Branches Book

BRANCHES

in the arm and I got a bullet hole through the sleeve of me coat. At last we spotted him in a tree and he was painted green from head to foot – green face and gun boots and clothes and we put six shots into him all at once and he fell out. Another day we got a woman sniper but she was shot before we knew she was a woman. There has been a lot of women snipers about and they are good shots.” After the initial clash on the beaches, the war of attrition began. Trenches were dug and companies settled into their new lifestyle. Unlike the sprawling plains of Europe, where the allies had miles of no man’s land, Gallipoli was small, hilly and rocky. This led to enemy trenches being as close as fifteen feet away from each other. Reggie recounted “you can almost shake hands with the buggers.” During this time, Reggie’s company was one of the first to have hand grenades used against them. Fortunately, the technology was new and Reggie quickly learned how to deal with them. “The worst thing about living so close is that the Turks keep throwing bombs into our trenches. These bombs are about the size of cricket balls and the only way we have of stopping them blowing us to pieces is to chuck a sand bag or a coat on them before they burst. They are called hand grenades. When the Turks first threw them us they left the fuse too long and we used to throw them back but they soon took a tumble to it and cut them shorter and now they burst as soon as they hit the ground.” Despite how common they were, it wasn’t bullets, shells, bombs, or snipers that removed Reggie from the battle, it was a tooth infection. So after seven weeks in hell, Reggie was taken from Gallipoli back to Cairo to receive the medical treatment he desperately needed. Talk About a Toothache (14 October, 1915) Reggie was rushed back to Egypt and put into the Heliopolis Hotel Field Hospital. It was here where he wrote a letter about his time on the beach to his grandmother and his brother. While still recuperating from “having all me back teeth out and septic poison set in my jaw,” Reggie struggled to come to terms with what he had been through. From his hospital bed he wrote: “I have had six weeks up at the Dardanelles and I seen more in one of them days than I seen in all me life before. We landed at a place called Sapa tepe and the beach was just like that at home, steep cliffs run up from the sea but they are a lot higher and covered with bush and this bush is thick with snipers. That first and second days was like hell on earth and if hell is any way like that I don’t want to go there... I could fill up this book if I like with adventures and narrow escapes and what I have seen but I know you would not believe half

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