kireçtepe

that streamed past us or danced at our feet. Orders by signal were equally and utterly futile, seeing that one could rarely be visible to more than four of one’s men at once… The bullets from rifle and machine-guns were descending in a curtain over the ground that we

were covering, the sand was up about our feet, dust and smoke were leaping up in little clouds, shrapnel was bursting overhead, and a great deal of small shell was falling innocuously enough, but with a terrifying trumpeting, in every direction.

un unidentified subaltern of the 5th inniskillings quoted in “Gallipoli”, Robert Rhodes James, p. 305

My platoon deployed on either side of me, and we begun our advance, stumbling over the rough ground. As we proceeded, it became impossible to keep a perfect line. Now and then a clump of bush or a hollow in the ground hid the men from their neighbours. Some places were so exposed that it was necessary to race across them at full speed, others so thorny and rocky as to be impassable… Orders by word of mouth were impossible in the din of the guns and the bursting shells, the incessant and voluminous roar of riffle-fire and the whole orchestra of bullets and ricochets and shell splinters