Grim Memorial of Suvla Bay, One of the mysteries of the war, the fate of part of a battalion of an English territorial regiment, the oth Norfolks, in the fighting at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, has at last been solved, says the London correspondent of the "New York Times."
Sir Ian Hamilton, in his dispatch on the fighting around Anafarta on August 12, 1915, referred to the fate of this battalion as a very my-serious thing. "On the night of attack they found themselves less strenuously opposed than the rest of the brigade," said the report, "and under ' Colonel Sir H. Beauchamp the men eagerly pressed forward. Some were wounded or exhausted, and found their way back to camp.
"But the Colonel, with sixteen officers and 250 men," continued General Hamilton' ispateh, "still kept pushing on, driving the enemy. before them. Amongst these ardent souls was part of a fine company enlisted from the King's Sand-bingham estates. Nothing more was ever seen or heard of any them. They charged into a forest and were lost to sight and sound. Not one of them ever came back."
A Ficur to tHe Exp.
The forest into which the battalion gallantly charged was never retaken by British troops. A few men who fell into the hands of the Turks, it was afterwards found, had fallen out of the attack earlier, and not a man of Colonel Beauchamp's force was made prisoner.
The Rev. C. S. Edwards, who has. just returned from a visit to the peninsula on graves registration work, says that on going over Anafarta Plain he found skeletons of men of the 4th and 5th Norfolks, the sth Suffolks and sth Hampshires more than a mile in front of what was afterward the British first line trench, Apparently the battalions had advanced in perfect order, and to all appearances had been caught by machine gun fire.
One man had taken cover behind a stone, and a large pile of empty cartridge cases around his skeleton showed that he had defended himself to the last.
Just behind the Norfolk front line r. Edwards came across the remains of about 50 men who had fallen in a grim han@-to-hand struggle. Touching each other lay bodies of Britons and Turks, the heads of the latter facing seaward and those of the attackers toward their adversaries' lines.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.