by Wade Davis
It was a dangerous plan. To the west of the Dardanelles lay the arid slopes of the Gallipoli Peninsula. To the east shone the mountains of Anatolia. The strait, which separates Europe from Asia, runs forty-one miles from the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara and at one point narrows to a mere mile in width. Turkish batteries lined both shores, and the passage was sown with mines.
On March 18, 1915, an Allied force of ten battleships, accompanied by a flotilla of minesweepers and cruisers, sailed into a maelstrom. Within hours three British battleships had been destroyed and a fourth severely damaged, with a loss of 700 men. The French battleship Bouvet exploded and sank in three minutes. Rather than expose the fleet to further losses, the British elected to silence the Turkish guns by storming the Gallipoli Peninsula from the west, by sea, in the most ambitious amphibious assault yet attempted in the war.
From the start things went wrong. The organization of men and matériel in England was so ill conceived that the entire force had to disembark in Egypt just to reorganize equipment and supplies. Every dockworker in Alexandria and Port Said knew the timetable to the day, while Turkish and German agents in Cairo reported every activity to Berlin. The British commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, planned his campaign equipped with only two tourist guidebooks, an out-of-date map, and a 1905 textbook on the Turkish army. Professing disdain for the fighting abilities of the Turks, he anticipated light resistance and expected to capture the lower half of the peninsula in three days.
On April 25 the British 29th Division, supported by 30,000 troops of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, landed at Cape Helles, at the southern tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. The Turks were ready. The ANZACs went ashore not on a gently ascending beach, as had been promised, but in an inlet dominated by steep cliffs and swept by Turkish machine gun fire. Assault boats filled with the dead would float in the cove for days. At a beach to the south of the ANZAC landing, 2,000 Irish troops packed onto the deck of a collier, the River Clyde, encountered such withering fire that men leapt in desperation into the sea, where they were slaughtered, as one Turkish officer wrote, like shoals of fish. The Irish dead lined the beach in such numbers that those British troops who followed had to walk astride the corpses to reach the shore.
Three days after the initial landings, Charles Bruce and the 1st Battalion, 6th Gurkhas, came ashore just after midnight at Sedd el Bahr, in the lee of the wreckage of the Clyde, to reinforce the 29th Indian Brigade, the only reserve force in the Allied order of battle. As they made their way onto the beach, the night sky flared as the British fleet bombarded Turkish positions. A mile inland an intense artillery assault presaged a series of desperate frontal attacks by the Turks that continued day and night until May 6, when the British once again took the offensive in a futile attack that left both armies exhausted. Dominating the British left still was a bluff 300 feet high that had to be taken. Two assaults on May 8 and 9 by the Royal Munster and Royal Dublin Fusiliers ended in disaster. On the evening of May 9, Bruce and the 1st Battalion, 6th Gurkha Rifles moved into the line, with orders to renew the attack at dusk on May 12. Traversing a ravine swept by machine gun fire, they fought their way to the base of the bluff only to be repulsed with massive casualties by a Turkish counterattack. For ten days the Gurkhas hunkered down in trenches separated from the enemy by mere yards. Then, on May 22, the Turks rushed the British line. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting left hundreds of dead, unburied and bloating in the sun. Soldiers on both sides of the line were killed upon capture. In gullies choked with dust and infused with the scent of thyme and cordite, the agonies of the wounded haunted the survivors.
On May 27 the men awoke to discover that the British fleet had abandoned Gallipoli for safer anchorages. That same morning the Gurkhas took over the extreme left of the British line. The futile, even suicidal, British attacks continued, climaxing on June 4, when an all-out assault collapsed within forty yards. On the left the Gurkhas reached the height of the bluff before being forced back by a Turkish counterattack, at a cost of 7 officers and 121 men. The following morning Bruce was ordered to renew the attack, this time with the 5th Gurkhas, one of his former commands, coming up in support. Bruce knew that he was leading the battalion to almost certain annihilation. “I don’t think,” he recalled, “I ever had a more unpleasant task given to me in the whole of my life, knowing full well the most hazardous nature of their task under these conditions and the practical certainty that I was saying goodbye to my best friends. Naturally the attack was a complete failure.”
