Stayed on board the Hythe all night and of course I touched unlucky. Did a seven-hour watch on the ship while a working party of Egyptians unloaded a few thousand bombs. We landed at 5.30 on the Friday morning and marched up to the new dugouts where I joined up with A Company 2nd Battalion RM. Deal and Chatham Battalions had been amalgamated and called the 1st Battalion, and Plymouth and Portsmouth called the 2nd Battalion. The four battalions only numbered about 800 men in total. Very few of the Pompey boys were left. Bob Heston still hung on. I pigged in with Mick Smith, a North Country lad, and a friend of Billy Georges, who died in May. Sergeant Owen was in charge of our platoon (No. 1). He was an old Pompey man and pretty easygoing.
Very little fighting was going on. The chaps said that Johnny never shelled now. He was too occupied with the new landing at Suvla Bay, where those three new divisions landed. Orders on Monday for the trenches and we moved at 1.00pm. Went up the gully ravine on the left, which ran from Y beach to the left of Krithia and was about 200 feet deep in places. It was a hot and dusty journey and our Lance Corporal Bill Love seemed to think that our legs were as long and as fresh as his. We had some rare lads in our platoon, all nationalities: Jock Baird from Motherwell, Cooper from Wales, very entertaining when he sang in Welsh, Jimmy Rimmer from Ireland, and real Irish, and Tommy Bolan, a corner boy from Middlesbrough. All ‘birds’ and they soon shouted if Bill Love opened out.
The gully twisted and turned so that it appeared never ending and had it not been for the little springs of fresh water trickling out of the rocks, the journey would have been absolute torture. We came to a zigzag path at the finish that led right up the face of the gully and at the top was the CT leading to the firing line.
We relieved the Hawkes and were in the firing line until Wednesday. Very little firing but plenty of work. I was attached to some miners and did six hours on and eighteen off. The work consisted of dragging bags of chalk along the bottom of an underground sap that two miners were making, and this thing was a foot deep in water. The eighteen hours off consisted of doing odd watches, fetching rations and SAA from the zigzag and clearing up the trench. When we could we slept. The RGA1 were very busy just then, bringing up some heavy trench mortars and land torpedoes that the French had lent us. The torpedoes are great things with fins on and have about 60lbs of high explosive in them. Thoughts and visions of another stunt flashed across my mind. We moved down into support about 4.00pm on the Wednesday and, about that time, our guns opened up on the Turks’ trenches in front of our position. I was on a sapping party from 1.00 to 4.00am, digging a little sap from our front lines towards the Turks’ trench. We were just about forty yards from the Turk and it was awfully lonely. Just Mick Smith and I with not a scrap of wire in front of us and a Turkish wiring party only thirty yards away. Mick and I took it in turns to dig and while one was on his knees digging the other would be filling sandbags with the loose earth and lifting them up on top to form a parapet. All at once someone dashed up the sap (on hands and knees) and told us to keep down as our chaps in the line were going to give Johnny’s party five rounds rapid. They did but I don’t think they did much damage beyond scaring them back into their trench. I was jolly glad when our four hours were up. About 250 reinforcements joined the battalion on 2 September with several new officers. Our company got a new OC, a Captain Cordnor, and two subs, Weeks and McCready. Captain Cordnor appeared dizzy, but I suppose that was only natural and to be expected.
Our ships and guns bombarded in the morning and the Turk replied with a few guns on our trenches. We moved up into the firing line at 3.00pm but received orders soon after to stand by to leave again at 5.00pm. There was to be a big strafe with the trench mortars, bombs and field guns from 5.30 to 6.30pm and we had to move down the CT, with the exception of two men in each bay who would keep watch. It was a strafe, and if Johnny Turk got it worse than we did, then I’m sorry for him. Great lumps of those torpedoes came flying back, bombs dropped short and the Turk opened up with whizz-bangs on the CT, where we were all crouched. Two or three fellows were killed about ten yards below me and when the order came at 6.30 to fix bayonets and man the firing line at the double several more chaps got stuck with bayonets. Our trench was in a shocking condition when we arrived there, sandbags knocked in and torn, all the parapet battered in and the whole place littered with lumps of iron, pieces of bombs and lumps of earth.
There was a chap called Shackleton grovelling about on the floor of the trench, moaning and groaning out that he was hit. No wound could be seen and only a small bruise on his hip told us that a stone or a splinter had caught him. It caused a laugh and relieved the tension which was pretty high just then. Poor old Shackleton, he was a funny little fellow and I often thought about the times I’d hammered him into a state of sleep in our room at Forton Barracks. He came from decent people, had had a decent education but something was wrong in his mental box. He used to get frightfully drunk every night at Forton and after ‘lights out’ would start tormenting the other chaps. I used to get first attention from him as my bed was next to his and as soon as he got to my bed I would knock him back into his own. He was then under a suspended sentence of two years for cowardice at Gaba Tepe. Somebody found him wandering about on the beach when he should have been in the trenches.
