John Gallishaw

“ Some, too game to quit, would not report to the doctor, working on courageously until they dropped, although down in the bay beckoned the Red Cross of the hospital ship, with its assurance of cleanliness, rest, and safety. By sickness and snipers' bullets we were losing thirty men a day. Nobody in the front line trenches or on the shell-swept area behind ever expected to leave the Peninsula alive. Their one hope was to get off wounded. Every night men leaving the trenches to bring up rations from the beach shook hands with their comrades. ”

“ Under cover of darkness, Lieutenant Donnelly, with only eight men, surprised the Turks in the post that now bears his name. The captured machine gun he turned on the Turks to repulse constantly launched bomb and rifle attacks. Just at dusk one evening Donnelly stole out to Caribou Ridge and took the Turks by storm. They had been accustomed before that to see large bodies of men swarm over the parapet in broad daylight, and had been able to wipe them out with machine-gun fire. All that night the Turks strove to recover their lost ground. ”

“ My job with the five men was to collect this rubbish and put it in our dump. At nine o'clock in the morning we mounted the parapet and began digging. There was no cover for men standing; the low bushes hid men sitting or lying. Every few minutes I gave the men a rest, making them sit in the shelter of the underbrush. The sun was shining brightly; and after the wet spell we had just passed through, the warmth was peculiarly grateful. The news that the canteen had been opened on the beach made most of the men optimistic. With good things to eat in sight life immediately became more bearable. ”

“ They were swapping yarns and telling stories with a lurid intermixture of profanity and a liberal sprinkling of trench slang. To me, one of the most interesting side lights of the war is the slang that forms a great part of the vocabulary of the trenches. Early morning tea, when we got it, was "gun-fire." A Turk was never a Turk. He was a Turkey, Abdul Pasha, or a cigarette maker. A regiment is a "mob." A psychologist would have been interested to see that nobody ever spoke of a comrade as having died or been killed, but had "gone west." ”

“ Men ordered off the Peninsula by the medical officer, instead of proceeding to the clearing station, sneaked back to their positions in the trench, waiting to see the surrender. But the surrender never came. Things went on in the same old dreary, changeless round. More than sickness, or bullets, the sordid monotony had begun to tell on the men. Every day, officers were besieged with requests for permission to go out between the lines to locate snipers. When men were wanted for night patrol, for covering parties, or for listening post details, every one volunteered. ”

“ A torrent of water had poured down the mountain side, flooding the trenches, and carrying with it blankets, equipments, rifles, portions of the parapet, and the dead bodies of men who had been drowned while they were sleeping. The men who were left had to forsake their trenches and go above ground. Turks and British alike suffered. The last day of the storm, while some of our men were waiting on the beach to be taken to the hospital ship, they told me they saw the bodies of at least two thousand men, frozen to death. Our regiment stood it perhaps better than any of the others. ”

“ The Turks never fired on burial parties; and men on the Peninsula, wounded by snipers, tell strange stories of dark-skinned visitors who crept up to them after dark, bound up their wounds, gave them water, and helped them to within shouting distance of their own lines, where at daylight the next morning their comrades found them. Once one of our batteries was very near a dressing station when a stray shell, fired at the battery, hit the dressing station. The Turkish observer heliographed over and apologized. ”

“ One wave of hope swept over the Peninsula in that dreary time. The brigade bulletin board contained the news that it was expected that in a day or two at the most Bulgaria would come into the war on the side of the Allies. To us this was of tremendous importance. With a frontier bordering on Turkey, Bulgaria might turn the scale in our favor. Life became again full of possibilities and interest. Our interpreters printed up an elaborate menu in Turkish that recited the various good things that might be found in our trenches by Turks who would surrender. ”

“ A little to the left, some Australians were severely punished. Shell after shell burst among them. A regiment of Sikh troops, mule drivers, and transport men were caught half way up the beach. Above the din of falling shrapnel and the shriek of flying shells rose the piercing scream of wounded mules. The Newfoundlanders did not escape. That morning "Beachy Bill's" gunners played no favorites. On all sides the shrapnel came in a shower. Less often a cloud of thick black smoke, and a hole twenty feet deep showed the landing place of a high explosive shell. ”

“ The battalion had just received orders to move to Aldershot. While we were garrisoning Edinburgh Castle, word came of the landing of the Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli. At Ypres, the Canadians had just then recaptured their guns and made for themselves a deathless name. The Newfoundlanders felt that as colonials they had been overlooked. They were not militaristic, and they hated the ordinary routine of army life, but they wanted to do their share. That was the spirit all through the regiment. ”

“ Some of them had been on the Peninsula for months. Many of them are still there. From the beach to the firing line is not over four miles, but it is a ghastly four miles of graveyard. Everywhere along the route are small wooden [46] crosses, mute record of advances. Where the crosses are thickest, there the fighting was fiercest; and where the fighting was fiercest, there were the Irish. On every cross, besides a man's name and the date of his death, is the name of his regiment. No other regiments have so many crosses as the Dublins and the Munsters. ”

“ At first, when a man saw a star shell, he dropped flat on his face; but after a good many men had been riddled by bullets, we saw our mistake. The sudden, blinding glare makes it impossible to identify objects before the light fades. ”

