At 4:53 A.M. there suddenly came a very sharp burst of rifle fire from the beach, and we knew our men were at last at grips with the enemy.  This fire lasted only for a few minutes and then was drowned by a faint British cheer wafted to us over the waters.  How comforting and inspiring was the sound at such a moment!  It seemed like a message sent to tell us that the first position had been won and a firm hold obtained on the beach.

At 5:03 A.M. the fire intensified, and we could tell from the sound that our men were firing.  It lasted until 5:28 and then died down somewhat.  No one on board knew what was happening, although dawn was gradually breaking, because we were looking due east into the sun slowly rising behind the hills, which are almost flush with the foreshore, and there was also a haze.  Astern at 5:26 we saw the outline of some of the transports, gradually growing bigger and bigger as they approached the coast.  They were bringing up the remainder of the Austrians and New Zealanders.

The first authentic news we received came with the return of our boats.  A steam pinnace came alongside with two recumbent forms on her deck and a small figure, pale but cheerful, and waving his hand astern.  They were one of our midshipmen, just 16 years of age, shot through the stomach, but regarding his injury more as a fitting consummation to a glorious holiday ashore than a wound, and a chief stoker and petty officer, all three wounded by that first burst of musketry which caused many casualties in the boats just as they reached the beach.

From them we learned what had happened in those first wild moments.  All the tows had almost reached the beach, when a party of Turks intrenched almost on the shore opened up a terrible fusillade from rifles and also from a Maxim.  Fortunately most of the bullets went high, but, nevertheless, many men were hit as they sat huddled together 40 or 50 in a boat.

It was a trying moment, but the Australian volunteers rose as a man to the occasion.  They waited neither for orders nor for the boats to reach the beach, but, springing out into the sea, they waded ashore and, forming some sort of a rough line, rushed straight on the flashes of the enemy’s rifles.  Their magazines were not even charged.  So they just went in with cold steel, and I believe I am right in saying that the first Ottoman Turk since the last Crusade received an Anglo-Saxon bayonet in him at five minutes after 5 A.M. on April 25.  It was over in a minute.  The Turks in this first trench were bayoneted or ran away, and a Maxim gun was captured.

Then the Australians found themselves facing an almost perpendicular cliff of loose sandstone, covered with thick shrubbery, and somewhere half way up the enemy had a second trench strongly held, from which they poured a terrible fire on the troops below and the boats pulling back to the destroyers for the second landing party.