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[Page 6]
Gallipoli
26:8:15 – Re the 8th A.L.Horse. Whose pen can adequately describe the dread tortures of war this gallant body of men have suffered. Thirteen to fifteen weeks ago they entered the firing line with big and stout hearts – men in their physical prime and buoyant with enthusiasm and nerve. To-day they are a battered and torn regiment – they have lost their belly – it has been knocked out of them. They have done all they could against great odds – they have proved themselves heroes. Contrary to my expectations they do not go on furlough, but are being moved to another post in the field of operations.
Russell's Top (Walker's Ridge) on which we are now stationed has been the scene of heavy and severe fighting. From here the 8th made their disastrous sortie. The Turk has become very saucy in his trench fighting, which game he plays "par excellence". He is using a captured French seventy-five to great advantage. We receive a peppering every morning and evening from this gun. It creates great havoc and blows trenches sky-high. This gun gives you no warning – it comes on you like a thunder clap, plugs into earth or stone three feet deep and roars like forty elephants run amuck. Our fellows in the front trenches are suffering and undergoing great trials. Perhaps their worst enemy is the unendurable stench from the Turkish trenches where the bodies of our heroes are rotting side by side with those of the enemy. Our sappers complain bitterly of the stench and many of them have given up sick at heart and physically overpowered. Many of the bodies are maggotty and eaten away by ants and other vermin and the nauseating odor floats through the trenches with the evening breeze in stifling intensity.
27:8:15 – There has been fierce fighting on the left flank in the vicinity of Chocolate Hill and "W.W." Hills. The attack was made at 4 p.m. and was covered by naval artillery. It raged for fully two hours. I had a full view of the battle. Terrific and terrible in its realism, the more I gazed upon it and its dreadfulness, the more I was convinced of the folly of war. There has been many such conflicts of late and the wearing down power of successful resistance is becoming each day more intensified. It has now resolved itself into a struggle of the trenches. Our main strategic objective is to cut off the Turkish supplies from the north to the south, and so it is a game of patience and stamina. It is like hacking at the middle of a great trunk of hardwood and our forward movement must necessarily be laboriously slow.
28:8:15 – I made a round of the trenches here (Walker's Ridge) yesterday afternoon. Everything is in apple-pie order. The men are happy and contented and for raw soldiers display remarkable nonchalance in the dangers around them. Machine guns spit their deadly pellets into the walls everywhere, the big seventy-five plugs into earth and rock and roars like thunder, yet our fellows spread their blankets out in dug-outs and in the open and sleep as peacefully as new-born babes. These trenches perched on the summit of a conical hill, 200 feet above the sea level, represent to me a 'township' as I have conceived existed in pre-historic days. We crawl in and out our dug-outs like moles, and we sleep and eat in dust. Some of us have accumulated beards of grotesque proportions and many have a striking resemblance of two-footed creatures I have seen in sketches portraying the days before Adam. Yet we are all in fighting mood and strong as horses and glad of the opportunity to get at the enemy.
It is fitting to pay a tribute to the unremitting attention which the Authorities have paid to hygiene. All latrines and suchlike conveniences are under the constant observance of a "fatigue" party and are daily disinfected or freshly dug so as to preserve to the utmost the good health of the soldiers. In fact, I have smelt less obnoxiousness here than I did at Liverpool in this regard.
The weather is now becoming cooler – the heat of the day is tempered by soft zephyrs from the Gulf of Saros, the changeless blue of its mirror-like surface ever smiling and glistening in the bright rays of a perfect golden sun.