Also they posted guns on well-chosen positions, and the Anzacs had to endure a bombardment that recurred every day. On Battleship Hill there was a battery that had the whole of the southern posts ranged, and dropped shells on them with unceasing regularity and remarkable accuracy. In the mangroves south of Gaba Tepe there was hidden a quick-firing gun known to the Anzacs as Beachy Bill. He had the Anzac beaches ranged, and did enormous damage with his sudden bursts of shrapnel.
This monster, and a twin gun on an elevation to the north, somewhere behind Anafarta village and known as Anafarta Anne, made the old amusement of beach bathing a deadly peril. Long before the final abandonment of the Anzac position a camp statistician had reckoned that the score of casualties due to the activities of Beachy Bill exceeded the total of 1,500, and on one bad day he accounts for sixty-four men. Many attempts were made by the warships to silence these guns and blow away their emplacements. Sometimes they were so damaged that they had to remain quiescent for a day or two, but just when hope was growing in the Anzac ranks that they had heard the last of Beachy Bill, a bathing party would be reminded by a spray of shrapnel that he was very much in being.
The sufferings endured by the troops holding the southern part of the Anzac line, from Quinn's Post down to The Pimple, arising out of the shelling of their trenches with high explosive, will never be told. The remnants of the Second Brigade, which were posted at Steel's Post and Johnston's Jolly, endured this for weeks, especially toward the end of July.
One experience related to me by a young officer of the 7th will ever stick in my memory. His company had maintained a ceaseless vigil for days and nights, men falling asleep where they stood under arms. When things appeared at their worst, he was delighted at the appearance of a small party of reinforcements, fifteen in number. He gave a relieved glance at the new-comers, and conducted them to a deep trench that had been made a few yards behind the firing line where the men used to retire to rest in comparative safety.
He left them there while he selected from his band of overwrought warriors those who needed rest most of all where every one was in vital need of a spell. No sooner had he left this rest trench than a great "Jack Johnson" came, burying the reinforcements under many feet of earth. Their comrades sprang to their assistance, digging away the earth like possessed beings. One by one the dead and dying men were discovered, and tenderly borne back to the beach from which they had just come. Finally all had been removed but one, and of him no trace could be found.