Facing a hail of lead at Gallipoli
It did not take long for Valentine Henry Solomon to realise what he was in for as he helped row towards the beach at Gallipoli on the day of the first landings on April 25, 1915.
In his diary, he recalled how he and his mates in the 12th Battalion had slipped into the boats off the deck of the destroyer which had taken them as close as it could.
"We had to pull the last few yards to shore," he wrote.
"I was on one of the oars.
"Before we reached the shore the bullets were flying around us . . . several in our boat were hit.
"We were now beginning to realise that we were tasting war, but had no time to think of what it meant.
"I jumped into the water up to my waist.
"When we reached the shore we were ordered to charge and went inland like demons with bayonets fixed."
Solomon had been working as a wool classer on a station near Port Hedland when World War I broke out in August 1914.
He travelled to Geraldton and when he heard Australia was to send a force he volunteered for duty, aged 20, and was sent to the training camp at Blackboy Hill, Greenmount.
He embarked from Fremantle on the transport ship Medic on October 31, 1914.
After the landing at Gallipoli his diary goes on to describe the afternoon of that day, when Solomon found himself lying in a cart track "having occasional shots at the enemy" when they began to advance on Solomon's position.
"Presently a machinegun got to work and I heard it spraying its deadly lead along our line finding its mark here and there," he wrote. "I stopped one of the bullets which entered my head behind my left ear coming through my neck on the left side and into the shoulder."
He also took a hit in the right hand but managed to get his equipment off and "dropped everything".
"I struggled into a disused Turkish trench where the bullets were still flying around," he wrote. "I must have become delirious as I remembered in a vague way staggering about between the firing lines.
"A comrade got hold of me and helped me to the dressing station."
He was taken back to a boat and then to a hospital ship and evacuated for a long period of treatment in Egypt.
"I remember little of my voyage home," he wrote.
Solomon's war records indicate he was returned to Australia in August 2015 "to be discharged".
But it did not take long for Solomon to hear the call again.
Australian War Memorial records show he embarked again from Fremantle on the transport ship Ajana in July 1916, this time as a reinforcement of the 11th Battalion.
But fate was not on his side and in May 1917 Solomon was again sailing for home, having lost vision in his left eye.
Solomon was an uncle of Barry Solomon, of Innaloo.
Mr Solomon said that after the war his uncle settled in Sydney.
Little was known of what had happened to him afterwards but the family was justly proud of his service, Mr Solomon said.