An officer and six men of the Manchesters came along at night and went out at North Barricade to fetch in one of their men who had been killed some time ago. He did stink! Standing by for another bombardment, but thank the Lord, the wind was too strong. We sent off a few bombs from the barricade, but the wind carried them back almost into our own trench.
Stood to arms at 4.30 Sunday morning and think we might have been ‘standing to’ for a week, had not two chaps, one in our bay and one in the next, been killed. We were all stuck up on that fire-step for two hours and we must have looked like Aunt Sallies to the Turk. It got to a nice shooting light and one smart Turk took advantage and popped both these fellows off. They were dead as they fell off the step. Sergeant Owen came along, found out what had happened and played war with Captain Gardner, who should have passed word along to ‘stand down, carry on daily routine’ an hour and a half before. The captain went down the line next day sick. We got our own back next morning at ‘stand to’. Two or three of us waited with our rifles at the ready and just before it got really light a Turk climbed over the back of his trench. I fired and Jack Spencer fired. Perhaps we both hit him, we shall never really know that but I’m certain he never climbed out of another trench. Later in the day we picked out another nice spot for sniping. We could see where the Turks’ CT ran into his firing line and about twenty yards down was a bend where anyone passing was visible to us for about three yards. We spotted a big fat Turk and something caused him to pause at that bend. He paused just long enough for Jock Baird to hit him. He must have yelled because two more dashed down and tried to get him away. We got one of those and the other one dashed away again. I guess all the other Turks who used that trench went up and down it on hands and knees.
We were relieved at 5.00pm and went down to the reserve trench, which was blessed with the name of College Green. This was an old Turkish trench battered into the semblance of a sunken road and wide enough in places to turn a horse and cart round. There was plenty of room for a comfy sleep though, different from the firing line where the fire-step was anything from a foot to eighteen inches wide and that with an outward slope on it. I had a walk with Jack Spencer along this trench to the left and, about a hundred yards past our sector, came into a maze of old Turkish trenches, which had been shelled and battered until they looked like anything else on earth but trenches.
They had been taken by 29th Division on 28 June and had suffered terribly in the bombardment. The remains of Turks were still lying about all over the place, no attempt being made to clear them away or bury them. The whole place was littered with broken rifles, equipment, telephone wires, blankets and greatcoats. I shouldn’t like a revetting job with his sandbags; they held anything from one to two hundredweight of earth and it must have been an awful job getting them into position. All the print on the bags was in German. In some parts of the trenches he had run short of bags and had used blankets and greatcoats to fill up. Safety before comfort was his motto.
We could see where the poor old Turk had been crouching down under the parapet and in his little funk-hole during the bombardment and a shell had burst, filling up the trench and burying the lot. Arms and legs were sticking out from the sides and bottom of the trench, and if we touched them the clothing would drop off, revealing just a horrid-looking bone. Jack Spencer spotted a pair of very good boots on a Turk. ‘I’m having them,’ he said, ‘they don’t need boots in heaven’, and he took them off and changed them for his own. He was a queer chap. A short time before coming out here, he was an orderly to Admiral Jellicoe on the Iron Duke and got kicked out for being in a frightful state of intoxication whilst escorting the Admiral’s wife to somewhere in a motor car.
I was jolly pleased to get away from that hell hole. The whole place stank of death and disease and everything was swarming with horrid black files and grass-hoppers. We were really hunting for firewood but had no luck. We spotted some barbed-wire stakes just over the top and went out to pull a few up and could see where several dead Turks had been hastily dragged into a heap, oil poured on them and fired. They were only half-burnt though and the stench from them was awful. We lingered out there a little too long and a Turkish sniper got busy. Two or three bullets whistled unpleasantly close to us so we got back at the double.
Went out again on the sapping job at night, for four hours, and had a few bursts of rapid while working. We had nothing to do the following day so had another walk through the ‘shambles’. Thought I might get a few souvenirs, but couldn’t bring myself to touch those dead Turks. C Company, who had relieved us, sent a few bombs over at night from the Northern Barricade and one burst in the catapult, wounding five of our men. Relieved by the Hawkes early on Tuesday the 7th and went down to Rest Camp. Had a bathe in the sea, a clean change and felt A1.
