But in those hill-trenches of Gallipoli the Turk and the Gentile fought
with each other all day with rifle and bomb, and in the evening crept
out and stabbed each other in the dark. There was no release from the
strain of watching and listening and taking thought. The Turk was always
on higher ground; he knew every inch of all those valleys and vineyards
and scrub-strewn slopes; and he had an uncanny accuracy of aim.
Moreover, many of his men had the devotion of fanatics, which inspired
them to lie out behind our lines, with stores of food enough to last out
their ammunition, certain only of their own ultimate destruction, but
content to lie there and pick off the infidels till they too died. They
were very brave men. But the Turkish snipers were not confined to the
madmen who were caught disguised as trees in the broad daylight and
found their way into the picture papers. Every trench was full of
snipers, less theatrical, but no less effective. And in the night they
crept out with unbelievable stealth and lay close in to our lines,
killing our sentries, and chipping away our crumbling parapets.
So the sniping was terrible. In that first week we lost twelve men each
day; they fell without a sound in the early morning as they stood up
from their cooking at the brazier, fell shot through the head, and lay
snoring horribly in the dust; they were sniped as they came up the
communication trench with water, or carelessly raised their heads to
look back at the ships in the bay; and in the night there were sudden
screams where a sentry had moved his head too often against the moon. If
a periscope were raised, however furtively, it was shivered in an
instant; if a man peered over himself, he was dead. Far back in the
Reserve Lines or at the wells, where a man thought himself hidden from
view, the sniper saw and killed him. All along the line were
danger-posts where many had been hit; these places became invested with
a peculiar awe, and as you came to them the men said, 'Keep low here,
sir,' in a mysterious whisper, as though the Turk could hear them.
Indeed, so uncanny were many of the deaths, that some men said the Turk
could see impossibly through the walls of the trench, and crouched
nervously in the bottom. All the long communication trenches were
watched, and wherever a head or a moving rifle showed at a gap a bullet
came with automatic regularity. Going down a communication-trench alone
a man would hear the tap of these bullets on the parapet following him
along, and break into a half-hysterical run in the bright sunlight to
get away from this unnatural pursuit; for such it seemed to him to be.
The fire seemed to come from all angles; and units bitterly accused
their neighbours of killing their men when it seemed impossible that any
Turk could have fired the shot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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