Think of a force larger than the intended landing-party entrenched,
with their rifles loaded and their range known, behind all manner of
overhead cover and wire entanglements, and then remember that you are
one of a party that has to step ashore there from an open boat, and
kill, or drive far enough inland, these enemy soldiers to enable your
stores to be landed so that when you have defeated him, you may not
perish of starvation. Far more than at Balaclava did these young men
from "down under" walk "right into the jaws of death, into the mouth of
hell!" And the Turks waited till they were _well_ within the jaws
before they opened fire. No one in the landing force knew where the
Turks were, and the Turks did not fire on us until we got to the zone
which they had so prepared that all might perish that entered there.
They could see us clearly, the crowded open boats were targets of naked
flesh that could not be missed. Was there ever a more favorable
setting for a massacre? The Turks in burning Armenian villages with
their women and children had not easier tasks than that entrenched
army. Our men in the boats were too crowded to use their rifles, and
the boats were too close in for the supporting war-ships to keep down
the fire from those trenches. How was any one left alive? By
calculation of the odds not one man should have set foot on that shore.
Make a successful landing, enabling us to occupy a portion of that
soil! What an impossible task!

[Illustration: Anzac Cove, Gallipoli.]

To the men in those boats and the men watching from the ships, it
appeared as if not merely the expedition had failed, but that not a man
of the landing force would survive. Boats were riddled with bullets
and sunk--other boats drifted helplessly as there were not enough alive
to row them--men jumped into the bullet-formed spray to swim ashore but