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Updated: June 1, 2025
Opposite, a few scattered lights showed where lay the town of Chanak on the Asiatic side of the Narrows. From forts along that coast also, there now and then darted a spit of flame, while half a minute or so later the dull roar of the report would reverberate through the night. "We've gone east," said Roy slowly. "We've done what that chap in the plane told us to do.
'Hurry! hissed Roy. 'No use, was the low-voiced answer. 'He'd get us both before we were out of range. As he spoke, Ken turned and stepped swiftly back to the beach. 'Friend, he answered, speaking in the same language. 'Despatches for Chanak from Colonel Gratz. The sentry, a burly Turk, armed with a Mauser rifle, pulled up opposite Ken. 'Despatches, he repeated suspiciously.
We got under way at daybreak and, picking our way as cautiously as a small boy who is trying to get out of the house at night without awakening his family, we crept warily through the vast mine-field which was laid across the entrance to the Dardanelles, past Sed-ul-Bahr, whose sandy beach is littered with the rusting skeletons of both Allied and Turkish warships and transports; past Kalid Bahr, where the high bluffs are dotted with the ruins of Turkish forts destroyed by the shell-fire of the British dreadnaughts on the other side of the peninsula and with the remains of other forts which were destroyed in the Crusaders' times; past Chanak, where the steep hill-slopes behind the town were white with British tents, and so into the safe waters of the Marmora Sea.
The New Zealanders had reached the high ridges of Chanak Bair, but no one knew, if they had progressed at all, how far they had gone over on the Dardanelles side. Nearly all the hospital ships had vanished with full cargoes of wounded; but otherwise the whole scene was little different from that of the previous day.
Besides attacks on forts inside of the strait, Smyrna was bombarded on March the 5th, and on March the 6th the Queen Elizabeth, the Agamemnon and the Ocean bombarded the forts at Chanak on the Asiatic side of the Narrows, from a position in the gulf of Saros on the outer side of the Gallipoli Peninsula.
The firing slackened, then stopped completely, and the launch, still untouched, sped through the gloom. Her crew, almost unable to credit such amazing luck, stood about the decks staring out into the darkness, occasionally exchanging a word or two in low voices. 'We're in the Narrows, said Ken. 'See that luminous patch over to the left. That's Chanak.
We might not land, we might not write a note to the commandant to see if the permission to stop in Chanak, for which we had wired to Constantinople the day before, had arrived; we might not telephone we must go back to Europe, and write or telephone from there.
Chanak was smashed like the towns in west Belgium, and, but for the garrison and the Turkish and German commandants tucked away in the trees, all but deserted, except by flies and half-starved cats. These unhappy creatures, left behind in the flight, were everywhere, and in front of the bake shop they crowded in literal scores gaunt, mangy, clawed and battered from constant fights.
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