On 26 April 1915 he would employ those same qualities against the nation which had so recently hailed him a hero. Doughty-Wylie’s presence on Sir Ian Hamilton’s Staff was entirely due to his pre-war experience in Turkey. It was considered that his vast knowledge, and understanding of the Turks, would prove immensely valuable to the expedition. Promoted lieutenant colonel, he was employed in the Intelligence Section. He was not, however, among the list of staff officers originally assigned to the River Clyde. According to Williams, who was serving in the Operations Section, Doughty-Wylie intended to accompany the Australian and New Zealand Corps, but was persuaded by him to join the main landing party. Ever eager to be in the forefront of the action, Doughty-Wylie ‘did not’, in Williams’ words, ‘want much inducing’.
During their brief time together, Doughty-Wylie made a deep impression on his fellow staff officer; most notably by his conduct on 25 April. Writing of him, a month after the landing, Williams declared: ‘He was a very splendid soldier of the very best type; he had been hit on more than one previous occasion and knew no fear; the previous day the Clyde was fired on throughout the day and Doughty-Wylie seemed positively to enjoy it’. However, Williams also detected in his colleague a darker side. ‘He was’, he wrote ‘rather a fatalist … I am firmly of the opinion that poor Doughty-Wylie realised he would be killed in this war’.
It is clear from Doughty-Wylie’s correspondence immediately prior to the landings that he was preoccupied with thoughts of his own death. In normal circumstances, such concerns might be considered a soldier’s attempt to come to terms with the real possibility of being killed. However, there is considerable evidence to suggest that Doughty-Wylie’s apparent fatalism on the eve of the expedition was rooted more in a personal crisis. By the spring of 1915 his tangled private life was giving him cause for growing concern. His wife, Lilian, who was working as a nursing officer in France, had spoken of committing suicide if he were to die. And there was the added complication of another woman in his life, the distinguished Middle Eastern explorer and writer, Gertrude Bell, with whom he had maintained a secret liaison. In an extraordinary echo of Lilian’s suicidal urges, she too had threatened to take her own life rather than live without him.
As he prepared to set out on his final mission aboard the River Clyde, he wrote pleadingly to Gertrude: ‘When I asked for this ship, my joy in it was half strangled by that thing you said, I can’t even name it or talk about it. As we go steaming in under the port guns in our rotten old collier, shall I think of it … Don’t do it. Time is nothing, we join up again, but to hurry the pace is unworthy of us all.’ Meanwhile, in a letter to his wife’s mother, he wrote:
I am going to embark tomorrow on what is certainly an extremely dangerous job, namely the wreck ship of which you will see in the papers. If the thing went wrong, Lily would feel intolerably lonely and hopeless after her long hours of work, which tell surely on anybody’s spirits … She talks about overdoses of morphia and such things. I think that in reality she is too brave and strong minded for such things but the saying weighs on my spirits …
The two letters were written twenty-four hours apart, within four days of the landing at V Beach. It seems reasonable to surmise, therefore, that for all his outward display of calm, Doughty-Wylie was in a state of emotional turmoil, torn, as he was, between concern for his loved ones and his sense of professional duty. In one of his last letters to Gertrude, he had referred to the ‘wreck ship, or wooden horse of Troy’ as ‘an ingenious arrangement’, adding prophetically: ‘If I can get ashore, I can help a good deal in the difficult job of landing enough troops to storm the trenches on the beach – and to see the most dashing military exploit that has been performed for a very long time …’
What thoughts ran through his mind as he ventured out from the River Clyde on to the beach of Sedd el Bahr will never be known. For the last hours of Doughty-Wylie’s life we must rely on the observations of his fellow officers. What is clear is that after a terrible day during which they had, in the words of Williams, ‘sat and suffered until sunset’, the senior officers aboard the River Clyde were determined to regain the initiative. According to Williams:
Next day, we ought to have been able to seize the crest quite early but the men were sticky and lack of officers very apparent; they wanted a good leader. I talked it over with Wylie and decided that I should land and try to get the men together for an attack; he was to watch progress and bring up the reserve of such stragglers as would be left behind.
