Eyewitness Read Free Page B

down on the line either of sea or shore a signal lamp flashes. We can’t say if it is on some small boat close in or on the shore itself. One of the ship’s officers next me takes my telescope and looks long through it.
    ‘No I can’t say which it is,’ he says.
    Then at 4.38 for the first time, listening eagerly, I catch faintly on a gust off the shore a distant knocking as of someone who held up a small wooden box and knocked the inside of it with a pencil.
    It comes again and again continuously, like the knock-knocking of an axlebox heard very far off, very faint, through the bush. To my mind there is no mistaking it whatever. It is the first time I heard the sound, but I have no doubt on earth of what it is. It is the distant echo of rifle firing – first few shots, then heavy and continuous.
    I told the ship’s officer next me to listen. He heard it too; he knew what it was. There was some doubt amongst others. But within five minutes there could be no mistake. Heavy firing was going on in the hills ahead. We could not see the flash …
    4.53: Just now there was the sound like a bursting rocket high in the air a little aft of the ship. A small woolly cloud unrolled itself. Below it a small circle of the surface of the silky water was lashed up as if by a very local fierce thunder rain. Presently far away on the face of a small promontory about two miles to the south of us is a brilliant pinpoint flash. Some seconds later a curious whizz through the air – a whizz on a descending scale just the opposite to the whizz of a steam siren. The long drawn-out whizz sinks and sinks down the scale. There is a flash high in the air a quarter of a mile in front of us this time. Then a bang, the whirr of a shower of pellets sprayed as if from a watering can, the whip up of another circle of sea below and another white fleecy cloud slowly floating overhead. The wondering crowd on the promenade deck says to itself ‘So that is shrapnel.’ ‘Look mate,’ says a voice on the foc’sle, ‘they’re carrying this joke too far – they’re using ball ammunition.’
    4.55: There was a bang which shook our ship – a huge bilious yellow cloud for a moment sprang out from the side of one of the warships just south of us. Far down on the point where that other flash came from, a huge geyser of yellow black earth lifts itself – a lurid red flash just showing through the cloud of it. The Infantry – they are New South Welshmen – on the deck below run to the side, cheering, delightedly.
    ‘Whew! That’s Pat,’ says one excited boy waving his cap.
    Several of the other ships begin firing, but the shrapnel still bursts ahead. At five o’clock one seems to burst fair over the stern of a transport ahead of us carrying a battalion of the 2 nd Brigade.
    Three minutes later we ourselves start moving in to take up our berth. Four of us, in line, are passing slowly in between the warships. Just on our port side we look down quite close upon the deck of one battleship – the Prince of Wales , I think … On our right the Triumph and Bacchante are firing round after round – the two big turret guns of the former roaring together.
    Not a sign yet from the beach. Only that ceaseless knocking, knocking, knocking. Presently a curiously oval object floats past us low in the water. It is a small rowing boat bottom upwards.
    That was the first sign we saw.
    Now at last as we moved in we could see on the sea, just below the line of the beach, a swarm of small boats – small boats everywhere. They seemed to be going each on its own and going every sort of way – rowing, not being tugged some were stationary – or seemed so. It is hard to tell at this distance. ‘I don’t like the way they’re all scattered about,’ said a staff officer near me. Some seemed as though they might be helping others in difficulties.
    The warships are firing more heavily now – there go two great turret guns together. The enemy is still scattering his