nning of bombardment.]

[Sidenote: Coolness of the Newfoundlanders.]

The first shell was the beginning of a bombardment. Beachy Bill, a
battery that we were to become better acquainted with, was in excellent
shape. Every few minutes a shell burst close to us. Shrapnel-bullets and
fragments of shell-casing forced us to huddle under the baggage for
protection. A little to the left some Australians were severely
punished. Shell after shell burst among them. A regiment of Sikh troops,
mule-drivers, and transport-men were caught half-way up the beach. Above
the din of falling shrapnel and the shriek of flying shells rose the
piercing scream of wounded mules. The Newfoundlanders did not escape.
That morning Beachy Bill's gunners played no favorites. On all sides the
shrapnel came in a shower. Less often, a cloud of thick, black smoke and
a hole twenty feet deep showed the landing-place of a high-explosive
shell. The most amazing thing was the coolness of the men. The
Newfoundlanders might have been practising trench-digging in camp in
Scotland. When a man was hit some one gave him first aid, directed the
stretcher-bearers where to find him, and coolly resumed digging. In two
hours our position had become untenable. We had been subjected to a
merciless and devastating shelling, and our first experience of war had
cost us sixty-five men. In a new and safer position we dug ourselves in.

[Sidenote: Four miles of graveyard.]

No move could be made in daylight. That evening we received our ration
of rum, and under cover of darkness moved in open order across the Salt
Lake for about a mile, then through three miles of knee-high, prickly
underbrush, to where our division was intrenched. Our orders were to
reinforce the Irish. The Irish sadly needed reinforcing. Some of them
had been on the peninsula for months. Many of them are still there. From
the beach to the firing-line is not over four miles, but it is a ghastly
four miles of graveyard. Everywhere along the route are small, rude
wooden crosses, mute record of advances. Where the crosses are thickest
there the fighting was fiercest, and where the fighting was fiercest
there were the Irish. On every cross, besides a man's name and the date
of his death, is the name of his regiment. No other regiments have so
many crosses as the Dublins and the Munsters. And where the shrapnel
flew so fast that bodies mangled beyond hope of identity were buried in
a common grave, there also ar