Less than an hour after the 29th Division began the containing battle at Krithia, the Australians at Anzac began theirs. This, the attack on the Turk fort at Lone Pine, in the southern half of the Anzac front, was designed to keep large bodies of Turks from reinforcing their right, on Sari Bair, where the decisive blow was to be struck. It was a secondary operation, not the main thrust, but it was in itself important, since to those at Anzac, the hill of Lone Pine was the gate into the narrowest part of the Peninsula, and through that gate, as the Turks very well knew, a rush might be made from Anzac upon Maidos and the Narrows. Such a thrust from Lone Pine, turning all the Turkish works on the range of Sari Bair, was what the Turks expected and feared from us. They had shewn us as much, quite plainly, all through the summer. Any movement, feint, or demonstration against Lone Pine, brought up their reserves at once. It was the sensitive spot on their not too strong left wing. If we won through there, we had their main water supply as an immediate prize and no other position in front of us from which we could be held. Any strong attack there was therefore certain to contain fully half a division of the enemy.
The hill of Lone or Lonesome Pine is a little plateau less than 400 feet high running N.W. S.E. and measuring perhaps 250 yards long by 200 across. On its southwestern side it drops down in gullies to a col or ridge, known as Pine Ridge, which gradually declines away to the low ground near Gaba Tepe. On its northeastern side it joins the high ground known as Johnston's Jolly, which was, alas, neither jolly nor Johnston's, but a strong part of the Turk position.
We already held a little of the Lone Pine Plateau; our trenches bulged out into it in a convexity or salient known as The Pimple, but the Turks held the greater part, and their trenches curved out the other way, in a mouth, concavity or trap opening towards The Pimple as though ready to swallow it. The opposing lines of trenches ran from north to south across the plateau, with from 50 to 100 yards between them. Both to the north and south of the plateau are deep gullies. Just beyond these gullies Turk trenches were so placed that the machine guns in them could sweep the whole plateau. The space between the Australian and Turk lines was fairly level hilltop, covered with thyme and short scrub.
For some days before the 6th August the warships had been shelling the Turk position on Lone Pine to knock away the barbed wire in front of it. On the 5th, the Australian brigade, told off for the attack, sharpened bayonets and prepared their distinguishing marks of white bands for the left arms and white patches for the backs of their right shoulders. In the afternoon of the 6th the shelling by the ships became more intense; at half-past four it quickened to a very heavy fire; at exactly half-past five it stopped suddenly, "the three short whistle blasts sounded and were taken up along the line, our men cleared the parapet," in two waves on a front of about 160 yards, "and attacked with vigour." The hill top over which they charged was in a night of smoke and dust from the explosions of the shells, and into that night, already singing with enemy bullets, the Australians disappeared. They had not gone twenty yards before all that dark and blazing hill top was filled with explosion and flying missiles from every enemy gun. One speaks of a hail of bullets, but no hail is like fire, no hail in a form of death crying aloud a note of death, no hail screams as it strikes a stone, or stops a strong man in his stride. Across that kind of hail the Australians charged on Lone Pine. "It was a grim kind of steeplechase," said one, "but we meant to get to Koja Dere." They reached the crumpled wire of the entanglement, and got through it to the parapet of the Turk trench, where they were held up. Those behind them at The Pimple, peering through the darkness, to see if any had survived the rush, saw figures on the parados of the enemy's trench, and wondered what was happening. They sent forward the third wave, with one full company carrying picks and shovels, to make good what was won. The men of this third wave found what was happening.
The Turkish front line trench was not, like most trenches, an open ditch into which men could jump, but covered over along nearly all its length with blinders and beams of pinewood, heaped with sandbags, and in some places with a couple of feet of earth. Under this cover the Turks fired at our men through loopholes, often with their rifles touching their victims. Most of the Australians, after heaving in vain to get these blinders up, under a fire that grew hotter every instant, crossed them, got into the open communication trenches in the rear of the Turk line, and attacked through them; but some, working together, hove up a blinder or two, and down the gaps so made those brave men dropped themselves, to a bayonet fight like a rat fight in a sewer, with an enemy whom they could hardly see, in a narrow dark gash in the earth where they were, at first, as one to five or seven to ten.
