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[Page 98]
Vide A.G. Hales in "John Bull" 4/9/15 – in refutation of some English critics – slanderers – who are deploring to the detriment of the British Tommy here the failure of British troops to cooperate with the Australians when the latter had to fall back from a position they had won by superb daring – when they actually saw the Dardanelles & had their thumb on the Turks windpipe, & but for this lack of reinforcements – failure it was – they would have closed right round his throat & the Turkish Army have been cut off from its source of supplies (See Colonel Braithwaite's letter re failure of British troops on this occasion).
I quote the extract from "John Bull" because of its faithful representation of the difficulties & hardships of the stupendous task we have before us -
Says the article "It has been easy for the Germans in their attacks on French, British, or Russians fronts to time their blows like clockwork – they have had the use of the finest military railways in the world, & their staffs could keep in touch (during an action) all the time by telegraph, telephone & heliographs but where our troops were fighting none of these things was available. But the men had to scramble as best they might through a perfect network of forbidding hills – they had to clamber like goats up precipitous cliffs & go down terrible declivities, they had to thread a passage amidst dense thorn scrub where officers & men could not possibly keep in touch. One & all they did their best, & what their best is, the inhospitable heights & plateaux of the Gallipoli peninsula could tell, had the stones tongues. We must all regret our fine fellows did not get to the coveted positions, but the men who criticise them harshly, the pariahs who place themselves in the seats of the scornful should be driven at the point of the bayonet to take part in the next blow that is struck under those