In the Line of Battle: Soldiers' Stories of the War
History
In the Line of Battle: Soldiers' Stories of the War
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
We did not need a second rousing. We all sprang up and rushed to a
spot not far away, where we saw that there had been a fall of earth
and rock, and we dug harder than we had ever dug before. At the end
of it, having dug to a depth of three feet, and thrown the earth and
rock away from us, we came across three poor chaps of my company who
had been buried by a fall of earth, caused by them digging too far
into the ground to give them shelter. They had undermined too much,
and the earth-roof had collapsed and crushed them. We saw at once that
there was no hope--the men looked as if they had been killed on the
spot: they must have been dead an hour--but we put them on stretchers
and the field ambulance men did all they could. But it was too late.
Next day we dug graves for them and put crosses over. There are some
fine graveyards out there, well cared for, and with barbed wire fences
to preserve them. While we were burying our comrades the Turks fired
on us continuously, and this had to serve as the last volleys over
the fallen. That solemn and tragic beginning of my experiences after
landing at Gallipoli will never fade from my mind.
Even at this early stage I noticed the extraordinary luck of war. Some
of the King’s Own Lancasters had been in the trenches for fourteen
days, and during the whole of that time they had had only twenty
casualties. They left the trenches and came right up alongside of us,
on a little bit of a mound. The Turks must have got wind that a lot of
troops were on the move, for the shrapnel came bursting over the lot
of us, especially the Lancasters, who in less than half an hour lost
more than forty men, fourteen being killed and the rest wounded. Four
or five of our own fellows were hit, so that we escaped lightly, and
were able to send our stretcher-bearers to give a hand in getting the
wounded soldiers to hospital.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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