Gallipoli Diary Volume I

Excerpt: ... at first rather chilly and I soon found out Pg 192 it was on account of my having gone round his lines during his absence. He is quite right, and I was quite wrong, and I told him so frankly which made "all's well" in a moment. My only excuse, namely, that I had been invited-nay pressed-to do so by his own Chief of Staff, I thought it wiser to keep to myself. Yesterday evening he got a cable from his own War Ministry confirming K.'s cable to me about the new French Division; Numbered the 156th, it is to be commanded by Bailloud, a distinguished General who has held high office in Africa-seventy years old, but sharp as a needle. D'Amade is most grateful for the battalion of the Naval Division; most complimentary about the Officers and men and is dying to have another which is, évidemment, a real compliment. He promises if I will do so to ration them on the best of French conserves and wine. The fact is, that the proportion of white men in the French Division is low; there are too many Senegalese. The battalion from the Naval Division gives, therefore, greater value to the whole force by being placed on the French right than by any other use I can put it to although it does seem strange to separate a small British unit by the entire French front from its own comrades. When d'Amade had done, de Robeck came along. No one on the Q.E. slept much last night: to them, as to us, the dark hours had passed like one nightmare after another. Were we miles back from the trenches as in France, and frankly dependent on our telephones, the strain would be softened by distance. Here we see the flashes; we hear Pg 193 the shots; we stand in our main battery and are yet quite cut off from sharing the efforts of our comrades. Too near for reflection; too far for intervention: on tenter hooks, in fact; a sort of mental crucifixion. Cox is not going to take his Punjabi Mahommedans into the fighting area but will leave them on "W" Beach. He says...