had been so much a part of 
 the Peninsular life that it was hard to realize 
 that he had gone to swell the list of heroes that 
 Australia has so much cause to be proud of. A 
 Company had suffered heavily in the front line 
 trenches that day. A number of stretchers had 
 passed down the road that ran in front of our 
 dugouts, with A Company men for the dressing 
 station on the beach. Snipers had been busy. 
 From the A Comj^any stretcher-bearers came 
 news that others had been killed. One piece of 
 news filtered slowly down to us that evening, 
 that had an unaccountably strange effect on the 
 men of B Company. Sam Lodge had been killed. 
 Sam Lodge was perhaps the most widely known 
 man in the whole regiment. There were very 
 
 138
 
 WAITING 
 
 few Newfoundlanders who did not think kindly 
 of the big, quiet, reliable looking college man. 
 He had enlisted at the very first call for volun- 
 teers. Other men had been killed that day ; and 
 since the regiment had been at Gallipoli, men 
 had stood by while their dugout mates were torn 
 by shrapnel or sank down moaning, with a 
 sniper's bullet in the brain ; but nothing had ever 
 had the same effect, at any rate on the men of 
 our company, as the news that Sam Lodge had 
 been killed that day. Perhaps it was that every- 
 body knew him. Other nights men had crowded 
 around the fire, telling stories, exchanging gos- 
 sip, or singing. To-night all was quiet; there 
 was not even the sound of men creeping about 
 from dugout to dugout, visiting chums. Sud- 
 denly, from away up on the extreme right end 
 of the line of dugouts, came the sound of a clear 
 tenor voice, singing, " Tenting To-night on the 
 Old Camp Ground." Never have I heard any- 
 thing so mournful. It is impossible to describe 
 the penetrating pathos of the old Civil War song. 
 Slowly the singer continued, amidst a profound 
 hush. His voice sank, until one could scarcely 
 catch the words when he sang, " Waiting for the 
 war to cease." At last he finished. There was 
 
 139
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 scarcely a stir, as the men dropped off to sleep. 
 It was a quiet, sober lot of men who filed into 
 a shady, tree-dotted ravine the next day behind 
 the stretcher that bore the remains of Private 
 Sam Lodge. Stenlake read the burial service. 
 Everybody who could turned out to pay their 
 last respects to the best liked man in the regi- 
 ment. After the brief service. Colonel Burton, 
 the commanding officer. Captain Carty, Lodge's 
 company commander, a group of senior and 
 junior officers, and a number of profoundly af- 
 fected soldiers gathered about the grave while 
 the body was lowered into it. In the shade of 
 a spreading tree, within sound of the mournful 
 wash of the tide in Suvla Bay, lies poor Sam 
 Lodge, a good, cheerful soldier, uncomplaining 
 always, a man whose last thought was for others. 
 '' Don't bother to lift me down off the parapet, 
 boys," he had said when he was hit ; " I 'm fin- 
 ished.'^ 
 
 140
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 NO man's land 
 
 OUR dugouts were located about a quarter of 
 a mile inland from the edge of the Salt 
 Lake. Somewhere at the other side of the Salt 
 Lake was the cleverly concealed landing place of 
 the aeroplane service. Commander Sampson, 
 who had been in action since the beginning of the 
 war, was in charge of the aeroplane squadron. 
 One day, by clever manoeuvering he forced one 
 of the enemy planes, a Taube, away from its own 
 lines and back over the Salt Lake. Here after a 
 spectacular fight in mid air, Sampson forced the 
 other to surrender and captured his machine. 
 The Taube he thereafter used for daily recon- 
 naissance. Every afternoon we watched him 
 hover over the Turkish lines, circle clear of their 
 bursting shrapnel, poising long enough to com- 
 plete his observations, then return to the Salt 
 Lake with his report for our artillery and the 
 
 141
 
 TKENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 navy. The day after Sam Lodge's burial, we 
 watched two hostile 'planes chase Sampson back 
 right to our trenches. When they came near 
 enough, our men opened rapid fire that forced 
 them to turn; but before Sampson reached his 
 landing place at Salt Lake, we could see that he 
 was in trouble. One of the wings of his machine 
 was drooping badly. From the other side of the 
 Salt Lake, a motor ambulance was tearing along 
 towards the place where he was expected to land. 
 The Taube sank gradually to the ground, the am- 
 bulance drew up to within about thirty feet of 
 it, and turned about, waiting. We saw Sampson 
 jump out of his seat, almost before the machine 
 touched the ground, and walk to the waiting am- 
 bulance. The ambulance had just started, when 
 a shell from a Turkish gun hit the prostrate 
 aeroplane and tore a large hole in it. With 
 marvelous precision, the Turkish battery pumped 
 three or four shells almost on top of the first. 
 In a few minutes, all that was left of the Taube 
 was a twisted mass of frame work ; of the wings, 
 not a fragment remained. 
 
 But although Sampson had lost his 'plane, he 
 had completed his mission. About half an hour 
 later, the navy in the bay began a bombardment. 
 
 142
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 We could see the men-o'-war lined up, pouring 
 broadsides over our heads into the Turkish 
 trenches. First, we saw the gray ships calmly 
 riding the waves; then, from their sides came 
 puffs of whitish gray smoke, and the flash of the 
 discharge, followed by the jarring report of the 
 explosion. Around the bend of Anafarta Bay, 
 we saw creeping in a strange, low-lying, awk- 
 ward-looking craft that reminded one of the 
 barges one sees used for dredging harbors. It 
 was one of the new monitors, the most efiflciently 
 destructive vessel in the navy. Soon the artil- 
 lery on the land joined in. About four o'clock 
 the bombardment had started ; and all that after- 
 noon the terrific din kept up. When we went 
 into the firing line that evening at dark, the bom- 
 bardment was still going on. About nine o'clock 
 it stopped ; but at three the next morning, it was 
 resumed with even greater force. The part of 
 the line we were holding was in a valley ; to the 
 right and left of us, the trenches ran up hill. 
 From our position in the middle, we had a splen- 
 did view of the other parts of the line. All that 
 morning the bombardment kept up. Our gun- 
 ners were concentrating on the trenches well up 
 the hill on the left. First Ave watched our shells 
 
 143
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 demolish the enemy's front line trench. Im- 
 mense shells shrieked through the air above our 
 heads and lauded in the Turks' firing line. 
 Gradually but surely the huge projectiles bat- 
 tered down the enemy defenses. The Turks 
 stuck to their ground manfully, but at last they 
 had to give up. Through field glasses we could 
 see the communication trenches choked with 
 fleeing Turks. Some of our artillery, to prevent 
 their escape, concentrated on the support 
 trenches. This manceuver served a double pur- 
 pose: besides preventing the escape of those re- 
 treating from the battered front line trench, it 
 stopped reinforcements from coming up. Still 
 farther back, a mule train bringing up supplies, 
 was caught in open ground in the curtain of fire. 
 The Turks, caught between two fires, could not 
 escape. In a short time all that was left of the 
 scientifically constructed intrenchments was a 
 conglomerate heap of sand bags, equipments, and 
 machine guns ; and on top of it all lay the man- 
 gled bodies of men and mules. 
 
 All through the bombardment, we had hoped 
 for the order to go over the parapet. When we 
 had been rushed to the firing line the night be- 
 fore, we thought it was to take part in the at- 
 
 144
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 tack. Instead of this, we were held in the firing 
 line. For the Worcesters on our left was re- 
 served the distinction of making the charge. 
 High explosives cleared the way for their ad- 
 vance, and cheering and yelling they went over 
 parapet. The Turks in the front line trenches, 
 completely demoralized, fled to the rear. A few, 
 too weak or too sorely wounded to run, surren- 
 dered. While the bombardment was going on, 
 our men stood in their trenches, craning their 
 necks over the parapet. All through the after- 
 noon, the excitement was intense. Men jumped 
 up and down, running wildly from one point in 
 the trench to another to get a better view. Some 
 fired their rifies in the general direction of the 
 enemy ; " just a few joy guns," they said. Every- 
 body was laughing and shouting delightedly. 
 Down in the bay, the gray ships looked almost 
 as small as launches in the mist formed by the 
 smoke of the guns. The Newfoundlanders 
 might have been a crowd rooting at a baseball 
 game. Every few minutes, when the smoke in 
 the bay cleared sufficiently to reveal to us a 
 glimpse of the ships, the .,i.'enches resounded to 
 the shouts of, " Come on, the navy," and " Good 
 old Britain." And when the great masses of 
 
 145
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 iron hurtled through the air and tore up sections 
 of the enemy's parapet, we shouted delightedly, 
 *' Iron rations for Johnny Turk ! " 
 
 Prisoners taken in this engagement told us 
 that the Turkish rank and file heartily hated 
 their German officers. From the first, they had 
 not taken kindly to underground warfare. The 
 Turks were accustomed to guerilla fighting, and 
 had to be driven into the trenches by the German 
 officers at the point of their revolvers. One 
 prisoner said that he had been au officer; but 
 since the beginning of the campaign, he had been 
 replaced by a German. At that time, he told us, 
 the Turks were officered entirely by Germans. 
 For two or three days after that, at short inter- 
 vals, one or two at a time, Turks dribbled in to 
 surrender. They were tired of fighting, they 
 said, and were almost starved to death. Many 
 more would surrender, they told us, but they 
 were kept back by fear of being shot by their 
 German officers. 
 
 With the monotony varied occasionally by 
 some local engagement like this, we dragged 
 through the hot, fly-pestered days, and cold, 
 drafty, vermin-infested nights of September and 
 early October. By the middle of October, dis- 
 
 146
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 ease and scarcity of water had depleted our 
 ranks alarmingly. Instead of having four days 
 on the firing line and eight days' rest, we were 
 holding the firing line eight days and resting 
 only four. In my platoon, of the six noncom- 
 missioned officers who had started with us, only 
 two corporals were left, one other and I. For 
 a week after the doctor had ordered him to leave 
 the Peninsula, the other corporal hung on, 
 pluckily determined not to leave me alone. All 
 this time, the work of the platoon w^as divided 
 between us; he stayed up half the night, and I 
 the other half. At last, he had to be personally 
 conducted to the clearing station. 
 
 Just about the middle of October comes a 
 Mohammedan feast that lasts for three or four 
 days. During the days of the feast, while our 
 battalion was in the firing line, some prisoners 
 who surrendered told us that the Turks were 
 suffering severely from lack of food and warm 
 clothing. All sorts of rumors ran through the 
 trench. One was that some one had reliable in- 
 formation that the supreme commander of the 
 Turkish forces had sent to Berlin for men to 
 reinforce his army. If the reinforcements did 
 not come in four days, he would surrender his 
 
 147
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 entire command. Men ordered off the Peninsula 
 by the medical officer, instead of proceeding to 
 the clearing station, sneaked back to their posi- 
 tions in the trench, waiting to see the surrender. 
 But the surrender never came. Things went on 
 in the same old dreary, changeless round. More 
 than sickness, or bullets, the sordid monotony 
 had begun to tell on the men. Every day, of- 
 ficers were besieged with requests for permission 
 to go out between the lines to locate snipers. 
 When men were wanted for night patrol, for 
 covering parties, or for listening post details, 
 every one volunteered. Ration parties to the 
 beach, which had formerly been a dread, were 
 now an eagerly sought variation, although it 
 was a certainty that from every such party we 
 should lose ten per cent, of the personnel. Any 
 change, of any sort, was welcome. The thought 
 of being killed had lost its fear. Daily inter- 
 course with death had robbed it of its horror. 
 Here was one case where familiarity had bred 
 contempt. Most of the men had sunk into 
 apathy, simply waiting for the day their turn 
 was to come, wondering how soon would come 
 the bullet that had on it their " name and num- 
 ber.'^ Most of the men in talking to each other, 
 
 148
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 especially to their sick comrades, spoke hopefully 
 of the outcome ; but those I talked with alone all 
 had the same thought: only by a miracle could 
 they escape alive ; that miracle was a " cushy 
 one." 
 
 One wave of hope swept over the Peninsula in 
 that dreary time. The brigade bulletin board 
 contained the news that it was expected that in 
 a day or two at the most Bulgaria would come 
 into the war on the side of the Allies. To us 
 this was of tremendous importance. With a 
 frontier bordering on Turkey, Bulgaria might 
 turn the scale in our favor. Life became again 
 full of possibilities and interest. Our inter- 
 preters printed up an elaborate menu in Turkish 
 that recited the various good things that might 
 be found in our trenches by Turks who would 
 surrender. At the foot of the menus was a little 
 note suggesting that now was the ideal time to 
 come in, and that the ideal way to celebrate the 
 feast was to become our guests. These menus 
 we attached to little stakes and just in front of 
 the Turkish barbed wire w^e stuck them in the 
 ground. Several Turks came in within the next 
 few days, but whether as a result of this or not, 
 it was impossible to say. The feeling of re- 
 
 149
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 newed Lope and buoyancy caused by the news 
 of the imminence of Bulgaria's alliance with us 
 w^as of short duration. A day or so afterwards 
 came the alarming news that the Allied min- 
 isters had left Bulgaria; and the following day 
 came word that Bulgaria had joined in the war, 
 not with us, but with the Central Powers. 
 Again apathy settled on the men. Now, too, the 
 rainy season had set in in earnest. Torrents 
 of rain poured down daily on the trenches, chok- 
 ing the drains, and filling the passageway with 
 thick gray mud in which one slipped and floun- 
 dered helplessly, and which coated uniforms and 
 equipments like cement. One relief it did bring 
 with it. Men who had not had a bath, or a 
 shave in months, were able to collect in their 
 rubber sheets enough rain water to wash and 
 shave with. But the drinking water was still 
 scarce. On other parts of the Peninsula there 
 was plenty of it; but we had so few men avail- 
 able for duty that we could scarcely spare 
 enough men to go for it. Also, there w^as the 
 difficulty in securing proper receptacles for its 
 conveyance. Most of the men were very much 
 exhausted, and the trip of four or five miles for 
 water would have been too much for them. 
 
