World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Turkey -- Gallipoli Peninsula
Here fell General Baldwin, whom I had known first as a Captain in
the 1st Manchesters on Cæsar’s Hill in Ladysmith, and later in the
lines at Helles. As in some medieval battle, all his Staff fell with
him. Lieut.-Colonel M. H. Nunn, 9th Worcesters, was killed. The
Worcesters were left that day without a single officer. So were the
Warwicks. So, as we have seen, were the Gloucesters. At the Farm
also Brigadier-General Cooper (29th Brigade) was severely wounded.
Brigadier-General Cayley (39th Brigade) was mentioned for distinguished
courage. The Farm, though recovered that day, was ultimately abandoned
to the Turks, who drove an enormous trench across the stubble-field,
and entangled the whole front with wire. But to the end the shrunken
relics of the dead who fell that morning remained in lines and heaps
upon the ground.
Hearing of the violent and almost successful counter-attack, General
Birdwood hurried up the last two battalions of his Corps Reserve--the
5th Connaught Rangers (29th Brigade) being one.[174] But by 10 a.m. the
immediate danger was over. The force of the attack was spent. The few
surviving Turks began to scramble back over the summit. As Captain Bean
wrote at the time:
“A few Turks could still be seen at about two o’clock, hopping
desperately into any cover that suggested itself. Out of at least
three or four thousand who came over the ridge only twos and threes
got back--probably not five hundred in all. But the attack had one
result. It had driven the garrison down from the trenches which
Wellington and the Gloucesters had won on the summit of Chunuk Bair,
and back on to the high spur 500 yards distant which New Zealand
had won the first night. The lines were now beginning to coagulate
into the two settled rows of opposing trenches in which every modern
battle seems to end.”
The Turks cleared the dead from the summit by dropping them over the
edge at the highest point of Chunuk Bair, and letting them slide down
that precipitous ravine or “chimney” which was mentioned above. To the
end of the campaign that chimney was black with corpses and uniforms,
weathered and wasting between the rocky sides.
Far away to the left, on the low but deeply intersected hills and
ridges overlooking the Asma Dere, General Monash’s 4th Australian
Brigade and the 4th South Wales Borderers were also compelled on the
morning and afternoon of the same day (August 10) to resist violent
counter-attacks coming across from the Abdel Rahman spur. They held
their position, but the South Wales Borderers lost their commandant,
the excellent soldier, Lieut.-Colonel Gillespie, who left his name on
part of the district he had helped to win.
[Sidenote: OUR LOSSES]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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