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[Page 5]
[Bartlett had been aboard the battleship "Majestic" when it was torpedoed on 27 May off Cape Helles. Following this he travelled to London via Malta before returning to Gallipoli at the end of June. During his absence, General Sir Ian Hamilton persuaded the writer, Compton Mackenzie, who was at Gallipoli, to write for the newspapers, in the belief he would be less critical and pessimistic than Bartlett. See "Myth Maker" by Fred & Elizabeth Brenchley, page 115.
This report was written by Compton Mackenzie and refers to events of 4th June in the British sector at Cape Helles]
Press - Daily Telegraph London
We boarded our ship, and travelled for nearly an hour toward the sound of guns that was coming down through a grey and indeterminate day that was very slowly changing to a clearer atmosphere. A northerly wind was blowing, such a wind as might shatter the chestnut blossoms in England on the fourth of June; therefore most of us stayed in the ward-room until we were off Cape Helles.
Among the transports and trawlers and various craft at anchor, a small green whale, all that is now visible of the "Majestic" waited, motionless upon the water. She was subsiding rapidly, they said: and already in the watery sunlight she gave the illusion of slowly assuming to herself the nature of the waves that splashed against her still rigid sides. Such a dream of a ship's transmigration to her own element vanished in the billows of dust ashore, vanished in that queer heartlessness of war that is really the desperate occupation of the mind with something to do and therefore not time to dream.
Lancashire Landing, the glorious name of that beach, is the climax of all the castles in the sand that were ever built. No children at Blackpool or Southport could imagine in their most ambitious schemes such an effect of grown up industry. Inevitably the comparison with a seaside resort on a fine Bank Holiday arrives, so inevitably as really to be rather trite. Yet all the time the comparison is justifying itself. Even the aeroplanes on top of the low cliff have the look of an amusement to provide a threepenny or sixpenny thrill: the tents might so easily conceal phrenologists or fortune-tellers: the signal station might well be a camera obscura: the very carts of the Indian Transport, seen through the driven sand, have an air of waiting goat-carriages.
[Lancashire Landing or 'W' Beach, was in the British sector]