The survivors slunk back into trenches, where for the ensuing weeks they would be tormented by dysentery, plagues of flies that coated khaki twenty-five to the square inch, and a stench of death so foul that men stuffed their nostrils with flannelette and breathed through their mouths. General Hamilton ordered another attack for June 28. The objective given the Gurkhas demanded that they assault and overwhelm five lines of Turkish trenches. On July 1, safely aboard a destroyer at sea, Hamilton wrote in his diary, “Good news from the Helles continues … Headed by Bruce their Colonel, whom they adore, they [the Gurkhas] retook the trench and, for the first time, got into the enemy with their kukris and sliced off a number of their heads. At dawn half a battalion of Turks tried to make an attack along the top of the cliff and were entirely wiped out.”
In fact, the Gurkha force itself was virtually destroyed. Every officer save the doctor was wounded or killed. Bruce lost all of his friends in the battalion. He himself was cut down with machine gun fire that nearly severed both his legs. As he later put it, “I got my little present which took me off the Peninsula and sent me to England to hospital for a year or nearly so.” His medical records indicate that a bullet had entered his right leg with a three-quarter-inch hole in front of the tibia and emerged at the same level, an inch below the knee joint, while a bullet to his left leg had shattered the fibula. As he lay helpless in his bed on the hospital ship carrying him to the Isle of Wight and home, he watched through a porthole as a German submarine sank two ships in his convoy, both within a mile of his own. In England a medical board advised him to retire to a quiet life and to be especially careful never to walk strenuously uphill.
WITH BRUCE FOR THE MOMENT out and Howard-Bury and Raeburn in, Hinks turned to an old friend to fill the vital post of expedition doctor and naturalist. Alexander Frederick Richmond Wollaston, Sandy to his family, was a shy yet generous man with a wry sense of humor who could, as his friend John Maynard Keynes wrote, “unlock hearts with a word and a look, and break down everyone’s reserves except his own.” The war led to his service at age thirty-nine as a surgeon on an armed merchant cruiser, a converted P&O luxury liner patrolling the North Sea from Scapa Flow to Norway and beyond, to the Faroes and Iceland, through winter storms where, as he recalled, the sea surged not in “waves but moving mountains,” where the word “wind” could not begin to describe the “force that lives in these latitudes.” After nine months he transferred to HMS Agincourt, the largest dreadnought battleship in the British fleet.
His own experience of battle came early in 1916, when he was ordered to join a naval landing party in German East Africa. In five months of fighting, Wollaston and his marines advanced into the interior, one small contingent in a British force of 80,000 soldiers supported by 500,000 native porters, charged with the duty of finding and engaging the enemy in a roadless track of thorn scrub and forest twice the size of Germany. In a forgotten campaign of the war, a struggle of attrition and extermination, more men would die from disease than from battle. After two years in Africa, Wollaston returned to sea and blockade duty, which carried him into 1919, until finally in October, after several harrowing voyages to Murmansk, he was demobilized.
Life in London proved intolerable. “If you know a war profiteer who wants to support geographical exploration,” he wrote to a friend in early 1920, “please introduce me. I do not find myself in tune with the people of this country.” Thus his delight when he received from Hinks, in January 1921, a note making vague inqui
ries as to his interest and availability for an Everest expedition. On January 16, he replied on the letterhead of the Savile Club:
If your question means that in your opinion I have any fitness for the work, you pay me an exceedingly high compliment, which I value at its proper worth. The answer is of course and most emphatically in the affirmative. I should not have dreamed of submitting my name to the Committee, supposing that there must be many others better fitted in every way for the Expedition but if there is any chance of joining it, of course, I should jump at it. Rawling wanted me to join his proposed M.E. Expedition of 1914 or 1915, which he thought might be possible, but like many other plans, that came to nothing. I shall not be disappointed if you don’t ask me to join this venture, but if you do I should be more proud than I can tell you.
