Free Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) by B A Lightfoot

crying and groaning hovered in the air like wailing gulls and chilled the waiting soldiers. The singing had long since stopped.
    Recognising the face of a man whose leg had been blown off, his thoughts were driven back to Laura and the kids waiting in Myrtle Street. He realized that some of these men had also taken that walk down Cross Lane to the Drill Hall. What would happen to their wives and families when they got home? Or to the wives woken by a knock on the door to read the few words of the telegram that would cleave through their lives?
    Suddenly, chillingly, this war was not about football and rugby, about chattering Arabs and spitting camels. This was about death and destruction on a level that was hard to comprehend.
    The officers had told them that they were about to enter a new theatre of war. ‘Some show this is going to be’ thought Edward with bitter irony. He stood at the rail of the ship, the HMT ‘Karoa’, numbed by the evidence of the awful carnage that was spread out below him, and thought about the kids in Salford, playing happily around home made maypoles; innocents on the streets who would now never see their dads again.
     
     

Chapter 4
    Gallipoli, May 1915
    The Lancashire Fusiliers boarded the troopship ‘Karoa’ at lunchtime on the 1 May 1915 and the activity in loading and securing all the weaponry and equipment that followed was a welcome distraction. They had been elated to be escaping from the stifling Egyptian summer and excited at the prospect of direct confrontation with the enemy. Only when they had been sitting on the quayside at Alexandria had they got a glimpse of the Hell's cauldron that they were about to be thrust into and their mood had become more sombre.
    The following day they brought on board food, blankets, clothing, tents and medical equipment. They stacked crates of sacks ready to be filled with sand, tarpaulins for the construction of shelters and mail for the soldiers already out there. Finally they loaded the mules which they had brought over from the Reserve Park in Alexandria.
    On the 3 May the ship nosed its way out of Alexandria harbour and the battalion diarist wrote ‘6 am 3.5.15 Saild’(sic). Edward and the now much sobered 1/8 Battalion headed out for the Dardanelles and the bloody fields of Gallipoli.
    On board the ship, they then spent two days in intensive training. This was a new battle, they were told, a new type of warfare and a totally different terrain that they were heading towards. They had instruction covering the use of the ship-to-shore barges, the offloading of equipment and animals, the dangers from the shellfire and about where they should aim to position themselves under the cliffs.
    As they sailed through the idyllic waters and the beautiful islands of the Aegean Sea, the story of the grim battles that had taken place less than two weeks before on the Gallipoli Peninsula began to emerge. Bit by bit, through official edicts and unofficial gossip, the explanation of the strategy, and the dreadful consequences, was gradually built up.
    The fighting on the Western Front in Europe, it seemed, had by now settled into the form of siege warfare that defied attempts by both sides to unlock the other’s defences. Attention had turned to look for other opportunities to break the deadlock. Some British politicians, led by Winston Churchill, had become infatuated by the idea of attacking Germany 'by the back door.' Despite pre-war Naval planning that suggested a passage of the Dardanelles Straits was not possible, the lure of an easier route to the defeat of Germany became irresistible. One strong argument put forward had been the need of the Russians for support in their struggle with the Turks. The senior officers in the Army high command, who felt that the attack should be concentrated on the Western Front, were overruled by the politicians and eventually they acquiesced.
    The Gallipoli Peninsula was a part of Turkey and formed, along its southerly