World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Turkey -- Gallipoli Peninsula
Sed-el-Bahr is to the immediate right of the beach, not in the
photograph.]
I ride with Thomson to “V” Beach and the _River Clyde_ comes in sight,
seen from the high ground near the lighthouse, which was the Turkish
position on April 25th. I hear from him the events of that awful day.
How, when the General and Costaker were hit, he was ordered to go back
to the _Clyde_ and to take Reave. How he was on one end of the hopper,
lying down, and Reave the other, and had to attract his attention and
call to him to follow. Then they had to get back over dead bodies
and the wounded under a hail of bullets, which zipped overhead or
crashed against the hopper and sides of the _Clyde_ with a loud
bang. He described the scenes on board the _Clyde_, and the cries of
wounded; the arrival of messages on steam pinnaces, signallers at work
semaphoring to battleships and transports. And there lay the _River
Clyde_, now a haven of rest, with a solid pier built out from shore and
alongside it, using its hulk as a harbour. “V” Beach, now a model of
an orderly advanced base, under the organizing talent of the French,
looked a different place to the “V” Beach that I saw last. We search
for Costaker’s grave without success. Two huge graves are on the right
of the beach looking seawards—the graves of those soldiers and sailors
whose bodies I saw laid out for burial on April 27th, wired round, and
with fine crosses erected on each. I ride back with him through the
village, past the camp of the amusing Senegalese, and along the new
road that leads to “Clapham Junction.” On either side rest camps have
developed, composed of lines of trenches and dugouts, sheltered in
trees and bushes.
I see several batteries of “75’s,” and one is in action.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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