A week later Wollaston followed up with a note from his home in Sloane Square: “Nothing would please me more than an invitation to join the expedition.” On February 6 Hinks replied, formally offering him a place on the team, even as he asked Wollaston if he might be prepared to bear the weight of his own expenses. They met the next night, and Wollaston, as Hinks put it, agreed to “find his own way to Darjeeling.”
Wollaston, like Howard-Bury, could readily afford to pay his own passage to India, and there was no one in England better equipped to find his way anywhere. He came from an illustrious line of scholars, painters, and scientists, a family that had placed more members in the Royal Society than any other in the history of Britain. His father, a housemaster at Clifton College, was austere and unforgiving, a dominating disciplinarian as happy to thrash his own son as any student in his form. His one brother having wisely bolted for Canada, Sandy grew up a solitary male in a home dominated by six sisters. He found his escape in nature, on the open moors of the West Country, and in the forested expanses of Lapland, where he wandered at the age of twenty-one while on holiday from his undergraduate studies at Cambridge. Though he loathed the thought of becoming a doctor, he pursued medicine as the one profession that would allow him to travel. While still in medical school he escaped London in the winter of 1901 to join Charles Rothschild on a zoological expedition to the Sudan. Elected to the Alpine Club in 1903, the year he completed his studies, he was saved from the dreaded life of a doctor by an invitation from Rothschild to return to the Sudan for a collecting foray that would yield over six hundred species of rare birds and mammals.
With Rothschild as both patron and friend—they would agree to burn the letters between them when they each married—Wollaston embarked on a series of journeys to Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, and, later, New Britain and the Bismarck Archipelago, along the coast of New Guinea, and through the Dutch East Indies. These travels only whetted his desire for true exploration. Back in London in 1905, he made a vain attempt to settle down and took a job as house surgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. The experiment lasted two days. Word reached him of a British Museum expedition to the Ruwenzori Mountains on the border of Uganda and the Belgian Congo that had sailed for Africa still in need of a botanist, an entomologist, and a doctor. Wollaston was all three. To catch up with the party he embarked by ship within days for Mombasa, where he boarded a train that carried him along the escarpment of the Rift Valley and the flanks of Kilimanjaro to Lake Victoria; then a steamer brought him to the colonial outpost of Entebbe. A rickshaw carried him to Kampala, and from there it was a two-week march into the forest. Merely to rendezvous with the expedition implied a journey of some ninety days.
For the next eight months he lived in the forest, a place, he recalled, of sunbeams and mysterious shadows where the sheer wonder of the flora and fauna fired a desire always to see more, beckoning him from tree to tree, as he collected everything because virtually everything was new to him and thus to science. Enchanted by the wild but drawn always to the heights, he scaled one of the highest peaks of the Ruwenzori, a snowy crag of 15,286 feet. When later he learned that the Duke of Abruzzi, with an entourage of four hundred, was also engaged in exploration in this limitless expanse, he thought nothing of walking sixty miles through the jungle to pay his respects and offer scientific advice. Remembering this kindness, the Duke would later name the summit for him, a gesture that Wollaston, as a gentleman, acknowledged but deflected, for he preferred native names and such personal recognition was to him unsettling.
When the British expedition came to an end, Wollaston and the naturalist Douglas Carruthers headed west across Africa. Following the old Arab slave route through the Congo, they walked for a month through swamps and thickets of elephant grass until reaching a gray slick of water that turned out to be a tributary of a larger river. Traveling downstream by dugout canoe, past villages decorated with human skulls where children on the shore shouted, “Meat! Meat!,” Wollaston and Carruthers encountered all of the madness and evil that was the Belgian Congo: a houseboy given twenty-five lashes for breaking a cup; a young soldier driven mad by fear that leopards or cannibals lurked behind every bush; a crazed trader who dressed for dinner and was joined each night by a well-mannered chimpanzee who took his soup with a silver spoon.
