Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  By early February, however, it began to appear that Fisher was right. At the Admiralty, at the War Office, and in the War Council, realization was growing that at least some soldiers would be necessary to occupy the forts after the guns were silenced. Even Kitchener conceded this and modified his first emphatic position. “If the navy required assistance of land forces at a later stage, that assistance would be forthcoming,” he informed the War Council on February 9. The fact was that, despite his statement that no troops were available, Kitchener, all along, had been hoarding in England a division of veteran soldiers, the 18,000 men of the regular army’s 29th Division. On February 16, Kitchener decided to release these men and told Asquith, Churchill, and Fisher that he had assigned the division to the Aegean where it would be available “either to seize the Gallipoli peninsula after it has been evacuated [by the Turks] or to occupy Constantinople.” He had also, he said, authorized the use at Gallipoli of 30,000 Australian and New Zealand troops training in Egypt.

  [The widely used abbreviation for “Australian and New Zealand Army Corps” was “Anzac.” Soldiers, individually and collectively, were known as “Anzacs.”]

  Word of the assignment of the 29th Division to the Mediterranean predictably infuriated Sir John French, the British Commander-in-Chief in France, who bombarded Kitchener with protests. Kitchener waffled and on February 20, four days after they were issued, the division’s Mediterranean sailing orders were canceled. Kitchener’s explanation to the War Council was that recent severe defeats inflicted on the Russian army might permit the Germans to transfer numerous divisions from the Eastern to the Western Front; therefore, prudence required withholding the 29th Division to shore up the Allied armies in France. Churchill, perturbed, pointed out that one division would not make the slightest difference between success and failure in France, but might have an impact in the East. He asked Asquith to overrule Kitchener and order the troops to the Aegean, but the First Lord’s argument was undermined by the fact that, only a few weeks before, he himself had enthusiastically promised that the navy could force the Dardanelles alone.

  Oddly, Kitchener himself kept coming back to the question of troops for the Dardanelles. After Carden’s bombardment of the outer forts, the war lord grandly declared in the War Council on February 24 that “if the fleet cannot get through the Straits unaided, the army ought to see the business through. The effect of a defeat in the Orient would be very serious. There can be no going back.” Nevertheless, he continued to withhold the 29th Division. Meanwhile, pressure for the involvement of ground forces continued to rise. A possibile solution was the offer on March 1 by the pro-Allied government of Eleuthérios Venizélos—impressed by Carden’s destruction of the outer Dardanelles forts—to land three Greek divisions on the Gallipoli peninsula and then to advance on Constantinople. Immediately, Russia objected. The liberation of Constantinople, the restoration of the cross to the dome of the former cathedral of Santa Sophia, control of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles astride Russia’s lifeline to the world’s oceans—these had been objectives of Russian foreign policy for centuries. Much as the tsar’s government wished to expel the hated Turk, it would not permit this expulsion to be performed by Greeks. The Russian veto snatched away the possibility of a Greek army on Gallipoli.

  Still, Kitchener could not leave the problem of ground troops alone. On March 1, he had sent Lieutenant General William Birdwood, the British officer commanding the Australian and New Zealand troops in Egypt, to confer with Carden about possible use of the army. While Birdwood was at Mudros, Kitchener—still vacillating—signaled him again, cautioning that there was no intention of using troops on the Gallipoli peninsula “unless the navy are convinced that they cannot silence the guns in the Straits without military cooperation on a large scale. . . . The concentration of troops at the entrance to the Dardanelles is for operations subsequently to be undertaken in the neighborhood of Constantinople.” Birdwood, responding on March 6, attempted to focus his chief on reality by saying that, on the basis of what he had seen and heard, he considered Carden’s estimate as to the rapid passage of the Straits “too sanguine . . . I doubt his ability to force the passage unaided.” Birdwood also passed along to Kitchener his confidential opinion that Carden was “very second rate—no ‘go’ in him, or ideas, or initiative.”