 150
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 Even when we did get water, it had to be boiled 
 to kill the germs of disease, and to prevent men 
 from being poisoned. The boiled water was flat 
 and tasteless; and to counteract this, we were 
 given a spoonful of lime juice about once a week. 
 This we put in our water bottles. About every 
 third day we were issued some rum. Twice a 
 week, an officer appeared in the trench carrying 
 a large stone jar bearing the magic letters in 
 black paint, P. D. R., Pure Demerara Rum. 
 This he doled out as if every drop had cost a 
 million dollars. Each man received just enough 
 to cover the bottom of his canteen, not more than 
 an eighth of a tumbler. Just before going out 
 on any sort of night fatigue on the wet ground, 
 it was particularly grateful. We had long ago 
 given up reckoning time by the calendar, and 
 days either were or were not " Rum days." Men 
 who were wounded on these days bequeathed 
 their share to their particular pals or to their 
 dugout mates. Some of the men were total ab- 
 stainers with the courage of their convictions; 
 they steadfastly refused to touch it. The other 
 men canvassed these on rum days for their share 
 of the fiery liquid, and in exchange did the 
 temperance men's share of fatigue duty. Dur- 
 
 151
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 ing this time, there was very little fighting. 
 Both sides were intrenched and prepared to stay 
 there for the winter. In the particular section 
 of trench we held, we knew that any attempt at 
 an advance would be hopeless and suicidal. 
 The ground in front was too well commanded by 
 enemy machine guns. Still, we thought that 
 some other parts of the line might advance and 
 turn one of the flanks of the enemy. Nothing 
 was impossible to the Dublins or the Munsters; 
 and there was always faith in the invincible 
 Australasians. We could not forget the way the 
 Australasians a short time before had celebrated 
 the news of the British advance at Loos. 
 
 Just after the Turkish feast, we went into dug- 
 outs again for a few days, and back once more 
 to the firing line. This time, we were up in the 
 farm house district near Chocolate Hill. It was 
 a place particularly exposed to shell fire ; for the 
 old skeletons of farm houses made good targets 
 for the enemy's guns. Every afternoon, the 
 Turks sent over about a dozen or so shells, just 
 to show us that they knew we were there. After 
 Bulgaria came in against us, it seemed to us that 
 the Turks grew much more prodigal of their 
 shells than formerly. Where before they sent 
 
 152
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 over ten, they now fired twenty. It was rather 
 grimly ironic to find, on examination of some of 
 the shell casings, that they were shells made by 
 Great Britain and supplied to the Turks in the 
 Balkan War. There was a certain amount of 
 sardonic satisfaction in knowing that the fortifi- 
 cations on Achi Baba were placed there by 
 British engineers when we looked on the Turks 
 as friends. No. 8 platoon was intrenched just 
 in front of a field in which grew a number of 
 apple trees. In the daytime we could not get 
 to these, but at night some of the more venture- 
 some spirits crawled out and returned with their 
 haversacks full. A little further along was what 
 had once been a garden. Even now there were 
 still growing some tomatoes and some water- 
 melons. The rest of it was a mass of battered 
 stones that had once been fences. Here it was 
 that the old gray bearded farmers who had been 
 peacefully working in their fields had hung up 
 their scythes and taken down from their hook 
 on the wall old rusty muskets and fought in their 
 dooryards to defend their homes. The oncoming 
 troops had swept past them, but at a tremendous 
 cost. For a whole day the battle had swayed 
 back and forth. Where formerlv had bloomed a 
 
 153
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 luxuriant garden or orchard, was now a plowed 
 field, — plowed not with farm implements but 
 with shrapnel and high explosive shells. Dot- 
 ting it here and there, were the little rough 
 wooden crosses that gave the simple details of 
 a man's regimental name, number, and date of 
 death. Not a few of them were in memory of 
 " Unknown Comrades." And once in a while one 
 saw a cross that marked the resting place of the 
 foe. Feeling toward the enemy differed with in- 
 dividuals; but we were all agreed that Johnny 
 Turk was a good, clean, sporty fighter, who gen- 
 erally gave as good as we could send. There- 
 fore, whenever we could we gave him decent 
 burial, we stuck a cross up over htm, although 
 he did not believe in what it symbolized, and we 
 took off his identification disk and personal 
 papers. These we handed to our interpreters, 
 w^ho sent them to the neutral consuls at Con- 
 stantinople ; and they communicated through the 
 proper channels with the deceased's various 
 widows. 
 
 After a week or so in this district, we moved 
 back again to our old quarters at Anafarta vil- 
 lage. Here we took over a block house occupied 
 by the Essex. The Dublins and the Munsters 
 
 154
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 were on our right. The block house was an ad- 
 vanced post that we held in the morning and 
 during the night. Every afternoon we left it for 
 a few hours while the enemy wasted shells on it. 
 A couple of Irish snipers were with us. The 
 first day they were there, our Lieutenant, Mr. 
 Nunns, spent the day with them; that day, he 
 accounted for four Turks. This was the closest 
 we had yet been to them. I stood up beside an 
 Irish sniper and looked through a pair of field 
 glasses to where he pointed out some snipers' 
 dugouts. They were the same dugouts that 
 Cooke, the Irish V, C. man, had shown me. 
 While I was watching, I saw an old Turk sneak- 
 ing out between his trench and one of the dug- 
 outs. He looked old and stooped and had a 
 long whisker that reached almost to his waist 
 and appeared to have difficulty in getting along. 
 All about him were little canvas pockets that 
 contained bombs and about his neck was a long 
 string of small bombs. " Begob," said one of the 
 Dublins, beside me, " 't is the daddy of them all. 
 Get him, my son." I grasped my gun excitedly 
 and aimed; but before I had taken the pressure 
 of the trigger, I heard from a little distance to 
 the right the staccato of a machine gun. The 
 
 155
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 result was astonishing. One second, I was look- 
 ing through my sights at the Turk; the next, he 
 had disappeared, and in his place was the most 
 marvelous combination of all colors of flames I 
 have ever seen. Literally Johnny Turk had gone 
 up in smoke. The Irishman beside me was 
 standing open mouthed. 
 
 " Glory be to God," he said, " what does that 
 make you think of? " 
 
 " It reminds me," I said, " of a Fourth of July 
 celebration in the States; and I wish," I added 
 heartily, " I was there now." 
 
 " It makes me think, my son," said the Irish- 
 man, " of the way ould Cooke killed a lot of the 
 sausage-makers over on the other side. He 
 threw a bomb in among tin of 'em and then fired 
 his rifle at it and exploded it. Killed every 
 damn one of 'em, he did. 'T was the same time 
 he got the V. C." 
 
 " I suppose," I said, " Cooke 's in London now 
 getting his medal from the King. He 's through 
 with this Peninsula." 
 
 " Thrue for you, my son," said the Irishman, 
 " he 's through with this Peninsula, but he 's not 
 in London. 'T was just three nights ago that I 
 went out yonder, and tin yards in front of that 
 
 156
 
 I Underwood & Underwood, N. Y. 
 
 Australians in the trenches consider clothes a superfluity
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 dugout I found ould Cooke's body. The Turrk 
 got him right through the cap badge and blew 
 the top clean off his head. 'T is just luck. Some 
 has it one way, and some has it another; but 
 whichever way you have it, it don't do you no 
 good to worry over it." 
 
 Having delivered himself of this satisfying 
 philosophy, he resumed his survey of the ground 
 in front. 
 
 About ten yards outside the block house we 
 were holding, the Turks had, under cover of 
 darkness, almost completed a sap, with the ob- 
 ject of surrounding the block house. A detach- 
 ment of the Dublins with three or four bomb 
 throwers sapped out to the left of the sap the 
 enemy was digging, after a short but exciting 
 engagement, bombed them out of it, and took the 
 sap at the point of the bayonet. They found it 
 occupied by only two Turks, who surrendered. 
 The rest were able to get back to their own 
 trench. We cut the corner off this sap, rounded 
 it off to surround our block house, and occupied 
 it. It brought us to within fifty yards of the 
 enemy firing line. We could hear them talking 
 at night ; and in the daytime we could see them 
 walking about their trenches. At this point, 
 
 159
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 they had in their lines a number of animals, 
 chiefly dogs. In addition, they had a brass band 
 that played timeless, wailing music nearly every 
 night, to the accompaniment of the howling and 
 barking of dogs. Some of the men claimed that 
 the dogs were trained animals who carried food 
 to snipers and who were taught to find the Turk- 
 ish wounded. This may have been true; but I 
 have always believed that their chief use was to 
 cover the noise of secret operations. This seems 
 likely, for they were able to get their sap almost 
 finished without our hearing them. 
 
 The block house we held stood just in the 
 center of the line that the Fifth Norfolks had 
 charged into early in August, and from which 
 not one man had emerged. The second or third 
 day we occupied it, a detachment of engineers 
 was sent in to make loopholes and prepare it for 
 a stubborn defense. In the wall on the left they 
 made a large loophole. The sentry posted there 
 the first morning saw about twenty feet away 
 the body of a British soldier, partly buried. 
 Two volunteers to bury the body were asked for. 
 Half a dozen offered, although it was broad day- 
 light and the place the body lay in offered no 
 protection. 
 
 160
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 Before any one could be selected, Art Pratt 
 and young Hayes made the decision by jumping 
 up, taking their picks and shovels, and vaulting 
 over the wall of the block house. They walked 
 out to where the body lay. It had been torn in 
 pieces by a shell the previous afternoon. At 
 first a few bullets tore up little spurts of ground 
 near the two men, but as soon as they 
 reached the body, this stopped. The Turks 
 never fired on burial parties; and men on the 
 Peninsula, wounded by snipers, tell strange 
 stories of dark-skinned visitors who crept up to 
 them after dark, bound up their wounds, gave 
 them water, and helped them to within shouting 
 distance of their own lines, where at daylight 
 the next morning their comrades found them. 
 Once one of our batteries was very near a dress- 
 ing station when a stray shell, fired at the bat- 
 tery, hit the dressing station. The Turkish ob- 
 server heliographed over and ai)ologized. That 
 is why we respected the Turk. When we tried 
 to shoot him, he chuckled to himself and sniped 
 us from trees and dugouts ; and when we reviled 
 him and threw tins of apricot jam at him, he 
 gave thanks to Allah, and ate the jam. The 
 empty tins he filled with powder ,and returned 
 
 161
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 to us in the shape of bombs. Only once did he 
 really lose his temper. That was when under 
 his very eyes we deliberately undressed on his 
 beach and disported ourselves in the ^gean Sea. 
 Then he sent over shells that shrieked at us to 
 get out of his ocean. But in his angriest mo- 
 ments he respected the Red Cross and never ill 
 treated our wounded. One chap, an English- 
 man, w^as wounded in the head just as he reached 
 the Turkish trench during a charge. The bullet 
 went in the side of his head, ruining both his 
 eyes. He was captured as he toppled over into 
 the trench, was taken to Constantinople, well 
 treated in hospital there, and returned in the 
 first batch of exchanged prisoners. When I met 
 him in Egypt, he had nothing but kind words 
 for the Turks. When the enemy saw the object 
 of the little expedition, they allowed Art and 
 Hayes to proceed unmolested. We watched 
 them dig a grave beside the corpse; and when 
 they had finished, with a shovel they turned the 
 body into it. Before doing it, they searched the 
 man for personal papers and took off his identifi- 
 cation disk. These bore the name, " Sergeant 
 Colder, Fifth Norfolk Regiment." That was in 
 the last part of October ; and since August 10th 
 
 162
 
 NO MAN'S LAND 
 
 not a word had been heard of the missing Nor- 
 folk regiment. To this day, the whole affair re- 
 mains a mystery. The regiment disappeared as 
 if the ground had swallowed them up. On the 
 King's Sandringham estate, families are still 
 hoping against hope that there may sometime 
 come word that the men are prisoners in Turkey. 
 Neutral consuls in Constantinople have been ap- 
 pealed to, and have taken the matter up with the 
 Turkish Government. The most searching in- 
 quiries have elicited nothing new. The answer 
 has always been the same. The Turkish au- 
 thorities know no more about it than the Eng- 
 lish. Two hundred and fifty men were given the 
 order to charge into a wood. The only sign that 
 they ever did so, is the little wooden cross that 
 reads 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 Sergeant J. Golder 
 
