[This is a simple, unaffected story of the doings of a young British soldier in Gallipoli and his subsequent experiences as a prisoner of war with the Turks. It is told by Private David Melling, 1/8th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers. He was a lad when he enlisted, his eyesight was destroyed by a bullet, he was captured on the battlefield by the Turks, and was the first British prisoner of war to be released from Constantinople. The narrator, when seen, was an inmate of the Blinded Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Hostel, Regent’s Park, N.W., the wonderful institution which Mr. C. Arthur Pearson founded and controls with so much success in the interests of those whose affliction he understands so well.] I enlisted in the Lancashire Fusiliers in November 1914, when I was only seventeen years old, and in June 1915 I went to Gallipoli, where we landed in the night-time. A big ship had been run aground there--the _River Clyde_--and pontoon bridges had been made at the side of her, connecting with the shore. We left our transport and got into little steam trawlers, which were out at the Dardanelles as mine-sweepers and so on, and these took us to the pontoon bridges. We hurried over them, under fire, and having got ashore we went straight into a bivouac rest-camp. We spent five days in the camp, then we went into the support line of trenches, which is the second line, and after a week or two we went on fatigue. We were in a Turkish communication-trench, digging it wider, and we came across all sorts of queer things. We dug a dead Turk up, a chap without a head, and near him we dug up one of our short Lee-Enfield rifles. He had equipment on, and when we looked into his pouches we found that he had some of our ammunition, besides his own. We supposed from the look of things that he had been knocked over by a shell and buried in the rubbish. We were throwing the earth out and making the trench deeper when we came across the Turk’s head. One chap got it on a shovel and fired it over the top of the parapet. You got used to digging bodies up--it was nothing to strike one with your pick or shovel. All this experience was good for us, and got us used to fighting before we were actually in it, because there was firing going on all the time, and preparations were being made for charging the Turks with the bayonet. Things began to get very warm early in August. At about five o’clock on the afternoon of the 6th, which was a Friday, there was a heavy bombardment and a big advance on the left of the Peninsula--that was Suvla Bay. According to the arrangements we were to charge on the Saturday morning, two hours after the bombardment began. The bombardment was to have started at five o’clock; but somehow the Turks got to know about it, and our attack was postponed till ten o’clock. At that hour we were ready for our job.