On the other side were forty thousand Turks (we are told) watching for the opportunity to kill us. Our mission was to get to Constantinople; theirs to drive us into the sea. We were "dug in"; they were "dug in." If we found it a long, long way to Constantinople, they were finding it's a long way to the sea, which is much nearer as the crow flies. They shivered at the sound of our land guns; they heard the broadsides of our ships; they watched the _Queen Elizabeth_ fire her 15-inch gun; the shells landing on the sides of the hills, tossing hundreds of tons of earth and rock high into the air, so that when the smoke cleared away they would not know those hills; and they trembled, as all men who have seen have trembled at the fury of the monstrous gun! But they fought on. Every yard of ground won cost us dear. I have seen our boys fall like ninepins before a hail of bullets. I have heard the cry "Lie low" in an advance, and every man has fallen flat upon the ground to escape certain destruction; and I have heard that other pitiful cry, time and time again, of "Stretcher-bearers wanted!" Once the men lay prone for four hours in the midst of the scrub, with the air full of bursting shells and rifle and machine-gun fire passing just over them. I do not wonder that some men lost their nerve during those terrible hours. But never yet did Australian officer call upon his men to take a position, no matter how impossible the feat, and find them wanting. "Impossible!" There was no such word in their vocabulary. Nothing was impossible to them--until they died. Colonel McCay, Brigadier in Command of the Second Infantry Brigade, spoke the truth when he said: "The way, the cheerful, splendid way, they face death and pain is simply glorious, and if no Australian ever fought again, April 25, April 26 and May 8 specially mark them as warriors. On the eighth of May I said in effect to them (my own brigade), 'Come and die,' and they came with a cheer and a laugh. They are simply magnificent." The men were led by brave officers--officers who would not ask their men to go where they themselves were afraid to go. It was thus, leading their men to the fight, that General Sir William Throsby Bridges, commanding the Australian Imperial Force when it made its historic landing, Colonel MacLaurin, Colonel Onslow Thompson, Lieutenant-Colonel Braund, and other gallant officers fell. And it was thus that, later, Colonel McCay received the wounds that put him out of action. Australian officers, like any other officers, are human and have erred at times, but they have never asked their men to take risks they would not share themselves. There is a letter written by Colonel McCay in which he says: "When my men have to go into a veritable hell, as they did on April 25, April 26 and May 8, I must lead them, not send them. I won their confidence because I shared the risks with them." And that is the spirit of all the Australian officers--gallant leaders of gallant men.