November 30,1914
Dear family,
This war has been tough to say the least. I have lost many friends and seen some die before my eyes. I remember when I first inlisted, I was so excited. Fighting for our great country.
When we first shipped out we were not fully trained but we felt ready. We encountered an enemy German ship. We thought we might die before we even reached our target land. But through some sort of miracle, we managed to defeat them. But at a cost. 140 good men died that day. They were true heroes. None of could have imagined anything like that. Shrapnel flying everywhere, blood pouring into the ocean. But the strange thing is, while we were fighting, we didn’t really pay attention to that stuff. We just kept going.
Anyway, after 3 weeks of sailing, we set up camp in Egypt. The pyramids are better than I could have imagined. Magnificent structures that would baffle you when you think that they were done thousands of years ago. Soon we went into to training. To say it was hell would be an understatement. The hot sand plashing into to your eyes, getting stuck in every part of your body you could imagine. Day after day, training and training and training.
After a while it had seemed we had overstayed our welcome. I heard that the natives were getting annoyed with us. Probably cause we had ran out of money.
Finally we were told we were headong to Gallipoli. We were all excited. We knew what could become of us, death, tortured, but we didn’t care. A lot were just happy they were out of Egypt. We were told that, at dawn, we would go for the surprise attack. Sail out at dawn on to the beach and attack guns blazing. Well that’s what we hoped anyway, turns out we landed at the wrong beach. They were ready for an attack.
So we sailed out under cover. Then the shots came. We splashed into the waist deep icy water. You should have heard the roar from the boys. We stormed on to the beach dropped our packs and went into war. Bullets flying, men dying. We...