The affair opened with a heavy bombardment of the Turkish position from the warships and monitors, which lasted for an hour. Then, punctually at 5.30, the whistle for the charge was sounded, and the men sprang over the parapet, and rushed across the plateau.
As they left their trenches, the enemy rifle fire rang out, and the burden was rapidly taken up by machine-guns here and there. But the charging Australians ate up the distance, and were soon among the barbed wire and at the very loopholes of the parapet. Then the observers saw a strange thing. The men stopped as if puzzled; many of them ran hither and thither as though in search for something.
The reason soon became clear, for men stooped and tore up from the earth huge planks of timber. The trenches had been roofed over with heavy sleepers of timber, on which earth had been cast, thus constituting a shell-proof defence, and one which could only be entered from the rear save by such expedients as the men of the 1st Brigade now adopted. Some of them stopped and tore up the sleepers which roofed in the foremost trenches, others charged on over the roofs to the communication trenches which afforded an exit to the Turks. These took the Turks in the rear; while the others, making holes for themselves through the roofing, dropped down into the darkness where the Turks were waiting for them.
The enemy, taken in front and rear, put up such a fight as the Australasian forces had never before experienced on the peninsula of Gallipoli. In the dark and fetid trenches men fought hand to hand, with bayonets and clubbed rifles, with bombs or knives or anything that came to hand. The Turks had the advantage of knowing every turn and twist of the rabbit warren which they had constructed, and fought as desperate men in the 150 yards of darkness over which these underground trenches extended.
One man who fought in that dark inferno told me a moving experience of its mysterious horrors. He found himself alone, a man with whom he had been engaged in a fierce hand-to-hand fight having suddenly fled into the encompassing darkness. The Anzac straightened himself, and after taking breath advanced, dully noting that he was treading on the bodies of the dead. He was brought to a standstill by the sound of hurrying feet and had time to shrink behind the angle of a traverse when a body of six Turks came running by.