Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Chronicle (Adelaide, SA: 1895 - 1954) Saturday 3 July 1915
THE CHARGE OF THE TENTH.
Bugler T. S. Gordon, of the 10th Battalion, writing from the Luna Park Hospital, Heliopolis, to a friend in Adelaide, states: —"We landed on the peninsula on April 25, and I had the bad luck to get wounded on the same day — shot through my foot. I really thought I had lost my foot. It felt as though the whole thing was smashed to pulp. When the bullet enters it feels as if somebody had given you a heavy blow with a big hammer, and after that all is numb for about an hour; then the pain commences, and one realises what has happened. They had to give me morphia to deaden the pain, but now I am quite O.K. The doctor says it will be another month before I can walk, so I don't know when I am going to get back again. I want to be with the boys when they enter Constantinople, but I am afraid it will be all over within a month. When we were about 40 yards from the shore the Turks opened fire on us from a hill. As soon as the boat touched, over the side we went, nearly up to the chest in water, and rushed for cover, but there was none. The hill where the Turks were looked impregnable. The old 10th fixed bayonets and charged. It looked certain death, but on we went, and, my word, South Australia has something to be proud of. I got hit about half-way up the hill, but watched the boys plod on, and when they neared the top the Turks turned tail and off, and you can take it from me there wasn't one of them running stiff. In the meantime their forts were pouring shrapnel and lyddite shells into us like hailstones, and this did the damage. I saw whole boatloads (34 men in a boat) wiped out with a single shell. Then the navy got busy, and there was something doing. The first 15-in. shell from the Queen Elizabeth blew one of their batteries kite-high, and then they all started bombarding. You talk about hell let loose; it wasn't in it. Shells screaming overhead, the deafening roar of guns, then the long drawn out boom, and another explosion; the bursting of shrapnel, followed by the regular hail of bullets—good Lord, what a nightmare it seems! It will be a long time before the sight is effaced from my memory. The most pitiable sights were the fellows who got shot in the stomach. Good Lord, it must be a terrible thing. I saw one of our sergeants begging and praying for someone to shoot him or hand him his rifle and let him do it himself. Out of my battalion we lost over 300 killed and wounded out of 1,000, so we suffered pretty severely. In fact, all the force suffered heavily—I believe the casualties numbered nearly 5,000 killed and wounded. One of the ministers here is speaking about some of the fellows singing 'Lead, kindly light' when they were landing. If he had been near me and heard the language from different ones he might have changed his mind. I never heard such profanity in my life. One chap got shot in the leg, and I think he swore for fully 10 minutes without repeating himself. We had the Sultan of Egypt in to see us the other day, and he is sending us 100,000 cigarettes and £100 for chocolate."