  Kitchener had heard enough: on March 10, he reversed himself again. The 29th Division, he told the War Council, would go to the Aegean, although it would not sail until March 16 and could not arrive before the first week of April. In addition, he had arranged for a division of the French North African army to join the force and, with the Anzacs thrown in, there now would be 75,000 Allied soldiers available for the Dardanelles. To command this polyglot force, Kitchener turned to an old friend and protégé, General Sir Ian Hamilton, his Chief of Staff during the Boer War. On the morning of March 12, Hamilton was summoned to Kitchener’s office. “Opening the door,” Hamilton said, “I bade him [Kitchener] good morning and walked up to his desk where he went on writing like a graven image. After a moment, he looked up and said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘We are sending a military force to support the fleet now at the Dardanelles and you are to have command.’ ” Kitchener said nothing else, but resumed writing while Hamilton remained standing silently in front of his desk. Eventually, Kitchener looked up and said, “Well?” Hamilton then learned that Kitchener hoped that the fleet would get through without military help and that he contemplated Hamilton landing his troops on the shores of the Bosporus to occupy Constantinople. Once the fleet got through the Dardanelles, Kitchener declared, “Constantinople could not hold out. . . . The fleet . . . with their guns would dominate the place and if necessary, burn the place to ashes. . . . There would be a revolution at the mere sight of the smoke from the funnels of our warships.” When Hamilton asked how many enemy troops were defending the Dardanelles and the names and backgrounds of the principal Turkish and German commanders, Kitchener replied that he had no idea. When Hamilton asked how many troops he himself would command, Kitchener said that the Greeks had proposed to put 150,000 men on the Gallipoli peninsula, but that in Hamilton’s case “half that number will do you handsomely; the Turks are busy elsewhere; I hope you will not have to land at all; if you do have to land, why then the powerful fleet at your back will be the prime factor in your choice of time and place.” Hamilton’s troops, Kitchener decreed, were not to fight on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, because “once we began marching about continents, situations calling for heavy reinforcements would probably be created.” If putting troops ashore on Gallipoli turned out to be necessary, Hamilton was not to attack until the full weight of his expeditionary force—including the 29th Division—could be thrown in. But the general was not to worry: “The peninsula is open to landing on very easy terms,” he was assured. “The cross fire from the fleet . . . must sweep that stretch of flat and open country so as to render it untenable by the enemy.” Hamilton was allowed one night to say good-bye to his wife and to pack his clothes. In the morning, he was back at the War Office. “I said good-bye to old K. as casually as if we were to meet again for dinner,” he wrote. “He did not even wish me luck . . . but he did say, rather unexpectedly just as I was taking up my cap from the table, ‘If the fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle, but the war.’ ”

  That afternoon, March 13, Hamilton left Charing Cross station on a special train, seen off by his friends Winston and Clementine Churchill, but not by Kitchener, who declared that he was too busy. The new commander was accompanied by a small staff of officers yanked the day before from behind their London desks. In their briefcases, they carried all the information the War Office could supply: an out-of-date map, a prewar Admiralty report on the Dardanelles defenses, an old handbook on the Ottoman army, and two tourist guidebooks to western Turkey. Whisked to France on a destroyer, then hurried south in another special train, they embarked in Marseilles on the new 30-knot light cruiser Ph
aeton. Along the way, Hamilton mused on his situation in his diary: “Only two sorts of Commanders-in-Chief could possibly find time to scribble like this on their way to take up an enterprise in many ways unprecedented—a German and a Britisher. The German because every possible contingency would have been worked out for him beforehand; the Britisher because he has nothing—literally nothing—in his portfolio except a blank check signed with those grand yet simple words ‘John Bull.’ ”

  Once Phaeton reached the Aegean, Hamilton, who had been born in Corfu, relished the “thyme-scented breezes . . . the crimson in the eastern sky . . . the waves of liquid opal . . . the exquisite, exquisite air . . . the sea like an undulating carpet of blue velvet outspread for Aphrodite.” Reality intruded when, “at noon, passed a cruiser taking Admiral Carden invalided back to Malta.”

