By this time the first line was well across the gully, and the enemy’s artillery had opened a terrible shrapnel fire. The second line had shown their heads and were coming as rifle and machine gun fire grew thicker. I saw three men running, so up we jumped. I don’t remember recognising anybody, but I know I got a bullet straight through my magazine, which fell out, hitting me on the toes. When we got in the Turks’ first line a chap sang out that we would have to go to the second line. No sooner had we touched the ground then one of my mates got a bang on the side of the head. He was bleeding a good deal, and died before anyone could do anything for him.

We decided to push on a little with the third line of advance. The fire at this period had grown terrific (the third line coming) when bang! I thought someone had given my leg a sharp kick out of the way and looked and saw a hole in my puttee about two inches above my right foot. For a while it never gave me any pain, but as soon as I moved my foot the pain nearly drove me mad. Groans of agony are nothing here, I yelled at the top of my voice. I said to the one mate left out of five of us that I had stopped one in the leg. The third line was well on us now, and I made three attempts to get up, but my leg kept giving from under me. I was too weak, through loss of blood. My mate went on with a chap out of the third line but, poor chap, he stopped a bullet and I had to lie and watch him die. I was too weak to get him. The next thing was to get back to the sap. There were three more killed and two wounded there. One had his back broken, and was trying to roll down off the little crest he was on, when a machine gun caught him. It fairly riddled him. Anyhow, the poor fellow did not moan after. The fire and shells were so thick that the scrub behind us caught fire. A chap came and lay alongside me, holding in his right hand the arm-bone of his left, from which the hand had been blown off. I helped him to bandage it up, and he said he would wait with me till dark. He was an Australian to the backbone.

I never said my prayers so often and with such sincerity as I did those two hours or so, which seemed a week that we were lying there. It was just living hell. When darkness came I crawled and rolled back to the sap following the line as best I could. After a while I was in the sap getting my wound bandaged up and in six hours I was on the hospital ship. Well, Jim, you see we are not those six bob a day tourists that some people out there call us.6

An unknown lieutenant in 3/AIF, attacking the heart of Lone Pine, wrote of the attack later from a hospital bed, as he recovered from his wounds:

Our blood was up, and our only thought was ‘Lone Pine must be ours’. It is a peculiar sort of ‘don’t care feeling’. You see your friends knocked out by your side, and you think, ‘They’re dead, and were as good as I am’. It is then that absolute contempt for death overtakes one. We got there, and were faced with a tough proposition. They had built their trenches with such perfection that the artillery did not do the damage we expected. Their overhead cover made their trenches like tunnels—they had pine legs and cut timber laid closely together, and on top 2ft. to 3ft. of earth. Running out towards our lines were huge tunnels in which they sheltered during the artillery fire. We just simply had to draw them out. Dead and wounded were simply packed under these coverings. However, by 6.30 we were establishing a new firing line, building up one of their support trenches with sandbags, etc. Bombs—how I loathe the name—are only little things, about the size of a small jam tin, but they do the work of the devil. However, we hung on, and the position is still ours. I am certain if some of those who shirk could just set their eyes on some of those bodies, as they rot under the sun’s rays, they would come along. By the periscope we could distinguish some of them, but for the most part they lay in a huddled mass. It is certain death to attempt to get to them to bury them, and so they lie there. If you could imagine fifty seven dead in about twenty yards of trench, and then lying there for three to four days, you will have an idea of what trench attacks are. We simply had to walk over them. Poor Meagers! His last words, after he was hit, about thirty yards from the Turkish trenches, were: ‘Go on, boys; don’t mind me’. He was hit in the stomach, and just turned over, and, I believe, died there. M’Gowan lay for fourteen hours outside the trenches with serious injuries. Young Vic Pinkstone was wounded and his brother Norman was attending to him, when a shell killed him in his arms. Norman got off without serious injury, but what an experience.⁷