 FIFTH NORFOLK REGIMENT 
 KILLED IN ACTION 
 
 163
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 THE gorgeous tropical sunset had given place 
 to the inky darkness of a Turkish night, 
 when we moved into trenches well up on the side 
 of a hill that overlooked Anafarta Plain. Here 
 an advance had been unsuccessful, and the Turks 
 had counter attacked. Half way, the British 
 had dug in hastily, in hard limestone that re- 
 sisted the pick. No. 8 platoon held six traverses. 
 Four of these were exposed to enfilade fire. 
 About two hundred yards away, at an angle on 
 the left front, a number of snipers had built some 
 dugouts on Caribou Ridge. These they manned 
 with machine guns. From this elevation, they 
 could pour their fire into our trenches. Several 
 attempts had been made to dislodge them; but 
 their machine guns commanded the intervening 
 ground and made an advance impossible. Their 
 first line trench was about two hundred yards in 
 front of us. Thirty or forty yards nearer us 
 
 164
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 they were building a sap that ran parallel with 
 their lines for about five hundred yards. At 
 that point it took a sharp V turn inward toward 
 us. The proximity of the enemy, and the con- 
 tour of the ground so favorable to them, made 
 it necessary to take extra precautions, espe- 
 cially at night. Each night, at the point where 
 the enemy sap turned toward us, we sent out a 
 listening patrol of two men and a corporal. The 
 fourth night, my turn came. That day it had 
 rained without cessation; and in the early part 
 of the evening I had tried to sleep, but my wet 
 clothes and the pouring rain had made it impos- 
 sible. I felt rather glad w^hen I was told that 
 at one-thirty I was to go out for two hours on 
 listening patrol. That night we had been is- 
 sued some rum, and I had been fortunate enough 
 to get a good portion. I decided to reserve it 
 until I went out. About ten o'clock I gave up 
 attempting to sleep, and walked down the trench 
 a little way to where a collection of trees and 
 brush had been laid across the top. Some one, 
 with memories of London's well-known meeting 
 place, had christened it the Marble Arch. I 
 stood under this arch, where the rain did not 
 penetrate, and talked with the corporal of an 
 
 165 - •
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 English regiment who were holding the line on 
 the other side of the Marble Arch. A Sergeant 
 Manson, who had been loaned to us from another 
 platoon, came along and we talked for a while. 
 He had received some chocolate that evening, and 
 the next morning he was going to distribute it 
 among the men. It was in a haversack under 
 his head, he said, and he was going to sleep on 
 it to prevent it from being stolen. About eleven 
 he returned to his place on the firing platform 
 and went to sleep. I was ravenously hungry, 
 and had nothing to eat. I could not find even a 
 biscuit. I did find some bully beef, and ate some 
 of it, washing it down with a swallow of the pre- 
 cious rum from my water bottle. Then I re- 
 membered the chocolate under Sergeant Man- 
 son's head, and went over to where he was lying. 
 He was breathing heavily in the deep sleep of 
 exhaustion. Quietly I slipped my hand into the 
 haversack, and took out four or five little cubes 
 of chocolate about an inch long. Manson 
 stirred sleepily and murmured, "What do you 
 want? " then turned over and again began breath- 
 ing regularly. It was now almost time to start 
 for the listening post. SO' I went along the 
 trench to where I knew young Hayes was sleep- 
 
 166
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 ing. He had volunteered as one of the men to 
 accompany me, and from D Company I got the 
 second man. My platoon by this time had been 
 reduced to eighteen men, and I was the only non- 
 com. We had to get men from D Company to 
 take turns on the parapet at night, although they 
 were supposed to be resting at the time. Be- 
 tween us and the Turkish sap a small rise cov- 
 ered with short evergreen bushes prevented us 
 from seeing them. To get to this we had to cross 
 about fifty yards of gTound with fairly good 
 cover, and another fifty yards of bare ground. 
 Where the bare ground began, a ditch filled with 
 dank, wet grass served as our listening post. A 
 large tree with spreading boughs gave us some 
 shelter. From behind this we could watch the 
 rising ground in front. Any of the enemy at- 
 tempting an advance had to appear over this rise. 
 Our instructions were to watch this, and report 
 any movement of the enemy, but not to fire. I 
 left young Hayes about half way between this 
 tree and the trench, and the other man and I 
 spread a rubber sheet under the tree and made 
 ourselves as comfortable as possible. The rain 
 was still coming down with a steadiness that 
 promised little hope of stopping. After a little 
 
 167
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 while I became numbed, and decided to move 
 about a little. When I came on the Peninsula, 
 I had no overcoat, but a little time before had 
 secured a very fine gray woolen great-coat from 
 a Turk. It had been at one time the property of 
 a German officer, and was very warm and com- 
 fortable, with a large collar and deep thick cuffs. 
 I had worn it about the trench and it had been 
 the subject of much comment. That night I 
 wore it, and over it a raincoat. So that my 
 movements might be less constricted, I took off 
 the raincoat, and left it with the D Company 
 man, who stayed under the tree. It was pitch 
 dark, and I got across the open space to the ever- 
 green-covered rise without being seen. Here I 
 dropped on my stomach and wriggled between 
 wet bushes that pricked my face, up to the top. 
 It was only about thirty feet, but it took me al- 
 most an hour to get up there. By the time I had 
 reached the top it had stopped raining and stars 
 had come out. I crawled laboriously a short dis- 
 tance down the other side of the little hill; I 
 parted the bushes slowly and was preparing to 
 draw myself a little further when I saw some- 
 thing that nearly turned me sick with horror. 
 Almost under my face were the bodies of two 
 
 168
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 men, one a Turk, the other an Englishman. 
 They were both on their sides, and each of them 
 were transfixed with the bayonet of the other. 
 I don't know how long I stayed there. It seemed 
 ages. At last I gathered myself together, and 
 withdrew cautiously, a little to the right. My 
 nerves were so shaken by what I had just seen 
 that I decided to return at once to the man under 
 the tree. When I had gone back about ten feet 
 I was seized with an overwhelming desire to go 
 back and find out to what regiment the dead 
 Englishman belonged. At the moment I turned, 
 my attention was distracted by the noise of men 
 walking not very far to the front. I crawled 
 along cautiously and peered over the toj) of the 
 rise where I could see the enemy sap. The noise 
 was made by a digging party who were just 
 filing into the sap. For almost an hour I lay 
 there watching them. It gave me a certain sat- 
 isfaction to aim my rifle at each one in turn and 
 think of the effect of a mere pressure of the trig- 
 ger. But my orders were not to fire. I was on 
 listening patrol, and we had men out on differ- 
 ent working parties, who might be hit in the re- 
 sulting return fire. At intervals I could hear 
 behind me the report of a rifle, and wondered 
 
 169
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 what fool was shooting from our lines. When I 
 thought it was time to go back I crawled down 
 the hill, and found to my consternation that the 
 moon was full, and the space between the foot of 
 the little rise and the tree was stark white in the 
 moonlight. I had just decided to make a sharp 
 dash across when the firing that I had heard be- 
 fore recommenced. Instead of being from our 
 lines it came from a tree a short distance to the 
 left, at the end of the open space. It was Johnny 
 Turk, cozily ensconced in a tree that overlooked 
 our trench. Whenever he saw a movement he 
 fired. He used some sort of smokeless powder 
 that gave no flash, and it was most fortunate 
 for me that I happened to be at the only angle 
 that he could be seen from. I resumed my wrig- 
 gling along the edge of the open space to where 
 it ended in thick grass. Through this I crawled 
 until I had come almost to the edge of the ditch 
 in which I had left the other man. But to reach 
 it I had to cross about ten feet of perfectly bare 
 ground that gave no protection. Had the Turk 
 seen me he could have hit me easily. I decided 
 to crawl across slowly, making no noise. I put 
 my head out of the thick grass and with one knee 
 and both hands on the ground poised as a run- 
 
 170
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 ner does at the start of a race. Against the clear 
 white gTOimd I must have loomed large, for al- 
 most at once a bullet whizzed through the top of 
 the little brown woolen cap I was wearing. Just 
 then the D Company man caught sight of me, 
 and raised his gun. " Who goes there? " he 
 shouted. I did some remarkably quick thinking 
 then. I knew that the bullet through my cap 
 had not come from the sniper, and that some one 
 one of our men had seen my overcoat and mis- 
 taken me for a Turk. I knew the sniper was in 
 the tree, and the D Company's man's challenge 
 would draw his attention to me ; also I knew that 
 the Newfoundlander might shoot first and es- 
 tablish my identity afterwards. He was wrong 
 in challenging me, as his instructions were to 
 make no noise. But that was a question that I 
 had to postpone settling. I decided to take a 
 chance on the man in the listening post. I 
 shouted, just loud enough for him to hear me, 
 " Newfoundland, you damn fool, Newfound- 
 land," then tore across the little open space and 
 dived head first into the dank grass beside him. 
 When I had recovered my breath, with a vocabu- 
 lary inspired by the occasion, I told him, clearly 
 and concisely, what I thought of him. While it 
 
 171
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 may not have been complimentary it was beyond 
 question candid. When I had finished, I sent 
 him back to relieve j^oung Hayes with instruc- 
 tions to send Hayes out to me. In a few min- 
 utes Hayes came. 
 
 " Do you know, Corporal," he said as he came 
 up beside me, " I almost shot you a few minutes 
 ago. I should have when the other fellow chal- 
 lenged you if you had n't said ' Newfoundland.' 
 I fired at you once. I saw you go out one way, 
 and when you came back I could just see your 
 Turkish overcoat. ' Here,' says I to myself, ' is 
 Abdul Pasha trying to get the Corporal, and I '11 
 get him.' Instead of that I almost got you." 
 
 Whether or not the noise I made caused the 
 sniper to become more cautious I don't know, 
 but I heard no further shots from him from then 
 until the time I was relieved. 
 
 The arrival of a relief patrol prevented my 
 replying to young Hayes. I went back to my 
 place in the trench, but try as I might I could 
 not sleep; I twisted from side to side, took off 
 my equipment and cartridge pouches, adjusted 
 blankets and rubber sheet, tried another place on 
 the firing platform ; I threw myself down flat in 
 the bottom of the trench. Still I could not get 
 
 172
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 asleep. At last I abandoned the attempt, took 
 from my haversack a few cigarettes, lit one, and 
 on a piece of coarse paper began making a little 
 diagram of the ground I had covered that night, 
 and of the position of the sniper I had been 
 watching. By the time I had completed it day- 
 light had come, and with it the familiar " Stand 
 to." After " Stand to," I crawled under a rub- 
 ber sheet and snatched a few hours' sleep before 
 breakfast. Just after breakfast, a man from A 
 Company came through the trench, munching 
 some fancy biscuits and carrying in his hand a 
 can of sardines. The German Kaiser could not 
 have created a greater impression. " Where had 
 he got them, and how?" He explained that a 
 canteen had been opened at the beach. Here 
 you could get everything that a real grocery store 
 boasts, and could have it charged on your pay- 
 book. " A Company men," he said, " had all 
 given orders through their quarter-master ser- 
 geant, and had received them that morning." 
 Then followed a list of mouth-watering delica- 
 cies, the very names of which we had almost for- 
 gotten. A deputation instantly waited on Mr. 
 Nunns. He knew nothing of the thing, and was 
 incensed that his men had not been allowed to 
 
 173
 
 TKENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 participate in the good things. He deputed me 
 to go down and make inquiries at A Company's 
 lines. I did so, and found that the first man had 
 been perfectly correct. A Company was revel- 
 ing in sardines, white bread, real butter, drip- 
 ping from roast beef, and tins of salmon and lob- 
 ster. If we gave an order that day, I was told, 
 we should get it filled the next. Elated, I re- 
 turned to B Company's lines with the news. 
 The dove returning to the ark with the olive 
 branch could not have been more welcome. Mr. 
 Nunns fairly beamed satisfaction. A few of the 
 more pessimistic reflected aloud that they might 
 get killed before the things arrived. 
 
 Just before uine o'clock I went down to see the 
 cooks about dinner for my section. On my way 
 back I passed a man going down the trench on 
 a stretcher. One of the stretcher bearers told me 
 that he had been hit in the head while picking up 
 rubbish on top of the parapet. He hoped to get 
 him to the dressing station alive. As I came into 
 our own lines another stretcher passed me. The 
 man on this one was sitting up, grinning, 
 
 " Hello, Gal," he yelled. " I 've stopped a 
 cushy one." 
 
 I laughed. "How did it happen?" I asked. 
 
 174
 
 in 
 o 
 
 B 
 
 cr 
 
 XT 
 
 P 
 
 ■-1 
 
 c 
 
 
 D 
 
 P 
 
 P 
 
 El 
 
 a 
 p 
 
 cr 
 
 P 
 
 o 
 p 
 
 *^^
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 " Picking up rubbish on top of the parapet." 
 
 He disappeared around the curve of the trench, 
 delightedly spreading the news that he had 
 stopped a cushy one in the leg. I kept on back 
 to my own traverse, and showed the diagram I 
 had made the night before to Art Pratt. Mr. 
 Nunns had granted us leave to go out that day 
 to try to get the sniper in the tree. Art was de- 
 lighted at the chance of some variety. While 
 Art and I were making out a list of things we 
 wanted at the canteen, a man in my section came 
 down the trench. 
 
