killed by Turkish shellfire. Lt Guy Nightingale watched Napier die.
He was hit in the stomach on the barge between our ship and the beach. He lay for half an hour on the barge and then tried to get some water to drink but the moment he moved the Turks began firing at him again and whether he was hit again or not I do not know, but he died very soon afterwards, and when I went ashore for the second time, I turned him over and he was quite dead.23
Nightingale, who had served with the Munsters in India, was sent to join the remains of Major Jarret’s company trapped behind a bank on the beach. ‘We jumped into the sea and got ashore somehow with a rain of bullets all round us. I found Jarret and a lot of men but very few not hit.’24 Nightingale was sent back to the River Clyde by Jarret to advise Tizard not to attempt to send any more men ashore in daylight. Wisely Tizard heeded this advice and chose to ignore orders from Division to press ahead. These, he rationalised, had been despatched in ignorance of the true situation at V Beach. Nightingale returned to the beach.
[I] lay all day in the blazing sun and the groans and cries of the wounded and dying were awful. The swines of Turks were picking off the wounded as they tried to crawl up the sand to us. At dusk Jarret, and I got together about 40 men who had not been hit and we pushed up a little and formed what we could of an outpost line with sentries so that we would have some sort of warning if we were rushed. Geddes was too bad to do much and finally had to be taken away. Just as it was dusk Jarret came up to me to have a look at the sentries I had put out and, as he was talking to me, he was hit in the throat. He died in a few minutes. That left me the only officer.25
Nightingale, who despite his youth and relative inexperience, was now the effective commander of the force on shore – later temporarily combined, because of the huge losses, into one unit, the ‘Dubsters’ – passed an anxious and miserable night, soaked to the skin like the rest of his men who had waded ashore; lashed by a heavy shower of rain; and expecting the Turks to counter-attack and try and push his small force off the beach. Captain Lane, lying helpless and wounded behind a bank, was almost resigned to the inevitable. ‘That night the Turks came so close that on one occasion we could hear them talking and I feared it was all up.’26 Lane became one of the long-term victims of the war. He was finally evacuated and taken to Malta where surgeons were forced to amputate his leg.
Capt Geddes was also evacuated. Some years later he reflected on the ghastly experience he had been through.
Hell it has been, with a vengeance, and the men who were at Mons and La Bassée say it was sheer child’s play to what we’ve gone through here … As I write we have only six officers and just over 300 men left, out of 28 officers and 900 men. The Dublins have one officer and just over 200 men, the two regiments are now amalgamated into one. The Turks are killing, torturing and burning the wounded – this is reported on every side. They outsavage the worst savages. Flanders is a picnic to this and its the most inhuman show that has ever been known – its simply downright murder!27
His allegations concerning the Turkish treatment of the wounded are, if they have any substance at all, greatly exagerrated.
Overnight the remaining troops from the River Clyde came ashore. Groups of them worked their way across to the fortress on the right hand side of the bay. That night the Turks set fire to some of the houses in Seddel-Bahr, probably to create more open sight-lines or ‘fields of fire’ for their snipers than were afforded by the narrow streets of the village. Tizard, as he surveyed the bay from the River Clyde, described his situation on the morning of 26 April in the following terms.
The enemy were still holding their position. On my left Lieut Nightingale with about ten men had dug themselves in under the cliff on the left. A small party of men were a little way up the nulla from the shore and there was a connecting party at the shore end. They were apparently held up. On the right under the fort and amongst the ruins on the shore were the greater part of the force.28
A staff officer, Capt Stoney of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, offered to go ashore and take command of a detachment of the almost officerless and hopelessly mixed-up troops.
At dawn British ships began pounding the enemy positions. Nightingale assisted in the burial of Major Jarret on the beach and at 7.00 a.m., in the early morning light of 26 April, the survivors of three companies of the Munsters, two of the Dublins and one of the Hampshires took the Sedd-el-Bahr fortress with a bayonet charge and moved into the village beyond where they were held up by well-concealed Turkish snipers. Guy Nightingale described their predicament in a detailed letter to his sister:
The village was an awful snag. Every house and corner was full of snipers and you only had to show yourself in the streets to have a bullet at your head. We spent from 9 a.m. till 2.30 before we finally cleared them all out, we lost a lot of men and officers in it. It was rotten fighting, nothing to be seen of the enemy but fellows being knocked over everywhere. I got one swine of a Turk with my revolver when searching a house for snipers but he nearly had me first.29
Once the village had been cleared of snipers by the force now led by the delightfully-named staff officer Lt Col Doughty-Wylie, the next target was the hill beyond, Hill 141. The hastily improvised plan was to take it from two sides. When Doughty-Wylie’s troops were ready, those led by Stoney emerged from their shelters and both forces stormed the hill with supporting fire from offshore from HMS. Albion. Though Nightingale claims this assault didn’t take place until nearly 4.00 p.m. Tizard puts the time much earlier.
By about 1.30 p.m. Capt Stoney had collected the men and the attack started and it was now that Cpl Cosgrove R.M.Fusiliers, greatly distinguished himself in clearing a way through the wire entanglements and leading a charge after Sgt Major Bennett had been killed. For this he was awarded the V.C.30
Tizard’s typically military and stylistically laconic account does scant justice to William Cosgrove’s courage. Cosgrove, a huge man for that era, 6’ 5” in height, from Aghada in Co. Cork, had enlisted in the Munster Fusiliers in 1910. Finding the wire in front of the Turkish positions was still intact, despite the bombardment, the attackers took cover. Cosgrove rushed forward, with some others, to attempt to dismantle the wire, right under the noses of the Turk defenders, who opened fire. The wire, however, could not be cut with the equipment available, so, instead Cosgrove grabbed one of the poles buried in the ground which bore the wire and heaved. He managed to uproot it and one or two others, creating a gap through which the Munsters poured on their way to taking the Turkish trenches.
A rather florid description of the incident is ascribed to Cosgrove himself as he recovered from wounds on his family’s farm in Cork:
Some of us having got up to the wires we started to cut them with the pliers, but you might as well try to cut the round tower at Cloyne with a pair of lady’s scissors. The wire was of great strength, strained like fiddle strings, and so full of spikes that you could not get the pliers between. Heavens! I thought we were done; I threw the pliers from me. ‘Pull them up!’ I roared to the fellows; and I dashed at one of the upright posts, put my arms around it, and heaved and strained at it until it came up in my arms, the same as you would lift a child … We met a brave, honourable foe in the Turks, and I am sorry that such decent fighting men were brought into the row by such dirty tricksters as the Germans.31
Cosgrove’s action, being entirely voluntary (he was not acting under orders) qualified him for the Victoria Cross, which he was duly awarded. Later, in a bayonet charge which took the trenches at the top of the hill, he was hit in the spine by a bullet and invalided home.
On the other side of the village the attack led by Doughty-Wylie (who wielded nothing but a cane throughout) was also successful in scattering the Turks from Hill 141. He did so with troops who, as Lt Henry Desmond O’Hara pointed out had ‘had no food for about 36 hours after landing, as we were fighting incessantly.’32 Guy Nightingale, having survived the snipers in Sedd-el-Bahr experienced a rush of adrenalin as he raced to the top of the hill.
My company led the attack with the Dublins and we had a great time. We saw the enemy, which was the chief thing and all the men shouted and enjoyed it tremendously. It was a relief after all that appalling sniping. We rushed straight to the top and turned 2,000 Turks off the redoubt and poured lead into them at about