by Alan Bardos
‘Reckon you’re right, sir,’ Boil agreed, ‘good jacket that, did for me anyways.’
Johnny smiled weakly and tried not to shake. Now that he knew he wasn’t dying the shock that he might have been started to come on. He took a deep breath and felt Gabrielle’s letter in his hand.
‘This does have a feeling of déjà vu though doesn’t it, sir?’ Williams pondered. He could still make ‘sir’ sound like a term of disrespect.
‘Why’s that?’ Johnny asked.
‘Well, this was supposed to be the second front that would open the back door of Europe and end the war and here we are sitting in a bloody trench, eating this muck exactly the same as we were in Flanders. Only this time the neighbours aren’t as friendly.’
Johnny knew he was right. This operation had already failed in its objectives, but as Williams quietly began to hum his hymn, Johnny consoled himself with the thought that at least he had done all he could to make a good show of it.
‘The views better than Flanders though.’ Johnny pointed at the bright purple sunset, filling the sky above the Aegean.
‘I’ll give it that much, sir,’ Williams agreed.
‘And at least we’re not wet and muddy,’ Johnny said.
‘What I wouldn’t give to be wet now. Oh, but for a glass of water, sir,’ Boil chipped in.
‘No indeed, I suppose I had better go and see about that.’ They hadn’t received fresh water all day and Johnny wondered if he should have paid more attention to water containers when he was in headquarters.
Johnny instinctively listened for the shriek of a 5.9 before standing up and was immediately knocked down by a violent kick in the chest, which was followed by a sharp pain. Williams swore and started to fuss around him once again. Johnny looked up at the purple sky and wondered if his life was fading away. He panicked struggling to breathe, feeling the grip of the Turk he’d fought with, around his neck.
‘Lucky bastard, clean through and through.’ He realised Williams was forcing a morphine tablet down his throat. ‘Cheer up, at least it’s not your face. The ladies will still love you.’
‘Sorry sir, your lucky jacket’s ruined,’ Boil said pulling his jacket off. Johnny coughed up blood, unable to stop him. ‘Bullet and shrapnel holes, that’s as good as armour now. Lightning won’t strike a third time. Fair swap for my field dressing I reckon.’
Boil gave Johnny his treasure box. ‘You won’t be needing it anyway now you’ve got a Blighty one.’
Williams finished bandaging him and Johnny felt himself lifted up, he clutched onto the letter from Gabrielle, as he slowly began to drift off.
Johnny came round in the dark, back under the cliff on W beach, and watched the murmuring shadows of reinforcements trying to get through the wounded. Hundreds of men were lying in the sand. The wounded next to him looked like they’d been out under the sun all day.
He was desperately thirsty and he gurgled and rattled every time he inhaled. He could feel flies crawling over his face, in his mouth, over his eyes. He heard someone screaming and realised to his horror that it was him.
He quickly shut his mouth and felt his poor tormented chest throb with red hot needles. However long he’d been here it was long enough for the morphine to wear off. He tried to grip the letter from Gabrielle but he’d lost it.
Johnny could hear his stepfather shouting in Welsh, here to pull him up on his poor performance before he died. Someone with great clod hopping boots kicked his head as he stumbled past.
‘Here he is, that’s him.’ Johnny heard William’s voice. ‘Come on.’
‘What the bloody hell have we got here then? Sir, is there room for one more?’ a rough cockney voice shouted above him. ‘For the one the taffy wants us to take.’
‘Sorry, Borden, we’re full. He’ll have to wait for the next trawler,’ a rich plummy voice came back.
‘But it’s him, that bloke we picked up from Bulgaria. The one that shot the mine and saved the boat,’ the cockney said, and Johnny realised it was the Petty Officer from the trawler.
‘Oh, really? How extraordinary. Very well, bring him along,’ the posh voice said and he recognised it as belonging to Sub-lieutenant Barringtons.
‘My God, you’ve got some luck, Williams 19666,’ Johnny managed to croak.
