1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [201]
Presently the Colonel came back and told me which way 26th Battery was to start off when it arrived, and told me that, when I had seen them all off, I was to try and get news of 21st Battery and then bring the Brigade Staff along.
At about 8 a.m. 26th Battery began to land. I told Kirby where to take them and then helped to hurry the mules away as the beach was being badly shelled. Twenty-sixth started about 10 a.m. up the hill, but there was no news or sign of 21st disembarking, so I left word with Thorn to bring them along the same way, and then I collected the Headquarters Staff and telephone mule and started off. I got on a wrong track and found myself at an unhealthy spot marked by some undiscovered snipers in the brushwood. I put the men under cover where some of our infantry were and had a look round and presently I found the track again, so I came back and brought them along. It was a longish steep climb and the whole time bullets were singing everywhere. I was going up the edge of a nullah and the enemy’s shrapnel were fairly well pouring down it. I wasn’t one little bit happy, and all the time was wondering, ‘Shall I get as far as that bush, or that mound?’ It didn’t occur to me that I should get up the whole way!
We had to take one or two breathers where there was any cover. Starting off again was the hardest part, and I wished I didn’t have to give the order! At last we got up to the battery mules, right at the top of the nullah, which ends on a small grassy hill we later called the Razor Back.
I went to the Colonel and found him very much agitated as Bruce had been up for an hour and hadn’t yet brought the Battery into action. At 11.50 he said, ‘If the Battery isn’t in action by 12 I will take command myself.’ Just before 12 however it came into action. Almost at once a Turkish Battery which had been shelling down the nullah switched onto the Battery, and it was pretty nasty.
Even without Turkish marksmen firing from the topmost heights and machine-guns sweeping the slopes it would have been hard going and, although the men clinging to the slopes were still in shadow, as the dawn spread slowly up the sky behind the Dardanelles there were shouts of alarm behind the crackle of the bullets, and the sickening thud of tumbling bodies as a bullet found its mark and a wounded man lost some precarious foothold and crashed back down the hill.
The three guns, dragged and man-handled to a perch well up on high ground, were at least able to give the troops some local help, but it was the big guns on the battleships standing off the peninsula which were meant to fire the artillery barrage that would help the troops to get ahead. It was not their fault that they failed. Signal stations on the landing beaches were to transmit messages to the ships and bring their guns to bear on the places where they were most needed. The difficulty was that the signallers on land had no idea what was happening on the high ground behind them and it was impossible for observers at sea to make anything of the situation for themselves. Even on the clifftops it was hard to see what was happening for the troops were so split up and units so confused that there was little or no cohesive command. Even where officers had managed to keep control, or to gather together a significant number of men, the command broke down. The low, thick scrub, so useful to the enemy in their defence, was of little use to soldiers creeping through it to attack across unfamiliar ground, and the officers leading them were so often obliged to stand up to find direction that snipers were easily able to pick them off as soon as they appeared. Deprived of leadership, with no specific objectives and with no clear idea of what was expected of them, driven on by the simple knowledge that they were there to capture the peninsula and kill any Turks in their path, the men acted on their own initiative and charged ahead into a hundred private battles of their own. The men at their backs followed their lead. They plunged down