More and more men dropped down or rushed in from the rear; the Turks so penned in, fought hard, but could not beat back the attack. They surrendered and were disarmed. The survivors were at least as many as their captors, who had too much to do at that time to send them to the rear, even if there had been a safe road by which to send them. They were jammed up there in the trenches with the Australians, packed man to man, suffering from their friends' fire and getting in the way.
Inside an Australian trench, showing a man using a periscope rifle and another man keeping watch by means of a periscope
The first thing to be done was to block up the communication trenches against the Turkish counter attack. Every man carried a couple of sandbags, and with these, breastworks and walls were built. Their work was done in a narrow dark sweltering tunnel, heaped with corpses and wounded and crowded with prisoners who might at any moment have risen. Already the Turks had begun their counter attacks. At every other moment a little rush of Turks came up the communication trenches, flung their bombs in the workers' faces, and were bayoneted as they threw. The trenches curved and zigzagged in the earth; the men in one section could neither see nor hear what the men in the nearest sections were doing. What went on under the ground there in the making good of those trenches will never be known. From half-past five till midnight every section of the line was searched by bombs and bullets, by stink pots, and sticks of dynamite, by gas-bombs and a falling tumult of shell and shrapnel, which only ceased to let some rush of Turks attack, with knives, grenades and bayonets, hand to hand and body to body in a blackness like the darkness of a mine. At midnight the wounded were lying all over the trenches, the enemy dead were so thick that our men had to walk on them, and bombs were falling in such numbers that every foot in those galleries was stuck with human flesh. No man slept that night. At half-past seven next morning (the 7th) a small quantity of bread and tea was rushed across the plateau to the fighters, who had more than earned their breakfast. Turk shell had by this time blown up some of the head-cover and some of the new communication trenches were still only a few feet deep. A Colonel passing along one of them told an officer that his section of the trench was too shallow. Half-an-hour later, in passing back, he found the officer and three men blown to pieces by a shell; in a few minutes more he was himself killed. At noon the bombing became so severe that some sections of the line were held only by one or two wounded men. At one o'clock the enemy attacked furiously with bomb and bayonet, in great force. They came on in a mass, in wave after wave, shoulder to shoulder, heads down, shouting the name of God. They rushed across the plateau, jumped into the trenches and were mixed up with our men in a hand-to-hand fight, which lasted for five hours. Not many of them could join in the fight at one time, and not many of them went back to the Turk lines; but they killed many of our men, and when their last assault failed our prize was very weakly held. At half-past seven the survivors received a cheering (and truthful) message from the Brigadier "that no fighters can surpass Australians," and almost with the message came another Turk assault begun by bomb and shell and rifle fire, and followed by savage rushes with the bayonet, one of which got in, and did much slaughter. No man slept that night; the fight hardly slackened all through the night; at dawn the dead were lying three deep in every part of the line. Bombs fell every minute in some section of the line, and where the wide Turk trenches had been blasted open they were very destructive. The men were "extremely tired but determined to hold on." They did hold on.
They held on for the next five days and nights, till Lone Pine was ours past question. For those five days and nights the fight for Lone Pine was one long personal scrimmage in the midst of explosion. For those five days and nights the Australians lived and ate and slept in that gallery of the mine of death, in a half darkness lit by great glares, in filth, heat and corpses, among rotting and dying and mutilated men, with death blasting at the doors only a few feet away, and intense and bloody fighting, hand to hand, with bombs, bayonets and knives, for hours together by night and day. When the Turks gave up the struggle the dead were five to the yard in that line or works; they were heaped in a kind of double wall all along the sides of the trench: most of them were bodies of Turks, but among them were one quarter of the total force which ran out from The Pimple on the evening of the 6th.