HOW THE LEINSTERS CAUGHT A GLIMPSE OF THE NARROWS

For five days and nights the Irish troops who took Chocolate Hill, or Dublin Hill, on Saturday, August 7th, lay in the captured Turkish entrenchments before they could be relieved. The men were in the highest spirits over their exploit. But they felt stiff and sore and very, very dirty. They had sand in their clothes, sand in their hair, sand in their eyes, sand in their mouths and nostrils, and their faces and hands were black with the grime of powder and the smoke of the bush fires. And now, upon all that, they had to endure the particular discomforts and hardships which attend a campaign in a dry and torrid land.

The greatest trouble arose from the scarcity of fresh water to mitigate the tropical heat. The wells were few and far between, and being within range of the Turkish guns, were, all of them, constantly shelled. The quantity of water that could be brought to Dublin Hill was totally inadequate to satisfy the demand. The supply was strictly reserved for drinking purposes. Water was too scarce and precious to be wasted on personal ablutions. Better a filthy face than a parched mouth. The dirtiest water was drunk with a relish. A Dublin Fusilier sighed for a draught of the cool and crystal water from the Wicklow hills. “Vartry water,” exclaimed another; “I’d be quite content with a bucketful from the Liffey, even off the North Wall.” Food was also hard to get. The commissariat had not yet been evolved out of the disorganisation attendant upon the landing. Under such a scorching sun the eating of the bully-beef in the men’s ration bags was unthinkable. So their meals consisted chiefly of biscuits. Then there was the pest of myriads of flies. The Gallipoli flies were having the time of the life-history of their species. Big, ferocious, and insatiable freebooters, they would not be denied joining the troops at their meals and getting the bigger share of the scanty rations into the bargain. The worst affliction of all, however, was the stench of the half-buried and rapidly decomposing corpses in the captured trenches.

During the week which thus elapsed between the capture of Chocolate Hill and the still fiercer series of battles for the heights of Kiretsh Tepe Sirt, to the north, and of Sari Bair, to the south, which were to follow, regiments of the Irish Division were constantly engaged with the enemy on the foothills. Sari Bair was the strongest strategical position of the Turks in this part of Gallipoli. Like Achi Baba, towards the lower end of the Peninsula, it commands the Dardanelles, and especially the great military road along the shore of the Straits, over which the Turks were enabled quickly to send reinforcements of men, munitions, and stores from one point to another. One Irish Battalion actually gained a point on Sari Bair, from which they caught a glimpse of the Dardanelles. This was the 6th Royal Leinster Regiment of the 29th Brigade, which, as I have already mentioned, was separated from the 10th Division and sent south to co-operate with the forces from the Dominions. On Monday, August 9th, a party of New Zealanders had fought their way up to a ridge of Sari Bair, but were unable to hold it; and as they came retreating down to the place where the 6th Leinsters were in reserve, they shouted: “Fix your bayonets, lads; they’re coming over the hill.” Sergeant-Major T. Quinlan, of the Leinsters, lying wounded in hospital, tells the story. “Everyone ran for his rifle and fixed his bayonet, picked up a bandolier or two of ammunition, and charged up the hill like a pack of deers, some without boots or jackets. I bet you the Turks never ran so quick in their lives, for our rifle fire and plunging bayonets, as we charged, were too much for them to stand. We regained the lost position in almost twenty minutes.” And down below them, to the east, they could see that narrow ribbon of water which was the object of all this horrible killing the Dardanelles glistening in the sun.

The positions held by the Irish regiments around Chocolate Hill were regularly bombarded. On August 9th Lieutenant D.R. Clery, of the 6th Dublins (a fine young Dublin man, very popular as a footballer), was missed. Captain J.J. Carroll, of the battalion, writing to a relative, says: “I know that he was in the very front of the firing line on August 9th, and one of our men told me on the ship coming home of Dan’s magnificent conduct in carrying man after man out of danger. The man I refer to said that in saving others Dan had seemed utterly regardless of danger to himself.” It was also in one of these outbursts of Turkish artillery that on Tuesday, August 10th, Captain James Cecil Johnston, Adjutant of the 6th Royal Irish Fusiliers, was killed. Before the war Captain Johnston a County Fermanagh man was Master of the Horse to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Second Lieutenant R.S. Trimble, who was wounded on the same occasion, describes the incident in a letter to his father, Mr. W. Copeland Trimble, of Fermanagh. He was standing between his Colonel and his Adjutant in conversation when a shell came along. It tore the Colonel’s arm to pulp, and though it passed Mr. Trimble, who was slightly out of the line of fire, the concussion of it dashed him violently to the ground, and then exploding, it blew Captain Johnston literally to pieces.

The Irish troops were greatly harassed by the enemy’s sharpshooters. These snipers assumed all sorts of disguises and occupied every conceivable hiding place up in the dwarf oak trees, lying prone in the scrub thickets, down in the rocks of the gullies so that it was very difficult to spot them. Among those discovered was a peasant woman the wife of a Turkish soldier who lived with her old mother and her child in a little house near the Irish lines. She was a fine shot, and apparently confined her attention to stragglers, whose bodies she rifled; for several identification discs and a large sum of money were found in her possession. The daring and resource of the sharpshooters made them a deadly peril. One man caught in a tree wore a head covering and cloak formed of leaves. Another was found in a khaki uniform, stripped from a dead British soldier. The most perplexing feature of the sniping was that shots often came from the scrub behind. One of the victims of these tactics was Lieutenant E.M. Harper, of the 7th Royal Munster Fusiliers, who, while advancing with his company on August 9th, fell from a rifle shot fired from the rear.

