It might have been thought in the face of such difficulties, with the fevers of the Mediterranean eating into their bodies, that the spirit of the army would have failed. On the contrary, the Australasians accepted the position just as it was, bad as it was: the sweltering heat and the short rations of water; the terrible fatigues, absent from campaigns in other theatres of the war zone; and, above all, the constant exposure to shell fire and rifle fire week after week and month after month. But the spirit of the trenches was buoyant and reflective without becoming pessimistic. The men were heartily sick of inaction. They rejoiced in the prospects of a battle. It was the inertia that killed.
It is doubtful if the true history of Quinn's and Pope's positions will ever be collated. But any soldier will tell you that these two posts made Anzac, for it was on the holding of these precarious and well-nigh impossible positions in the early days of occupation that the whole Australian line depended. The names will be for ever bound up with the gallant officers who defended them, though it will be only meet that their subsequent commanders should have their names inscribed on the roll of the bravest of brave men that clung to the edges of the hillsides at the head of Monash Gully. There was, till the last days, always some fighting going on round Quinn's and Pope's, where the Turkish trenches approached to within a few yards of ours. Sorties by one side or the other were frequently made there; always bombing, alarms, mines, and countermines. I would never have been surprised if at any time the whole of Pope's and Quinn's had collapsed, blown to atoms by some vast network of mines, or wrecked by shell fire. The two places were a mass of trenches, burrows, secret tunnels, and deep shafts. They bristled with machine guns. My greatest difficulty is to adequately convey some detailed idea of the positions as I saw them--a few of the desperate conflicts have been already recorded, and I hope that what will follow will enable the nature of the fighting to be better realized.
Quinn's! The famous post was soon after the landing known throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, and its history, or a portion of it, reached England and Australia early in the accounts of Anzac. That it "held," the Turk found to his cost. He tried to overwhelm it; he was driven back into his trenches, not once, but scores and scores of times.