The live long day there were furious
semi-detached fights by Battalions and Brigades, and we butted back the
enemy for some 200 or 300 yards. So far so good. But we did not capture
any of the main Turkish trenches. I still think we might have done as
well at much less cost by creeping up these 200 or 300 yards by night.

However!

At 4.30 we dropped our high-vaulting Achi Baba aspirations and took to
our spades.

The Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division had been roughly handled.
In the hospital clearing tent by the beach I saw and spoke to (amongst
many others) young Asquith, shot through the knee, and Commander
Wedgwood, who had been horribly hurt by shrapnel. Each in his own way
was a calm hero; wrapped in the mantle bequeathed to English soldiers by
Sir Philip Sidney. Coming back in the evening to the ship we watched
the Manchester Brigade disembarking. I have never seen a better looking
lot. The 6th Battalion would serve very well as picked specimens of our
race; not so much in height or physique, but in the impression they gave
of purity of race and distinction. Here are the best the old country can
produce; the hope of the progress of the British ideal in the world; and
half of them are going to swap lives with Turks whose relative value to
the well-being of humanity is to theirs as is a locust to a honey-bee.

That night Bailloud, Commander of the new French Division, came to make
his salaam. He is small, alert, brimful of jokes and of years; seventy
they say, but he neither looks it nor acts it.

The 7th was stormy and the sea dangerously rough. At 10 a.m. the
Lancashire Fusilier Brigade were to lead off on our left. They could not
get a move on, it seemed, although we had hoped that the shelling from
the ships would have swept a clear lane for them.

The thought that "Y" Beach, which was holding up this brigade, was once
in our hands, adds its sting to other reports coming from that part of
the field. In France these reports would have been impersonal messages
arriving from afar. In Asia or Africa I would have been letting off the
steam by galloping to d'Amade or Hunter-Weston. Here I was neither one
thing nor the other:--neither a new fangled Commander sitting cool and
semi-detached in an office; nor an old fashioned Commander taking
personal direction of the show. During so long drawn out a suspense I
tried to ease the tension by dictation. From the carbons I select these
two paragraphs: they occ