  Ian Hamilton was an exemplary British soldier of the old Victorian army, a small, professional force whose gentlemen officers lived in a clubbish, colonial world, undergirded by the plucky courage of common British soldiers. Hamilton, a delicate and romantic Scot, was a man of feverish energy. He had charm and a quick smile, he knew classical and English literature, he wrote witty letters, and he had a circle of important friends reaching far beyond the army. Most of his life, however, had been spent on the imperial frontiers in India, the Sudan, and South Africa; by 1914, he was said to have seen more active service than any other senior officer in the British army.

  [When Hamilton encountered Roger Keyes off the Dardanelles, it was a family reunion of sorts. Hamilton’s first overseas assignment, in 1873 when he was a twenty-year-old army subaltern, was to an Indian army unit commanded by Keyes’s father, General Sir Charles Keyes. Roger Keyes’s mother, wrote Hamilton, “of whom . . . [Roger] is an ugly likeness, was as high-spirited, fascinating, clever a creature as I ever saw. Camel-riding, hawking, dancing . . . she was the idol of the Punjab Frontier Force. His father . . . whose loss of several fingers from a sword cut earned him my special boyhood veneration, was really a devil of a fellow. . . . Riding together in the early morning . . . we suddenly barged into a mob of wild Waziri tribesmen who jumped out of the ditch and held us up—hand on bridle. The old general spoke Pushtu fluently and there was a parley between them. . . . Where were they going? To buy camels at Dera Ghazi Khan. How far had they come? Three days march, but they had no money. The general simulated amazement. ‘You have come all that distance to buy camels without money? These are strange tales you tell me. I fear that when you pass through Dera Ismail you will have to . . . [sell] your nice pistols and knives. Oh yes, I see them quite well; they are peeping at me from under your poshteens [cloaks].’ The Waziris laughed and took their hands off our reins. Instantly, the general shouted to me, ‘Come on—gallop!’ And in less than no time we were going hell for leather along the lonely frontier road. . . . ‘That was a narrow squeak,’ said the general, ‘but you may take liberties with a Waziri if only you can make him laugh.’ ”]

  He had often been wounded, his left hand was paralyzed, and three times he had been recommended for the Victoria Cross. Hamilton’s flaw as a commander was that, in the colonial wars that had taught him his trade, he had learned to rely on the competence of fellow British officers; they, being on the spot, were often better qualified to make decisions than the commander. He preferred to urge rather than to command and his inclination, even when things appeared to be going badly, was not to intervene. Now, in this new kind of warfare where the stakes were higher, the absence of ruthlessness in this military leader was to hurt him and his men. Nevertheless, at sixty-two, Ian Hamilton had been summoned by his old chief, the man whom he privately referred to in his diaries as Old K. He had been given an army and ordered to conduct the largest amphibious operation in the history of the world. If he succeeded, Old K. had said, he would win the war.

  Gallipoli is a peninsula of rugged and desolate land thrusting fifty-two miles into the Aegean Sea. At its neck, the peninsula is connected to the European continent by the Bulair isthmus, three miles across. To the southwest, the peninsula broadens to twelve miles; then, continuing southwest, it tapers to a rounded tip at Cape Helles. Viewed from the sea, Gallipoli is sternly beautiful, corrugated with green and brown ridges rising to a thousand feet. To the walker or climber, the ground is rough, broken, indented with gullies, escarpments, and narrow, irregular valleys, lifting to a craggy spine of steep ridges. Six miles north of Cape Helles, the sloping hill of Achi Baba stands 590 feet above the lower peninsula; in the center of the peninsula, the crest of Chunuk Bair rises 850 feet; nearby, Sari Bair ridge, the highest point on Gallipoli, is just short of a thousand feet. The shores of the peninsula are edged by sandstone cliffs, broken here and there by ravines washed out by torrential autumn and winter rains. At the mouths of some of these gullies, narrow strips of sandy or stony beach lie along the sea. For a few weeks in April and May, Gallipoli is covered with red poppies, purple lupine, large white daisies, and other flowers. Heather and wild thyme grow everywhere along with scrub: low shrubs, thick brushwood, and small clumps of stunted pine. The soil is sandy, blowing in dry weather, sticky when wet, and generally inhospitable to agriculture, although in the small villages there are fruit trees, small olive orchards, and a few vineyards. In 1914, the roads were primitive and travelers passing from one point on the peninsula to another preferred to go by boat.