‘Well, there you are then. Luck he calls it. I’ve been up and down this bloody beach all night trying to find a bloody boat to take you. And begging your pardon, sir, I still haven’t had any bloody water.’ Williams gave him another morphine tablet. ‘Of all the bloody stupid things to do, you go and get yourself shot like that.’
‘You can’t win a war hiding in ditches, trying to keep everyone safe.’
Williams chuckled, ‘and now he misquotes Crassus bloody Dawkins at me. Go on sod off.’
Johnny felt himself lifted up. The pain was excruciating and he began to fade into unconsciousness.
He came to in the warm embrace of disinfectant and the gleaming brown eyes of Staff Nurse Lee-Perkins. She was pale and drawn like his old school matron, but Johnny wouldn’t have traded her for a whole troupe of can-can girls.
‘You will take good care of him, miss?’ Johnny heard Borden ask. ‘I know you’re full to bursting. It’s just he was clutching this letter and the address on it was HMHS Sicilia.
‘Of course,’ Gabrielle answered, ‘I can’t believe he’s alive!’
Delirious Johnny rested his head against her and started to conjugate verbs in French.
Historical Note
Despite concerted efforts to drive inland from the beachheads, the Allies never managed to achieve the first-day objectives of the landings. In the face of ferocious Turkish opposition, difficult terrain and poor logistical and artillery support, Gallipoli turned into a stalemate in the East, mirroring the trench warfare of the Western Front it was intended to bypass. The Allied troops were eventually withdrawn in January 1916, having suffered 252,000 casualties and the Ottoman Forces 251,309.
Whether Churchill was the instigator of the Dardanelles campaign or the scapegoat is something that historians still fiercely debate. The idea originated as a way to help the Russians and to open a second front. Churchill was against it at first, but became its biggest exponent and undoubtedly pushed the idea.
The senior figures in the Navy failed to present any strong opposition and the War Council agreed the forcing of the Dardanelles Straits and should be bound by a collective responsibility for the decision.
There was an attempt to bribe Turkey out of the war in 1915, as outlined in this book. If it had been successful, it could have made the whole Dardanelles campaign unnecessary. The crux of the negotiations for the Turks however was a guarantee for the future of Constantinople, which had long been promised to Russia and without it, the negotiations were doomed.
My main sources of information for the bribe were an article in the May 1963 issue of The Royal United Service Institution Journal called ‘A Ghost from Gallipoli’ by Captain G.R.G. Allen and a response to this article by Hall’s biographer, Admiral Sir William James in the November issue of the Journal. James’s biography was also very helpful: ‘The Eyes of the Navy; a Biographical Study of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall’. As well as Halls unfinished memoir published under the title, ‘A Clear Case of Genius: Room 40's Code-breaking Pioneer’ with a foreword by Nigel West. My other constant companions on this subject were ‘Blinker Hall Spymaster‘, by David Ramsay; ‘Room 40 British Naval Intelligence 1914-18’, by Patrick Beesly, ‘Gallipoli’ by James Robert Rhodes and ‘Gerald Fitzmaurice (1865-1939), Chief Dragoman of the British Embassy in Turkey’, by Geoff Berridge.
I have used a bit of artistic licence in the writing of the discussions between the Grand Rabbi and Talat Pasha, throwing Johnny into the centre of things. In doing this I found Henry Morgenthau’s book ‘Ambassador Morgenthau's Story’ extremely helpful. Morgenthau was the American Ambassador in Constantinople and had negotiated with Talat and Enver. His descriptions of this and Talat and Enver’s re
spective homes, was invaluable in putting these scenes together.
The naval campaign reached its zenith on the 18th March 1915, with an all out attempt to force the Straits, which was driven off by the Turkish and German defenders, in a unique battle between land and sea forces.
There is an account in Sir Ian Hamilton’s Gallipoli Diary of a minesweeper detonating a mine near his ship, during the battle. If that mine had hit his ship history may have been different.