Williams duly departed for the left of the beach, where he organised a mixed force of some 150 men from the Dublins and Munsters. Doughty-Wylie appears to have followed him ashore, to reconnoitre the beach on the right, beneath the walls of the Old Fort. The time of his first journey on to the beach is unclear. Some accounts have him exploring ashore after nightfall and reporting back to the River Clyde before midnight. Williams, however, insisted that ‘neither I nor Wylie landed that day’. Whatever the precise timing, Doughty-Wylie met Maj. A.T. Beckwith, of the 2nd Hampshires, on the darkened shore and discussed the possibility of renewing the attack. Beckwith had gone ashore to lead an assault on the right, but, with the men exhausted, he reported that an immediate attack was out of the question. Doughty-Wylie agreed, and asked for a naval bombardment to precede the early morning assault.
Around midnight, fresh orders from Gen. Hunter-Weston, GOC of the 29th Division, reached the River Clyde, calling for the advance to be resumed. They were delivered by Capt. Garth Walford, brigade major of the 29th Divisional Artillery, who had seen a considerable amount of action in France before joining the expeditionary force. Walford remained on board the River Clyde until Doughty-Wylie returned to report his findings to Col. Tizard. It would appear that Walford then went ashore to join Beckwith’s force, apparently determined to carry out his chief’s orders personally.
The hastily arranged plan for the morning attack involved a three-pronged assault. Maj. Beckwith was to lead the fresher troops, mainly consisting of the 2nd Hampshires, on the right to capture the Old Fort and village, while a mixed force of Dublins and Munsters was to link up with the troops advancing from W Beach on the left. In the centre, an assault would be made through the broad belts of barbed wire to seize Hill 141. After a short delay caused by confusion over the naval bombardment, Beckwith quickly cleared the Old Fort. From his vantage point on the River Clyde, Col. Tizard observed:
At about 6.30 a.m. a small party of men about six or seven with an officer leading them, I believe now that this was Major Walford [sic], moved from under the fort wall on the right towards the path that ran up into the village between the end of the low wire entanglements and the fort wall. When about half way up this path and opposite an abuttment of the fort that had two windows in it a machine gun opened up on them from the nearest window. None of them were hit and they jumped over a low wall on their left and took cover.
Tizard called for naval support and the guns of HMS Albion promptly silenced the opposition in this quarter. His account continued:
This party then advanced and got behind some buildings on the left where they were held up by snipers. A support of eight men now went up to them from the men under the bank on the right and after a bit, they got a little further into the village on the left side of it. About 7.30 a.m., or soon after, I saw this party coming back, taking cover under the compound walls and the houses, and returning the fire of the snipers who were in the houses.
Another party now started off and reinforced them and, after a bit of skirmishing behind walls etc, they pushed on into the village and I did not see them again.
What Tizard was witnessing was the start of one of the fiercest struggles of the beachhead battle; the savage, close-quarter fighting for control of Sedd el Bahr. The force on the right, having taken the Old Fort with relative ease, ran into a hail of fire as they attempted to enter the village through a small postern gate on the eastern side of the fort, which was later found to be covered by a small Turkis
h trench on the edge of the cliff. Anyone emerging from the gate was an easy target and the advance was briefly checked. Realizing the importance of maintaining momentum, Capt. Walford placed himself at the head of the troops who were pinned down and led them forward. Surging through the gate, they burst into the maze of streets. With Capt. A.C. Addison, of the 2nd Hampshires, alongside him, Walford led Y Company forward. The Hampshires’ historian recorded:
In the village they met desperate resistance. The Turks contested every house and had to be ousted with the bayonet from one after another. Some lay quiet, concealed in cellars or ruins, till our men had passed by and then fired into their backs.
It was a brutal, costly action with no quarter given. At 8.45 a.m. Capt. Walford reported: ‘Advance through Sedd el Bahr is very slow. Am receiving no support on my left.’ According to Capt. G.B. Stoney, the V Beach landing officer, who was on board the River Clyde, it was shortly after receipt of this message that Doughty-Wylie ‘asked me to come ashore with him as there was nothing doing on the boat and we might find something useful to do there’.
