by Jan Morris
The British public was encouraged to think of the withdrawal from Gallipoli as a compensating triumph, like Rorke’s Drift after the defeat at Isandhlwana, or Mafeking after Black Week. Official accounts of the tragedy always ended with images of its success—the stealthy withdrawal from the forward trenches, the skilful assembly of guns, stores, horses, the boats stealing away muffled through the night, the watchful warships standing by, and finally, as the transports sailed off beneath the guns of the Fleet, the fires of burning stores and abandoned ammunition which at last revealed the truth to the Turks. ‘In that marvellous evacuation’, wrote Sir Julian Corbett, the official naval historian, ‘we see the national genius for amphibious warfare raised to its highest manifestation.’ The Turks awoke on the morning of January 9, 1916, to find that not a British soldier was left in the crannies and hidden valleys of the peninsula. ‘I hope they don’t hear us go’, one Australian is supposed to have murmured, as his battalion stole through the graves of their comrades down the cliff-tracks to the boats.
But it is truer to the nature of the Gallipoli story, fairer to its soldiers, to end with a glimpse not of success in defeat, but of tantalizing failure in victory. On August 9, 1915, half-way through the campaign, the front element of British troops on the Anzac front had fought their way almost to the crest of Sari Bair, the central ridge of the peninsula and perhaps the key to all else. The ground up there was stony and serrated, rough at any time, now horribly cut about with shell-holes, gun-pits and lines of trenches: for weeks the opposing armies had struggled on those unhappy heights, now losing a vantage point, now winning a trench.
Soon after five o’clock that morning a small group of British and Gurkha soldiers fought their way, in savage hand-to-hand fighting, to the summit of the ridge. The Turks fled down the hill the other side, the British pursued them over the top: and suddenly they saw before them, for the first and only time, the object of their battle. There below them down the eastern slopes, only five miles away across the dun rolling countryside, blue in the morning sunshine they saw the Narrows. There was their objective. There were the old grey forts at the water’s edge, there the cluster of Chanak with its castle and its minaret, and only a few miles upstream the channel, swinging between its hills, broke away into the Sea of Marmara. They looked at it with awe and elation, wiping the sweat from their eyes, torn and breathless and bleeding from the fight, and for a moment felt the campaign had been won.
In a few minutes they were forced up the hill again, and leaving their dead behind them in the sunshine, retreated once more over the ridge.1
15
Many imperial instincts had found their epitome, or their disillusionment, in these several campaigns, so far from the crux of the world conflict. Gallipoli ended in total failure, the Middle Eastern campaigns, co-ordinated in their final phases, ended in absolute success, with the British armies sweeping far to the north, to Damascus, Mosul, Aleppo and the frontiers of Turkey. When the Turks sued for peace the British controlled the whole of the former Turkish Empire, except only the Arabian interior, and upon this achievement they would erect the last of their great imperial structures, an empire among the Arabs.
In a wider spectrum, too, the war at first seemed only to have strengthened the Empire. ‘The British flag’, Lord Curzon told the House of Lords after the Armistice in November, 1918, ‘has never flown over a more powerful and united Empire.’ For a time it had seemed that Joseph Chamberlain’s vision of imperial federation might after all be realized. The Imperial War Cabinet was described by Sir Robert Borden, Prime Minister of Canada, as a ‘Cabinet of Governments’, and was the nearest the Empire had ever come to the projected Grand Council. Jan Smuts, so recently a defeated enemy, became one of the most influential men in London. The victory celebrations in London were almost like the Diamond Jubilee again, as soldiers from the four corners of the King’s dominions marched through the adulating crowds. The Empire seemed more than ever a band of brothers: men from Fiji and Egypt had served in France, men from Trinidad at Gallipoli, men from Belize and Hong Kong in Mesopotamia. Messages of congratulation flashed across the globe. Colonial Premiers basked in the benevolence of the Court, or were welcomed effusively at victory banquets. Emblems of Empire embellished the margins of Special Editions, or were woven into the sentiments of picture postcards. ‘Never while men speak our tongue’, wrote The Times, ‘can the blood spent by the Canadians at Ypres and by the Australians and New Zealanders at Anzac be forgotten. That rich tribute of love and loyalty to the highest ideals of our race has not been wasted….’
