Close upon the heels of the advanced party, the main bodies of the three battalions had followed, leaving only their reserves. Before twenty minutes had passed, the reserves also went forward. Within a few minutes of the start, the Turkish guns had the range of the open ground, and swept it from end to end with a cross-fire of machine-guns and low-bursting shrapnel. At the same time, Turkish 6-in. howitzers continued to fling their crunching shells sheer into the emplacements of the Anzac guns, drawn right up among the parapets of the firing line. So thick was the air with shrieking missiles of death that it seemed impossible to live unsheltered. Yet as soon as the gun parapets were shattered, they were rebuilt, and across that deadly open space of heath, now thickly strewn with lumps of khaki marked with white, group after group of companies steadily ran forward, and the wounded--only the wounded--came staggering or crawling back. Along the foot of that first white parapet the dead lay in line, and here, as at the landing on W Beach, eager watchers in our trenches asked each other what the men were doing there. [Sidenote: FIGHTING IN THE TRENCHES] Fifty minutes from the start, the 1st Battalion was sent up to reinforce and consolidate, but the blind struggle for life or death continued in the trenches. No one will ever fully describe what happened in those twisting galleries and passages and pits, for neither actors nor witnesses of the deeds survived. Crowded in places so tightly together that they could hardly use their rifles, in other places hidden singly in dark corners, or lurking in groups behind angles of traverses, the unhappy Anatolians, Syrians, and peasants from the Asiatic shores awaited and repelled the fiery and tumultuous onset with unyielding persistence. Rifles were fired at scorching range; bayonet clashed with bayonet, and plunged into the softness of living bodies full of blood; bomb-thrower flung his bomb into the face of bomb-thrower flinging at him. It was like a battle of infuriated beasts tearing each other to death in the narrow confines of a pit. The bottom of the trenches was soon so thick with the dead and dying that Australians and Turks alike trampled upon bodies without discrimination of race, and the sides of the trenches no longer sheltered from fire the heads of those who still fought on.