illery was inadequate and was inadequately supplied with high
explosives to prepare for an attack in the style afterwards perfected on
the Western Front. It was realised nowhere at this period that the role
of infantry in attack is quite secondary to that of the guns. The
bombardment that preceded the infantry assaults at Cape Helles in August
did not last over two hours, and certainly never hit the trenches
actually in front of the Manchester Territorial Brigade. The gunners
could do no more than they did. The resources at their disposal were
quite insufficient to atone for the Army's difficulties in point of
numbers and in point of ground. It would appear as if we enjoyed no real
ascendancy over the enemy either in aircraft or mining. Bombing was most
unfamiliar to us on arrival. It appeals to the English sportsman
greatly and came to be brilliantly practised, but it was rarely a
determining element. The Battalion bombers on Gallipoli were officially
known as Grenadiers. Steel hats were, of course, unknown. They would
have saved many lives. Visual signalling, on which pains had been
lavished during training, proved of little use. The telephone, however,
was a godsend, and in our Battalion was admirably worked by Sergeant
Stanton.

The one handicap that was above all others a constant and pervading
thought in the minds of our men was the shortage in numbers. It was a
common belief that more reinforcements would have carried the great
advances of June and July over every obstacle. Our drafts were always
too small and too few, and the want of men infinitely aggravated the
exhaustion of the survivors. With but a part of its old strength, and
with no supports whatever between itself and the beaches, a battalion
was still expected to hold the same length of line as when it was up to
strength. Some two hundred men, for instance, occupied the long stretch
of trenches from Skinner's Lane corner to the eastern bird-cage and its
numerous forward saps, upon which men had once been employed. The task
involved weeks of scanty and broken sleep, and caused our support and
reserve lines to be utterly untenanted. Fatigue work was necessary the
very hour that a unit had straggled down to a bivouac from the fire
trenches. So precious was man power that the doctors were forced to
keep unfit men at duty until they dropped. It is impossible to imagine
men more worn by sleeplessness and sickness than the jaded Manchester
Territorials at the