It was true, and it was false. The Empire really had gone to war united, and it fought together to the end. Even India provided an army of 1½ million men, most of them volunteering for the money or the honour, but many out of loyalty too. As for the 25 million people of the ‘white’ Empire, they had sent 857,000 of their men overseas, and 141,000 of them were killed. A sense of common sacrifice and accomplishment really did give to the Empire’s scattered peoples a new and triumphant brotherhood—‘What remains to us?’ cried William Morris Hughes, the spectacular Welsh-born Prime Minister of Australia. ‘We are like so many Alexanders. What other worlds have we to conquer?’ The Empire was more powerful than ever, possessing at the end of the war not only the greatest fleet, but also the greatest air force in the world, and from the conflict it was to win great prizes: new territories in Africa and the Pacific, a whole new paramountcy in the Middle East.
Yet it was false, for behind the triumph, the illusion was spent. After so many miseries in its name, glory was discredited in the hearts of the people, and war, which had given the British such vicarious satisfactions in the past, was recognized now in its true obscenity. The imperial peoples had gone to war in 1914 in a mood of brave, even happy idealism: by 1916, when conscription was first enforced in Britain, the spirit was lost, and ‘Tipperary’, with which they had marched so guilelessly to their early battles, was tacitly dropped from the Army’s musical repertoire. After the war they found among the papers of Wilfred Owen the poet, killed in France in the last week of conflict, a fragment called ‘An Imperial Elegy’. This is all it said:
Not one corner of a foreign field
But a span as wide as Europe,
Deep as ( ).
I looked and saw.
An appearance of a titan’s grave,
And the length thereof a thousand miles.
It crossed all Europe like a mystic road,
Or as the Spirits? Pathway lieth on the night.
And I heard a voice crying,
This is the Path of Glory.
The Empire stood wiser but more cynical for the experience of holocaust. Elgar sang no more of the bayonet’s clash, and was exploring sadder and profounder themes. Kipling, having lost his only son in the fighting, never again wrote a lay of Empire. Kitchener had shrunken in stature, as the conflict extended beyond the scale of any Paardeberg, until shipped off on a mission to Russia in 1916 he died far from his imperial exploits, drowned in the cold north sea. Through the Empire a new kind of memorial arose, not to the men who died bringing the flag to the distant dependencies, but to those who returned across the oceans to defend it. ‘Sleep on, dear Howard,’ said a memorial tablet in Mapleton, Manitoba, to Private Howard Pruden, killed in France—
Sleep on, dear Howard, in your foreign grave,
Your life to your country you nobly gave,
Though we did not see you to say goodbye,
Now in God’s keeping you safely lie.
‘In Memory of the Brave Sons of Smith’s Parish’, said a slab in the little country church of St Mark’s, Bermuda, framed among its trees and crab-grass lawn beside the sea, ‘who Risked their Lives in Defence of the Empire against the unscrupulous German Foe.’ And in one of the lonely cemeteries in which, buried where they died, the Anzacs lay lost among the Gallipoli ravines, the parents of one young soldier wrote their own epitaph to their son, killed so far away, so bravely we need not doubt, in so
obscure a purpose:
God Took Our Norman,
It Was His Will.
Forget Him, No,
We Never Will.
‘I hope they can’t hear us’, said the Australian soldier of Our Norman and his mates, and one hopes they could not: for all too often the sacrifices of the Great War, as its contemporaries called it, were given to a cause that was already receding into history, like those discredited grey battleships, their smoke-pall filling the sky, hull-down on the Aegean horizon.1
1 Published in The Times, on August 8, 1914, four days after the declaration of war. Before the year was out it was set to music by Arthur M. Goodhart, and dedicated to ‘LORD ROBERTS and to all Etonians serving in the War’. 5‚687 were to serve: 1,160 were killed.