 " Corporal Gallishaw," he said, " the Brigade 
 Major passed through the lines a few minutes 
 ago, and he 's raising hell at the state of the 
 lines ; you 've got to go out with five men, picking 
 up rubbish on top of the parapet." 
 
 Instantly there came before my eyes the vision 
 of the strangely limp form I had met only a few 
 minutes before that had been hit in the head 
 " picking up rubbish on top of the joarapet." 
 But in the army one cannot stop to think of such 
 things long; orders have to be obeyed. Since 
 coming into the trench we had constructed a 
 dump, but the former occupants of the trench 
 had thrown their refuse on top of the parapet. 
 
 177
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 My job with the five men was to collect this rub- 
 bish and put it in our dump. At nine o'clock in 
 the morning we mounted the parapet and began 
 digging. There was no cover for men standing; 
 the low bushes hid men sitting or lying. Every 
 few minutes I gave the men a rest, making them 
 sit in the shelter of the underbrush. The sun 
 was shining brightly ; and after the wet spell we 
 had just passed through, the warmth was pe- 
 culiarly grateful. The news that the canteen 
 had been opened on the beach made most of the 
 men optimistic. With good things to eat in sight 
 life immediately became more bearable. Never 
 since the first day they landed had the men 
 seemed so cheerful. Up there where we were the 
 sun was very welcome, and we took our time over 
 the job. One chap had that morning been given 
 fourteen days' field punishment, because he had 
 left his post for a few seconds the night before. 
 He wanted to get a pipe from his coat pocket, 
 and did not think it worth while to ask any one 
 to relieve him. It was just those few seconds 
 that one of the brigade officers selected to visit 
 our trench. When he saw the post vacaut, he 
 waited until the man returned, asked his name, 
 then reported him. Field punishment meant 
 
 178
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 that in addition to his regular duties the man 
 would have to work in every digging party or 
 fatigue detail. I asked him why he had not sent 
 for me, and he told me that it had happened 
 while I was out in the listening patrol. He was 
 not worrying about the punishment, but feared 
 that his parents might hear of it through some 
 one writing home. But after a little while even 
 he caught the spirit of cheerfulness that had 
 spread amongst us at the news of the new can- 
 teen. To the average person meals are like the 
 small white spaces in a book that divide the para- 
 graphs ; to us they had assumed the proportions 
 of the paragraph themselves. The man who had 
 just got field punishment told me the things he 
 had ordered at the canteen, and we compared 
 notes and made suggestions. The ubiquitous 
 Hayes, working like a beaver with his entrench- 
 ing tool, threw remarks over his shoulder anent 
 the man who had delayed the information that 
 the canteen had been established, and offered 
 some original and unique suggestions for that in- 
 dividual's punishment. When we had the rub- 
 bish all scraped up in a pile, we took it on shovels 
 to the dump we had dug. To do this we had to 
 walk upright. We had almost finished when the 
 
 179
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 snipers on Caribou Ridge began to bang at us. I 
 jumped to a small depression, and yelled to the 
 men to take cover. They were ahead of me, tak- 
 ing the last shovelful of rubbish to the trench. 
 At the warning to take cover, they separated and 
 dived for the bushes on either side. That is, 
 they all did except Hayes, w^ho either did not 
 hear me or did not know just where to go. I 
 stepped up out of the depression and pointed 
 with outstretched arm to a cluster of under- 
 brush. " Get in there, Hayes ! " I yelled. Just 
 then I felt a dull thud in my left shoulder blade, 
 and a sharp pain in the region of my heart. At 
 first I thought that in running for cover one of 
 the men had thrown a pick-ax that hit me. Un- 
 til I felt the blood trickling down my back like 
 warm water, it did not occur to me that I had 
 been hit. Then came a drowsy, languid sensa- 
 tion, the most enjoyable and pleasant I have ever 
 experienced. It seemed to me that my backbone 
 became like pulp, and I closed up like a concer- 
 tina. Gradually I felt my knees giving wa;y 
 under me, then my head dropped over on my 
 chest, and down I went. In Egypt I had seen 
 Mohammedans praying with their faces toward 
 Mecca, and as I collapsed I thought that I must 
 
 180
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 look exactly as they did when they bent over and 
 touched their heads to the ground, worshiping 
 the Prophet. Connecting the pain in my chest 
 with the blow in my back, I decided that the 
 bullet had gone in my shoulder, through my left 
 lung, and out through my heart, and I concluded 
 I was done for, I can distinctly remember 
 thinking of myself as some one else. I recollect 
 saying, half regretfully, " Poor old Gal is out 
 of luck this morning," then adding philosophi- 
 cally, " Well, he had a good time while he was 
 alive, anyway." By now things had grown very 
 dim, and I felt everything slipping away from 
 me. I was myself again, but I said to that other 
 self who was lying there, as I thought, dying, 
 " Buck up, old Gal, and die like a sport." Just 
 then I tried to say, " I 'm hit." It sounded as if 
 somewhere miles away a faint echo mocked me. 
 I must have succeeded in making myself heard, 
 because immediately I could hear Hayes yell 
 with a frenzied oath, " The Corporal 's struck. 
 Can't you see the Corporal 's struck? " and heard 
 him curse the Turk who had fired the shot. Al- 
 most instantly Hayes was kneeling beside me, 
 trying to find the wound. He was much more 
 excited over it than I. 
 
 181
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 " Don't you try to bandage it here," I said ; 
 " yell for stretcher bearers."' 
 
 Hayes jumped up, shouting lustily, " Stretcher 
 bearers at the double, stretcher bearers at the 
 double ! " then added as an after-thought, " Tell 
 Art Pratt the Corj^oral 's struck." 
 
 I was now quite clear headed again and told 
 Hayes to shout for " B Company stretcher bear- 
 ers." On the Peninsula messages were sent 
 along the trench from man to man. Sometimes 
 when a traverse sex)arated two men, the one re- 
 ceiving the message did not bother to step 
 around, but just shouted the message over. 
 Often it was not heard, and the message stopped 
 right there. One message there was though, that 
 never miscarried, the one that came most fre- 
 quently, " Stretcher bearers at the double." Un- 
 less the bearers from some particular company 
 were specified, all Avho received the message re- 
 sponded . It was to avoid this that I told Hayes 
 to yell for B Company stretcher bearers. Ap- 
 parently some one had heard Hayes yell, " Tell 
 Art Pratt the Corporal 's struck," because in a 
 few minutes Art was bending over me, talking 
 to me gently. Three other men whom I could 
 not see had come with him ; they had risked their 
 
 182
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 lives to come for me under fire. " We must get 
 liim out of this," I heard Art say. In that mo- 
 ment of danger his thought was not for himself, 
 but for me. I was able to tell them how to lift 
 me. No women could have been more gentle or 
 tender than those men, in carrying me back to 
 the trench. Although bullets were pattering 
 around, they walked at a snaiFs pace lest the least 
 hurried movement might jar me and add to my 
 pain. The stretcher bearers had arrived by the 
 time we reached the trench, and were unrolling 
 bandages and getting iodine ready. At first 
 there was some diflflculty in getting at the wound. 
 It had bled so freely that the entire back of my 
 coat was a mass of blood. The men who had car- 
 ried me looked as if they had been wounded, so 
 covered with blood were they. The stretcher 
 bearer's scissors would not work, and Art angrily 
 demanded a sharp knife, which some one pro- 
 duced. The stretcher bearer ripped up my cloth- 
 ing, exposing my shoulder, then began patching 
 up my right shoulder. I cursed him in fraternal 
 trench fashion and told him he was working on 
 the wrong shoulder; I knew I had been hit in 
 the left shoulder and tried to explain that I had 
 been turned over since I was hit. The stretcher 
 
 ' 183
 
 TKENCniNG AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 bearer thought I was delirious aud continued 
 working away. I thought he was crazy, and told 
 him so. At last Art interrupted to say, " Just 
 look at the other shoulder to satisfy him." They 
 looked, and, as I knew they would, found the 
 hole the bullet had entered. To get at it they 
 turned me over, and I saw that a crowd had 
 gathered around to watch the dressing and make 
 remarks about the amount of blood, I became 
 quite angry at this, and I asked them if they 
 thought it was a nickel show. This caused them 
 all to laugh so heartily that even I joined in. 
 This was when I felt almost certain that I was 
 dying. I can't remember even feeling relieved 
 when they told me that the bullet had not gone 
 through my heart. The pain I felt there when 
 I was first hit was caused by the tearing of the 
 nerves which centered in my heart when the 
 bullet tore across my back from shoulder to 
 shoulder. Never as long as I live shall I forget 
 the solicitude of my comrades that morning. 
 The stretcher bearers found that the roughly 
 constructed trench was too narrow to allow the 
 stretcher to turn, so they put me in a blanket 
 and started away. Meanwhile the word had run 
 along the trench that " Gal had copped it." I 
 
 184
 
 3 
 en 
 
 a 
 'a 
 
 V 
 V 
 
 d 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 eS 
 >j 
 V 
 
 cS 

 
 WOUNDED 
 
 did not know until that morning that I had so 
 many friends. A little way down the trench I 
 met Sergeant Manson. He was carrying some 
 sticks of chocolate for distribution among the 
 men. I asked him for a piece. To do so on the 
 Peninsula was like asking for gold, but he put 
 it in my mouth with a smile. Hoddinott and 
 Pike, the stretcher bearers, stopped just where 
 the communication trench began. The doctor 
 had come up. He asked me where I was hit, and 
 I told him. He examined the bandages, and told 
 the stretcher bearers to take me along to the 
 dressing station. Captain Alexander, my com- 
 pany commander, came along, smiled at me, and 
 wished me good-by. Hoddinott asked me if I 
 wanted a cigarette, and when I said, " Yes," 
 placed one in my mouth and lit it for me. I 
 had never realized until then just how difficult 
 it is to smoke a cigarette without removing it 
 from your mouth. Poor Stenlake, w^ho by this 
 time was worn to a shadow, was in the support 
 trench, waiting with some other sick men, to go 
 to hospital. He came along and said good-by. 
 A Eed Cross man gave me a postcard to be sent 
 to some organization that would supply me with 
 comforts while I was in hospital. " You '11 eat 
 
 187
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 your Christmas dinner in London, old chap," he 
 said. 
 
 We had to go two miles before the stretcher 
 bearers could exchange the blanket for the regu- 
 lar stretcher. The trenches were narrow, and 
 on one side a little ditch had been dug to drain 
 them. The recent wet weather had made the 
 bottom of the trench very slippery, and every 
 few minutes one of the bearers would slide side- 
 ways and bring up in the ditch. When he did 
 the blanket swayed with him, and my shoulders 
 struck against the jagged limestone on the sides. 
 To avoid this as much as possible the bearers 
 had to proceed very slowly. Those two miles to 
 me seemed endless. I had now become com- 
 pletely paralyzed, all control of my muscles was 
 gone, and I slipped about in the blanket. Every 
 few yards I would ask Hoddinott, " Is it very 
 much farther?" and every time he would turn 
 around and grin cheerfully, and answer, as one 
 would answer a little child, " Not very much 
 farther now. Gal." 
 
 At last we emerged into a large wdde communi- 
 cation trench, with the landmarks of which I was 
 familiar. I was suffering severely now, and was 
 beginning to worry over trifles. Suddenly it 
 
 188
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 came to me that I was still a couple of miles from 
 the dressing station, and when we came out of 
 the communication trench on to open ground 
 that had been torn up by shrapnel, I was con- 
 sumed with fear that at any moment I might be 
 hit by another shell, and might not get aboard 
 the hospital after all, for by this time my mind 
 had centered on getting into a clean bed. A 
 dozen different thoughts chased through my 
 mind. I was grieved to think that in order to 
 get at the wound it had been necessary to cut the 
 fine great -coat that I had so much wanted to take 
 home as a souvenir. I asked Hoddinott what 
 they had done with it, and he told me that part 
 of it was under my head as a pillow, but that it 
 was so besmeared with blood that it would be 
 thrown away as soon as I arrived at the dressing 
 station. From thinking of the great-coat, I re- 
 membered that before I went out with the dig- 
 ging party I had taken off my raincoat and left 
 it near my haversack in the trench, and in the 
 pocket of it was the little diagram I had drawn 
 of the position of the sniper I had seen the night 
 before. Again I called for Hoddinott, and again 
 he came, and answered me patiently and gently. 
 "Yes, he would tell Art about the little dia- 
 
 189
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 gram." Where a fringe of low bushes bordered 
 the pathway at the end of the open space, Hod- 
 diuott and Pike turned. For the distance of 
 about a city block they carried the stretcher 
 along a road cut through thick jungle. At the 
 end of it stood a little post from which drooped 
 a white flag with a red cross. It was the end of 
 the first stage for the stretcher bearers. A great 
 wave of loneliness swept over me when I realized 
 that I was to see the last of the men with whom I 
 had gone through so much. I was almost crying 
 at the thought of leaving them there. Somehow 
 or other it did not seem right for me to go. 
 I felt that in some way I was taking an unfair 
 advantage of them. Hoddinott and Pike slipped 
 the straps from their shoulders and lowered the 
 stretcher gently. Under the blanket Hoddinott 
 sought my hand." " Good-by, Gal," he said. 
 " Is there any message I can take back to Art? " 
 " Yes," I said, " tell him to keep my raincoat." 
 Since the moment I had been hit, I had been 
 afraid of one thing — that I should break down, 
 and not take my punishment like a man. I was 
 tensely determined that no matter how much I 
 suffered I would not whine or cry. In our regi- 
 ment it had become a tradition that a man must 
 
 190
 
 WOUNDED 
 
 smile when he was wounded. One thing more 
 than anything else kept me firm in my determina- 
 tion. Art Pratt had walked just behind the 
 blanket until we came to the communication 
 trench. Even then he was loath to leave me. 
 He could not trust himself to speak when I said, 
 " Good-by, Art, old pal." He grasped my hand, 
 and holding it walked along a few feet. Then 
 he dropped my hand gently. There are some 
 things in life that stand out ineffably sweet and 
 satisfying. For me such a one was that last mo- 
 ment of farewell to Art. I had always consid- 
 ered him the most fearless man in a regiment 
 whose name was a byword for reckless courage. 
 Of all men on the Peninsula I valued his opinion 
 most. No recommendation for promotion, no 
 award for valor, not even the coveted V. C, could 
 have been half so sweet as the few words I heard 
 Art say. With eyes shining, he turned to the 
 man beside him and said, almost savagely, " By 
 God, he 's a brick." 
 
