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When we got on the boat my sister and father came down to see me off and as I went up the gangway an old aunt pushed a little bag into my hand and there were ten gold sovereigns in it. Just think of that today! The first thing we knew was in the morning we’d slipped anchor and the two big ships, the Euripides and the Ulysses, both Blue Funnel ships that had been converted to troop carriers, were steaming out on their trip to the Suez Canal. We didn’t touch any other Australian port. We went by the Luin, a headland in Western Australia, and that was our last view of Australia. All the troops were on deck and you should have heard all the noise and yelling that went on. We all hung over the rail. It was fairly rough and the lights on shore were getting dimmer and dimmer. I think everyone was fond of their country. They were watching – I suppose they were thinking of their wives and sweethearts. I hadn’t a sweetheart, I hadn’t a mother, so it was a fairly easy trip for me, but as the lights got dimmer and dimmer they all went down below, and that night I never heard the men go to bed so quietly. The Captain said, ‘Have your last look at Australia.’ He couldn’t have spoken a truer word because 50 per cent of the infantry on board never came back.

If the Aussies had hesitated to treat Sir Maurice Hankey to a recital of their woes they were only too willing to express their views to any other passerby, regardless of his rank.

Cpl. G. Gilbert, A Sqn., 13th Light Horse.

We had no horses at Anzac. We were serving as infantry and we were all crawling with lice, thirsty, hungry and completely browned off. One of our Generals came up to inspect us in our trenches in front of Lone Pine, and he was a fatherly sort, always used to ask the blokes about their family and stuff like that. He spoke to all the troops and he said to one soldier on the firing step, ‘Don’t forget to write home. How is your father?’ The bloke answered, ‘He’s dead.’ A bit later the General coming back along the trench asked the same question to same soldier, ‘And how is your father?’ And the bloke said, ‘He’s still dead, the lucky bugger.’ We all laughed. I don’t know what the General thought! But the tale went the rounds.

Col. G. Beith, 24th Bn., AIF.

I went down to one of my boys, I said, ‘How are you getting on, son?’ He said, ‘I’m not too bad, I’ll tell you what, if I could get out of this bloody place I’d volunteer to scrub out the Melbourne exhibition building with a tooth brush!’

Cpl. G. Gilbert.

My best mate and I used to go on the firing step together in Lone Pine. One morning moving into Lone Pine trenches one soldier just ahead of me turned to my mate and said, ‘Come on, Dick, you and I will go on together this time.’ One used the

periscope to see what Johnny Turk was doing, the other was ready for any quick sniping at anything that moved (the trenches of the Turks were only thirty or forty yards away and in some places closer). The rest of us waited in an old dug-out, to take our turn. The next minute, bang, Dick got a bullet right through his head, and he fell at our feet. He made no sound at all! He was still alive when the stretcher-bearers took him down to the beach to be put on a hospital ship for Malta. But he died there. We think an enemy sniper must have been just out in front using slight ground cover waiting for our relief guard to come in. I made sure I got that sniper later on.

In these high lands where the Anzacs were perched among rough outcrops separated by sheer drops and steep ravines there was no continuous trench-line, only rudimentary support-lines, and few conventional communication trenches. But the outcrops had been ringed and fortified with short lengths of trench, sometimes tunnelled underground and pierced with loopholes to command the Turkish lines. They called them ‘posts’, and the Anzacs clung to them like limpets.

Pte. N. Scott, 6th (Victoria) Bn., 2nd Brig., 1st Australian Div.

I’ll try