1 Or sometimes, when a more stately Canadianism was required, moose.
1 Killed in France, 1915, aged twenty.
1 ‘You are enjoined to make war against the infidels even though this maydisplease you: for you may well be displeased by that which is to your good, as it may be that you like a thing which instead is harmful to you: but God knoweth and you know not’: Koran, 11: 216.
‘Oh Muslims! Embrace ye the foot of the Caliph’s throne and join in the ühad‚ the Holy War. Warfare is ordained for you. Your enemies will not cease until they have made you renegades from your religion if they can. Drive them out! If they attack you, slay them! Such is the reward of unbelievers’: Sultan Mehmed V‚ the Caliph‚ November 1914.
The title of Caliph was abolished after the war, and has never been revived.
2 I have disarranged the order of them, in telling the story. Here is the correct chronology:
Mesopotamia
Gallipoli
Syria
1914 1915 1916 1917 1918
1 Still seriously incapacitated by an attempt on his life in Delhi two years before. It is not true, Mr John Bowle the historian assures me, that when the bomb exploded in his howdah the Viceroy cried ‘Save the elephant!’
1 Which the British gunners were forbidden to shell, even if the Turks used it as an observation post. The Arch is crumbling slowly anyway—Victorian travellers reported far more of it—and is nested in nowadays by rollers, greenish-blue birds like big jays, who find its brick construction convenient.
1‘When the Mejidieh was about 300 yards off’, wrote one medical officer, describing the arrival of a hospital ship at Basra, ‘it looked as if she was festooned with ropes. The stench when she was close was quite definite, and I found that what I mistook for ropes were dried stalactites of human faeces … the whole of the ship’s side was covered.’ When he complained about conditions, he was described by Nixon’s supply chief, General Cowper, as ‘an interfering faddist’.
1 The Turks, refloating the boat and taking possession of her cargo, renamed her The Gift. They shot her navigator, who was awarded a posthumous VC.
1 Stigma of another kind attached itself to Townshend, for he was blamed for neglecting his troops in captivity. The Turks released him shortly before the end of the war to arrange terms of surrender, but though he was knighted and elected to Parliament, he received no further military appointments, and died disgruntled in 1924.
1 Nixon died in eclipse, in 1921, having been blamed by a Commission of Inquiry for the catastrophe of Kut (‘his confident optimism was the main cause’). He outlived the beloved and victorious Maude, though, who died of cholera in Baghdad in November, 1917, and was buried there. This is what Colonel Dickson, Maude’s South African Director of Local Resources, wrote of the event:
Batteries have told the listening town this day
That through her ancient gate to his last resting-place
Maude has gone north.
1 ‘I was convinced’, the statesman later wrote, ‘that this work was a better guide to a military leader whose task was to reach Jerusalem than any survey to be found in the pigeon-holes of the War Office.’ Lloyd George’s own copy of the atlas is now mine, and I have used it in writing this chapter.
1 Among them volunteers from the United States, Canada and the Argentine. David Ben Gurion, future Prime Minister of Israel, and Jacob Epstein the sculptor both served in this force, whose motto was said to be ‘No Advance Without Security.’
1 Meinertzhagen survived to write the standard work on the birds of Arabia, dying aged eighty-nine in 1967. Though not Jewish, he became a passionate Zionist. In this he was following the example of his great-grandmother, who had launched a Return of her own, setting off for Palestine with a white donkey and a group of Jewish adherents, but getting no further than Calais.
1 The Kaiser did not actually pass through the gate, though, for a neighbouring section of the city wall had been pulled down, and a roadway laid, to allow him a more ample access.
