Presently, as it grew lighter, the Turks" big howitzers began shelling the beach, and their field-guns, well hidden. opened on the transports, now busy disembarking the 1st and 2nd Brigades. They forced the transports to stand farther out to sea, and shelled the tows, as they came in, with shrapnel and high explosive. As the boats drew near the shore, every gun on Gaba Tope took them in flank, and the snipers concentrated on them from the shore. More and more Turks were coming up at the double to stop the attack up the bill. The fighting in the scrub became fiercer. Shells burst continually upon the beach, boats were sunk, men were killed in the water. The boatmen and beach working-parties were the unsung heroes of that landing. The boatmen came in with the tows, under fire, waited with them under intense and concentrated fire of every kind until they were unloaded, and then shoved off, put slowly back for more, and then came back again. The beach parties were wading to and from that shell-smitten beach all day, unloading, carrying ashore, and sorting the munitions and necessaries for many thousands of men. They worked in a strip of beach and sea some five hundred yards long by forty broad; and the fire directed on that strip was such that every box brought ashore had cheer more shells and not less than fifty bullets directed at it before it was flung on the sand.
More men came in and went on up the hill in support; butas yet there were no guns ashore, and the Turks" fire becameintenser. By ten o"clock, the Turks had had time to bring up enough men from their prepared positions to hold up the advance. Scattered parties of our men who had gone too far in the scrub were cut off and killed, for there was no thought of surrender in those marvellous young men; they were the flower of this world"s manhood, and died as they had lived, owning no master on this earth.
More and more Turks came up with big and field artillery; and now our attack had to hold on to what it had won, against more than twice its numbers. We had won a rough bow of ground, in which the beach represented the bowstring, the beach near Gaba Tepe the south end, and the hovel known as Fisherman"s Hut the north. Against this position, held by at most 8,000 of our men, who had had no rest and had fought hard since dawn, under every kind of fire, in a savage, rough country unknown to them, came an overwhelming army of Turks to drive them into the sea. For four hours, the Turks attacked and again attacked, with a terrific fire of artillery and waves of men in succession. They came fresh from superior positions, with many guns, to break a disorganized line of breathless men not yet "dug in." The guns of the ships opened on them, and the scattered units in the scrub rolled them back again and again by rifle and machine-gun fire, and by charge after counter-charge.
More of the Army Corps landed to meet the Turks; the fire upon the beach never slackened, and they came ashoreacross corpses and wrecked boats and a path in ruin with blasts and burning. They went up the cliff to their fellows under an ever-growing fire that lit the scrub and burned the wounded and the dead. Darkness came; but there was no rest nor lull. Wave after wave of Turks came out of the night, crying the proclamation of their faith; others stole up in the dark through the scrub, and shot or stabbed and crept back. or were seen and stalked and killed. Flares went up to light with their blue and ghastly glare the wild glens peopled by the enemy. Men worked at the digging-in till they dropped asleep upon the soil; more Turks charged, and they woke, and fired, and again dug. It was cruelly cold after the sun had gone, but there was no chance of warmth or proper food; to dig in and beat back the Turk or die were all that men could think of. In the darkness, among the blasts of the shells, men scrambled up and down the pathless cliffs, bringing up tins of water and boxes of cartridges, hauling up guns and shells, and bringing down the wounded.
The beach was heaped with wounded, placed as close under the cliff as might be, in such yard or so of dead ground as the cliff gave. The doctors worked among them, and doctors and wounded were blown to pieces, and the survivors sang their song of " Australia will be there." and cheered the newcomers still landing on the beach. Sometimes our fire seemed to cease; and then the Turk shells filled the night with their screams and blast and the pattering of their fragments.
With all the fury and the crying of the shells, and the cries and the shouts on the beach, the rattle of the small arms and the cheers and defiance up the hill, and the roar of the great guns far away, at sea or in the olive- groves, the night seemed in travail of a new age. All the blackness was shot with little spurts of fire, and streaks of fire, and malignant bursts of fire, and arcs and glows and crawling snakes of fire; and the moon rose, and looked down upon it all. In the fiercer hours of that night, shells fell in that contested mile of ground and on the beach beyond it at the rate of one a second, and the air whimpered with passing bullets, or fluttered with the rush of the big shells, or struck the head of the passer like a moving wall with the shock of the explosion.
All through the night the Turks attacked; and, in the early hours, their fire of shrapnel became so fierce that the Australians soon had not men enough to hold the line. Orders were given to fall back to a shorter line; but, in the darkness, uproar, and confusion, with many sections refusing to fall back. others falling back and losing touch, others losing their way in gully or precipice, and shrapnel hailing on all, as it had hailed for hours, the falling back was mistaken by some for an order to re-embark. Many men who had lost their officers and non-commissioned officers fell back to the beach, where the confusion of wounded men, boxes of stores, field dressing- stations, corpses, and the litter and the waste of battle had already blocked the going.