rom the AEgean Sea, on Sunday morning,
April 25th, 1915, was the roar of the _Queen Elizabeth_--the mammoth
vessel of the Navy and armed with the mightiest guns--sending forth at
each bellow and flash a ton of high explosives. It inspired awe and
dread to the uttermost, that concentration of fire from all the ships
of the Fleet. What living being, or work of nature or man, could
survive it? Those on the ships who were searching the peninsula with
the most powerful telescopes could see no sign of life. Houses and
walls disappeared, and clouds of sand and earth and smoke arose where
the Turks were supposed to be entrenched. There was no reply to the
cannonade, not even the crack of a rifle.

The allied Fleets of England and France had failed to batter open the
gates of the Dardanelles from the sea in March; and now there was to
be an attempt to invade Gallipoli by making a number of separate but
simultaneous landings of British troops on the southern and western
sides of the peninsula. The object was to seize the Turkish positions
defending the Straits, which was to be followed, if all went well, by
an advance to Constantinople by both land and sea, and the dictation
of terms to the paralysed Ottoman Empire at St. Sophia. English,
Scottish, Australian, New Zealand, and Indian troops, as well as
Irish, were engaged in this grand enterprise. They all acquitted
themselves nobly, especially the Lancashire regiments, with their very
large Irish element; and the Dominion forces, in which Ireland was
also well represented; but to the Irish regiments was allotted what
proved to be the most desperate part of the invasion, as will be found
fully admitted in the official despatches of Sir Ian Hamilton in
command of the Army and Admiral de Robeck of the Navy. The British
troops consisted of the 29th Division under Major-General
Hunter-Weston. In it were battalions of three Irish regiments, 1st
Dublin Fusiliers, 1st Munster Fusiliers, and 1st Inniskilling
Fusiliers. They had been brought from India and Burma to England at
the outbreak of the war, and having rested for some months in the
Midlands, around Coventry, left Avonmouth for the Near East on St.
Patrick's Day, 1915.

Along this western side of Gallipoli, washed by the AEgean Sea, the
yellow cliffs of sandstone and clay, clothed in scrub, seem to rise,
in an undeviating line, clear out of the waters to a height of from
two to three hundred feet. But there are points where the