We did fatigues for four days, first making winter quarters for the corps staff on the beach, second building a pier on Y beach, the third and fourth days with a sanitary squad at divisional HQ, shovelling a big stack of dry horse manure into a deep pit. Both those days were very windy and I think I swallowed nearly as much manure as I put into the pit. Anyhow, on Sunday I felt bad and thought I was going to touch for dysentery or jaundice. Both complaints were prevalent and it was pitiful to see the men with dysentery. They could hardly crawl about and had no hopes of getting sent away from the peninsula or even to field ambulance unless they were just about dying. There appeared to be absolutely no method of preventing or treating the disease in that awful place. It was a sickening sight to see the poor devils as they crawled on hands and knees to the latrines, lying there for hours, in many cases all through the night. My chum Mick Smith had had it bad, but the doctor sent him away on the Sunday. I never expected him to get better.
I felt bad on Monday, but didn’t report sick as there were no fatigues on. We went over to 3rd Field Ambulance (3 FA) in the afternoon to be inoculated again for cholera. When we got back the company was being paid out and I drew 10/- (50p). What on earth they paid us for I don’t know and didn’t care much then. Fancy giving us 10/- in that wilderness?
I crawled down to the doctor’s shop on Tuesday morning. I had a temperature of 101.2, so I suppose Jimmy Ross (that’s our pet name for the doctor) thought I was ill. He excused me duty and ordered me milk diet. I didn’t waste any energy thinking where I was to get the milk from. All I wanted to do was get down and sleep. Some of the chaps bought some eggs from a Greek on the beach and tried to tempt me with them but I couldn’t face anything. The doctor put my complaint down as pyrexia2 on Wednesday. Don’t know what that is. The battalion went up the line after tea but I stayed down along with about fifty more sick, lame and lazy. We all had orders to report at 3 FA in the morning for treatment. There was a frightful storm all night, rain, thunder and lightning but I slept through it all. I was lying in about two inches of water in the morning and, as soon as I made to get up, all the water that had collected in my waterproof sheet – and there was at least a gallon – came down on me, drenching me through. Nothing mattered. They packed me off to the beach CCS from 3 FA and from there to the hospital ship Valtivia, where, thank the Lord, I was able to undress and get into a clean bed. And there I stayed until we reached Lemnos on the Saturday afternoon. I felt a bit better then and went up on deck. I had something to eat on Sunday, the first for a week and then managed a shave.
I was taken on the 21st to the 1st Canadian Field Hospital and stayed there till the 29th, receiving better attention and food than on either occasion in Egypt. There were some real jolly Canadian nurses there and I felt sorry when the time came to move to convalescent camp. Once there the hardening process commenced and I was pushed with seven more chaps into a bell tent. It certainly had floorboards but they were damned hard after a soft bed. All the other fellows in the tent were of different regiments and absolutely different natures and, although arguments got rather fierce about the merits of our respective regiments, we got on very well together. Most of our time we spent playing bridge but life there was rotten. I think that convalescent camps are instituted by GHQ solely for the purpose of making wounded and sick men so fed up that they are only too glad to rush back to the fighting. I know that my short stay in the camp had been far too long. I was put on sanitary squad fatigue from getting in camp to leaving it. The work consisted chiefly of emptying latrine buckets twice a day, and digging great pits in the hard ground to bury the contents. Quite a nice steady job for a chap who had just been dragged from the ‘edge of beyond’.
I had a few letters the day before leaving convalescent camp. As a matter of fact there were forty-three and I hardly knew how to begin on them. One night, while in camp, we had a violent wind and rain storm and had to dash outside with only our shirts on. We could feel all our tent pegs giving and by the time we got outside they had given and we had to hang on like grim death. Half the camp was down by morning.
It was 15 October when I went to the RND detail camp and it was no easy job getting away from there. There was plenty of work but we had a certain amount of freedom and a little pay, so I managed a run through one or two of the villages. These half-Turks-half-Greeks were realising one of the effects of the war – easy money by fleecing the British Tommy.
I left Detail Camp on 21 October and embarked on the Brighton, a big minesweeper. The voyage to Cape Helles was awfully rough, waves washing right over the boat nearly the whole way. The weather seems to have broken up and I reckoned we were in for a rotten winter.
Landed at dawn on W beach and went straight to the battalion. Joined up with the same section and found them in new quarters. They were supposed to be winter quarters but the dugouts were only partly finished. All the camp was laid out on proper lines and all work carried out under supervision of the engineers. Dugouts were twelve feet long, six feet wide and four feet deep, and we were to have sheets of iron to put on the top. I wonder! No one was allowed to walk about on top as we had five-feet trenches connecting up all the dugouts and lines. The Turk might know we were here if he saw us walking about.
Just a few words about the section. Captain Pilgrim in charge, a real decent chap and a first reinforcement. He was wounded pretty badly in their little stunt on 25 June and had only lately rejoined.
Private Daniels, long-service marine and just reverted from corporal. He had just done seven days’ field punishment and couldn’t get over it. He got wrong with Major Tetley over some Turkish binoculars and of course went under. He was talking about getting back on the signal staff again and good luck to him. We all hoped he would get back; he always had a moan on.
