eriences of men who go through it for the first time is a
distracting indecision whether to advance, halt, or retreat. But the
successive lines went steadily on in short rushes, the men falling on
their stomachs between each rush. There was no shelter. The expanse
was unbroken even by a rock. The men sank almost to their knees in the
soft sand. Very heavy, slow and tiring was the going. All the time
Turkish explosives were bursting on every side, and comrades were
dropping out of the ranks killed or disabled. One instance will show
the steadiness and resolution of the troops. A shell burst in the
middle of a platoon that was marching in rather close formation. Five
men were blown to pieces. The platoon opened out and continued their
advance. High over their heads the shells from the British cruisers
and monitors out at sea went shrieking on their way to find the Turks.
The land seemed to tremble with the din and vibration caused by this
long-range artillery duel. The men were bodily shaken. But they were
also greatly heartened to see, now and then, clouds of earth thrown
into the air, telling how the explosive shells from the ships were
rending the entrenchments behind which the enemy lay concealed.

After this ordeal in the open sandy plain, the Irish reached a totally
different kind of country--an inextricable jumble of hills and
gullies, strewn with boulders, overgrown with a thick prickly scrub,
and wholly trackless. Here some shelter was afforded from the high
explosives of the Turks, but not from their machine-guns and rifles,
and the progress was still more slow and difficult. The nature of the
country gave a tremendous superiority to the enemy, on the defensive
behind their entrenchments. What a hopeless, heart-breaking task it
seemed to get free of this entanglement of rocks and scrub, which tore
the clothes and lacerated the flesh, and force a way up these steep
hills, on hands and feet to the Turkish positions. Men were falling on
all sides. How soon would the end of the fiery furnace be reached?
Would anyone get safely through? Such were the thoughts that occupied
the mind of many a man, expecting that the next bullet or shell would
strike him down. The battalions were broken up into unrelated
sections, or else were mixed together. The nature of the ground, the
gullies and ravines, the scrub and the rocks, split them up into
fragments, each with its independent command. This kind of fighting
was quite to the