The Queenslanders who reached this trench and took it, found themselves looking out over a wide expanse of country.  Miles in front of them, and far away to their flank, there stretched a virgin land.  They were upon the crest of the ridge, and the landscape before them was the country behind the German lines.  Except for a gentle rise, somewhat farther northward behind Thiepval, they had reached about the highest point upon the northern end of the ridge.

The connecting trenches, between Mouquet Farm and the ridge above and behind it, were attacked by the Tasmanians.  The fire was very heavy, and for a moment it looked as if this part of the line, and the Queenslanders immediately next to it, would not be able to get in.  Officer after officer was hit.  Leading amongst these was a senior captain, an officer old for his rank, but one who was known to almost every man in the force as one of the most striking personalities in Gallipoli.  He had two sons in the Australian force, officers practically of his own rank.  He was one of the first men on to Anzac Beach; and was the last Australian who left it:  Captain Littler.

I had seen him just as he was leaving for the fight, some hours before.  He carried no weapon but a walking-stick.  “I have never carried anything else into action,” he said, “and I am not going to begin now.”  He was ill with rheumatism and looked it, and the doctor had advised that he ought not to be with his company.  But he came back to them that evening for the fight; and one could see that it made a world of difference to them.  He was a man whom his own men swore by.  Personally, one breathed more easily knowing that he was with them.  It would be his last big fight, he told me.

Half-way through that charge, in the thick of the whirl of it, he was seen standing, leaning heavily upon his stick.  It was touch and go at the moment whether the trench was won or lost.  “Are you hit, sir?” asked several around him.  Then they noticed a gash in his leg and the blood running from it—­and he seemed to be hit through the chest as well.

“I will reach that trench if the boys do,” he said.

“Have no fear of that, sir,” was the answer.  A sergeant asked him for his stick.  Then—­with the voice of a big man, like his officer, the sergeant shouted, and waved his stick, and took the men on.  In the half-dark his figure was not unlike that of his commander.  They made one further rush and were in the trench.

They were utterly isolated in the trench when they reached it.  A German machine-gun was cracking away in the same trench to their right, firing between them and the trench they had come from.  There was barbed wire in front of it.  When they tried to force a way with bombs up the trench to the gun, German bombers in craters behind the trench showered bombs on to them.  Then a sergeant crawled out between the wire and the machine-gun—­crawled on his stomach right up to the gun and shot the gunner