There were Jock Baird and Tommy Barlow, old chums, and a bird by the name of Clayton. All the chaps nicknamed him Kelly and he was the dirtiest specimen of a marine that I had ever struck. He was lousy. They say a chap is never really lousy till they come out of his lace holes. Kelly was beyond that. He made me shudder when he came near me. He was one of the original Plymouths and was badly bayoneted in the scramble to get off the peninsula on 26 April. The back of his neck was covered in wounds, some of which kept discharging, owing, I supposed, to the filthy state in which he kept himself.
I shook down alright with them all and they shared rations and parcels for the first day. They said it was a lucky dugout for parcels and hoped now it would be more lucky.
It rained all the first day and my new WP sheet came in handy. It kept the dugout fairly dry.
Up at 6.30 next morning, improving dugouts and drains. At it till noon, then from 1.30 to 6.30 on fatigues at the bomb school at the beach. We only had two shells over all day and they pitched about ten yards from our line. About ten men were leaving the battalion every day through sickness, some of them just worked to death. It was nothing but dig from getting up to getting down. Our new CO, Colonel Hutchinson seemed keen on it. If we weren’t digging our own camp, we were doing for divisional HQ or brigade HQ.
We were all inoculated on the 26th for cholera and the following day went up the line. I was let in for the section as Corporal Daniels had picked up his two stripes and had rejoined his signal section (for which Allah be praised). A platoon of London Fusiliers was attached to our company for instruction in the line. As they were unable to bring their big sisters with them from Malta (where they had been since 14 August) we had to carry their blankets, fetch them water, let them have our funk-holes to sleep in, and carry them about generally.
We were filling sandbags all the first morning, in the M Barricade and revetting fresh traverses in the F line. Told off for duty in Sap 9 at night. This was the new firing line and ran from N[orth] Barricade to the Manchesters on our left. This was the little sap that Mick Smith and I worked in before I was bad. It was a fine trench now but awfully near the Turks, only about sixty yards in some places. We had a new chap with us, Sergeant Jeffries, a pre-war Bisley man and crack shot of Plymouth Division. He arrived with two rifles, one fitted with telescopic sights for fine sniping. He came in Sap 9 the first morning, got on the fire-step and took a few pot shots at nothing in particular. A good shot he may have been, but he had a lot to learn about the kind of shooting that was done out there. It’s a case of one round, one position. It was about his fourth shot and as soon as he had pressed the trigger his hat flew off. One of Johnny’s fairly decent shots had beaten him. The bullet went clean through the front and back of his cap, taking with it a few of Jeffries’ remaining hairs. He never sniped from Sap 9 again.
We had a crazy way of working things at night, Captain Gowney’s idea again. Everybody did half an hour on watch, and was down half an hour, and every man during his half hour on watch had to fire at least five rounds. Most of the bullets, from the sound of them, would just about hit the top of Achi Baba, about two miles away. Usually the half hour up would seem like hours, our heads nodding, our eyes half closed and our minds a complete blank. Had it not been for the five rounds we had to fire we should have gone to sleep standing up.
The half hour down went like a flash. We no sooner appeared to drop off than our opposite number was shaking us, ‘your turn up’. ‘Go on, I’ve only just got down,’ we would say. Sometimes it would need the corporal or sergeant on watch to induce some of the fellows to get up. They were awfully long nights too, and it was frightfully cold, especially the hour before the dawn and ‘stand to’.
We had a Sergeant Major Cutcher in charge of our platoon, and a dizzier old bird I’ve never struck. He just daren’t put his head above the top and he went off something alarming at me for looking over the top without using the periscope.
We went down to the reserves on the Friday afternoon and at night went out digging a new trench. It was all top work and the whole time bullets were whizzing by us or going plop, into the ground by us. No one was hit. The whole area of ground that we were working on was littered with dead men, and we had to move several of them before we could get on with the work. All sorts were there, Scotties, English, Indians and Turks. One chap we moved was a major. Gowney got another brilliant idea: we were to have a big party out, collect all these dead and burn them with some sprayers and chemical stuff. One party did go out, but all they collected was souvenirs. As soon as they tried to lift the dead they dropped to pieces.
Johnny shelled our line pretty heavily on 31 October. He had got some 4-inch howitzers by then and was getting pretty accurate with them. We moved to Sap 8 on 1 November. It was very decent there, and about 150 yards from the Turk. A dead man was lying just in front of our parapet and when Johnny kept hitting him with a bullet, which was pretty often, the stench was awful.