 191
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 AS soon as Hoddinott and Pike had left me, 
 two other stretcher bearers carried me 
 about two hundred yards farther to a rough 
 shelter made of poles laid across supports com- 
 posed of sandbags. This was the dressing sta- 
 tion. On top of the poles, sandbags made it im- 
 pervious to overhead shelling. On three sides 
 it was closed in, but the side nearest the beach 
 was open. From where my stretcher was placed 
 I could just catch a glimpse of the JEgean Sea 
 and of the ships. Men on stretchers were lined 
 up in rows on the ground. Here and there a man 
 groaned, but most of the men were gazing at the 
 roof, with set faces. Some who were only slightly 
 wounded were sitting up on stretchers while Red 
 Cross men bandaged up their legs or feet. A 
 doctor was working away methodically and rap- 
 idly. A little to the right another shelter housed 
 the men who were being sent to hospital with 
 
 192
 
 HOMEWAED BOUND 
 
 dysentery, enteric, or typhoid. As soon as I 
 was brought in, the doctor came to me. " I '11 do 
 this one right away," he said to one of his as- 
 sistants. The assistant stripped the blanket 
 from me and cut off the portions of the blood- 
 stained shirt still remaining. As he did so, some- 
 thing dropped on the ground. The Red Cross 
 man picked it up. 
 
 "Here's the bullet that hit you," he said, 
 putting it beside me on the stretcher. " It 
 dropped out of your shirt. It just got through 
 you and stuck in your shirtsleeve." 
 
 " You 'd better get him a little bag to keep his 
 things in," said the doctor. 
 
 The Eed Cross man produced a bag, took my 
 pay book, and everything he found in my pocket, 
 and put them in it, then tied them to the 
 stretcher. By this time I was ready for the doc- 
 tor to begin work. That doctor knew his busi- 
 ness. In a very few minutes he had probed and 
 cut and cleaned the wound, and adjusted a new 
 bandage. The bleeding had stopped by this 
 time. He asked me the circumstances of being 
 hit. He told me to grip his hand and squeeze. 
 I tried it with my right hand but could do noth- 
 ing; then I tried the left hand and succeeded a 
 
 193
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 little better. The doctor looked grave when I 
 failed to grip with my right hand, but brightened 
 a little when I gripped with my left. All the 
 time he talked to me genially. That did me 
 nearly as much good as the surgical attention he 
 gave me. He was a Canadian, he told me. At the 
 outbreak of the war he had been taking post- 
 graduate courses at Cambridge University in 
 England. The University sent several hospital 
 units to the front, and he had come with this one. 
 He knew Canada and the States pretty thor- 
 oughly. 
 
 " Where do you come from? " he asked me. 
 
 " Newfoundland," I told him. " But I live in 
 the United States." 
 
 "What part?" he asked. 
 
 " Cambridge, Massachusetts," I told him. 
 
 "Oh," he said, "that's where Harvard Uni- 
 versity is." 
 
 " Yes," I said, " I was a student there when I 
 enlisted." 
 
 The doctor called to a couple of the Red Cross 
 men. "Here's a chap from Harvard Univer- 
 sity in Cambridge, over in the United States." 
 The two Red Cross men came and told me they 
 were students at Cambridge. They talked to me 
 
 194
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 for quite a little while. Before they left me to 
 attend to some more wounded, they made me 
 promise to ask to be sent to Cambridge, England, 
 to hospital. The University had established a 
 very large and thoroughly equipped hospital 
 there. All I had to do, they said, was tell the 
 people that I had been a student at the other 
 Cambridge, and I should be an honored guest. 
 They persisted in calling Harvard, Cambridge, 
 and when they went away said that they were 
 overjoyed to have seen a man from the sister 
 university. 
 
 The doctor came back in a few minutes. 
 
 " How are you feeling now? " he said. 
 
 " I feel pretty well now," I answered, " but it 's 
 very close in here with all these wounded men, 
 and the place smells of chloroform. Can't I be 
 moved outside? " 
 
 " I '11 move you outside if you say so," said 
 the doctor, " but you 're taking a chance. Occa- 
 sionally a stray shell comes over this way. The 
 Turks are trying to locate a battery close to this 
 place. Sometimes a shell bursts prematurely, 
 and drops around here." 
 
 On the Peninsula, officers who gave men leave 
 to go on dangerous missions salved their con- 
 
 195
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 sciences by first warning the men that in doing 
 it " they were taking a chance." The caution 
 had come to mean nothing. 
 
 "All right, doctor," I said. "I'll take a 
 chance." 
 
 Two stretcher bearers came, and lifted me out- 
 side the shelter, where the wind blew, fresh and 
 invigorating. Just as they turned, I heard the 
 old familiar shriek that signaled the coming of a 
 shell. It burst almost overhead. Most of the 
 missiles it contained dropped on the other side 
 of the shelter, but a few tiny pieces flew in my 
 direction. Three of them hit me in the right 
 arm, a fourth landed in my leg. 
 
 "Is anybody hit?" yelled a Red Cross man, 
 whose accent proclaimed him as an inhabitant 
 of the country north of the Clyde. 
 
 " I 've got a couple of splinters," I said. 
 
 I was lifted inside quickly. The Scotchman 
 who put on some bandages on the little cuts 
 looked at me accusingly. 
 
 " Ye were warned, before ye went," he said. 
 "Ye desairved it. But then," he added, "ye 
 might hae got it worse. Ye 're lucky ye did not 
 get it in the guts." 
 
 After a little while mv arms and back began 
 
 196
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 to ache violently. Two Red Cross men came 
 along and moved me to another shelter similar to 
 the first. This was the clearing station. From 
 here motor ambulances carried the wounded to 
 the shore. I knew from the burring speech of 
 the big sergeant in charge that he hailed 
 from Scotland. I asked him where he came 
 from, and he told me that he came from Inver- 
 ness. 
 
 " Our regiment trained near there for a while/ ^ 
 I said. " They garrisoned Fort George." 
 
 " Ye '11 no' be meanin' the Seaforth Highland- 
 ers, laddie," said he. 
 
 ^' No, I said, " we 're Newfoundlanders, the 
 First Newfoundland Regiment." 
 
 " Oh, I ken ye well, noo," he said, gloomily. 
 " Ye 're a bad lot ; it took six policemen to ar- 
 rest one o' your mob. On the Peninsula they 
 call ye the Never Failing Little Darlings." After 
 that he thawed quite a little. " I '11 look at your 
 wound noo, laddie," he said, after a few minutes. 
 " Ye 're awfu' light, laddie," he said as he raised 
 me. " Puir laddie," he added, pityingly. " Puir 
 laddie. Ye 're stairved. I '11 get ye Queen 
 Mary's ration." 
 
 " What 's Queen Mary's ration? " I asked. 
 
 197
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 " ' T 's Queen Mary's gift to the wounded. 
 I '11 get it for ye right away." He went outside 
 the clearing station and returned in a few min- 
 utes with a cup of warm malted milk. " ' T will 
 help ye some till ye get aboard the hospital ship. 
 Here 's the ambulance noo." 
 
 A fleet of motor ambulances swayed over the 
 uneven ground and rolled up close to the clearing 
 station. The drivers and helpers began loading 
 the stretchers aboard and one by one started 
 awa3^ Before I was put into one, the big Scotch- 
 man took a large syringe and injected a strong 
 dose of morphia into my chest. 
 
 " Ye '11 find it hard," he said, " bumping over 
 the hill, but ye' 11 soon be all right and com- 
 fortable." 
 
 " Tell me," I said, " shall I get into a real bed 
 on the ship?" 
 
 He laughed. " Sure ye will, laddie. The best 
 bed ye 've had since ye 've been in the airmy. 
 Good luck to ye, laddie." 
 
 Each of the motor ambulances carried four 
 men, two above and two below. I was put on 
 top, and the door flap pulled over. We jolted 
 and pitched and swayed. Once we turned short 
 and skidded at a curve. I knew just the very 
 
 198
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 place, although it was dark in the ambulance. I 
 had gone over the road often with ration parties. 
 Fortunately the morphia was beginning to take 
 effect, and dulled the pain to some extent. At 
 last the ambulance stopped, somebody pulled 
 the curtain back, and we were lifted out. We 
 were on West Beach. A pier ran out into the 
 sea. A man-o'-war launch towing a string of 
 boats glided in near enough to let her first boat 
 come close to the pier. The breeze was quite 
 fresh, and made me shiver. The stretchers were 
 laid across the boats, close to each other. Soon 
 all the boats were filled. I could see the man on 
 the stretcher to the right of me, but the one on 
 the other side I could not see. I tried to turn 
 my head but could not. The eyes of the man 
 next me were large with pain. I smiled at him, 
 but instead of smiling back at me, his lip curled 
 resentfully, and he turned over on his side 
 so that he could face away from me. As he did, 
 the blanket slipped from his shoulder, and I saw 
 on his shoulder strap the star of a second lieu- 
 tenant. I had committed the unpardonable sin. 
 I had smiled at an officer as if I had been an 
 equal, forgetting that he was not made of common 
 clay. Once after that, when he turned his head, 
 
 199
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 his eyes met mine disdainfully. That time I did 
 not smile. I have often laughed at the incident 
 since, but there on that boat I was boiling with 
 rage. Not a word had passed between us, but 
 his expression in turning away had been elo- 
 quent. I cursed him and the system that pro- 
 duced him, and swore that never again would I 
 put on a uniform. Gradually I calmed down; 
 the morphia had got in its work. In a little 
 while I had sunk into a comatose condition. I 
 remember, in a hazy sort of way, being taken 
 aboard a large lighter. There were tiers of 
 stretchers on both sides. This time I was in the 
 lower tier, and was wondering how soon the man 
 above me would fall on me. At last I went 
 to sleep. When I awoke, I was alone and in mid- 
 air. All about me was black. By that time I 
 was completely paralyzed from the waist up. I 
 could see only directly above my head. It was 
 night, and the sky was dotted with twinkling 
 stars. I could feel no movement, but the stars 
 came slowly nearer and nearer. " What was I 
 doing here in mid-air?" Subconsciously I 
 thought of the body of Mohammed, suspended 
 between earth and heaven. Now I felt I had hit 
 on the answer. I was going to heaven, and the 
 
 200
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 thought was very comforting. Suddenly the 
 stars stopped, and after a pause began receding. 
 A face appeared above me, then the head and 
 shoulders of a man dressed in the uniform of a 
 naval officer. This suggested something else to 
 me. The officers of the Flying Corps wear naval 
 uniforms. I decided that while I was asleep I 
 had been transferred to the Flying Corps. 
 
 " Hello, old chap," said the naval officer. 
 " Do you know where you are? " 
 
 " No,'' I said. " Am I going to heaven, or have 
 I joined the Flying Corps?" 
 
 " No," said the officer. " You 're on the 
 stretcher being hoisted aboard the hospital ship." 
 
 Two big, strapping, bronzed sailors approached 
 and lifted the stretcher on to an elevator; they 
 stepped on and the elevator descended. We 
 stopped at the end of a short white-walled pas- 
 sage-way, lighted by electricity. The sailors 
 grasped the stretcher as lightly as if it had been 
 empty, walked along to the end of the passage- 
 way into a ward. It had formerly been a dining 
 saloon. Large square windows looked out upon 
 the sea, everything was white and clean and or- 
 derly. After the dirt and filth of the Peninsula 
 it was like a beautiful dream. The sailors lifted 
 
 201
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 me gently into a bed and stood there waiting for 
 orders from the nurse. As I looked at them I 
 thought of our boys standing in the trenches 
 during a bombardment and yelling, " Come on, 
 the navy," and I murmured, " Come on, the 
 navy ; " and then when I looked at the calm, self- 
 possessed, capable-looking nursing sister, moving 
 about amongst the wounded, I said, and never 
 had it meant so much to me, " Good old Britain." 
 
