ng steel-headed darts from their aeroplanes. Their
chance of striking any man was, luckily, very small.

Nothing daunted the spirit of East Lancashire. Our men held concerts to
the very last, and the football eleven survived three rounds of an Army
Corps competition, losing their tie in the fourth round on a field in
which shells burst repeatedly to the discomfort of the players. Captains
J.F. Farrow, F. Hayes and E. Townson returned to strengthen the small
band of officers, while R.J.R. Baker, who had been intercepted on his
way out and sent to Suvla Bay, was released for service with us.

CHAPTER VIII

LAST WORDS ON GALLIPOLI

The last I saw of the trenches was the tangled line on Fusilier Bluff.
The last I saw of Gallipoli was the fading contour of its cliffs as we
sailed in the _Delta_ for Mudros and Alexandria. When we touched at
Mudros we heard the first whisper of Lord Kitchener's fateful visit to
the Eastern Mediterranean.

All questions relating to the initiation and conduct of the expedition
are fitly left to the judgment of the Dardanelles Commission. Here have
only been expressed ideas that occurred to a Regimental Officer, whose
range of vision is always restricted, and whose generalisations are
inevitably based on a narrow, personal experience. Yet such ideas may
still have a bearing upon the history of the campaign, as the whole
theatre of operations at Cape Helles was extraordinarily congested. In a
tiny area, barely three miles by four, strategy had no elbow-room when
once the Army was committed to the plan of operations that had been
adopted. The war with the Turks on the Peninsula became purely a war of
tactics. If Inkermann was "the soldier's battle," Gallipoli was the
soldier's campaign.

It is easy to criticise in the light of a later standard. Gallipoli was
invaded early in 1915, not in 1916 or 1917, when the whole technique of
assault had been revolutionised. We landed with the methods practised in
England since the Boer War, methods as out of date in France in 1917 as
Wellington's methods were in 1815. On later knowledge no one can doubt
that a vast concentration of gun power, infinitely equipped and
munitioned, a scientific use of barrage fire, nicely adjusted to the
movements of a great infantry force, itself organised to develop the
fullest use of machine guns, Lewis guns, and grenades, would have broken
the defences of Achi Baba. Our Army knew none of these advantages. The
art