We had a few spasms of rapid and on Tuesday night the Turk shelled us with shrapnel and sent over a lot of bombs. Old Bob Trevot, our sanitary sergeant, woke up at ‘stand to’ in the supports and found out that he was wounded. A shrapnel ball had gone through his leg. Volunteers were wanted for a wiring party at night. Jock Baird and I went out with Sergeant Douglas and pulled a few coils of concertina wire out and pegged it down. Then there were a few chevaux-de-frise to be put into position. It was a queer sensation being out in no man’s land at night with firing going on all around and lights going up suddenly from the Turks’ trench. Everything was like day then and it was policy to stand still. It made me feel like dropping down for cover and you felt certain a Turk only fifty yards away had just got a fine sight on you. I expect the Turks were like most of our fellows though; as soon as a light went up, they got down.
The 1st RM Battalion put some wire out one night – just chevaux-defrise – and never anchored them to the ground. Next morning the wire was in front of the Turks trench instead of their own. We were relieved at 5.30pm on the 3rd and went down to camp again. We had a stand-off on the first day to get cleaned up and I ran into a square number as company clerk again. There was no clerking to do, I just had to fetch the company’s mail every day if there was any, serve rations out to platoons and keep the CSM’s and QM Sergeant’s rifles clean; they were a drunken pair, especially CSM Chapman. He came out with us in Portsmouth Battalion, as a bugler, was made corporal of the band at Port Said (where it died) and colour sergeant after Gaba Tepe. He won’t get much beyond that because his best friend, Jacky Luard our old colonel, has gone west. The Hawkes had a little stunt on the Saturday night. They advanced from both barricades, but only succeeded in making headway from the Southern. From there they advanced about twenty-five yards and dug in. They had several casualties.
The weather changed again and on the Sunday it was just like summer. Terrible hot. We were served out with winter clothing. Jerkins, cardigan jackets and big waterproof capes.
Three monitors and the Swiftsure turned up on Sunday afternoon and bombarded behind Krithia. Some of the shells from the monitors, 12- or 14-inch, sounded just like express trains as they rushed through the air. They did kick some dust up behind the village. I felt bad all Monday and Tuesday but managed to drag myself to the battalion order board when someone told me I had been made lance corporal. I couldn’t believe it at first but didn’t feel very keen, only that it meant another 4d (1.5p) a day more, and that’s a consideration, especially if this silly war lasts many years. I reckoned my pay now to be about 1/9d (8.5p) a day. And 6d (2.5p) a day field allowance if it materialised.
Up at 5.00am Wednesday morning, everything to be ready for moving up the line by 9. We only went as far as Eski Lines, the general reserve trench. This was a strongly-built trench, stretching right across the peninsula from one coast to the other. Everything was ankle deep in mud and it rained every bit of the day. Nothing to do until 7.30 at night when we went digging a new trench.
Rations were poor and water was scarce, and when we got water we could find no wood or heather for a fire. I felt bad all Thursday and, after returning from a ration party to the front line, I turned in. And it started raining again, and raining harder than I’d ever known it rain before. It kept up for the best part of the night and washed everybody off the fire-step. We were all walking about until dawn knee deep in water and mud. I went scrounging down the gully later in the day and found enough wood to boil a canteen of tea and one of stew. Cutcher excused me rations at night, so I turned in early and felt heaps better on the Saturday. I had to go up to the battalion sergeant major’s dump at Marble Arch on the Saturday morning and on the way had a narrow escape. Three whizz-bangs came over and I bet none of them burst more than five yards from me. I got a move on then.
Heard at Brigade Dump that Kitchener had been on the peninsula and was very pleased with the troops. More heavy rain on Monday morning and I made things cheerful again.
Exactly at 3.00pm, two monitors sent over two heavy shells, two mines went up and part of 52nd Division advanced and took two lines of trenches in a place called the Vine Yard. All this with sixteen casualties, mostly wounded. The whole thing was an absolute surprise to the Turk and the Scotties were all over him before he knew there was a stunt on. All our guns opened up after that and gave the Turk no time to concentrate or re-organise for a counter-attack. This was kept up at full force for an hour and a half, but of course it wasn’t all one-sided. He had some guns and he used them. He shelled Goki Lines pretty heavily and our battalion had several casualties.
More thunder and rain at night and everybody was walking about like lumps of wet mud. I was caked from head to foot with the beastly stuff. We were working hard all Tuesday trying to clear the trenches of water, but there was nowhere to run it to. There was heavy fighting in the Vine Yard all night, but in his several counter-attacks the Turk never once got beyond his own wire.
Up and about by 5.30 Wednesday morning getting things ready for moving down. Most of the way down the CT we were over the knees in water. We drifted back to the same camp that we had left and found it in a state of flood. Most of the dugouts were dry, but the connecting trenches were a foot deep in water. We rigged our WP sheets over the dugouts in case the weather changed and we had some rain. Rain it did, and the water gradually came in through the trench and crept up round our feet as we lay down. It came in through the top and down the sides and we were jolly soon washed out and were walking about to keep warm. What a hole in winter! I wonder what happened to our iron sheets for the dug-outs? Somebody said that the ship that was bringing them out had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean. My section was down to five including myself.