 The string of boats in which I had come was 
 the batch that filled the quota of the patients of 
 the hospital ship. In about half an hour she 
 began to move. An orderly came around with 
 meals. The doctor came in after a little while 
 and began examining the patients. From some 
 part of the ship not far from where I was came 
 the sound of voices singing hymns. It was the 
 last touch needed to emphasize the difference be- 
 tween the hospital ship and the Peninsula. Sun- 
 day evening on the Peninsula had meant no more 
 than any other. The ship moved along so quietly 
 that she seemed scarcely to stir. The doctor and 
 the nurse worked noiselessly; over everything 
 hung the spirit of Sabbath calm. Gallipoli 
 might have been as far away as Mars. 
 
 It must have been about nine o'clock when an 
 
 202
 
 a 
 
 e 
 
 o 
 tr 
 
 w 
 
 a- 
 
 td 
 cr
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 orderly came around and turned out all the 
 lights except a reading lamp over the desk where 
 the night sister sat. All that night I could not 
 sleep. About midnight the night sister gave me 
 a sleeping draught, but it did no good. I was 
 suffering the most intense pain, but I was so glad 
 to be away from the dirt of the trenches that I 
 felt nothing else counted. The next day I was 
 a great deal weaker, and could scarcely talk. 
 When the doctor came around to dress my 
 wounds, I could only smile at him. All that day 
 the sister came to my bed at frequent intervals. 
 I was too weak then to eat. Two or three times 
 she gave me some sort of broth through a little 
 feeding bowl. In the evening I had sunk into 
 apathy. The sister sent for the doctor. He 
 came, felt my pulse, took my temperature, then 
 turned and whispered to the sister. She called 
 an orderly, and I heard her say, " Bring the 
 screens for this man." The orderly went away 
 and in a few minutes returned with two screens 
 large enough to entirely conceal my bed. When 
 the screens had been put in position, the sister 
 came in, wiped my mouth and forehead, and went 
 away. On the other side of the screen I heard 
 her speaking softly to the doctor. The whole 
 
 205
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 thing seemed to me something entirely apart 
 from me. I felt that I was watching a scene 
 in a play, and that I found it of little interest. 
 After about an hour the doctor and the sister 
 came in again. 
 
 " Feeling all right, old man? " said the doctor. 
 
 " Yes," I said. " Fine." 
 
 " Sister," said the doctor, " give this man any- 
 thing he wants." 
 
 The sister bent over me. She was a woman 
 between thirty and thirty-five, of the type that 
 inspires confidence; every word and movement 
 reflected poise, and there was a calmness and se- 
 renity about her that you knew she could have 
 acquired only as a result of having seen and eased 
 much human suffering. 
 
 " If there is anything you would care to have, 
 please ask for it, and if it is at all possible we 
 will get it for you," she said, in a softly modu- 
 lated voice, with the slightest suspicion of a 
 drawl ; it was the voice of a cultivated English- 
 woman; after the Peninsula, a woman's voice 
 was like a tonic. 
 
 '^ Yes," I said, " I want chicken and wine." 
 
 I had not the slightest desire for chicken and 
 wine just then, but I felt that I had to ask for 
 
 206
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 something, and the best I could think of was 
 chicken and wine. She smiled at me, went away, 
 and in about fifteen minutes she returned with a 
 little tray. She had brought the chicken and 
 wine. She had minced up the chicken, and she 
 fed me little pieces of it with a spoon. In a little 
 cup with a spout she had the wine. When I had 
 eaten a little of the chicken, she put the spout 
 between my lips ; I had expected some port wine, 
 but when I tasted, it was champagne. I drank 
 it to the very last drop. 
 
 " How do you feel now? " said the sister. 
 
 '^ Never felt better,'' I answered. 
 
 " That 's very nice," she said. " I hope you '11 
 get to sleep soon." 
 
 Then she went away, and in a few minutes the 
 night sister came on. She peeped in at me, 
 smiled, and went away. All that night I looked 
 up at a tiny spot on the ceiling. In the board 
 directly above my eyes, there was a curious knot. 
 A little flaw ran across the center of it. It re- 
 minded me of a postman carrying his bag of let- 
 ters. It seemed to me that night that I could 
 stand the pain no longer. My back seemed to be 
 tearing apart, as if a man was pulling on each 
 shoulder, trying to separate them from the spine. 
 
 207
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 I tried to jump up from the bed but could not 
 move a muscle. I felt that it would be better to 
 tear my back apart myself at once and have it 
 over, but when I tried to move my arms I found 
 them useless. It must have been well into the 
 morning when the night sister came around 
 again. The doctor was with her. He had a 
 large syringe in his hand. He said nothing. 
 Neither did I. I closed my eyes. I wanted to 
 be alone. I felt him oj^en my shirt at the neck 
 and rub some liquid on my chest. I opened my 
 eyes. He was putting the needle of the long 
 syringe into my chest where he had rubbed it 
 with iodine. The skin was leathery and at first 
 the needle would not penerate. At last it went 
 in with a rush. It seemed at least a foot long. 
 He rubbed another spot, and plunged the needle 
 in a second time. " We 've got to get him 
 asleep," he said to the night sister. " If he 's 
 not asleep in an hour, call me again." Very soon 
 a drowsiness crept over me. Nothing seemed to 
 matter. I wanted to rest. In a short time I 
 was asleep. When I woke, it was broad daylight. 
 The day sister was standing by my bed, smiling. 
 She turned around and beckoned to some one. 
 
 208
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 The doctor came close to the bed, felt my pulse, 
 took my temperature again, and smiled. '' Quite 
 all right, sister," he said. 
 
 An orderly came in, lifted me up in bed, 
 washed my face and hands, and brought in a tray 
 with chicken. There was the same little feeding 
 cup. This time it had port wine in it. The or- 
 derly propped me up in bed, putting cushions 
 carefully behind my back and shoulders. The 
 sister and the doctor superintended while he was 
 doing it. Lifting a wounded man is a science. 
 An unskilful person, no matter how well inten- 
 tioned, may sometimes do incalculable damage. 
 Putting a strain on the wrong muscle may undo 
 the work of the doctor. I could see out one of 
 the large windows now, and I noticed that we 
 were passing a good many ships, mostly vessels of 
 war. They seemed to increase in number every 
 few minutes; and by the time I had finished 
 breakfast, we were in the midst of a forest of 
 funnels and rigging. Soon the engines stopped. 
 When the doctor came around to dress my back, 
 I asked him where we were. 
 
 " We 're in Alexandria, now," he said. " In an 
 hour's time we '11 have unloaded. You 're the 
 
 209
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 last patient to be dressed. We 're doing you last 
 so that you won't have so long to wait before the 
 bandages are changed." 
 
 "■ Doctor," I asked, " how long will it be be- 
 fore this wound gets better? " 
 
 " I don't know," he said. " It 's impossible to 
 tell until you 've been X-rayed. Last night we 
 were certain you were dying, but this morning 
 you are perfectly normal." 
 
 In a short time the ward filled with men from 
 the shore, landing officers, orderlies with mes- 
 sages, sergeants in charge of ambulance corps, 
 and an army of stretcher bearers. The orderlies 
 of the hospital ship began putting out the kits of 
 the wounded at the foot of their beds. The dis- 
 embarkation began as soon as the doctor had com- 
 pleted his dressing. I was propped up in bed, 
 and could see a long line of motor ambulances 
 on the pier. The less seriously wounded cases 
 were taken off first. The sister told me that 
 these were going by train to Cairo. Those who 
 could not stand the train journey were going to 
 different hospitals in Alexandria. I was to go 
 to Alexandria, she said. A middle-aged man 
 passed us on a stretcher. He was hit in the leg, 
 and sat on the stretcher, smiling contentedly, 
 
 210
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 and looking about him interestedly. When he 
 saw the sister, his eyes lighted up. 
 
 " Good-by, sister," he shouted. " I '11 see you 
 again, the next time I 'm wounded." 
 
 The sister returned his good-by. Then sh^e 
 turned to me, and said : " That man was on the 
 hospital train that left Antwerp the day the 
 Germans shelled it in 1914. When he came in 
 the other night I did n't recognize him, but he re- 
 membered me." 
 
 While I waited for my turn the sister told 
 me that she had been in the first batch of nurses 
 to cross the Channel at the beginning of the war. 
 She had been in the hospitals in Belgium that 
 were shelled by the Germans. At eight o'clock 
 in the morning she had left Antwerp on the last 
 hospital train, and at nine o'clock the Germans 
 occupied the town. She had been on different 
 hospital ships and trains ever since. Once only 
 had she had a rest. That was some time in the 
 summer of 1915. She expected a week off in 
 London at Christmas, when the ship she was now 
 attached to laid up for repairs. The boat I was 
 on, she said, carried ordinarily seven hundred 
 and fifty wounded. At present she carried nine 
 hundred. They generally arrived in Suvla Bay 
 
 211
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 in the morning, and left that night, filled with 
 wounded. At the time of the first landing at 
 Auzac an hour after the assault began they 
 left with twelve hundred wounded Australians. 
 The sisters were sent out from a central 
 depot in England, and went to the various fronts. 
 When the stretcher bearers came to take me 
 away, the sister gathered up my belongings in 
 a little bag, tied it to the stretcher, put a 
 pillow under my head, and nodded a bright 
 good-by. 
 
 The stretcher bearers, two stalwart Austra- 
 lians, took me to the elevator, across the deck, 
 and out onto the pier. It was now getting to- 
 ward evening. A lady stopped the stretcher be- 
 tween the pier and the ambulance, and handed 
 one of the bearers a little white packet contain- 
 ing a towel, soap, tooth-brush and tooth-powder. 
 Without waiting to be thanked she went on 
 to intercept another stretcher. The stretcher 
 bearer put the package under my pillow. 
 " Ready, Bill," said one of the bearers with the 
 nasal twang of the Bushman. " Lift away," said 
 Bill, and they lifted the stretcher up on the top 
 tier of the ambulance wagon, without stepping 
 up from the ground. They did it with the same 
 
 212
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 motion as when two men swing a bag of grain. 
 But it was not in the least uncomfortable for me. 
 These Australian stretcher bearers who meet the 
 incoming hospital ships are amazingly strong. 
 There is an easy gracefulness in the way they 
 swing along with a stretcher that makes you 
 trust them. I was the last man to go in that am- 
 bulance w^agon, and in a few minutes we were 
 whirling smoothly along good roads amid the 
 familiar smells of Egyptian bazaars. This am- 
 bulance drive was a good deal different from 
 the one on the Peninsula just after I had been 
 wounded. After about half an hour the ambu- 
 lance swerved off the smooth asphalt road onto a 
 gravel road, slowed down, and ran into a yard. 
 The Australians reappeared, opened the flaps, 
 and began unloading. We were in the square of 
 a large hospital. All around us were buildings. 
 A fine-looking, bronzed man, with the uniform 
 of a colonel, was directing some Sikhs who were 
 carrying the stretchers from the ambulances into 
 the different buildings. All the stretchers were 
 lying on the ground in a long row. As soon as 
 each one was inspected by the colonel, he told 
 the stretcher bearers where to take it. When he 
 came to mine, he said, " Dangerously wounded, 
 
 215
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 Ward three. Then, to the stretcher bearers, 
 " Careful, very careful." 
 
 Ward three was a long ward with stone floor 
 and plaster walls; it contained about fifty beds. 
 More than half of the beds had little " cradles " 
 at the foot; when I came to know hospitals, I 
 learned that these were to iDrevent the bedclothes 
 from irritating wounded legs. In a few min- 
 utes a doctor came around, gave orders, and the 
 night sister began bandaging up the wounds of 
 the men who had come in. The sister who ar- 
 ranged my bandages was Scotch, and the burr of 
 her speech was pleasant in my ears. She came 
 back about ten o'clock and gave me a sleeping 
 potion. The change from the hospital ship must 
 have been too much excitement for me, because 
 I could not get asleep that night. But I did 
 not feel as I had felt on the hospital ship. I 
 have very seldom experienced such joy as I did 
 that night when I found that I could move my 
 head. I did it very slowly, and with great pain, 
 and rested a long time before I tried to 
 turn it back again. The door was right oppo-^ 
 site my bed. I could see the sand shining white 
 in the moonlight in the square, and right ahead 
 of me a large marquee where, I found out later, 
 
 216
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 some of the convalescent men slept. A man 
 about four beds away from mine was dying. 
 When I had first come in he had been groaning 
 at intervals, but now he was silent. About one 
 or two o'clock an orderly came running softly 
 in rubber-soled shoes to tell the sister that the 
 man had died. Half an hour later two men with 
 a particularly long stretcher, appeared in the 
 w^ard. They stepped quietly, trying not to dis- 
 turb the sleepers. I saw them walk along to the 
 bed of the dead man, and go in behind the screen. 
 After a litle while the ward orderly moved the 
 screens back, and the stretcher bearers reap- 
 peared. Over the burden on the stretcher was 
 draped a Union Jack. Often after that while I 
 was in Ward three I saw the same soft-step- 
 ping men come in at night and depart silently 
 with the flag-draped stretcher. Many of the 
 wounded left the ward in that way, but their 
 places were soon filled by incoming wounded. 
 
