Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 219
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[Page 219]
109
In the event, this method proved successful enough, except that the first boats, in the pitch-black darkness just before dawn on Sunday the 25th April, hit the shore nearly a mile farther down the peninsular than was intended, and at a place where there were many big rocks littering the beach and hindering some of the boats from going right up to the sand. Some boats were checked in deep water, and impatient soldiers jumping overside in their heavy equipment were drowned. It was said that a strong current had carried the boats down the coast away from the planned landing spot, but at the time I saw no evidence of this. Fifty years afterwards in the Turkish Officers Garrison Club at Gelibolu (Gallipoli) I got the true story from a very lively retired Turkish officer who had commanded a company of their defending battalion in that sector. He said that a few days before our landing they had noticed a small red buoy in the water off-shore, about a mile farther north and opposite the flat terrain at Suvla Bay. They concluded that it had been dropped as a marker by our Navy, and moved it down opposite Anzac Cove and the precipitous succession of scrub-covered gullies and ridges behind it. They then took up ideal positions from which to enfilade the little beach with rifle, machine-gun and artillery shrapnel fire.
The Third Brigade, recruited from Queensland and South and West Australia, were the first to land (in the dark) and were soon detected and came under heavy and accurate fire as they crossed the beach, scrambled up the slopes and pushed on inland.
They were followed at sunrise by our Brigade, which was subjected to punishing artillery fire, on the beach and up on the ridges above. As I waded ashore with my Platoon, I could not help feeling very romantic about my being so near the place where, over twenty centuries ago, Lysander swam the Hellespont to meet Hero, and very inspired by remembering that the site of the siege of Troy by the Ancient Greeks was only a score of miles to the south of us. I felt a thrill of exaltation as I reflected that we modern-day invaders were one, through all the ages, with Agamemnon, Achilles, Lysander