1 So many armies have fought over this ground, before and after Allenby’s, that few traces of his campaign are left. When I soldiered in Palestine, thirty years later, every blue-eyed Arab was said to have had an Australian father, there was a bust of Allenby beside the wells at Beersheba, and the main crossing over the River Jordan was Allenby Bridge, erected by the Royal Engineers in 1918. Even then, though, the most vivid memorial of the campaign was the inscription cut by the imperial army in the rocks of Nahr el Kelb, north of Beirut, where passing conquerors since the days of the Pharaohs have left their graffiti: it was a fine thing, I thought, to see Allenby commemorated there among such company—Rameses II, Nebuchadnezzar, Tiglath-Pileser III, Sennacherib, Marcus Aurelius and Selim the Turk.
Allenby himself became a viscount (Lord Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe), a field-marshal, Gold Stick in Waiting and High Commissioner in Egypt, before going to his grave in Westminster Abbey in 1936.
1 They had done it once before. In 1807 Admiral Sir John Duckworth forced a passage with seven ships of the line, but beat a rather too hasty retreat while the going was good, and became Governor of Newfoundland.
1 The ‘fierce-face’ look peculiar to French battleships since the 1870s, and defined by Sir Oscar Parkes as ‘piled-up superstructure, preposterous masts, uncouth funnels, tumble-home sides and long ram bows’.
1 King George V thought he ought to be hanged at the yardarm for desertion, but the old admiral, growing rather grotesque in his last years, remained a national figure until his death in 1920. He was entered for the Navy by the last of Nelson’s captains, his first ship was HMS Victory, and he died in the presence of the Duchess of Hamilton.
1 So called because of a map error—it is really Achi Tepe.
1 The E11 survived the war, to be broken up at Malta in 1921. The gunboats were presently dispersed all over the Empire, many of them lasting until the next world war, when four were destroyed by enemy action in the Mediterranean and the China Sea. The River Clyde outsailed them all: refloated in 1919, she was bought by Spanish owners, and sailed the Mediterranean first as Angela, then as Maruja y Aurora, until she was sold for scrap in 1966.
2 The general in command, Sir Frederick Stopford, had been Military Secretary to Redvers Buller in South Africa, and was said to have been the only officer in his confidence at the battle of Spion Kop. Stopford was relieved of his Gallipoli command after only ten days, and though he lived until 1929, that was professionally the end of him.
1 Hamilton never commanded again, but he lived to an honoured old age, dying in 1947. It was to Monro, who became Governor of Gibraltar and died in 1929, that Churchill bitterly attributed the apothegm: ‘I came, I saw, I capitulated.’
1 I felt their presence still, when I stood on the very same spot in 1975, looking through a morning mist to the straits below, for Gallipoli is the most truly haunted place I know. Long after the war much of it was planted with trees, but they were destroyed in a fire in 1974, and when I was there the peninsula must have looked much as it did sixty years before. Until 1964 it remained a closed military area, and not many people go there even now. The landing-beaches are unchanged, many of the trenches may still be traced, and cemeteries scattered ov
er the hills mark the sites of old redoubts, Lone Pine, Twelve Tree Copse, Dunn’s Post or The Nek. To this day the bones of dead soldiers are still found in the more remote ravines.
At Cape Helles the British erected a commanding memorial, magnificently greeting the visitor with the roster of the great ships whose heyday ended here. At the Narrows the Turks have made two more. One is simply a date, marked out in white stones on a hillside above the strait: 18:3:15. The other is a figure of a soldier, on the bluffs above Kilid Bahr, with a quotation beside it from the poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy: ‘Stop, passer-by! The earth you have just unknowingly trodden is the spot where an era ended and where the heart of a nation beats.’
1 The Empire’s central memorial to its dead was the Cenotaph, erected in Whitehall in 1920, the first of more than fifty war memorials designed by Edwin Lutyens. Sir Fabian Ware, who devoted his later life to the Imperial War Graves Commission, calculated that if the dead of the Empire were to march four abreast through London, they would take three and a half days to pass this monument, and one of the most vivid memories of my own first visit to London in the 1930s is that of the Londoners respectfully and unselfconsciously removing their hats when they walked by it.