We did nothing all Thursday but clear our dugouts and drains and try to make them a little more waterproof. We had no mail up that day. The sea was so rough in the night, it washed the pier away from W beach.
All the company went over to 1 FA on Friday to be fumigated, but when we got there they were unable to put us through. If we liked we could take all our clothes off and put them through the steaming arrangement. There they had to stop for thirty to forty minutes and in the meantime we were stood outside with absolutely nothing on and November too. Very few availed themselves of the generous offer, but were content to put in two blankets which we had taken with us.
Somebody who knew wrote an article about the winter in Gallipoli. ‘Usually,’ it said, ‘it is very mild, with some rain but very little snow. Not at all severe, but similar to those experienced in the South of France and Italy.’ We had already had some rain and over the way we can see the island of Samothraki with its great mountain, the top of which was already snow covered.
Three men were wounded in the camp on Saturday night by stray rifle bullets (Turkish) and two more on Sunday night, one of them being Corporal Daniels. For some reason, no doubt a good one for himself, he refused to leave the battalion and was content to put up with the crude attentions of our sick-bay. One chap in the next dugout was shot through the arm and another, a little farther away, through the nose. Those bullets must have come at least four miles. The Turks bombarded our trenches heavily on Sunday morning and followed it by an infantry attack which fizzled out at his own barbed wire. We heard on the Monday that they had lost about 800 men in that attack and gained nothing.
The Turks tried every day to get at two of our 6-inch guns just on the left of our camp, but usually managed to drop their shells amongst us. Up the line again on Wednesday 24 November. Our platoon was to work the Northern Barricade. The bombers under Corporal Grindy worked a catapult from there and sent over bombs. These were made on the beach, from jam tins, nails, bits of barbed wire and ammonal, with a six-second length of time fuse. Sometimes they worked alright and the bombs got over into the Turks’ trenches and sometimes they didn’t work. This was the case on the Thursday morning. I was in North Face, just opposite the little entrance to the Barricade, and had watched Grindy send over a few bombs. Captain Gowney was there, Cutcher was there (which was surprising) and Sergeant Major Chapman was there along with a few more. All at once there was a rush for the entrance. Cutcher got there first but fell over himself and Chapman dropped on top of him, completely blocking up the entrance. I heard a bomb go off in the barricade, but no one was hurt. It seems the bomb left the catapult but struck the parapet and instead of going over the top dropped back into our trench and exploded. There was a repetition of this about an hour after, only Cutcher wasn’t there. I think he’d gone to change. This time the bomb didn’t leave the catapult and no one noticed it but Holt, the bomber. He told Grindy, who just nipped the fuse with his fingers. No doubt he saved some lives by doing that. (Grindy afterwards received the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal for that bit of work.)
Company cooks were up the line with us this time with dixies and a good supply of wood, and all our tea and food was cooked for us. We were not allowed to light fires in the firing line.
The Turks were busy at night putting out wire and building a machine-gun emplacement. We had quite a lively night trying to hit a few. Two more chaps joined up with my section. Both ‘Birds’ – Houlet, a jailbird and Griggs, a Yank. Houlet fired at least 200 rounds at those Turks and all through his watches he kept calling to me, ‘Corporal, I can see a blurry Turk.’ It was no use telling him that what he could see were our own wire stakes. Everybody saw Turks advancing until they’d been up a few times. His last half hour up before ‘stand to’ he let off a yell and dropped off the step. He swore he was hit – and he could swear too – and he was hit. One of the other chaps, I think it was Jock Baird, had thrown a lump of shrapnel at him.
As soon as it got light the bombers got on to his emplacement and knocked it flat. He had rigged an artillery ranging flag up just opposite us and we had a good hour’s sport shooting it to bits.
Down to Chelmsford Street in support at 1.30 pm. Had a most awful night, thunder and heavy rain and afterwards a wind storm that nearly blew us out of the trenches. Our capes came in jolly handy. They were the only means of shelter that we had. I was on patrol round the supports and up to the front line most of the night but I enjoyed the whole storm. I felt better than I had done for weeks, and trudging knee deep through the sloppy mud was no hardship.
Saturday was a decent day but awfully cold and about 8.00pm it commenced snowing and went at it hard until it was a foot deep; then it froze. No one could sleep at night, it was so bitterly cold and most of the fellows had to keep walking about to keep warm. It was awful for those on watch on the fire-step. We had to relieve them every twenty minutes, otherwise they would have been frozen stiff. I was on the same patrol again and when I reached the line found that none of the chaps could use their rifles. The oil on the bolts had frozen and locked the rifles. I expect Johnny was in the same plight, so it wouldn’t matter much.
