the first "hotel de charme" on the Gallipoli peninsula
How well I
remember that terrible day
How the blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that town that they called Suvla Bay (*)
We were butchered as lambs at the slaughter.
Turk he was ready, he primed himself well
He chased us with bullets, he rained us with shells
And in five minutes flat he’d blown us all to hell
Nearly blew us right back to Australia
From the song “And the Band played waltzing Mathilda”, 1977, Eric Bogle & the
Buchwalkers Band
(*) Anzac Cove
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I saw and heard him moving along the line calling to the men to get ready and
that they would be up on baby 700 for breakfast. Well, the right of the line
did go over the top and my brother was killed. We were not ordered out of the
trenches as orders to cancel the fourth-line attack in view of the massacre
reached us just in time. I was soon told that my brother had been brought in
dying. I didn’t get to him in time and all there was left for me to do was to
bury him and write to his wife.
Enie Bain, brother of
Duncan Bain
– sergeant in the 10th Light Horse – quoted in "Men of Gallipoli", Peter Liddle,
p. 202
Giuseppe Camilleri was
a member of the Maltese Labour Corps :
On the Helles
beaches the British used a proportion of hired Greek labour, and an effort was
now made by the lines-of-communication staff to obtain a corps of Maltese for
Anzac. The men were raised, but on reaching Mudros a large number were found
unwilling to face the danger. Some 200, however, under Captain Stivala and
four other Maltese officers, volunteered to undertake the service, as did
about the same number of an Egyptian labour corps. ...
... This labour was not adequate for the works at hand, especially as winter
approached and the weather grew more severe and the work heavier and more
pressing.
"The story of Anzac", Volume II, (Sydney 1981), Charles E. W. Bean, p. 835