 The first morning I was in Ward three the doc- 
 tor ordered me to be X-rayed. The X-ray ap- 
 paratus was in another building. To get to it 
 I had to pass through the square. The sun was 
 too hot in the morning for us to cross the square. 
 We therefore skirted it under the shade of the 
 
 217
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 long portico that runs along the outside of nearly 
 all buildings in Egypt. In beds outside the 
 building were men with dysentery. At the cor- 
 ner of the square a plank gangway led to the 
 quarters of the enteric patients. Just before I 
 reached the X-ray room, a man hailed me from 
 one of the beds. It was Tom Smythe, a boy I 
 had known since I was able to walk. All the 
 time I had been on the Peninsula I had not seen 
 him, nor had I heard any news of him. On the 
 way back from the X-ray room, the stretcher 
 bearers stopped near his bed while I talked with 
 him. He had been in the hospital about two 
 weeks, he said, and hoped to get to England on 
 the next boat. He promised to come to see me 
 in my ward as soon as he was allowed up. The 
 next day he came, although he w^as not supposed 
 to be up, and brought with him a chap named 
 Varney. Varney had been in the section next 
 mine at Stob's Camp in Scotland, he told me, 
 Smythe and Varney vied with each other after 
 that in trying to make me comfortable. To me 
 that has always been the most remarkable thing 
 about our regiment: their loyalty to a com- 
 rade in trouble. I have known Newfoundlanders 
 to light with each other, using every weapon from 
 
 218
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 profanity to tent mallets while in camp ; on the 
 Peninsula I have seen these same men carrying 
 each other's packs, digging dugouts, and taking 
 the other man's fatigue work. Varney was very 
 much distressed to see the condition I was in. 
 He knew I was fond of reading, and searched all 
 over the place for books and magazines. Once 
 he brought me three American magazines, one 
 Saturday Evening Post and two Munsey's. 
 They were nearly two years old, but I read them 
 as eagerly as if they had just been published. 
 During the six weeks I was in hospital in Alex- 
 andria, I improved wonderfully. The doctor in 
 charge of the ward took a special interest in my 
 progress, and seemed to pride himself on hav- 
 ing handled the case successfully. Every day 
 or so he brought in a doctor from some other 
 ward to show him my wounds and the X-ray 
 plates. He was very careful and tried in dress- 
 ing to cause me as little pain as possible. " Poor 
 old chap," he would say, when he saw me wince, 
 " poor old chap." I think there was a great deal 
 of psychology in my getting w^ell. In this Twen- 
 ty-first General Hospital nothing was omitted 
 that could make one comfortable. Every morn- 
 ing an orderly w^ashed me. The orderlies were 
 
 219
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 all very considerate, except one. He did not last 
 very long in our ward. He began washing the 
 l^atients at four o'clock in the morning. He al- 
 ways made me think of a hostler washing a car- 
 riage. When he had washed my arms he always 
 let them drop in a way that reminded me of the 
 shafts of a wagon. He was soon replaced by a 
 chap who did not begin his work until seven. 
 At eight we had breakfast : fruit, cereal, and eggs. 
 At eleven we had soda water and crackers or 
 sweet biscuits. At one came dinner: soup, 
 chicken, and vegetables, half a chicken to each 
 man, with a dessert of pudding or custard. At 
 four we had tea, with fish, and at eight came 
 supper: cocoa and bread and butter, with jelly. 
 In the morning visitors came in and brought us 
 the daily papers. Sisters of the V. A. D. — Vol- 
 untary Aid Detachment — came in each afternoon 
 to relieve the regular nursing sisters. They 
 were mostly Englishwomen resident in Egypt. 
 Most of their men folks were at one of the fronts. 
 They read to the men who could not hold books 
 in their hands, talked to us cheerfully, and wrote 
 letters for us. Some of them brought us little 
 delicacies: grapes and chocolate. Men in hos- 
 pital have no money. Any money they have is 
 
 220
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 taken away when they arrive and refunded when 
 they leave. Like most of the rules in the army 
 to-day, this was made for the old regulars. 
 When the regulars felt they needed a rest they 
 went into hospital; the only way they could be 
 stopped was to keep all their money away from 
 them. To-day two million men suffer as a result. 
 Ever since the day I left the Peninsula I had 
 wanted chocolate. Biit I had no money, and for 
 a long time I had to go without it. At last 
 young Varney got me some. He had gone er- 
 rands for a wounded Australian, who had been 
 given some money from outside, and the Aus- 
 tralian had given him some ; he could hardly wait 
 to get to me with it. 
 
 As soon as a man was sufficiently recovered to 
 travel, he was sent to England. New men were 
 always coming in to take the places of the old. 
 A lot of them were Australians. I kept asking 
 them all as they came in if they could tell me 
 anything of my friend White George. Of course 
 a nickname is very little to go on. A man who 
 w^as White George in one part of the trench might 
 be Queensland Harry in another. All I knew 
 about him was that he was in the Fifteenth 
 Battalion, and that he had a beard. At last a 
 
 221
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 chap did come in oue evening from the Fifteenth 
 Battalion. I was in bed at the time, and 
 could not get a chance to ask him about White 
 George. The next day the poor chap was writh- 
 ing and screaming in the terrible spasms of tet- 
 anus, and for two days the screens were around 
 his bed. On the third day he was better. As 
 soon as Varney came in, he wheeled me up to the 
 Australian's bed. I asked him what was the 
 matter with him, and he told me that he had a 
 flesh wound in the head that did n't bother him, 
 but that his left leg was off at the knee. 
 
 "Are you from the Fifteenth Battalion?" I 
 asked. 
 
 " Yes," he said. 
 
 '' Do you know a chap in that battalion," I 
 said, " that they call White George? " 
 
 The w^ounded Australian looked at me in a 
 quizzical way. Then he drawled slowly, " Well, 
 I think I do. Why, damn it, man, I 'm White 
 George." 
 
 Then he recognized me. " Why, it 's the New- 
 foundland Corporal. Hello, Corporal. You 're 
 just the man I wanted to see," he said. " I 
 stood on that bomb all right, and got away with 
 it — once. When I tried it a second time, I put 
 
 222
 
 HOMEWARD BOUND 
 
 the bomb on the firing platform, and when I 
 stepped on it, my head was over the parapet; 
 Johnny Turk got me in the head, and the bomb 
 did the rest." 
 
 " Don't you wish now you had n't tried the ex- 
 periment? " I said. 
 
 " No," said White George, " I feel perfectly 
 satisfied." 
 
 " By the way," I said, as I was leaving him, 
 "why do they call you White George? Your 
 hair is dark." 
 
 " My real name," he said, " is George White, 
 but on the regimental roll it reads * White, 
 George.' " 
 
 223
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 " FEENISH " 
 
 IT must have been about the sixth week that 
 I was iu Egypt that one of the Australians 
 came over to my bed and told me that my name 
 was on the list of men to go to England by the 
 next boat. I was allowed up for two hours in 
 the afternoon ; and when I got up I looked at the 
 list, and found my name there. An orderly from 
 the stores came in and asked me for a list of 
 clothing I needed. He came back in about an 
 hour with a complete uniform and kit. The sis- 
 ter told me that I was to go to England the next 
 morning. At ten o'clock the next day I was 
 taken out to the little clearing station in the 
 square, and put in with a lot of other men on 
 stretchers. An officer came around and in- 
 spected our kits. A little later a sergeant from 
 the pay office gave each man an advance of 
 twelve shillings. After that the loading began. 
 A line of about twenty ambulances filed out of 
 
 224
 
 "FEENISH" 
 
 the yard and through the malodorous byways of 
 Alexandria to the waterfront. Here we were 
 put aboard the hospital ship Rewa, an old rocky 
 tub that had been an Indian troopship before the 
 war. I learned this from an old English regu- 
 lar in the stretcher next me. He had seen her 
 often before, and had made a trip from England 
 to India in her once. The Rewa was so full of 
 men that the latest arrivals had to go on deck in 
 hammocks. The thought of a trip across the Bay 
 of Biscay as deck passenger on the Rewa was not 
 very attractive, but our fears on this point were 
 soon allayed by one of the ship's officers. We 
 were not going to England on the Reica, he said. 
 We were going to Lemnos Island, and in Mudros 
 Bay we should transship into the Aquitania. 
 When we had cleared Alexandria Harbor, the 
 wind had freshened considerably. All that night 
 and the next day we pitched and rolled heavily. 
 The second night, when we had expected to reach 
 Mudros Bay, we were still twenty-four hours 
 away from it. Canvas sheets had to be rigged 
 above the bulwarks to prevent the spray from 
 drenching the men in the stretchers on deck. 
 The next day a good many men were sea sick, 
 and it was not till the next evening that the storm 
 
 225
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 abated. Even then it was too rough to get close 
 to the big ship. We did try to get near her once, 
 and succeeded in getting one hawser fast, but the 
 wind and tide drove us so hard against her, that 
 the captain of the Aquitania would take no more 
 risks and ordered us ofif. We had to lay to all 
 that evening, and the next morning. At noon 
 the wind died down enough to begin the trans- 
 shipment from the smaller ships. We waited 
 while seven other hospital ships transferred their 
 human freight, and then moved up near enough 
 to put gangways between the two boats. The 
 change was effected very expeditiously. We 
 were soon transferred, and settled in our new 
 quarters. I was in a ward with some Australian 
 troops on the top deck. Board petitions had 
 been run up from it to the promenade deck, mak- 
 ing a long bright, well ventilated corridor. 
 There was only one drawback on the Aquitania. 
 The sister in charge of our ward did not like 
 Colonials, and made it pretty plain. She was 
 rather a superior person who did not like to dress 
 wounds. We were to make two stops before we 
 arrived in England, I was told ; one at Salonica 
 to take on some sick, the other at Naples for 
 coal. The Salonica stop took place at night. 
 
 226
 
 "FEENISH" 
 
 We did not go into the harbor; probably it was 
 not deep enough for the Aquitania. The sick 
 were taken aboard outside. We came to Naples 
 early one fine Sunday morning. As we went into 
 the harbor, I could see through the window Mt. 
 Vesuvius, smoking steadily. We were in Naples 
 at the same time as the big Olympic , and the 
 Mauretania, the sister ship of the Lusitania. It 
 was the time that the Germans had protested 
 that the British hospital ships carried troops to 
 the Dardanelles on the return trip. The neutral 
 consuls in Naples went aboard the Olympic and 
 Mauretania that Sunday and investigated. The 
 charge, of course, was unfounded. An Italian 
 general and his staff came aboard our ship and 
 were shown around the wards. He was a dapper 
 little man, who gesticulated vehemently and 
 bowed to all the sisters. The sister who did not 
 like Colonials was speaking to him when he came 
 through our ward. She was trying to impress 
 him with the excellent treatment our wounded 
 received. She pointed out each man to him, in 
 the same way a keeper does at the zoological gar- 
 dens. 
 
 " They get this every evening," she said, indi- 
 cating the supper we were eating. " And what 
 
 227
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 is this?" she said, looking at some apricot jam 
 on a saucer on my bed. 
 
 " Apricot jam, sister," I said, then added 
 sweetly, in my best society fashion, " We get it 
 every evening." I might have told her that I 
 had had it not only every evening, but every noon 
 and morning while I was on the Peninsula. 
 
 " And what is this? " she said, pointing to the 
 cup in my hand. " Is it tea or cocoa? " 
 
 " It 's tea," I said. " We get it every even- 
 ing, — just as if we were human beings, and 
 not Colonials." After that I think she liked Co- 
 lonials even less. 
 
 The Bay of Biscay was just a little rough when 
 we went through it, but it did not affect the 
 Aquitania very much. 
 
 When the word went around on the day that 
 land had been sighted, every man that could 
 hobble went on deck to get a first glimpse of 
 England. We could not see very far because of 
 the thick mist of an English December. About 
 ten o'clock we were at the entrance to South- 
 ampton, but the tide was out, or the chief engi- 
 neer was out, so we could not go up until that 
 evening. That last day was a tedious one. 
 Every one was eager to get ashore. To most of 
 
 228
 
 "FEENISH" 
 
 the men, England was home; and after the 
 trenches and the hospitals, home meant much. 
 
 As soon as we landed, a train took us to a 
 place near London. It was twenty-five miles 
 from the hospital that was our destination. 
 Here we were met by automobiles that took us 
 to the hospital for Newfoundlanders at Wands- 
 w^orth Common, London. There were only half 
 a dozen of us from Newfoundland. At first the 
 doctor on the Aqidtania persisted in calling us 
 Canadians, and wanted to send us to Walton-on- 
 Thames. It took us two hours to convince him 
 that Newfoundland had no connection with Can- 
 ada. Two automobiles were enough for our lit- 
 tle party. The man who drove me in told me 
 that he had come a hundred miles to do it. All 
 the automobiles that met the hospital trains were 
 loaned by people who wanted to do whatever they 
 could to help the cause. He was a dairy farmer, 
 he said, and gave me uninteresting statistical in- 
 formation about cows and the amount of milk he 
 sold in London each day. But apart from that, 
 I enjoyed the smooth drive over the faultless 
 roads. 
 
