ed spray to swim ashore but
were caught in the barbed wire and drowned. Who could expect success,
but it nevertheless happened! The Turks were sure that we could not
land, yet _we did_. Not only did those boys set foot on those beaches,
but the remnant of that landing-party drove the Turks out of their
entrenchments up cliffs five hundred feet high, and entrenched
themselves on the summit. How did they do it? No one knows; the men
who were there don't know themselves. Did heaven intervene? Perhaps
spiritual forces may sometimes paralyze material. It must be that
right has _physical_ might, else why didn't the Kaiser get to Paris?
Mathematics and preparedness were on his side; by all reasoning Germany
ought to have overwhelmed the world in a few months, with the
superiority of her armament, but she didn't. The Turks ought to have
kept us off the Peninsula, by all laws of logic and arithmetic, _and
they didn't_. I really think the landing succeeded because those boys
thought they had failed.

They must have believed themselves doomed--they could see that there
were too few to accomplish what was even doubtful when the force was
intact. When they were on the shore they must have felt that it was
impossible that they could be taken off again. All the time more were
falling, and soon it seemed that every last man must be massacred.
They made up their minds that, at any rate, they would get a few of the
swine before they went. Every man believed that in the end he must be
killed, but determined to sell his life as dearly as possible, and that
made them the supermen that could not be "held back." A whole platoon
would be cut down, but somehow one or two would manage to get into the
trench, where, of necessity, it was hand-to-hand work, and with
laughing disregard of the odds would lay out a score of the enemy and
send the others fleeing before them, who would yell out that they were
fighting demons from hell. After the confusion in the boats, and from
the fact that in most cases companies were entirely without officers,
there was no forming up for charges--indeed, there were no orders at
all, but every man knew that he could not but be doing the right thing
every time he killed a Turk, so they just took their rifle and bayonet
in their naked hands and went to it. There was no line of battle, it
was just here, there, and everywhere, khaki-clad, laughing demons,
seeking Turks to kill.

Never was there fighting