Cpl James Drummond Burns (Lilydale), 21st Battalion: He was in the front line at Courtney’s Post when the Turkish forces fired an artillery barrage upon their position. Private Robert Glenister later told a friend –‘There was a Turkish demonstration; Jimmy said ‘Don’t let them have their own way, boys’. He got up and fired four shots. ‘They’re shooting at me! They’re shooting at me!’ he said, and two shots later he got one through the head. He never knew what hit him. He died through being too brave’.
Pte Ernie Mason, who had also enlisted from Lilydale, wrote to another Lilydale soldier telling him –‘Jim got excited and jumped up onto the parapet of the trench and got a bullet through the head’. In later years Pte William Carroll remembered: ‘One of the first men to be killed in our section was my dear friend Jim Burns, a tent mate from Broadmeadows and Mena camp. Poor young Jim, like most of us, was rearing to have a look over the trench. He knew it was dangerous but couldn’t restrain himself. He stuck his head up for only a split second and fell dead into the trench with a bullet hole clear through his forehead’.
Shot in the head by a sniper’s bullet he fell back unconscious and his mates, including Ernie Mason, quickly picked up his limp body and carried him to the nearest regimental aid post but Jim died there soon after, having never regained consciousness. It was exactly three months after his twentieth birthday and only his tenth day on Gallipoli, he was the 21st Battalion first fatal Gallipoli casualty. He was the author of the famous poem ‘The Bugles of England’. He is buried at the cemetery at Shrapnel Valley, Gallipoli.
Archibald Arnott (Lilydale): Leaves his job as a plasterer and enlists in the AIF, he is 22 years old.