 The Third London hospital at Wandsworth 
 fJommon is a military hospital ; and although the 
 
 229
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 discipline is strict, everything possible is done 
 for the comfort of the patients. Concerts are 
 given every few evenings ; almost every afternoon 
 people send around automobiles to take the 
 wounded men for a drive. Twice a week visitors 
 come in for three hours in the afternoon. At 
 Wandsworth I stayed only a very few days. 
 Two days before Christmas I was sent to Esher 
 to the convalescent home run by the V. A. D. 
 Sisters. Nobody at this hospital received any 
 remuneration. Esher is in Surrey, not many 
 miles from London. Even in the winter the 
 weather was pleasant. Here we had a great 
 deal of liberty, being allowed out all day until 
 six at night. Only thirty men were in Esher at 
 one time. The hospital contained a piano, vic- 
 trola, pool table, and materials for playing all 
 sorts of games. At Esher one felt like an indi- 
 vidual, and not like a cog in a machine. Paddy 
 Walsh, the corporal, who had hesitated so long 
 about leaving me on the Peninsula, was at Esher 
 when I arrived. He was almost well now, he 
 told me, and was looking forward to a furlough. 
 After his furlough he was going back, he said, in 
 the first draft. " No forming fours for me, 
 around Scotland," said Walsh, " drilling a bunch 
 
 230
 
 "FEENISH" 
 
 of rookies. I want to get back with the boys." 
 After two weeks, Esher closed for repairs. 
 We all went back to the hospital at Wandsworth. 
 News had just come of the evacuation of the 
 Peninsula. In the ward I was sent to w^ere half 
 a dozen of our boys. I asked them what was the 
 trouble, and they told me frozen feet. " Frozen 
 feet,'' I said, "in Gallipoli? You're joking." 
 They assured me that they were not and referred 
 me to their case sheets that hung beside the beds. 
 Shortly before the evacuation a storm had swept 
 over the Peninsula. First it had rained for two 
 days, the third day it snowed, and the next it 
 froze. A torrent of water had poured down the 
 mountain side, flooding the trenches, and carry- 
 ing with it blankets, equipments, rifles, portions 
 of the parapet, and the dead bodies of men who 
 had been drowned while they were sleeping. 
 The men who were left had to forsake their 
 trenches and go above ground. Turks and Brit- 
 ish alike suffered. The last day of the storm, 
 while some of our men were waiting on the beach 
 to be taken to the hospital ship, they told me they 
 saw the bodies of at least two thousand men, 
 frozen to death. Our regiment stood it perhaps 
 better than any of the others. It was the sort 
 
 231
 
 TKENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 of climate they were accustomed to. The Aus- 
 tralasians suffered tremendously. I met one 
 man who had been on the Peninsula during the 
 evacuation. They had got away with the loss of 
 two men killed and one wounded for the entire 
 British force. The i:)apers that day said that the 
 Turks claimed to have driven the entire British 
 army into the sea, and to have gained an immense 
 amount of booty. The booty gained, our men 
 said, was bully beef and biscuits. Far from 
 being driven into the sea, the British got off in 
 two hours without the Turks suspecting at all; 
 and it was not till the second day after that the 
 Turks really found out. It had taken a great 
 deal of ingenuity to devise a scheme that would 
 let the evacuation take place secretly. The dis- 
 tance from the shore was about four miles. As 
 soon as the troops knew they were to leave, they 
 ripped up the sand bags on the parapets, and 
 broke the glass in the periscopes, so they would 
 be useless to the enemy. Then they attached the 
 broken periscopes to the parapets, so that the 
 Turks looking over would see the periscopes 
 above the trench, just as they would any ordinary 
 day at the front. Only one problem remained 
 unsolved. As soon as the Turks heard the firing 
 
 232
 
 "FEENISH" 
 
 cease entirely, tliey would think something was 
 not as it should be. If they began to investigate 
 before the troops got away, it might mean an- 
 nihilation. At first it w^as planned to leave a 
 small party scattered through the trenches, but 
 this meant that they would have to be sacrificed 
 in order to allow their comrades to escape. An 
 Australian devised a scheme. He took a number 
 of rifles, placed them at different points along 
 the parapest, and lashed them to it. In each 
 one he put a cartridge. From the trigger he sus- 
 pended a bully beef tin, weighted with sand. 
 This was not quite heavy enough to pull the 
 trigger. On top of the rifle he placed another 
 tin, filled with water, and pierced a small hole 
 in the bottom of it. After a while the water, 
 dripping slowly from the top tin, made the lower 
 one heavy enough to pull the trigger. Some of 
 the tins were heavier than the others, and the 
 rifles did not all go off at once. As soon as 
 things were ready, the troops moved off silently, 
 " Just as if they were going into dugouts," Art 
 Pratt wrote me. They got aboard the warships 
 waiting for them in the bay, and went to Mud- 
 ros and Imbros. The evacuation was facilitated 
 by the fact that the Salt Lake that had been 
 
 233
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 dried up when I was there was swollen high by 
 the rain of the previous weeks. All that night 
 the firing continued at intervals, and kept up all 
 through the next day. The Turks, taking the 
 usual cautious survey of the enemy trenches, saw, 
 as they did every other day, periscopes sticking 
 up over the parapets and heard the ordinary re- 
 ports of rifle fire ; to them it looked like what the 
 official reports call a " quiet day on the Eastern 
 front." 
 
 One other item of news I received that pleased 
 me very greatly. Art Pratt had taken my place 
 as corporal of the section, and had sent me w^ord 
 that he had got the sniper who shot me. 
 
 After I had been back in the Wandsworth 
 Common hospital a few days, I was " boarded." 
 That is, I was sent up to be examined by a board 
 of doctors. They found me " unfit for further 
 service," and I was sent to my depot in Scotland 
 for disposal. The next day I w^as given all my 
 back pay and took the train for Ayr, Scotland. 
 There I w'as given my discharge " in consequence 
 of wounds received in action in Gallipoli." 
 Major Whitaker, the officer in charge, paused and 
 looked at me, w'hile he was signing the discharge 
 paper. 
 
 234
 
 "FEENISH" 
 
 " I imagine," he said, " you feel rather sorry 
 that you caught that train, Corijoral." 
 
 " What train is that, sir? " I said. 
 
 " The one at Aldershot," he answered, as he 
 completed his signature. I smiled noncommit- 
 tally, but did not answer him. 
 
 Looking back now it seems to me that catch- 
 ing that train is one thing I have never regretted. 
 I was convinced of it that day in Ayr. For a 
 few weeks past convalescents of the First Bat- 
 talion had been dribbling into Ayr. You could 
 tell them by their wan, fever-wasted faces, and by 
 the little ribbons of claret and white that they 
 wore on the sleeves of their coats, the claret and 
 white that marked them as the "service bat- 
 talion." And there was in their faces, too, the 
 calm, confident look of men w^ho had hobnobbed 
 with death, and had come away unafraid. Every 
 one of them had the same tale. "We're tired 
 of the depot already. They're a new bunch 
 here, and we want to get back with the crowd we 
 know." There was no talk of patriotism, or 
 duty; all this had given place to the pride of 
 local achievement. To those men, my little 
 claret and white ribbon was all the introduction 
 I needed. 1 was a member of the First Bat- 
 
 235
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 talion. As I hobbled along the main street of 
 Ayr, a crowd of them bore down on me. A 
 heterogeneous bunch they were, bored to death 
 with the quietness of the Scottish town, shouting 
 boisterous greetings long before they reached me. 
 The lot of us took dinner together and afterwards 
 went in a body to the theater. The theater pro- 
 prietor refused unconditionally to take any 
 money from us. We were " returned wounded," 
 and the best seats in the house were ours. Four 
 or five of our party had just returned from Edin- 
 burgh, where they had spent their furloughs. 
 They had been received royally. The civic au- 
 thorities had made arrangements with the owners 
 of the Royal Hotel in Edinburgh to put the New- 
 foundlanders up free of cost during their stay. 
 The First Battalion had spent their money 
 freely while they were garrisoning Edinburgh 
 Castle, and the authorities had not forgotten it. 
 I hated to leave those men of the First Bat- 
 talion, who welcomed me so heartily. I was glad 
 at the thought of getting back to the States 
 again; but it was strange to think that I was no 
 longer a soldier, that my days of fighting were 
 over. An inexpressible sadness came over me as 
 I bade good-by to them. Some of their names I 
 
 236
 
 "FEENISH" 
 
 do not know, but they were all my friends. 
 There are others like them in various hospitals 
 in England and Egypt ; and also in a shady, tree- 
 dotted ravine on the Peninsula of Gallipoli there 
 is a row of graves, where also are my friends of 
 the First Newfoundland Regiment. 
 
 The men our regiment lost, although they 
 gladly fought a hopeless fight, have not died in 
 vain. Constantinople has not been taken, and 
 the Gallipoli campaign is fast becoming a 
 memory, but things our men did there will not 
 soon be forgotten. The foremost advance on the 
 Suvla Bay front is Donnelly's Post on Caribou 
 Ridge, made by the Newfoundlanders. It is 
 called Donnelly's Post because it is here that 
 Lieutenant Donnelly won his Military Cross. 
 The hitherto unknown ridge from which the 
 Turkish machine guns poured their concentrated 
 death into our trenches stands as a monument to 
 the initiative of the Newfoundlanders. It is now 
 Caribou Ridge as a recognition of the men who 
 wear the deer's head badge. From Caribou 
 Ridge the Turks could enfilade parts of our firing 
 line. For weeks they had continued to pick off 
 our men one by one. You could almost tell when 
 your turn was coming. I know, because from 
 
 237
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 Caribou Ridge came the bullet that sent me off 
 the Peuinsula. The machine guns on Caribou 
 Ridge not only swept part of our trench, but 
 commanded all of the intervening ground. This 
 ground was almost absolutely devoid of cover. 
 Several attempts had been made to rush 
 those guns. All these attacks had failed, held 
 up by the murderous machine-gun fire. Whole 
 companies had essayed the task, but all had been 
 repulsed, and almost annihilated. It remained 
 for Lieutenant Donnelly to essay the impossible. 
 Under cover of darkness, Lieutenant Donnelly, 
 with only eight men, surprised the Turks in the 
 post that now bears his name. The captured 
 machine gun he turned on the Turks to repulse 
 constantly launched bomb and rifle attacks. 
 Just at dusk one evening Donnelly stole out to 
 Caribou Ridge and took the Turks by storm. 
 They had been accustomed before that to see 
 large bodies of men swarm over the parapet in 
 broad daylight, and had been able to wipe them 
 out with machine-gun fire. All that night the 
 Turks strove to recover their lost ground. The 
 darkness that confused the enemy was the New- 
 foundlanders' ally. One of Donnelly's men, 
 Jack Hynes, crawled away from his companions 
 
 238
 
 "FEENISH" 
 
 to a point about two hundred yards to the left. 
 All through the night he poured a rapid stream 
 of fire into the flank of the enemy's attacking 
 party. So steadily did he keep it up that the 
 Turks were deluded into thinking we had men 
 there in force. When reinforcements arrived, 
 Donnelly's eight men were reduced to two. 
 Dawn showed the havoc wrought by the gallant 
 little group. The ground in front of the post 
 was a shambles of piled up Turkish corpses. 
 But daylight showed something more to the 
 credit of the Newfoundlanders than the mere 
 taking of the ridge. It showed Jack Hynes pur- 
 posely falling back over exposed ground to draw 
 the enemy's attention from Sergeant Greene, who 
 w^as coolly making trip after trip between the 
 ridge and our lines, carrying a wounded man in 
 his arms every time until all our wounded were 
 in safety. Hynes and Greene were each given 
 a Distinguished Conduct Medal. None was ever 
 more nobly earned. 
 
 The night the First Newfoundland Regiment 
 landed in Suvla Bay there were about eleven 
 hundred of us. In December when the British 
 forces evacuated Gallipoli, to our regiment fell 
 the honor of being nominated to fight the rear- 
 
 239
 
 TRENCHING AT GALLIPOLI 
 
 guard action. This is the highest recognition 
 a regiment can receive; for the duty of a rear 
 guard in a retreat is to keep the enemy from 
 reaching the main body of troops, even if this 
 means annihilation for itself. At Lemnos 
 Island the next day when the roll was called, of 
 the eleven hundred men who landed when I did, 
 only one hundred and seventy-one answered 
 " Here." 
 
 After the First Newfoundland Regiment left 
 the Peninsula, they went to Egypt to guard the 
 Suez Canal from the long-expected attack of the 
 Turks. After they had been rested a little while, 
 they were recruited up to full fighting strength, 
 again, and were sent to France. In the recent 
 drive of the Allies against the German positions 
 on the Somme, the regiment has won for itself 
 fresh laurels. The " Times " correspondent at 
 British headquarters in France sent the follow- 
 ing on July 13th : 
 
 " The Newfoundlanders were the only overseas 
 troops engaged in these operations. The story 
 of their heroic part cannot yet be told in full, 
 but when it is it will make Newfoundland very 
 proud. The battalion was pushed up as what 
 may be called the third wave in the attack on 
 
 240
 
 "FEENISH" 
 
 probably the most formidable section of the 
 whole German front through an almost over- 
 whelming artillery fire and a cross-ground swept 
 by an enfilading machine-gun fire from hidden 
 positions. The men behaved with completely 
 noble steadiness and courage." 
 
 THE END 
 
 241
 
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