No one guessed he was so
near. We were still in our summer lack of clothing, and were not
prepared for cold weather, when like a wolf on the fold the blizzard
came down upon us. This was the worst enemy those battered troops had
yet encountered. Hardly any of those boys had ever seen snow and now
they were naked in the bitterest cold. There were more cases of
frost-bite than there were of wounds in the whole campaign. More had
their toes and fingers eaten off by Jack Frost than shells had
amputated. In those open, unprotected trenches, in misery such as they
had never dreamed could be, the lads from sunny Australia stood to
their posts. When the snow melted the trenches fell in and Turk and
Anzac stood exposed to each other's fire, but both were fighting a
common enemy and so hard went this battle with them as to compel a
truce in the fight of man against man.

Soon it was evident that our final objective of capturing the Narrows
could not be accomplished with the forces we had. Directly the winter
gales would arrive and on those exposed beaches no stores could be
landed. We had to leave and leave quickly, or starve to death. So the
evacuation was planned.

No achievement in military history was better conceived or more
faithfully carried out. Here was scope for inventive genius and many
were the devices used to bluff the Turk. We schooled him in getting
used to long periods of silence. At first he was pretty jumpy and
could not understand the change, when the men who had always given him
two for one now received his fire without retaliating. After a while
he decided that as we were quite mad there was no accounting for our
behavior. Then we scared him some more by appearing to land fresh
troops. As a matter of fact, a thousand or so would leave the beach at
night and a few hundred return in the daylight under the eyes of the
Turkish aeroplanes, causing them to report concentration of more
troops. Stores were taken out to the ships by night, and the empty
boxes brought back and stacked on the beaches during the day. It must
have appeared as if we were laying in for the winter.

There were many inventive brains of high quality working at great
pressure during all the days of holding on, but one of the cleverest
ideas put into operation was the arrangement devised by an engineer
whereby rifles were firing automatically in the front-line trenches
after every man had left. There is no doubt the Turks w