Pte Arthur ‘Smiler’ Williams (Lilydale), 5th Battalion: On Anzac Cove. In a letter to friends in Lilydale – ‘On June 11 we went into the firing line again. We had to climb up the hill we were on by means of rope. Horses cannot be used here and all the guns are hauled up the steep cliffs and hills by the infantry. The place is all hills. Roads have been cut lately in some places and there are better facilities for provisions, so life is a pleasure to what it has been. Our mail, too, arrives in good order and the weather is pleasant; also our health is tip-top, and we are as happy as Larry.
If ever I get back to Australia, I’ll be able to live in anything – a burrow or a fowl yard. At time of writing I am in my burrow looking out over the sea. The burrows are well under cover, so when a hail of shrapnel comes screeching along we make for our holes like a lot of rabbits. On a still calm day the bushes change their position and move, and our chief pleasure is to observe this and fire at them; in most instances they turn upside down, with Turkish snipers grafted into their branches. If we show an eyelid above the parapet the air becomes thick with bullets in an instant.
I would like people to know that we Lilydaleites are giving a good account of ourselves and are not downhearted. I’d like to tell a lot more but the censor says casualties etc are not to be recorded. If I get out of this my 20th birthday will be a memorable one’.
Trp John Taggart (Wandin), 4th Light Horse Regiment: Is evacuated from the trenches to a Casualty Clearing Station on Anzac Cove suffering from a hernia. He is later sent to hospitals on Malta and then England.
Pte Ernest Commerford (Lilydale), 23rd Battalion: On the HMAT Euripides travelling to Egypt. In a letter to friends in Lilydale – ‘Our next calling place was Alexandria at which place we arrived on June 11th, and disembarked the following morning, taking train for Cairo, nearly 100 miles away. One would expect to travel through desert but we were surprised to find the land all under cultivation, irrigation being supplied by the Nile. We arrived at Cairo about 3pm and marched to our camp at Heliopolis, a fine town about four miles from Cairo, where we were not sorry to halt, as we were on the move from 4am the same day. Mena Camp is now closed and this is the main camp. I don’t know when we will be going to the front but by the way our battalion is shaping. I don’t think it will be very long before we go’.
Trp Arthur Rouget (Wandin), 13th Light Horse Regiment: On board the HMAT Persic. From his diary –‘From Port Melbourne we get small pay going down the bay, after that nothing much happened till we got in the Bight where she shipped a sea and breaking some of the horse boxes on top deck, one man receiving a fractured leg. By this time plenty of seasickness on board, but soon getting alright. We had a quiet time from then on till we got out in mid ocean when a wave broke over the stern and breaking the horse boxes on that part. From then on we started to feel the heat and had to take to sleeping on deck, another inconvenience coming into the warm climate the horses required exercising and in some cases had to be brought up out of the hot holds onto the top deck and the horses on the top go below’.
Alfred Sutherland (Wandin): Leaves his job as an electrician and enlists in the AIF, he is 28 years old.