1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [207]
I was put on as latrine orderly and we had to dig a trench for the latrine and you had to stand astride to do your business, and then you had to cover it with soil because the flies were, oh, dreadful! The latrine was like a hole in the ground. I had to cover it with a ground sheet pegged above the hole and at night if I struck a match to light a candle in the dark the ground sheet was just black with big flies, and when you were eating jam or biscuits you had to knock flies off to get them to your mouth. Most of us got dysentery. That was the biggest scourge we had on Gallipoli, dysentery and ill-health from lack of fresh water and lack of proper food. I got dysentery very badly. I hadn’t the strength to go up and down the cliff, across the ravine and up the hill to get to the Medical Officer (he was on the other side) and in the end I lost two or three stones. I was dreadful! I practically had to sleep alongside the latrines, my tummy had so much trouble.
I used to go with an officer on observation post duty. We hadn’t trenches, we only had parapets built up with sandbags, and we were going up one day to the front line to do OP duty and he stopped to talk to somebody. We stopped about two minutes and that saved us from being blown to bits, because the Turks blew a mine just at the top of the ravine and when we got up there, there were infantrymen laying dead and badly wounded all over the place. A proper mess – and we should have been there if the officer hadn’t stopped. He was a ranker officer, and he seemed to sense that I was fed up with not being one of the gun crew and being sent on mucky jobs all the time, and he used to take me up to the OP when it was his turn to go. I loved it for all it was dangerous, because No Man’s Land was very short and you daren’t put your head above the sandbagged parapet, but to me it was what I joined up for – and that was to see action.
With constant grappling between the lines there was plenty of action, but there was little progress and after the costly battles for Krithia the fighting had settled down to trench warfare. The troops were weak and debilitated, ammunition was scarce, and with no real prospect of advancing until more reinforcements arrived there was no alternative but to mark time, knowing that when the chance did come it would be harder than ever to break through. It was plain to see that the Turks were using the respite to dig more trenchsystems, to bring in more troops and to strengthen the defences. Since the guns were strictly forbidden to fire more than two rounds a day unless the Turks attacked, there was precious little that could be done to impede them.
The French contingent, on the other hand, was well-off for ammunition and fresh stocks of high explosive shell were arriving regularly from France. The French had played a vital role. On 25 April their diversionary landing on the Asiatic shore had helped to confuse the Turks and appreciably assisted the landings on the peninsula. Now they had taken over the sector running north of Morto Bay where the toe of the peninsula turned into the Dardanelles and in a series of costly attacks between 21 and 25 June they had advanced their line and gained high ground which would give the allies a head start when the time came to push ahead towards the vital objectives of Krithia and Achi Baba. But there was still a huge stumbling block on the Aegean shore. It was Gully Ravine. And before there could be any thought of going further the situation there had to be resolved.
Like all the soldiers of the 156th Infantry Brigade the Royal Scots were soft after weeks of inactivity on the journey. A few days after their arrival they were pushed into the reserve line to acclimatise, to become accustomed to shell-fire, to tone up flabby muscles and get back into shape. They dug communication trenches until they were sick of it and they were only too happy when the time came