Once again, the precise timing of events is uncertain. Captain Edward Unwin, who had spent the night recovering from the previous day’s exertions, recalled sleeping soundly until 5 a.m. and then having coffee with Doughty-Wylie, who presently declared: ‘I can’t stick this any longer. I’m going to see what I can do ashore.’ If accurate, it would appear he must have returned again to the River Clyde during the morning, because the River Clyde’s indefatigable doctor, Burrowes Kelly, remembered sharing a cup of tea with him around 11 a.m. In his diary, he noted: ‘I had a chat of about a quarter of an hour with him, and he seemed depressed about the whole affair. Several times he remarked that something must be done. He then left us, and I recall vividly his walking stick …’. In a letter home, Stoney wrote:
He [Doughty-Wylie] walked about quite regardless of the snipers, but who as a matter of fact did not fire at us. After talking to lots of people lining fences, he told me to go along and whip up any effectives and advance up the front of the hill commanding the beach and get in touch with a company of a Regt that had worked up through a village on the right.
By this time Williams’ attack on the left had stalled and the centre force, under the command of Capt. Stoney, had yet to move. The hopes of the landing force, therefore, rested largely on the success of the troops assaulting on the right, and it was in that direction that Doughty-Wylie headed. The fighting to clear the village was still going on. Capt. Walford, the life and soul of the advance during its early stages, had been killed leading another party through the postern gate. Capt. Addison, his chief lieutenant in the street fighting, had also fallen, a victim of a Turkish grenade.
Doughty-Wylie had a narrow escape as he approached the village from the Old Fort. Lt. Guy Nightingale, of the Munsters, wrote:
He was passing some distance in rear of the gateway when a bullet knocked the staff cap off his head. I happened to be quite close at the moment, and remember being struck by the calm way in which he treated the incident. He was carrying no weapon of any description at the time, only a small cane.
Some time afterwards, Nightingale saw the colonel leading a rush, armed with rifle and bayonet, but he noted that the weapon was quickly discarded. Throughout the rest of the morning, Doughty-Wylie put fresh heart into the attacking force. Nightingale later recalled:
I saw him on several occasions that morning walk into houses, which might or might not contain a Turk ready to fire on the first person who came in, as unconcernedly as if he were walking into a shop. Naturally, this confidence of manner had a great effect on the men.
Even so, it was not until three hours after Walford had led the first parties of men into the village that Doughty-Wylie was able to report the capture of Sedd el Bahr. His men were then in position to attack Hill 141. Having reached the outer limits of the village, he arranged for a naval bombardment as a prelude to an assault on the Turkish positions by his own men in conjunction with Capt. Stoney’s disparate force in the centre. Together with Capt. Nightingale, Doughty-Wylie watched the bombardment from one of the corner turrets in the Old Fort. As they observed the fall of shells, he explained how they would storm the hill. Nightingale later wrote:
There was a strong redoubt on the top, but he decided that the remnants of the three battalions should assault simultaneously, immediately after the bombardment. He was extraordinarily confident that everything would go well, and the hill be won by sunset, and I think it was due much to his spirit of confidence that he had been able to overcome the enormous difficulties with only such exhausted and disorganised troops as he had to deal with.
His sole idea and determination was that the hill should be taken that day at all costs; for he realised that it was impossible for us to hold any position between the high ground and the edge of the cliff where we had spent the previous night.
As the time was getting near for the bombardment to cease, the colonel gave his final orders to the few remaining officers before the assault. Major C.T.W. Grimshaw was to lead the Dublins. Simultaneously, the Hampshires were to assault from the far end of the village and come up on the far shoulder of the hill, while the Munster Fusiliers were to advance on the left of the Dublins, and at the same time.
