They waited neither for orders nor for the boats to reach
the beach, but, springing out into the sea, they waded ashore and,
forming some sort of a rough line, rushed straight on the flashes of
the enemy's rifles. Their magazines were not even charged. So they just
went in with cold steel, and I believe I am right in saying that the
first Ottoman Turk since the last Crusade received an Anglo-Saxon
bayonet in him at five minutes after 5 A.M. on April 25. It was over in
a minute. The Turks in this first trench were bayoneted or ran away, and
a Maxim gun was captured.
Then the Australians found themselves facing an almost perpendicular
cliff of loose sandstone, covered with thick shrubbery, and somewhere
half way up the enemy had a second trench strongly held, from which they
poured a terrible fire on the troops below and the boats pulling back to
the destroyers for the second landing party.
Here was a tough proposition to tackle in the darkness, but these
colonials are practical above all else, and they went about it in a
practical way. They stopped a few moments to pull themselves together
and to get rid of their packs, which no troops should carry in an
attack, and then charged their magazines.
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