Redemption - Leon Uris [242]
Jeremy knew I was lying in my teeth.
“We’d better go see the Major,” Jeremy said.
Christopher Hubble was pleased as punch, pacing to and fro before our battalion headquarters dug into the hillside. A work party was building permanent fencing at the paddock and pulling up the barbed wire. At least one outfit on Gallipoli knew what it was doing.
“Never thought I’d be glad to see a mule. Dr. Mordechai says we’re getting in over a hundred today—Yurlob! What the devil are you doing here?” Christopher demanded.
“Totally my screwup,” I said. “I had told Yurlob back on Lemnos to come ashore with the first batch of animals so he could get a fix on our situation. When we got aboard the Wagga Wagga I had so many things on my mind, I overlooked mentioning it to you. My responsibility, sir.” “Is your post covered, Yurlob?”
“Absolutely. By two of the best packers in Punjab.”
“Do they speak English?”
“They are British troops, sir. They’ve trained half the Indian Army.”
“Are you two people diddling me?” the Major asked.
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“Landers is covering for me, sir. It was my doing.”
“And I suppose you want to stay, Yurlob?”
“Please, sir, you must let me stay.”
“We do need him here,” I said quickly. “I have to spend the next several days finding trails to the front lines. We really need him in the paddock…really….”
“Really,” Jeremy added.
We were utterly struck by the Major’s next remark. “At least you came ashore. That’s a hell of a lot more than General Darlington has done.”
“Then I can remain, sir?”
“You chaps…you think…you’re pressing…Oh, welcome to paradise.”
How do I explain this thing? We were an Anzac nut inside of a Turkish nutcracker.
The immediate objective was the stringing together of a coherent front line. We had to push the Turks off this hill and out of that ravine, take that ridge, hold this spur. We shoved them far enough back so the Turk didn’t have us squarely in his gun sights and could not use us as free shooting gallery.
Colonel Monash, the Aussie, pushed his brigade forward by a series of head-on-head bayonet charges until he created a series of defensible positions.
The New Zealand Brigades were ostensibly led by Major General Godley, but he never showed up during battle. Our main frontline officer became Colonel Malone, a North Islander, teacher, and farmer, who simply took over and crafted new units out of what was left of the original ones.
The Anzac enclave was carved out by clawing at the ground, turning rocks over with bayonets, using trenching tools, then picks and shovels…filling sandbags, shoring the earth from collapsing….
As we burrowed in, the Turks made life hell. They sat above us in defenses six and eight trench lines deep with sweeping fields of fire. Behind them were batteries of mobile howitzers.
All ashore who were going ashore!
All ashore was everyone in the expeditionary force with a weapon. I was at the bottom of the rung as an officer, but I knew that an attacking force should hold a three-to-one superiority in troops over the defending force, under ordinary circumstances.
Gallipoli held no ordinary circumstances. The Anzacs had come in from the sea, a unique invasion in modern history. As we hit land, we had an uphill push into brutal and forbidding landscape against a well-entrenched, well-armed, well-led enemy. Our ratio over the Turks should have been six or seven to one. My uneducated guess was that the Turks had as many men as we had, maybe more. Moreover, they had an unchallenged corridor from Constantinople to receive reinforcements and supplies.
The situation down at Cape Helles was no better. British and French forces inched inland and dug a line not much more than a mile up the peninsula and were under a constant rain of gunfire from the Turks on the high ground.
Our casualties were running in excess of fifty percent!