Somebody said it had been fifty years since it snowed there before Christmas. It was freezing keen all Sunday and lots of our fellows went away with frostbite. One young lad in No.2 Platoon took off his shoes and stockings and started running up and down the trench in his bare feet. He was taken away that day and by the time he had got to Malta had lost both his feet.
Rations were very poor that time up the line. We got tea and stew, but it isn’t like being able to make your own tea. With that arrangement we only got tea twice a day; with our own method we always had a canteen on the go.
All supplies of water were frozen up except the engineers’ well in the gully, and that’s a nice old tramp. Up in Sap 9 again on Monday morning. I had a new chum now, Billy Hurrell from Woodhouse, and quite a decent chap. He was a first reinforcement and was badly wounded in the back in their stunt. He was now doing runner to old Cutcher. Charlie Hamilton was cooking for Cutcher and we all three got on jolly well together. There was always a drop of real tea ready and we often managed a decent feed out of old Cutcher’s rations. One or two shells were quite sufficient to put him past his meals.
Plenty of whizz-bangs on our trench and north face on Monday. The buzz came round that Turkey wanted peace, but it took a lot of swallowing. He had more guns by then than he ever had and was making good use of them. There wasn’t much actual fighting and we were pretty sick of things by Wednesday. The most interesting thing that happened was a Turk singing every morning from the trench opposite the Northern Barricade. He had a lovely voice. We used to give him a cheer when he’d finished, but he would never oblige with an encore. Bob Hacking, an Oldham fellow, obliged twice with a song in return but we never got any appreciation from Abdulla, as we named the Turk.
We were relieved on the Wednesday and went down to camp again and started the next day down on five hours digging. Most of the digging was done for the sake of keeping us occupied. Having lost or given away their cap-badges, most of the fellows drew a crossed pick and spade in blue pencil on their caps which led to a Divisional Order that ‘practice of disfiguring the uniform with indelible ink must cease forthwith’. A big bombardment started on 4 December on the left of the line, monitors, cruisers and destroyers taking part and about twenty land mines were exploded. Very little was done by the infantry, however and the whole thing died away about 5.00pm.
On work in the battalion area on Sunday, each man with a double task; dig 108 cubic feet in hard brittle clay. It was a most awful job, especially on the rations we had been having lately. Bread twice a week and then a pound loaf between five or six men, biscuits, and not many – five days – and fresh meat, three days. Even the apricot jam was being knocked off and some of the fellows were scrounging round trying to find some of the stuff we had slung away in the summer. Every day in the hot weather we got apricot jam, and every day we slung it as far as we could sling it. Sometimes it would run a pound tin per man. Now we were lucky to get one between the section three times a week.
I watched a curious experiment after tea on the 7th. Two destroyers were cruising about off Y beach and sending off clouds of thick black smoke. It looked almost solid as it left the funnels. This gradually drifted right across the peninsula and moved slowly towards Achi Baba until not a scrap of the hill could be seen. We heard that day that the next time up the line we were to take over the old July sector up Achi Baba nullah and relieve the French Senegalese troops who were leaving the peninsula. We went up on 10 December and our company stayed in supports. A small stream flowed down the nullah just by the right of our sector and over it the engineers had put a wooden bridge with a five-foot wall of sandbags towards the front line.
The firing line was similar too but the nullah was deeper there. There were still numbers of Turkish dead about, and in the stream just by was the hand of one, shot or cut off clean by the wrist. We used the stream for washing and sometimes for drinking and cooking. The Lord knows what came down it from the Turkish trenches.
A change for dinner on the Saturday – steak and chips cooked in butter. Real butter too, not marg. Billy and I went with Cutcher after dinner up to the front line to look over the sector we would occupy when we moved up. In places the line was only forty yards away from the Turk and bombing and listening saps had been run out so that the distance in some places was only about twenty yards. There was no wire, or not enough to deter a blind man.
The Turks were now sending over some heavy shells and shelling the rest camps again every day. It was getting quite like old times, except that his stuff was much heavier and hotter. The Asiatic guns appeared to have got a new lease of life and were warming things up on the beaches. I saw a decent fight in the air on Sunday.
A Taube came over our lines flying fairly low and we opened up on it with rifles and machine guns, but without any apparent success, then one of our planes came along and chased it away, finally bringing it down in flames. Got word along about eleven on Sunday morning that the Turkish support trenches were full of troops and that they were expected to attack at noon on our sector. Everybody wished they would come as we were all bored stiff. Nothing exciting seemed to happen these days.
