Big Fight. Cet article n’est pas disponible.Big Fight

Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Gallipoli TODAY all is quiet at Gallipoli Peninsula. The rows on rows of wooden crosses at Anzac and Helles, at Nibrunsei Point and Brighton Beach, look out over the JEgean Sea, doubtless blue as it ever was. The dead who lie beneath these little monuments of great deeds?the crosses amid the dwarf holly bushes that clothe the western slopes?have reached their rest. In the scrub Lee-Enfields lie rusting alongside shattered Mausers. The pebbles on the long bleak beaches are mixed with shrapnel bullets, and in the sand and the dunes west of the Long Sap are buried bones and scraps of leather, clips of corroded cartridges, and shreds of khaki clothing. We had no false idea when we left Lem- oos Island, eight transports carrying ourpartiar 3,000 Australians, twelve more carrying the remainder of General Birdwood's diion, as to the diffity if not impossibility of the task ahead. Our training at Lemnos Island had shown some of the diffities, especially the business of landing through choppy seas or narrow beaches under frowning cliffs and then scaling those cliffs. The Turks with their German officers had had their warning in the attempt to force the Dardenelles by the allied forces in January. It was absurd to think that they would be surprised by any movement we could make only a few months after. We discussed the improbability of success quite openly. We went over the old defeats in the history of the Dardenelles, the defeats when Helen of Troy figured as the object of conquest, the defeats of the Crusaders and of Constantine. As I say, we didn't have much hope, but nevertheless, we were all glad that the time had come when the training was at an end and we were to go into the fight. Personally, I set about the same task as the others. On the eve of the ...

When great historians with their learned pens shall come to set forth the complete story of the most sweeping and horrible war the world has ever known, I figure they may perhaps have need of such evidence, information and material as a man like myself can give. I mean a man who has been through the red hell of the vast conflict in places where it has flamed most fiercely, a soldier who has been eye-witness of its superb heroisms, its stupendous tragedies, scientific mai-vels, has undergone its tense emotional and psychol(jgical experiences, bears on his body its wounds, has seen at first hand, with the amazement all civilisation has felt, the cowardice, bestiality, utter moral abandonment to which a nation may fall in a mad dream of the conquest of the world.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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