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By Root 1804 0

to describe a fortnight my battalion spent in a place in the firing line known as Steel’s Post. To draw it mildly, I might state that at Steel’s Post we were in a hell on earth, with all the most fiendish appliances of man thrown in just to spur things on a bit. I had charge of a post of ten men in a position some forty yards in front of the firing line. This position was a maze of underground passages and the fire-trench was also in the form of a tunnel, with ten loopholes looking down the side of a gradual slope towards the Turks. This post was the extreme left of the Australian position and the New Zealanders were on my left. Well the NZs sapped forward and placed a 12-pound mountain gun right alongside our post. This gun fired only ten shots when Mr Turk spotted its position. Then things began to move! For a solid hour the Turks shelled it with every kind of gun they had but not one of those shells even touched the gun. My post got the blooming lot! Sixty-four shells dropped into my twelve yards of trench in one hour. They knocked all the tunnel work in, smashed our firing line to atoms and still were not satisfied. I received orders to move out all my men except one.

Well, the two of us dodged shells for another hour. One shell burst within four feet of where we were standing and how the Dickens the splinters missed us, I can’t make out. It was a nice big 8-inch shell and it buried us where we stood, right up to our necks. The sensation of being buried by a big shell is terrible. (I know that all the faces of my friends and relations seemed to crowd before me, and I remembered every bad deed of my life in a flash. That’s the time you wish you had been a saint all your life!) Well they got me out and told me I was lucky! Lucky mind you!

Before the end of the fortnight I’d managed to get buried three times. One shell didn’t bury me, but it simply bashed me up against the side of the trench as though I was a blooming sandbag. I just sagged forward, crumpled up and forgot everything. To give you some idea of what an ordinary 6-inch Howitzer shell can do, I saw a machine-gun smashed to atoms by one, and the crew of a corporal and five men wiped clean off the face of the earth. They were picked up in pieces and carried out in their blankets. That was on just an ordinary ‘quiet’ day at Steel’s Post. We heard later that before we went in Steel’s Post had been comparatively quiet, and the Turks must have just opened up all of a sudden. At the end of that fortnight of bashing, tearing, relentless shelling, we were all nerves, every one of us. The stuffing was knocked clean out of us. Steel’s went back to its normal state when we left. It was just like the luck of the poor old 6th. We seemed to walk straight into all the music.

Pte. W. Carrol.

We were right against the Turks. You could touch a Turk on the head the trenches were that close at Courtney’s Post. That was the first place I was put on, Courtney’s Post. The Turks were good soldiers, you couldn’t deny that. He’s always been a good soldier, right from the Crusaders and Saracens. But the Turks were quite good types. Oh, you don’t tell me! He’s no harm. Sometimes we’d be talking to each other and we’d say, ‘Got any weed?’ Sometimes we ran out of tobacco and when you were a smoker and had the feeling to smoke it drove you mad. The Turks said, ‘Oh, we’ve tons of tobacco. Have you got any meat?’ They’d got no meat. You could hear the fowls crowing at the back of their trenches. There were no chickens on our side but we had a barter with bags of Turkish tobacco for our bully beef. That’s how the war goes on. But it wouldn’t do to be getting too friendly with those men, because you might give them the idea that they could do what they liked and break through. You want to let them know they’re not welcome in our lines. We put barbed wire all the way along at night time along our trenches, and when we woke up in the morning they’d trained grappling hooks and they’d pulled all our barbed wire over in front of their trenches. All the trouble we went to put all our barbed wire