  This is the ground where an Allied army was to land and a Turkish army to defend in a campaign that, perhaps more than any other in the Great War, still is vividly recalled to memory by its name alone: Gallipoli.

  Carden’s destruction of the outer forts and de Robeck’s assault on the Narrows had given warning. On March 24, Enver Pasha, the Turkish minister of war, had summoned Otto Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission, to his office and asked him to assume command of the Turkish army at the Dardanelles. Sanders, a tall, stern Prussian cavalry general, quick to make decisions, scanty with praise, and sharp in reprimand, had been sent to Turkey by the kaiser himself and viewed his position as one of extraordinary consequence. Invited to dinner at the American embassy, the general, his uniformed chest sparkling with medals, was seated next to the ambassador’s daughter, to whom he boorishly refused to speak. Afterward, he bitterly complained that the personal representative of the German emperor belonged at the head of the table, not alongside an insignificant young woman. The Austrian ambassador, who had advised his American colleague on the seating arrangements, pointed out that Wagenheim was the German ambassador and that “it is not customary for an emperor to have two representatives at the same court.” Sanders persisted, making himself so unpopular that all other foreign ambassadors announced that if he were ever given the kind of precedence he demanded at any function they attended, they would walk out in a body.

  Despite his social pretensions, Sanders was an experienced, professional soldier and Enver had made an excellent choice. Sanders accepted the request and immediately set off for the Gallipoli peninsula, where he found himself in command of 80,000 conscript soldiers. Most were Anatolian peasants so ill clad that they passed the same vermin-infested uniforms from unit to unit in order that, on inspection, the German general would find the men before him completely dressed. Sanders noticed, however, that he often saw “shoes” made of cloth tied around the foot with a piece of string; at other times, the men simply appeared barefoot. These troops were “scattered like frontier guards” along 150 miles of seacoast on both sides of the Dardanelles; thus, an enemy on landing “would have found resistance everywhere, but no forces or reserves to make a strong and effective counterattack.” Sanders corrected this deployment, pulling two divisions away from the coast and stationing them in the middle of the peninsula where they could respond to threats from several directions. He began building roads and bridges to expedite their movements. He found that the peninsula’s potential landing beaches had only rudimentary fortification and he set thousands of men to digging more trenches, setting up more gun emplacements, and string
ing more barbed wire, some of it out into the water in front of the beaches. Chosen men were given special training in handling machine guns and hand grenades and in sniping. “If the English will only leave me alone for eight days,” he said on March 27. Later, he was to write: “The British allowed us four good weeks.”

  Hamilton defined his own instructions in their simplest form: “I have no roving commission to conquer Asia Minor. I have not come here for any other purpose whatsoever but to help the fleet through the Dardanelles. The War Office think the Gallipoli peninsula occupation is the best way to ef-fect this purpose. So do the Admiralty and so does the admiral in executive command.” To occupy Gallipoli, Hamilton now commanded 75,000 men: Englishmen, Scots, Irishmen, Australians, New Zealanders, Gurkhas, Sikhs, French Foreign Legionnaires, Senegalese, and Zouaves. These troops were scattered around the eastern Mediterranean. Some were already at Mudros, some were in Egypt, some were still in North Africa. The 29th Division was on the high seas aboard twenty-two troopships and would not arrive until the first week of April. Then, when the transports did begin to arrive, it was discovered that the ships had been loaded so rapidly and haphazardly that it was impossible to know which ones contained what equipment; wagons were in one ship, horses in another, harnesses in a third; the same chaos applied to artillery, ammunition, machine guns, tents, and supplies of food. “The slipshod manner in which the troops have been sent out from England is something awful,” said Wemyss. The 29th Division, Hamilton decided, would have to be disembarked and the ships unloaded, sorted out, and repacked. This could not be done at Mudros, where there were neither docks nor cranes nor laborers. It was this situation that led Hamilton to tell de Robeck that he needed three weeks to reorganize his army in Egypt.