st of musketry, which caused
many casualties in the boats just as they reached the beach.

From them we learned what had happened in those first wild moments. All
the tows had almost reached the beach, when a party of Turks, entrenched
almost on the shore, opened up a terrible fusillade from rifles and also
from a Maxim. Fortunately most of the bullets went high, but,
nevertheless, many men were hit as they sat huddled together forty or
fifty in a boat.

It was a trying moment, but the Australian volunteers rose as a man to
the occasion. They waited neither for orders, nor for the boats to reach
the beach, but, springing out into the sea, they waded ashore, and,
forming some sort of a rough line, rushed straight on the flashes of the
enemy's rifles. Their magazines were not charged, so they just went in
with cold steel, and I believe I am right in saying that the first
Ottoman Turk since the last Crusade received an Anglo-Saxon bayonet in
him at 5 minutes after 5 a.m. on April 25th. It was over in a minute.
The Turks in this first trench were bayoneted or ran away, and a Maxim
gun was captured.

Then the Australians found themselves facing an almost perpendicular
cliff of loose sandstone, covered with thick shrubbery, and somewhere
half-way up the enemy had a second trench strongly held, from which they
poured a terrible fire on the troops below, and the boats pulling back
to the destroyers for the second landing party.

Here was a tough proposition to tackle in the darkness, but these
Colonials are practical above all else, and they went about it in a
practical way. They stopped a few moments to pull themselves together,
and to get rid of their packs which no troops could carry in an attack,
and then charged their magazines. Then this race of athletes proceeded
to scale the cliffs without responding to the enemy's fire. They lost
some men but did not worry, and in less than a quarter of an hour the
Turks were out of their second position, either bayoneted or in full
flight.

This ridge under which the landing was made, stretches due north from
Gaba Tepe, and culminates in the height of Coja Chemen, which rises 950
feet above the sea level. The whole forms part of a confused triangle of
hills, valleys, ridges, and bluffs which stretches right across the
Gallipoli Peninsula to the Bay of Bassi Liman, above the Narrows. The
triangle is cut in two by the valley through which flows the stream
known as Bokali Deresi...