The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry | Page 7

issued as the water
was boiled. Apart from the November blizzard our first week in the
reserve trenches, until we got our water supply in working order, was
the most uncomfortable of our stay. Rations were really wonderfully
plentiful and good.
That night we were ordered forward to complete the digging of a new

reserve area. Just as we were falling in to move off, a regular strafe
started in the front line only just over a mile away, but luckily it
stopped just before we were to move off. It was our first experience of
being under fire, and for all we knew it might have been the sort of
thing that happened every night, so we just carried on as if nothing
unusual were happening. Familiarity may breed contempt in most 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