When the order came to fix bayonets, however, the men scarcely waited for any orders, but all joined up together in one mass, and swept cheering up through an orchard and over a cemetery, Hampshires, Munsters and Dublins, to the first line of wire entanglements, through which was the way out leading past the deserted Turkish trenches to the summit of the hill. On the top was a flat space surrounded by a moat 20 feet deep with only one entrance leading up over it, through which the assaulting troops were led by Colonel Doughty-Wylie and Major Grimshaw.
The men lined the top edge of the moat, firing down on the retreating Turks, who were retiring down their communication trenches in the direction of Achi Baba. It was at this moment that Colonel Doughty-Wylie, who had led his men to the last moment, was killed by a shot in the head, dying almost immediately on the summit of the hill he had so ably captured.
The successful attack had taken little more than thirty minutes. By 3.00 p.m., V Beach was at last secure and the disaster which threatened to overwhelm the entire operation had been averted.
Tragically, many of those largely responsible for the reversal of fortunes were not alive to witness the fulfillment of their self-ordained mission. Walford and Addison had been killed in the battle for Sedd el Bahr, Grimshaw died on the summit of Hill 141 and Doughty-Wylie, by common consent the chief architect of the V Beach victory, had fallen at the moment of his greatest triumph.
Col. Williams, who had spoken to Doughty-Wylie shortly before he launched the final attack, found his body lying just inside the ‘castle’ on top of the hill. He recorded:
I came up shortly after he had fallen; the men round about were full of admiration and sorrow. They told me he was first the whole way up the slope and it was only in the last few yards that some four or five men had got up to and passed him actually over the castle walls; personally, I noticed him on two or three occasions always in front and cheering his men on.
As soon as I came up and realised that he was dead I took his watch, money and a few things I could find and had him buried where he fell. I had this done at once, having seen such disgusting sights of unburied dead in the village that I could not bear to have him lying there. This was all done hurriedly as I had to reorganise the line and think of further advance or digging in; we just buried him as he lay and I said The Lord’s Prayer over his grave and bid him goodbye. That night when things had quietened down I asked Unwin [Cdr. E. Unwin VC] to have a temporary cross put up to mark his grave.
The following morning the Munsters’ regimental chaplain climbed the hill, soon to be renamed Fort Doughty-Wylie, and read the burial service over the lone grave.
Doughty-Wylie’s achievement in rescuing a seemingly lost cause made a profound impre
ssion both on the survivors of his gallant band and on the senior commanders who watched events unfold from the battleships standing offshore. Of the former, Capt. Nightingale wrote:
When he took command of them, they were exhausted with the strain of the landing and depressed with what they had already experienced; but the last he saw of them was at the moment when these same men realised the day was won, and rest close at hand, both of which they knew they owed to his gallant leadership.
Sir Ian Hamilton, conscious, no doubt, of the great debt he owed to his staff officer, wrote in eulogy of Doughty-Wylie’s exploit:
The death of a hero strips victory of her wings. Alas, for Doughty-Wylie! Alas, for that faithful disciple of Charles Gordon; protector of the poor and of the helpless; noblest of those knights ever ready to lay down their lives to uphold the fair fame of England. Braver soldier never drew sword. He had no hatred of the enemy. His spirit did not need that ugly stimulant. Tenderness and pity filled his heart and yet he had the overflowing enthusiasm and contempt of death which alone can give troops the volition to attack when they have been crouching so long under a pitiless fire. Doughty-Wylie was no flash-in-the-pan VC winner. He was a steadfast hero … Now as he would have wished to die, so he has died.
It was, of course, the stuff of legend and, in the hands of the Press, ever eager to find new heroes, that was precisely what it became. First reports of the action, based on accounts supplied by wounded soldiers in Cairo, were cabled to the London newspapers on 7 May. Nine days later, beneath such headlines as ‘Bravest of the brave’ and ‘Nameless hero of Sed-le-Bahr’ [sic], they identified the gallant officer as Doughty-Wylie. Rather in the way that seventy years later Lt. Col. ‘H’ Jones would become lionised long before any official recognition was made, so Doughty-Wylie became the Gallipoli Campaign’s first hero, overshadowing all others involved in the gallant break-out from the beach at Sedd el Bahr.
VCs of the First World War Gallipoli Page 10