• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1840 0

started to crawl inside when my head came into contact with hobnailed boots. I shouted to the man to shift up and make room for two more men, but there was no response. Then we realised something was wrong and we found that there were seven men in the tank and they’d all been suffocated with the fumes. They were all dead! We had a real fright at finding this and intended reporting it when we got to our camp. Then we made our way towards our camp and rounding a corner we saw what seemed to be a number of men sitting and sprawling in the mud. We found on getting nearer to them there were twenty-three men all frozen to death. They’d left the front-line trench after being there for thirty-six hours and were making their way to the beach to a boat which was waiting to take them out to a Red Cross boat to give them food and a night’s rest and more food supplies before they returned to the front line again, as supplies could not reach them owing to the floods. They had had a ration of rum before leaving the trench – that was all they had there – and the effects of the rum on their way down to the boat had worn off. They had slumped down where they were and had been frozen to death. You see, when the rain stopped a bitter frost set in, and men who’d been soaking wet the previous day had the clothes frozen to their bodies, and if you took off your overcoats they could be put to stand upright frozen stiff. For a couple of days after the storm died down we were on duty digging graves.

The troops were hardest hit at Suvla Bay, where there was little or no shelter. There was less flooding at Helles where the trenches were mostly on sloping ground, and in the high posts on the peaks at Anzac the Aussies with their underground dug-outs and galleries were a little better off. The trenches were virtually abandoned, but it was fortunate that the Turks were in the same plight. The temperature plunged. On the third night the wind dropped and in the wake of the hard frost it began to snow. Not many of the Anzacs had ever seen snow before.

There was an unofficial armistice in places where the soldiers of both sides had been forced out of the flooded trenches and huddled in groups in the open with no attempt at concealment and no stomach for a fight. But the guns were still firing from batteries miles behind.

Col. G. Beith.

I was in command of fifteen posts and I lost thirteen or fourteen of them in the storm. I was conferring with a sergeant and a corporal and bang, the next thing I knew I was lying in a trench with two corpses on top of me. There were eight or nine inches of icy cold water and mud in the trench and about eight inches of snow on the parapet. I managed to push the corpses off and I crawled into the dug-out. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning and I wasn’t picked up until seven o’clock at night and taken down to the Advanced Dressing Station. All they did was wipe mud off me a bit and send me off to the Casualty Clearing Station on the beach, but the barge that took the wounded out to the hospital ship had been smashed on the rocks during the storm and we had to wait for two days before they could get us off. There were hundreds of us there and it was sheer hell.

I said to a doctor, Is it possible to get a drink of water? I’m dying of thirst.’ He said, I’m afraid we haven’t got a drop.’ I said, ‘Well, does nobody think of scraping that snow off the scrub outside there and melting it?’ So he sent someone off to do that and after a while an orderly came down with about half a pint of snow water. When I saw him I said, ‘Well, well, well, so it’s you, Snodgrass!’ Now this Snodgrass was a man I’d sent down weeks before with a self-inflicted wound. I heard this shot and I rushed out and he was sitting on one of the latrines, and he said, ‘I’ve been wounded in the foot.’ Imagine that, wounded in the foot sitting on the latrine! Well, he showed me and believe it or not the boot wasn’t even undone – it was all laced up, and that fellow’s state of mind was such that he had taken off his boot, shot himself, and put his boot back