Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is a more beautiful country than any we saw in Gallipoli, in spite of its waterlogged ditches and the rain which had fallen miserably almost every day since we arrived. There is green grass up to within a few yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches; and not a hinterland of powdered white earth which was all we had at Anzac or at Helles.
The boys in the trenches and on the beach at Anzac never failed to thrill with pride as they heard her baying forth her iron hate against the oppressor. We knew that wherever her ton-weight shells fell there would be much weeping and gnashing of teeth among the enemy. We readily believed all the stories told of her prowess, no matter how impossible they seemed.
When the relieving guard came, Mac and Bill just stripped off their shorts, and ran across the stones for a splash in the sea. At night they were more alert on guard. Sleepy as Anzac appeared in the hot sunlight, dark hours shrouded a scene of energy and purpose.
"But assuming that reinforcements can only reach me in echelon of divisions I have decided that the best policy would be to adhere to my original plan of endeavouring to turn the enemy's right at Anzac with the first three divisions and to gain a position from Gaba Tepe to Maidos. By these means I should hope to compel the surrender of the whole Gallipoli Army.
This epic of Australian fortitude was written in September, 1915, and is part of the Dardanelles story. But the latest troops from Australia are of the same heroic stuff as those who wrote the name "Anzac" with their blood on the Gallipoli beach. For the Southland incident was duplicated in almost every particular on the Ballarat in April, 1917.
On these occasions Mac would watch eagerly through his glasses the bursting shells along its crests, and would seek indications of a British advance, but always in vain. Much as the Anzac troops yearned for some activity to break the monotony, there was little prospect of success of any present push from there.
Hard fighting in the North zone and the South. Both outposts captured by us on the 29th May at Anzac and on the French right at Helles heavily attacked. In the North we had to give ground, but not before we had made the enemy pay ten times its value in killed and wounded. Had we only had a few spare rounds of shrapnel we need never have gone back.
There was no open space on which they could dream of alighting at Anzac; and one machine which had to come down at Suvla was shelled to pieces as soon as it landed. So planes had to live at Imbros, and there were ten miles of sea to be crossed before work began and after it finished, and some planes, which went out and were never heard of, were probably lost in that sea.
To be sure they fought in numbers and with conspicuous bravery throughout the Boer War; but Anzac was an operation all their own, on a scale never before attempted by them as a distinct military organization.
The starry brightness above the blackness of the sea, the steep rising face of the hill, with the twinkling lights and flickering fires of the bivouacs, the throng of toilers among the great piles of stores, the mules and water-carts crunching along the gravel, the wounded waiting embarkation Mac saw what might be called the throbbing heart of Anzac.
Word Of The Day