The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry | Page 7

cases, but bullets singing about four feet above one's head is one of the exceptions, and Heaven knows we had plenty of experience of "overs" on the Peninsula. They are undoubtedly a fine incentive to work however, and once on the ground the men dug like beavers--and they could dig--and by dawn at 4 A.M. we had a continuous though somewhat narrow trench. The soil, for the most part, was clay, and it was tough work digging, but once dug the trenches stood up well.
After a day or two we began to be sent up to the front line for instruction, 30 men per squadron at a time, the remainder digging trenches and going down singly to the beach for a bathe. That was the one thing for which Gallipoli was perfect. The beach was rather far away, perhaps two miles, but we were all glad of the exercise, and the bathing was glorious--the water beautifully warm and so refreshing.
As regards the lie of the land and our positions there--coming up from the beach at Suvla there were fully two miles of flat country before you reached the foothills. The northern part of this plain was a shallow lake dry in summer but with a few feet of brackish water in winter called Salt Lake, and the southern part a few feet higher stretched down to "Anzac," where spurs running down from Sari Bahr to the sea terminate it abruptly. Our front line, generally speaking, was just off the plain, a few hundred yards up the slopes of the foothills, with any reserves there were lying in trenches on the plain.
Imagining the whole Suvla plain and its surrounding hills to be a horse-shoe, you might say the Turks held round three parts of the shoe, leaving us with the two heels at Caracol Dagh on the north and Anzac on the south, and a line between these two points across the plain. This plain was practically bare, but Caracol Dagh was thickly covered with dwarf oak and scrub, and Anzac with a good undergrowth of rhododendron, veronica, and other similar bushes. At Sulajik (the centre of the horse-shoe), and immediately to the north of it, and also round the villages in the Turkish lines, were numbers of fine trees, but nowhere that we could see was there anything that could be called a wood. As regards the soil, the gullies at Anzac on the spurs of Sari Bahr were quite bewildering in their heaped up confusion, partly rocky, but mainly a sort of red clay and very steep. In the centre it was a yellower clay with patches of sand and bog, and on Caracol Dagh it was all rock and stones, so that digging was impossible, and all defences were built either with stones or sandbags. The view looking back to the sea from almost any part of our line was glorious. Hospital ships and men-of-war, and generally monitors and troop-ships in the Bay, and on the horizon the peaks of Imbros and Samothrace reflecting the glorious sunrises and sunsets of the Levant.
In these surroundings we spent about a week before getting a turn in the front line. We struck a reasonably quiet sector and fairly well dug, but there were several details in which the trenches varied from what we were accustomed to read about. The first and most noticeable difference from the point of view of the inhabitants was the entire absence of head cover. Even after we had been on the Peninsula nearly three months all we had collected were one or two poles, a sheet of corrugated iron (ear-marked as a roof for a signal station), and a few yards of wire-netting. There was not a house or a building of course in the country-side, and as our neighbours were as badly off as we were, there was no scope for the enterprising.
Our first turn only lasted four days, and we had hardly a casualty until an hour or two before we were to move back into support. The support trenches were very much less comfortable than the front line, and as there were lots of parties to go up at all hours of the day and night to dig and wire in front, it took a lot of scheming to get everyone satisfactorily fixed with water and food. We also had to send out officers' patrols to fix the Turkish line, as we were intending to have a dash at capturing his barrier across the Azmac Dere--a dry watercourse which ran right through both the Turkish and our lines--and so straighten out our line. Patrolling was very difficult--there were no landmarks to guide one, the going was exceedingly prickly, and at that time the place was full of Turkish snipers, who came out at