The men of all the Irish battalions suffered from this game of hide-and-seek with death as they lay in the trenches on Dublin Hill. Relief came to them in the early hours of the morning of Friday, August 13th. They left at 1.30, and marched seven miles to a rest camp in a gully of Karakol Dagh running down to the Gulf of Saros, which they reached at 4.30, and a footsore, sleepy, haggard, unkempt, bedraggled, hairy, unwashed, and unshaven crowd they were. They owed this bivouac to the success of the Munsters and Royal Irish Regiment in expelling the Turks from part of the ridge. When dismissed in the camp every man, officer and private alike, flung himself down in the open where he was and as he was, and had his first undisturbed sleep for a week. In the morning they had the luxurious experience of getting out of their clothes and plunging into the sea. How they revelled in it, after that awful week of forced marches, battle, flies, smoke, stench, and sweat! What laughter and splashing! The shouts and the merry jests and their accents made the scene just such a one as might be witnessed at home in a swimming pool under Howth or Bray Head.

Afterwards the chief desire of all was to write home. As the men lay almost naked on the warm sands, under the scorching sun, many a letter was written to loved ones in Ireland, each telling how he got safely through his baptism of fire the best news he could possibly send and what a grand name his battalion had made for itself. Words of comfort and cheer are freely used in such of the letters as have been made public. “I’m happier than ever I was; it’s just the sort of life I like.” “You can’t realise what high spirits I am in when I’m fighting. I feel as if it were all one long exciting Rugger match.” “Don’t you fret, I’ll get through it all right; and even if I fall, sure we’ll all meet again in the next world after a few brief years.”

To call the camp a “rest” camp is, perhaps, a misnomer. It certainly afforded no refuge from the flies. “There is a fellow near me doing nothing but killing them in millions,” writes one of the Dublins. “I had ten in a mug of tea as soon as it was handed to me,” says another. This place of shelter was not safe even from the Turkish guns. As many as twenty-five men were knocked out by a shell. But such as the camp was, the stay of the Irish in it was very brief indeed. On the morning of Sunday, August 15th, they were ordered to take up positions on the ridge above them, and wait for the word to go forward and attack. Though “burned like a red herring, and just as thin and thirsty,” as one of the officers of the 7th Dublins said, describing himself and giving a comic picture of them all, they were again in good physical condition. And they had need to be. For they were now assigned a task that was to demand of them more fortitude and resolution and a bigger toll of life than even the taking of Dublin Hill.

It was fortunate, then, that on that very Sunday, August 15th, the great Irish Catholic festival of Our Lady’s Day, the Catholic members of the forces were able to reinforce themselves with that sustaining power which the Mass and Holy Communion impart. The services were held by Father W. Murphy, one of the chaplains, under the sheltering hill, in the open air, not only within sound of the guns, but within sight of the bursting shells. It was a rudely improvised altar a stone laid on trestles, a crucifix, and two candles and the priest in his khaki service uniform under the vestments. Many of the men thought of the village chapel at home on that fine Sunday morning. They saw the congregation, all in their Sunday best, gathered outside, and while waiting for the bell to stop, exchanging gossip about the war, and inquiring of one another what was the latest from the Dardanelles, about Tom, and Mike, and Joe. The familiar scene was distinct to their mind’s eye, and their beating hearts kept time to the measured tones of the chapel bell. After the Mass they were given the General Absolution. “It was very impressive,” says Sergeant Losty, of the 6th Dublins, “to see Father Murphy standing out on the side of the hill, and all the battalions, with their helmets off and holding up their right hands, saying the Act of Contrition and he absolving them.”

At this point it is appropriate that I should refer to the cordial and intimate relations which existed between the Protestant and Catholic chaplains of the 10th Division. An officer of the 30th Brigade, consisting of the 6th and 7th Dublins and the 6th and 7th Munsters, gives the following pleasant picture of Father W. Murphy, Catholic priest, and the Rev. Canon McClean, Church of Ireland minister:

“This morning Father Murphy said Mass in the trenches, where bullets, etc., were falling like hailstones. Oh! he is a splendid man. The Canon, a dear, good Irishman from Limerick, holds his services side by side with Father Murphy. They put a great spirit into the men, who love them both; in fact, almost adore them. I personally think that nothing I know of is half good enough for those two noble gentlemen. Catholic and Protestant are hand-in-hand, all brought about by the gentleness and undaunted courage displayed by these two splendid soldiers of Christ. Never since the landing has the roar of battle, be it ever so ferocious (and God only knows it is bad here at times), prevented these clergymen from forcing their way into the firing line and attending to our gallant sons of Ireland. Canon McClean is over fifty years of age and Father Murphy is forty-eight. You can imagine them, even though of such an age, never off their feet, as they go to and fro daily to their duties.”

Both have been mentioned in Sir Ian Hamilton’s despatches. Brigadier-General Nicol, in command of the 30th Brigade, writes in the warmest appreciation of their services. “We of the 30th Brigade are never likely to forget your fearless devotion to your duty,” he writes to Canon McClean. “With you and Father Murphy we were indeed fortunate; and it was so nice to see you two the best of friends working hand in hand for the common good. You both set us a fine example.” Canon McClean is rector of Rathkeale, County Limerick.