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U guys are all British u bet they counted.as in any high stress situation men attach different ways of coping. Dark humor is one.im sure there was betting on everything....hey I was majoring in psychology until girls got in the way.

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There was nowhere on the Gallipoli Peninsula, held by British forces in 1915, that wasn't being shelled or otherwise swept by machine gun fire. There were no safe areas, (or, 'safe spaces' as the Uni kids would call them now days) just places that occasionally weren't under direct bombardment.

If you exposed even a portion of your head in a forward area, in all probability, someone would put a bullet through it.

The front line was a place where the hundreds of bloated putrefying corpses were just left to rot into the ground, that is, when they weren't being disinterred or blown apart by the unending shell-fire. The flies that fed on these corpses moved in great clouds and were so thick at times that the sound of their buzzing made conversation difficult. Any notion of burying the dead was just laughable because it invited certain death. In the event of an attack, everyone who could fight (that is, who wasn't gravely wounded or afflicted by disease) was expected to pitch in until death or wounding put them out of action. To put yourself into an exposed position where you could accurately shoot and reload your SMLE sufficient to make a stopwatch 'mad minute' test any sort of meaningful exercise would have invited almost certain if not instantaneous death. Now, in these circumstances you may well have considered an impromptu mad minute test a bit of harmless high jinks but I suspect the guys who were actually out there, just trying to get through this nightmare, would have suggested somewhere unpleasant where you could respectfully, shove it.

Edited by lonewulf (12/01/17 01:12 PM)

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