ect the
strength and resisting power of the enemy's front line. Each advancing
wave of the Manchesters was swept away by machine-gun fire. A few of
them gallantly reached the Turkish trenches and fell there. Long
afterwards, during the last flicker of a British offensive in December,
some Lowland Scots soldiers of the 52nd Division found in trenches on
the west of the nullah the bodies of some of the Manchester men, who had
also this day fought a way to their objective and perished.

We saw shrapnel bursting along the nullah, through which C Company was
passing, and progress seemed stopped. I ran along the deserted saps
that connected our support line with the front firing trench, and came
to the gap. Some twenty yards ahead, a group of about thirty men were
lying together in the shallow water-course, mostly dead. Another group
was gathered under cover by the gap. The rest of C and B Companies were
still running up to the gap from the support line through the long grass
of the nullah, and dropping in their tracks under the constant fire of
the redoubt. Chadwick and J.R. Creagh were both in the forefront of the
advance, and Chadwick signalled back its hopelessness. His subaltern,
Bacon, had been the first to pass the gap, and had been killed on
emerging. The whole battle in this sector was really over, and I stopped
the men under cover from moving out into the open. In the late afternoon
the survivors of the little group in front crawled back to safety. The
dead were gathered in by the devoted stretcher-bearers under Sergeant
Mort, during the evening. One party, under Corporal F. White, had alone
penetrated to within a few yards of the redoubt. He held his men
together through the afternoon and brought them in under cover of
darkness, for which the D.C.M. was his reward. Mort had won the D.C.M.
earlier in the campaign.

All through that hot afternoon the wounded Manchesters trailed back to
the busy dressing-stations, pictures of suffering and patience. The
attack still further reduced the numbers of the original Territorial
units, already greatly diminished by casualties.

[Illustration: In Khartum Station.

Col. Gresham. General Wingate.]

[Illustration: In the Turkish trench captured on 4th June.]

We wondered to what extent the effort at Cape Helles had eased the great
task of the armies operating from Anzac and Suvla Bay. The guns used to
boom all day long from the hidden north until the 22nd August, when the