No further naval attempt was made to force the Straits. Whether or not the Turks were running out of large calibre shells and whether all that was needed was one final push to break through to Constantinople, which Churchill certainly believed, has remained a matter of controversy ever since.
Exploiting the divisions within the Young Turk government and bribing them into making peace would have been a much simpler solution to invading the country.
My main intention in writing this book was to chronicle the missed opportunities that led up to the stalemate of the Gallipoli campaign. Unfortunately there were just too many, particularly on the first day of the landings, besides the campaign and the Suvla Bay debacle. I have instead focused on a few of the key events and decisions of the first day.
Mustafa Kemal’s (Atatürk) decisive action that stopped the Australian and New Zealand advance. The taking of Hill 114 and the landing at W beach where 6 Victoria Crosses were won ‘before breakfast’, by Captain Cuthbert Bromley, Captain Richard Willis, Sergeant Arthur Richards, Sergeant Frank Stubbs, Corporal John Grimshaw and Private William Kenealy (Many of the events depicted at the landings are drawn from their experiences). There is some debate as to whether there were machine guns at the beach. The point for the book is that the professional soldiers landing thought they were facing machine guns, so it is only natural that Johnny would feel the same.
Robin Prior in ‘Gallipoli, the End of the Myth’, points out that once Hill 114 was taken the British were in a position to outflank the Turkish line, but the troops at X beach had no further objective than to take the hill and had not been issued with contingency plans to exploit any possible advantage.
Hamilton’s plan to distract the enemy through as series of landings and dummies does seem to have worked in that von Saunders delayed deploying his strategic reserve. Whether that delay was significant is another matter, von Saunders’s plan to hold the invasion with a covering force also seems to have worked; with the invasion stalled at V beach he had sufficient time to counter the landings.
Peter Hart (‘The Great War: 1914-1918’/‘Gallipoli’) argues that von Sanders plan was perfectly formulated to counter Hamilton, who had spread his forces too thinly between the various landing sites.
If the reports from prisoners about the number of Turkish troops at Cape Helles had been believed and had Hamilton been more flexible in his approach he might have been able to use troops at X, Y and S beaches to flank the defences holding up the attack at V beach. However, entombed in the conning tower of HMS Queen Elizabeth, he would have found it difficult had he wanted to.
I would like to thank Sharpe Books for publishing my novel and their help in editing the book. Beth for finding the articles in the Royal United Service Institution Journal (once I gave her the RIGHT references). If she hadn’t done that I probably wouldn’t have written the book.
I’d also like to thank Emma for going from my long suffering girlfriend to my long suffering wife through the course of writing the book and for coming to Paris, Turin, Venice, Sofia and Istanbul with me just to look at the train stations! She was the first person to read the book and her feedback helped to make this a much better novel. I’d also like to thank her mum, Frédérique, for her help with research. Not to mention my mum for all her constant help and support, and passing on her love of books and history.
A huge thank you to Hazel for her help with proofing the first draft. I’d also like to thank Dave B for the trips to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and last and obviously least Daz for the Llanelli reference.
The National Archives had some interesting documents concerning the War Council, the Imperial War Museum Research & Archive room was a treasure trove of accounts of every aspect of the campaign from sailors who served on trawlers and ships that tried to force the Straits, to a letter Captain Willis wrote to his father shortly after the landings at W beach. Other firsthand accounts that I found really helpful and inspired me are: ‘Old Soldiers Never Die’, by Frank Richards; ‘Storm of Steel’, by Ernst Junger, translated by Michael Hofmann; ‘The Secret Battle’, by Alan Herbert; ‘The Dardanelles Disaster in Soldiers' Words and Photographs’, by Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers; ‘Trench Warfare 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System’, Tony Ashworth; ‘Gallipoli: The Landings at Helles 25 April 1915’, Huw Rodge; and ‘VCs of the First World War: Gallipoli,’ by Stephen Snelling.
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