The attack came off alright but not on our sector; the French had all the fun and glory, what bit there was. Exactly at noon the Turkish batteries opened up on the back areas and CTs and their infantry got out over the top. And that was the Turks’ share in that attack. Not one reached the French lines. The French were in readiness for them the same as we were and they opened up with rapid fire, machine guns, 75s and their big land torpedoes. Half an hour of incessant hammering and the Turkish attack fizzled completely out.
We got plenty of shrapnel after that, but I think everybody is more or less used to that now, under the cover of a trench, that is. Of course there are exceptions, Cutcher and ‘Kelly’ Clayton for two. We moved up to the front line at 3.00pm, when the stunt had just about died away, and our platoon took over a trench just on the left of the ‘Horseshoe’. We were in a funny position, only eighty yards from the Turk but with not a sight of his trench to our front or left. There was a dip just beyond our wire and the Turk was down there. However, we had a grand view up Achi Baba nullah and could see the whole front slope of the hill about 1,500 to 2,000 yards away.
Had a good bit of sport on Tuesday. Micky Ash was on watch in my bay and all at once he called to me that he had spotted a Turk moving about up the nullah. He put me on to the spot and I told him to fire and I’d watch the shot. It brought a big dog out of a trench about 300 yards away and after it had stretched itself it walked slowly up the nullah. Micky fired fourteen rounds at it and never even made it hurry. Just as it jumped into another trench, one of our shrapnels burst behind us and Micky fell off the fire-step. It was nothing serious, just a shrapnel ball on the head. It hit his cap first and made a good old bump but didn’t go inside. He went down to the doctor’s shop and we expected him back any time, but he never came. (I heard afterwards that complications set in and a dose of enteric at the same time and Micky Ash nearly went under.)
About an hour after that, I was looking out for something to snipe and spotted the dog in the same place. I fired about ten shots and only succeeded in making it jump once. I think I must have hit its tail. Others were firing at it too from the Horseshoe, but it dropped safely into its trench again. We hadn’t a shot in reply to all this from the Turk. I passed the time on spotting loopholes in the Turkish trenches and could always tell when I hit them by the metallic ring they gave off. No Turk took up my challenge, so after a time I got fed up with shooting at inanimate objects, and turned in for an hour’s nap.
Went down into reserve at 6.45pm and our platoon manned Port Arthur Redoubt. There were plenty of good places to turn in for a sleep but no chance. It was work from going in to getting out. We were working all night on Wednesday and from 4 to 6 in the morning I took two men (Kelly Clayton and a lad called Smith) down the approach trench and starting revetting the parapets. All the work was on top, the two men filling and carrying the sandbags from about a dozen yards away and I fixing them. We had been out about an hour and were getting on fine when I heard two yells and Clayton dashed up to me yelling ‘he’s hit’. He tripped over a sandbag and disappeared into the trench. I shouted to him to fetch the stretcher-bearers but he got up and set off for the redoubt as fast as he could go. I looked round for Smith and was just in time to stop him falling into the trench. A stray bullet from the line had got him through the knee, smashing the bone badly and, seeing Clayton dash in, he thought the Turks were on us and so tried to get into the trench. I dressed his wound as well as I could and, just as I was getting him fairly comfortable, Cutcher and Sergeant Douglas came along and soon after we got him away with the stretcher-bearers. (The lad lost his leg in hospital later.) Kelly got strafed by Cutcher and chaffed by the lads about the way he’d got the wind up. I could quite understand how he’d got all those bayonet wounds in his neck.
We had a fine view of Krithia from the redoubt and it appeared quite near. A monitor was lying off in the Gulf of Saros on Wednesday, sending 14-inch shells right into the village. It was possible to see what a mass of ruins the village was. Not a single house remained complete, some being just heaps of charred wood and stone, others just mere skeletons of houses. The lines of windmills were badly battered and I should imagine it most unhealthy for the Turks in occupation of the place. The ground all around the place was a maze of trenches and wire. The Turk evidently intended to stick to that place as long as he could.
Digging again all night and about 11.30pm we had to take cover. The French exploded a big mine and both sides went at it ding-dong for the crater. Shrapnel and bullets flew about and we got quite a lot of both. This lasted about an hour and when it was over we carried on digging.
This redoubt had been built in case we were pushed back at any time. Several had been constructed across the peninsula and manning them would enable the troops from the firing line to retreat in an orderly manner with an opportunity to construct another line of defence. Our redoubt was about twenty yards square and consisted of a broad fire trench on all four sides, thus obtaining an all-round field of fire. It was well wired towards the front and flanks and the only entrance was by the trench leading from the left. This trench was protected by a loophole in the redoubt which commanded a stretch of straight trench for twenty-five yards. The chunk of earth in the middle of the redoubt was cut into three gun positions but were not occupied, except by Cutcher and Sergeant Douglas for sleeping quarters.