The key to travel in Africa, Wollaston later maintained, was to break camp before dawn, when the grass glitters with dew, and to walk some distance behind the porters. “I shall never come to tolerate,” he wrote, “the peculiar bouquet of the African.” Controlling the natives, he declared, required hard work, plenty of tobacco, and the liberal use of the stick, which was much preferred by them to a cut in pay. He thought nothing of slapping a man who demanded exorbitant fees for his labor, and he once broke an umbrella over the head of a porter. “Don’t laugh at the natives,” he advised, “but learn their greetings and submit to any ceremony of blood-brotherhood.” As for maintaining morale and decorum in the wild, all that was required for an Englishman was “a hot bath or sponge down every night, regular bowels with porridge for breakfast and a night dose of ‘Livingston Rouser’ and a good book.” With this remarkable creed guiding their way, Wollaston and Carruthers would travel the entire length of the Congo River, becoming the first party since Henry Stanley’s to complete the journey across the African continent.
His book From the Ruwenzori to the Congo had barely been published when Wollaston decided to join a 1909 expedition of the British Ornithologists’ Union to New Guinea. The lead surveyor was none other than Cecil Rawling. The goal was to find a way to the unexplored Nassau Mountains, the backbone of the island, and to map the approaches from the mangrove swamps of the coast to the summit of snow-covered Mount Carstensz, the highest point in Oceania and the tallest island peak in the world.
It was an unwieldy expedition, in many ways doomed from the start, consisting of six naturalists, three Dutch soldiers, forty Javanese troops, sixty convicts, ten Gurkhas, and scores of East Indian porters, who mutinied, collapsed, and died with terrible regularity. With the rivers and low-lying forests in flood, it took nearly a year simply to move supplies twenty miles from the coast to a forward base from where a thrust to the interior might begin. “Never,” Wollaston wrote to a botanical colleague, “was there such vile country … There was nothing of beauty in it, nothing of romance, nothing to stir the soul. If I don’t get a foot onto that snow I shall consider it a year of my life wasted.”
One researcher died and two others became so tormented with fever that they had to be evacuated. Two convicts quarreled over food and killed each other with knives. A surveyor was found dead in the forest. Another man grew so paranoid that he had to be restrained with chains. In his journal Wollaston describes a lunatic scene as the river rises yet again and begins to inundate their camp. One of the three white men left is delirious with malaria, prostrate on a bed raised above the ground on tins. Wollaston and the other survivor are seated at a table eating their dinner as the water reaches the level of their knees. To wash their dishes between a main course of biscuits and sardines and a dessert of the same biscuits with marmalade, they merely dip their plates beneath their chairs into the flowing water
of the river and continue their conversation.
Just as the expedition faced complete collapse, two natives appeared from the forest, naked save for penis sheaths, fifteen-inch gourds held at the waist by a string. Led by these strange men, Wollaston made one final effort, a forced march high into the cloud forest and beyond the tree line to open slopes where, for the first time in a year, they could see the horizon. The forest slipped away to the sea, which was only forty miles from where they stood. Above them beckoned the snow and ice of Mount Carstensz, but in their exhaustion after fifteen months in the jungle, they were incapable of reaching the summit spur.
Incredibly, within a year Wollaston would return to New Guinea to have another go at Carstensz. He would stop first in Borneo to recruit seventy Dyak headhunters, men of the forest he could trust. It made for an enormous party, 220 men altogether, with seventeen tons of rice, a ton of dried pork, half a ton of dried fish, along with tents, blankets, cots, rifles, trade goods, and equipment. In four months they managed to penetrate as far as a hundred miles, a distance that took Wollaston close to the snows, but once again death and disease and foul weather forced him back, though he did make it to within an hour of the summit ridge.
In a desperate retreat, Wollaston, in a malarial fever, glimpsed an apparition that would haunt him for the rest of his life. In the mist and rain, he saw another European moving ahead in the jungle, as if leading him to the sea. Though the pace was impossibly fast, the stranger was always there. When Wollaston reached the coast he made inquiries, only to learn that no other white man was in the region. Years later, while having a suit fitted in London, he would glance toward the mirror and see this same figure, a spirit of his imagination, a guardian angel in the form of an iconic explorer and guide. In 1912 Wollaston published Pygmies and Papuans, his second book. Two years later, as he was about to return to New Guinea for a third attempt on Carstensz, word reached him at his London club that Britain had declared war on Germany. He headed immediately to the Admiralty to volunteer as a medical surgeon.