Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

GALLIPOLI MEMORIES.

Go through the calendar for the last three years and pick out any day marked on it (says a contributor to the London 'Times' of August 21). Whatever day you choose it will be the anniversary of some desperate
battle, some gallant attack or brave defence. Two years ago to-day men from England, Australia, from New Zealand, and even from the high hills of Nepal strove with a gallant foe amid the dwarf holly bushes that clothe the western slopes of the Gallipoli Peninsula. To-day all is quiet at Gallipoli. The rows on rows of wooden crosses at Anzac and Helles at Nibrunesi Point, and Brighton Beach look out over the Aegean, doubtless as blue as ever it was; the dead who lie beneath these little monuments of great deeds have reached their rest. In the scrub Lee-Enfields lie rusting alongside shattered Mausers. The pebbles on the long bleak beaches are mixed with shrapnel bullets, and in the sand of the dunes west of the Long Sap are burled bones and scraps of leather, clips of corroded cartridges.- and shreds of khaki clothing.

The 'Vineyard' has blossomed and the small green grapes duster on the vines. The well by the Fisherman's Hut has run sweet once more. The cave dwellings by Shrapnel Gully, Quinn's Post, and Courtenays are as quiet and still as tombs. Grass and weeds have crept over the winding paths that, thread the valleys and skirt the hilltops. The sandbags of the traverses and trenches have rotted and burst, spilling their earth on the litter of these battles of yesterday. And out through the chessboard fields grave-mounds of earth that we patted-down with spade and entrenching tool have blossomed with wild flowers and green grass. The warm, tideless Aegean washes these 'empty beaches, where once thousands of men from the Empire's back-blocks made war as it had never been made before.

Two years ago 40,000 men walked these paths. They slept in these dug-outs, or in the trenches, and the detonation of the guns of the warships shook loose the sand and earth above them so that it rattled down on their faces, waking them from dreams- or home to an uncomfortable reality.

Think of those three days two years ago! Think or the waterless fight for Chocolate Hill; of the wounded lying in the brushwood and waiting for the sweeping grass fires to reach their resting place. Men lay there unable to move; some of them not able to pull their water-bottles from their Webb slings. Think of them and remember them, for in all war there was never a more gallant forlorn hope than this one. Lone Pine, Chocolate Hills, Sari Bair, and Biyuk Anafarta were goals set far ahead. Many reached them and many never came back.

Lone Pine was attacked on August. 6, and of all the attacks at Gallipoli this was, perhaps, the most terrible.
The Turkish trenches were provided with head cover made of stout timber. Under these were loop-holes from which the Turks fired ^with temporary immunity at the advancing Australian battalions. The enfilade fire was terrible, but the men bodily lifted the timber beams and dropped feet first into the dark trenches beneath. By 5.47 p.m., 17 minutes after the first advance, we held the trenches. At 1.30 the same night there came a terrific counter-attack headed by scores of bombers. For seven hours the counter-attack pressed, wave on wave of Turks coming to the very parapet, /often to be shot and to fall into the trench. One Australian brigade, only 2000 strong, carried this work in the face of an entire enemy division, and held it during six days' counter-attacks. A thousand corpses were in the trench system after the occupation and to make room for more
fighting men these were stacked in piles at intervals between the traverses.

There was one example there that will never die. The 7 th Gloucesters lost all their officers and senior non-commissioned officers, but they fought on, mere isolated groups of men under privates and lance corporals, green troops of the New Army, from midday until sunset! The Lancashires. the Hampshires, Gloucesters, Australians, and New Zealanders— all did men's work on those days. None of their deeds will die.

None of the names of men or regiments will ever be forgotten. Yesterday in 'The Times', the gallant Gloucesters were commemorated for another great fight a year later. The memorial notice said: —'To the glorious memory of .the Officers, N. C. O.'s, and Private Soldiers of the Gloucester Regiment who fell or died of wounds at Longueval, in the Battle of the Somme, 1916.'And that is the way we must look at these things. Every day in the last three years is an anniversary.

PTE. J. HEADY,A member of the printing staff of the 'Sydney Mail, who has been missing since the Bullecourt fight; six months ago

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