“ At dark, sentry groups were formed, three reliefs of two men each; these two men stood with their heads over the parapet watching for any movement in the no man's land between the lines; that accounts for the surprisingly large number of men one sees wounded in the head. The Scottie and I stood close enough together to carry on a conversation in whispers. It turned out that he had been training in Scotland at the same camp [53] where the Newfoundlanders were. He had been on the Peninsula since April, and was all in from dysentery and lack of food. ”

“ A shell can be heard coming. Experts claim to identify the caliber of a gun by the sound the shell makes. Few live long enough to become such experts. In Gallipoli the average length of life was three weeks. In dugouts we always ate our meals, such as they were, to the accompaniment of "Turkish Delight," the Newfoundlanders' name for shrapnel. We had become accustomed to rifle bullets. When you hear the zing of a spent bullet or the sharp crack of an explosive, you know it has passed you. The one that hits you, you never hear. ”

“ Every train from the interior brought lumbermen, fresh from the mills and forests, husky, steel-muscled, pugnacious at the most peaceful times, frankly spoiling for excitement. From the outharbors and fishing villages came callous-handed fishermen, with backs a little bowed from straining at the oar, accustomed to a life of danger. Every day there came to the armory loose-jointed, easy-swinging trappers and woodsmen, simple-spoken young men, who, in offering their keenness of vision and sureness of marksmanship, were volunteering their all. ”

“ I was still wearing the service uniform I had worn in camp in Scotland, for I had not been regularly attached to the office force in London.
"I'll take you to Wellington Barracks," volunteered the Englishman. "That's where your lot is."
We trudged through sand, on to a gravel road, through the main street of the town of Aldershot, and into an asphalt square, surrounded by brick buildings, three storied, with iron-railed verandas. Men in khaki leaned over the veranda rails, smoking and talking. A regiment was just swinging in through one of the gaps between the lines. ”

“ Before the London Terriers even saw the firing line, they lost over two hundred men. They simply could not escape the Turkish shells. The enemy had a habit of sending over one shell, then waiting just a minute or less, and following it with another. The first shell generally wounded two or three men; the second one was sent over to catch the stretcher bearers and the comrades who hastened to aid those who were hit. Before they had completed their dugouts, the shrapnel caught them in the open; after they were dug in, it buried them alive. ”

“ No women could have been more gentle or tender than those men, in carrying me back to the trench. Although bullets were pattering around, they walked at a snail's pace lest the least hurried movement might jar me and add to my pain. The stretcher bearers had arrived by the time we reached the trench, and were unrolling bandages and getting iodine ready. At first there was some difficulty in getting at the wound. ”

“ There are others like them in various hospitals in England and Egypt; and also in a shady, tree-dotted ravine on the Peninsula of Gallipoli there is a row of graves, where also are my friends of the First Newfoundland Regiment.
The men our regiment lost, although they gladly fought a hopeless fight, have not died in vain. Constantinople has not been taken, and the Gallipoli campaign is fast becoming a memory, but things our men did there will not soon be forgotten. The foremost advance on the Suvla Bay front is Donnelly's Post on Caribou Ridge, made by the Newfoundlanders. ”

“ Torrents of rain poured down daily on the trenches, choking the drains, and filling the passageway with thick gray mud in which one slipped and floundered helplessly, and which coated uniforms and equipments like cement. One relief it did bring with it. Men who had not had a bath, or a shave in months, were able to collect in their rubber sheets enough rain water to wash and shave with. But the drinking water was still scarce. On other parts of the Peninsula there was plenty of it; but we had so few men available for duty that we could scarcely spare enough men to go for it. ”

“ The ground they had selected was sheltered from observation by the little ridge near our line of dugouts; but some of our men in moving about attracted the attention of the Turkish artillery observer. Instantly half a dozen shells came over the ridge, past our line, and bang! right in the midst of the Londons, working fearful destruction. Every ten or fifteen minutes after that, the Turks sent over some shells. Some regiments are lucky, others seem to walk into destruction everywhere they turn. The shells fired at the Newfoundlanders landed in the Londons. ”

“ Men who formerly prided themselves on their profanity have listened, envious and subdued, awed by the originality and scope of a cook's vocabulary, and thenceforth quit, realizing their own amateurishness. Occasionally, though, one of the cooks, stung to retort, would appear, wiping his hands on his overalls, and in a few well-chosen phrases, cover some of the more recent exploits of the one who had angered him, or endeavor to clear his own character, always in language brilliant, fluent, and descriptive. ”

“ I followed Cooke out through the sap and up the trench a little way to where it turned sharply to avoid a large boulder. Just in front of this boulder was some short, prickly underbrush. Cooke parted the bushes cautiously with his hand, and motioned me to come closer. I did and through the opening he pointed out the enemy trench about four hundred yards away, and about thirty yards in front of it a little clump of bushes.
"Just in front of those bushes," said Cooke, "there's a sniper's dugout. Keep your eyes open to-morrow and you ought to get some of them." ”

“ As soon as Hoddinott and Pike had left me, two other stretcher bearers carried me about two hundred yards farther to a rough shelter made of poles laid across supports composed of sandbags. This was the dressing station. On top of the poles, sandbags made it impervious to overhead shelling. On three sides it was closed in, but the side nearest the beach was open. From where my stretcher was placed I could just catch a glimpse of the Ægean Sea and of the ships. Men on stretchers were lined up in rows on the ground. ”