United States or Jersey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They consolidated their positions in a great semicircle all round us and we just held the bay and the Salt Lake and the Kapanja Sirt. So all this seemed sheer waste. Thousands of lives wasted thousands of armless and legless cripples sent back for nothing. The troops soon realised that it was now hopeless. You can't "kid" a great body of men for long.
So we set off a long, straggling, follow-my-leader line of men and stretchers. Cold, dark, shivery mornings they were; our clothes soaked in dew and our pith helmets reeking wet, with the puggaree all beaded with dew-drops. We toiled up and up the ridges and gullies of the Kislar Dargh and the Kapanja Sirt slowly, like a little column of ants going out to bring in the ant eggs.
Queer scents, pepperminty and sage-like smells, came in whiffs. It was cold. I must have gone several miles along the Kapanja Sirt when I came to a halt and once more tried to get my bearings. I peered at the gloomy sky, but there was no star. I listened for the lap-lap of water on the beach of Suvla Bay, but I must have been too far up the ridges to hear anything. There was dead silence.
For, although I did not then know it, this was the topmost ridge of the Kapanja Sirt. The great searchlight came nearer and nearer, and I slid backwards and lay on my stomach looking over. The nearer it came the lower I moved, so as to get well off the skyline when the beam reached me. It may have been a Turkish searchlight.
I looked at the mountains on my left the lower ridge of the Kapanja Sirt and saw how the water-course went up and up and in and out, and I thought if I kept low and crawled round in this ditch I should come out at last close behind the firing-line, and then I could get in touch with the trenches. I could hear the machine-gun of the M 's rattling and spitting.
The closer we crept to the shores of Suvla Bay, and the deathbed of the Salt Lake, the more exact and vivid are the impressions; the one is like an impressionist sketch blobs and dabs and great sloshy washes; but the memories of Pear-tree Gully, of the Kapanja Sirt, and Chocolate Hill are drawn in with a fine mapping pen and Indian ink like a Rackham fairy-book illustration every blade of dead grass, every ripple of blue, every pink pebble; and towards the firing-line I could draw it now, every inch of the way up the hills with every stone and jagged rock in the right place.
The two bodies lay upon the sand as we stepped down. The metallic rattle of the firing-line sounded far away. We man-handled all our medical equipment and stores from the hold of the lighter to the beach. We had orders to "fall in" the stretcher-bearers, and work in open formation to the firing-line. The Kapanja Sirt runs right along one side of Suvla Bay.
This particular young lieutenant was left on Lemnos sick. He really was very sick indeed. He recovered to some extent of the fever, and joined us one day at Suvla. This was in the Old Dry Water-course period, when Hawk and I lived in the bush-grown ditch. Officers, N.C.O.'s, and men were tired out with overwork. This young officer came up to the Kapanja Sirt to take over the next spell of duty.
Mechanical Death pressed forward across the Salt Lake. It stormed the heights of the Kapanja Sirt on the one side, and took Lala Baba on the other. Puffs of smoke hung on the hills, and the shore was all wreathed in the smoke of rifle and machine-gun fire. A deadly conflict this for one Turk on the hills was worth ten British down below on the Salt Lake. There was no glory.
Such was Father S , a very 'cute little man, knowing most of the troubles of the men about him, noticing their ways and keeping in touch with them all. Just after the episode of the lost squads we were working our stretcher-bearers as far as Brigade Headquarters which were situated on a steep backbone-like spur of the Kapanja Sirt.
Word Of The Day